in sickness and in health, a parody

being sick / america

Squirrel through the office fruit basket looking for some oranges. Buy orange juice from concentrate. Empty three packets of Emergen-C into your orange juice from concentrate. Pop, fizz, slurp. Stock up on instant soup. Pray whatever's coming won't last for a long time. Begin to get stressed about the thought of becoming sick and having to deal with it at work. Pop some pain-killers. When the inevitable hits, and you wake up with a cold, purchase tissues during your lunch break at work. Have trouble deciding if you want pocket packs or one big box. Purchase both. Feel your throat begin to go. 'Oh, you're getting sick', say your colleagues. 'Yeah...' you mumble. Sucks. It's been a month since last time. Some Sudafed will help with the drip but it will dry you right up, so drink some water. Listen to the man next to you cough and cough and cough. This doesn't gross you out enough. 5 minutes later, ask to borrow his tissues because they're much softer than yours. Stock up on Purell. Squirt, wipe, flap. Go home on the bus and try not to think about the fact that your nose is running and you ran out of tissues. Clutch the tattered toilet paper in your jacket pocket. Zinc! You need zinc. Zi-cam. Wasn't that stuff, like, removed in nasal spray form because it took away people's sense of smell? Not like it matters, because you currently don't have a sense of small anyway. Spray, whiff, snort. Try and calculate if you sleep in for two hours tomorrow, is the office equivalent of a two hour delay, and will it really count as using a full half of a sick day? Think about how much you have to finish with That Project at work and goddamnit, Becky's been out of the office for like three days and that bitch only had a fever. Has she ever heard of Dayquil? She should be better and back by now. She's probably faking it, you think, as you empty the little plastic cup of Nyquil down your throat, the rancid cherry flavor twisting your face into the picture of misery, and yet years of downing D-level vodka in college has prepared you for these very moments. Crash, bed, fade. Wake up the next morning and your nose is clogged as hell but it isn't dripping anymore. Thanks Sudafed. Or was it the Nyquil? Downside/upside: throat is ragged, voice is gone. This is good because you will milk all of the sympathy at work. Make sure to emphasize it in front of your boss. 'Oh, your voice is gone!' says a co-worker. 'You sound really sick.' 'Yeahh,' you croak, popping disgusting-flavored Halls your roommate had in her sock drawer, (pop, suck, cringe) 'But it's fine. I've got to make sure I finish The Project.' Hunch over your desk and start typing away for added sympathy slash badassness. You really should see the doctor, $20 co-pay to make sure you haven't since developed cancer. Just make sure you take Mucinex because otherwise it'll all spread to your lungs and that's just bronchitis waiting to happen. Miraculously, Friday you wake up, and everything is good. Everything is good! Happy hour after work? Yes please. You need a damn drink. Pour, slurp, gone. After this week, you need to relax. Jesus, being sick is exhausting.

being sick / currently

At the first onset of sickness, pray whatever's coming won't last for a long time, for your own sanity. There is no medicine here for you to take. You can take a few hours off in the morning tomorrow to re-charge with an extra long night's sleep, and probably nip the whole damn thing in the bud right now. But you are American. You go into work. When the inevitable hits, and you wake up with a full-blown cold two days later, you go into work. Your boss will hear your voice on the phone and ask you if you have a cold. Your boss will tell you to either A) take it easy or B) go home. You do not play up your symptoms, because there is a very real chance your office mates will get super grossed out and immediately demand you leave before you get anyone else sick. What are you thinking?! If you do reveal to your co-workers you are feeling under the weather, prepare for a myriad of homeopathic suggestions ranging from alcohol to a delicious combination of raw ginger, lemon, & honey steeped in hot water. If it's realllllllly bad, you can pick up some Panodil at the pharmacy, but, you know, that's medicine. Don't even think about seeing a doctor for this. You don't need a doctor. You'll let your illness run its course. You'll drink a lot of tea and eat a lot of soup. You will feel okay if it takes a turn for the worse and you have to be out of the office for two days. You will secretly give yourself a double-dose of the Nyquil you have snuck back from the U.S. and pass out for a blissful 10 hour sleep, the likes of which ginger tea cannot provide. It is the best thing you have brought back from the U.S. besides the Trader Joe's almond butter. Your Danish roommate will look on with a combination of envy, intrigue, and suspicion. You'll be better by the time the office Friday bar rolls around. Being sick happens.

danish gastro cooking

One of the cool perks of the job is getting the chance to accompany students on various cultural immersion experiences they sign up for. Last night a group of sixteen students and I visited Tim Vladmir's Køkken in Valby and spend four low-key, educational, creative hours enjoying wine and cooking our way through some inspiring dishes.

Menu for the evening. New Nordic inspired, a bit of science, and local ingredients.

Vegetables in edible dirt. The base is a mixture of thick mustard (complete with whole seeds), homemade mayonnaise, apple cider vinegar, capers, and Icelandic skyr. It is covered with crushed roasted rye bread, dark malt flour, and savory pop rocks. Yeah, I'm not actually sure what the culinary name for 'savory pop rocks' is, but that's what they were! Planted are radishes, carrots, sprouts, and nasturtium flower.

Want to make this again sometime. It's really beautiful and I already own these exact glass jars.

Cod tartare - fresh, simple. Cucumber cut out with a tiny melon-ball scoop. Little bits of bacon to add a saltiness and crunch so the raw fish texture doesn't take over. Small amounts of broken apple jelly to add sweetness. Dusted with bacon dust, which was cool to make but I don't think added too much - maybe I needed more?

PORK BELLY: My first time having sous vide meat.. We finished it off by cooking it in equal parts butter and olive oil just to give the outer fat a good sear.

Preparing the shaved fennel salad to go underneath.

This was just as delicious as the meat - the vegetarian alternative was celeriac 'steaks'. Celeriac is the white bulb-like root under the celery stalks we are more familiar with. Most people use it to make soups, but if you slice it and cook it in a good oil or butter, it retains its texture and you can eat it like meat, i.e. it won't turn into mush. It's slightly sweet and very satisfying. 

