Getting a hair cut shouldn't be this difficult.

Alright, this is embarrassing, but definitely more frustrating. I spent two hours today writing the longest blog post I've ever written. It was great, I was real happy with it. I go to click publish and it sends me to a screen that says Error 404 and my post is gone. I cursed loudly. I slammed my desk. I punched my bed (walls are too hard, I like punching soft things). Over 1500 words gone forever, into the wind. But I still need to write today, because it's the last time I likely will for a few weeks. So here is my effort to try and recreate what I had written, and it will be shorter. Here goes nothing...

Ever since I've had hair, there's been one constant in my life. There was one woman that stuck by my side through thick and thin, fads, trends, and phases of all sorts. Her name is Claudia. Her hands are thin and delicate, yet strong. Claudia has been the only lady cutting my hair my whole life, except for a few flings with other women that were all one night stands and never brought the same satisfaction. She was always willing to look over these brief lapses of loyalty and always serviced my hair needs. But I can't go four months without a haircut. Some people can, I can't. Others can just buzz their head and it looks good, I can't. Something about having large ears and a very prominent widow's peak that makes a buzz a last resort option. By now, I've been in Denmark for two months, and my hair was getting to be pretty ridiculous. My hair doesn't grow long really, get a little curly, and get a nice flow. My hair is ultra thick, and just gets big. It's like a straight haired afro. To sum this all up, I can't have real short hair or real long hair, so I need to actually get pretty frequent haircuts. It was about that time last week. Friday was the day I decided to make it happen. I had been scouting places to go for awhile, trying to find the right combination of cost and quality. There was the Copenhagen school of hair and shit (that's just the technical term, the kids call it CSHS). It was real cheap, even by American standards. But do I really want to put something as important as my striking good looks in the hands of a high school drop out who was sick of working at Burger King and decided "Hey, I like hair and make up and stuff, I'll go to cosmetology school!" The answer is an obvious no. There was a real nice place down the street from CSHS, it looked like some real pros working the scissors in this joint. But this place cost like 300 kroner, and I was not paying over $50 for a haircut. I found this other place which seemed like a pretty good in between. It was just a Middle Eastern, middle aged couple running it. It was real small and cheap, but they seemed like they could give a good cut. I wasn't quite sure though. You need a certain element of trust with your hair dresser. There has to be chemistry. Claudia and I had that, so trying to find a decent hair cut in Denmark proved to be an arduous task. I decided on the last option. They spoke basically no English. I didn't think of this at the time, but maybe it wasn't a great idea to get a hair cut at a place where your only methods of communication are hand signals and the few mutually understood words that they possess in their very limited. Once in the chair we were able to settle on what they were gonna do to me. "Machine side, scissors top, just make it look good." That last part was my downfall. I didn't want to watch. I was borderline sweating, just real nervous. The end result was essentially a crew cut with really long flared bangs. It looks incredibly Danish, but terrible on me. I Skyped my mom tonight and was immediately told to cut my bans. I look kind of ridiculous. Claudia would have done me better. Claudia would have done me perfect. Random Middle Eastern lady in Roskilde, Denmark did me poorly. My hair might have a date with the clippers soon. All pictures have been confiscated and burned.


This weekend, most of my friends in my kollegium went on the booze cruise to Oslo. I already did this, so I was back in Denmark with a few friends. Saturday we decided to go into Malmo in southern Sweden. It's only like a 20 minute train ride from Copenhagen, so it's real easy. This 20 minute train ride wasn't smooth though. We forgot (OK, it was my fault) to buy tickets since we have all zones passes, so we just got on the train without a ticket. We narrowly avoided that 750 kroner ticket on the train by playing the ignorant American students card. That works a lot in Europe I've noticed. Upon our arrival into Sweden, my leg was starting to feel a little cramped. I didn't think anything of it, so we just kept on walking for about two miles. We ate lunch around noon, and when we got up, my lower leg completely locked up and I couldn't walk. I got to a park bench to check out my leg. I could barely even pull my pant leg up since my leg was so swollen. My entire lower leg is hot, swollen, and red, and there's a bite mark looking thing in the middle of my calf. The only diagnosis I could think of is a spider bite, especially because it actually looks like a bite. Luckily one of my friends had Benedryl, so I popped one of those and chilled for an hour or so. After this wait, my leg loosened up a bit and we were able to walk back to the train station to call the day early on account of a mystery leg wound. I've been taking Benedryl today to keep my leg loose, but I am absolutely going to the doctor tomorrow to get this checked out. I feel like that would definitely be the medically advisable reaction to this situation. Maybe if I'm lucky I will have to get it amputated, then I can get prosthetic limb and people could call me Peg Leg Pete! That would be the best result of this predicament.


I watched the entire first season of Community in 26 hours this weekend, and that includes sleeping, eating, and time spent out drinking. It is a fantastic show, I haven't been this hooked on a show since Weeds. I was more hooked after one episode of Community than I was after one episode of Breaking Bad, and that's saying something. But I literally did nothing by lay in my bed and watch this show all weekend. I was a bonafide couch potato, and it was awesome. I mean, I could have been productive and done homework, read, or file a police report about my stolen pink lady's model bike, but none of those options are funny. Community is so hilarious, yet incredibly deep and emotional. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. On a scale of 1-10, I'd give it 8.94 spankings.


