Month: February 2017

Pass the days

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I woke up too early today, laughing. I have noticed that every morning brings light slightly earlier; every afternoon extends just a little bit longer. This is the literal light at the end of the tunnel.

My mood has been uneven, veering toward the desire for constant sleep – as always happens in February. Not in a good mood, cranky, antisocial, wanting hibernation and to be left alone. I thought I might avoid this ‘affliction’ this February because I felt as though I ended January on a relative ‘up’. No such luck. I pushed it.

Having made such an effort to write every day, I could not let today pass without writing a blog post, despite having very little to write. I have written some other things I am not ready to post, not sure if I want them to be out in the open, fearing that they will be misread or misinterpreted. I might need to be in a better mood to deal with that.

The art of letting go …

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 …or ‘it wasn’t a dry fuck’

“It sucks to be reliable.”
“Maybe we should teach you the art of letting go.”

Yesterday apparently was the birthday of poet David Ignatow – a poet whose few works I’ve rather haphazardly come across impressed me and were worthy of going back and reading again at different points in life. I first heard of him in high school – during the hated poetry unit we were force fed. Our teacher assigned us each a poem to explicate and investigate and then present to our class. She had apparently taken some care to match our personalities up with poets she felt somehow had something to offer us. I was given Adrienne Rich. Don’t get me started. The teacher had hoped we would each respond to these assigned poets and pursue a more in-depth research project on the one we were already acquainting ourselves with. By this time I was deeply entrenched in my 20th century Russian women (Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and Akhmadulina) and could not be bothered with Rich.

Meanwhile my dear friend Mike, whom the teacher had previously referred to as a “miscreant” (for some unknown reason?), was given a poem (I believe) by David Ignatow. Mike decided he would pursue Ignatow as a research project but ran into the problem we all ran into back then: a dearth of information thanks to … well, the limitations of libraries and access to information. Libraries were well-connected networks, of sorts; you could look up and order information, but it was not instant or immediate. There were still barriers to all the information you might have wanted – primarily temporal barriers, particularly the more obscure your topic. If you could find what you wanted eventually – time was often the ultimate limitation. School assignment deadlines – waiting for some book or resource to arrive at the local library – really not practical. But once upon a time, it was the only way. And probably was the reason that many viable but difficult research topics ended up abandoned by well-meaning and curious students. I suspect this is why, in the pre-internet era of too-little-information at the fingertips, Mike abandoned David Ignatow.

Now I run across Ignatow fairly frequently in my readings and find gems, such as this Paris Review interview from 1979. I loved to read about Ignatow’s attempts to succeed at business, only to find that he felt more like a (willing) prisoner to his writing and had to write. Or that it was an inevitable pleasure: “I didn’t will myself to become a writer. It was just a natural outgrowth of the pleasure readers got from my work. I wanted to give pleasure and give myself pleasure. It wasn’t a dry fuck, in other words.” HAHA. And also was inspired by reading the following passage, feeling as though this ‘background of immortality’ is a guide:

“INTERVIEWER

A Mexican writer, José Gaos, was quoted in Octavio Paz’s beautiful book The Bow and the Lyre as saying: “As soon as a man enters life he is already old enough to die.”

IGNATOW

That’s good. When you assume that knowledge, you begin to live a very vital life, because everything you do is in the background of immortality. The background is the immortality of death. That’s when you can say you are a man in the full sense of the word. You’ve become an existentialist. That’s what it’s all about.”

Photo (c) 2013 Jana Reifegerste

You don’t own me; I don’t own anything

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Don’t people’s lives sound a lot more interesting or exotic on paper than they are in the big scheme of things? I run into this problem, if you could call it a problem. I look at the day to day, mundane process of slogging through life, and I doubt my life looks particularly interesting. But other people tell me how amazing it sounds to dash off to different European cities on the spur of the moment. Yes, maybe these “highlights” sound fascinating … whether the moving from country to country and taking on new challenges and whatever, but all the mundane stuff like dealing with immigration authorities (as I used to do), tax authorities, walking through knee-deep snow to get to the mailbox, shoveling snow on a daily basis just to be able to walk from car to house, the boring task of choosing what food to eat, making sure pictures are hung straight on the wall, vacuuming, getting medical checkups and so on… all of that is, well, not that exotic, interesting or sexy. (For any person who has only lived in one place and not lived somewhere significantly different… or a person of any nationality who has stuck with what is most familiar in one place all their lives, the novelty of the day to day differences can seem cool and exotic for some time if the frustration of it does not push them over the edge first.)

