I am Drowning

I am drowning in stress, and I am running out of time. Some of it is good and exciting stress, most of it is cranking out poor quality papers that I do not care about, a few of them is more personal than I would like to admit.

Roomchecks

I HATE room checks. I am notoriously messy. I can make lists and color code and organize like a champ, but when it comes to my room I get overwhelmed and it gets cluttered. I never know how it gets so bad, but it does. I should keep it clean since chaos and feeling out of control two of the things that bother me the most, but I never seem to be able to for long. My room right now is horrific, and by tomorrow morning everything has to be clean, organized, vacuumed, mopped, and scrubbed. If it was a normal week I could handle it, but right now I just want to scream and go to sleep. I also had a record 6 loads of laundry, and if you calculate that there are only 2 washers and 2 dryers and it takes about 4 1/2 hours to get through a wash and dry, you can see that I have been doing laundry since 5pm and will not finish until the wee hours of the morning. Idiot Julia that I am also decided to wash her comforter and bedding in the last load, sooooo I can't even do the trick where I shove things in the dryer and go to sleep and be the first in the morning to get them out. It is okay, because I will not finish my room by then anyways. At this point, I do not care if I get written up to DIS, what are they going to do... send me home because my floor is not mopped? But I really like my SRA and I do not want to disappoint her or make her job more difficult by having to report me. I am so ashamed that I cannot keep my room clean. Here is a picture that I took about 3 weeks ago to show how long my hair has gotten. I had to put it on my window ledge and crouch down to laptop level (holding the walls for support) because my window ledge was the only surface besides my bed that was clear enough. I never posted it because I was too embarrassed by the mess in the background.

Eurovision

Eurovision is a song contest that happens every year where all the countries in Europe figure out the "best" song from their country and send them to big arenas to compete with the other countries. In the end the best song wins and that country has bragging rights for a year. I am sort of in love with the Danish song, it reminds me a bit of a song for children, but it is just happy and hopeful. The band is called A Friend in London and the song is New Tomorrow.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Leave them in the Kitchen and Run Away to the Forest.

Forest Kindergarten today was spectacular. I need two things before I go back though: 1) rain pants, and 2) a healthy ankle.

Today was by far the most foresty and greatest day we have had. I have drawn you a picture.



Things to note in the picture:
- Steepest hill in the entire world encircling a little fire pit area.
- Slide made out of mud.
- Campfire.
- I need a haircut.

EDIT/ADDITION:
St. Patrick's Day isn't a thing here. We briefly discussed it for like 2 minutes in practicum, but the children were hardly interested in learning more and only 4 people in class were wearing green, including myself. I also looked in my closet today at the dress I always wear on March 17th. It is obnoxiously kelly green, but is also short and sleeveless. Today it snowed. Oh Denmark, what are you doing to my concept of what acceptable weather is?

My heritage is mostly Irish and Swedish, yet here I am at 11pm on St. Patrick's Day in Scandinavia on the first year I can legally drink and I am sober and in my pajamas about to go to bed. Best decision I have made all week. Let's hope for restful sleep and pleasant dreams. That reminds me, I had a dream last night where I literally laughed myself awake. I made a conscious effort to remember what was so funny, but of course now I forget.

What is the Worst that Could Happen?

Our inspirational speaker on study tour told us to ask that to ourselves when we feel completely overwhelmed and hopeless.

What is the worst thing that could happen?
The worst thing that could happen is I could fail this semester. I mean, I probably am not going to. The worst thing that will probably happen is I will go home with a C average from this semester. If I get a 2.0 this semester my GPA from study abroad will still be a 2.7, which is enough to keep me a ways away from academic probation. If that is averaged out into my overall college GPA I will still be above a B average. I will not longer be in the running for graduating with honors, but most CSU schools do not even have that option. Even if I get a 1.0 this semester, from this year I will still have above a 2.0. I do not need to be perfect and I do not need to have control over every tiny detail of my life. For a psychology student, I often forget how important it is to keep my mental health in check.

I missed two big academic trips today because 1) they overlapped which I had not noticed in the hustle and bustle of midterms, and 2) because I have 22 pages worth of research papers due within the next 2 days and am having crazy writers block. I will take responsibility for my absence and talk to my professors, but I am utterly disappointed in myself.

