REO Speedwagon

You know how some songs just bring up memories; REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on loving you” is for me one of the very best ones. This is when I was an exchange student in States, one year long celebration being away from my best friend, my mom (Yes, I have a mountain of unsolved mother-daughter issues, but I am not gonna go to a shrink and get them solved. Who the hell am I going to blame for all the misery in my life if I one day get over my mom????).

So even my year in States was one long party, I also had a lot of heartache. This is the price to pay being passionate and falling in love very easily. Many nights I fell asleep listening to this song, and singing it in my mind to the love of my life. As the text says, I kept loving Greg, Jeff, Brad, Jay, Greg again, Terry, Mario, Chris, Greg again, Mike, John…

Let it snow

When did these boots become obligatory in Denmark?

Everybody is wearing them, and I don’t know why. These boots are rated to -40 degrees, come on, hardly a temperature even near by Danes will experience. This is just like Danes riding mountain bikes or driving land cruisers; where are the mountains? Denmark is about the flattest country in the world, but maybe Danes didn’t learn this at school. Which explains the poor PISA results.

Today it has in fact been weather which almost justifies a pair of these La Crosse boots. It has been snowing and as one never knows if this is the one and only time during the winter, I went right away sledging with the kids. I LOVE SNOW! I love sledging, making snowangels and snowmen. I love throwing snowballs at my kids. For these few snowy days I have a pair of very ugly, flat Ecco boots; they are so awful that people stop me and tell me how ugly they are. I can only agree, maybe I should get a pair of La Crosse instead.

Men

What is wrong with you men? There are things you are not supposed to do;
- Send bank account saldo by mail or by any other means either. You are just supposed to take care that there is always money on your wife’s account. If you cannot, you are a failure.
- You are not supposed to say “There is one more gear” when you are sitting as a passenger in car driven by your wife because you had a bottle of Amarone and the wife just a club soda.

But as Simone de Beauvoir said:“One is not born a woman, one becomes one. Men on the other hand are born fools and stay fools forever.”

Manners

In Finland and in Sweden the employees at supermarket‘s cash register always say “Hello” to the client. This never happens in Denmark, I am about to give up. I have now been trying for almost 11 years always saying “Hej” to the daydreaming employee, but they just ignore it. Sometimes I tell them how impolite it is not to say “Hej” back, then I get a “Huh?” from the employee. Well, at least it starts with “h”.

But I won’t give up, I am a fighter. Maybe one day I get lucky and the employee is a Nazi. When he hears my “Hej”, he might hear it as “Heil” and will eventually greet me back.

The Poet Of Ignorance by Anne Sexton

Perhaps the earth is floating,
I do not know.
Perhaps the stars are little paper cutups
made by some giant scissors,
I do not know.
Perhaps the moon is a frozen tear,
I do not know.
Perhaps God is only a deep voice
heard by the deaf,
I do not know.

Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.
It is written on the tablet of destiny
that I am stuck here in this human form.
That being the case
I would like to call attention to my problem.

There is an animal inside me,
clutiching fast to my heart,
a huge carb.
The doctors of Boston
have thrown up their hands.
They have tried scalpels,
needles, poison gasses adn the like.
The crab remains.
It is a great weight.
I try to forget it, go about my business,
cook the broccoli, open the shut books,
brush my teeth and tie my shoes.
I have tried prayer
but as I pray the crab grips harder
and the pain enlarges.

I had a dream once,
perhaps it was a dream,
that the crab was my ignorance of God.
But who am I to believe in dreams?

.

Melancholia

As I often don't have any money, I must find other means than buying things to cure my winter depression. My favourite ones, always working, are:
- Reading Madame Figaro
- Watching Sound of Music or Mary Poppins. The wonderful Julie Andrews…
- Listening to Cole Porter

And if I for some odd reason want to drown in my self pity I can always
- Read Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton
- Watch again and again “In the mood for love”
- Have a look at the saldo on my bank account

What a life

I have a feeling that I am not using my time very reasonably. The hours I am not sleeping, I use my time in average

- 20 % for laughing
- 20 % for crying
- 20 % in a state of mind I don’t know whether to laugh or cry
- 40 % for daydreaming

Liar, liar

I don’t know why I lie so much, but I guess that sometimes getting my way is so much shorter with a little lie. Today at Piscine Municipale someone had taken my swimming track, the one next to the middle cord separating the swimming section from water gymnastics. I just cannot get in the spirit of Michael Phelbs and dreaming of winning my 117th Olympic gold medal if I am not swimming on my usual track. So I asked the lady who had taken my track if she would mind changing the lanes as I feel more secure next to the cord being epileptic. She could perfectly understand my point and went off swimming elsewhere.

Once on a flight we were served coffee with very boring vacuum packed sand cake. It looked quite disgusting so I told the stewardess that I had diabetes, maybe she had something else for me. After two minutes she came back with a sandwich with smoked salmon. My husband tried in vain to convince the stewardess, half of the sand cake in his mouth, “I am diabetic, too!”.

