The Difference Between Laughing and Crying

 I think (I hope) that every one of us has laughed so hard that tears come to our eyes. I've had this happen several times over the past week, and it's reminded me that sometimes the tears threaten to take over. It's a bit bizarre, but it's as if I'm laughing so desperately I could literally start crying my eyes out. I can remember a bouldering trip at Rumbling Bald in North Carolina that about eight of us went on, and we were all were sitting around under a giant overhanging boulder talking about nothing in particular. Someone said something that made me giggle, and then someone else added to it, or I did, who knows--but after a minute I was laughing so hard I was completely controlled by it. I couldn't stop if my life depended on it, and began to wonder if this was what insanity was like. Tears were streaming down my face. Everyone else had stopped after a couple of minutes, but at the sight of me on the ground crying my eyes out they fell in again, too, soon enough. No one was as unhinged as me, though. I couldn't even control my face. I knew it looked more like I was in pain than anything, and by this point it was merciless. Laughing, laughing, laughing, gasping for breath. Ten minutes later I had forced it down enough that heavy breathing could mostly take its place, but it had left its mark, and for the next hour I had to resist any urge to let a giggle escape lest I be forced to surrender completely again.

My stomach hurts just thinking about it.

TV Can Be Good for You

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When I was in Chile earlier this year I had a conversation in English with a local teenager at my hostel while she folded laundry. Her grandfather Jaime owns the place, and though he seems to understand a lot of English, his speaking is terrible. Many Chileans don’t speak any at all, though, so I asked her how she became so fluent.

“I just watched all the English TV shows and movies here when I was a little girl. I remember when I was about eight years old, my mom finally said to me, ‘¿Por qué estás viendo eso? No puede entenderlo.’ But I could understand. Once I had started learning how to read, picking up English became even easier, but I had probably understood a good bit even before then, just like any kid does from just watching.”

Of course, I thought. If we had all had constant access to foreign language shows growing up, we could already have a solid understanding of a second language by the time we graduated elementary school. If only I had grown up in a country that imported much of its best media from a country with a different language . . . well, obviously this is a lot less likely to happen in the U.S. But wouldn’t it be great if there were one channel on standard issue free television, like an alternative (non-profit channel) that has only shows in Spanish, with English subtitles? Or, though to a less effective extent, at least one that offers Spanish subtitles on every kid’s show and a few of the adult shows, too? It would still be a matter of encouraging a child to prefer that station over others, but something that is well within the grasp of our powerful corporate station owners. Not only would this take advantage of the wired-in ability of young children to pick up language more easily than learning to tie their own shoes, it would also help them recognize the validity of another culture. This is pretty much the opposite of what the U.S. does right now.

The last time I watched a TEDtalk I noticed that I could choose to have this particular one subtitled in 14 different languages. Though it was already in English I chose Danish since I’m in Denmark, and the majority of words I’ve learned have been through watching English movies or shows translated into Danish text. I'm aware this isn't even close to a new idea, but it's well worth emphasizing--why not watch TV and learn a language at the same time?

As an adult with a brain every day looking more like pumice than sponge, I can of course opt to watch every DVD I see with its available subtitles or buy cable (doubtful, seeing as how I haven't had a working TV in several years) and watch foreign language channels. I can also now go to the TEDtalks website and find the ones that both interest me and offer subtitles in the language I want to pick up. Since I want to work on my Spanish I have more options than those who are attempting to pick up Cantonese, but the options are growing quickly. TED is enlisting volunteer translators as part of their enlightenment army, and anyone can join and turn in translations (which will of course be reviewed by another fluent speaker before they attach it). Sounds like something teachers could encourage students to do for extra credit—translate your favorite not-yet-subtitled TEDtalk or any favorite speech into your studied language, and not only do you make Teacher happy you can literally help educate others when the translation is uploaded to the web. Fantastic.

From TED’s website:
         
“Along with subtitles, every talk on TED.com now features a time-coded, interactive transcript, which allows users to select any phrase and have the video play from that point. The transcripts are fully indexable by search engines, exposing previously inaccessible content within the talks themselves. For example, searching on Google for "green roof" will ultimately help you find the moment in architect William McDonough's talk when he discusses Ford's River Rouge plant, and also the moment in Majora Carter's talk when she speaks of her green roof project in the South Bronx. Transcripts will index in all available languages.

The interplay between the video, subtitles and transcript create what we call a Rosetta Stone effect. You can watch, for example, an English talk, with Korean subtitles and an Urdu transcript. Click on an Urdu phrase in the transcript, and the speaker will say it to you in English, with Korean subtitles running right-to-left below. It’s captivating.”

