All posts by ester

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i could be heading to budapest in less than a week. this is contingent on becca’s approval: we had plans that fell through and we’ve been tentatively exploring alternatives, none of which seem too possible. yesterday afternoon studying for dk pol with shannon, a girl i know only vaguely chatted with us and revealed that she’s traveling by herself and would enjoy company. she has accomodations already and is flying on wednesday — she welcomed me to join her. it would be in its way perfect: a few days in a city the odds are i’d never visit otherwise/again, still an adventure because i don’t know my companion (she seems nice. artsy, thrift-store cool, she hails from bryn mawr and watches danish films without subtitles.) i could return comfortably in time to pack and prepare for russia.

i’m going momentarily to check prices. i’m told the flight is cheap; i’m hoping it’s true. the housing arrangement certainly is.

i have officially FINISHED with all my damn midterms. mythology, the middle one, was the toughest, with a full page of obscure, context-less identifications worth five points each. jews in europe and dk pol today were both blessedly straight-forward. i didn’t study overmuch for either. yesterday evening shannon and another girl who joined us and i spent most of the time talking; afterwards, i met the group at studenthouse for jazz of the laughably low quality we’ve come to expect from livemusic here. (belle and sebastian on sunday nite will hopefully go a long way towards redeeming this city.)

this blessed city. showing ben around on foot has caused these sentimental surges of affection. it’s a perfect size for me, i know my way around but it can of course still surprise. now that my tests are out of the way, i’m mellow and auraed with contentment and luvv.

of i go to investigate hungary. happy weekend and good shabbes, all.

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it almost didn’t make sense for me to come to DIS this afternoon. ben and i parted at norreport, him saying are you sure you don’t want to come [to the worker’s museum]? a pretty day; we’ve been walking for a while; there’s still three hours til my myths midterm, i could have gone and wanted to (the ancient posters in the window depict a huge scowling russia fending off small, scurrying, obsequious eastern europe). but i came here instead. met heather, chatted refreshingly, until we were approached by two KU students with notepads and strained smiles. would be consent to be interviewed?

after some innocuous background-type questions, they launched into our interpretations of america. what’s the american dream? are we influenced by the countries our families came from? from the positions they now have? what makes an american an american? does the government have a responsibility to take care of its citizens? what’s america’s chief flaw? (heather and i both agreed so i summed us up: “just write CLASS in big letters”)

it was interesting. our answers contained flotsam and jetsam of media and democracy (heavier emphasis on the former), hard work and good fortune, consumerism and individualism. americans are americans when they surrender to it, appreciate the freedoms, vote, send their kids to the skools, absorb the culture. so anyone could be an american, pretty much? well, yeah. that’s the idea, isn’t it?

and us? what’s our american dream? largely heather and i concurred: we had the advantage of growing up in houses. for us the dream isn’t to go forth and own land in the ‘burbs (“although it’s important to own things,” says heather) but to be successful and fulfilled. for her, that means career and cids; for me, a creative life filled with stimuli; for both of us, comfort.

“are you, do you think, representative of america?” we exchange glances, look each other up and down, reflect that we’re in denmark. how could we be representative? i go to a small liberal arts college on the east coast, i explain; we’re more leftist than is normal. (queen of understatement: yes, that’s me.) heather purses her lips and shakes her head. i don’t talk about this stuff with anyone where i come from, she says. it’s hard to know. does everyone conceive of the u.s. this way? we objected at points that we couldn’t speak for the country as a whole; it’s huge, diverse…. our interviews shook their heads at that: generalize, they told us, try. so we tried.

the last point i made was about alienation. people aren’t as connected to each other, they don’t feel compelled to take care of/ responsibility for the general population. heather chimes in, it’s the individualism thing again. they nod and scribble. we sit back. in a way, we have just been held responsible for the general population. they smile and thank us and drift away; heather and i hug goodbyes, wish each other great breaks, and do the same.

