"mobning" in the blogosphere

this may look a little scary

but really it's a totally cool place.

danish has a great word--mobning. i've seen it translated as bullying, but to me, it's a bit more nuanced than that word is in english. it's a word that conveys the whole notion of holding someone outside of your group. intentionally. if you're the parent of a school-age child, you hear the word a lot. because danish schools (or at least the one our daughter attends) are very focused on it and on keeping it from happening, at least to a harmful, overt extent, since you can never really fully prevent it. because everyone needs their albanian. but even an albanian would like to belong.

small aside to explain the last statement: this is one of the earliest theories that husband and i came up with (way back when he was still someone else's husband). we were in the balkans and noticed that everyone there (well, everyone everywhere, really, if i think about it) had someone they looked down on to feel better about their group--the croats and the serbs had each other. and tho' it was never clear to me where the bosnians stood, they had some complex system of someone they looked down on. the bulgarians looked down on the macedonians. the macedonians looked down on the albanians. the albanians looked down on the...hmm. there wasn't really anyone--except maybe the roma and let's face it, everyone looks down on them, so sadly they don't really count. if you were a regular albanian, you looked down on those poor suckers in kosovo and vice versa. so we decided that albanian was the end of the line. and that everyone needs their albanian--someone to feel superior to.

now, back to the regularly scheduled post. i've been thinking about this because things have gotten a little nuts in the comments on some of the other blogs of late (most recently the blog camp blog last evening--and i can't even blame wine b/c i was drinking tea in my hotel room in oslo since the little tiny bottle of wine in my hotel minibar costs 185NOK ($28) and the two glasses i'd had six hours earlier in the lounge at the airport were no longer having any effect).

you see, we're all stark raving mad. and we found each other here in the blogosphere. and finding other mad people has clearly fed that madness. and i fear that some people (like whoever stopped following blog camp in the middle of the madness last night) found all this talk of corn and rocks and herman and to rad or not to rad (definitely the latter) (and which shall hereafter be referred to (on this blog at least) as the r-word which shall not be named) and pink and all that stuff to be a bit much.

but i'm here to say that we most definitely didn't mean it that way. and so you should ALL feel that you can jump into the fray at any time. like monique (hey, she's new!) did last night on the blog camp blog.  all of this madness might have looked like mobning, but it really sincerely wasn't meant that way. we want everyone to feel welcome in this particular vortex of madness. so please play along if you want to--jump right in and ask what all that silly talk is about if you don't understand. we're really quite harmless. we just like the calming effect of rocks and watching corn grow (not watching corn pop, that's totally not relaxing, or so i've heard) and IM conversations in the comment section. maybe it just makes our comment numbers look good, or maybe we're just a bit crazy. but either way, we're harmless and would love it if you joined in the fun. we're all albanians here. :-)

p.s. none of this comment madness really happened here on MPC, but i feel a bit responsible for it because i'm definitely one of the IM-convo commenters, so that's why i'm posting here. click the links above if you want to see firsthand what i'm talking about. :-)

did any of that edukashun stick?

i was reading an article in the IHT the other day. the article was on the golem and how the little monster figure is on the ascendence again in prague. the whole notion of the golem rang a bell deep within the recesses of my graduate school brain. the article defined it as "The Golem, according to Czech legend, was fashioned from clay and brought to life by a rabbi to protect Prague’s 16th-century ghetto from persecution, and is said to be called forth in times of crisis." i couldn't really place the golem thing, tho' it's undoubtedly some central european lit i once read. i like the idea of a golem, actually, a kind of protective figure. i think we could all use one of those.

but it got me thinking about what other remnants of grad school are there lurking between the song lyrics that are cluttering up my thirty-twelve year-old brain.

: : lots of marxist rhetoric.

: : oddly filtered through ayn rand.

: : and even more oddly which involves the chasing of little green bits of paper and ascription of meaning thereto (or it thereof?).

: : a residual embarrassment of not getting pilnyak's naked year on the first read (and admitting as much to the professor--tho' that was as an undergrad).

: : occasional musings on how master & margarita might be a modern example of menippean satire. (thank you bakhtin.)