With statistics like these below, a lot of kids could probably be performing the translations themselves by high school:

• Approximate number of studies examining TV's effects on children: 4,000
• Number of minutes per week that the average child watches television: 1,680
• Percentage of day care centers that use TV during a typical day: 70
• Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900 hours
• Hours per year the average American youth watches television: 1500

                    
                              -- California State University

I’m a huge fan of Academic Earth as well, the website that offers actual university classes for online public viewing, where I can see brilliant professors from schools like MIT, Stanford, and Yale that some families are refinancing homes to let their kids listen to while I watch for FREE. Academic Earth has yet to offer translations, though, so I save those talks for when I am working on something a little mindless like assembling an Ikea TV stand or cleaning house, and can simply listen while only occasionally watching. No, you can’t ask questions or ask for feedback from these professors, but if you need to you can play their words over again until you get the gist of their subject, or you can simply switch them off should you not enjoy it. Who hasn’t wanted to do that in class before?

One More Week in Copenhagen...

Yep. I'm pretty ambivalent about leaving. I mean, this place is frickin' amazing, between the biking everywhere, the overwhelming amount of nature all over the city, the canals you can swim in at 4am when you've had way too much wine and nothing seems more natural than downtown skinny-dipping, the fact that there is ALWAYS something happening--festivals, jazz fests, free outdoor movies, parades, demonstrations, gang-related drive-by shootings (actually, that's relatively recent and not so common). Of course I'll miss my Great Dane, and not only his incredible cooking (I swear).

I've been hatching so many plans for my time back in the States, though, that I can't help but be excited to return. It's not just that I'll see my friends and Ollie Cat for the first time in over three months, it's that the weather will be perfect in South Carolina, and once again I'll have my porch to sit on, along with the lovely neighborhood surrounding it. I'll be able to relax outside in the mornings and evenings for hours if I want to and just listen to the cicadas and the owls. Annabelle, the lonely Jack Russel next door, will join me on walks again. I'll be able to ride my motorcycle again (yes yes yes!)! Ooh, and my longboard! My car! All my wheels!

And finally, I'll be going rock climbing again. I could have done so here if I'd wanted to, in a gym, anyway (for about $12 a visit--yuck), or I could have spent a few weekends in Sweden like last year, but this year was different. I tried to spend not very much money as well as spend as much time with the important people here as humanly possible. I figured taking yet another long break from climbing would let me heal my nagging shoulder injuries and clean the bad climbing habits out of my head. But now it's back to the New River Gorge for me, back to scaling the sandstone walls of West Virginia (at least until encroaching mountaintop removal finally makes all the rivers run black), it's back to great dinners with friends, campfires, and great parties.


By January I'll have to have figured out how to swing the nutrition school in New York thing, which will likely be a combination of some weekends in class and the off-weeks living and climbing more cheaply near the Gunks, but who knows? I always wanted to live in New York City for a little while, at least while I'm still young and unencumbered by the crap everyone else seems to be chained to. What makes this even better is that one of my most wonderful friends ever, Erin, is taking the same course, so we can team up and tackle the living situation, studying, traveling/commuting, socializing, or even each other should we need to. I'll be able to more easily convince overseas friends to come visit since NYC is cheap to fly into, and for that matter, if I should decide I need to travel somewhere NOW, fares will be cheap and flights everywhere will be available, no hour and a half drive to the Charlotte airport required. Plus, the shows! Great music everywhere! Nonstop people-watching!

Oh, the possibilities. I feel my muscles twitch every time I think about it (which is pretty much constantly).

Sustainable Architecture at Its Most Magnificent

If you're a fan of incredible architecture and sustainable design, check out this TED talk by the brilliant and funny Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. It could blow your mind.

A couple of weeks ago I rode my bike by this apartment building Ingles not only designed but lives next door to. I spend a lot of hours each week riding around Copenhagen taking bad pictures of design I think is beautiful. Many of the houses in the neighborhoods in the Copenhagen suburbs are exercises in brilliance, often petite but loaded with charm in the form of second story porches, walls of sliding glass doors, large sun-filled kitchens connected to warm and inviting living rooms, and private and cozy gardens filled with fruit trees and flowering vines enclosed by fences made of stripped branches. That there is a park within a ten minute walk of anywhere in Copenhagen doesn't hurt their appeal, either. Lakes are literally everywhere here, there are dedicated bike lanes and traffic lights on all main roads, and all patches of vegetation more than a few meters long have some kind of edible fruit within them.

