#2 - not what i thought it was going to be

this week i'm writing each day about a person, place or thing that has had a big effect on my life. i'm going to be leaving aside parents, sister, husband and daughter because those are a given for having had a big effect and writing about that effect would be way more typing than i should do with the angry nerve in my left hand.

when i was in junior high, at the height of ronald reagan's cold war escalation rhetoric, there was a made for t.v. movie starring jason robards called the day after. (leave it to a B movie actor to use a B movie as a medium for his propaganda.) it was, looking back, prototypical cold war propaganda, and basically showed kansas being nuked off the map by the evil russians. i'd been to kansas and while it wasn't my favorite place in the world, it was a little too much like the flat prairie, amber waves of grain of my home state for comfort. and the movie called attention to the fact that where i was growing up was probably in some danger...within fallout range of strategic air command near omaha, nebraska.

the movie made a big impression on me and for years afterwards, i imagined that somewhere in russia was a girl who looked a whole lot like me and if we could just talk to each other and get to know one another, then all that cold war mumbo jumbo wouldn't really be necessary.

so, years later, when i got the chance to take an evening class in russian at a community college, i jumped at it. i was still idealistically picturing my "sister" in russia as i slaved over the cyrillic alphabet and all those cases...accusative, genitive, dative...i still shudder a bit thinking of those. by then, reagan was in the last stages of his presidency...the bits he didn't really remember anyway, and nancy was running the country together with her astrologer (which in retrospect, wasn't really so bad).

that whole zeitgeist fit nicely with the very spiritual, authentic, red-haired russian woman who was teaching my evening course. i loved her. she loved shirley maclaine's spiritual journey, which was so in vogue at the time, and made dramatic declarations about the future of people in the course. hers for me was that she could feel that i should keep studying russian, that it was my destiny. i was 19 and looking for my destiny, so i thought, "why not?" i was a bit romantic on the notion of russian anyway, so it was as good a destiny as any. within a few short years, i found myself with bachelor's and master's degrees in, you guessed it, russian. self-fulfilling destiny?

i even found myself in the middle of russia, standing at a bus stop together with some friends, waiting to go out to their dacha, when an old man came up and asked me and my friend aida if we were indeed sisters, just as i had suspected all along! i really did have a "sister" in russia and if we just knew one another and could talk, we wouldn't need all that cold war mumbo jumbo.

you may think this story ends there, but i'm not really to that influential person yet.

not long after that, i was in a literary theory course (pursuing yet another master's, i just couldn't seem to get enough). we had to write weekly 1-2 page essays on our reading assignments. being a good marxist (since the only ones left by that time were in american universities), i found a way to weave the evils of capitalism and trickle down economic policies into my reactions to the readings week after week. finally, the professor scrawled in the margin of one essay, "you make me feel old. it's clear that ronald reagan is really the defining president for you."

and that's why that as much as i am loathe to admit it, ronald reagan, B movie actor turned president, is one of my 5 big influences. even if it was an influence borne of loathing, it still significantly guided the direction of my life.

epilogue (or is it actually prologue?): i can still remember when he was shot in 1981, it was semester test time at school and we were about to be dismissed for the day when they made an announcement over the loudspeakers that the president had been shot. i asked a tad too hopefully, "is he dead?" and my teacher, clearly a staunch republican, flew into a rage and made the entire class stay after school because of my disrespectful comment regarding the president. already then, he was effecting my life. at that point, i didn't really imagine just how much.

Reagan Nausea

I am utterly nauseated by the eulogizing of Ronald Reagan. It's nauseating from afar and it must be a veritable nightmare for anyone with functioning brain cells and access to a television in the US. The man has effectively been dead for 10 years, just get it over with already. Admittedly, I had one moment of being moved watching CNN International this a.m.--a shot of Gorbachev paying his respects at the coffin--hand outstretched, lost in thought. It seems that he has some legitimate ownership of the grief. Whereas the rest of us--why do we have to be subjected to a litany of airbrushed (typical Hollywood) half-truths as to the grand effects of Reaganomics.

I realized during a course a few years ago at ASU that Reagan was a defining president for me--but in a negative sense. The president of my childhood. The president whose thoughts and policies I defined myself against. Even as early as his shooting in '81, I was in the 7th grade and my entire class had to stay after school when I asked brightly (and not without hope) in response to an announcement that he'd been shot, "Is he dead?" This did not please the wizened Mrs. Walker and she doubly punished me by making me unpopular with my classmates, since the entire class had to stay after for my statement. No wonder he was the defining president for me. It makes me feel a bit sad, really, to think that Reagan had any part in defining who I am.

walls in my mental topography

pondering walls, like everyone else on this 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall. already last night on the news, they were discussing it and the significance of the event, which marked, at least symbolically, the end of the cold war. sabin was watching and her response was, "berlin wall, blah, blah, blah," which is interesting. because it's clear that she has no reference for it (being 8 and all). she can't imagine what all of the fuss is about just because some people knocked down a stupid old graffiti-covered wall. she knows nothing of NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact, nor the Iron Curtain, nor the Soviet Union. (strange that those things are so deeply etched in my mental topography that i can't bring myself not to capitalize them.)

when i think about the fall of the berlin wall, it takes me back to college. i had personalized plates on my car that read CCCP (believe it or not, the state of iowa allowed that), i was studying russian, i was an avid fan of gorbachev and i despised ronald reagan with a passion (the only thing that cooled that was the 8 years of dubya, who made reagan seem quite harmless in retrospect). i don't believe for a single second that ronald reagan was a visionary that foresaw the downfall of soviet-style communism. he was just a guy who could deliver a good speech and happened to be in the right place at the right time to get the credit. and those who really deserve the credit were the people on the ground who pushed their way through that wall and in all honesty, the wall coming down was just the culmination of a long, slow demise of the soviet empire (which took another two years to formally dissolve).

but do i remember it per se? in all honesty, i really don't. i remember more the aftermath. i remember russian history departments in universities all over the world scrambling to find a new narrative. i recall those pierce brosnan incarnations of the james bond franchise that struggled to find a new narrative without the cold war as backdrop. i remember studying in russia in the early 90s with an east german guy who was a bit of a character and had a big fat laptop named hannah as his pride and joy. i remember that the other germans i studied with found him very strange because he was from the east. it was obvious that the divided germany had set itself deeply on the personal topographies of its people and that it would take more than the symbolism of knocking down of a wall to change that.

strangely, i'm left with a nostalgic longing for the dichotomies of cold war rhetoric - the whole notion of good and evil was so straightforward then. plus, i think we've struggled since with only one superpower in the world. i don't think it's been good for us. any of us, not just americans. in one symbolic gesture - breaking down that wall - an entire ideology and way of life crumbled - on both sides of the iron curtain. and we've had trouble picking up the pieces. it took another broad symbolic gesture in the form of september 11 to give us a new narrative, but i'm not sure the narrative of terrorism is a worthy replacement for the cold war. i don't really believe today's possessors of nuclear weapons have the same cool heads that the leaders of the soviet union and the cold war united states had. where is mutually assured destruction when you need it?

and speaking of destruction, i find myself thinking of other walls that have fallen. wall street for one, last year at about this time. but it's back up where it was now, isn't it? and the financial wizards are collecting their taxpayer-funded bonuses once again. and nothing has really changed.

maybe the last time there was real change was when the berlin wall fell. it had such fantastic symbolic value. and so we watch it again and again this week. and we read the stories. and we remember simpler times full of grander gestures. and i try not to let in the sneaking suspicion that what we are witnessing now in a kind of slow motion accident-type sequence, is the demise of the american empire...

the end of the innocence

i had a discussion with my sister some weeks ago about don henley's 1989 classic the end of the innocence. go watch it, i'll wait here...