Sea buck thorn is local to Denmark and is often picked the late summer to fall. These were frozen from prior. They are very tangy in their taste and remind me almost of a orange Push-Up Pop. We cooked them down with some sugar and water until they were a thick syrup. Their color is phenomenal.

Prepping sheep's milk ice cream. Already plated the sea buck thorn syrup. To the left are Danish butter cookies with a slight variation of hazelnuts and the same dark malt flour used in the 'dirt'.

Using liquid nitrogen to flash-freeze the ice cream. I didn't have time to top my ice cream with a shattered leaf on top, but it was cool to watch.

End result.

hiking kebnekaise, 2009

you’re an old man 

with a violent heart

i’ve wandered up 

and down

your windswept shoulders

your aqua ice rivers

i’ve tasted your tears—or is it your blood?

i,

i am all fear and anger

i am sunstruck

no sleep sweaty hands oily hair tired face worn

feet.

it is here

i am reminded of my own insignificance,

it is here that the world could end.

the mosquitos are fat off my sweat, and blood—

or is it my tears?

i steal sleep on your molting snows,

i put my head to your chest

and curl my fingers around your stones.

it is here that the world could end.

you, me, and the tiny flowers

you, me, and our demanding hearts

on the doorway of kebnekaise

river of rock, cradle of snow.

18.2.2014

Maybe here you miss driving. The independence, the significance of the closed bubble of individuality that means your music, your optimal temperature, your conversation. Everything tailored. Long night drives with your own thoughts, uninterrupted, sleek black roads of silence. Or music - and with the car racing along, your inertia is always the perfect accompaniment.

But here nothing is your own, really. Space, sound, scent - you're at the whim of everyone and everything else. You laugh to yourself when you realize halfway home the reason your commute home has tantalizingly - agonizingly - smelled like warm, greasy, cheesy, pizza is because the guy two bikes ahead is dangling double boxes in his right hand and biking with his left. And unless you pass him, you and everyone else behind him are left to bike, forcibly enveloped, in a smell so good your mouth waters in the night air, until by some grace of god he turns onto a side street.

And of course, the other feelings: tension, aggression. Bikes have bells and cars have horns, so that type of 'polite gesture sometimes veering towards over-abused annoyance' is the same. But other things seem slightly different. Beefs are expressed through direct verbal comments, often when riding right past someone. I think very rarely, if ever, do I see people just start screaming and causing a scene. Instead, they'll bike by the person and express their discontentment (perhaps a sharp word or two) but it isn't a volume intended for the world to hear. Or, people get into really intense staring contests.

Once I witnessed two men on bikes almost collide into each other. Everything seemed to melt into slow-motion as they both turned at the same time, locked eyes with each other, and didn't let go. It was a cold Scandi-glare at its finest. No words or sounds were made. 

Or the time I saw a biker gracefully glide around a truck going through a red, in a cinematic fashion. My heart leapt as he narrowly avoided a collision, but instead sailed in a beautiful 180 degree arc around the front of the truck, with one perfectly poised middle finger raised to the sky.

It's real. You're in the same environment, interactions are closer. You're not behind a full ton of metal. Tempers may flare, but there's no violence. When I think about space I think about the times that people get angry in the safety of their cars, and the stages of escalation - honking horns, screaming, cussing, rolling down the window, opening the car door, getting out of the car, getting in someone's face (and then, rarely but regrettably, the road rage shootings) and I laugh because when you've gotten in someone's face you've really crossed the line, but that's sort of the personal-space line you begin with on a bike because you're so damn close to everyone that in the summer you better hook your purse around your handlebars because the guy next to you in traffic could easily reach over and grab your wallet.

file this under 'things i wish i had made'

Noah by Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg

Navigating the dashboard of relationships and online existence. A succinct, scarily-ADD yet painfully accurate 17 minutes.

9.2.2014

Being back in Odense, Denmark was slightly surreal because I hadn't been there since the second time I returned as a student to study in Denmark - the spring of 2011. It was there that I walked back to our hostel one night with the Communication program intern, and I revealed that I worried I'd never truly get the chance to come back to Scandinavia for any long period of time. Very rarely do you get to witness full circles, but when you do, they're quite precious. I remember the exact walking route we took through the King's Garden. I walked the same way on Saturday morning to get a dirty chai from Nelle's, three years later.

My bike was hit in Copenhagen last week - while it was parked, so no, I wasn't riding it at the time. They've been working on making the downtown Copenhagen streets even more bike friendly, which involves switching some street directions around and creating more bike parking. The current street that my office is on is a one-way for cars and a two-way for bikes, and they've been replacing a lot of the parking spots with bike parking. The downside is that a lot of trucks still want to act like it's mainly a driving street, so they tend to be pretty annoying. On this particular day, a truck backed into an entire bike rack and bent the front wheels of four bikes, before speeding off in an anonymous hurry. The Danes I talked to were pretty shocked that the truck driver hadn't turned himself in (but as an American, I would have been shocked if the truck driver had stopped) but luckily I think my insurance will cover it.

Then I saw the above in Odense. Bike parking in that is both design-y, a visual reminder of the eco-friendly nature of bike riding, and, most importantly, a good framework for bike parking near the street. Without any sort of metal protecting the front of our bikes in Copenhagen, the rack provided no support from the street elements, mainly rogue trucks. But this rack protects the bikes with the 'car' face. Nice.

On the way back to Copenhagen the group ended up paying a visit to Midtfyns Bryghus, which is actually American-owned. They had a really good chili tripel.