The way getting things done at the office

My phone headset hasn’t been working for weeks; these kind of technical problems really annoy me as I have no interest in getting involved with cords and codes, it is a man thing (I am sure that all the cordless inventions are thanks to women). The hetero guy has tried to look at it, but without results. Finally last week I got so tired of not having the head set that I used the last possible mean to get it fixed; I told the hetero guy I would agree to have sex with him if he fixed the phone. HE FIXED IT.

I am not going to the company Christmas party, hell no.
.

School evaluations

Just as much as I fear my son’s school evaluations, I love my daughter's. The teachers always start with the positive stuff and on my daughter’s part the evaluation stays positive for all the 20 minutes. My son’s school evaluation starts with the very short positive part; how the teachers are impressed of his perfect spelling of dirty words he certainly hasn’t learned at school and hopefully neither at home (both I and my husband shake our heads firmly to convince he hasn’t learned them at home either). Yes, that was the positive part, then comes the negative one for the rest of the 19 minutes. Well, he is a boy, he likes to put living frogs on girls’ desks, I personally think dead ones would be much worse.

Today we had my daughter’s evaluation and as expected, it was very positive. My daughter is wonderful and fantastic, just like her mummy. But according to the teachers she has a very weird sense of humour. HOW CAN A 6-YEAR OLD GIRL HAVE A WEIRD SENSE OF HUMOUR? Like all the children, she thinks Mr Bean and Louis de Funes are funny. That she also laughs at my jokes doesn’t make her sense of humour weird, or does it?

WW1

Jean-François Delassus has made a fantastic documentary about World War I that ended for 90 years ago. EVERYBODY SHOULD SEE IT. What madness, I can’t believe that the human kind doesn’t learn from it's mistakes.

My grandpa was a messenger in World War II. He had to deliver the messages, no matter how many grenades were exploding around him. Still in the fifties my father had to witness my grandpa’s screaming in the middle of the night when he was having nightmares about the war.

And as my grandpa hadn’t been suffering enough, I just had to go and burn down his chicken house. And pee in his boots...

I have a dream

I dream of building a boat, I have had this dream for more than 30 years. I will ask my dad again, but he doesn’t really share the dream with me. He dreams only of the day I stop asking him.

One cup of coffee = xxx litres of water

I drink far too much coffee and keep saying that I should quit drinking it or at least drink less. But just saying that is as absurd as I would say tomorrow I will become Afro-American. I cannot, I won’t, it’s just not gonna happen.

But in these green times I should really reconsider. Do you know how much water is used to produce just one cup of coffee? 220 litres! The coffee plant, just like cotton, is very water demanding (a pair of jeans is equal to 11.000 litres of water).

Before was excessive alcohol use something to be ashamed of and people tried to hide their red wine in coffee cups. These days one must fear being regarded as environmental pig, are people putting their coffee in wine glasses now?

Does God exist?

No if God is equal to justice and fairness. Why does this guy get sexier and more charming for each year that passes by while we women wear out like a pair of jeans?

Quand vient le soir
N'allez pas croire
Qu'on fera l'amour dans le noir
Et dans la chambre
Elle rit, elle ment
Et moi, je meurs
D'amour pour elle

Julien Clerc, "La jupe en laine"

Things we fear

A friend of mine told me a story about her childhood that explains some of her strange behaviour today. I don’t want to mention her by her real name, let’s just call her Ane (any similarity to any living person is purely coincidental).

Ane had (she still has, the proof that there was no reason to be afraid) 3 smaller sisters and sometimes she had to babysit them. If one of the sisters wanted her to sleep with her, Ane always insisted sleeping next to the wall. This was to protect herself if a gun man entered the room; the gun man would shoot the sister first.

I was always wondering why Ane always insists that I enter a café, a shop or cinema first. Now I know. If there is a gun man waiting, he will shoot me first.

Life before computers

The kids often wonder what we did when we were children as there were no computers. This is the answer:

I remember it being quite harmless. Or was there maybe some one who got so addicted that she played it for 70 hours without interruption and collapsed?

Wise words...

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."

Ernest Hemingway (wonderful author, real life macho pig and the one who didn't wear underwear)

My new orthopaedic surgeon

My orthopaedic surgeon couldn’t help me any more so he sent me to a colleague. He might also have gotten offended when I took the earplugs on when he begun his preacher about how high heels are bad for women. I told him I wouldn’t listen to it but he just kept going. Come on, I am one of those women whose femininity is totally depended on the size of the heels. I do envy women who in fact feel feminine in their flat Ecco shoes, but I don’t belong to them.

This new orthopaedic surgeon was a real macho man; his kittel was wide open, he was wearing a net shirt under it, and thick, black hair was popping out all over his body. Perfect! This is a guy who would never ever start talking about giving up high heels; he is a man and can see that I am a woman. And quite right, he promised to fix my toe so that I can wear as much high heels as I want to as long as I will live. Amen.

