we did it!!!!

i've been busy all morning with my comference, but when i had the chance, i sneaked a look at huffington post on my iPhone and had to restrain a victory whoop! i seriously got goosebumps over my entire body when i read "president-elect obama," and tears in my eyes as i sat in the hotel lobby just now and read this:

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America."

i am so thankful that i don't have to write any more posts about sarah palin! :-) we really did it!!! let's hope that the energy that swept him to victory will enable all of us to pull the country (and the world) out of the mess it's been left in by 8 years of bush's mismanagement. it seems that hope has arrived!

the twilight of mcpalin

it's long past sunset on election day where i am and i thought this picture, taken of the sun setting over manila bay this evening, was a good metaphor for the dark hours ahead of the mcpalin campaign. we are surely in the twilight of their negative, counter-productive, no-ideas, anti-intellectual, moose hunting, QVC pork knife-selling, massacre of the constitution and everything it stands for (alas, if only sarah palin had read it (and understood it), it would surely have been a lot less amusing).

let's all raise a glass to the waning hours of this election...

i think we're really gonna make it...i just can't really bear to watch.

time to clear my head

i'm thinking about...



...how much i adore this photograph that i took today. it's one of my favorites in a very long time.

...how many hours i've wasted that i'll never have back.

...totally changing around the living room.

...painting the inside of some drawers a surprising color.

...how lulled we were into thinking there was real summer on the horizon, only to be (cold)snapped back to danish summer reality.

...a sewing/design problem.

...really being a vegetarian.

...the different reactions stress causes - sleeplessness, excessive counting, a sore jaw, curtness, snapping at loved ones, unarticulated and unarticulatable anger, cleaning frenzies (i could go on, but i'll stop here, since it begins to look like i'm in need of stress treatment).

...how badly the garden needs weeding.

...reseeding some of the things that didn't seem to come up and whether it's too late for that.

...what a great week sabin has had with her friend maria.

...how much i love the design (of the front page, not the little scrolly bits in the actual page windows) and (dare i say it) the down-to-earthness of GOOP.

...how unintelligent chickens seem to be (standing on top of each other up on a little ledge where they're not meant to be, but apparently desire very greatly to be).

...how on earth this can be true.  and is sarah palin shitting her pants now that bachmann is taking her flaky inarticulate freak for president role?

...whether i can apply for asylum in denmark if this lunatic beats obama (thankfully it's early days, so this may not be necessary).

...how i know i read and really liked jonathan franzen's the corrections, but i'm reading it again and find i have little or no recollection of it and am a bit mystified by the passages which i underlined on the first reading. i must have been someone else then.

...how much of a bust today really was. and how i'll never have it back.

...if i get a good night's sleep, tomorrow will be a fresh new day and i can begin again.

too much

one bright spot in today.
an A+ from my high school english teacher
she probably doesn't know about my lack of caps on this blog.
the barrel she's talking about is here.

i know i've written fondly before of the liminal space, but i have to say that right now, it pretty much sucks. waiting is never easy, especially when you're waiting to know whether you're bought or sold. or just confined to the scrap heap as the case may be.

on top of it, i learned today that a beloved aunt, who has always been this amazing, steadfast presence of goodness, kindness and general interest in life at the center of our rather chaotic, otherwise presenting a pretty good image of having been raised by wolves family, has cancer and is declining treatment. i can appreciate her decision because she has had a long and amazing life and i can completely appreciate that she doesn't want an undignified ending. but it all seems a little bit unfair in light of losing dad so recently and not being over that (will i ever be over that? i don't think so.).

but really, how much more can we take? and by we, i mean me. it's just too much.

* * *

oh dear, sarah palin is back at it again.

what she's doing to the language and politics in general is a criminal act.

* * *

thoughts on what changes when you move abroad.

stacked books and balderdash

i hadn't stacked any books in awhile, but this morning, these books leapt off the shelves and just stacked themselves. strange, i'm not feeling as bleak as this stack would indicate, perhaps it's just residual withdrawal from the antics of sarah palin.

