Ani contacted me a few weeks ago about doing an interview-swap of sorts, which was really exciting, because a) Ani is wonderful, and b) I get to try being on the other side of the, uhm, email-exchange? Receiving questions rather than sending them. And let me tell you, I knew it was going to be tricky for me to be the interviewee, because I am indecisive and have a tendency to  over-think everything, but this was much, much, much harder than I had expected — a hell of a challenge in fact. I needed 3 days to think of an answer to just one of the questions. Maybe this is why I never get anything done in school.

Anyway, I got to interview Ani, which was sweet. Ani is a sweet and lovely 26 year old girl from L.A, California, who blogs over at Love Well Crafted. Also, she has the most stunning eyes, ever.

***

What is your favorite sound?

I love the sound of the ocean. That moment when you just barely doze off under the sun, laying out on the beach, and when you wake up, everything is sort of hazy but you feel the sun and all you can hear are the waves crashing. It’s so peaceful, and one of the reasons I would never want to move away from the west coast!

When do you feel beautiful?

That’s a tough one. I think I feel beautiful when I put on an outfit and it works, effortlessly. It just has the perfect fit and I feel glamorous, powerful, fun, flirty, whatever it is I want to feel like with that outfit, right away, without having to make adjustments. It also helps when I get a compliment, especially from my hubby!

Do you often smile at people on the street?

I try to! It’s funny, when I participate in the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, you walk for two days and you smile and say hi to just about everyone that walks by because that’s just what you do, and everyone is super friendly. So, for DAYS after the walk, I am still in that mode. Last year I was walking through the halls at the hospital smiling and saying hi to everyone … all these doctors I didn’t know, and everyone thought I was nuts! But I think it makes us all happier people. I mean, it’s just a smile – it’s free! So why not?

If you had to choose one color to wear forever, which would it be?

Such a tough one to answer. I’m getting in to bright and bold colors and patterns lately, but I feel like I always revert back to a pair of comfy jeans and a gray sweater. That dark heather gray color is so comfortable to me, it’s always soft and soothing. It sounds boring, but I love it!

When was the last time you cried in a movie theater?

Oh jeez. OK… confession…. I cried at the end of Brave. I took my cousins to see it and it was so sweet, it’s really a great mother-daughter movie. And at the end (*spoiler alert*) when the mom is still a bear and they think she’s stuck forever, it’s just so sad…. :’(

What would you most like to be remembered for?

I’d like to be remembered as someone who was loving, caring, and creative. A good nurse who does her job right, is an advocate for her patients, and helped make a difference. I’d like for people to remember my style and my creativity (my blog!?) and that I am always trying to find another project to start. But mostly, I hope that whatever people remember me for, it can one day inspire others to reach their full fabulously loving and creative potential!

HOLY EFFING SHIT, WE WON THE EUROVISION SONGCONTEST.

Some of you might not know what that is, but it’s like… the annual Champions League of tacky music. It was created in the mid-fifties to bring a broken up and war-torn Europe back together after World War II, to give us something to bond over — Music. Each year, more countries are added to the competition, and now there are so many that we need semi-finals to decide who should be in the finale (where there are “just” 26 countries participating). Unfortunately, it has become very political, with neighboring countries voting for each other, etc. At least, you sometimes get the sense that there is more than just one motive when it comes to handing out points… that part is a little disheartening, and a relatively new phenomenon, which kind of takes away from the innocence of the concept and the mentality it was originally founded on.

ANYWAY.

I was beginning to think that winning was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, which would mean that I had already had my “once”, since I was alive and kicking back in 2000, when we last won. Last night, thirteen years later, we won again, and Denmark has officially gone berserk. Like, beserk. Everyone is extatic, almost dancing in the streets. We knew our chances were good (notice how I say “we”, like I have had any part in this), because we had a really great song for once, but you can never be sure, ever. And because I am a careful optimist, I kept a healthy skepticism, because hybris likes to kick you in the rear when you get too confident. That is why the Danish speaker/commentator annoyed the hell out of me. 5 minutes into the show he made it sound like we had already won, and I just refuse to believe that it is good karma to be so ahead of the game and overly assure of yourself. This time, Karma had other plans/better things to do than pay attention to our douche of a speaker, but next time, next time I bet you we won’t be so lucky.