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the young gentleman and i made dinner — tortillas that turned into chips: first mine did, and he laughed at me; but then his did too — to the longwindedness wittiness of phil ochs; now we’re reclining to the baritone, intentionally melodramatic wackiness of magnetic fields, all courtesy of the little battery operated speakers that the young gentleman, having no patience for the oppressive silence of floor 7F, swooped up for me this afternoon. thanks hon.

meanwhile my second midterm was on par with the first, leaving me with three to go and little to stress about. my giddiness lasted me all yesterday. in fact it has yet to pass. after hours and hours of walking, ben and i landed at DIS so darling andrea and i could reflect each other (apologies for the excessive light metaphors). we meant to study too but it was more important to talk. she ben and i hopped over to selena’s, one of our favorite haunts, where bartenders are reliably friendly, drinks are reliably good, and raucous clientele reliably break into drunken song. our company washed over us, one wave after another, until at last we made our way back home.

post-midterm this afternoon i went out with the girls while ben museumed, then debated with shannon about the pros and cons of majoring in american studies. when she goes to skool, you don’t need a major, only a concentration. i envied that: i’d gladly trade one-major-one-minor for three minors. she worries grad skools, not that she plans on attending one but you never know, might squint through their monocle at that and drawl, Gracious me, what a slacker.

grad skool? yet another question. one that, thankfully, i am at least another year from worrying about. i have much to occupy me before then, like what i should do next week if becca and i can’t meet (damn you, easter for clogging up flightplans and your non-kosher-for-passover pastel goop) do i dare travel by myself? and where? i shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. i have heard the mermaids singing each to each. i do not think that they will sing to me ….

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palestinian painted frog? who searched for that and how on earth did it lead them to my site? ahh the mysteries of the web. my feet hurt from walking for three hours but i successfully led ben back along the path jamie and i took on our much-recounted trip here after high skool. we stayed in a little hostel in norrebro and i was thrilled to be able to find my way straight back there on my first try. that’s right, i’m awesome. on the way back i also found the hare krishna vegetarian restaurant jamie and i ate at for damn cheap. mental note.

i don’t think i can be blamed for being giddy: it’s a tropical 15 degrees celsius outside under a mild blue sky and with only the faintest breeze twirling the air. therefore my hair has yet to surrender curls to frizz. AND though i won’t go into detail yet another of the loveless girls have fallen. no ross don’t take me literally — i use the term as a coverall for the wonderful females who don’t have as much with gaining due attention from the opposite (or same) sex as some.

so. i’m guestblogging for tinka eventually, in the illustrious company, once again, of the secretary of the stratosphere. good stuff. and i got lovely supportive emails, including one from my mother bristling, defending my achievements this semester and my character in general. they made me smile. who needs guardian angels when you have protective souls?

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what’s danish for “not as bad as expected”? i just finished sailing through my criminal justice midterm. it’s gorgeous out, at least by local standards, which are all i remember. ben should be appearing momentarily. i left him home to explore on his own the dorm laundry room and, if he finds it, christiania.

yesterday, post-morning mournfulness: lunch at rizraz, bountiful veggie meditterranean buffet, with heather, heather’s drag-along david, and andrea, followed by walking around town where we met serendipitously with katie and her perternaturally cheerful fiancee. ben bought a hat and i despaired over exorbitant sweater prices. the ones my mother would look best in are of course mind-bogglingly expensive, and while ben patiently allowed himself to be used as a model for fur hat after fur hat, i wasn’t satisfied that any one would satisfy my father. i continue to look.

we went shopping and between that and making dinner Talked. i realized how anxious i get when i have to play hostess (becca who called later pinpointed it, “it’s your mother in you”). i want everything to be perfect and wonderful; he’s simply trying to adjust and absorb. some more tears on my part, too many of them recently, but everything’s been better — best, even — since. i think i just needed to get my irrationality out.

four midterms to go. four more days with ben. sapna, on the way to the test this morning, said i was glowing. oh, that elusive glow. how i missed you.

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i am, according to my first observer in two months, changed. whether i’ve merely adapted to circumstance and environment or earnestly, deep-down changed, i won’t know til i get home. less childish, more self-sufficient. you wouldn’t think those are bad things, but his tone and my reaction implied they were. i like being childish, at least sometimes. it’s easy as i’m often surrounded by people who like taking the lead, being capable, patronizing me a little maybe but that’s okay; after all, i let them. not here. the other day heather said i was smart. no one would say that at home (well, home = swat.) to be smart at swat you have to be brilliant, you can’t just be passable. you forget that the rest of world might have a different standard. or at least last semester, losing perspective sleep and sanity over evil bruce as well as, to some extent, barnies, i did.

eye-opening, thought-provoking. feeling that i’m unhappy, he suggests hanging out with fewer americans. immediately i feel worse, my weaknesses in this place highlighted, what i’ve failed to do, i.e.: learn the language and meet boatloads of cool danes. it’s not as easy as it sounds <-- an excuse. mm, i have to get off this train of thought because it's taking me to an unfriendly mental place. i'm trying to be a good worldtraveler. i guess to really succeed i would need to be less childish and more self-sufficient still.

