thanks to heather, i’ve been making the most of fat tuesday. mmmm yes. although i left the computer lab in low spirits, my nordic mythology class was as always a riot with the prof in the exact same sweater he’s worn every classday so far. one has to imagine he knows. i spend half the period laughing and writing down quotes; once i’ve compiled a sufficient number i’ll post them here.

that was followed by a better-than-average danish politics class. the DIS instructor gave a guest lecture on an article we read, whose author apparently went to swarthmore. cathy ta turned around and we smiled at each other. the article touched on many of the issues and contradictions of this place. you could tell, despite the attempt at evenhandedness, that the author was smitten. that’s okay, i kinda am too. at the end of class, this chick shannon with whom i’ve been hoping to become better friends invited me to a movie tomorrow evening.

my wonderful mother just sent me an email. she’s been babblebooking to keep up with me. ‘for all that bar sitting,’ she says, ‘surely you’ve drunk something more interesting than hot chocolate!’ and here i thought i was being moderately self-censoring for her benefit. she also said that following the links on my sidebar brought her to tinman’s site. the whole bit made me laugh. hi mom. 🙂

danish resistance museum tomorrow — assumedly we’ll learn more than just that the whole thing about the danish king wearing a yellow star is a myth — then christiania with heather and a new possiblefriend katie, then the movie with shannon. after that, the field study trip to jutland. we’ll see how often i’ll have access to the net.

meditative. saw family life in film this morning which had me hostile right from the start. not because it’s upsetting, i like upsetting movies. no matter how many i see, the good ones still get to me and i appreciate that. getting all twisted about for different reasons is a nice change. but this one (about a relatively normal teenage girl in britain’s suburban 60s with disgusting narrow parents who whirlpools into insanity) irritated me, which is not the same thing. in a lot of ways it’s like girl, interrupted. both are based on true stories, both involve young women whose mental maladjustment is a result of their environment, specifically a stifling family life, in that age when the gap between parents and offspring was at its widest (or so the media tells us.)

this was so heavyhanded though. it’s easy to put all the blame on society. but the girl had a responsibility to herself not to do everything she was told, to make friendships, to find some kind of creative outlet — small things that could improve her state tremendously. her own passivity it seems does her in as much as her dull parents do. they turn her into a victim; she lets them.

very unsympathetic of me. blah. it’s sort of a blah day. i looked outside at what i thought was sky. a moment later i realized i was staring across an alley at a white brick wall nearly indistinguishable from what it hits its head on.

last nite the some of us opera-bound folks stopped for a traditional danish meal in nyhavn. first herring i’ve had here. it was delicious. carmen itself though — set in spain, sung in french, subtitled on the little screen in danish — was enjoyable but didn’t make an impression on me. maybe it would have had i understood more, or maybe i’m just unused to opera.

not reading up on the show first was a mistake. over intermission, a few of us scrambled to read the synopsis in the program and try to figure out who you were supposed to feel for while some others explained. ‘she’s a slut,’ said mel helpfully. ‘really?’ i said. ‘this whole time i thought she was just being friendly.’ katie shared with me that the sopranos and the basses are usually the bad guys. why should that be, d’you suppose?

luckily the end is very direct. i love you don’t leave me/ i don’t love you anymore i love him, ad nauseum, is pretty universal stuff.

announcements! oh what a lovely day ’tis. oh who expected such a lovely day? tra-la-la ….

well, to let you share in my giddiness:

first in the sequence of things i can reveal is that jocelyn my darling roomie chateau-partner from freshman year sent me a valentines box just thrilling with chocolates and little hearts that say 21st century sweet nothings such as, “fax me”. i’ve danced around distributing them with credit to her and feeling like quite the sprite of generosity and sugary goodness and joy.

second, hesitant firmness is back in business. we’ve brought it back from the dead, given it a face life, and proclaimed it a dumping ground for random facts, links, and tests the newest of which is yami’s still-in-development as-meta-as-it-gets Which Hesitant Firmness Blogger Are You? i will most certainly and with great delight post the link here when it’s ready.