Finally, come Sunday my roommate celebrated her birthday with a 'Festelavn' themed brunch. Being back in Copenhagen is always the best. 

how to meet danes

When I was a student my class traveled to Aarhus, the largest city outside of Copenhagen, and a small, seaside town called Kolding. Kolding: population 57,000. The top rated attraction in Kolding, according to TripAdvisor? Koldinghus, a royal castle (and don't get your hopes up, it's not huge) within which the most valuable exhibit they had at the time was a roving Beatles-in-Denmark retrospective, which was hopelessly random but endlessly entertaining, and I spent 90% of my time at the castle covering renditions of Beatles songs with my classmates on the lone GuitarHero set-up in the castle basement. We ultimately gathered a small crowd of older Danish fans who watched us, playing our fake instruments with gusto, and politely clapped at the end of our set.

But I digress. Come night, which place did I end up having the most fun in? Kolding by a long shot. Why? For some reason the small town mentality did a number on us Americans, as if its plain little Danish existence was daring us to get something funny and semi-crazy out of it. We had dinner with the group that evening, had a drink with our tour leaders, and then they let us 'loose' on the town, which seemed like a joke in itself. In the beginning we managed to stumble upon a high school pub crawl, which was fun enough, but time ran out on that one and we found ourselves wandering the tiny streets with a hunger for more.

Or was it a literal hunger? After all, there were these Danes that kept wandering by with huge slices of pizza. Some of our merry little band of wanderers wanted pizza. I believe a few may have been interested in finding some other substance. I was freaked out by the mere thought of asking a random Dane where he got a slice of pizza bigger than his face, so I kept quiet while the bravest among us asked about the pizza, and then continued on to try and score some of the above mentioned, and timid me kept wanting to leave, but then somehow we ended up wandering down a street, outside of an apartment, waiting as the Dane ran up a few flights of stairs to check on things with his friends. Moments passed. I really wanted to go back to the hostel. I almost did. But then the door creaked open, a sliver of the Dane's face visible. He invited us in.

What proceeded to happen was an impromptu apartment party between six American students and seven eighteen-year old Danes, who gave us beers and sat us down in their living room while they smoked countless cigarettes and rolled joints in their kitchen. They asked us what the hell we were doing in their tiny town in Denmark. It was interesting--here we were, fresh-off-the-plane Americans, meeting even younger Danes who listened to rap and dreamed about America, or even just getting out of Jutland to Copenhagen, who were in and out of school, who owned their own apartments at eighteen while many of us didn't know life beyond a dorm. And here we were, dreams of a random night utterly fulfilled, talking to, nay, partying with, real locals! Our eager, easy-going cross-cultural conversations carried on for hours in the smoky apartment, beer cans on the table, music videos on the TV, questions and laughter and harmless flirtation and silent looks exchanged between us, moments stolen while backs were turned, this is freaking crazy, so random, can you believe this? At some point a Spice Girls singalong happened. It's on film somewhere. No, I won't show you.

(This is something I'll never understand about Denmark. I have yet to witness American males at a social gathering singing Backstreet Boys, and yet just the other weekend I was walking home from the Metro late at night and came across a street-level apartment, where a party was being thrown on the ground floor. A group of 10 Danish men and women, at least my age or older, had reached a certain drunk point of the evening where they all were huddled in a circle, arms around each other, belting out 'Backstreet's Back, Alright' with a heart-felt passion, heads tossed back, locking eyes, singing every lyric with drunken-love gusto. Denmark, you kill me sometimes. Most times.)

The evening got late. We got tired, we knew we had to find our way back to the hostel. We filtered out, said our goodbyes, knew we'd never see each other again but didn't have to pretend otherwise, went to bed, woke up, and it became a good story. But I remember it did give me the confidence to capitalize on more random moments, to seize more of my missing spontaneity, to experience all of the forms that being abroad comes in, both big and small. This was two weeks after I had arrived in Denmark, and I was able to ask these young Danes real questions about their lives, and learn from them beyond the Copenhagenized version of 'How to Meet Danes!!!' I carried this night with me triumphantly.

Thursday the class section that I'm traveling with goes on tour to Western Denmark, and I've gotten a typical mix of reactions to the fact that we're spending two days in the same fairly small town: have fun, but really, what are you going to do there, oh that's nice, I suppose it's old, cool, enjoy the 'nightlife', ha ha ha. And forgive me for hoping that the students are bright and alert in the morning, but that they are adventurous and spontaneous at night. Because any small town in Denmark is just like everywhere else in the world: it's totally what you make of it. And sometimes you do miss out on a lot by just going to bed.

3.2.2014

“When the spring comes,” he told me as I leaned on the printer, “it’s a mercy. It’s a miracle. You’ll catch people lifting their necks, turning their faces, like a plant, towards the sun.”

He didn't have to tell me twice. I've lived in the cold and the dark for a long time now, so long I almost can't believe I'm still doing it. But nothing is as glorious as light after darkness. Nothing was ever as precious as early summer days in Minnesota, when you couldn't believe the world could be like this again, and you had almost forgotten that people walked the earth in great numbers.

Denmark averaged 19 hours of sunlight for the entire month of January. Less than a day of sunlight...for the entire month. When the sun came out on Sunday, there was no time to waste. When you're really inside your head, some days you imagine you're part of some post-apocalyptic place where everyone is sickly pale and you've forgotten what faces look like without florescent. I read that some place in Norway, a tiny town nestled in a valley, gets absolutely no sun, so they rely on mirrors to project sun into the valley, and they all huddle together to feel it on their face. Copenhageners seemed to be smiling in droves on Sunday, smiling at strangers, peeking into cafes, little kids hiding behind their parents, the mood suddenly lifted, all because rays had touched our cheeks for a real moment. 

It's strange but the knowledge that it'll get lighter soon makes me want to relish the darkness. I've never felt that before. I want the candles, I want the thick city-fog that makes the cobblestones wet and lets my imagination run wild with how Copenhagen looked 200, 300, 400 years ago. I want the frosty, foreboding lakes, the ice sheets, everything. It'll be hot and sparkly and wonderful before I know it, but my mind wants the physical equivalent of the extra-cold shower before the pool plunge, the polar extremes, to enshroud itself in darkness to make the summer dazzle with even greater ability, to implode in on itself with a crazed comprehension of the sun and endless days to lose track of time in.

