recent developments:

1) am indeed heading to budapest (!!) with anne. would spend the few days preceding the trip getting to know her maybe, going out for coffee, gauging, observing, but she’s going to berlin tomorrow morning on a DIS fieldstudy. so i’ll be with her for the first substantial length of time ever on a plane to hungary. awesome. i bought the tickets yesterday when i went into STA so check the prices. the clerk informed me it was the last day i could buy them; i hesitated a second and a half and said, let’s do it. impulse shopping of the very best kind.

2) ben’s still here. oh yes, hush your objections, close your fish-mouths, shade your goggling eyes. he’s here, + $400 the airline compensated him for the inconvenience of spending an extra day. the kobenhavn airport is as nice a place as any to while away a saturday morning, i feel, especially when you emerge young gentleman in hand, giddy and grinning.

ben and i sought refuge in the minimalism of krasnopolsky’s, a blackchairs whitewalls cafe with a slender candle per table. no one ever notices the wick of a candle, i thought, as he went to get us an irish kaffe. the flame could be a magnificent headress on a manequin, or a flag tied to a pole, or a tent pegged into waxy ground, but nothing without the wick. i mellowed under the heat of his arm and the upper-downer drink; emerged happy again. even happier this morning to find paradise prolonged. as i wrote in my notebook during one of my many stretches where i was left to watch think wait in the terminal, the visit was everything i expected; the visit was great. so anything more at this point is unnecessary. and wonderful.

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.

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”)

“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.

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 ….

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?

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.

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.

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.