* * *

for several weeks, i've been collecting those blogger verification words that look like real words. it's so much more entertaining now that they changed their algorithm and the words look like they might mean something. i find myself constantly scrambling for a pen and paper when i'm surfing the blogosphere, so these words are scribbled everywhere in the house..on the edges of newspaper, in the notes on my iPhone (for those times when no pen/paper were available), i even started a document with a bunch of them in it, but mostly, they're scribbled here, along with phone numbers and movie seats and journal prompts and stamped owls and the name of a fabulous chanel perfume, on a scrap notecard at my desk.

but, inspired by amanda's post nearly a month ago, i thought i'd make up some definitions for some of the ones that seem most fun.

cringo: i was going to say that it's what you do when you see a WTF Wednesday posting like this one, but upon further reflection, i think it's a curly-haired white person in mexico.

rhorifer:  a filter which clears away boring conversations like "do any of you ever use the highest temperature wash on your washing machine?" at dinner parties. i'm looking into a portable version of one of these.

domit: a small home constructed in the garden to attract hedgehogs.

menwisms:  the all-too-seldom clever utterance or observation by the male of the species. as in husband's statement last week while watching news of california wildfires on CNN that it so typical of americans to participate in global warming in such an extreme way.

brapigic:  that itchy feeling you get when you've just taken off an ill-fitting bra.

mismar:  to accidentally get caught in the waves and get the bottom of your pant legs all wet.

kajushin:   spontaneous squatting.

quinort:  an orangey-colored moss found at the foot of evergreens in the forest.  can be brewed into a healthy (if somewhat bitter) tea.

this reminds me of playing balderdash, that game where you make up funny definitions for words, at family holidays. 

what new madness?

i'm sorry, i couldn't stay away from the huffington post this morning, so i'm going back to my political musings. and although this is old (from 2007), you simply must see it, because it completely underlines yesterday's argument that postmodernity is indeed alive and well in election '08:



i'm speechless.

* * *

i also did a bit of research into sarah palin's wardrobe upgrade. remember yesterday when i asked how bad her old wardrobe was that she needed to go all imelda. well, take a look at this, taken just a few months before she became the VP nominee. frankly, i understand better now the $150,000. she needed a LOT of help here, people:

that lipstick on a pig comment is making more and more sense. is it just me or is it a little disturbing that she has the same evening gown competition up-do in this grocery store shot?

i do think this whole wardrobe issue will have a knock-on effect of making the job much more appealing to women in the future. heck, like my fellow julie, i would consider running if it meant a whole new wardrobe. of course, one cools on the idea when the campaign announces that they are giving the clothes away to charity after the election (as if). poor little piper will have to give up her louis vuitton bag. that kinda breaks my heart.

* * *

as i watched the daily show last night (the one from last week with that guy from the PC-Mac commercials--now there's a weird guy!), it hit me that watching it was pretty much the only thing keeping me sane through this election. these people are actually capable of driving people crazy, and thankfully, i'm not even there where i'd have to see all of the awful campaign ads. i feel for all of you who are living there in the middle of it and can highly recommend the safe distance of an ocean between you and the campaign the next time around. larry david has quite a funny piece on keeping sane (or not) in this mad election, check it out.

i've been flipping back and forth between CNN and BBC World these days. one thing that has struck me is how much footage from other networks and shows the news broadcasts are using--especially on CNN, but frankly, BBC is doing it as well (they disappoint me at times with their CNN-ness). clips of jon stewart and this new up and coming woman on MSNBC--rachel maddow (how are we going to keep her separate from rachel ray? dark-haired, perky. but i digress), clips of SNL. it's one thing to use another interviewer's clip, but an awful lot of entertainment is entering the news sphere.  and that seems to me like further evidence that we are in this strange, postmodern, unreal place.  what's frightening is that it's all too real! and not all that entertaining. 

i'll leave you with an especially good (and funny) example of what i mean, which i admit is pretty entertaining:

and now i shall try to restrain for the rest of today. there's only so much we can all take.

sorting diversions

i've spent the past hour sorting my scrap stash (no, i'm definitely not procrastinating, why do you say that?). and i discovered a few things.

a minor addiction to sassafrass lass products:

enough cool halloween-related stuff to make some decorations for sabin's upcoming halloween party:

and along the lines of sorting, i keep seeing sorted books stories in the blogosphere and so i had to give it a whirl. (no, i'm NOT procrastinating, why DO you keep saying that?)

first attempt:

and then this one:

and one more, i couldn't resist using "before i forget" again, it just starts things off so well:

you should give it a try too. i suspect it could get a bit addictive.