I just need to make it to next Wednesday. Only a week. I can do that. Maybe... Afterall, what's the worst that could happen?

Springtime!

Spring is here! Well, not really, but yesterday got up to 8ºC, and even though today is only 3º the sun was shining and if you lay down on my bed at about 11am there was a perfect strip of sunlight streaming in. H&M is getting all of their adorable Spring collection in and it is probably a blessing it is still so cold or I would spend all my travel money on cute floral dresses with coral accessories. I cannot wait to stroll through the Botanical Gardens (which are right across the street from me), and go to the King's gardens to just lie out in the sun. Spring please come faster, but please do not bring the end of my time here with you.

This is the most stressed I have been in my time in Denmark academically, and it was fine in December when I had finals and it got dark at 3:30 and I could light candles and eat cookies and call it "hygge", but the sun is beckoning me to go out and take long walks and do anything in the world but write papers. Probably good my ankle is still hurting, or I would be a springtime-frolicking machine.

Estland og Sverige på Sticks

Long Study Tour this semester went to fabulous places, but by the end of the trip I was completely frustrated with my professor and that left a little bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. I was also on sticks and Estonia was covered in inches of ice, since apparently they are on the low-sodium sidewalk diet.


We left for Tallinn on Sunday and arrived in just enough time to get settled into the hotel and go to dinner. We ate at a place called Olde Hansa, which is a medieval themed restaurant where all the waiters are characters in full costume and the dinner is lit by candle light and you get your hands washed with a pitcher of water. The food was excellent, and apparently very authentic. It consisted of all sorts of foods that I adore but do not get the opportunity to eat all the time. We had smoked-sauerkraut, lentils, ginger and turnips, juniper and herb baked cheese, and those are only a few of the side dishes. The actual feast was amazing and such a fun experience at our long table of 26. There was also this great thing since it was served family style that if you ran out of something (including the meat dishes and dessert) you could just let one of the servers know and he would run and grab you more. They also had honey beer and cinnamon beer, but at almost 5 euro a piece I decided to pass, but I had some sips and they were devine. Other people went out to explore the city but my ankle was killing me so I took a cab with my professor back to the hotel. My friend bought me a rose at the Estonian flower market because she could see that I was bummed out to not get to explore. It was a perfect act of kindness to end the night.


The next two days we went and saw some schools and had a bit of free time in Tallinn. Going out to the schools we got to see a lot outside of "Old Town" and it was startling because it looked quite a bit like I would imagine an ex-soviet country to look, with sort of run down apartment buildings and a little bit of a depressing vibe, but in Old Town it was bursting with culture and tourism. I wish we had been able to have a little bit of a review of Soviet countries. It is hard to remember anything besides "it was bad" from sophomore year in high school, when the USSR seemed lifetimes away. Estonia is the first country I have been to that is younger than I am. I mean, Tallinn is old, but all the schools we saw were still in the process of figuring out what to do. Since my class is "Children with Special Needs" we also had to deal with the shock that under the Soviet regime most children with disabilities did not live long enough to go to school or were institutionalized. There was more snow in Tallinn than I have ever seen before in my life, and granted that I have only really seen wimpy Danish snow, considering that it is MARCH and there were still MOUNTAINS I was impressed.


I hope I get a chance to go back to Tallinn some time. I really did enjoy it, and I cannot wait to see how that little country flourishes on its own. Also fun fact, Tallinn literally means "City of the Danes".


We took a ferry/cruise over to Stockholm, and that was my favorite night by far. Not only was the ship fully equipped with bars, night clubs, a ball pit, karaoke, and a buffet that went on for miles, but it was Mardi Gras. We ate the traditional Estonian Shrove Tuesday buns, which were kinda gross consisting of unsweetened rolls with fermented cherries and cream inside, but it was still and experience. We had read about how a ferry making the same exact voyage we were on in 1994 sunk and killed over 850 people, so that was fun and scary. The ship is also an icebreaker, which literally means that the sea around us is frozen and it feels like an earthquake when our ship's special design crushes ice around us. We all spent hours staring into the ocean. It is one of those things that you see that you will probably never see again and strikes you with a silent awe. Almost like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, or the feeling I got when I first saw snow. Just huge abysses of the darkest black with no lights in sight but the glow of the ship illuminating sheets of ice that stretched meters and meters across and floated and knocked into each other. I could have watched it forever. It is also something that did not photograph well at all, but I tried.