My life produces more than its share of monotony, especially since I do push myself to work A LOT. I do sometimes do very random, spontaneous things that sound thrilling when tossed out casually, e.g. “I dashed off to Brussels for the weekend” or, as I recently did, “I went to Berlin one day just to see a movie and fly home.”  But life is still mostly about going to the store, buying too much dental floss, fighting to get sleep, making sure not to hit the random moose who runs out into the road, feeling sorry for myself on rare occasions (5-10% of the time, maybe?) because I am “alone” (even though I readily choose this), etc. etc. By comparison (and why should we ever do too much comparison?) others may feel that their lives sound dull, but for me, most people’s lives are fairly interesting (some more than others)… in the end, it is more about what they have to say, what they bring to the conversation. I think I would be boring and empty if all I had to talk about was something that was “surface exciting”. Monotony can be, in fact, comforting sometimes.

How many conversations end up being about balance? It all comes down in the end to balance, doesn’t it? I love the idea of a perfect balance of monotony/routine and spontaneity. But while I have monotony, I am always doing weird stuff and making plans to “set sail” (as someone once eloquently put it)… but this is also why I am unsettled, why I cannot commit to furniture or force myself to make the kinds of domestic changes I should make. Different levels of bucking the trend. I don’t want to make the choices. I don’t want to make the choices at all. I don’t want to admit that this is “it” and somehow imagine that by not furnishing the inside of the house to my taste and doing renovations is somehow making all of this temporary, something I can walk away from in a heartbeat. This might be one of the ways I fool myself. I don’t think anything is ever permanent, but my need for running and running and seeking adventure need not be at odds with my (somewhat hidden and unrealized) desire to settle in somewhere, even if it is a place into which I don’t settle into a daily life.

Ownership is a funny thing, isn’t it? I did not mind taking the step of owning my house or various pieces of property I’ve had in my ownership for brief or long periods of time, but that was mostly because comparing it to the idea of renting was more terrifying and a good deal more expensive. But then, perplexingly, owning a table is a much more difficult proposition. In fact I don’t really own any of the furniture in my house. All of it belongs to a friend; I am the recipient of sort of temporary furniture that may or may not be temporary. And I like it because I feel no ownership or connection to it. I am just a babysitter. Maybe it all comes down to my not wanting to care about stuff. I have prided myself on being mobile and spontaneous (which is funny since I come from a family of pack rats). I love getting rid of things… and not acquiring too many things in the first place (except maybe kitchen stuff).

I have given thought to the idea that getting rid of stuff, and by extension making major changes in life, is sometimes a form of running away from oneself (getting rid of yourself), and I know sometimes that I am guilty of this. “Guilty” might be too strong a word, but it fits for the moment. I think of a poem (“I Cannot”) by Polish poet Anna Swir, which simply reads: “I envy you. Every moment/You can leave me./I cannot/leave myself.” Sometimes being able to leave oneself would feel so liberating. And completely without compromise. Just you – and not even the you that you are today. A new you, again and again. But then, you would not really be able to leave yourself – the real you – no matter how many times you reinvent. Ownership – owning yourself – your own.

And would anyone know the difference? Particularly if you have lived your entire life conditioned to stand on your own two feet (and what else am I doing?). At some point, it actually becomes tiring to be perceived as that strong and independent. While I may like making my own decisions and doing what I want in life, I cannot see that there is an alternative. I have considered sometimes that I have  reached a point where people seem to think I am incapable of compromise and relish the total independence, as if I cling fiercely to it. In fact it might not always be the ideal – I like the idea of discussing and making decisions with someone else, if for no other reason than to get a second opinion. It is not so much that I second guess myself, but I think there is a certain amount of emptiness in how I do things. No misunderstanding though: people just perceive that I am incapable of compromise, but I am not incapable. People look at my life and see that I have plowed ahead and made choices, travels, moved abroad, studied, taken career, financial, property decisions on my own, and that signals that I am like an uncompromising bulldozer. But I have to – I have to live my life. I know many people who have spent lifetimes sitting on the sidelines, waiting for someone else to show up and instruct them in what to do. I don’t judge them for wanting partnership – who doesn’t on some level – but in the absence of it, is life long enough to just sit and wait, letting fear manifest in excuses? In this way, in fact, it is not me who does not compromise. It’s those who do nothing and make no choices, just waiting. That is the true compromise.

