The Chopper Challenge

My friend Chopper of Cars! Cars! Cars! sent me an email challenging me to join in updating my blog everyday this year. The 365-posts-a-year thing, intimidated me, but then I realized that I can make my own rules.

So, Chopper, I accept your challenge, but I’ve decided on what seems like a more realistic schedule for me. I’ll try to post every work day: that is, Monday through Friday, not counting vacation days, holidays and sick days. Hopefully, having a blogging buddy will help me stick to the schedule.

Update: Okay, so this is just embarrassing now since I so clearly have not updated my blog in, like, forever. I think I’ll leave the post here though as a reminder to myself not to make outlandish promises — especially when I’m working AND going to school part-time.

I’m now adopting a new philosophy: Blogging without Obligation. Sorry, Chopper.

Door #11: Academic Hilarity

Today one of the research fellows at work regaled my boss and I with the following joke:

[A classicist] goes into a bar.

[At this point, both of us started laughing already since the jokester used the actual name of our resident classics fellow.]

He walks up to the counter and says “Give me a martinus.”

The bartender says, “Don’t you mean a martini?

The classicist bangs his fist on the bar, ” If I wanted a double I would have asked for it, dammit!”

How do you say ba-dum-chuck in Latin?

Door #10: Gone Dinin’

Yes, dear readers, I’ve taken the night off.

The fellowship program I work for at Fancypants University (F.U.) is having its annual holiday dinner. The food and drink are lavish and delicious: salmon mousse, lobster, two different champagnes, port, cheese, chocolate.

Two years ago, I learned that I prefer 1994 Dom Perignon to 1995. Who knows what lessons this year will bring?

Door #7: Friday Fiddle Tune #5

This was the first fiddle tune I ever wrote. It started out life as “Busshållplatsvalsen” – “The Bus Stop Waltz” — because it popped into my head while I was waiting for the bus.  Later I dedicated it to my friend Betsy in honor of her fiftieth birthday.

Friday Fiddle Tune 3

Here’s a hambo tune I dedicated to my friend Carolyn when she had surgery. It’s called “Krya på dig” — “Get Well Soon” in Swedish.

If you’ve never seen hambo, here’s a video clip of the dance:

Friday Fiddle Tune 2

Here’s another pols tune — this one dedicated to my friend Andrea on her fiftieth birthday.

Finding My Tribe

Tonight I went to the weekly dinner sponsored by the post-doc fellowship program where I work. These are swanky affairs with sherry and mingling followed by a four-course meal in the program’s private wood-paneled dining room. As a part-time administrator I don’t usually go to these; but one of the fellows, M, an anthropologist had invited some colleagues, one of whom is a friend of a friend of a friend of mine, so I decided I’d attend this week.

When I got there, I introduced myself as one of the program administrators, and M added “And she’s an anthropologist.” I almost contradicted her, but then decided, anthropology is as much a way of being and thinking as it is an occupation, so why can’t I be an anthropologist — even if I’m not yet officially accepted into the program where I’ve been taking courses.

As the evening progressed and I chatted with them, it dawned on me that I really don’t need to be so intimidated. Not only did I understand what they were talking about, I even had things to contribute. The more I hang out with other anthropologists, the more I realize how much I enjoy the field. It all seems new and fascinating and exciting, and even more that that, it feels like I belong.

It’s almost the same feeling I had when I first found out that there were other people (here in the U.S. even) who were as obsessed with Swedish folk music as I was. When I described that feeling for an acquaintance of mine, he smiled and said “You’ve found your tribe!”

Sounding Off

Yesterday Mark Liberman at Language Log posted about a Christian Science Monitor article by Matthew Rusling, an American expat living in Japan. Since Rusling picked up Japanese intonation and idioms from his Japanese girlfriend, he unknowingly picked up speech patterns that native listeners interpreted as female.

I had a similar problem the year I lived in Sweden, although I ended up sounding like the someone of a different age, rather than a different gender. Since I was attending classes at a folkhögskola — roughly equivalent to an American community college — I spent a lot of time listening to and talking with people in their late teens and early twenties.

By the end of the year, my Swedish was fluent, but it was fluent teenage-speak, which must have sounded ridiculous coming out of the mouth of a thirty-something woman with a vaguely American accent. Imagine a middle-aged immigrant in this country speaking fluent, American slang with a non-native accent, and you’ll get the idea — something like Dan Akroyd and Steve Martin’s two Czech brothers, the Wild and Crazy Guys of Saturday Night Live fame.

Of course it didn’t help that my classmates were always trying to get me to say things that they knew sounded goofy — either because they knew it was something I couldn’t pronounce quite right or because it was up-to-the-minute hipster slang. Even three years later, some of my Swedish friends will still try to get me to pronounce the words for frogs (grodor) and sprouts (groddar), two pronunciations I have a particularly hard time with.

One last point about Rusling’s original article and some of the responses to the Language Log post. Two other anglophone men mentioned similar problems with learning Japanese. One even concludes “…Just resign yourself to talking like a little girl for the rest of your life and hope to God that no one beats you up.” The underlying message is that, for men, sounding like a woman opens you up to ridicule, if not violence.” Interesting that, apparently even in Japan, the country that brought us the onnagata (male Kabuki actors, often renowned, who play female roles), one of the worst transgressions a man can commit is doing something that might cause him to be mistaken for a woman.

Reason # 4124 Why Everything’s Better in Sweden

Coffee Naïvté

In 2003-2004 I spent year studying music in Sweden. One day, at the end of lunch I drank a mug of hot chocolate and leafed through my new copy of The Atlantic that had just come in the mail. My classmate Gustav reached out and grabbed my hand just as I was about to turn the page and conceal a Hewlett-Packard ad. “Ooohh, psychedelic,” he said as he looked over the rainbow-hued artwork.

The type, which looked like it was fading into multicolored smoke, read “Stop and smell the coffee” and touted a business partnership between HP and Starbucks. Gustav is fascinated with all things 1970s, despite being born in 1979 (or maybe because he was born then).

After a second Gustav looked at me and asked “Vad är en Starbucks för nånting?” (What the heck is Starbucks?), and I just laughed and laughed. When I saw the look in his eyes change from indignant to hurt, I tried to explain. “I’m not laughing because you should know what Starbucks is. I’m laughing because I think it’s great that I’ve spent the last eight months in a place where it’s possible for people not to know what Starbucks is. Back home, you can’t escape Starbucks, they’re everywhere with their green logo and their expensive coffee.”

I’m sure Stockholm exists somewhere on Starbucks’ road-map to global domination, but it was comforting to know that young Swedes could live their lives in blissful ignorance of all things tall, grande and vente.