If I forget about the frustrations with how the trip was ran, Stockholm was also fabulous. It is maybe one of the only cities I have been to that I could see myself in besides Copenhagen. I am such a little Scandinavian girl. Everything was beautiful, including the weather. I know I will go back at some point.


We had a day of field visits on our last day that started at a spectacular Reggio Emilia school, and I have said it once and will probably say it every time I am asked for the rest of my life, I LOVE REGGIO EMILIA. Seriously, if you have a child and public school just isn't cutting it, please please please send them to a Reggio Emilia preschool/kindergarten. The children served us refreshments and then performed a belly dance and then a hip hop routine, complete with full costumes. They also made us welcome signs. The last academic visit we made was by a social entrepreneur, and although she was a little intense, she was 26 and had started 3 businesses that made her money and helped the world, one of them specifically helping children. She was a bit of a wake up call to why I am really in Denmark. It is great to take this year to get experience and figure out who I am, but I am really hear to help me later in my career. The experiences here need to be taken to the next level when I get home so I can apply the Danish philosophy to how I view children I will work with in the future. My new thing is to ask myself "Julia, right now are you being more or less competent than a Danish child?". It is funny because it is true.


The last thing we did before we got on the plane to come back home to København was go to Junibacken, which is the children's play amusement park type thing based on Swedish children's literature, mostly Pippi Longstocking (which all of Scandinavia is obsessed with). I am taking my children to Scandinavia when they are young, maybe around 7 or 8. I want to take them to Legoland, and the Tinderbox, and Junibacken. It is so hard to learn about my ideal child rearing countries and then have to go back to the states. Junibacken had a ride that was 11 minutes that was what I always wanted Storybookland at Disneyland to be. We rode in boxes that were on tracks, but tracks from the top so you flew, but they moved, so more intense than Peter Pan, but not as endearing, although pretty darn cute. It told you little synopsis of the different stories and ended with a longer one where essentially the little boy got paralyzed by the evil dragon and he and his brother committed suicide together, but it was a very peaceful almost happy ending. The same type that the real Little Mermaid had, where she died for love and was taken up to heaven by angels.


Okay, I took some Nyquil before starting this entry because I am a little sick and I am practically delerious right now. I need to go to bed, this is also the stress week from hell, so please wish me luck and hope I do not post, because any posts this week will be in procrastination of paper-writing and studying that should have priority. Today is the 205th day I have been away from home, I get to see my family for the first time in the time in 9 days when I am going down to meet them in Munich. I am still stressed, but also excited!

Maybe I was Raised by a Memoirs Teacher

When I was young, maybe around the age of 8, sometimes the opportunity would arise when I got to spend the night at my grandma's house. I would slip on one of her silky pink night gowns and sleep in my uncle's old bedroom. My grandmother's room was on the other side of the house. She would shuffle to bed and I would listen to the distinctive sound of her slippers and her walker down the long hallway from my bed. Often I would fall right asleep, but if I could will myself to stay up or if I woke up in the middle of the night I would sneak to the kitchen/living room area because that is where the TV was, and Grandma had cable. I would turn on the Disney channel and they would play these old black and white movies about Disneyland, that were essentially Walt Disney advertising how great Disneyland was going into all the details of the rides and the new technology. I was obsessed with these and would try really hard the next morning not to talk about them nonstop with my mother, who I pretended thought that I had gone to bed at a reasonable hour. After I figured out that she and my grandma had actually been to Disneyland when all of these rides existed blew my mind. The House of the Future was my favorite idea, but there were many I could not fathom. A few years ago at the 50th year celebration at Disneyland I made my mom wander with me into every giftstore that talked about Disney history searching for copies of these film clips that I had only faint sleepy childhood memories of. I would have thought I had made them up entirely if not for one 10 minute clip on the Pirates of the Caribbean DVD special features. Walt did a great job of selling his idea to children, too bad I was 20-40 years too late for most of the rides he talked about. To this day I still find myself getting a little too interested in old Disneyland rides and the history of the park. At night they would also play the Mickey Mouse Club which I knew my mom adored as a child, but I always wound up angry because of a story she had told me about her skirt being the wrong color, so I did not find the charm and attachment to the black and white like I did for Disneyland.

