If everyone generates good anecdotes at approximately the same rate, and I have more than one friend, my friends are going to generate more good anecdotes than I will. As a consequence of this fact, sometimes I feel a bit like a middleman or a sneaky meme-trader, like much of my coolness lies in all the good stories my friends have told me and all the neat things they do. At times it turns into a kind of hero worship, and I’m unable to imagine that anyone would be retelling my stories in the way I retell theirs, and I’ll even forget that my own life can generate stories at all.

Which is why it feels so funny to look back on my archives and realize that I’ve mostly been telling my own stories here, and people are still listening to me.

I like pseudonyms. I like them in much the same way that I like changing my site design around for no good reason, or changing my clothes - it’s all a part of playing with image, I think, and image is a fun game. My scattershot approach to online identity politics hasn’t been the most efficient means of branding myself, but so what? I’m not out to establish myself and make money, even though I do have 2.03 sitting in my amazon.co.uk associate’s account.

Hmm. There was a rant hiding in there somewhere yesterday, sprung from the bosom of a thread in hesitant firmness, all about whether or not I consider each of my pseudonyms to have a distinct personality, but I’ve just worked myself into a distraction by introducing the clothes analogy. Now I’m thinking about socks, and warm woolen tights that have bright patterns on them, and funny hats, and other ways to winterize my wardrobe. Also about the fact that in a box somewhere, I think it’s in California, I own a tie-dyed union suit, complete with the butt-flap, that I wore to class sometimes last year. I always felt bright and happy wandering around inside it. I think if I wore it around Copenhagen, though, I would not only freeze my ass off but I would feel quite awkward while doing so - people here seem to almost uniformly go for this muted, sophisticated, solid-color look, and it’s quite nice from any mature fashionista perspective but it never makes small children giggle.

Now I should flog myself a bit for making two English errors: I just split an infinitive, and yesterday I improperly pluralized the Euro. Of course, infinitive-splitting is a perfectly acceptable practice if you’re not trying to impose Latin grammar on the universe, and only an idiot would seriously think that “one euro, two euro” would ever make it into common usage. But I did want to use the word flog.

I should go to bed.

General advice for all concerned: before you leave a country, be sure to spend all of your coins. No reasonable change agents will be nice enough to turn them back into real money for you.

So I have a whole bunch of Belgian one franc coins, and I need to get rid of them, and I’ve always wanted to have a contest for my loyal minions… therefore I am announcing the beginning of the

green|gabbro super stalker search

From the information given on this website, I am uniquely identifiable, and any sufficiently patient and/or clever person should be able to figure out all kinds of things about who I am, where I live, and how I spend my money. But, I’m not sure exactly how much of my personal information is scattered around the internet, or how much patience you need to find it. So I will give a prize of one shiny Belgian franc (that’s about $0.03 US, and better hurry up to spend it before they convert to Euros next year!) to the first person(s) to e-mail me with one or more of the following pieces of information:

• My full, real name (bonus points for getting my middle name).
• Any one of my three current addresses.
• My birthdate.
• Any other bits of information that might disturb me - social security number, Danish CPR number, credit records, elementary school progress reports, the color of my toothbrush, things I did when I was 14 that I never told anyone about, etc, etc.

And of course, there have to be some rules:

• You may only use public (or semi-public) internet resources. Your ability to hack into database servers, or cajole secretaries into giving out protected information, should not be an issue here. Also, don’t go around sending stupid e-mails to people you think I might know, or otherwise act like an ass.
• To claim your prize, e-mail me with all the information you could find, and a detailed description of how you found it. You’ll also need to give me your real name and address, so’s I can mail you the shiny coin.
• If you know me in real life, you can still play, but I’ll be looking especially carefully at how you found things out to make sure you didn’t cheat.
• The contest will continue until I run out of francs, or get bored of it. Changes to these rules may be made at any time, with or without notice, and my decisions are final even if they don’t make sense.

That’s all… have fun!

In honor of (yeeks) Mole Day: java Whack-A-Mole.

