The Void in my Kitchen

No one in this country believes in leftovers.

It's true.

The portions here are the same size, if not bigger, than back home, and yet I get looked at like a freak when I ask for a box. I can't help it! I've done one too many studies on food waste in landfills to let half of a perfectly good meal get thrown out. And call it a poor-man's mentality, but I see no shame in wanting to get two meals out of one. Isn't it better for my waistline that way as well?

Although, one waitress, when I apologized for wanting a box out of embarrassment, said "Oh I'm so glad! I wish more people did that! You should see how much food we throw away everyday..."

This whole anti-leftovers society has created an interesting problem in my life. I haven't seen a single microwave since I arrived in Denmark.

The result? I'm growing accustomed to eating my dinner cold (when I don't feel like heating it up in a pan, like tonight, after a long day). I guess that's one way to save energy...

Hours Spent Working V. Time Spent Producing

Since Monday, I have spent 44 hours at work (I am only supposed to work 37 hours per week. oops!), and I'm still at work, and it's only Thursday. The overtime keeps piling up. I won't get paid for it, but perhaps I'll get to take a few days off and go to... Berlin? London? Amsterdam? All three?

But that's not the point. The point is, computers sometimes really suck.

The amount of work I have produced in those 44 working hours? Embarrassingly small. I am making giant maps of various contexts for an upcoming exhibition being put on by Henning Larsen. When they're done, they should be gorgeous (please oh please!), but they are about 1.5 gb a piece while I work with them in layers in photoshop, and there are 13 of them. 1.5 gb is freaking huge, for those who don't know. That's one fat file. So I wait 20 minutes just for one of the fastest computers in the office to open the file, wait 2-10 minutes each time I wait for the computer to follow through with a command, and then, an hour and a half (or more) after working some magic on the map, I try and save it.
Operative word: try

It just happened. Right now. After waiting 20 minutes for my file to save, a very rude little message popped up with a big red X on it, saying "Could not save because the document is bigger than 2 gigabytes".
Oh. Come on.
So I save as a jpg, lose all of my layers, and set myself up for further failure later. WTF technology.

FAIL.

Anyway, I've asked all over the office. No one has a recommendation for making a workable, layered file of a meter X a meter map with super high resolution small enough to work with. Thanks guys.

I'm allergic to technology. I have been my whole life. How did I end up choosing to marry a computer? I should have stuck with English. Journalism. Should have become a painter. Or a singer.
But no, instead I won't sleep tonight while I wait for my computer to stop sleeping. Unfair, dude. Real unfair.

I long for the days of hand drafting. Cartography done by pen and paper. Time consuming as it was, at least the effort you put in equaled the work produced.

And plus, things done by hand, undeniably more steazy.
I think this makes me a contemporary architectural heretic.

Shameless Self Promotion!

I've been working crazy long hours the past week, and that will only continue for the next two-ish weeks, so as far as taking the time to compress the video and post it here? Yeah right!

Maybe some day... when there's a slightly better video!

For now, this will have to do. I present you, blog readers, with a link to a video of me playing at open mic last Thursday (was it last Thursday? I'm already losing track of time. Oy!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTGbr78QEhY

A Girl and Her Guitar: Second Installment

Dedicated to dear mom and pop, my second biggest fans (Mark, you can still claim to be numero uno).

I played singer/songwriter open mic night at cafe retro in the city center last Thursday. I dare say it was the first of many...

So. Freaking. Fun.

I sent out an obnoxious near-office-wide email advertising my potentially socially suicidal performance (if I were to have bombed? Laughing stock. For certain). But so many people came out to see me! I felt so looooooved! Aww sucks.

Thomas showed off his Dutch bike-riding prowess and carried my guitar, through the rain, on his bike. Super impressive. But I didn't even end up using my own guitar. Put an acoustic guitar with a pick-up on the wish list!

The bar was so packed, like a sardine can. You can't see from the pictures, but just take my word for it. Full of hipsters, as is all of Copenhagen. It would have been intimidating for one's first truly public performance, but I was too busy peeing myself with excitement to be scared. Ok, I didn't really pee myself. That would have been a poor way to kick-off the evening.

After waiting a while to play, I got up there and opened with "Scars on my Bones". Uplifting first. Huge applause though! Nothing feels quite as good as a bar packed with attractive strangers paying rapt attention to you while you sing your little heart out. Oh, the ego stroke!

I played a second song, more cutesy than the first. The only rule was that you had to play originals. Some people cheated and played covers, while I shook my head in disapproval (but they were good anyway). I stuck to the rule.

