Pancakes for Breakfast

Our grown children (4) plus 3 significant others & 3 grandkids here for Easter. I am well aware how privileged we are that they want to come home & even be seen with us in public. Daughter + main squeeze already here so today I made pancakes for breakfast. I operate on the principle stated by Buffy the Vampire Slayer's mother: "They only have no calories if I make them for you."

    A bit of a shock to my system nevertheless, because we fasted all day yesterday, as in: several glasses of water & 3 cups of herbal tea, period. It was Good Friday & I usually do fast - not a lot to ask given the reason we celebrate Good Friday - but it's as much cleansing as Christianity. Always send a thought to the millions fasting because they haven't got food. Here it's 'interesting' to experience actual hunger, because we wellfed westerners have pretty well forgotten what that's all about. It does feel good too - afterwards.

   Give it a try & have a Happy Easter.

Suad & Amanda - safe after Somalia

Almost quitting time last Thursday, then Suad showed up, looking worried. We had met Suad twice before, both times with her husband. They are Somali immigrants newly arrived in Svendborg & needing some local guidance. Both speak Danish but Suad is very fluent, very lovely & pleasingly plump. (Does anybody still say that? It describes Suad.) Her hair is the original afro, bleached orangey at the tips, no headscarf. Thursday she showed up alone, bruised after a beating - not the first - by her husband. She had left in a hurry while he slept & wasn't about to go back. At the volunteer/self-help center where I work we offered food, tea & sympathy & an hour later got her on her way to a women's shelter. We enjoyed imagining her husband's rage & frustration when he realized she was gone, out of his clutches, away from the repression he thought he could keep up in Denmark. Dream on, fanatic - that's not how women behave in the west. HA!

Of course Suad is the lucky one here. She gets all the sympathy; he gets despised & laughed at. What a dickhead. Did he really think he could keep a bright woman down? When will those idiot Muslim men ever learn? If they can't deal with western values, they can beat it back where they came from. Good riddance. They are all terrorists at heart anyway, aren't they?

       Yeah, I think they are, but I begin to understand the mechanism. In the case of Somalia, it's very clear. Not only is there a civil war on & no functioning government, but their livelihood was smashed when French fishermen violated Somalia's territorial waters & other nations followed their example. Most Somali pirates are ex-fishermen out of a job; that's why they know the territory so well. The lucky ones get to Europe or the US & some do really well - like the successful Somali enclave in St. Paul, Minnesota. Four young men from that community played the pirates in Captain Philips & one was even nominated for an Oscar. Then there are the others.  

       A culture that doesn't drink even a beer & forces its women to wander around in their own pup tent is as not-Danish as you can get. There has always been plenty of sympathy for the women & children, while the men were despised. Needless to say, this makes integration a whole lot tougher than it otherwise might be, & not only that. This attitude often makes the men even more repressive to their women - who figure out fast enough that western societies are going to be a lot more fun than what they came from. Here in DK girls get better educations than boys - really keep at it & are rewarded, especially if they ditch the Muslim headscarf - which of course keeps the vicious circle turning. There are jobs for immigrant women, mainly in the public health sector. Read: nursing homes. Everybody figures women from backward cultures are born caregivers at a time when there is a shortage of young people here & a crowd of oldsters needing care. Guys aren't so lucky. There's not the big demand for unskilled & semi-literate; besides, they repress their women. Yes, it's the only way they can feel just a bit manly in a country where they are not popular, but that won't get them any points & shouldn't. They have to change their ways.

       Suad is safe now; her husband is frustrated & pathetic. Canadian Amanda Lindhout is safe too, after 15 months of Somali captivity, starting in 2008. More on that next time.

Unforgivable - Utilgiveligt

There is one statement that is completely unforgivable: THAT'S JUST THE WAY I AM.

Read: I know perfectly well I should confront the characteristics that make it necessary to say this, but I am too

1. lazy

2. conceited

3. afraid

4. all of the above - however paradoxical it sounds. The human mind is capable of all sorts of excuses & self-delusion. That's just the way it is. So DO something. Even if psychoanalyzing yourself seems obnoxiously egocentric & the quest can give some silly-sounding results, it's worth it. It will eventually get you there.

THAT'S JUST THE WAY I AM is unforgiveable!

Der er én erklæring der er fuldstændig utilgiveligt: SÅDAN ER JEG BARE.

Læs: Jeg er udmærket godt klar over, at jeg burde arbejde med mig selv og de karaktertræk, der gør denne erklæring nødvendigt, men jeg er for

1. dovn

2. indbildsk

3. bange

4. dem allesammen - selvom det lyder paradoksalt. Menneskesindet er i stand til alle slags undskyldninger og selvbidrag. Det er bare sådan det er. Så GØR dog noget. Selvom selv-psykoanalyse kan virke som værre navlepilleri og søgen kan give nogle skæve resultater, er den det værd. Du når det til sidst.

SÅDAN ER JEG BARE er utilgiveligt!

Overpopulation

Overpopulation - scary stuff, that. Anyway it scares me. A lot of us enlightened westerners imagine modern utopias where the local society is as connected & supportive as back in the bad old days, back when being pushed out meant death or at least misery. There will be roof gardens with beehives, solar panels & a big windmill at the end of the road. Homegrown produce, recycling, zero growth, fellowship. It's already happening here & there. Neighborhood dinner clubs, urban greenhouses, electric cars, clothes & tool swaps, people taking care of each other. Even old fogies get a chance to form elder communes - olle kolle in Danish - that will stave off the inevitable trip to the nursing home. It's beautiful.