I was so proud last night. So proud and so happy. It’s such a stupid thing to feel pride about, but I guess I feel proud for several reasons. First, I am proud that we had such a good entry, because we really did. Emmelie de Forest, our performer/representative is just 20 years old, and she has been consistently great throughout the whole thing. She is sympathetic, humble, and she was modestly dressed (unlike some of the other, erhm, performers). The song had a universal message (the lyrics were pretty banal, but I have yet to hear a song in this competition that has profound lyrics), something we could all relate to, and the production and arrangement was brilliant for this show. It had easily recognizable instruments (a flute and drums), and you got a sense of the chorus straight away. It was just an all-around great song. The second reason why I am proud is that it was written by a completely unknown song-writing team. One of them, a young male, is working as a sound technician on one of our larger TV-stations. Another one, a young woman, finished 5th (or something to that degree) on our version of the X-Factor. The third one has written songs for this show before, but apparently not as successfully. It just proves that we need new blood, and that there is a new generation ready to take over this competition.

I watched it in the summerhouse with my grandmother, and there is no one I would rather have shared this experience with. We’re not proud to say it, but we watch it every year, even when we know we have no chance of winning, and every year we tell each other, “There is no hell we are going to waste three hours of our lives on this BS next year”, but we do. Every year. Because you know most other people are watching it, and it’s like a nationalist thing. You feel extra connected to everyone else, and everyone wants the same thing. Everyone feels a little extra united, I guess. And now we also feel pride.

If you want to, you can watch our entry here.

Yesterday, I just happened to walk by my aunt’s totally sane ex-boyfriend’s leisure woodshop; a sanctuary that holds a lot of wooden flutes and toilet paper holders, and also a place he had to call home for a couple of months after he was, erhm, “brutally kicked out” of their shared apartment.

Without giving too many details (it’s not my story to tell, although I reeeally want to), I just wanted to show you an alternative way to handle a break-up.

Clearly, I should have been an English major.

***

There is an odor in here,
And it’s really severe,
How can fiddling with expiration,
Lead to such asphyxiation?
The food was supposed to be frozen,
And now, like an explosion,
This unappetizing smell has hit my schnoz,
And it’s entirely my loss,
So, I can’t help but ponder…
What’s the source of the smell in the big cold box down yonder?
Is it that fish I bought on sale?
Or maybe the block of homemade soup that looks like urine from a whale?
Is it those mini-pizzas I have tried to hide?
Or perhaps the frozen berries I weep into at night?
Might it be the chop meat that’s gone bad?
Or maybe that spicy chicken I never had?
Now, I don’t mean to imply,
That it might be that meat pie,
But it really smells like death in here,
Fuck, I think it’s that canary I forgot to burry last year.

***

Firstly, no animals were harmed in the making of this poem. Secondly, I have yet to locate the smell. I was going to yesterday, but then I went out to lunch with a friend and had clams, and it’s like, when you have had clams, you feel like you have the whole pacific ocean in your belly, and you don’t need to be seeing/smelling something that can push you over the edge, if you know what I mean. It’s a weird enough feeling as is. Thirdly, I am feeling really good today. I hope you are also.

1. Today, I saw myself forced to make a difficult decision. I have decided to (severely) cut down on my coca cola zero intake. I made the mistake of telling my dentist about my only vice, also known as the one thing that makes every-day life bearable, and he made it abundantly clear that my carbonated friend is pretty much undoing everything he (the dentist) is doing every third month. I thought for sure it was the crack. RIP Happiness.
2. Today, I walked 3,4 kilometers just by going to the dentist and back.
3. Today, I watched yet another episode of “Hercule Poirot”, and yet again had to ask myself, 1) How does he do it? 2) Why do I see so much of myself in this chubby neurotic Belgian detective, who walks like a penguin and talks about himself in the third person? (rhetorical question, please don’t answer).
4. Today, I learned that my complexion definitely can’t pull off yellow nail polish. I’m alright.
5. Today, I realized that there are things about the Spanish language that I am never going to understand. So, plan B: MEMORIZATION GALORE.
6. Today, I gave a taxi driver instructions to how to remove a coffee stain on his white shirt. Five minutes later, he smelled his own arm pits, while looking at me in the rearview mirror. Surreal.

HAPPY FRIDAY! Today didn’t turn out at all how it was supposed to. My alarm went off at 6 a.m, like it was supposed to, but somehow I managed to fall asleep again on top of my phone, and didn’t wake up until 8.30.am. I was so upset, because today we were supposed to watch a Pedro Almodovar movie, and I had been looking forward to it so much. I should be giving myself the silent treatment for killing my alarm with my corpus.

–

Okay, this is the second to last part of the apartment tour, because, well, I am running out of things to show. I still need the office, but that still looks like a bomb went off in there, so it might be a while. Also, the walls are really bare, but that’s only because I take the placement of art very seriously, and I haven’t found the right spots yet. That’s very important.