: : an unhealthy adoration of derrida, tho' in retrospect, i had no idea what he was talking about.

: : ditto foucault. and baudrillard.

: : an ability to turn to whatever scene you reference in my copy of dostoevsky's brothers karamazov in under ten seconds.

: : a desire to frantically and thoroughly clean when a deadline looms.

: : the time my serbo-croatian teacher said, "spanish is easy, you can learn it in a weekend."

i'm sure there's more, but half-watching a total crap movie about stewardesses starring gwenyth paltrow (which cured me of that stewardess envy thing, by the way) has so thoroughly numbed my brain that i can't come up with them now. t.v. is evil.

happy monday, everybody.

sunday morning theories

we sit on sunday mornings at the dining table with the fat sunday newspaper, steaming cups of tea and the morgenbrød that husband always goes and gets at the bakery. it was during one of these times that the whole blog camp idea was born. what we're reading always provokes discussion, this morning it was of trading schemes to offset CO2, how this government hasn't devoted enough money or attention to research into alternative fuel technology and on to how difficult it must be to write a feature story about someone who won't speak to the reporter.

on the table were the stones i gathered on that beach in norway last week.  husband was teasing me about bringing half of norway home in my suitcase and i was assuring him i'd left quite a lot of it behind.  since he loves to dig, i said he should have more understanding for my need to commune with the rocks as he does with the soil in all that digging. i philosophized some lofty thoughts about how the stones put you back in touch with something ancient and basic and make you feel some kind of connection to a continuous line stretching through time.

and i was only half-kidding, tho' i said it all off the top of my head. i told husband that it gives me a palpable sense of calm to find a stone that fits perfectly in my hand and hold it, feeling its coolness in my hand and transferring my own warmth to it (sabin just picked up this stone which i had been holding and it was still warm after lying on the table for half an hour). husband suggested that i start a new -ism.  rockism. (we need to work on that name.) i'm aware that there are already theories like this involving crystals, but i'm much more drawn to simple stones.

rockism would advocate the gathering and collecting of stones and of sitting around holding them in order to get in tuned into that line of continuity with the earth. because i swear that if the stone is right, you can feel the ur-energy humming and flowing into you through the stone. i think we're searching for centres of calm in this fast-paced life and that one way i find it is in my love of stones.

that's my -ism and i'm sticking to it.

patience

the thousand year oak, age 4

springing forth

husband is incredibly patient. it's one of the many reasons that he's a keeper. this boy has absolutely stunning patience. he can toss a ball and swing a jumprope for hours. he can direct large groups of small children through intricate treasure hunt after intricate treasure hunt, patiently gathering up the stragglers and making sure they have fun too. i love to watch it, even while i know it's utterly impossible for me.

but the best example of his patience is a little teeny tiny oak tree in front of our house. it's about half a meter tall now. he calls it the thousand year oak. and he doesn't mind that he won't be here in 1000 years to see it (at least not as who he is this time around). we found it in the woods a couple of years ago when it was about 20cm (8-ish inches) tall. it still had the remnants of the acorn attached to its fledgling roots, but he carefully brought it home and planted it (in kind of a dumb spot) in front of the house, next to the driveway. and he thinks it will be a magnificent tree that will still stand there in 1000 years, but it's just beginning its 4th year now.

we make fun of him for it, but i kind of hope he's right.

if you MOO or would like to...

hey guys--if you have been thinking about getting your own MOO cards and have never ordered before, you can use this code: RDVYSN and get 20% off a single MOO product in your first order! and if you use it, then i might win a cool magnetic photo thingie, since that's a unique code and the first 100 of these that MOO gets on orders (it was in their latest Moosletter) will win the cool magnetic photo string thingie. and i love to win, you know. so if you were thinking of ordering some MOO cards anyway...do it now and then we can swap, i've got MOOs for every occasion!!