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i should be taking this opportunity to start studying for my criminal justice midterm. upstairs, the young gentleman is sleeping off jetlag. i woke up neurotically early this morning, at 6:40, to get to the airport with plenty of times to twiddle my thumbs, drink tap water, and reflect while i waited. at 8:15 or so he came through the gate, primly white-collared so as to attract as little undue attention as possible. becca, who so often commented last year that he looked like a terrorist, would think this wise. on the ride home i defended my ignorance of the language with the passion of one whose guilt is clear. my excuses are pitiful: i don’t meet danes as my hallway’s silent flickering is interrupted only by the periodic cries of a baby; i’m not taking a class.

actually last nite at andrea’s, i met A.C., a young dane with whom i was greatly impressed. although he insisted lamely he had to go work on CS, we covninced him to sit with us, the group assembled for Girly Drink Night, and keep us company. he acquiesced and andrea radiated. when the crowd grew unwieldy he fled. we finished the bacardi breezers and made crepes, popcorn, and rum punch (i think of that scene in Mary Poppings where she’s doling out medicine, a different flavor for each child, and for herself, “rrrrrum punch.”) we played a drinking game which involved a pack of cards, laughed our heads off and finished the whole bowl. katie demonstrated the universal sign for oversharing and sam calmed down from her traumatic experience on the bus. a drunk threw first a beer bottle and then a pack of cigarettes at her, screaming in danish and barring her way. in tears finally she climbed over the back of her seat and called her host dad. A.C., present at the first telling of this story, was astonished that no one offered to help her. andrea warmed to 150 watts, nearly blinding. but for a good cause.

that was the follow-up to my equally lovely afternoon, wherein i finally met up with a girl from my dk pol class. we had lunch on the way to the dfi, chatting, bonding. she made me feel lowbrow listing her top three films as i had only vaguely heard of them. we saw dr. zhivago, sincerely acted, epic and silly. we were laughing quietly at points by the end. people who are not russian should not make movies about russia. still, we agreed, it’s good prep for visiting the country.

i feel like i should have a plan. of course i don’t. heather suggested riz raz for tomorrow lunch, an excellent idea. hopefully everything else will simply fall into place.

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beyond the call of duty, last nite heather and andrea dismissed our plans and showed up at my dorm bearing bags of chocolate and diet coke, and a 6-pack of Kleenex. we assumed positions for another tea party and talked and laughed. they left after a while, and i, distracted and comforted, went to sleep.

the situation had been rather strange before they arrived. in shock i cleaned and cried, came down to the computer lab to correspond with my mother and called my dad. sapna, my suitemate, had invited people over, for which she kept apologizing. at one point while i was sitting on my immaculately made bed one of the guy from the other room came in and extended me a tulip. a long-winded explanation for why he was distributing flowers to strangers later, another guy came in with another tulip. this was more matter-of-fact. “sapna told me your great uncle just died,” he said, and as i gripped both tulips he told me that his great aunt just died a week ago from emphysema.

later i made a vase out of an empty bottle half-filled with water and the tulips posed as a centerpiece for our teaparty. they haven’t opened yet: like the little red fists of infants, they seem both ferocious and calm. looking at them i remember: amsterdam, the flower market, my brother adam and i wandering there; springtime (how much longer could it wait?); our parade of dutch aupairs passing out wooden shoes and sprinkles and leaving me with a deeply ingrained desire for blonde hair. so many tests of my powers of recollection.

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a tribute — my uncle hy passed away; and though i call him uncle i think technically he was a great-great uncle, my father’s great uncle, living out by himself in a house in albuquerque, new mexico with pictures of his late wife smiling down off of the walls. she was supposed to have been the most wonderful of women but i never knew her. i couldn’t imagine uncle hy with a wife; i always saw him so self-sufficient. it was years before i realized a person could be both cheerful and lonely. he grew tomatoes with noses in his backyard. my little brother would squeal when he saw them. twilights, he sat with me on his backporch and introduced me to hummingbirds, loyal frequenters of his feeder even while, he whispered to me, they no longer appeared anywhere else. patiently he showed me how to wind the magnificently carved coo-coo clock. he whittled too and he always told me whatever animal i wanted he’d whittle for me. only i never could think of one. when i was 11, i had a poem published in an anthology — the whole thing was a scam, of course, a vanity press, but i was vain, or young, enough to be thrilled; and he sent me a little wooden stand instead with a place for a “fountain pen” (a white pen with a trailing purple feather) and a little brozne plaque that read, “ester _____, published poet, 1994.” i couldn’t have been prouder.