Hot and cold

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Real life mirrors the thoughts. Floods of thoughts on the juxtaposition of hot and cold, all its meanings, spill over into literal hot and cold. The heating in my house is out again. My neighbors will have to help fix it, but the neighbor is away on holiday so will have to contact his son to help. Meanwhile I will run, dance, climb up (and down) the stairs, hula hoop, jump like a fool throughout my house as the temperature drops.

I am trying for the moment to look at it as a strange kind of blessing. I read an article last week about how the human body is not made for the kind of constant idle comfort we generally live in.

“Until very recently, there was not a time when comfort could be taken for granted—there was always a balance between the effort we expended and the downtime we earned. For the bulk of that time, we managed these feats without even a shred of what anyone today would consider modern technology. Instead, we had to be strong to survive.”

Yes, maybe I do not need to live in this icebox forever, but I also do not need to live in “a perpetual state of homeostasis”. I did after all try to wake my mind and heart from a comatose state as the new year began, as well as my body – this just pushes it up to a whole new level. The level where you never get warm again.

Photo (c) 2007 Jonas Bengtsson

drop like a rock

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It is strange how disrupting a routine can set an emotional downturn into motion. Getting tired and overstimulated by socializing, and then feeling a great urge to sleep and do nothing else turns the mind inside-out. The great productivity and motivation of the past six weeks gives way to at least a couple of days of despondency, feeling a certain emptiness that feels like it comes suddenly, from nowhere. But all the signs that it would arrive were waiting to ignite, alongside a building resignation.

At least it only lasted for about two sleep-filled days. Now it is – and I am – back to normal. I suppose that is what we always hope for – normalcy and balance.

The best way to get there is to go back to what was before all the disruption, before all the up-down-all-over-the-place. Back to the quiet of place and mind. Back to a time before the little sounds of hope (and crashes of dashed hope) chimed.

Photo (c) 2007 Karen

Micro pen pal

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Years and years ago, I knew a guy who was intelligent, nice and cultured. We lived in different cities but had many lovely conversations about music and art and the world in general. But at some point, he kept backing me into corners with his feelings and suggestions. And what do I do when backed into a corner? I push my way out with (verbal) fists flying.

For me, he was a pen pal, whom I saw on occasion when in his city, but he interpreted all of it to mean I also wanted some kind of romantic relationship. I thought after meeting that I had made it – and repeatedly did – abundantly clear, that I had no interest in this whatsoever. But beset by lack of self-esteem, an inexplicable persistence and jealousy, I suppose he thought anyone who would talk to him as much as I did must have felt something else, something more, but … it was next to impossible to see redeeming qualities that would make someone be attracted to him. Not because he was repellent, ugly or stupid or anything like that. No, it boiled down to his COMPLETE lack of confidence and accompanying spinelessness.

One summer when I was visiting his city, I stopped by his place to pick him up to go to a gallery. While waiting in his tiny flat, he came out of the shower (undressed) and said, “OH, I did not realize you would be there.” Where the hell else would I be in this micro apartment? (I could not help but notice, in the midst of this particular awkward “overture” on his part, that the apartment was not the only “micro” item in the room.) Eventually this kind of behavior made me run away, realizing that it was not possible to be friends and that he could not, in the absence of other viable options, deal with the direct truth (my telling him he is cool but not for me romantically just made him try harder and annoy me more). Given his hard luck and “nothing going for him” nature, I also didn’t want to hurt him. But any compassion or kindness, he misinterpreted as (ardent) interest. After enough of these misunderstandings, I felt frustrated, angry and trapped, and this is when I lash out most cruelly.

At some point, in the midst of a couple of stupid affairs I was having (which I used as fodder for making him jealous/angry enough to stop talking to me and leave me alone, which never worked. Instead I got lectures about devaluing myself; certainly all true, but nothing I wanted to hear) I indirectly compared his penis to Brussels sprouts (i.e., when he said I had never had sex with him, so I should try him out to get over an obsession with someone else, to which I replied, “That is like telling a heroin addict that she will stop shooting up if she just eats some Brussels sprouts.” As he well should have, he got angry and hurt).