Remember when the days were long
And rolled beneath a deep blue sky
Didn't have a care in the world
With mommy and daddy standing by

When "happily ever after" fails
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers dwell on small details
Since daddy had to fly

But i know a place where we can go
That's still untouched by man
We'll sit and watch the clouds roll by
And the tall grass wave in the wind

You can lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair fall all around me
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence

O' beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They're beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king

Armchair warriors often fail
And we've been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie

But i know a place where we can go
And wash away this sin
We'll sit and watch the clouds roll by
And the tall grass wave in the wind
Just lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair spill all around me
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence

Who knows how long this will last
Now we've come so far, so fast
But, somewhere back there in the dust
That same small town in each of us

I need to remember this
So baby give me just one kiss
And let me take a long last look
Before we say good-bye

Just lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair fall all around me
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence

what was interesting is how different our memories of the song were. she finds it very political, whereas the only politics i can find is the stanza about the tired old man that we elected king (has anyone ever described reagan more aptly?). for me, that summer was the one where i had a very painful broken engagement. i was devastated and lost 17 pounds in a week, mostly in tears shed. that felt like the end of my own innocence and a real transition into adulthood. it caused my life to change course...shifting from plans to attend u.c. irvine to iowa city and the university of iowa. looking back, i think it made me less trusting of potential boyfriends for years afterwards, really ending my own romantic innocence...poisoning my own fairy tale. in other words, i found the song very much about my own situation, even though reading the lyrics now, i can clearly see that it was about one's parents splitting up. my own happily ever after had failed (thank odin now, looking back), so i sang along at the top of my lungs as i drove my little gold pontiac fiero and felt like the song was written specifically for me. especially after i met a handsome summer fling who gave me back some confidence and made those lines about the tall grass in the wind and the small town in each of us ring true. it was really more or less the anthem of the summer of 1989 for me.

for my sister, her departure for college was on the horizon and she felt the pressure of that. i think we both thought that our parents wouldn't be able to survive the empty nest, having such separate interests. so the words about daddy having to fly spoke to my sister and she felt a heavy weight of responsibility for keeping them together. and watching the video, with its odd 50s feel (aside from the shots of tattered reagan posters and ollie north), it does seem much more political that it ever seemed to me at the time. and though i was home that summer, i definitely didn't feel the same pressure my sister did to be the glue holding our parents together. in the end, their marriage held, though some part of me still wonders why when they shared so little. i suppose staying together was just what you did in their generation (speaking of the 50s).

in these times, where our entire existence is smeared in the nasty politics of our post-truth era, it does seem that our innocence has ended once and for all.

* * *

today's lack of truth has its roots in postmodernism.

i heard about this piece here on T.O.E.
and i'll admit to feeling a little guilty for all that derrida, foucault and baudrilliard i read in college.

* * *

the problem is way deeper than trump. 

the teachers you remember - a post without pictures

we all have teachers we remember...sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for not so good ones.

~ mrs. polly, who made us try sardines on saltines in kindergarten and who made sheila madsen disappear after she cried at school, leaving one thinking one had better not cry at school or one might disappear oneself. tom pranger also cried and both he and his brother tim, who did not cry, disappeared as well. crying was not a good thing to do in kindergarten.

~ mrs. bushman, who divided us all into blue birds, red birds and yellow birds according to our ability to read "saw" as "saw" and not "was" and to not leave a puddle of pee beneath our desks on a regular basis. come to think of it, you could still be a blue bird and pee your pants regularly, as jody hoekman proved again and again, so it must just have had to do with reading ability.

~ mrs. luze, who was the subject of a horrible joke by my father, who stamped one of my worksheets with a "horseshit" smiley stamp and asked her if that wasn't a little harsh. she stared at him in wide-eyed horror, her jackie o bouffant perfectly coiffed (it was the 70s, but the 60s lingered on in south dakota, we were a little behind, after all).

~ miss maryann. my favorite grade school teacher. she who taught us about chicken soup with rice and allowed us to choose spelling words like uruguay and triskaidekaphobia. she was in a horrible car accident and ended up in a body cast in pierre. i think i had nightmares about that for years afterwards. i think her husband owned the seattle mariners for awhile at one point. or was it the super sonics?

~ mrs. petersen. she put up with horrendous plays we made up ourselves, based on various combinations of nancy drew and the hardy boys. they were interminable and she allowed them, but she punished us by making us sit together in desk groupings with boys.

~ mr. teller. he lived in the apartment across from my grandmother and always had the yuckiest warm coffee breath which he breathed on you in a moist, uncomfortable way if you asked him a question. not that long ago, dad mentioned that he was a vietnam vet with issues. that i did not realize at the time...the vet part at least (tho' of course, for years, i thought veteran's day was veterinarian's day, so there was that aspect), i do, however, think i picked up on the issues.

~ mrs. blunck. she had been a teacher for too long and hated children. i remember when i wore my first pair of high heels to the 6th grade...they had awesome wooden, chunky heels and were brown leather with colorful leather stitches. she told me to wait to grow up. which, in retrospect, might have been wiser than i thought it was at the time. but i still maintain she hated children. and i think she might actually have been a man. a very short, stout, child-hating man.

~ mrs. walker. the superintendent's wife, with her severe haircut, gabardine pantsuits and cowboy boots. on the day ronald reagan was shot, they announced it over the school's pa system. i, perhaps a bit too cheerily, and with more than a tinge of hope in my voice, asked, "is he dead?" and she made the entire class stay after school because of my disrespect for the president (that made me very popular, i tell you). i was already a liberal in the 7th grade. i will say tho', that she taught me how to draw using perspective and for that, i am grateful, tho' i've never been that fond of polyester since then.

~ mrs. tappe. she always seemed classy and a little bit above the fray and like she didn't really need the job but did it just for fun. she taught us girls how to take shorthand and do other officey-things, like filing, that girls should learn in those days. i liked her and i liked shorthand too.