***

This is it: the IKEA-fundament for my fundament. Handpicked from IKEA’s couch department after a long, tedious day of doing nothing but eating meatballs and trying out every.single.couch again and again and again, because my heinie kept forgetting what that HÄRNÖSAND two-seater felt like compared to the KNISLINGE. You know how you can stare yourself blind, right? It turns out that the same thing can happen to your posterior, when couch-hopping. So, yeah, I moved in for a day. I took my shoes off and went from one couch to another and made a day of it.

When I was in the hospital, I spent most of my time in a morphine haze surfing for secondhand armchairs on a Danish website equivalent to eBay on my phone. This is a chair from IKEA, which I saved a bazillion dollars on by buying it used. It was in perfect condition, and had the upholstery that I wanted. I also got my coffee table and my dining table from that website, and not only did I save so much money, but someone else also got rid of furniture that they no longer wanted — win win.

These prints were purchased at the same time as the cupcake print from Green Nest Shop” on Etsy.

And that’s it. I can’t tell you how much I love this living room. It’s so open and inviting, and holds so many possibilities. I swear, I walk through this apartment every day feeling like a million bucks.

(Photo from EarthSky.org

It’s only International Women’s Day for another hour in my neck of the woods, so I am going to attempt to squeeze a little shout-out in before it’s too late, or else it will become one of those awkward belated (and thereby sorta irrelevant) shout-outs that I do so well and often, where it’s like everyone has moved on except for me. I am trying to change my ways, here. I think it’s called personal growth.

My sister and I had a conversation recently wherein I peripherally mentioned that I consider myself to be a feminist. It was relevant and in context, and that is how I tend to reveal that part of myself. Not because I am ashamed of my identification with that word – quite the opposite, actually – I have just learned that putting a voice to these thoughts and beliefs are wasted on most of the people I have talked to, as they the second they hear the word write me off as some extremist, who invents issues that aren’t really there, because aren’t we such a progressive society, and yadayadayada.

And it’s true; Denmark is a very progressive society. Sure, women still aren’t paid as much as men, but we have a lot of choices. I mean… basically, we control our own lives. Of course, there are 284238 expectations to who and what a woman should be, but we have the choice to either do right or do wrong. Aren’t we privileged? Aren’t we free?

I have met women, who glamorize the 1950s, where “men were men” and “women were women”. What does that even mean? Sure, I love a lot of things from back then: the music, the clothing, the movies, etc, but I wouldn’t want to go back, I mean, what the hell? How many periods of Social Studies did you miss? Why would you glamorize gender roles that gave you less of a voice?

If I had a nickel for every time I have heard, “I am not trying to sound like a feminist or anything…”, my little piggy bank would be reeeally heavy. I have heard it from women my age, and younger, and older. It’s like it’s a hush word, a dirty word, a box some people are scared to death to be put in. And I guess I just don’t understand why. What part of feminism is it you disagree with? What part of it tastes sour in your mouth? Why can’t we work together, rather than fight each other? Sometimes I think we, women, block ourselves from getting anywhere, when we basically want the same thing – we just fear the alienation.

I want for women to have a choice. If you want to work, work, if you want to stay at home with the kids (and is able to), stay at home with the kids. If you want to wear make-up, do it to highlight your beauty and not to please someone else, or because you think that’s what you should be doing — you are enough. If you want to express yourself sexually, express yourself sexually, but never let anyone talk about you/treat you like you are less than a person (who should be respected). And don’t let anyone tell you what is right or wrong for you to do with your ovaries!

While I don’t agree with the radical extremists (I am talking from a strictly Western European viewpoint here) who believe that women, who shave their legs, have some kind of self-gender-hatred going on, I do think it took extremists once. And I thank those for walking miles and miles in those shoes that others are now so afraid to step into. I thank them for giving me a voice, human rights, and a vote. I thank them for giving me the right to drive, to own my own land, and to own my body and myself. I thank them for giving me choices. It’s not over, and it might take hundreds and hundreds of years, but we have a much better starting point because of those women, as we have the right to demonstrate and to voice our opinions.

***

It’s now twenty-five minutes past twelve, which means that I am once again late and irrelevant. I’m sorry. Of course there is so much more to say on this issue, and if I wasn’t so tired I would write twenty more paragraphs, but it has to end somewhere.

So, my fellow women (and men, for that matter), here is my shout-out to you: Happy International Women’s Day 2013. Let’s make this the year where we dare to put this word in our mouths and inspire others to do the same.