But what upset me was that the next day — and this was the crux of his total problem with women, people and success in general — he sent me flowers and apologized for getting angry. Seriously?! He had every right to be hurt and angry, and what he should have understood is that he needs to own that anger and lay down the law. He should have told me, “You have no right to talk to me that way.” But no, he just took it. And that is so utterly unattractive in another person.

At some point this kind of talk finally made him so angry that he stopped contacting me for three or four very peaceful months. I enjoyed that time because, most of all, I respected that he finally took a stand. Unfortunately he was never going to know about the respect or get credit for it because it would all disappear if he were to contact me again, which he did.

Thereafter (still years and years ago), for the most part he seemed to accept that I would never be interested, but on occasion he would do something like send flowers at Valentine’s Day and make some remarks that would again push me into petty territory (talking about my ultra-promiscuous life with lesser intellects) and sheer cruelty: “Ah the Married Idiot (one of the erstwhile affairs, whom this guy hated and had the most jealousy for) is in town this week and wants to get together.” His reply, “That guy has HUGE problems.” Seeing “HUGE” written in all caps like that made me immediately respond, wickedly, cruelly, inexplicably, just to be hurtful, “That’s not all he has that’s huge.” ?! What on earth was wrong with me?

After this, he got mad, as I hoped, and went silent… for a while at least. I am happy to report that sometime soon after, he finally met someone who loves him and probably does not treat him in a cruel and careless way, the way I, his pen pal, did.

used… and more used

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The inconsistencies, excuses and indecision got under my skin. As someone who is all or nothing about change, the dragging things from the past and present into the indefinite future, never moving on or moving forward (case in point: saying for six years that the time had come to leave the city he lived in; he is still there), living in a perpetual state of dependence, holding each other back, was not at all my scene. By joining him, I would have become part of this floating and unstable but static life of which I wanted no part. No offense to him and his choices. It is simply not a lifestyle I wanted to be a part of. And frankly, he wanted very little of mine either.

In the start, there must have been some part of it that seemed appealing… the idea of change, and a wholly different life, had a certain ring to it. Enough years (almost 15) had passed since I had spent one, interminably long, miserable summer with someone I could only describe as a directionless loser that I had forgotten the pain that came with it. I did not see the similarities early enough to avoid a repeat of this mistake I had promised myself I would never make again.

Ultimately the repeated mistake was not long-lived or permanent, and it was nowhere near as painful as the first confusing experience of youth. It had been as painful as it was then because it came among a whole series of firsts, and I had been young, naive, sheltered and completely inexperienced; this time, well, I had the tools to walk away and understand that the issues at hand were not mine nor mine to deal with.

He didn’t actually like me as a person – this “square” me who didn’t do any of the stuff he did and couldn’t deal with most aspects of his stumbling, directionless life. All the slow-boil commentary on how maybe things would change and maybe he would then like something more pastoral and calm only proved it over and over again. He wanted this – some part of this (in a limited capacity that he dictated) and everything else, too. But he could not have this if he kept everything else. And in terms of “this” (meaning this “involvement” because I would not have gone so far as to call it a relationship), he was interested enough only in certain aspects that pertained to what he could get/gain and how he could extend what he got from or through me to people he actually cared about (the “everything else”).

He chose to go on living his life the way he always had, not willing to make changes or sacrifices to the degree that people are when and if they want to be with someone. Meanwhile, he criticized, always finding fault and things wrong, while I tried to find what is right about him. He was content to show up, lounge around, have me pay bills, buy things and be cared for but … it was a one-way street. What I wanted, upon reflection, was some minor glimmer of affection, emotional support – things that are free and have absolutely nothing to do with money. (He came back to this excuse frequently, “But I don’t have money – I don’t have anything to offer.” It may in fact have been true that he had nothing to offer because he was emotionally empty/bankrupt and had no true affection for me, but it was never a matter of material exchange. I do recognize, then as now, that affection and emotional support, too, cost something – but it is a very different matter.)

But no, he never cared at all unless he had done something directly to upset me, recognized it and somehow had to make amends quickly to set things back into balance (i.e., to keep the engine of getting what he wanted running).