After the second song, the MC for the night tried to tell me to come back again and play more material. But, being semi-self-aware (I hope!) I noticed that the crowd didn't seem to be bored with me yet, and I had prepared a third, favorite song to play. So I was a bit obnoxious and I said "woah woah, but I have a third song!". The guy tried to tell me that there were too many others waiting to play. It later turned out that he just wanted time to play his own stuff. Rudie McRude Pants! We asked the audience what they wanted, and maybe they just felt a little bad (whatever), but they applauded their approval. I played. I won that one! haha

I played "Toxic" as my third song. I still have to come up with a new title for that one... I'd hate to be confused with Britney Spears. While playing, I looked out into the audience and noticed a girl singing along with me. Whaaa? So flattering! Later, watching back the video, it turns out she was harmonizing with me. Even more flattering!

As I got off the stage, I was met with hugs, applause, more hugs from strangers. Man. It felt so freaking good.

Anyway, thanks to all who came out. For those who didn't, or couldn't (oh, a little thing called distance), I have some footage taken by friends I have to compress, and then I'll upload. Woo!

Needless to say, more performances to follow. Good first foray into the public eye though. Fame to come! A star is born! hahaha. A girl can dream...

Beware The Chocolate

An update on dear Tiffany's leg:

The leg isn't really getting better. It's worse, actually, but after a healthy dose of antibiotics, it's starting to hurt her less, and is only getting worse in preparation for getting better (puh puh please?).

The best diagnosis she got was from a doctor who said "maybe you ate some chocolate!" What? Tiffany said "But I didn't have chocolate before this all started." "Maybe you forgot," replied the doctor. She then tested Tiffany for diabetes. I mean, sure you can get blisters from a diabetic reaction, but still... chocolate?

The most competent doctor she's seen thus far said "It's likely that it was something like a spider." Boom. Read it and weep, Danes!

The source is still relatively a mystery, however, and the wound is now being treated as an autoimmune infection.

Pictures exist of the current wound. I'll save you from the horrors.

Tomorrow Tiffany is playing truck driver with her self-eating leg, driving a Henning Larsen truck to Munich -a good 10? 12? Hour drive. Hope the leg behaves. Don't meet any new spiders, Tiff!

Guesses are still being entertained, at least by me. If only for amusement's sake.

A Girl and Her Guitar

I serenaded my housemates and a few other friends last night. I even played a few originals. After playing my first song, my hyper-critical friend Mark said, "And you're doing architecture, why?".

Needless to say, I was flattered.

I also didn't really have an answer. I think I've always been afraid of pursuing music, for fear of failure. Failure? What? Why?

Anyway, my friend Linda has suggested a cafe for me to play at, that has a singer-songwriter open mic night on Thursdays. I checked it out last week. Pretty sweet gig. I'm going to do it.

Details to follow.

Daily Affirmation with Stewart Smalley

I apologize. Things are about to get real. Things are about to get personal. Things are even about to get serious. Deal with it. Isn't that what a blog is all about anyway?

And while this has little to do with Copenhagen, being here, in a new environment, has had everything to do with what I'm about to say...

Once upon a time, I was a very unhappy girl.

It's true.

Many people used to tell me (even recently) that I'm far too hard on myself. That I strive for so much, that I'll miss out on just being happy to be me.

I always used to think there was nothing to be happy about. What was so great about being me?

Thus, it was so profound when, just over a week ago, I said to myself for the first time ever, "It's really great to be me. I wouldn't rather be anyone else in the world." I stopped for a few minutes, dumbfounded with myself for having had such a thought. It was completely foreign to me, and utterly unprovoked. Nothing remarkable had happened to me that day. What had changed?

Sure I had been pleased with myself in the past. But it was usually for doing better than someone else on a test, getting a perfect grade on a paper, landing a lead role in a play... there was always some sort of competitive reasoning for feeling good about being me. Obnoxious right? Miserable? Yes.

I just got out of one of the darkest periods in my life. Among other things, I poured my all into a relationship, almost completely losing myself, sacrificing over a year trying to make someone who loved me, but had a knack for only seeing the negative, see that I loved him back. He never did. He only ever pointed out the ways that I failed to be a good partner, and I fought back for vindication. This man was, in a lot of ways, exactly who I saw myself with in the future (ugh. yes. I know I'm young, but still...), and I thought "If I can just get this to work, I'll feel settled. I'll at least have that piece figured out. I'll be happy." We never reached a point of happiness. And I think fingers can be pointed all around. He's undoubtedly a work-in-progress (I would say, even more-so than myself), but I finally see that happiness will never come from someone else's approval. I worked so hard to fix myself in the context of "we" that I failed to see that maybe I'd be better off just fixing "me". I find myself truly single, with not a single guy on the back-burner, for the first time in... well... as long as I can remember. 5 years? More? And I'm not even looking. Sooooo not the me I used to be. Again, what's changed?