Indulge yourself here for 18 minutes--you'll no doubt finish this video more optimistic about how sustainable architecture could be a big part of saving our future.

I'm terrible.

Terrible at posting a blog, that is. I do a lot of writing lately as I have loads of time on my hands here in Copenhagen, but it's mostly letters. I spend at least a couple of hours a day just writing people e-mails, and though I usually start out each letter with the intention of only writing a few sentences or passing on a worthy link, I more often wind up writing the equivalent of several pages. My letters become my diary of sorts.

I've probably received about twenty journals as gifts in my life, and have never made it more than ten percent of the way through any one of them. My e-mails, though--they are a chronicle of my friendships, boyfriends, breakups, family issues, temporary obsessions--and they have been spewed out with far greater abandon than they would have had I sat down with pen and paper. That said, I still always have a tiny journal with me most of the time. I think using a pen versus a keyboard accesses a different part of my brain, as if writing more slowly allows for less free-association and encourages a little more focus. My typed letters tend to be a series of tangents. My handwritten stuff can be tangential, too, but it's far more controlled and I usually wind up inspiring actual well thought-out ideas.

(In the distance you can see a few hundred deer waiting for dusk to fall in Dyrehavn. Then the barking, the mating, and the head-butting begin.)


Today I copied a link to www.zenhabits.com to send to my brother, titled "The World Needs You to Do What You Love." The blog was exactly what I needed to read right now, and I knew he could use it, too. But then I had to preface it with a little introduction. First, I let him know I officially signed up for nutrition school, and I knew that it would help me to write out exactly why this was going to be amazing for me, that I knew I had some self-defeating habits I need to crush, and then, of course, I had to tell him why I thought I had them in the first place. I figured he might get something out of it, considering we had the same crazy parents, we have similar insecurities, we have similar questions about how to fix ourselves ... you get the picture. I moved it to Word so I could see it all laid out in front of me better, and I wound up typing 2,500 words. Whoops.

When I talk I don't tend to be long-winded, and when I write I deeply value brevity. After spending over an hour just typing the stream of thoughts through my head, though, I did not want to go back and make it shorter. What's great is that I know it doesn't matter to him. I know he'll enjoy it, that he'll read every word, and that mistakes don't matter all that much to him. What matters most is that he has a glimpse inside my head, and we grow a little closer as a result.

I think this is the biggest reason why I would rather write an e-mail any day than scribble in my journal. I like knowing that not only do I have a record of my thoughts, I have shared it with one other person, and for me it's a lot safer than writing my secrets down on a journal that could be found by anyone. I've gone back to old e-mails over and over, and sometimes I'm extremely surprised by the bizarre headspace I was in at the time. If it had been taken out of context and shown to me, I often wouldn't recognize it as my own writing.


What makes it monumentally more rewarding than writing in a journal, however, is the response. I don't expect novellas in kind, but any acknowledgment at all lets me know I've connected.

Show some love to your fellow humans.

The Neighbor

I have stuck my head out the window to place myself in the sun for the first time in this long lazy day. It’s almost 5:30pm, and Carsten hasn’t made it home yet from work.

Hey. There he is again, the man I met last week, on the brick patio next door in a green plastic chair at a green plastic table, staring at the hedge in front of him. I lean out further and smile thinking about how funny our last encounter was. I have to say something.

Wait. No, I don’t. I walk away from the window after a minute. I don’t know if I want him to look up and find me smiling down at him. Danes are different than people at home. They’re closed and quiet and they don’t look at you on the street. But then I walk back and lean out the window again. I’m bored and have been in front of the computer all day.

Hey, Ken, I say out loud.

He looks up from the beer he has both hands wrapped around.

Hello.

How are you? I say.

Just fine, thanks.

For some reason his English over-enunciation makes me laugh to myself. It’s as if he’s seen someone say this in a movie and he’s trying it out for the first time. He’s looking for something else to say, I can tell, but doesn’t know what.

No. I’m lying, he says next.

You are? What’s wrong?

My mother died.

Oh no. I’m so sorry. When? Today?

I didn’t know what else to say. I said to myself, of course not today, you dumbass.

Two weeks ago. She had Parkinson’s, you know, that stuff. Alzheimer’s, too.

Wow. That’s not a good way to go.

No.