~ mrs. leistra. gabardine and cowboy boots - she and mrs. walker clearly shopped the same fashion crime scene, but she had an even more severe haircut. i learned to type from her on an ibm selectric. i'm still using that skill at this very moment (tho' i have thankfully graduated to an apple product) and no, i don't need to look at my keyboard. tho' maybe i'd have learned it anyway as i'm pretty much bred to be good at typing.

~  mr. hirt. they gave him history because it didn't matter that much (maybe they knew we'd eventually be able to google any historical knowledge we needed to know). he was actually the football and wrestling coach. he could be easily led astray during a boring recounting of the civil war and made to tell stories of the brave wrestlers of the university of iowa, which always seemed a little bit like being in a john irving novel, so i liked it. i believe i eventually went to the university of iowa because of him, but oddly, i don't think he went there himself.

~ mr. schaefer. i'll never forget the day he droned on and on about filling out tax forms while dressed as gilligan (tho' i have a more hazy recollection of why he did that). he looked strikingly like gilligan even in his regular attire and it was very difficult not to laugh during the entire hour. i think there was more to him than we realized at the time. he coached girls basketball.

~ mr. harvison. bitter man who, despite the triple major to which he loved to refer, never really seemed to amount to all that much himself. he was, naturally, appointed guidance counselor, as we weren't really supposed to amount to all that much either, being from a small town as we were. we shouldn't have too many aspirations. after all, we could never live up to mr. harvison's own triple major. i was never clear what it was in, but when he taught psychology, he liked to use, by name, various people in town and former students as examples of the various psychoses (there's likely a whole other blog post in recounting those). i spent my time in his physics class reading dostoevsky. i think it's probably why i eventually got a fulbright. funnily, enough, i don't think mr. harvison ever got one of those.

~ mr. markhart. the math teacher. he had a ruler and he wasn't afraid to wack it against a desk. i think i was actually better at geometry than i was supposed to be as a girl, but managed to pull myself back to the level where i belonged where algebra was concerned. mr. markhart wanted us to think he was strict, but actually, he liked kids and got more of a kick out of us than he let on. and we really did learn stuff from him, and not only how much force it took to break a wooden ruler, but actual math and things.

what teachers do you remember?

magic in the museum with iPhone photos

late-afternoon, energy flagging, i decided to go for a little walk for some fresh air and to clear my head. the office has a park-like campus along the oslo fjord and a short distance away is the henie-onstad modern art museum. i walked in that direction, thinking i'd just have a walk in the sculpture park and not go in, but for some reason, i was drawn inside. and happily, i learned that the museum is free on wednesdays!

first, i checked out the to be heard is to be seen exhibition, which featured paintings specially done directly on the walls and several interesting video installations, a sound installation and a rotating rhinestone-clad accordion. i wasn't supposed to take pictures, but since i was all alone, i sneaked out the iPhone and snapped some shots. they of course don't do it justice. even just the architecture of the place means it's a tremendous space, even without the art.

one of my favorite parts was a series of art-journal kind of pages featuring a poem by a scandinavian poet who i didn't know and whose name i failed to write down. this was my favorite page:

i like screaming i like my brain i like horses

in type, on ordinary paper and with faded cello tape. i love it.

tapestry by asger jorn
and a little peek of the hallway i describe below

then i headed for the other wing of the museum, feeling content with the fact that i was the only visitor. the exhibition on the other side was entitled the art of tomorrow today. it's a selection of pieces from their permanent collection, displayed in beautiful surroundings that completely do justice to the art. danish artist asger jorn apparently loved norway and the henie-onstad museum and donated a whole lot of his drawings and sketches and doodles. they were matted and framed and all hanging together in critical mass along a long, curved wooden hallway. my iPhone couldn't come close to capturing it, but it was so marvelous i had to go back and have a second look. here are a few shots i did manage to get.

in addition to jorn, there were miró, a couple of picassos, a matisse, jasper johns, warhol's electric chair 1-10 and some rauschenberg soviet pieces from 1988 that to me were very evocative of those waning years of the reagan era and the soviet union.

i really couldn't believe my luck, having those wonderful paintings all to myself, to enjoy in silence on my own, no one moving past me, getting in my way or breaking into my thoughts with their voices. the golden light of the afternoon sun coming through the windows into the (typically norwegian) wood-intensive space combined with the art did that thing to my molecules where they hum in perfect alignment.

i told the girl at the desk on my way out that i thought it had been quite magical having the place all to myself. and for free to boot! how lucky was that?

mood

about right now:

~ there is a (disturbingly large) segment of the population that is wilfully, proudly dumb. that's disconcerting. people who were dumb used to want to conceal that fact. i wish they would again. i blame reagan for the fact that they no longer want to do this. and doubly so dubya. and now, we see the results of it with the current dysfunctional administration.

~ sometimes it's fun to go against your own nature and just quietly observe instead of jumping into the conversation with your own stories. or rehearsing them in your head before it's your turn and then not really listening. this is also hard. but undoubtedly good for you. and by you, i mean me.

~ when your own mother is losing her mind, it's always interesting to listen to someone else's lightly racist mother reminisce. being able to remember is a good thing.

~ husband took a disgusting manufactured (albeit locally) plastic-wrapped cake of the sort that will be what survives a nuclear war (which these days, is closer than we might think/hope) to his meeting instead of the beautiful homemade cake that i made for him. he took the cake i made for him along, but "forgot" it in the car. the purchased cake was a joke. apparently. (tho' i fail to see the punchline if one doesn't reveal that one has actually brought a proper cake.) but i'm not bitter. or maybe i am. seriously, wtf?

~ i would feel better if we just had a few days of sunshine. i'm definitely in an end-of-winter-darkness funk. and probably have a serious vitamin d deficiency.

part 5 :: long weekend in berlin :: east vs. west

these small smooth stones and bricks look like they could have been collected by me. i have a very similar stash at my house - bits of brick that have been in the water, a stone that resembles a bird, smooth stones, a general impulse to collect. so much i can relate to and find in various baskets and on shelves in my own home. 

we had a lot of interesting conversations over the weekend. i learned so much. and in some ways, it was a blessing that there was a language barrier. if i'd have been able to converse on equal footing, i wouldn't have had to listen as much as i did. it was good for me. and i was exposed to some very different opinions than my own. i think in these times when people are very polemicized, it's too easy for us to shut off and not listen to someone whose opinions are different from our own. i'll admit to having done so myself. but not being able to jump in with my own opinions made me do more listening and less formulating my own answer in my head instead of listening.

it was eye-opening. today, 34 years after the fall of the wall, this family still regrets it. they miss the society they had in east germany. they were important artists with meaningful work and a beautiful home. they traveled all over the eastern bloc, practicing their craft, participating in exhibitions and meeting other artists. and when the wall fell, it all went away (except the house, they do seem to have kept the house). and they do seem to have still been able to live from their art. but a big part of the prestige crumbled with the wall. and they had a lot of regrets.