uncle hy was one of the few people i knew whose eye never stopped twinkling and who showed no signs of being intimidated by my father. hy even beat him at the word game once (or as dad would say, “i let him win one.”) my father stays one-week-a-month in new mexico: so he’s spent at least a few days every month chuckling with hy, buying books from his private rare-book business, and dining out in the same restaurants where the head waiters know their names and usher them to the same tables. this awed me. the process, from the first step in, the effusive greetings, the inside jokes, the stories recounted, to the haggling over the check, which heroic battles ended only when one of them would capitulate with rolled eyes and extravagant sighs. sometimes not even then. one favorite story had them fighting with the pitch and stubbornness of generals. finally hy threw down his napkin in disgust, announced his defeat and left for the bathroom. after a moment or two to catch his breath and revel in his victory, my father signalled for the check. the waiter only shook his head and smiled. hy had ambushed the counter and paid it himself.

it’s been years since i last saw him. the birthday cards kept coming, usually signed “uncil hy” in reference to an old spelling mistake my little brother made on hy’s 80th birthday banner. my father repeated “hy sends his love” each month, his sincerity never in doubt. but nothing drew us as a family to new mexico. now i regret it of course. of course, there’s nothing to be done. i didn’t even know he had cancer. it attacked swiftly, taking him by the lungs. my mother writes with tears in her eyes to let me know that he died nobly rather than become a burden on any member of his family. people are mourning in chicago, in san francisco. people will gravitate to albuquerque from d.c., from boston. some of a generation that remembers the wars, some with children barely one-year-old. and maybe the hummingbirds will attend as well, as tribute to a man with a soul so light it hovered.

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in case you hadn’t noticed, i’m going to stick to this color for a while and see how i feel about it.

in external news: yesterday, i hurried through horrible weather, from research with my eye on my watch, to the post office. there they handed me a lumpy manilla envelope from my darling liz filled with hamentashen. even two weeks old and postal-service bumped-and-grinded, they were better than the ones i made. i had no time however to savor then (though i grabbed like three at once) as i had to haul ass to teacher jeanne’s house for our criminal justice presentations followed by buffet dinner for 25. i didn’t know where she lived quite, and, having caught the worst bus, was quite late as it was, so 5 o’clock, the appointed time of commencement, found me shuffling down various wet streets, flagging down passersby to beg them to translate the back of my hand where i’d written t. jeanne’s address into a concrete direction.

eventually i found the place, rang the buzzer, and was mortified to hear t. jeanne say, “is that ester?” the rest of the class was comfortably assembled in her wonderful apartment (oh i want this woman’s life: one wall of books, the opposite of cds, a huge green-glass somethingorother piece of art/receptacle for winebottle corks). as i soon as i arrived, we began. none of our Alternatives to Imprisonment were too controversial and most leaned left rather than right, though an argument broke out as to whether ceasing welfare payments to those who have frauded the system is cruel and unfair, or just justice. guess which side i took, rather heatedly too.

apparently t. jeanne told us chemical castration of sex offenders is a practice in dk, so long as you have the offender’s consent. some of them line up for the treatment which isn’t permanent — reminded me of dpt, actually, you have to get continuous shots to keep you blessedly sex-drive/fantasy free. the boys winced at that; one compared it to giving a lobotomy to a thief.

after dinner, cara and i bonded over our occasional alienation, frustration at not meeting more people (it can be a problem of self-definition. circles form, the Indie crowd, the potheads, the texas chicks, and where do you place yourself?) and the fact that we’re going on the same russia tour. came back to the dorm to find neither computer nor telephone operable; grumblingly i ate more hamentashen — holy lord, don’t send me cookies when i’m depressed — and read more jews in germany narratives. actually they’re really interesting, little first person windows into a past i wish i knew more about.

speaking of first person windows: ross has written Remembrance of Things Present on his website; my alter-ego sarah c. has begun one of her own; and poor danny who has suffered quietly long enuf is recognized at last. sorry for the delay, danny.