NOTE:  the code can be used by as many people as want to use it--you'll get your 20% off on one item in your order!!!

wherein she explains that alarming cheek licking thing

yesterday, in a fit of pique over a few things going wrong--standing at the baggage carrousel 'til the last bag came and the huge group of australian pharmacists (two of which sat next to me on the plane and were just lovely) had all wandered off into the copenhagen night and still not having my bag, followed immediately by some totally badly-raised arrogant asshole queue-jumping dane cutting ahead in the line at the DSB counter (and yes maybe i HAVE given up commas as well as capital letters)--i may have mentioned in the middle of a comment that was just a titch rant-y on one of my favorite new blogs a desire to lick the cheeks of certain parties. which may or may not have caused a bit of alarm on the part of those parties and an admonition to:

1. stop swearing on their blog. 
2. let them use any damn word they wanted (including rad, despite its obvious fall from use sometime around 1988, tho' usage possibly hung on in places like fargo into 1989) or they would take away my crown(!?!) WTF!?!
3. keep my tongue within range of licking only the inside of my own cheeks.

this made me realize that i should probably explain the cheek licking thing.

but first, a small diversion (like you didn't see that coming). one of the beauties of new friends (in the blogosphere or in real life) is that you can revive all of your old habits/jokes and they seem new again. so you can once again say, "lemme think about it, no." (with no pause between "it" and "no") to people and they find it hilarious once again (b/c let's face it, your old friends know ALL about it and think it's a bit lame of you to keep saying it).

it's the same with the licking thing.

the licking thing began at a party many years ago (let's just say early 90s and leave it at that). it was someone's older sister's party and so we didn't really know most of the people there all that well. but we (being my friend K (it was her sister's party) and me) wanted to have a bit of fun and be remembered, so we cooked up a scheme wherein we would go up to someone we didn't know very well (say a kind of cute boy) and stand beside him, one on each side. we would then, with a glance, both go in for the lick. on his cheeks.

it's rather surprising to suddenly have two girls you don't know very well simultaneously lick your cheeks, but once people got over the shock and wiped off the spit, they had to admit they actually rather liked it.

of course, eventually, you get known for this and then one day, to your dismay, the person you're about to lick dodges the lick at the exact moment when it's too late to pull back and you accidentally lick your friend, who in turn licks you simultaneously--on the tongue, leaving you a bit scarred and unable to play the licking game anymore for a number of years. tho' the cute boy who just dodged the lick is pretty into the whole idea and would like the two of you to demonstrate again. which you do not oblige, seeing as you are sputtering and spitting and generally washing your tongue off with beer.

however, you do, on your own, occasionally use a quick lick of the cheek to disarm people during a boring moment at a party or when husband is being all serious and needs to lighten up a bit. it's a totally affectionate gesture, you see. tho' husband has developed a 6th sense about it (or maybe knows when you get the look on your face that means you're about to go in for the lick) and is pretty good at dodging it. it matters less that the lick is dodged when you are going in for it alone.

and that's the story of the alarming cheek licking thing. 

things i learned in norway

i'm sitting in the lounge, my flt should have been in 20 minutes, but instead it's in 50. however, i'm content because i love airports, there's free internet and yes, free wine (albiet italian not south african) and free coffee (strangely can feel the effects of the coffee more than the wine, which is perhaps something i should ponder on another occasion).

but i've learned a few things sitting here:

• if you are a bit chubby totally fat, but wearing a suit and think no one is watching, you should look around and see if anyone is in fact watching before straightening your skirt in a way which would make people who were watching glancing up curl up their toes.
• some british guy's wells (we're talking oil here not water) are showing very encouraging results.
• someone's competitor is laying up five ships (he wouldn't say who that competitor was, tho' the wife on the other end of the phone really tried).
• people have some weird notion that b/c they're in a foreign country no one will speak english.
• they are wrong.
• they've changed out the south african white for an italian one. 
• it's not bad.
• i just saw a guy with a red wine glass full of bailey's.
  
• if you wear some seriously cool high heels, wolford black stockings with some kind of tattoo-like patterns on them (yes, they are worth the $47 you must pay), flat-iron your hair and wear eyeliner that borders on night-time makeup along with your big hoop earrings and molly's fabulous beads, boys in shipping will tell you anything.

life is good here in the lounge.