it seemed to make them especially susceptible to conspiracy theories and it also weirdly made them love putin and hate america. they were very much on the russian side of the war in ukraine and very resentful of the ukrainians who had flooded into germany. they completely saw ukraine as russia and understood that putin wanted to bring it back into the fold. they blamed the entire thing on biden and nato.

and maybe there are some grains of truth in that. letting ukraine think they could be part of nato was a provocative act. it's one thing with the baltics, but quite another with ukraine. 

and listening to them, still fully in thrall of the propaganda they had been brought up in, i realized that i too am in thrall to the propaganda i was raised in. and even though i've been resisting it for years - i did after all study russian due to a deep and abiding loathing of ronald reagan - i am still stepped in it myself. 

and perhaps the truth is somewhere in between. 

maybe what we all want is for our foundation to stay the same. it's hard if your country disappears and is absorbed into another country over night, or if it's falling apart before your eyes due to craven, power-hungry politicians driven by financial interests who wouldn't know the truth if it hit them over the head. or a supreme court hell bent on taking it back to the stone ages. it does something to you and your picture of yourself. 

i know trump being elected shook my foundations (and my back teeth). so it's no wonder they still have regrets that the only country they ever really knew was on the losing side in a battle that wasn't entirely theirs to win or lose. 

and while i do not agree with them that putin is right, it did me good to have to be quiet and just listen.

and to look around their beautiful home, at their beautiful collections of things and realize that we actually have a lot in common. 

people are such complex creatures. we can hold so many contradictions at the same time - praising putin's war while being a gracious host. hating america, yet welcoming one american warmly into your home. there's so much more to us than we let ourselves see these days. 

secret 19 - when i grow up

as kids we all go through phases as to what we say we want to be when we grow up. we try them on and abandon them for different reasons. over the years, i've wanted to be:

: : a paleontologist - abandoned this idea rather early when i decided that all the good dinosaur bones would be discovered by the time i grew up.

: : a lawyer - this is the thing i assumed i would be for years. right up until i didn't get into law school.

: : a riding instructor - i actually carried around application materials for johnson & wales college in rhode island for this. i think i just wanted a really cool trunk for my riding equipment and i never did really apply.

: : governor of the state i grew up in - yup, i could have been the sarah palin of the upper midwest. or not.

: : russian literature professor - got the farthest towards this one. but then life took me in another direction. and i never really liked the teaching that much, what i liked was the writing and the research. and the theory. oh, the theory. still love that.

: : spy - abandoned when i realized that i never really could keep a secret and that if i were to spy it would most likely be for the other side (due to deep and abiding loathing for ronald reagan).

: : writer - i've always thought there was a highly autobiographical novel in me, waiting to come out. it might still. when the conditions are exactly right. it's kinda why we built that whole writing house place in the garden.

: : stewardess - this one never really seems to go away. it stays in the back of my head and although stewardesses are really just waitresses in the sky, i still have some kind of romantic picture of that job in my head (despite how much time i spend on planes).

jobs i've actually done:

: : secretary - a couple of times, once to the vice president of a refrigeration company and once to the head of a foundation.

: : newsroom gopher - at a daily paper during college. spent a lot of time at the courthouse writing down who had gotten all those public intox and public urination tickets on the weekend. i also had to call all the bars and find out what bands were playing where, so i always knew what was going on. that was cool.

: : waitress in my favorite pub - it really was a pub and i was hanging out there so much i decided i might as well get paid for it.

: : eLearning developer - making training materials for a product i knew very little about. ha! funny how that can happen.

: : middle management - responsibility for big budgets and some 200 days a year of travel.

: : journalist - now i'm editing a magazine.

and here we come to the secret...i still don't know what i want to be when i grow up. do you?

going down in flames

the whole shitshow in the house right now, with the repuglicans' inability to elect a speaker, is like driving by an accident on the highway. you just can't help but slow down to watch the flames. and i have so many mixed feelings about it. i'll admit i'm mostly amused as i write this. though the utter dysfunction of one of the branches of the united states government isn't amusing at all. it does seem quite satisfying to see these clowns make fools of themselves. over and over again. where is the shame in these people?

i remember back when dan quayle was the vice president. that's when i began to be embarrassed for my country. little did i know that it would only go downhill from there. i thought he was really the lowest we could sink. a vice president who couldn't spell potato. oh, how we long for those innocent days. 

but honestly, these craven assholes are reaping what they sowed. at least biden and pelosi's house got a shit ton done over the past two years. nothing will get done now, if they're even able to seat the congress, it'll just be one long shitshow. but at least, it will likely make it very, very clear that no repuglican can be president in 2024 with this level of dysfunction.

while it's not the beginning of the end of the repuglican party (that started long ago and as you know, i blame reagan), it's surely the death throes. please let it be the death throes. let's hope they're going down in flames.

writing maps: on language

i follow the writing maps account on instagram and i've even ordered a few of their writing maps. i'm sick today and have stayed home from work. i've got a fever and that ache in the shoulders that comes with the flu. so i'm sitting in bed, propped up with pillows and my laptop and i thought i'd use one as a prompt. 

- - -

being from south dakota, second languages weren't really the norm. in the era i graduated from high school (1985), a second language wasn't even a requirement, though a requirement was passed around then, so my sister, who graduated in 1991, had to take german in high school. i didn't even have the option, so it was only english for me.

when i got to south dakota state for my freshman year, i signed up for french with a little near-sighted woman with a white bob called madame redhead (rather a misnomer with her white hair) to fulfill my language requirement. i wasn't a natural language-learner and i always felt rather silly trying to speak it.

then i moved to california and took a russian class at fullerton community college. i was interested in russian thanks to my deep and abiding loathing of ronald reagan. my teacher, tatiana gale, was a russian emigré with shockingly purpley-red hair that i later came to know as russian red (it comes straight from a bottle). i dedicated myself to learning the cyrillic alphabet and even decided to go back to university and major in russian after tatiana, with her late 80s new age vibe, told me that she had a feeling that i should do something with russian. being 19 and looking for guidance, i jumped on that advice wholeheartedly.

like the french, learning russian didn't come easily to me - i suppose i missed the language-learning window in my brain, not being exposed to any other languages when i was younger. but i had much more motivation for russian and fell in love with the literature, so i persevered through my bachelor's degree, a master's and well into ph.d. studies. adding a summer course in serbo-croatian (as they still called it in the early days after the dissolution of yugoslavia) and macedonian and even getting that fateful fulbright to macedonia that meant meeting husband in skopje.

and meeting him meant adding yet another language, that has ended up my second most fluent language today - danish. and through danish, i can read (if not entirely understand) swedish and norwegian and a surprising amount of german, if i can't actually speak those languages. 