AND i can’t really discuss This online unless i get Her permission but i’m very very happy for yet another of the whatrosswouldcall Loveless Girls who in february either hit a lucky streak or come into their own. dancing around the subject, i know. one hates to be indiscreet online. such a coming of age thing. ohh! joy. from far away the problems seem silly and besides the point, of course these things are never perfect. the point is the Thing itself.

i mailed my own valentine today too. happy eleventh everyone.

heavenly IM conversations with ben and brig and emails from ross and ‘relle make me nostalgic. if i hadn’t had such a calmhappy weekend, i’d get maudlin. this place is growing on me though. the people particularly as i’d already been 75% in love with the city. i spent the entire day in pajamas — andrea’s pajamas to be exact. we ventured out around 11:30 to get pastries, mmm those flaky cinnamon things, and then on our way home met jess, so drea and i rebounded with her to get actual lunch food. that meant in my case shrimp in a pita with white sauce. bizarre. on the plus side, i realized i was relaxing with these people. thinking less, joking more. a sure sign of growing comfort.

i’m sorry i don’t have any links to share. ooh, wait, i can think of one: visit tinka. she’s got a lot of interesting insights on denmark and danish culture. and becca’s resumed posting! from rome. joy.

tomorrow’s the eleventh. that’s Six Days Short of a Year Day for those of you familiar with my history. it’s also my two year anniversary of graduation from highskool. jdsers, help me out: did we graduate on the eleventh or was that the day i sat there and watched my loved ones collect prizes? either way, momentous. february’s just like that. vday we leave on a tour of western dk. maybe they’ll hand out chocolate on the bus. we can all retreat into the greedy corners of our minds, watch the countryside roll by, and ponder love …

i can hear the tour des chambres continuing outside. here (in andrea’s room again) all is quiet. the way this works, everyone prepares a drink for the people who troop through, staying in each room for ten minutes or so, handling whatever the room’s occupant has left lying around, drink, laugh, talk, move on.

i got here late, arriving in a hair-tangled flurry from dinner at mel’s house. her host-parents are out of town. instead of throwing raucous parties, she’s hosting three separate small events. tonite she cooked six of us a lovely dinner and dessert over which we had to linger and from which we then had to clean.

and to that katie and i had appeared in a hair-tangled flurry from our full day of touring denmark’s viking sites. we met our nordic mythology class at 9 a.m. in center city, hopped on a bus, and between then and hopping off again at 5:30 we did a lot of trekking through sheep’s droppings, mud, wet grass, hail and wind. it was worth it though. our mythology’s teacher’s a riot. if you can imagine it, he’s a mix of hagrid and harry potter, with a little mr. miller thrown in. at one of the museums, you can try on replicas of helmets and chain male (sp?) so katie and i took turns taking pictures of each other. i tried to hold my axe with pride but the helmet was so heavy i had to hold the helmet up so it wouldn’t smash my nose. yeah, can’t really take me seriously as a warrior.

yet again last nite we couldn’t find jazz. the place we had intended to go had a kr. 200 cover. instead we ended up at the student house, packed and well-atmosphered although full of sketchballs. one guy grabbed my waist at the bar and when i ignored him he did it again. a girl with him got me a discount on my drink and he insisted that meant i owed him a dance. date rape doesn’t exist in this country — one of the ways dk and most of europe is less advanced than we are. anyone who accepts drinks from a guy and goes home with him can’t press charges no matter what happens.

these nice and entirely wasted folks let me slip away to nurse my hot chocolate without much protest. heather went to get a beer and came back twenty minutes later with a description of the guy who hit on her that matched mine. we laughed about it and later returning from the bathroom together we passed him, shading our eyes with the exact same motion, walking on.

despite nori’s emailed warnings and invectives against women’s magazines, i can’t seem to help myself. i’m hooked. there were five thick ones left in our kitchen cabinet and i’ve pawed thru each now, page by page. not quite done with the last, a british cosmo. most likely i’d still be at the table if andrea hadn’t called. dinner? ha ha, i’d already eaten (it involved the oven, which according to a new rating system still in development [for those of us whose kitchen skills are as well] was two points. another two because it involved more than one color. so did the pasta i made last nite. for no one else is pasta an achievement. well, for andrea, i guess, which is why we’re friends. end note.)

we’re meeting — by which i mean The Group — at 8 at dis. how grateful are we all that our hq is so centrally located. we meet there and spiral off in whatever direction please, in tonite’s case to hear more jazz. tomorrow will be consumed from 9 a.m. to 5:30 with a nordic mythology field study, followed by a dinner party at mel’s empty house and a drinking party at drea’s dorm. called tour des chambres, each participant is responsible for providing drinks and a decorative theme for the hall as it parades through. sunday tentatively i have planned to see the georgia o’keefe exhibit at the lousiana, a modern art museum a train ride away. monday nite is the opera and tuesday nite is dinner at heather’s. cooler than any of that, however, sapna left for paris this afternoon.