---

63,000. That, according to the Danish Red Cross, is the number of people in a poll that were going to be alone on Christmas in Denmark this past December. What's one aspect of society the Red Cross is dealing with in Denmark? Loneliness. Dying alone. Being released from jail and being alone. Entering as an asylum-seeker and being alone. I took a student group to the Danish Red Cross and we all were a little bit surprised to hear that something as seemingly intangible of a humanitarian need as loneliness was a focus. But we were told that more people died from loneliness than many other causes, that it takes years off of your life. An example: They have volunteers that sit for three, four days, 24 hours a day, next to the bed of a dying person, holding their hand. I was also interested to hear about some of their other programs, for example, slightly different theme: a group of two or three volunteers that are assigned a person who was in jail, that after they are released meet with them to aid in the transition. One might be a soccer enthusiast, one might know computers, one might know finance. 

What small countries can do in their backyard. 

---

The Secret to Desire, Esther Perel, TEDtalk

'So we come to one person, and we are basically are asking them to provide us with what an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise.

I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long.' 

---

friday voices

Some Minnesota poetry I love. (And Graywolf Press!)

Dobby Gibson, It Becomes You (2013)

The Minneapolis Poem

Beauty Supply

Gretchen Marquette, "Ode to a Man in Dress Clothes" (I believe Graywolf Press will be publishing her debut collection?) from Harper's

20.1.2014

This past Sunday meant me and Per the bus driver and a personalized tour of Copenhagen while we drove the highway route between the airport, Nor Vest, and Bispebjerg and back again four times over. I thought the wind was going to blow me away every time I jumped out to greet the students. Per was there with a smile to open the doors and help with bags, even though some of these students packed like they were moving to Copenhagen for two years.

They tell us at the beginning of our internships that Danish bus drivers will either be notoriously difficult, insisting on particular routes and stopping for their mandatory breaks every three hours and such, or wonderful people that tend to talk about...everything. I definitely have only ever encountered the latter.

Per heard I was taking Danish, so he immediately told me I was free to try as much as I'd like in the vicinity of the bus. "I have an old, old friend from Utah," he told me, "and whenever we get together he says, Per, don't be perfect, we're just trying to communicate. Kenzie, people all speak to each other in some way, we'll get there. And if we don't? We ask questions. You ask me as many questions as you'd like."

Per was excited to show the students some of the sights on the ride, but a lot of them were jet-lagged and quiet, so it ended up being me in the front, enjoying his vast knowledge of the area that comes with driving many busses, growing up in Copenhagen, and being a generally curious person. He told me about the architecture of some buildings, a place near the airport where they recycle dirt that has been contaminated by oil spills and can be used again, where the new development is in Copenhagen. He went over how to count in Danish, the weekdays, and that aegte means 'authentic' when we passed Thai restaurants. He offered to take me by the scenic route on our way back, a pretty route on Amager that had us passing beaches, which looked cold but beautiful, and a lot of wind surfers. He pointed out the tiny water-side summer houses and we both wished summer would come sooner. He suggested to me that I compare tiny Nettos (local grocery store) and larger Nettos if I had time, swearing the prices differed, and told me that toasted rye bread with cheese on it is 'heaven'. He noticed after lunch I had began to crash, so he politely told me to take a power nap and that he'd wake me up when we reached the airport. At the end of the day, he gave me a bottle of water and dropped me off near my neighborhood and we thanked each other for making the day a low-key, enjoyable-as-one-can-have-in-a-bus-for-eight-hours kinda day.

I've met all kinds of people here, from the friendly to the outrageous to the thought-provoking. What about the performance artist, with whom I had a discussion about 'acting' in the public realm? How Americans always seem to treat their existence in the public realm, such as on public transportation or on the street, as a unified experience, somehow knowing that everyone is secretly paying attention in some small form, and so we perform for each other, we come together in small ways as a group. And that Danes are more likely to shy away from any collective public existence, preferring to exist in smaller bubbles, keeping the quiet, narrowing the focus. Why she loves being in America because it is a more fertile place to observe as a performance artist, because we are all actors in some way.

Or what about the woman who came here as a refugee from Iraq? Who showed me the dual existence of Denmark's ugliness and Denmark's opportunity? She lived in an immigrant ghetto of a community - she had owned multiple cars, her father had been an engineer, they came from wealth - before being housed in the same building as many other types of people, including criminals. A girl was raped there. The family was told they would never amount to anything, would never learn Danish, would never integrate. The immigration officer asked her mother how many camels the family owned. It's a story that's painful but familiar - her father working many months as a delivery man, geography dictating that him and his knowledge suddenly meant nothing. And yet - she didn't become a maid, like they suggested she be. She learned Danish, and now her family is all so successful, and Denmark was a land of contradictions for her. But she's smart and beautiful and quietly powerful, more so than I'll ever be.

I greedily collect faces, and moments, and colors. I tuck them into my pockets, hide them behind my ears, watch them puddle in my cupped hands, dripping between my fingers. My world throbs with the knowledge that now is the clearest vision, now is city-dirt, is foreign-stare, is sweat, is taste, is something.

A gift. A task.

Every night here, my mind races. Every day here is opportunity. In the past each day might have been but a grain of sand, quickly collecting, meaningful only in quantity. Here? Each day is bright in the knowledge that no two are ever the same and each lasts but once.

the right to be happy

The 'How Are You?' Cultural Clash

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the phrase’s precursor, “How do you do?” as a common phrase “often used as a mere greeting or salutation.” The anodyne exchange dates at least as far back as 1604, to Shakespeare’s Othello, where Desdemona asks her husband, “How is’t with you, my lord?” and Othello replies “Well, my good lady.” Even though he is half-mad with jealousy and only five scenes away from murdering her.