the prompt asked about family languages - my parents only spoke english, though dad remembered his grandmother who more or less spoke only german. that must mean that emil, my grandfather, also spoke german, though he died when my dad was 16, so i never knew him. his father julius and mother frederikke, had come over from a little town near koenigsberg in east prussia and settled on the prairies, though if i remember correctly, emil was born after they got to south dakota. they surely kept speaking their native german together for the rest of their lives. 

my grandmothers, to my knowledge, only spoke english as well - i never heard of them having any knowledge of another language. their stock was sabins and barnhardts, which i oddly know less about than the nachtigals. funny how one strong branch of the family sticks out and becomes the dominant one.

i don't necessarily know how this informs the stories i write or will write, but it surely informs who i am, or at least the foundation of who i am. i definitely feel like i don't have the full spectrum of my personality when i speak danish. who i am at my core, is who i am in english. 

i'm happy to have raised my child with more or less two native languages - as i always spoke english with her and her father (and the school system), always spoke danish. she had some german as well in school here in denmark, though, like me and french, she didn't really take to it. 

when she first went to the US, she had a bit of a danish accent, but after 5 years there, that's gone. i doubt my accent in danish will ever disappear and i'll never get the hang of those danish articles (et/en), but i'm happy that she inherited her father's language ability and not mine. 

#5 - what if?

this week i'm writing each day about a person, place or thing that has had a big effect on my life. i'm going to be leaving aside parents, sister, husband and daughter because those are a given for having had a big effect and writing about that effect would be way more typing than i should do with the angry nerve in my left hand.

this is the last installment. it has been a very interesting assignment and i have even discovered a few things along the way (the thing about reagan) and confirmed others (the iPod posting proves what we have long suspected--i have a very deep shallow streak). i think i'll try to come up with some other writing assignments for myself in the coming weeks. if there are any ideas/suggestions out there, please do leave a comment!

this last of the 5 people, places or things that have had a big effect on my life is another professor. as i pondered this one, i found myself thinking how different my life would be if i'd never met her.

if i'd never signed up for a graduate course called intro to comparative literature during my first semester at playboy magazine's #1 party school, i might not ever have met elizabeth horan. 

i was interested in comp lit because i thought i eventually wanted a ph.d. in it. in fact, i had applied to a ph.d. program (only one, silly me) and didn't get in because i had had only russian lit and thus nothing to compare, so i found myself seeking another master's degree, in humanities, to try to get something to compare to the russian stuff.

if i hadn't taken that course, i wouldn't have:

• had my first exposure to magical realism.
• or reception theory.
• or had my first thoughts on the implications of translation on the literary work.
• met two fantastic and interesting people who i am still friends with to this day.
• had a truly fantastic discussion about the poetry of osip mandelstam and anna akhmatova.
• found my voice and thus my confidence in the graduate classroom (despite already having a master's degree when i started, i wouldn't say i'd really found my graduate feet).
• met the professor who would head my thesis committee.

and i certainly wouldn't have signed up for another of prof. horan's courses:  nobel prize winners from north and south america. and if i hadn't done that, i wouldn't have:

• made the completely hilarious and annoyingly consistent mistake of referring to the swedish academy as the "swiss" academy throughout the bit i wrote for a group assignment! (in fact, i still haven't lived that one down!)
• suggested that a figure like camille paglia might eventually win a nobel prize for literature (i was a bit off there, but i intentionally wanted to go for a longshot and my arguments were good).
• i wouldn't have stuck my foot in my mouth about annoying high school teachers who thought they could fit in in graduate courses, saying it TO one of said annoying high school teachers. (sigh...we learn from these experiences).
• had the chance to prepare in depth and teach a session on octavio paz.
• read a whole lot more gabriel garcia marquez and pablo neruda and gabriele mistral.
• gone out to casey moore's for beers and wings twice a week with the gang after class.

i adored prof. horan's teaching style. she was very laid back and very much let the course be student-driven. we took turns presenting the assigned readings and it went a long way towards preparing us both as researchers and as teachers, which is more than most graduate programs do.

but the most important thing she did for me was point out a poster for meetings regarding applying for fulbright scholarships. she said, "you should go, they'd be crazy not to give you one." i was blown away. i hadn't even been considering it. what would i research? where would i go? how would i pitch it? would they really give one to me? but those are prestigious! how could that be?

so i went to the meeting. it seemed that the #1 party school year after year wanted to shed that image and raise their academic reputation (and in all honesty, at the graduate level, it was awesome--very engaged teachers and students all around!). they saw helping their students gain fulbrights as one way of doing that. and help us they did. there were 7 or 8 of us receiving a fulbright that year.

and prof. horan was probably the biggest help to me of all, not only by suggesting i apply, but in helping me shape my application (she'd had at least one herself, so she knew how it all worked), but also writing me what my dad called the mother of all recommendation letters. it was like having a letter from god that would open any door. and although i hardly recognized myself in it, i was and will be eternally grateful for the kind words that were there.

but the biggest "what if" in this is that if it hadn't all gone as it did, i wouldn't have been in the right place at the right time to meet that lovely danish boy who is now my husband (and has been for nearly 10 years!) and i shudder to think about that. i would have lived a completely different life without elizabeth horan. so i am forever grateful to her for all that she taught me--both in the classroom and about myself and even more so for the guidance she gave. she definitely steered me in the right direction.

on having a russian soul, but not passing it on to my child

i have a russian soul. i know it sounds bad these days, with all of the homophobia and intrigues and hired clappers at the bolshoi and odin knows what else going on in russia, but it's still there. the same burning fascination that drove me to collect several degrees and a large bookshelf full of russian literature still smoulders within. i'm reading andrea pritzer's the secret history of vladimir nabokov and it, together with sabin's recent trip to st. petersburg, have fanned the flames once again.

russia is just so infuriatingly complex and vast and incomprehensible. it is at once primitive and highly cultured, traditional and fresh and new, provincial and cosmopolitan, a pastiche of copies of styles from around the world, but utterly its own. just when you think, i've just read brothers karamazov and now i really understand the russian soul, you turn to master and margarita or pale fire and another entire facet opens up. layer upon layer upon layer of complexity and history and blood and violence and art and thought and religion. i never get my fill of it.

i'll admit i was a little sad that it didn't speak to sabin in the same way. she said she was glad she went, but that she wouldn't want us to plan a family vacation to go back. maybe at 12, wandering the streets of modern st. petersburg, sipping a starbucks, and taking snapshots with her iPhone, it's perhaps understandable that she didn't feel the soul and the pulse of history running through the veins of nevsky prospect. but i had hoped that russia would open itself to her the way it did to me.

times are, of course, different. my initial interest in russia was a reaction to an instinctive and idealistic loathing of ronald reagan (i still think he's where the slippery slope began). it also arose in following the story of dissident andrei sakharov in the early 80s and in reading that baggy monster war & peace at too tender an age. the cold war was in full swing and we practiced nuclear fallout drills in the basement of our school. that's all very remote for sabin, if she has any awareness of it at all. the foundation just isn't there.

