Expect me to be incommunicando for the weekend; the association of/for exchange students at the science faculty has arranged a retreat to a research cottage in the middle of Danish agricultural nowhere. It promises to be at the least an educational look at native fungi, and probably a good time as well.

Meanwhile, to celebrate, here’s Salvaged Item #3, which is what we wrote during my very first ever calculus study group back in high school.

The 10 Stages of Calculus Problem-Solving

1. Denial - “I don’t really have to do this problem”
2. Bargaining - “if I do the rest of the problems, then maybe I won’t have to do this one”
3. Anger - “goddammit, who the hell wrote this fucking problem, and why the fuck do I have to do it anyway?!”
3b. Incoherent Hostile Muttering
4. Despair - “I’ll never be able to solve this problem!”
5. Acceptance - “oh, I suppose I should start the problem now”
6. Confusion - “what? huh? three?”
6b. Pathetic Whimpering
7. Determination - “I am Thrag, the barbarian mathematician. I will use my club made from the femur of Blaise Pascal and beat this problem to a bloody integrable pulp!”
8. Ingenuity - “maybe if I take the derivative of f(g(x)), and then have a look in the back of the book…”
9. Procrastination - “I’ll understand it better in the morning anyway”
10. Apathy - “ah, whatever, fuck it”

I had this taped onto my book cover for the rest of the year, along with a list of reasons why calculus is like sex (you know, curves and the area under them, that sort of thing). It made the teacher laugh… my high school calculus teacher was one of the rare gems who seemed to genuinely appreciate the antics of the bored smart kids in the back of the room, as long as we kept things reasonably quiet. In a way, I kind of miss high school, since I was bored and trapped enough most of the time to come up with some great creative outlets. The witty banter was doomed from the beginning, of course, and all the TI-basic programs were lost when I spilled hydrochloric acid on my calculator in chem lab, but I’ve still got a couple sketchbooks full of abortive comic strips and one-panel sarcastic nematodes.

Of course, yesterday I filled two pages of my Danish workbook with Sven the Danish Gangsta Sheep and variations on the phrase “København er ind huset, baaa!!!” - maybe there’s hope for the future. Or at least some Ritalin or something.

I walked home from the International Café tonight. On the bridge from the city center to Christianshavn (see also Terabithia) lay a drumbeat, bounced off of so many buildings that the echoes had a rhythm and counterpoint of their own, coming from nowhere and joining lustily with the thud of my boots. On the bridge from Christianshavn to Amager, my footsteps dropped hollow into the canal. I knew that I was of the world - after all, the wind blew through my hair and hummed tunelessly in my ears - but I couldn’t tell if I lived in it, or if I merely lived upon it like a loose grain of sand.

It was the feeling you get when you have smiled at a girl, and spoken a few words of nothing, and watched her vanish liquid into the sea of dancers. Maybe you’ll see her again next week, and maybe you won’t.

Those of you who are intersexed, trans*, or otherwise in a never-never land of gendered language may skip out on the following exercise. The rest of you must participate, and you must complete it before you read the rest of this entry. I have spies everywhere, I’ll know if you cheat, and cheaters never prosper.

Now then, describe yourself:
• male / female
• girl / boy
• man / woman
• lady / gentleman

Which did you pick? Why?

Personally, I’m in the stage of super-extended-angsty-young-adulthood where both “girl” and “woman” make me feel a bit odd. But the real reason I wrote this, the thing that was about to set me off into a silly rant before I got distracted and then thought better of it, is that I’ve been noticing people use “females” in some odd contexts lately. Contexts of gender rather than sex, where I would almost always use “women.” (NB! I’m a hairy legged feminist, and I may be missing a similar “males” phenomenon out of acculturation and laziness.) Seeing someone comment on cultural divides between “men” and “females” especially makes me twitch.

I’m not going to bring out the Feminist Ray Gun just yet, but I am thinking about cleaning it out in preparation for a nice argument with some poor sot. I haven’t had one of those in a while.

Salvaged Item #2: a list of things that have led me to believe my life is a surrealist novel. Either that, or the beginnings of something by Neal Stephenson, along the lines of Snow Crash - and I don’t think the world knows how to write a decent ending either. This list is only the barest scratching at the surface of this issue, and I’m sure you can all come up with more entries.

• the prevalence of mySimon.com - I was looking up “postmodernism” in the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. At the bottom, a little dialog box asked me if I wanted to compare prices on “postmodernism”-related products at mySimon.com.
• Donut Star - a shop in Orange County, California (Orange County!) that serves donuts and americanized chinese food. And nothing else.
• those little stores tucked inside the skywalks in the Twin Cities - they’ve got a maze of nicely carpeted tunnels connecting large office buildings. The same damn sunglasses shop appears at about 3 junctions in a row, and then you never see it again. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean.
• Sheboygan, WI - Sheboygan. Tee hee.