and i offer one more small diversion. an article about diagramming sarah palin's sentences. it's a doozy! :-)

so much for living a more intellectual life, eh?

the naughty noughties

what a decade it's been. we've gone from monica lewinsky to sarah palin. ken starr to osama bin laden. clinton to bush's non-election in 2002 to obama. from the Y2K scare to the triumph of the iPhone. september 11. the asian tsunami. wars in afghanistan and iraq. from the skeptical environmentalist (bjorn lomborg) to an inconvenient truth (al gore). from the matrix to avatar. it's been an eventful decade.

my friend zuzanna wrote not long ago about all of the words that are forever changed by the decade, so i won't repeat that, tho' i did argue in a comment that the word "bush" is forever changed. we do things differently now than we did at the beginning of the decade. we blog. we google. we tweet. we have clever phones and GPS and digital photography.

although i think that forty is the new thirty, i spent the prime years of my life thus far in the noughties. i had a daughter. i accidentally worked for microsoft. i traveled the world. i had a good decade. but i'll admit, i'm ready for the new one to begin. i'm ready to leave behind the excess. the striving. the constant accumulation of more stuff. i think the decade ahead will be a simpler decade. we'll do more for ourselves - growing more of our own food, learning more, remember more of how things were once done. we'll return to a place where we can simply do more things for ourselves (sewing, canning, making cider are on my list). or at least that's what i hope.

i hope a lot of other things too, but only time will tell.

an intellectual life

today i drove across the disturbingly windy øresundsbro (that's a bridge) to sweden to attend an all-day symposium in honor of my father-in-law. it's the one that upset me so much when i received the invitation a few months ago. i was pleased to see that there is still a glimmer of being pleased that i'm crossing a border to another country, even tho' it's pretty much like going to another state. i do apparently retain some of my former awe of living in europe (to be said to oneself in a hushed tone). but, i digress.

as i listened to a danish architect speak about urban planning and how he has basically lived his life in a reaction to the modernism of mies van de rohe and le corbusier, and a retired seagoing captain speak about regional cultures and identities and a rector of a university speak about the meaning of an entirely new field invented by my father-in-law, it struck me that i am living an insufficiently intellectual life.

how much time do i spend thinking about what makes cities tick? what makes a great urban space a great urban space? and how do our surroundings affect us? what effect will places like dubai have on the people who live there? you might think that i would have no business spending any intellectual energy on such questions, but you would be wrong. perhaps if i devoted more time to these questions, i would get to the bottom of what makes me uncomfortable about singapore's pristine, clean, safe streets.  would i be able to live there and keep my sense of self as i know it? should i even want to? should i be more open to change than that? shouldn't i ponder those questions in a bit more depth?

and the question of culture and identity is certainly relevant for a person who is going on ten years outside the country of her birth. what remains of the culture and identity i grew up with and what has been layered on top of it? and what does that mean to my identity? who am i today because of the things i've experienced. why is it that i can take the piss with sarah palin's cross-eyed flute performance when my adelaide from guys & dolls in the miss south dakota pageant was no doubt no better or more successful? what aspect of who i am today distances me so far from that person that i was that i'm ok with that?

what am i really doing with the chance i'm being given to write about one of the most important industries in the world? 90% of the stuff on the planet is transported by ship at some point and there is an enormous shortage of people to sail those ships. and i'm writing about that these days (when i'm not experiencing a total writer's block). am i doing enough with that chance? i could have a real effect on an industry that's undergoing an enormous change. have i devoted sufficient intellectual energy to the questions before me?

after today, my answer is that i could do better. and if i do, it would make peter proud. wherever he is. and for some reason, that seems really important.

i voted today!

after a horrible panic due to the fact that i hadn't yet received my absentee ballot (and i had been patiently waiting, thinking it would come), i got in touch with the chicago election commission and found out they hadn't received my request! arrgh! the good news was, it wasn't too late and because they have great service, i actually was able to request and receive a ballot via email, all in one day! i've filled it out and sent it, so it's on its way! i would have been devastated after all of this, not to be able to vote.

today's election quote translated from danish :  "sarah palin has had the same effect on the campaign as  halloween candy. at first, voters got a proper sugar high and afterwards a bellyache."

and looking ahead to 2012, i bring you today's tangobaby campaign button:

and because i adore the campaign button maker :

hope you're having a lovely weekend.

that does it...