her danish sensibilities were a bit overwhelmed by the excessive ornate decoration of everything. gold trim and entire rooms of amber or malachite do make you understand why they needed a revolution. she found she didn't like not being able to read signs or understand what people were saying (being so multi-lingual, those are strange experiences for her). i guess i will have to accept that she will find her own forms of rebellion and passions and infatuations and that they don't have to mirror mine. i'm actually pretty ok with that, but i do wish that russia had made her heart go just a little bit pitter patter. but it wasn't a wasted trip. anytime you travel the world, you grow.

kittens don't care if they're black or white

like the rest of the world, i have looked on in dumbfounded horror as the reports rolled in last week of two innocent men in louisiana and minnesota who were killed in cold blood by those meant to protect them for no reason other than the color of their skin. then, when a sniper fired on a demonstration in dallas, killing and injuring police, it seemed that the united states was on the verge of meltdown.

during a long drive back from germany, on my phone i read the early accounts of the dallas events, all of which were very careful not to name the color of anyone's skin. some part of me appreciates the caution, as it's somehow borne of politeness and a wish to reserve judgement. but the fact is that these things are happening due to the color of people's skin and to be afraid to talk openly about it only adds to the problem.

the problem seems pretty insurmountable. instead of making things better, having the first black president in american history (who will also undoubtedly go down as one of the best) seems to have made things worse. the toothless mouth breathers are angry and with open carry gun laws in force, they're not afraid to show it.

i don't pretend to have any knowledge of what it must be like to be black in america today. as a white, educated, midwestern female living in europe, i'm surely steeped in about as much white privilege as one can be. living outside my culture, i have my moments feeling Other, but they are no doubt mild compared to daily fears of being stopped and shot by police just for going about my life within my own skin.

all these events seem to be bringing out the worst in people, especially on facebook. i suspect it's not good for us. we isolate ourselves in silos of those who believe as we believe. and we shake our heads at the sharing of treacly videos about how people are not born racist, considering ourselves above such superficial analysis. we don't really engage with the question at all. and it all feels quite hopeless.

some part of me feels as i did during the reagan years with his anti-russian rhetoric. i imagined a young girl in russia who was my age and maybe looked a bit like me and wanted the things i wanted. and i thought, if we could just meet and talk to one another and get to be friends, we wouldn't need all of this. maybe we all need to start making friends with people who are different from ourselves - whether it's skin color, sexual orientation, nationality or something else. maybe it's a place to begin.

fabulosity all around (and a giveaway)

i'm all for looking at the world differently, with fresh eyes, from a new perspective. wearing orange tights with red shoes and taking photos of my feet against the green grass in front of a snotty spa hotel in skodsborg while i wait for husband. but seriously, i have to draw the line somewhere and that somewhere is here.  apparently nancy reagan gets regular visits from ronnie during which he talks to her. i always knew the woman was nuts. tho' admittedly running the US by astrology does seem better in retrospect than the 8 years of the bush administration.

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A VERY BIG THANK YOU!! so big, i had to use actual capital letters, so that's big. thanks to all of you and your votes, my story will make the print issue of disco underworld. i quite literally couldn't have done it without you, so to celebrate, i'm going to give away one of my helleristning stones.  if you want to be entered to win, please leave a comment on this post. i think i will make an entirely new helleristning on one of my stones from my recent trip to norway, so this picture is just a sample. you will get a totally new, unique to you, very own helleristning. :-)

so, to review: leave a comment to win a helleristning stone on a stone from norway. it's my thanks to you for helping me make the print issue of discounderworld! and speaking of discounderworld, there's a new issue out now, full of cool people and things! you can go read it right after you finish reading here. :-)

my lovely assistant (i haven't decided yet whether it's sabin or husband) will draw the winner on friday.

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did you know that you're limited to 200 characters in labels? it's practically a tweet. i'm feeling restricted!

* * *

and while i was sitting here, killing time waiting for magazine proofs and in between last-minute edits and trying to shoo a bumble bee out of the addition (they get totally confused by the big windows), the mailman knocked on my door. he brought me this:

a package from the fabulous (i know, i'm overusing that word, i can't help it, there's just so much fabulousity) lynne of wheatlands news. and look what was inside!

rocks and toys and cards, oh my!

and lynne's 82-year-old mom made the cards.

i love that!!

these are seriously cool toys!

husband is gonna love these.

and so is sabin.

i might have to hide them and play with them all by myself.

and each of these rocks is cooler than the next!

lynne calls us stone freaks rotsifarians--b/c rots is rock in afrikaans--i LOVE that too!

the flat one is from namibia

the others are from diamond diggings at alexander bay

the red one is a "red luck stone" because it indicates the presence of diamonds (cool!)

and the little one is covered in eyes!!!

i love the little beaded doll too. 

it appeals to my superstitious side.

THANK YOU LYNNE!!!

i love having these little pieces of africa right here in denmark.

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blog camp note:  don't forget about blog camp II scheduled for september 4-7 here in denmark. i have room for 4 and one spot is tentatively booked. all of you north americans should be checking ticket prices right now (i hear air france is having a sale (ha, bad joke, but i couldn't resist)). but seriously, there are some good prices out there, so do book ahead! and if you're coming all that way, we can arrange for spending a bit more time than just a long weekend.  there may be one more blog camp during 2009 in the US--we're in the tentative stage of planning a trip and just might make time for a few days of blog camp fun sometime in the autumn. stay tuned for updates on that one.

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don't forget to check out the latest issue of disco underworld now.

there are lots of cool and creative people featured this month!

self-care in the age of trump

i am genuinely distressed by the trump presidency. i spent years loathing ronald reagan and the younger bush, but they seem so tame now in comparison. i think it's made even worse by the fact that obama, who was the very epitome of grace and erudition, preceded the cheeto. the contrast is stark.

my stomach is in knots, i wake up at 3 a.m., wondering what he's done now, and i'm still clenching my jaw. i can't even have the fillings i lost due to all of the grinding of my teeth fixed because i can't open my mouth wide enough for the dentist to work on me, thanks to what is beginning to look like permanent tightness in my jaw. and i realize that i need less facebook and more self-care. i need to do something other than obsessively refresh the nytimes website. it's time to take care of me.

so i snuggle with cats. make up fresh combinations in the juicer (grapes, carrots, oranges, ginger and turmeric). i got out a beloved sweater that's developed a few holes and i'm working on visible, pretty embroidered repairs. i read some of the mary oliver poetry that i bought and a jo nesbø thriller that i picked up at good will for a dollar. i put down a few ideas for what i'd like to do photographically in the coming year. i finished and put away all of the laundry (and yes, this is self-care - it feels so satisfying to know the laundry is done). i stayed in my pajamas all day. new pens. netflix (i'm almost done with season 2 of how to get away with murder). a long, hot shower. i have candles lit all around. and best of all, i took a bit of break from facebook, if only for a few hours.

i think i'll be ready to rejoin to the real world tomorrow.