&

Half a year ago I wrote the following. It had taken me a little bit to get to that place after a semi-rough year post-college. It's strange to find myself in the middle of Danish winter with this developed mindset still mostly intact - maybe being here makes it easier? I mean, I am still practically giddy by the time I finish trivial things such as my daily fifteen minute commute to work - that I have been doing every day for six months now - and I'm still not sure why. But it's also important to realize that where I'm at right now is very special - my social, interesting, workplace that really pushes me to do my best, a compassionate and intelligent boss to whom I really look up to as a leader, sharp friends, a culturally rich and very accessible environment - and know that wherever I'll end up next may be very different, and quite possibly not as perfect.

"I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness lately.

Perhaps it’s because spring is in full force in D.C. Perhaps it’s because it’s almost been a year since I graduated from college, and with that time comes a lot of reflection.

What did the founders mean when they stated that the pursuit of happiness was a divine, inalienable right? How have we as a country come to interpret that? How does that play a role in my every day life?

When I was little it was very common for me to happy, at least in the way that I interpreted it. I loved things — being outside, friends, dinnertime, sports, etc. Things were fun until they weren’t — getting in trouble, getting hurt, having a crush, etc. But I certainly didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing a path to happiness and what that meant. I sort of just experienced the emotions as they came.

And then gradually as I got older I noticed people peppering their speech with “happy”-isms. Like, “Do what makes you happy” and “Find your happy place” and such. There was such an emphasis on feeling happy, and if you weren’t, you were clearly doing something wrong. And then I reached a point where I began to feel very differently due to the changing of the seasons and the existential crisis that is post-college life. Not only was I not happy, I wasn’t really feeling anything.

After a period spent in that mind-frame, I remember thinking that when I reached the other side, it wouldn’t be a happy world of happy. Instead I just had a desire to experience the complex state of emotions that constitute normal life. And in going through a period of dulled emotion, I began to realize the importance of periods where I had felt sad, or frustrated, or angry. They were experiences that had also shaped my life. Life wasn’t just about the “happy” moments, it was a mosaic of every true emotion experienced that I could later reflect on and impart personal meaning from.

Here is a little, sub-par, Microsoft Paint chart that illustrates what I mean. Faced with the spectrum of human emotion, are we meant to be fully planted in the yellow all the time?

I think there is sort of a wild, crazed desire to “be happy, be good" in America that often translates to doing a lot of things that make it harder to us to actually feel good. “Happy” is what has fueled the entire advertising industry and rampant consumerism. “Happy” has been translated into a car, new clothing, body image, experiences, etc. We’re constantly running around putting happiness at the top of our list, and then panicking when things aren’t so happy. When I reached the end of college, and especially this year, I’ve realized that to emphasize happiness above all other things is to ultimately set yourself up for failure.

But what are you saying, one might ask. To give up on being happy?

Well, not necessarily. I’m just saying that that thing we’ve been telling ourselves, that life should be happy all the time, is not realistic. It’s not realistic because a whole bunch of shit happens — called life! Life happens. And it isn’t pretty all the time, or fun, and is often monotonous, and sometimes amazing, and cruel, and everything else. And you have to learn to be okay with that.

I read an article about the new “disorders” added to the DSM-5 that include grief. When we label human emotions as disorders, we only add more weight to the American industry of happiness. Buy this! Do this! See this! Are! You! Happy! Yet! NO?! PILLS!

I remember that most Danes, when asked what makes them the “happiness nation in the world”, seem a bit confused, and then offer that it might be because their expectations are set lower.

I love the Swedish concept of lagom, which roughly translates to “just right”. A concept that seems to have no bearing in modern America as we swing wildly from overindulgence to under-indulgence. Look at our food systems, for example. “Everyone either seems to be on a strange diet or eating cheeseburgers all day,” a foreigner once mentioned to me about the U.S. We’re never just right. We’re never just right because apparently it’s not okay to be just right. It’s not sexy. It’s not fun. It’s vanilla.

Seek contentment for that first year out in the 'real world'.

Don’t compare yourself to others too often. Social media is probably the #1 destroyer of self-esteem for most people. Do your personal best. Don’t give in to the pressure of having an awesome life, 24/7. Don’t settle for things that you can change that are taking away from your experience. Don’t panic when you go through rough periods, or when life just sucks. Okay, panic a little, but know that it, too, shall pass. Do what you need to do. Try to loosen the grip of what society tells you you need, such as Stuff and Things and That One Thing You Probably Should Have, Otherwise You’re a Loser.

Hint: seek things that are free and don’t have advertisements, like friends,  being outside,  doing a favor or deed for someone else, or volunteering. Simplicity. Find what makes you tick from the inside.

Do things that are hard, because you don’t learn that much about yourself when everything is easy.

So as you can see in my little chart, perhaps the focus should be setting a personal calibration, a zero if you will, to contentment. Then we can realize happiness is just as much an emotion to dip into as any other feeling, and that it shouldn’t be the starting point.

Whereas happiness always seems to be focused on external factors (“If I could just have a girlfriend, if I could just have this job, if I could just have more money”) contentment conveys a sense of inner thinking that paves the way for self-expression, self-realization, and ultimately, self-improvement. You should never stop changing or pursuing new things, scary things, weird things. But also remember to stop every once in a while and be in the space you’re in.

17.1.2014

I recently learned that a lot of Danes don't have an asthmatic breathing problem like I thought they did.

To go back: I had one of those moments yesterday where I completely regressed into a child-like, or even pre-teen, state of mind. My Danish class was lucky enough to have a wonderful teacher for our first module, the type of young masters student with boundless energy and a desire to get us all talking and comfortable, who spends hours on our pronunciation and our lilts and moving around the classroom. Not only is my new class up five new flights of stairs, but we have a teacher that's been around for quite a while, that tends to talk quickly in Danish and look into his book a lot, as if he's reading to us, and we spend a lot of time in our seats, fairly confused and/or bored. 'This is our Everest,' I whispered to one of my classmates. 