Tonight, I found "The DIsneyland Story" and I made an audible sound of excitement.


I promise I will blog about Copenhagen and my travels at some point, but right now I am drinking hot chocolate and reliving my midnight excitement. It is not as thrilling without turning the volume down every few minutes in the fear of being caught, but it is still enjoyable and I can feel her amusement and a little bit of a stern lecture coming my way. Looking back on it, she probably knew the entire time.

Estonia and Sweden

I morgen skal jeg til Tallinn! I know virtually nothing about Tallinn, so it is quite exciting. The only reason I do not want to go is because my ankle is hurting more every day. That is a lie, it felt loads better about 3 days ago and I was hopeful that I would be able to walk on it, but since then it has taken huge steps in regression. Here is the picture I took about half an hour after my incident, it isn't the biggest my ankle got, but I like to look at this picture because I feel it justifies the pain I am in.


I have literally done nothing all week. I managed to get out of my room on Friday to go to class and get some groceries. I need to do laundry before I leave in less than 24 hours, but the laundry is 6 flights of stairs down, and I do not know how I am going to do that on sticks while holding a big laundry bag. If I ever get a picture of my crutches I will explain to you why we have renamed them sticks. You know how when you are injured there are things that you crave? Just things that your parents used to do for you? Whenever I get sick or hurt myself I crave chocolate milkshakes. I watched Bright Eyes two nights ago when my ankle was throbbing and I couldn't sleep. I had not watched a Shirley Temple movie since my Grandmother passed away, and I bawled through a large chunk of it. I also enjoyed every moment and the rush of memories it brought back. Fun fact: I still consider Potato Soup my favorite food, but it is another thing I have been avoiding for the past 7 years. I cannot be afraid of the things that she and I loved so much together in fear that if I love those things without her here it will make our memories less special. When I get home I am going straight for My Fair Lady and tuna fish sandwiches with coke. I am excited to be going to "real" Sweden (as in Stockholm instead of Malmö). I feel like my Grandma would be proud of me.

Home is Where the Heart Is, I Must be a Mutant

The title of this was rewritten so many times. I had metaphors about why I fall in love so often and why I am so emotional and why I am so indecisive, but it all leads down to I have two hearts.

I was thinking about it a lot yesterday as I was crying and fretting over my Sonoma State housing problems, and I think that I genuinely have things to be emotional and upset about. I do not live in a third world country, I have parents who love and support me, I for the most part have good health, but my life is still hard. My life has always been hard. This got me thinking about when life started throwing curveballs at me and I realized that I never had the same home life that other kids did, I didn't even know where I was supposed to consider my home. My childhood was full of awkward conversations and secrecy from administration. I had created a stigma against my own "real" house that created not only fear but over glorifying my "fake" home. I always felt more at home where I went to school and with my Grandmother, and a lot of the time now when I talk about my childhood I tend to block out the memories that were created at night and on the weekends, even though there were some really good times.