       It's also exclusive. Many million people on the planet are nowhere in these cozy plans. The planners ignore them because there's nothing else to do. They/we/I wish they would just go away.

Of course they won't. They will keep on keeping on as they always have, having many children, using up all the resources they can find, settling in nature preserves & burning the wood, poaching, generally making a mess. They are a whole lot better than the mining, logging & oil companies out to grab whatever they can, aided & abetted by various multi-nationals & corrupt governments, but they are still in the way of the modern utopia. They are just so annoying.

       The best thing for the planet would be to exactly achieve zero growth, stop producing a bunch of useless luxury products, dumb-ass toys no kid would miss, gas guzzler cars. And pop off half the population. Robots are going to take most of the jobs anyway, not? So as a little mental exercise, who has to go?

       We'll start with pedophiles, human traffickers, wife-&-kid beaters, tyrants & torturers, rapists. No protests there, right? Moving on to terrorists, bigtime bullies & fanatics of every stripe, swindlers, gangsters, psychopaths (one might be your boss), the mining, logging & oil companies + those who cooperate with them (okay - going to be impractical), corrupt politicians generally (there went the entire governments of India, Pakistan & points east + some of ours), drug dealers, the wolves of Wall Street & the fashionistas who tell perfectly normal girls they are fat.

        Next? This is where innocent people take a hit. Very retarded or senile & others who are almost or completely helpless + anybody dying of AIDS - or anything else, I guess. Then who? Well, here we come to the great mass of foreign humanity with no prospects, a gang of kids they can't care for or educate because they are ignorant, lazy or out to breed a million little Muslims; people I will never get to know. (The very few I do know - because they made it up here - I often like a lot.) I don't want to think about them. They are just in the way. Dang, that's annoying! 

Philip Seymour & the 10 others

Just read - a week after the fact - a heartfelt tribute to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Time magazine. It's written by his friend & fellow addict, the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. It's down to earth & sincere & made me feel marginally better. A Late Quartet finally got to Denmark & I had just seen it when I heard the news. (My favorite remains Almost Famous. "Of course I'm home on Saturday night. I'm not cool.") Sorkin quotes Philip Seymour in one of those eerily astute statements that turn out to predict exactly what happens.

"If one of us dies of an overdose, probably 10 people who were about to won't."

Doubtless absolutely right. My daughter - who was also a big fan like me - summed it up well & directly: "What a dickhead." Yep - that he was. Even so, I wish Philip Seymour hadn't & the other 10 had. Truly unfair thought & I know it, but I also know I am not alone. Okay, 'thought' is probably the wrong word; it's something more basic, something we all feel sometimes. My further thoughts on this sort of thinking are the subject of the next blog.

Dang, Philip Seymour! I would have liked to see your King Lear.

Justice in India / Retfærdighed i Indien

Nice to see that 3 men were arrested for the rape of a Danish woman in New Delhi. Nicer still that rape is now a capital offense. Nicest of all if this is actually enforced when Indian women are raped - even though they don't bring in tourist dollars. And imagine if Indian society takes a long hard look at their view of women, now that India is the new Silicon Valley, the big I in BRIC & even Bollywood films depict women with brains & influence as well as amazing beauty.

This time I hope life imitates art!

Godt at se at 3 mænd blev anholdt for at have voldtaget en dansk kvinde i New Delhi. Endnu bedre at voldtægt nu er anerkendt som en alvorlig forbrydelse. Allerbedst hvis denne lov ren faktisk bliver håndhævet når indiske kvinder bliver voldtaget - selvom de ikke trækker turist dollars til landet. Og bare tænk, hvis det indiske samfund kigger alvorligt på dets kvindesyn, nu hvor Indien er den ny Silicon Valley, den store I i BRIC og sågar Bollywood nu viser kvinder med hjerne og indflydelse oveni forbløffende skønhed.
Denne gang håber jeg at livet efterligner kunst!

New Year Resolutions

How goes it with your New Year resolutions? My main one is that I still want to be here this time next year & in good health. Not so complicated, that one, even from this guilty segment of society known as the Elderly Burden. Yep, not only are there waaay too many of us aging Baby Boomers, we're also poised to go on & on. Last week we lost Peter O'Toole at 81 & Joan Fontaine at 96. (No, they have nothing to do with Boomers, but I was a fan of both.) Now I'd rather copy Ms. Fontaine, who died at home, presumably just from old age. Selfish, that, but I'll try to Make a Contribution to the local society along the way. That's also expected of this generation, mainly in the form of volunteer work. Fair enough.

     Other New Year resolutions? Drop a few kilos & take a load off my arthritic knees. Write more, write regularly, do an online course if that's what it takes. Exercise regularly is a no-brainer but luckily that just comes naturally. If you're hyper, you're hyper & it doesn't stop because you pass 65, you just tire out faster. I know because I am & I do. Take up yoga. Write more. Said that last year too - & the year before that. This year I'll take it more seriously because of a couple of concrete projects that augur well. Meditate more & get to the bottom of my penchant for wasting energy on regrets about stuff I can't do anything about anyway. My daughter gets after me for that - clever girl.

      All my December/Christmas To Do Lists start with "Cook a lot & love everybody" because that way I know at least one thing will get done. Keeping that thought too, all year. Write more.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!