At the end of the day, he could only be who he was. Me too. We might have pretended to be something or someone else. We might have pretended to feel something we did not feel (or deny feelings we did actually feel). But we could not keep it up forever.

the whole cake

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It strikes me every time I read something from several years ago how many repeated patterns there are in the lives of all the characters involved, including myself. It shouldn’t come as a surprise – I am a certain type of person, and despite changing my surroundings, approaches, and putting up solid boundaries when needed, it does not change the fact that I am the same person at my core, and the feelings with which I respond are essentially the same. It also does not change the kinds of people I encounter in my life, or the preferences my heart (or mind) seems to have. None of this is a value judgment – just observations about how fundamental, deep change is not easy or quick. If it happens at all, it happens like soil erosion – it is happening but isn’t visible to the naked eye or even perceptible for many years.

Autumn 2011 (?) – excerpts from an email

A weekend of major baking (1200 cookies for a PR event at work). I invited a young German assistant to come and help me.

Latest drama: Mal is convinced he is going to die, like a total hypochondriac, despite not actually having real symptoms of anything. All I could do was roll my eyes, even if I wanted to be sympathetic, because 1. what a total overreaction, 2. go to the fucking doctor if you are so scared, 3. he was sooooooo unsympathetic when I had my own much more realistic health scare not long ago and has not been sympathetic or understanding when I have told him about the actual health problems I faced. Eventually he saw a doctor who told him that his symptoms were imagined/psychosomatic. Being the dramatic manipulator he is, he uses even fake health crises to milk what benefit he can get from them. He told me he feels he has had a “near-death experience” now. Oh my god. Seriously. Until they are cutting your balls off and shooting radiation into some part of your body, don’t even talk to me about near-death. He apparently told a mutual acquaintance that if he had been diagnosed with something terminal, he would immediately pack up and move here, as if he had been invited to die at my house. At some point he told me the same thing, imagining I would be flattered that he would choose me as nurse and caretaker for his final days?! Me, being the cynic always believing the worst in people like him, I said, “Oh why… better free medical care in Sweden?” He got offended and said, “No! To spend my last days somewhere beautiful with someone who really cares about me.” I guess that is a nicer sentiment, but note that it is always about who cares about him, what he can get out of it and not about for whom he cares or some kind of mutual care or respect.

Of course I am not supposed to be talking to him at all since my deadline for getting rid of him was September 30. It really had become such a chore and difficulty that I literally had to give myself a deadline. It is beyond difficult to just cut someone off, even someone so destructive and selfish. I have put a lot of distance between us, causing him to call me a “frosty fucker” the other day (haha). I enjoyed being called a frosty fucker so much that I just had to repeat it. It has grown easier, though, because I’ve been working and dashing constantly from place to place – Oslo, Trondheim, New York, Seattle, Stockholm, and will be right up until the end of the year, meaning there is no time to mess around with his nonsense, inconsistency, excuses and bullshit. I sometimes find myself in the position of sort of missing him when we are out of touch for a while, but as soon as I talk to him again, listening to his stupid excuses and bullshit-filled banter, I am back to wanting to forget that this summer happened at all…

Actually being around R (the dentist), I was just struck again, hard, by the realization that it is just so easy to get worn down into a pattern with some people (ML) where you accept and think something, some pathetic behavior, is okay or even normal, which it totally is not. R is open, funny, generous, warm … he barely knows me but he invited me to stay in his house during this extensive dental treatment. We had some great conversations and even greater laughs… and you know, he did not have to do any of that – I was not his friend, but his sister’s, but he still did. I like to think I am a lot like that most of the time. I am not a taker, so when I am taking (like from R this past week), I am extremely grateful and gracious, offer to help in any way I can, offer whatever I have (in this case, I brought a shitload of cookies to him). I just don’t understand people who can take and take and barely register that it might require a thank you.

I was telling R about this situation with Mal, and he laughed and said, “It sounds like an indie movie… full of unknown actors.” It made me think… maybe I should write a screenplay or something out of this ridiculous summer. Then I would at least feel like I walked away with something.

These days, after this stupid summer entanglement and its idleness, I am oddly contemplative/reflective on what it is I really want to do in life… ever since Steve Jobs died the other day and I re-watched his Stanford commencement speech about death (or threat of it) being the best catalyst for taking action in life. Do I want to write product sheets about the Android OS for the rest of my life? No. The last thing I want is a routine life.