Indecent proposals 3

I still have no idea how I get the money for the eye surgery. I wonder if there is any expire date for suing someone for sexual harassment? Then I could sue my physics teacher from lycée (the one always whispering the exam assignments to me in advance). He was supervising my French exam at baccalaureat and made a quite indecent proposal to me. Funny enough I didn’t get shocked, I just giggled very stupidly. But as he must be very old today, he cannot certainly remember this. I can tell the court how I instead cried of anxiety and shame. How much would this bring me? Enough also for a liposuction and a breast job?

Indecent proposals 2

The hetero guy at work is also very bored at the moment and made just a very inappropriate proposal. If he wasn’t a colleague, I wouldn’t mind at all. He is very good-looking, athlete (Ironman!) and the most important, he really makes me laugh. But I had to tell him “Sorry honey, I don’t have sex with colleagues. Look what happened last time I did, I ended up getting MARRIED!”

20 years!

I have another reason to celebrate (??) today; I have been together with my husband for 20 YEARS! My husband really surprised me and sent flowers to the office. As I just love white flowers, it still puzzles me after 20 years that my husband for the rare occasions gives me multicoloured roses. I could tattoo “I love white flowers” on my butt and he still would ignore the fact. And not that he doesn’t see my butt. As a Finn I am very relaxed about nudity (despite all my complexes) and often walk around naked in the house, for a big irritation of my husband and great fun for the neighbours. But flowers, he just doesn’t get it. But as Ane would say, just be happy I get flowers, and I am.

So 20 years together, but only 10 years of marriage. It was Un long dimanche de fiancailles. As people these days get divorced just after a couple of years, I wonder what has kept us together such a long time. A great deal of compromises. Accepting that a romantic evening means reading Mary Wesley or Jane Austen, accepting that sex is something I read about in Tidens Kvinder and accepting that also Emmanuelle (my new painting of Emmanuelle Beart) will end up hanging in the garage.

Congratulations America!

I cried of joy this morning, way to go Obama! Even I wanted Hillary to become the first American female president, the first black one is almost as good. I had put a cava in the fridge to celebrate the occasion, but came to drink it accidentally last Monday (I had to listen my husband reporting an antenna meeting, I needed some encouragement).

John McCain was not a bad guy like Bush, he was just too old (and of course too republican). He would probably have had a stroke soon after entering the White House; can you imagine Nailin Palin taking over? Sending a troop of Huskies to Iraq?

Now the Americans just have to take the last step, a black president deserves a proper domicile. The White House must be painted and called The Black House.

I am an optimist!

Nobody can accuse me being a pessimist. I have booked time for eye surgery examination even I don’t have any money to pay for the eventual surgery. But a lot of things can happen in the next month’s time. I can win in lottery (this requires though that I buy a lottery ticket, I try to remember it), a rich relative I know nothing about dies leaving a heritage to me, I get my yearly bonus 6 months in advance, I find 20.000 kr on the street while walking to work, a rich blind guy falls in love with me or Bill Gates answers my letter enclosing a big check.

The Year of Living Dangerously

When the great Spanish dancer Luis saw me doing the splits from a hop, he told me how dangerous it is without first warming up. “Hey, danger is my middle name, just f… help me up!” I answered. Yes, this line was mine; Leslie Nielsen stole it and used it at Naked gun 33 1/3 without my permission.

Well, Danger isn’t definitely my middle name anymore. The most dangerous thing I do these days is asking once a month for a salary raise from my boss. Then she calmly drinks up her coffee and hits me on the head with the empty coffee cup. But even this isn’t that dangerous anymore, now I am wearing a helmet when I walk over to her desk.

My middle name nowadays is most probably Inferiority complex. Everybody else is smarter, more beautiful, richer, skinnier and more successful. I better see a shrink. Or a plastic surgeon.

French Can Can

I had this fantastic idea to have a little French Can Can show with Mademoiselle A at the company Christmas party. There is just a little detail I had forgotten, I am not naturally supple. That I once was able to do impressing splits was indeed a result of hard training, and the only thing I train these days is my tonsils (and it isn’t opera I am talking about). I thought that maybe the extra body weight would help my legs to straighten out, but God, how they resist! I tried yesterday, and there is missing, not just a couple of centimeters, but a meter or two.

I think I need help from Luis, a great Spanish dancer I knew for ages ago. If he still isn’t in chock after I once demonstrated one of my impressing splits from a little hop, and wasn’t able to get up again. Luis became later the artistic director at Moulin Rouge, but he never contacted me to join the dance girls. Was I too short?

Mademoiselle A was quite delighted about the Can Can idea, but we have postponed it to next year. This year I just stick to the same old theme entertaining my colleagues; getting drunk and telling embarrassing stories from my past. There is enough of them until the day I retire.

Albert Camus

"Les doutes, c'est ce que nous avons de plus intime."