A few minutes earlier I had read about a music conductor and his wife who went to an assisted suicide clinic to die together. She had terminal cancer in her late 70’s and he was about 85, I think. They held hands on the beds next to each other and went to sleep together, never to wake up. To me, it sounded almost like the perfect way to go.

He stands up and walks to the gate so I can hear him better over the noise from the cars on the adjacent road.

She was still very much alive, still working in the garden most days, still tending the roses. Not all there all the time, of course, but you know . . .

Oh, I walk by those roses a lot. They don’t really smell like anything, though. Hold on, I’m coming down.

I do walk by those roses a lot, and every time I would smell each kind within my reach, and none of them smelled like anything. I pull some pants on and walk out the door and down the stairs in my bare feet.

As I walk out the door he begins again.

There was this one red kind that had the most wonderful perfume. Wait here, I will bring it to you.

I wait by his gate for what seems like a long time, and look down the road for Carsten approaching on his bike, but only a few bikes pass, bouncing over the speed bump out front, none carrying him.

Ken walks back across the brick patio and hands it to me.

It’s in pretty bad shape, with wilted petals and brown spots all over. I put it to my nose but smell nothing.

It smelled really good up until a couple of weeks ago, Ken says, but I think it’s gone now.

He shrugs an apology.

I’ve only been here for a few weeks, so I guess I arrived just in time for all the roses to lose their scent. I was beginning to wonder if all the roses in Denmark were of the unscented variety.

Last week I parked my bike in the central courtyard with everyone else’s and walked back out front toward the street to go in the apartment, and I almost walk into a man in his early sixties who seems to be coming from the door I’m going in. There are only three apartments up these stairs, the guy on the first floor I’ve never met, Carsten’s above him, and the old lady on the third floor who spent a lot of time last year banging on the pipes leading to her radiator, thinking we were making noise when it was actually her neighbors through another wall. So this guy and I both stop and just stare at each other. I think he must be thinking what I’m thinking—that he’s the guy on the first floor and I’m the girl on the second floor, and we should say hello.

Hello, I say.

Hej, he says back. He seems a little taken aback, even though he stopped the same as I did. I assume it’s because I said hello and not hej.

What’s your name?

It was kind of a bizarre question at that point, which made it seem appropriate.

Ken, he responds.

He now looks as if he thought I was someone he knew, but now realized I’m not.

Are you the guy that lives on the first floor right here?

No, he says. I live around the corner. You live up there?

Yep.

I think we’re both amused this encounter is happening, especially considering the standard behavior for Danes: remain silent and appear absorbed in thought.

Well, alright, I continue. Did you think I was someone you knew?

Yeah, well, I’m not sure. Maybe.

Ha, alright. Well, good to meet you, Ken.

Well, what’s your name?

Lydia.

Alright, good to meet you, too. See you, okay.

Yeah, see you.

And we part ways, and I look for him after that, the uncommon Dane who stopped to talk to me out of the blue at the same time I wanted to stop and talk to him. I am a little lost without my usual daily casual interaction with a few dozen people at the store, or Immac, or at the Hunter Gatherer, or with a hundred or so people when I’m picking up time at the café. I miss the ability to say any random thing to people I don’t know, to make people laugh at nothing in particular. Most people here speak English, and seem to enjoy doing so, but when people don’t smile or look at each other on the street it’s a lot harder to take the risk. Carsten’s at work every weekday, and half the week I hang out with Hunter for a few hours, but my friend Jacob is out of town for weeks and I’m accustomed to a lot more human interaction.

So when I see Ken out the window I want to talk to him, even if only as a person I can wave to when I pass by any given day.

Somehow we get on the subject of family names, and I tell him my last name, one about as Scottish as they come. He becomes more animated and tells me I have to hear this Scottish band he loves, Runrig, so I follow him onto his deck, where there are rows of beer bottles awaiting refund. He walks inside to put a CD in the stereo. A very old man in a plain white undershirt and blue shorts is sitting inside, his brows furrowed at nothing in particular.

Ken says something to the old man in Danish after we have stood talking about music for a couple of minutes, so I walk over and shake his hand. He’s fine with that but doesn’t have anything to say.

Is that your dad? I ask Ken.

Yes, that’s my dad. This place belongs to my parents. I live next door.

Okay.

My phone rings. It’s Carsten, so I tell him that I’m next door, which he no doubt thinks is strange, but he gamely walks over and says hello to Ken, who insists that we borrow a Runrig concert DVD before we leave.

Then he spends the rest of the evening sitting in that chair at that table with a beer, staring at the hedges in front of him.