canadians take the piss with sarah palin and surprisingly (or not), she doesn't have a clue! i wish i could say something nice about her, but the only thing i can think of is that she's hilarious.

great adverts

i'm not usually one for posting you tube videos here (unless they make fun of sarah palin and let's face it, she's a bit over), but there are several ads running in denmark at the moment that are just so good that i want to share them. the danish ad people are really irreverant and innovative and they must be some of the best in the world.

the first is for carlsberg sport, a soft drink (kind of a cross between sprite and mountain dew). it takes place on an antarctic research base and depicts what happens when you get really bored all by yourself and have only penguins for companions. you'll get the idea without any translation:



and this one from scandinavian airlines does such a great job of capturing the ennui of business travel and i love, love, love the plane at the end, where it's just the orange and blue of the engine and tail--pared down to the simplest elements, but still recognizable as a plane--scandinavian design at its best. the man in the ad is uffe elleman jensen, a former danish foreign minister. the ad may be echoing lost in translation a bit as well, there's a lot going on and i find it very evocative.



and on the lighter side, a commercial for a mobile phone plan where a girl goes into the changing room to try on clothes during winter and is having so much fun with her phone that when she comes out, it's summer. check out the awesome wallpaper in the changing room. love:



my response to watching that the other day was, "as if her battery would last that long." for some reason, husband laughed uproariously at me for that.

i'm off to put my studio in order now. a real post later...

like watching beavis & butthead

i've just been chatting with amanda and we've been discussing that feeling we get these days whenever we see the latest antics from sarah palin. whether it's falling hook line and sinker for canadian comedians posing as sarkozy (seriously, did she REALLY think that sarkozy would be calling her?) or claiming the first amendment is to protect a politician's right to say stupid shit without media scrutiny. or claiming obama is a communist. as amanda said, it's like watching the olympics and the girl falls off the balance beam and you can't watch anymore because you know she'll do it again. for me, it's the feeling i get watching mr. bean or beavis & butthead...an uncomfortable, fist-clenching, squirmy, can't-sit-still feeling.

i have the same feeling about watching actual election returns tomorrow. it's been such a long, mad road and i have such a feeling of dread about it. from where i sit, i have an excuse...i'm in a time zone that makes it slightly inconvenient to watch the returns. plus, i'm really busy tomorrow, so i can probably escape watching. because it's no doubt going to be uncomfortable, fist-clenching and squirmy.  i hope i'm wrong, but i will not trust these clowns and their banana republic-esque voting irregularities until it's all over.

speaking of banana republic, i've learned that one has opened in greenbelt 5, so perhaps i'll check that out tomorrow evening, rather than torturing myself with election returns.

what are you going to do? be glued to the t.v. or trying to stay far away until it's all over?

p.s. this was my 400th post. we all expected so much more....

on intellectualism and feminism

i admit it, i can't stay away from the huffington post, even though the election is over. this morning, it was bob cesca's article on the madness of the far right in cyberspace. although some pretty wacky stuff is being said out there...he cites "impeach obama" groups on facebook (ahem, guys, can't really impeach a guy who hasn't taken office yet...) and some far out far right blogger who is actually claiming that bush made no verbal gaffes in the past eight years...we would do well not to ignore it, as beneath argument as it would seem to be. i think that's what got us into that anti-intellectual space in the first place. tho' it does seem pretty absurd to have to go head-to-head on issues like whether africa is a continent or a country or which countries are part of north america.

* * *

debi's comment on my quick michelle obama post yesterday has me thinking about feminism and what it means, at least to me. and although i posted the article link light-heartedly and more as a justification for my love of middle-of-the-road/pocketbook fashion, debi brings up a valid point about what feminism means today. i'm not sure that i really know because it's a word that gets bandied around quite a lot and used and abused by all sides.

when i was in college, i studied lots of feminist literary theorists--bell hooks, camille paglia, julia kristeva, to name but a few. i was, for a time, interested in the whole notion of "the gaze" and how it often objectifies women, especially on film. i read naomi wolf's the beauty myth and the classics by betty friedan and simone de beauvoir. but i had to admit that i was still hesitant to call myself a feminist. yes, i thought women should have equal pay for equal work, the same opportunities as men, control of their own bodies, but feminists just seemed so angry and strident and righteous. and i'm just not really cool with righteous.

