Wow. After a long, stuttering lapse of communication with my man-in-minneapolis, he’s back, with an out-of-the-blue reply to a message I had almost forgotten about. We’ve exchanged two rambling emails in as many days, and even though there’ve been none of the old arguments about semantics and the future of human artistic impulse (and we’re talking two years old, now, incredible how time passes only when you’re not looking, his forehead’s gotten much taller) it still feels good to blather on at someone who intuitively appreciates most of how I tick, or at least, how I blather on. Not to mention his idiosyncratic writing style… *funblort*

Of course, this has also led me to the lead-stomach-sinking realization that all our old correspondence has vanished from my dusty, spam-choked webmail account. Which is a loss indeed. There’s nothing quite so nostalgically comforting on a cold, lonely night as rereading old emails and reminding yourself that someone, somewhere, once thought enough of you to write tolerable poetry. Don’t ever store things with emotional impact on a foreign server, boys and girls; keep them instead on a diskette, which you can lose and rediscover as many times as you want.

There’s a really gigantic bug fluttering around. I’m going to bed.

Hmm. Very bubbly, and yet, not saccharine. Quite the combination.

I love looking through my own site statistics, particularly the referrals section (click on the little graphic at the bottom left if you want to see them, too). This site turned up at a respectable #9 on a google search for “little gal naked” - hah!

I’ve also been meaning to hop on this particular bandwagon for a while, but haven’t had time:

three things I see

1. Hanging fluorescent lamps, and their accompanying white plasticky ceiling tiles. Vintage 70s library decor, yum yum.
2. A strip of paper along the top of my monitor, telling me that “denne pc er tilsluttet printer no 6″ in a nice, all-caps, sans serif font that I don’t recognize. There’s another sign on the bottom, reading “Print: 50 øre stk. Betal venligst i Udlånet”
3. My own fingers. Only right now, I’m seeing them as separate entities, kind of blobular and spreading across the keyboard, all pinkish and a little bit greasy compared to the bright yellow cheapwood of the desk.

three things I hear

1. Keyboard clackety-clack. Mostly not belonging to me.
2. The hum and whirring of a copy machine immediately to my left. When it finishes scanning a page, it makes a whimpering noise with a bit of a squeak to it. Plus assorted soft beeps for no reason at all.
3. Two women conversing in low tones, far enough away that I can’t even tell what language they’re speaking. They sound so much more human than everything else in this library, though, that I’m oddly comforted by them.

three things I smell

1. Dust and old book. I’m not sure where it’s coming from, and it’s subtle enough that it could just be a figment of my imagination, but figment or not I still smell it.
2. Warm Xerox toner, from the same copy machine I mentioned above. It reminds me of the evenings I used to spend copying reams of paper for the debate team, eating crap food and discussing federalism with a surreal level of animation. I still shudder at the thought of a federalism disad.
3. Myself. I stink of human. Incidentally, if you haven’t seen Planet of the Apes yet, don’t bother unless you can find a theater where they’ll let you haul in a bucket full of rotten fruit. I went with an assortment of non-native anglophones, who crushed one of my most cherished fantasies: apparently, not understanding the monkeylisp or the american slang does not enhance one’s experience of a completely horrid script.

three things I feel

1. My watch, pressing into my wrist as it rests against the edge of the table.
2. A bit of a rumble in my stomach as I digest the spaghetti I had for breakfast/lunch today.
3. The confines of my boots, as I absentmindedly jiggle my toes around inside them. I’m a huge fidgeter, in all circumstances, and it’s even worse when I’ve had some caffeine. Maybe it’s a sign that I need more regular exercise. Meh.

three things I taste

1. Garlic, left over from the spaghetti sauce, or perhaps from something else I ate days ago. Garlic is one of the few spices I feel comfortable using, and as a result I throw tons of it into almost everything I cook. It doesn’t help that the only things I really cook are pasta, stir fry, and meatballs, all of which are very good receptacles for a clove or three of garlic.
2. Snot in the back of my throat. Yes, it’s gross, but I’m fighting off a cold.
3. That stale taste that oozes out from the corners of your mouth when you haven’t spoken or chewed in a while. Not quite as severe as morning breath, but it’s basically the same principle.

Since I’m revelling in my new access to the dorm computer room… here’s the religion search. Enter all the features you want from a religion, and it tells you where to look. Somehow, being told that I’m 100% compatible with the Unitarian Universalists just doesn’t feel like that much of a revelation.

I woke up from my nap in the middle of a dream, wherein my ex-boyfriend came and accused me of periodically restoring his life from backup all throughout high school. I politely refrained from mentioning that if I hadn’t kept backups of his life, he wouldn’t be alive at all. I woke up just as I was about to yell at him and remind him of this somewhat sensitive fact.

There’s lots of things I’d like to restore from backup, unfortunately.