Work has been fairly draining this week. I slid into my seat at the start of class and immediately realized I had forgot to prepare for a presentation on American traditions, and so naturally, instead of taking it like a champ, I stared my teacher in the face, turned bright red, and said, "Sorry...no." It wasn't rude, it was more pleading and slightly tinged with self-loathing. I stammered and refused a few more times and got very quiet. 

Learning a new language can be really frustrating, because it takes time, it takes a certain type of teacher, and it's often hard to actually use it in a country where people are either impatient or equally excited to show off their use of English. But I sat there and looked around at everyone else in my class and reminded myself of the fact that I'm one of the only people for whom this is merely a second language.

Well...language 2.5. I took Spanish for many, many years, so I shouldn't discount that. At the beginning of my time here in Denmark I kept interjecting Spanish to fill in the language gaps, such as 'porque', 'pero','y' and 'o'. I would start sentences in Spanish only to trail off as I realized it was the wrong language. Now that I've been taking Danish since September, I worry that I'm forgetting my Spanish because my mind turns into a total blank every time I try to recall my Spanish. My English...still intact.

I can't even keep two small parts of two other languages in my own head, and practically everyone else in my class is on their third or fourth language, so I sat there silently chastising myself for being such a loser. And while it is a travesty that I seem to have inherited a Dansk teacher with the world's smallest sense of humor, there are many good things that come out of breaking out of one's equivalent of fun-Danish-kindergarten and into bigger things. I feel like I'm entering the third grade again, where things are slightly harder and you don't color all the time and have real homework.

The flip-side of this new module is that we are spending a lot more time talking about Danish culture and cultural observations. 

Which brings me to the Danish breathing thing.

I had noticed, when I began working with Danish faculty at DIS, that when I was talking to them they would often breath in very sharply for 1-2 seconds, repeatedly. The only way I can think to describe this is a very short, sharp, inhale that sounds like a combination of choking and gasping for air. Sometimes it was very faint, and other times I worried that my faculty were 1) stuck with an eternal hiccuping problem or 2) secretly having an anxiety attack because I was handing them too much work (in the case of one particular older gentleman).

I never mentioned this to anyone because I was sure I had just somehow gotten to know a random combination of Danes that were all either shocked at what I had to say, or all had breathing problems. Freakin' healthcare, am I right?

I learned in class yesterday, while discussing cultural body movements and tone of voice, that this is actually a way that Danes agree with someone while they are talking, since, as my teacher explained, 'It's too tedious and interrupting to keep saying 'yes, of course' or 'yeah, sure' while someone else is talking.'

In my mind this type of strange reasoning is similar to another Danish phenomenon: the fact that in order to not 'bother' anyone on the S-tog, you'll often hear people rustling their bags passive-aggressively instead of asking you to move.

So while you are talking, don't freak out if Danes intersperse your conversation with these little hiccup-gasps. 

17.12.2013

Let's play the game: Danish political parties or Star Wars references?

Left

New Alliance

Social Democrats

Radikale (also the greatest name for a vegan political group, ever)

Danish People's Party

My bike game has a long way to go

This past weekend I reached Level: Cake on my bike. In order to earn this badge one must Bike With Four Boxed Layer Cakes of Various Frosting Type and Delicate Cream and you must Make It All in One Piece with Fancy Frosting & Fruit Topping Art Undisturbed to Your Event.

I also recently succeeded in Level: Julefrokost, which one only gets to attempt once a year. That entails Biking Home After A Holiday Party Where One Has Consumed At Least 8 Drinks, Over Half Must Be Schnapps Shots, and As You Bike You Will Laugh at All of the Office Hanky Panky You Saw Go Down While Avoiding Getting Hit (On) by a Similarly Drunken Rando on Street, Coming Home from Own Party.

There are many levels I have yet to reach... There is the tricky and awe-inspiring Level: Fir where you Bike With An Entire Christmas Tree (Base Snuggled Into Your Basket, Branches Everywhere, Bonus Points if Blocking Your Vision). There is Level: Santa where you Stick All Christmas Presents Into Giant Red Sack and Hold With One Hand While Biking. Level: Chainsmoking. (Double points if you light your match one-handed on your pants!) Level: Dutch Master (Fit Someone on the Back and Make It Look Both Sexy and Easy, preferably to Bring Them Home for the Night). The list goes on.

Google Street View Art has got me thinking

I've been kind of keeping tabs on all of the Google Street View Art that is popping up and I think it raises some interesting questions. I want to keep finding more art in this category because I think it has blown open the photography world in some ways.

Google Street View as travel

'All of us have a ‘Detroit’ in our minds, or a ‘Dallas’ or a ‘Fresno,’ even if we have not travelled there,” Rickard told me. “I think that I chose pictures that partially represented those biases and media-affected notions of place, and yet I explored immensely these American places, a thousand hours or more, gaining an understanding of the conditions.'

GSV as surface-level

'Also, Google’s blurring of the faces and the lo-fi nature of the images changed the individuals into symbols or emblems and representative of larger notions, such as race and class, instead of personal stories that would have wanted to emerge with recognition.'

- Doug Rickland

GSV as omniscient

'I almost see the Google camera as the modern concept of God. It knows everything but does not act in history. It takes no positions, but it’s there, watching.'

GSV as both objective and ideological 

'But the truth is that the neutrality of the camera is actually somewhat . . . there’s hidden ideologies within it. For example, the camera only captures who’s on the street during daylight hours, while most, let’s say, white-collar workers are in their offices somewhere. People like prostitutes, people living on the street, they have much more of a chance to be captured by the camera. With the prostitutes, I don’t think it’s a licentious or erotic gaze. There’s something about the camera that gives respect to the subject being photographed, something about the fact that it is this robotic gaze restores this balance that I feel like would be exploitative if it were a human photographer taking the picture.'