…And then on compatibility, with your husband and with people in general. I understand what you are saying about choosing the “right qualities” when you decided to be with him… his stability and some of the more fundamental things. Yes, you might have liked to have been with someone who wants long, deep conversations and shared literary interests, but it is rare (if possible at all) to get a whole package. Isn’t it a matter of what is most important – and how you can get by and relate in the day to day? And I guess, as we may have discussed before, you can get some of the more in-depth conversational needs taken care of with close friends, even if it is still not quite the same thing.

And if love is important – or what makes you feel loved, rather – I just talked to my German assistant about this. She is young, so inexperienced. She asked whether she should wait around for someone if she is in love with them and they just don’t respond to her in kind. I assumed she was talking about Mal (and if she wasn’t, that means she has gotten herself into yet another unhealthy situation with someone else), and it made me so intensely sad for her to know that she KNOWS it is not going to change. She is just an accessory and a “safety/back up” for him. It is not that he does not care at all about her, but that he cares more about himself. Obviously. He is always going to give her a few crumbs to keep her hanging on but will never give her the whole cake, so to speak. To which I almost screamed, “Don’t settle for stale crumbs. Wait for – and accept – only the whole cake.”

a full deck & bad metaphors

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Later this month, I will already have lived in my house for seven years, which feels impossible. Coupled with the two years before that that I lived in Norway, I have already been in Norway/Sweden for longer than the entire period I spent living in Iceland, but somehow the Iceland period felt so much longer. How is it that I so often feel like I just got to Sweden, when in fact I have been there for ages – almost the longest I have been in one place since adulthood began?

On an entirely different note, it’s strange how people’s personalities and realities unfold to others with time.We might really connect with someone immediately when we meet them, and this can (partly) stymie our ability to really see them – to see the full deck of cards fanned out rather than being dazzled by a few face cards, hiding all the trumps and jokers. Or at least we don’t know that a couple of cards are missing at first. We will see them later. Not intentional hiding, of course – it is just, you know, a full deck of cards has a lot of cards. You’re not going to see every card right away. The most forthright, honest and open person still is not going to have an opportunity or reason to share every single thing immediately – some things they would never even think to share, other things don’t come up until something triggers them. And then it is a whole new hand dealt each time.

I don’t at all doubt the reality of instant reactions to people we meet – like the instant hatred/dislike, the instant connection with someone remarkable (this does not need to be romantic), the love at first sight, the whatever-inexplicable-alchemy that makes people click. But I also do not doubt – and do appreciate – the occasional feet-on-ground reminders of why, despite my love for spontaneous action, we should not jump in and do mad things and make mad declarations too soon. For someone like me, that temptation is great at times. I have tiny, split-second misfirings in the brain sometimes, admiring people for doing things like meeting and getting married in a week (or thinking how fun it would be to go to work on a Monday, announcing with no fanfare at all that I had gotten married or something similarly dramatic, after having had no plan to do so on the previous Friday). But I have also seen these pseudo-admirable risks fail on a grand and destructive scale (of course they do!) and have been around the block enough times to know that it’s a monumentally bad idea. Particularly if you’re going with this blind, trusting-the-gut, instant ramen feeling (you know, it’s warm, it’s filling, it’s quick and sort of delicious for a few bites. But it cools off and kind of congeals, starts to taste unpleasant, oversalted and then just toxic. Bad idea. Unhealthy. Just like an instant wedding! I used wedding/marriage because it is the most instant and dramatic thing I can think of that involves following the heart over the logical mind but there are undoubtedly other things… buying big-ticket items, moving to another country without thinking it through?).

I quickly return to my senses; I have never bothered to gamble.

Photo (c) 2012 Ivette de la Garza

dashed

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The major purpose for my Gothenburg visit – Steve Mason concert – was canceled, along with his entire European tour. Hmm. Oh well. I really want to go to more live shows but looking at the upcoming music schedule (particularly for the nearer Oslo), it’s pretty pathetic. Bryan Adams, anyone? Ugh.

I found some notes I wrote ages ago, a few years after I had moved to Iceland. I look at it now and ask myself, “But at what point did I cease to be a tourist?” And that has different answers – there was probably a time that I no longer felt like a tourist, a point when I was legally no longer a tourist and a point when Icelanders begrudgingly no longer considered me a tourist (even if, despite having Icelandic citizenship slapped onto my forehead, I would never be a native, a local or anything more than a “paper Icelander”).