i had this feeling that to be feminist, you had to forsake makeup and beaded cocktail dresses and i simply wasn't prepared to do that. i love high heels and eyelashes and mac paint pots and sparkly clothes. so, instead i embraced a strong woman like madonna, who is arguably a feminist, but one who someone like me could believe in. she was sexy, strong, determined, capable and successful. with her sex book in the early 90s, i felt she took that "gaze" by the horns and in embracing it, subverted it and made it hers, wresting it away from the male who would objectify her. i'm not sure now that it really worked, but for me, it worked at the time--i felt that was a feminism i could identify with.  frankly, madonna at 50 represents a feminism i can still live with (even if i wouldn't personally go there on the plastic surgery)...she's still sexy, feisty, successful and going strong. 

i was a little dismayed to read last summer that camille paglia was coming out as anti-madonna on her 50th birthday. although she's a bit of bitch (something a feminist is also free to be, so i mean it in a good way), i always kinda liked camille for her daring. it just feels a bit wrong for her to abandon madonna on the feminist front. 

i guess what i'm trying to say is that the label "feminist" has always been a bit problematic for me. it is a little too equated with bitch (in a bad way) and perhaps a bit too anti-man in its formulation for me to fully identify. i like men and i like being able to use my femininity in the very male world in which i find myself making a career. would a feminist do that? i'm not sure. they would probably castigate me for indulging in feminine maneuvering to accomplish my goals--like wearing my "audit dress," a grey suit with a short skirt, and sexy black wolford tights--on days when there's an audit. but isn't using your feminine side to be strong and achieve the upper hand also a form of feminism? or shouldn't it be? enjoying one's ability, even at 40-something, to possess a room full of men just by walking into it wearing the right clothes and makeup and then having the further satisfaction of sealing it when you open your mouth and they find out that you're smart on top of it! that's feminine power if not feminist power. and as i see it, the only way to achieve equality in paychecks and career opportunities.

i guess i don't think feminism has that much to do with the abortion issue. i can imagine that feminists think that women should have control of what happens in and around their bodies. and to believe that just because you believe in free choice means that you think everyone SHOULD get an abortion is naive. it's called pro-choice, because we think that people should have the choice to decide for their own body and their own life. although i used to provoke my mother by saying i wished i needed an abortion whenever we passed those clinics in wichita with all the protesters outside of them, i'm really glad that i never needed one. i'm certain it's a heart-wrenching choice for those who choose it. however, i would fight to the end for their right to do so and never imagine that i could make that decision for them (not unless i had already donated the kidney that i'm not using, in which case i could really argue that i 'm pro life...but i digress). 

i objected to sarah palin's citing to katie couric that hunting moose was a form of feminism, but if i reflect on it, perhaps it is. because it's about making your way on equal footing in a man's world--and hopefully transforming it to a more human world, without gender distinction. hunting moose is just her way of doing it and wearing my audit dress on audit days is mine...perhaps that's the beauty of feminism, it's what we make of it.

and me, i'm gotta go put on some of my new eyelashes because husband and me have a date night tonight..we're gonna go see the new james bond!

things can only get better

going to bed early seems to make me get up early. not sure i'm so keen on that...but it did give me time to check up on my election obsession before getting ready for work.  and this piece warmed my heart--9000 people brave pissing down rain in pennsylvania to see barack obama. john mccain canceled a rally at the same time, citing the weather. it may also have been that no one had shown up due to lack of interest.

the cracks are really starting to show in the mcpalin campaign.  mitt romney, who has apparently been living under a rock, acknowledges that there is now a "very real possibility of an obama presidency." that's been apparent for some time, my friends (to quote mr. mccain). one of mccain's advisors has actually called our sarah a "wack job"and others are beginning to admit publicly that they were shocked at how little she knew. it's clear she's trying to save herself a political future, going increasingly "maverick" on the campaign trail, tho' these fruit fly comments aren't going to help. let's hope she doesn't succeed and goes back to alaska to her refurbished governor's mansion with her tail between her legs. sadly, she probably lacks the good sense to do this. and sadly, she won't have all her pretty new clothes to wear in the prettied up governor's mansion. that is, if we actually believe they will go to charity. i can see it now: a sotheby's auction of palin memorabilia.

i'm not sure what i feel about the 30-minute ad the obama campaign is going to air--it seems like a bit much--but i am definitely looking forward to seeing obama on the daily show!

time for my day to begin...things can only get better, right?