Saturday, March 20, 2010

Goodness Gracious


Great balls of meat. Pic vaguely related, mostly just hilarious.

I have been entirely too busy here and loving every moment of it. I have been writing essays like Don Magic Juan turns tricks, which is to say readily, with great speed and little regard for their emotional stability. If I may wax Foghorn Leghorn for a second, this Thursday I destroyed -- I said ah I said de-stroyed -- a six page paper with little to no remorse. I wrote that paper so hard that the second I chiseled the last sentence onto that monolithic work of immortal intellectual granite, the prompt tore itself asunder and erupted into Red, White and Blue flames. That essay had no idea I even existed until it was already too late and I had emptied its substance onto the page. Then, just to prove my continued dominance over academia, I went to the library to check out books about Vikings. And then my Journalism and Public Relations teacher told me I had one of the two best press releases in the class -- the class about PR, you know the one. The one filled with Communications majors that do that kind of thing for a living.

On top of that, the recent success of my Manifest Bestiny rap (going onto video today, up by the end of next week if not sooner I promise), my much-anticipated cameo in a rap video about the Danish People's Party and St. Patricks Day have vaulted this week into awesome week status. PLUS I biked up the mile-long hill from the train station...with somebody else sitting on my rear tire. AND (YOU THOUGHT IT WAS OVER) tonight is performance night at my hojskole, which means that Jeppe and I get to blow the collective brainminds of everyone with our rendition of The Balcony, followed by a cover of Hallelujah (a la Shrek), feat. Taylor Woodward a.k.a. The Hurricane (with a voice like a summer breeze (makes me feel fine, blowin' through the jasmine in my miiiiiiind)).

You could say I've been busy

And loving every exhausting minute of it.

Last Sunday I went on a bike ride with some folks from the folkehojskole (ironic, amirite?!?) to a slightly post-medieval watermill. We biked through a forest, a refreshingly arboreal experience after really only seeing greenery from within a speeding train for the past two months, and while nothing is really blooming right now it was still...evanescent? That's not the word I'm looking for, but oh well -- back to the story. This mill, driven by a series of ponds and streams linked and subsequently diverted by a Danish king centuries ago, has one purpose, and a particularly epic one at that -- to run a giant hammer. This hammer, pounding relentlessly like a tireless engine of hatred and revenge, was used to flatten steel in the process of gunsmithing. An entire colony of gunsmiths lived and worked in this mill and the quarters surrounding it, secluded in the forest where the Swedes couldn't pelt them with meatlumps. Anyone who catches that reference gets a million Fond Childhood Memory points, redeemable for crappy renditions of cartoon characters I still love unabashedly. Pic above is a clue.

Meanwhile, in reverse-tangent land, biking is wicked cool. I always underestimate how good it is to bike, or I used to at least. Getting them out of the basement where they are stored here is kind of a hassle, and I really wish the snow had melted a little earlier so I could have been using it all this time, but I can't really describe how lucky I am to have a bike provided for me by the program here. Doing this all over again I would gladly consciously choose an hour-twenty+ commute if I knew I would get a bike out of the deal. Every day even if I'm a lazy little slut and only go into the city to stuff my face with shawarma (which I'm convinced is a terrorist plot to get me to trust foreigners, and I find myself powerless to stop it) I still get two miles of exercise out of it, one exhilaratingly fast downhill ride and one thigh-exploding, thick-swelling, rip-maxing uphill climb that makes me regret just having eaten and also immediately want to eat more. It makes dinner that much better or a night that much more complete when I bolt off the train and hufflepuff my way up the hill. I think exercise, as unstructured as it is in my case, works wonders no matter what the problem is.

In other hilarious news, the likes of which can only happen coincidentally in a manner such as this, I learned some rather...intriguing information at a bar on Thursday night. The story starts at the wrap-up for my core class, featuring drinks on DIS and a hilarious slideshow with a shaggy-headed me and some 30 other kids shenaniganizing our way across one or more foreign cities. This was an event of tremendous import as it symbolizes the end of my last 8:30 am class, meaning my dominion over the fickle forces of sleep is nigh. I took a train home after my coupons were veritably use'd, met my friends out at Annexet, our local haunt. I arbitrarily had a conversation struck up with me (weird way of phrasing it, but trust me it encapsulates the situation pretty aptly) by a Californian and a Helsingor native, apparently on the same football team -- the American kind, mind you -- here in Denmark. We got to talking about the folkehojskole where I live and the sketchy Turks that live across the street. Now, most Danes think any and every Turk is a sketchy Turk, but I am using all of my American sub/urban went-to-a-diverse-public-school-system sensibilities when I say that these Turks are characters of a most unsavory nature. Every night their driveways are empty, but by noon every day there are upwards of 10 cars (and a boat) parked outside their house. I rarely see the same cars twice here, and when I do they are frequently missing crucial engine components or in the process of being jumped. One of the houses has a bar in the basement, which is normally just plain cool, but the entire first floor of the house, viewable through ridiculous and probably Swedish bay windows, is a veritable marble forest of busts depicting various Mediterranean old gods and personages. At least I think that's what they are. I really don't know. To drop the crime olive in the creep martini of this situation, once a week a dude in a red Ferrari absolutely tears down our street and screeches to a halt in the driveway of one of the houses. This is the only Ferrari I've seen in Denmark -- you don't really get rich in this country without taking some...extra-ordinary measures. At this point the Dane breaks into the conversation and says "you heard about what happened there right?" Suffice it to say my interest was piqued, and I said to him as much. Turns out one of the biggest drug busts in Denmark's history took place in those three houses about a year and a half ago.

Sooo....yeah. I'm in the middle of mid-terms, kicking ass and taking names, performing across genres, biking like the man who made my wristband and doing all of this across the street from what may or may not be a drug depot or chop shop. My last couple of blags were really angry, but hopefully this post will give you a glimpse of my good side and dissuade that image of me fuming with rage while stoic Danes with their pointy shoes and dumb sweaters prance by (hilarious as that image may be). The truth is that anger, while usually associated with negative connotations and bad experiences, bestows upon me the mystical power to express myself like no other emotion can. Words pour forth like so much boiling vitriol, and the deep channels carved by the floes of my rage are soon after filled with the soothing rains of literary catharsis. It's been hard for me to write in the past week, maybe because I've been so busy, but I suspect it also has to do with the fact that I haven't had anything whip me into a lather this week. Hopefully I can learn to let positive inspiration work its magic and shine through onto this thing more frequently. Sorry for keeping everyone waiting.

Yep.







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2 comments:

  1. watch out for general specific and his sheep-powered ray gun!!!

    and those sketchy turks.

    ReplyDelete