Yesterday, I made a fun and exciting pilgrimage to Roskilde, home of a respectable rock festival, some old viking ships, and a church with lots of dead Danish royalty inside. As fascinated as I was by the sight of really old wood that’s just been dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, what really struck me about the afternoon were the tombstones set into the floor of the cathedral. They had all been ornately carved, and obviously marked the graves of some very important people who were probably quite excited at the thought of being commemorated for all time with a stone in the Roskilde Cathedral. And they were all in varying stages of illegibility, the carvings mostly worn away by the feet of generation upon generation of worshippers and cheeky tourists who can’t tell the difference between kings named Christian and kings named Frederick.

Which is why I want the writing on my memorial stone, if I get one, to be worn away by lichens and winds and trees and other things that aren’t so busy deciding if that arch there is Gothic or Romanesque that they don’t even notice that they’re eroding my last pretensions of immortality. And there should also be lots of run-on sentences like that last one. Yeah.

I have finished my three week intensive Danish course. To show for it, I have a nice little certificate, and three bottles of beer I snagged from the reception on my way out. But now what I really want to know is why these silly Danes don’t ever seem to follow the scripts… whenever Jytte or Søren orders a cheese sandwich in the book, the counter-guy always asks if they want anything else, but whenever I order a cheese sandwich, I get asked what kind of cheese I want, or if I want my bread toasted, or something else equally incomprehensible. No one has ever asked me if I want anything else.

So I think there should be a clever international system for this sort of thing. When you come to another country and want to practice the language, you indicate somehow - perhaps by wearing a colorful button - that you can understand phrases from a standard, pre-approved list of scripts. And if “what kind of cheese do you want?” isn’t on that list, then you’ll be happy to eat whatever kind of cheese you’re given, as long as you can answer the question “anything else?” with “that’s all, thanks” like they do on all the practice tapes.

Hmm, I seem to have stumbled upon some sort of comrade-in-arms. Or at least, another American writing a blog from Copenhagen, if that means anything at all in terms of fateful quests to find (or possibly restore to some former greatness) the One True Expatriate Blog.

Meanwhile, I was shocked to realize that I only have two more days of Danish classes before it’s the weeklong, pre-semester break. I want to travel someplace, maybe Helsinki or Oslo or Prague, but since I have little money and also very few trip-organizing skills I’ll probably end up taking the ferry to Malmo, or perhaps a train to Stockholm, and riding around on busses in Sweden for a couple days. The real trick is finding somebody to go with… *ponders*

Right. I’m waay overcaffinated and have about 15 minutes before I have to go running around town signing up for classes (geodynamics, paleontology, and wavelet analysis… probably). So I’m going to say something stupid about beer, like I promised. Buying beer is probably the most obvious difference between here and home, since I can here and can’t there, and also one of the least interesting. I feel odd walking into a convenience store and buying a bottle of beer; I don’t really feel odd walking into a pub and buying a “lille fadøl”. That’s all there is to say. The real question is - are obvious cultural differences like this inherently boring, because of their obviousness? Or is it just me, and maybe my lack of insightful microbrew beer snobbery?

Also, check out this poor guy. Maybe I should learn some Portugese so I can work with him… I’d love to be coauthor on a paper by Dr. R. A. Fuck, and doesn’t everyone like proterozoic folded belts?

(The answer, of course, is yes: everyone likes proterozoic folded belts. It was a rhetorical question. If you disagree, there’s a nice geological reeducation camp in Greenland that you can go to.)

The Danish language has no word for “please.” There are various ways to politely ask for things, and I know some of them, but there’s no single, easy word I can put at the end of a question that indicates that even though I don’t know the language well enough to politely ask this without horrendously mixing up and saying something completely wrong, I’m still trying. So I’ve been smiling a lot, and I’ve come to realize two things:

1. I say “please” much more than I had previously thought. I’ve never been as please-happy as some Americans can be, and tend towards a philosophy of “courtesy through indirectness” - putting things in conditional tenses, asking “do you know?” instead of “can you please tell me?” and that sort of thing. Actually, I say please all the time. A glass of water, please, and oh, please, that’s ridiculous, and would you please get your chair the hell off my foot? Thanks.
2. I don’t normally smile very much. Before anyone points out that it takes only a few muscles to smile, while you need some zillions to frown, I’d like to point out that there are many facial expressions beyond simple smiles and frowns. Wandering around slackjawed and drooling, for example, doesn’t strain any of your facial muscles at all. Much as I love my blank (er, I mean, subtle) facial expressions, though, I suspect that this is something I should pay attention to. Particularly when I’m in social settings in a completely new country where I know almost nobody and am trying to make friends. As antithetical to the spirit of snotty, arrogant “take me as I am or fuck off” blogging as this might sound, I happen to like it when people like me, and I don’t have any problems modifying a minor quirk so that people like me more.

Hmm. I’ve also realized that all my posts from Denmark have been to do with language quirks. The next one, I promise, will be a culture quirk or even a rambling introspection, even if I have to say something stupid about my new ability to buy beer.