500th post - an interview of me by tangobaby

that 499 was staring me in the face in my blogger dashboard this morning. i knew this would be my 500th post and i had nothing but a really weird dream that i had last night (strangely not in a mall) which although i took a page and a half of notes when i woke up from it, wouldn't have much sense to all of you...so, i was very fortunate that the lovely and talented tangobaby was staying up late during her staycation and just sent her 5 interview questions for me. we can all breathe a sigh of relief about that one! especially me, because i didn't want to waste my 500th post on drivel. so, here goes...

tangobaby:  I see now in your profile that you're currently working as a bee charmer. Since previously you were in the shipping industry, can you please elaborate on the change of career and tell us how you do charm bees. Is charming a bee easier than charming a sailor?

me:  back in '97 when i was on my fulbright in macedonia (at the point where i was just hanging out because the subject of my research turned out not to exist), a couple of NGO/peace corps types who i had met in the ex-pat community in skopje were going to travel to russia during the summer. they had been to the russian embassy to acquire their visas and had faced a lot of bureaucratic red tape and had come away discouraged. one of the women, bless her heart, was a prematurely grey 40-year-old with one of those eyes that looked off the other direction during the conversation and the other was a frumpy, slightly lumpy, no makeup, very granola-type. they were very nice, don't get me wrong, but they just weren't getting anywhere on the visa front. they knew i spoke russian (and had a few very short skirts and some nice new high-heeled sandals), so they asked me to help them out.

it just so happened that i needed a russian visa myself as i was headed on my friend gabi's honeymoon. so, i took my paperwork and theirs, put on my short orange dress and walked over to the russian embassy, which was about two blocks from my apartment. the dress is here on another occasion (when i was too afraid of heights to stand all the way up on a column at a ruin in central macedonia):

in those days (and maybe still today), you needed an invitation to get a visa to russia. my friends had a formal invitation from the place they were going to stay--very official-looking. i had an invitation from some friends. now there were some issues with my invitation. for one, it only had my first and middle names on it, not my last name. oh, and although the passport number was correct, it said i had a german passport. so, when i fronted up with a last name and a US passport, i expected i'd have some explaining to do.

it was a bright sunny day in early june. very summery and i was in a buoyant mood (it was probably the dress). i was let into the courtyard to the consular window by the guards. you actually stood outside and there was a picnic table there where you could wait. i went up to the window and explained in my rusty russian about the three visas and avoided mentioning the problematic bits with my invitation, hoping they might not notice.  then, i sat down at the picnic table to wait.

before long, the visa officer, a stocky, 50-ish russian gentleman, came out to the picnic table. he asked if i'd like a coffee and i said, yes and he asked someone to bring us coffee. then, he asked me about my invitation. he pointed out that my last name was missing and that it stated that i had a german passport. i was, of course, aware of these facts. but he was quite nice about it, laughing a bit and not at all intimidating. i explained that i was going together with german friends and they had arranged for our invitation and the russian friends must have not realized i wasn't german too. and then he laughed and said he'd issue the visa and that i should have a nice trip. and that i was welcome to come back anytime for coffee. then he went in and issued all 3 visas while i waited (which was quite unheard of, people normally waited at least a week).

when i went back to my friends to give them their visas, ellen pronounced me a bee charmer, so that's the long version of where that came from. actually, i think it's a line from the lovely 1991 movie fried green tomatoes at the whistle stop cafe.  that same summer, i had several other bee charming experiences, which i'll save for another day, so it was somehow the place i was in and the aura i was giving off.

i decided that i wanted 2009 to be such a bee charming year--to call some of that positive energy back into my life, so that's why i recently changed my blogger profile. and sailors are just as subject to bee charming as anyone else (if the queen bee can swear), so i expect to keep right on charming them as well.

tangobaby: You're remarkably candid about your feelings on your blog, especially in the area of the media and politics. If you could distill the greatest differences between the media and politics in Denmark and the US, what would they be. If you could infuse part of Denmark into the US, what change would be most beneficial? (Feel free to expound voluminously.)

me:  first, i guess i'm remarkably candid about my politics and opinions in general pretty much all the time, so it's natural for me to be so here on my blog as well. my blog is an extension of me, so to speak, so i behave here like i do in "real" life. and i guess i'm honest to a fault. husband has said that he understands the phrase "brutally honest" now that he knows me. this has been both good and bad for me, but is so closely tied to my identity and how i want to live my life...in a very real, raw, true manner, that i can't imagine being otherwise. i have tried to learn to temper it a bit when necessary, but i don't always succeed.

now back to media & politics...the largest difference surely comes from the fact that running denmark, with a population of 5 million, is like running a moderately-sized US city. of course, cities don't have embassies or a navy, so that's a bit of an over-simplification, but, it's still a scale. it's a bit easier to put a national health care system in place for 5 million people than for 300 million, just as one example.

there are a lot more parties in danish politics than in the US and people are starting new parties all the time. and because denmark is so egalitarian, it's really quite difficult (for me at least) to see any real difference between parties. the social democrats, the radicals and the socialists are the opposition to the coalition government that's in power at the moment, which consists of the left (venstre) party (which confusingly, is actually right), the conservatives and, as a "supporting partner," the danish people's party (dansk folkeparti). dansk folkeparti is the most colorful party, with a very colorful leader named pia. she's a real piece of work with her madonna-esque gap between her front teeth (the comparison most decidedly stops there) and speaks for the lower classes (whatever they may be in denmark, since everyone is SOOooo middle class)--those people who want to keep denmark for the danes, who are afraid of any foreigners and who go on charter holidays to mallorca, where they take their rye bread and liver pate along from home and stay in a hotel full of other danes. i'm sure that the woman who ran into the disabled guy in the wheelchair the other day was a member of dansk folkeparti's core audience.

as far as media, there is DR--danish radio, which would, in being publicly funded, be something akin to PBS in the US. however, it's a major media force in denmark--with two t.v. channels, 4 radio channels and lots of local radio. they do a limited amount of own production quality t.v. dramas and then crap like a danish version of x-factor (5 million people is not a large enough pool to draw talent from, let me tell you), which appeals to the masses.

i learned just the other night that if a t.v. station broadcasts from denmark, they cannot have commercials during their programming, only between the programs. a friend of ours works for a commercial station that broadcasts from the UK to get around this. weird how these things work.

as for other media...we have disney (the hannah montana channel, as nearly as i can tell), which strangely has ads only for their own programming, discovery, BBC world, CNN, BBC entertainment, 3-4 swedish channels, a couple of german ones, one swiss, a couple of french. but the main thing i watch is british detective shows and comedies. nothing is dubbed in danish (except children's programs and hannah montana for the morning broadcast), the market is too small, but it's good for people's english.