- Jon Rafman

GSV as intruder, Orwellian

'As the publicly accessible pictures are of individuals taken without their permission, I reversed the act: I took the pictures of individuals without Google’s permission and posted them on public walls.

The obscure figures fixed to the walls are the murky intersection of two overlain worlds: the real world of things and people, from which these images were originally captured, and the virtual afterlife of data and copyrights, from which the images were retaken.'

- Paolo Cirio

november, again

ii.

Sanskrit supposedly has 96 words for love. Greenland has many, many words for snow. And Denmark has many different words for ... blonde hair color. At least that's what I learned from a Danish colleague over lunch last week. Here's how it goes: her friend traveled to Argentina and was there for a few months. She is blonde, and she was with another woman who had light brown hair. But to the Argentinians, they both were 'rubia'. There wasn't any difference to people in that country. But my colleague's friend was shocked because to her, light brown hair was very different than blonde hair. At least in Denmark. And the Argentinians had many different names for tones of brown and black hair, but to her they they only seemed 'brown' or 'black'-haired. Isn't language funny like that? The world around us engenders our language, language creates our filter of culture, everything is shades, yadda yadda.

Yeah, this is not lunch. But...I did have a good brunch last week.

I didn't realize the Danes have so many words for types of blondes. "Yes," my colleague said. "For example - my hair is very dull, it's not very blonde - it's lys leverpostej." I laughed out loud. Lys leverpostej means light liver pate blonde. Google liver pate if you don't know what I'm talking about. I asked my roommate later and she said Danes most certainly have different names for different blonde types of hair, and started rattling them off: "There's Norwegian blonde - that's more silvery, very white blonde - and Swedish blonde, that's more corn, more gold, and leverpostej, and. . . "

I asked my colleague at lunch what she thought Americans had a lot of words for, and she said 'polite manner words'. 'Please' and 'thank you' and 'how are you' and 'charming' and 'you're welcome' and 'may i', etc. There is no word for please in the Danish language. We talked about how American culture compared to Danish culture, as seen through language, is a lot of verbal dancing. The niceties you go through, the words you learn, the gestures. How easily offended we can get. How we scold our children if they don't say please, even though telling someone to tell someone else please really defeats the purpose because the word can then become a hollow sort of chore. How we say a lot of things we don't mean, like 'how are you' as a breeze-by greeting gesture.

I read somewhere that - and I think this is the best way to begin to describe Danish interaction to a foreigner, seeing as I'm a foreigner myself - if you think of how your immediate family interacts, that is how Danes interact. You've grown up with your family. You don't really need to use niceties every day. You're direct. You can weather certain jokes and a fair level of inappropriateness because you're all close. You come from such a strong base level of connection that you don't have to tip-toe around as much. Now think of an entire society, for the most part, acting that way, and you're closer to how Danish communication differs from American communication. Denmark is so small and insular and homogenous that the starting point for communication is one of much more shared references and backgrounds. Obviously that has its problems, too.

It was a good lunch conversation, something to mull over without trying to rush to black and white conclusions about either country. 

iii.

coconut curry hokkaido pumpkin soup

4 cloves of garlic, minced

1 knob of ginger, around 1×1′ chunk (but if you’re a ginger lover, you can double this), diced

1 medium sized onion, diced

3 tablespoons olive oil

2 teaspoons curry powder

1 tsp salt, 1 tsp pepper

1/3 cup coconut milk, any kind (light, full-fat, your choice)

1 bouillon cube

3 cups water

3 fingerling potatoes, cubed

1 medium hokkaido pumpkin, cut into 1′ sized chunks, seeds removed

Combine garlic, ginger, onion, olive oil, curry powder, salt and pepper in a soup pot over medium heat and cook until the onions have softened. Add coconut milk, bouillon cube, water, potatoes, and pumpkin. Cover, reduce stove to low-medium heat, and let simmer for around 25 minutes, or until both the pumpkins and potatoes are completely soft when pierced with a fork. Use an immersion blender to blend all of the soup. Top with Sriracha, pumpkin seeds, or a dash of cream.

november

i.

I feel the power to produce so strongly within myself, I’m aware that there will come a time when I’ll finish something good, so to speak, daily, and do so regularly.

At present hardly a day passes without my making a few things, but it isn’t yet what I really want.

Well — sometimes it seems to me that I’ll become productive very soon — I shouldn’t be surprised if it happens one fine day. I’ve an idea that in any case painting will also indirectly awaken something in me. Here, for example, is a scratch of the potato market in Noordwal. The bustle of workmen and women, with the baskets being unloaded from the barge — it’s a very interesting sight.

These are things I would like to paint or draw forcefully. The life and movement of such a scene, and the types of folk.

. . . It doesn’t surprise me, though, that I can’t do this straightaway, and that so far when I try I’ve often failed. Now, through painting, I’ll certainly become handier with colours, and better able to capture such a subject. Well, the point is to be patient and carry on working. 

. . . I’m doing my very best to put all my energy into it, for I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort — and disappointment and perseverance.

- Van Gogh, letter to brother Theo, September 9, 1882

I'm not sure what it was that struck me so about my time in Amsterdam - many things, of course - but it was the dual experiences of the Van Gogh and Anne Frank museums that linger. Historically, contextually, their lives were very, very different. But it's what remains afterwards that we live off of, and that got me thinking about self-realization and legacy. Legacy is the wrong word, really - it brings to mind sweater-ed Yale students or something stuffy - but what I mean is, in the span of a few days I witnessed first hand what two very different but very well-known and prolific people left behind, and how that is interpreted. What stood out to me was the instance in which an individual realizes that they are going to make their mark. 

Van Gogh's letters. Anne Frank's diary. Do people plan on being prolific?