I was just sitting on a stoop, eating some take-away dinner with Tiffany (see previous spider-bite post for reference) talking about all of this. She, like me, has always had some far-off goal that drives her. We both tell ourselves "If I just reach this career goal," "If I just find myself on the arm of this man," "If I just someday fulfill the image in my head of the life I one day hope to have," then... I'll be happy? I said to her, "Do you really think we'll just wake up one day and say to ourselves 'I'm there. I finally reached it,' or is it more likely that we'll just keep setting ourselves up to fail?" There won't be some great event that'll take place where I'll finally just be good enough for me.

As much as I fight cliches, they're overused for a reason. They're true. When it comes to romance, you've got to love yourself before you can truly let someone else love you. I think I finally believe this. And currently? I'm having a minor love affair with myself. It's not some sort of ego-trip. It's more a sort of excitement I get just to be mindful of the things that really make me tick, rather than defining myself based on what I am, career wise, or who I'm with.

Now that I don't spend all of my free time fighting with someone, trying to validate myself through someone else's love, I'm getting to spend time doing all of the stuff that just validates me, period. And the work culture in Denmark helps too.

Here, people don't live to work, they work to live. I often get off work around 5:30 and have an entire evening to just do whatever I damn well please. And when you're job isn't some distracting, all-consuming thing that keeps you from discovering what you love or hate about yourself, about your life, you really get to find happiness. Not some happiness from some big goal, but happiness found in the little things. Daily moments.

I've got, what seems like, all the time in the world for introspection and hobbies. I get to come home from work, throw on running shoes, and take off to explore for as long as I want, get home and sing in the shower, put on music and dance naked (shit happens), lay on my bed and just reflect on my day, write songs and play guitar for 4 hours, grab a beer with friends, write (blog?), cook a leisurely dinner, watch a movie, skype with some of the best people in the world, and fall asleep cuddling with no one but myself. And damnit, I'm so comfortable!

I still want to be successful career-wise, no doubt. But there's no need to compete or compare myself to others. There's no need to strive for fame in my field by the age of 25. I think I'd rather slow down and just enjoy things a little in the meanwhile, before my youth truly slips away. Yes, I need to work on my portfolio. But that can wait. It does no use to stress about these things now.

And I will probably be Mrs. So-and-so someday. I'm one of the few who would still really like to settle down and live the married life at some point. But there's no use trying to fit myself into a relationship that doesn't just, well, fit, just for the sake of not being alone. Because right now? I'm really loving this alone time. For the first time in my life.

Because I'm good enough. I'm smart enough, and goggone it, I like me!

Yeah... I'm almost nauseated by my positivity. What happened to negative Natalie? Whatever. I think I like this version better.

There are No Spiders in Denmark

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I would like to tell you a tale. This is not a tale for the faint of heart of the weak of stomach. You have been warned. (Honestly, the photos I'm about to post are a little gnarly. My apologies in advance!).

This is a tale of intrigue. Of mystery. But mostly, it is a tale about maneuvering the great bureaucracy that is the Danish medical system.

ooooooooh!

ahhhhhhhh!

My friend Tiffany showed up to work the other day with a mysterious sore on her leg. She said she woke up that morning, dragged her tired self into the shower, and then noticed a burning sensation on the back of her calf.

She photographed it post-shower (seriously smart move!), recognizing how unusual it was. She wanted a baseline photo, should it start to get worse (honestly, genius!).

So, as shown, it started as a rash, with a kiss-shaped mark in the center.

By the time she got to work, it looked like this:

I freaked. I had a case of arachnophobia a while back, and at one point spent a fair amount of time looking up creepy spider bites. It looked to me like the start of a crater-sized scar, caused by a brown recluse, black widow, etc...

"Get yourself to a doctor, lady!" I said. She kept working, complaining about the burning, all the while, before finally parading her mysterious blisters around the office, asking for advice on how to see a doctor. Everyone's response? "I know you think it's a spider bite, but there are no spiders in Denmark!". Absurd. I've seen spiders. Either way, toward the end of the day, she finally got a doctors appointment, with a special after-hours doctor at 4 pm (yes, that's after-hours. Again. Absurd).

She later called me, telling me all about her trip to the "doctor". Apparently, the medical campus looked like an ivy league school, it was impossible to navigate, and the doctor she saw was a hot 2o-something in running clothes, who told her she probably scratched herself. Or maybe she got stung by a bee. But no way was it a spider bite. "There are no spiders in Denmark". He marked the size of the wound and said "come back tomorrow and we'll see if it has gotten worse". Oh cool. Comforting.