the DR popular radio station, P3, is great. they are some of the funniest DJs i've ever heard on radio (and i  lived in the southern california, chicago and phoenix radio markets) and they do a lot of really edgy stuff. the DR satire department is not at all afraid of lampooning any aspect of danish society and current events. nor do they have issues swearing on air. much freer in that sense than US media and not so restricted by political correctness.  i think it's this that i would infuse into US politics/media. a figure like jon stewart is doing so in the US, but he's on comedy central and that's not exactly wide distribution/mainstream media.  here, the daily show is broadcast on CNN and DR2, which says something interesting.

another interesting aspect of denmark that i'd like to inject into the US is a bit hard to describe. one of our best friends is black--her danish mother was studying in london and met a nice nigerian boy and produced our friend. she grew up in denmark, as danish as can be, but her skin is really black. and i always joke (even to her), that she doesn't know she's black. not in the way that people who are black in the US know they are black. she's completely complex-free and that's so refreshing. the US could use more of that and perhaps it will come for the generation growing up today now that obama is our coming president. i would wish that for the US.

tangobaby: You're a girl of many blogs. What does your hubby think of all of us in Bloglandia? (I ask this because my Boy is still befuddled about it all.) Does he encourage and/or enjoy your pursuits, or does he try to unplug your computer and hide it?

let me explain all those blogs, because they're for different purposes and not all active.

• moments of perfect clarity - this is the main blog. this is the one i write on (nearly) every day and where it all happens. this is my REAL blog.
  
• balderdash - this blog seemed to be needed as a place to put the funny made-up definitions i was coming up with for the WV words. and making a new blog afforded me the opportunity to invite a others to contribute. i've found that i really need to be inspired to write them and so my entries there are more sporadic than i would like them to be. i faithfully write down the words tho', they're scribbled on surfaces all over the house.
• just know where you are - this is the blog my sister and i put up about a year ago, when she was getting ready to go home to the US after being here for five months. we thought we'd continue our conversation there. that hasn't really happened (mostly because i think she lost the link and doesn't remember it exists). it has ended up being a place where i post pictures and small vignettes of what's been happening on our side of the atlantic. i do this because i have set it to send an email to our parents when there's a posting there and it's a good way to keep them informed when i don't call them often enough. i also post recipes there and i do think my sister goes there to look those up. we named it just know where you are because my sister wanted a GPS last year for christmas and husband's response was to buy her a map and a compass and tell her, "just know where you are," which i thought was pretty clever.
• too late nathan - my cousin does a family newsletter twice a year. i put up this blog as a supplement to that...to be a place where we could share a few more pictures and where my cousins would tell their stories. they haven't really done so. i think my family is actually rather luddite, if i'm honest. and it disappoints me a bit, because i have 29 cousins and i know that some of them must have something witty and/or humorous to say.
• getting it outta my system - only has 3 posts in it, but i write there when i want to vent about something that no one else should read, but which i need to get out of my system to move on. it's completely private and no one can go there but me. :-)
• sea skill - this is an invite-only blog where i put my work-related writing over the past year. i was having a writer's block in october and thought it might help cure it, since i seemed to have no trouble writing within this little blogger compose space during that time. it did help. it was also a way to solve the problem of my working on a mac in a PC environment and the issues i had with working on three different computers and never having the file i needed on the computer i needed it on at the moment i needed it.  basically, it's a sharepoint.

and as for husband's opinion...he thinks it's madness. i'm occasionally petulant to him about him not reading my blog, but he says, "i get to have the conversation with YOU, in person, i don't need to read it." and he's really right. many of the things i write about are the result of conversations i've had with him over a cup of tea in the evening or breakfast on a sunday morning.

tangobaby: As a former almost beauty queen from SD, what in your childhood prepared you for your life abroad and your years of travel? 

me:  i didn't have a passport or travel outside the US (except to canada and mexico, which didn't count since all you needed was a blockbuster card) 'til i was 26 if you can believe it. but, despite growing up in a very small town (1334 people), i learned to be outward looking from my mother, who hauled us in a 7-state area showing horses every summer. she drove us miles and miles and i learned from that to be fearless and that you didn't have to sit around waiting for a man to do stuff for you, since dad stayed home and golfed and no doubt enjoyed the peace and quiet.  and i've written before about how the made-for-t.v. movie the day after with jason robards and a deep and abiding loathing for ronald reagan (which i must have learned from my dad) made me want to study russian and visit russia.

i don't think i ever imagined that i'd live outside the US, especially not in denmark, which wasn't even on my list of places to visit--kind of in the same way that north dakota wasn't really on my list either--it just seemed boring. it just goes to show that you have to be open to what life throws at you and just go with it. and that, i learned growing up.

as for the beauty queen thing, i don't think that had anything to do with it, that was about revenge on a boyfriend who dumped me.

tangobaby:  To me, your photography is very graphic, vibrant and playful. Does your vision of the world inspire this aspect of your photography? What do you wish to learn most through your photographic exploits, what lessons are you looking for?

me:  this is an excellent question, mostly because it's provoking me to think about something that i never really thought about before.  i think that i'm very attracted to strong colors (which may contribute to my winter depression in this dark, grey danish landscape) and find myself taking pictures of things with strong colors. i only just started to play with the black & white presets in lightroom, to try to force myself off the direct positive and to expand my horizons (hence the new avatar pic).

as for the lessons i'd like to learn through my photography...i'm not sure i have consciously had any. but, i've been positively surprised on numerous occasions to notice some detail in a photo that i didn't realize was there when i was taking it...a shadow, a detail, some depth. i enjoy noticing those things. and i would say that noticing my surroundings has been one side-effect of photography. i think in photographs now in a way that i didn't used to. i tend to have a camera on me all the time, tho' i discovered the battery was dead on the pink sony when i was in ikea the other day and had to use my iPhone, which takes crap pictures, but i NEEDED a picture of this lamp to show to husband:

i'd like to learn a lot more about my camera. i have a nikon D60 DSLR and i've invested in some great lenses--an 18-200mm zoom lens and a macro, plus a fun lensbaby. i'm using the manual setting and choosing my own ISO more and more often, but still use it on auto settings most of the time. so from a learning standpoint, i'd like to work more on manual. my rolleicord TLR and other analog cameras help me on that front as well. i guess developing a photographic eye involves new, fresh ways of looking at the world. i look at things more closely than i used to, noticing chipping paint and details that i wouldn't once have noticed. photography grounds me and places me more firmly in the world, here and now. and although i hadn't articulated it until you asked me, that's what i want from it.

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well, that's it, that's my 500th post and my interview with the fabulous and wonderful tangobaby. thank you, dahling, for asking me these great questions! and now i've got to go pick my sister at the airport, which means my postings for the next ten days may be sporadic at best. but i'm sure i'll find time to share some pictures!