It was the letter above in the Van Gogh museum that made me stop and think. Van Gogh is around 29 at this point. He's taken up painting rather late in his life by comparison. But this is one of the moments in his letters that I found most beautiful, because not only is he filled with this crescendoing sense of self and capability, he realizes just exactly what that will take. What the true stakes are to step into your full potential. Effort, and disappointment, and perseverance. Van Gogh is so damn relatable, even when he's begging Theo for money for the fiftieth time. 

And Anne Frank - to be in your early teens and already have such unflagging belief in your desire to be a writer that you re-write an entire journal because you hear on the radio that they're planning on collecting diaries and other writings for the future. How many people start journals when they're young and actually follow through with them, much less edit them, curate them? She reminds me of the twelve and thirteen-year olds I worked with during summers in high school, young girls with abilities and ambition and something in them that seemed to exude this shimmering immortality.

I guess what I find most beautiful in the writing of both these individuals is self-realization. Which, in turn, forecasted or not, was a factor that led to their legacy being what it is. 

 Many people seem to worry about their legacy when it comes to death. How they'll be remembered. If they'll have made a mark, that sort of thing. Where you stand in relation to everything around you. Maybe I'll be more concerned with that concept when I'm older. Right now I seem to be more affected by the thought of attaining true self-realization - I already feel like 'legacy' has been covered in such a unique way by our ever-social and always-online generation. When do we as individuals look out across the whole of our existence and see something out there for us? And when do we realize what that something will take, and when do we start actually doing it. . .

Apartment Life

July

The first day I move in there are pig's feet in my freezer, which is another way of saying that my roommate is in medical school. Well, she used to be in medical school. And they were left over from her session on stitching flesh. Which was many months ago. But pig's feet keep well. We share internet (I don't mind) and have a hot plate instead of an oven (I don't mind) and our dishwasher doesn't come for two weeks so every Saturday she lugs an Ikea bag full of dishes down to her parent's apartment, which is often accompanied by a free meal, and in this way I sometimes feel that I am pretending, make-believing at being an adult.

The first day I move in my roommate has decided the apartment looks better if it's white, not cream, and so I scrub the bedroom floor with my black dress hitched around my waist, sloshing water and cleaning liquid onto the wood beams under my bed. I push my furniture around and sweat triumphantly until my black dress sticks to my back and I make my bed and sink happily into it, sighing to myself, making snow angels in my sheets.

The first week I move in I am too tired and too lazy and too scared to properly grocery shop, and so I eat dinner in my bedroom window, and I am sure to turn all of my lights out so that I can watch everyone but they cannot watch me. One night it is Cup of Soup and one night it is an ambitious yet ultimately quite flat lentil dish, but both make me feel incredibly lonely when eating in a window. I am pretending at being an adult, and since there is no montage, and no indie track to cover my chewing sounds, and I am not a character on an HBO show, I come to the conclusion that living alone with nothing to your name is certainly poetic, but it is definitely not glamourous. 

denmark, two months

Know why I love to bike in Copenhagen?

Because it requires nothing of you.

Just two wheels spinning.

A helmet, if you want to be extra safe. A basket -- for the double bags of groceries, or books, or flowers, or, let’s face it, those two bottles of wine, a loaf of bread, and cheese. Your legally obligated front and back lights, so you can join the twinkling rows of merry-makers at midnight on a Friday, heading into town to shed coats and step into smoky bars and sip cold, sweating glasses of Carlsburg in uniform sea of black and beauty.

So you might need a few extra things, but it’s just two wheels spinning in the end. You don’t need attitude, you don’t need years of experience, and biking doesn’t have to define you. It will become an essential part of you, make no mistake, but Copenhagen biking isn’t roped off for the hardcore, the ‘gangs’, the fixie-junkies, the road-ragers, the Portlandia-esque gauged ear million tat folks. It’s for everyone. It’s for the girl in high heels, the man with his kid in the back, the old folks, the unsure, the five year olds with their first whiff of independence.

If I am not biking in Copenhagen I do not feel like I am in the city at all. Driving is sterile, removed. Walking is nicer, but slow. Where’s the rush of wind? Where’s the montage of sights that shift with every minute, the changing of light, the snatches of sound, the snapshots of neighborhoods as you flash by, a scent of something lingering (is it the bakery? is it someone’s perfume? is it a fall fire?).

Here is a Sunday afternoon and everyone has taken to the lake, dappled light dancing on water, and I catch a glimpse of the swans as I lazily slide past the bridge, and now here is a young couple kissing, their faces turned to the sky in quiet bliss, and next is a teenager learning chess with a steady hand, and now I am pausing at a red light to listen to the sound a herd of brakes makes, quietly shifting like metal grass blades.

And here is the city on a Monday morning, and every single Dane is yearning for sunlight, and I catch the smell of a dozen freshly showered citizens heading to work, and there are toddlers babbling in the bike lane strapped to the backs of their long-haired mothers and bearded fathers, who coo at them in the guttural Nordic language within which I am only beginning to be able to pick out melodies.

Biking is meditation. It is the cure for everything, they’ll tell you: a bad mood, a hangover, a feeling of joy that you fear may erupt inside you if you do not move fast and sing. You can sing in the bike lane, at night if you’d like, as you weave between the glittering carcasses of long-gone bottles of beer. It’s lifeblood, this way of being. It’s 3D. It’s surround-sound, it’s IMAX.

You begin biking in Copenhagen because although daunting it welcomes you, promising you don’t need to be anything other than yourself. And then before you know it, you've drank the koolaid. You’re just on top of two wheels spinning. You’re ruined forever.

off to denmark

I left for Denmark via Iceland on July 25, 2013.

The pre-flight meal: all the comfort of oatmeal, all the "I'm not going to see American farm stands for a year" preemptive nostalgia of blueberries.

Two days after I flew out, my Danish family came home from their July vacation in Italy and we had an Italian feast.

Veal stuffed with proscuitto and herbs, cooked in a sauce of Danish butter and Italian marsala (sweet wine).

Homemade tiramisu, surprisingly easy. Unsurprisingly delicious.

Finished off with brandy.

Outdoor heaven.