The next day, two blisters melded into one. Awwwww, cute!

She saw more doctors, and none of them ran a single test. One wanted to pop the blister and treat it like a burn. Funny thing? If it is in fact a gnarly spider bite, burn cream is one of the worst things you can apply to it. Smarty-pants Tiffany said "no way, jose". Another doctor tried to prescribe an antihistamine. Luckily, the pharmacist said "this medication is going to do absolutely nothing for you" and wouldn't sell it to her. That pharmacist got three gold stars that day for being the only non-quack in the system.

She also called a doctors office with the traditional hours of 9-11 am, three days a week. She didn't call within the oh-so-generous hours of operation, and got not even so much as an answering machine.

Yesterday, the blister finally popped.

Yum!

And today? It started to hurt her like crazy, and it's begun to look like a mad science project, or an awful case of bed-rot (so sorry, Tiff. Thanks for being such a trooper!).

Today, after talking to 12 or so doctors, even calling her own doctor from Harvard, back in the States, she finally saw someone who took a swab of it to test, who said "maybe it actually is something serious." We also read an article, explaining that black widows (and maybe other poisonous species??) entered Sweden in 2008 in cars imported from the southern US, and that they're now accepted as having become a part of Scandinavian fauna. Sweden is right next to Denmark. If they can come over in cars from the US, how is it that they're kept out of Denmark? Let's get real.

The doctor suggested that it's maybe a staph infection. Perhaps. But I'm sticking with my original theory (and I'm willing to be proven wrong!). Humans haven't always existed on the planet. Species evolved in the galapagos at record speeds. Maybe it's time for the Danish to cut out the part of their national anthem that says "And the Danes have never seen a spider. There are no spiders in Denmark," because lookie what I found just yesterday, comfortably hanging out among the spokes of some poor shmuck's parked bike:

Oh, what's that? A spider?

Proof! Now would you please treat my friend?

...stay tuned.

The Loud "American"

This last Sunday I went to Louisiana, a nice art museum on the coast, just outside of Copenhagen. On the train on the way there, my friends and I sat opposite a very talkative redhead with an ambiguous accent, and his Danish friend.

My friends Ross and Thomas, an Irishman and a Dutchman, immediately looked at me and said "Oh god, it's an American."

In case you were unaware, it's unbelievably trendy to hate on Americans. And I don't completely blame the world for this trend. I think we can perhaps thank the Bush-era, obesity, a poor education system, and our pervasive, trashy media (what a train wreck!) for that.

Thus, I near called-it when both of them quickly judged this obnoxious man as an American. It's common-place with both of them. But I was skeptical.

Sure, he was running his mouth about international defense, the galaxy, esoteric literature, some girlfriend he once had, some famous friend of his...

But he referred to calling a friend of his as "ringing" him. Distinctly un-American. He also had a faint Irish accent, and for all of Ross' judgement, I prayed that my suspicions were correct.

As we prepared to exit the train, I said "I have to ask where he's from". Despite everyone begging me not to ("But then he'll engage us all in endless conversation!"), I just had to ask.

"So sorry to interrupt, but may I ask where you're from? I can't quite place your accent."

The answer? Unbelievable.

"I'm half Irish and half Dutch, but I went to a British school in Hong Kong..." and yes, he did continue chatting. But I didn't hear a word he said beyond that. Gloating. Half Irish (Ross!), half Dutch (Thomas!). The answer couldn't have been more perfect.

These people (the world?) don't seem to realize that Americans are everyone. It's an immigrant country. Earlier that morning, Thomas had said, "That's one thing Americans can cook: breakfast. That, and burgers," and I got seriously upset. He claimed all other American food is sub-par. Wha? But all of the food we have in the US is pretty damn close to authentic, considering the great diversity in the states. Los Angeles alone has Little Tokyo, Korea Town, China Town, Little Ethiopia, Little Armenia, Oliveira Street, etc... and you can bet your bottom dollar that the food your getting is coming from immigrants who come from the source, unlike here, where I can buy a Shwarma at the same place I buy a pizza (even a Shwarma pizza!) so my pizza is far from Italian.

Get your heads out of your European arses. Just because someone is loud and talkative doesn't mean they're American. It means they're likely Irish and Dutch. But maybe one day they'll move to America, just like everyone else.

The Meaning of "Hyggeligt"

Is somewhere between "coziness" and "a dinner party", usually involves pancakes, has no direct translation in English, and is the most used word in Danish. At least according to me.

I am clearly the foremost scholar on the matter.

It's getting cold outside. Let's get some hygge up in here!