My high school therapist tried to make me talk about my two homes thing, but I would put on the same face of secrecy I thought would protect me. I would not tell her all the facts and the important issues and actual problems I had with it would get lost. I bring this up because I feel like I still rely on being split in two. I have only lived in one place for four years of my memory. Since it was high school and I had so much other turmoil in my life from other stressors I did not even take the time to acknowledge the stability it created. I did not really understand how to have people over and I was, and still am, embarrassed to. In our entire 3 year relationship my best friend had been to my house once, and that was after we had dated for four months and knew each other for almost a year. A few times when I needed to pick something up from home I would take him over and make him wait in the car in the driveway while I ran in as quickly as I could. I left for college and again was divided in two. I settled in my dorm of course, but living only two hours away makes it easy to rely on going home. I never transferred my life to Sonoma. I did not start going to a doctor up there until last year, when I was instructed to find one the first month of freshman year. I do not let people into my rooms at school. I remember last year I literally wrestled with my friend in the stairwell because he wanted to go through my room to use the bathroom. After I locked myself in my room and cried. My room in Denmark is a very central location, but I make people stay in the kitchen. No one is allowed in my room and I get heightened anxiety if someone knocks on my door. I have this image of what home should be, of perfection that I will never be able to reach. The only time I allow people to see my "home" is when it is so clean and sterile it doesn't even look like someone lives there, even though I do not care at all about mess when I visit other people's homes. If you notice I have not even posted pictures of my room on facebook, which is what every study abroad student is supposed to do the first week.

I am really thinking about this now, when I am 5,500 miles away from "home". Denmark feels like home, and California feels like home. I am worried that for the rest of my life I will have the sense of being split, of not knowing where I belong. It is not the same as when I grew up, and I will not have to keep Denmark a secret, but I realize that there is so much about my study abroad experience that no one cares about except for me that it will end up not being talked about anyways. I want to feel like I belong. I do not want to be in a limbo, but I would rather be in the limbo and get these fabulous experiences than feel a sense of belonging and be ignorant. Thanks parents for letting me grow up with the opportunity to go to good schools and the chance to know and love the amazing woman who was my Grandmother.

My Life in Stolen Pictures

I would like to inform you all that I fail at taking pictures this semester. Because things do not seem nearly as exciting in every day life, I have stopped taking my camera with me, meaning I have missed picture opportunities of everything. I also have misplaced my camera cord so even the pictures that I HAVE taken are not on my computer. Here are things that I wish I had pictures of that I am going to proceed to steal from other people or off the internet:

Last Friday I took a test I was sure I failed (I got a B which is the same as failing when everyone else got A's) and as I stepped outside my school I heard a fanfare. I go to the square around the corner and the cavalry is out. I walk down Strøget and there was a parade for the Danish troops that had returned home from the Middle East. It is always nice to be caught in a parade in the middle of your walk home.


On Saturday Spring officially started when I waited outside in freezing temperatures twice because it was the opening of the Danish ice cream season meaning Paradis reopened and was giving out free ice cream! I went twice with a total of about $11 free ice cream. They do it way better than Baskin Robbins.


Saturday night I went to the epic Egmont Fastelavn party. My costume was "flower girl" or "garden party" or "flower child", we were not really sure and since puns get lost in translation anyways it was really just an excuse for me to glue pretty flowers to things. My ex-boyfriend once told me that I am incapable of being "sexy" or "hot" and the highest I can achieve on the attractive scale is "cute". I hate to admit it but I think he may have been right. Next time I should try for slutty firewoman...


Later Saturday night/Sunday morning I fell off of a hidden 4inch step (you know those sneaky hidden ones) and messed up my ankle pretty badly. The highlight of my life was the angle bus. I went to the night bus stop right by the housing (the night bus only runs once an hour) and after I had been waiting for maybe 5 minutes an "ikke i rute" (not in service) bus pulls up and asks me which bus I am waiting for and where I need to go. He tells me to get in and he drove me literally to my doorstep. It was amazing. I do not know how I would have gotten home without him or his kindness.


I was going to wait until Monday to go to the doctor, but the next morning I couldn't wait. I wish I had the pictures I took of my ankle right after it happened, because the swelling looks disgusting and hilarious. I was too freaked out by how big it had gotten by the morning to remember to take a picture. I got up on Sunday and went to the kitchen. I tried to stand on my foot with full pressure and I woke up on the floor in front of the sink because I had passed out from pain. I called a cab and went to the Skadestuen (ER) at Bispebjerg Hospital where I spent from 2pm until midnight.


My ankle is sprained but since it gave signs of being broken just no fracture was visible on the xray I am on crutches for 2 weeks and if it still hurts after that I get to go back and they will treat it like a break. I am missing my field study today and my practicum tomorrow and my practicum's fastelavn party on Friday. I leave for Estonia with my class on Sunday. I am not a happy camper.