This of course is excluding the bizarre and subtle drinking competition between the United States and Japan, wherein each country packages surrealism and exports it to the other, and whoever buys the most takes a shot. Hello Kitty, anyone?

Also, if you’ve got a blog of your own and haven’t registered yourself with either blogdex or disturbing search requests, you should do so immediately. Blogdex is about the best look into creepy blog subculture that I’ve seen, and the other site just makes me want to wash my hands after using the keyboard.

The outside of my Mandala is burning hot sun and pouring rain that will either burn you or drown you. The arrows in the water are for when people try to swim across. The different color spikes are guarding the Nike signs.

I too would be happier drawing protective magicks around corporate symbols.

I went for a walk in the park yesterday, and came upon a slug eating a leaf. Normally, I feel the same squishysick aversion to slugs that other people feel to spiders or blood, but this was fascinating.

*cough*

Sorry, I hadn’t meant to post that quite yet. The gist of my thoughts, before I was rudely interrupted by a fabulous museum visit (which I’ll get to in good time) was this: how do slugs decide what to do next? They’ve got brains the size of pinheads. Assuming that a slug would have some rudimentary kind of self-awareness, I crouched there for a good 15 minutes, wondering what it would be like to be a big ol’ black slug eating a leaf, and that leaf expanded to fill my world. It was crisp, dissolving slowly in my goo without losing its essential tang, and it pressed up gently against my blubbery chin. My odd slice of a mouth moved slowly, and though I was aware of it I was not aware that I could stop it if I so chose. It felt like textured rubber boots.

When I was done being a slug I went home. That was yesterday. Today, I went to the National Museum, to see things that have been dug up from bogs around the country. I only made it from prehistory to the year 2020 or so, the end of the Viking exhibit, but the number of metal arm rings that passed before my eyes is astounding. I left with visions of Viking serpents and Bronze Age hand symbols dancing before my eyes, wishing I had a good design project in which to incorporate them.

Why do we use justice as a euphemism for death? I still count myself a pacifist, but lately I’ve been sympathizing with an unusual number of calls for blood, from people other than trained medical personnel. What I truly want is for the pictures of a dazed survivor or the words of a fabulous poet to spread gently over the world and into the hearts of all the Bad Men, so that they become sorry and promise never to do it again. For everyone who has caused suffering to spend the rest of their lives working in good faith to repair it - that would be justice. Killing the Bad Men, no matter how necessary it might be, is not justice; it’s merely more killing. And yet, and yet, it takes away some of the sting of powerlessness, and isn’t that important, too?

Well, not really, no, it’s not. Not in the grand scheme of things at all.

____

[… an edited-in addition to this post, because somehow, what’s on top deserves to stay there for a little while longer. c. 2020 the same night.]

I opened up my email this evening to see the following gem from David Baltimore, Nobel laureate and president of Caltech: “Each person in the Caltech community should remember that we work for a greater good that terrorism cannot touch, the enlightenment produced by discovery and learning.” The rest of it, loosely translated, reads “so get back to work, bitch.” A firm belief in the ultimate triumph of applied topology notwithstanding, it seemed a bit callow (not to mention inaccurate, but that’s a debate for another day) and I was nonplussed.

But I think this will be my last post on america-go-boom. I’ve had my release, the important things have all been said, it’s time to yield the floor to those with more legitimate personal involvement. And oh yes, get back to work, bitch.

Thought the First: generally, when I have mostly keenly felt my Americanness, I have also felt loud, and large, and brash, and somewhere on the scale from cheeky to insufferably rude. Today, when I feel like an American it is because I feel small, and quiet, and vulnerable.

Thought the Second: despite having several American friends from my language courses, I haven’t felt the presence of an actual expatriate community around me until today. It’s been nothing more than exchanged glances and the quiet reassurances of “yes, I’m OK” - but that’s really enough.

Thought the Third: since I have been luckily spared from thousands of individual tragedies, what saddens me most is the following: that obviously peaceful Islamic groups in the US are receiving a deluge of hate mail, and also, that so many people in the world believe that violence is their only route to justice.

I took a nap yesterday afternoon, and at the end of it, Jane knocked on my door to ask why I wasn’t watching television. I felt like a broken Rolodex, flipping through all of my friends and family to make sure none of them had reason to be in Manhattan, little index cards of names and addresses flying everywhere. My corner of everyone is all right.

My kitchen, as it contains two Americans and cable TV, quickly became an imitation of CNN central headquarters. There are all sorts of things I want to say about watching a national tragedy from a foreign country, but my classes haven’t been cancelled, I have no real mourning to do, and the bus isn’t going to wait for me.

It’s raining again, and I need groceries.

Meanwhile, adequacy.org looks like it might be a viable alternative to other supposed newsfilters. Where “viable” means “amusing but probably doomed.”