Also, I am convinced, now, that home is the place that you return to after leaving. Which is a sort of convoluted way of saying that you have to leave someplace to truly appreciate it, and also that I’m glad to be back in Copenhagen. The church bells in Luxembourg played a lovely trick where the first two notes of the quarterly chime were the same two notes that begin the chime from the Rdhus tower, and so every fifteen minutes I broke away from whatever I was doing to feel just a little incomplete. That, and the sidewalks there bore a suspicious resemblance to the bike lanes here, which had me looking over my shoulder every three seconds expecting to be flattened.

So I feel properly at home here, at last, when I’m over halfway done with my stay. In a way this helps to make up for losing bits and pieces of hominess from the town where I grew up - this summer, I was unpleasantly surprised to find that I no longer knew my way around town without thinking about it a little, and that street scenes imposed themselves upon me in the ways only an unfamiliar scene can. In other ways, it’s twice as sad - now I have two cities to forget.

Redesign fever. Does it look funny in your browser?

More wacky produce pictures here.

Today I stumbled upon the “American Store” only to discover that yes, it has Dr. Pepper, but not mac’n'cheez which is the only thing I’ve really been missing. Phooey.

Two things that I found in the supermarket in Luxembourg really ought to have come from Japan. Fruit Pocket, the fruit that you can eat when you want and how you want according to the packaging, is actually just applesauce in a slick foil juice-bag thing. Funny Orange Drink is some sort of milk and orange juice concoction. I was too scared to buy it, since I vaguely recall a failed experiment along those lines from back in the day in grade school, and also parallel experiments with Bailey’s and cola.

In my dream, Holy Mother Dabney was at war with a group of spiky-blond Indians. The only way to fight it was for Ryan, a very calm and peaceful friend of mine, to ride a moped down the narrow dark alleys with a giant rubber bomb, place the bomb, and leave. After exploding, it was necessary for us to walk through the half-rubbled hallways of our enemies, crying for the dead and comforting the survivors.

The way to stop fighting was to color-code our weapons, so that for every act of violence there would be a puff of shining mist to tell who was at fault, so that within days the city would be shrouded in swirling colors and we would all be too blind to do anything, so that at least something beautiful would have come from it all.

There was a group of elderly pilgrims in the cathedral. After they had wandered around a bit and admired the stained glass windows and the statues and all the other things one admires when visiting a new cathedral, they sat down and started to sing hymns. For the most part they had quivering old-people voices, in desperate need of some breath support and a pitchfork. But when their echo returned from the nave, it sounded like a perfect children’s choir in four-part harmony. Underneath all the wrinkles and smoke-damaged vocal cords and the abstracted weights of life they were still children, I think, but they could only remember it for two moments at a time at the end of each phrase.

Luxembourg is gorgeous. QWERTZ kezboards are crappz. Travelling alone, I’ve been compulsively writing stuff down and saving it to blog as some kind of substitute companionship, but out of sympathy for the people waiting for my computer I’ll talk zou onlz through the train ride. (See, I can find the Y, but it’s so much effort…)

I took the overnight train, and during false dawn it pulled into Cologne (or Köln, if zou’re zo inzlinedzz.) Three years ago, I had spent about two days there on the classic high school whirlwind tour, so I didn’t expect to recognize it at all… but crossing the bridge through the groggy fog of horrible couchette sleep, I suddenly flashed back to sitting on the bus while someone up front pointed out all the parts of town that hadn’t been smashed to bits during WWII, and of course walking into the cathedral while the organist was practicing and understanding for the first time ever why so many people choose to worship inside. Approaching the train station, there’s this incongruous view of the cathedral rising out at you from the beginnings of the light, and immediately you’re swallowed up by ghetto bauhaus cylindrical train station roof. It’s kind of like being born backwards, if you’re a robot.

And as usual, on the regional connecting train through Germanz, I kept looking at all the old people (for some reason the rural train-taking demographic in Germanz is such that almost everzone was this old, at least at 7:30 am) and wondering how old they were in 2020 and what they and their families were doing then. I should reallz, reallz stop doing that. It’s like the Viking warrior bit, only not at all funny.

In fact, imagining people as members of their culture’s most recent barbaric regime is only funny in Scandinavia. I think Vikings go along with Elvis, Jesus, and the Ayahtollah Khomeini in passing the “10,000 parachuting” test.

For those who just can’t get enough: it’s Hesitant Firmness, the new group blog. Makes ya feel all warm and squishy inside, doesn’t it?