I can only imagine what Iceland is like now, overrun by hordes of tourists as it has been the last two or three years. Summers were always rich with them, but recent years have become seemingly unbearable if I am to believe media accounts. If I had issues dealing with the few I encountered in 2001 or 2002 (see my judgmental nature on display below), what would I think now?

“At last writing I mentioned that most people don’t come to Iceland, so they don’t understand why I like it nor indeed why anyone would choose to live here. However, having been a tourist here myself once, I am well aware, as any resident of Iceland is, that there is in fact a large contingent of tourists who do find their way here each year. Naturally I cannot characterize ALL tourists who come to Iceland because some of them blend in with the scenery, both innocuous and semi-chameleonic. The majority, though, observe a sort of tourist credo: let’s make ourselves as obvious as we possibly can. Of course this is not just the case in Iceland. Tourists are like this everywhere you go, but there are some unique aspects to the tourists who come to Iceland. Where else do you see couples adorned in bright, matching winter gear in the middle of summer, perhaps even carrying something like a walking stick, or worse yet, an ice ax, on their initial stroll down Laugavegur, the main shopping street in the city? One afternoon I saw a couple wearing matching, elaborately embroidered jackets with “New Zealand” stitched on them. Who could forget the lovely groups of tourists wearing lederhosen and thick, woolen socks pulled up to the knees?

Although these tourists stand out like a sore thumb to the naked eye, there are always the tourists who manage to be even more obnoxious. (They usually tend to be American, I should add).

At one of Iceland’s two Indian restaurants*, Shalimar, two older American tourists came in and the woman announced loudly, “We’re back!” The husband, quiet and subservient, cowered as his wife asked the proprietor what was being served that day. She ordered for both of them, getting wine for herself and insisting on water for her husband. “Yes, dear,” he humbly mumbled, as if he had an alternative. Talking to no one in particular, as she wandered away from the counter to choose a table, she exclaimed, “This is beautiful!” Through her Coke-bottle glasses and mop of mousy grey hair, she trudged toward her chosen table in squeaky bright turquoise rain boots. As she and her husband sat down (far too close to me for comfort), she practically yelled, “This is such a sweet place!” What followed was hideous, “Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. This is delicious. Mmm. Mmm.” With every bite there came an emphatic “mmm” accompanied by some unabashed lip smacking. “Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Good. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Ah.” When one of the servers brought her some naan bread, she used her one word of Icelandic, not once but twice, “Taaaaaaaak. Taaaaaak.” Soon she was slurping, excitedly, as she resumed, “Mmm. Mmm.” And with that I finally had to leave.

Speaking of the use of “takk”, since tourists are quite proud of having mastered this useful word, I have sometimes found myself sitting in Café Paris, which is almost always filled with tourists. One can invariably observe the diligent tourist with a Lonely Planet Guide to Iceland and Greenland as well as several maps littering his/her table. On occasion, two such tourists will be drinking or dining and suddenly their eyes will meet, they will smile at each other, and often conversation (loud, of course) ensues. One day I heard an American woman and an Australian man discussing their own experiences in Iceland at length. Until finally, the woman decided it was time to be on her way and paid her bill, exclaiming, “TAAAAAAAAAAAAAK” (always far too much emphasis on the “a”) before leaving and wishing the Australian “un bon voyage”.

Another time when I had the misfortune of agreeing to meet with someone at the Dubliner (not my sort of venue), I waited there while an American woman sat at the bar spouting her expertise on “all things tourist”. She informed everyone at the bar (and indeed anyone within hearing range) that, “Americans have ruined Mexico. Damn tourists completely ruined it.” I very much wanted to approach her and say, “Yes, tourists like you…” However, that would have been both rude and would have drawn attention to myself. And unlike tourists as a whole, I don’t care to draw attention to myself. This is, I guess, the point and the best part of observing tourism in action. You can learn so much about people and their personal lives, not only because they are so loud but also because, quite often, tourists bond with other tourists and share personal details across crowded cafés. Indeed you also learn why people wanted to come to Iceland in the first place, and their reasons are as diverse as the tourists are loud.”

*I believe there are more now, but back then there was only the veteran Austur India Fjelagid and the upstart Shalimar, technically Pakistani, not Indian.

Photo (c) 2013 Terry Feuerborn.