my first full week of classes behind me, i have the feeling time will start to move much more quickly. good thing or bad, i don’t know. i think i’m growing more comfortable with the city. i’ve spoken at least once in each of my classes. for mythology i already handed in a paper (written over my lunch break today actually because i spent last nite swallowing emotional ipecac. that is to say, i read over the last couple months as recorded in my real space notebook and listening to the two mixes lana made me until i wept, and, feeling purified, could sleep.)

today’s film was the french lieutenant’s woman and i don’t have time to go into it but see it if you get a chance. really interesting movie.

just returned from a nice stroll with katie. set out to buy boots after class and ended up wandering for a couple hours.

we continued the discussion downstairs by the pooltables while we prepped to go to christiania for jazz, establishing that his major suited him to take over a small centralamerican country. cuong, feeling protective, warned me as we went to get coats of alex’s predatorial reputation. although the prospect of a one-night stand with the future dictator of nicaragua was superficially tempting, i laughed and assured him i’d be okay.

alex, eric, cuong and i set off in the rain to the hippie haven, about a ten minute walk from our door. the venue was packed with smoke and twentysomethings, both equally funky. the first band was a lackluster rock group whose sax player couldn’t hold a candle to sam dingman. the second was a woman wearing two slips and knee-high boots singing along valiantly to french opera. when she finished her aria, the spotlight shifted to the third band, this one authentically jazzy. people started dancing. alex offered to take my coat (cuong hovered) i refused nicely, and he hung back with his arms crossed. one birthday dance with eric — i danced! i wasn’t drunk! we laughed and stumbled through — and i left with cuong. talked differences between ethnic here and at home. returned around 2:30, after sapna was in bed for a change.

phones should be outlawed. don’t prattle on to me about their potential for good. last nite after getting off of mine and drifting promptly into sleep, i dreamt:

that i was dreaming in my house in dc about ben — and suddenly he was there. we hung around, just laughing, wandering. got back into bed and the alarm clock went off realization: if i woke up he wouldn’t be there anymore competing with a little voice that said, hey, maybe he will

woke up and he wasn’t.

see? who needs it.

had a similar dream when i was in north carolina with lana, only in that dream ben was with us in that house and lana was eating dirt. it seemed quite natural at the time.

today at lunch i returned to my table after a very impressive trip to the bathroom (the trip, as i explained, was the impressive part). you have to walk through door after door.

me: and i’m always apprehensive that the next one i open will have a dead body behind it

andrea: what is it with you and dead bodies?

what indeed.

i’m in a place where people use “gay” as an insult. it jars me whenever i hear it, like a couple seconds ago from a guy at a computer across from me. i don’t know him and he wasn’t talking to me, so how do i respond? the first couple times i was too shocked to react, although of course that’s stupid — i guess i’m just used to swat, and not even swat as a whole; my particular self-editing circles. here the rules are different, or there are no rules, or no one’s set them out yet. it’s hard to know. people have different unifying characteristics than i’m used to. they go to college rather than to swarthmore. they’ve decided to study abroad. they’re american. that’s about it. my jews in europe class is populated both by people who when answering questions about traditions say, “we …” and people who dangle crosses over their collars. the professor asks questions about impressions of religions and i shudder a little waiting for the first faux pas.

to what degree am i responsible and til what point should i keep my mouth shut?

meanwhile another question begins to be answered on cathy’s site. she knows what she’s fighting against.

writing on andrea’s laptop which provides relief in the form of a standard american keyboard — no more searching for keys — in europe they wander, you know. at some point maybe drea’s keys will be influenced by european keys and start meandering around the board looking for excitement. might as well enjoy the stability as long it lasts.

after my second class of the day, jews in europe (i took notes dutifully throughout. temple destroyed the 586 bce — check. second temple — 70 ce. i have evil memories of dr. granite [phd in theater, as it turned out, that fraud] lecturing on the same material. she and i were natural enemies. i rarely had it that bad with teachers. she took 5% off a test of mine once supposedly because i took it in pencil. memories of injustice remain with me. good thing i have so few.) (oh wait, i was in the middle of a sentence, wasn’t i? to resume:) i took the train out to her dorm to meet her.

walked, looked wideeyed around the supermarket and opted for the pizza/pasta place instead where i got a forlorn excuse for a greek salad and we stayed so long talking the gruff men around us kept shooting us looks in mumbled danish.

NB: to all those who care about me, and i know there are at least three of you, i got wonderful emails today, please help me in my latest quest. i have to move one step up from my frozen french fries. but to what? how? supermarkets, though heavenly, are intimidating. i need to focus and for that i need advice, which you can feel free to dish out. go ahead, show off for the world!