This is going to be my last post for a few weeks unfortunately. I leave for a two week vacation from heaven on Thursday night. Four nights in Amsterdam for Halloween weekend, four nights in Paris, three in Barcelona, and four more in Prague may be the craziest/most expensive two weeks of my life, but I won't ever be able to do this again in my life in all likelihood, so I will definitely be living in all senses of the word. But it is going to get in the way of me blogging for that period. I probably won't write one before Thursday either, as I got lots and lots of shit to take care of before I go. I got ducks on ducks on ducks to get in a row. Hopefully I'll write a giant report of my trip when I get back, the only problem will be determining what is appropriate for this forum. But it's about time to watch the Vikes get slaughtered. But I'm gonna man up anyway and watch. The Minnesota sports scene is sad to have allegiances with this day and age. So instead of posting music this time around, I'm gonna cheer up all those Vikings fans out there with a little reminiscence. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE8sJI7PxQU

I'll talk to ya later.

Not sure why I'm up and chipper and 7:30am on a Saturday morning, but ain't nothin wrong with starting the day with a run, a cup of coffee, and a post

The creative world can sometimes be a cruel mistress. You gotta draw the line between trying to please the public and staying true to your art. While I am not an artist myself (except when I'm trying to stay awake during a lecture), I do get attached to work that a group member produces. I always have ideas, but the physical display of the idea isn't my strong suit. Luckily for minds like me, there are artists in the world. To give a little background, we have a project in my Creative Industries class where we have to design the t-shirt for DIS (our study abroad program). It has to say DIS on it somewhere and has to be symbolic of Copenhagen. We got lucky and got a very talented photoshop guy in our group, and through a little brain storm sesh this is the design that came out in the end. Pretty sick, right? Jeff (the artist) did an awesome job on the design if you ask me. Got the hip, urban hat on the very contemporary portrayal of a Danish elephant with a Danish flag (elephants are big here, not sure why but they are everywhere). But we had a focus group anyway to discuss our design to see if we could make any tweaks to make it better. To put it bluntly, we got roasted in this group. They all hated the design. The hat is dumb, the elephant looks stupid, why would you make a black t-shirt, rabblerabblerabble. There wasn't much positive feedback on our work. We talked about improving it for awhile afterwards, and we came to the conclusion that we can make a few adjustments to make it more popular, but we are sticking with what design we like and not selling out our design because a small sample size didn't like it. Outside of the focus group, we have gotten nothing but positive feedback for the design, and we feel pretty confident that our design is going to win just because it's so cool (in my ever so humble opinion). I'm not sure if this strategy is going to pay off, but we are going to take the Punk Royal route here and stick with what we think is best. Hopefully this doesn't crash and burn like that route sometimes tends to do, and maybe the mistress will be kind this time.

If anyone has any feedback on the design, I would love to hear it. We still have a few days before it has to be finalized. Afterwards I need to find another project I can work on that will keep me working, since as you can imagine, a study abroad workload isn't really enough to keep me busy. I'll take any suggestions. Otherwise I'm going to spend the next two weeks applying for internships and writing an incessant amount of cover letters, and that doesn't sound quite as much fun.

On a completely unrelated note, I have wasted approximately an entire week (give or take) listening to Stuff You Should Know podcasts. "Wasted" probably isn't the best word to use, but I feel like "spent" wasn't strong enough. There's gotta be a middle ground between there. But I can proudly say I know everything there is to know about the Underground Railroad, Amelia Earhart, memory, parallel evolution, quantum suicide, Ponzi schemes, moonshine, Friday the 13th, scientists who use themselves as guinea pigs, microloans, and Jack the Ripper. What better way to spend your time than learning? Besides learning about things that are actually relevant, I mean. I highly recommend checking it out, it's got my stamp of approval.



If you don't like being sad, don't click this link. The state of popular music is depressing.



When shuffle treats you right: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOXG8wtxx_w. Thank you, iTunes.


That is all.

London Part II

I've had a few days to reflect on my week and get some perspective on it. I wrote down a list of things I wanted to talk about in this blog awhile back, but I may have lost the booklet, so I'm going to have to go off my memory here, which is notoriously unreliable. I will do what I can.

So picking up where I left off, I woke up the next morning after the adventure at like 8am, which was nice because I got a whole 6 hours of sleep. This was my most eventful story of the week. Most of the rest of it consisted of getting up really early to do academic/tourist visits after a night out on the town. The cumulative exhaustion from five consecutive nights of no sleep definitely KO-ed me when I got back Friday at 3am. It was a real deep recovery slumber. But there were a few other notable points from my trip.

I hadn't had a real high fructose corn syrup Mountain Dew in like two months, so when I saw they had them in London, I went a little bananas. Oh sweet syrupy goodness, how I missed thee. Not only did they have real Dew, they had Chipotle. One of like two non-US Chipotles in the entire world, and it was in my city. Needless to say I ate five burritos in five days. I want to say phenomenal, but it might not do it justice. It was identical in flavor, but the satisfaction of eating that first burrito in months was not comparable to most other pleasures I've had in my lifetime. It was a surreal moment. As you can see, I'm a big proponent of burritos.

This leads me to another point. England is the exact same as America. They speak the language, they have all same fast food, they do high fructose corn syrup instead of sugar like the rest of Europe does, they aren't on the Euro (other countries aren't either, but the pound isn't even linked to the Euro like other country's currencies are like the Danish kroner and the Polish zloty), and they are all fat. The only thing that is different is there awesome accents (which are actually 100% sexy) and they drive on the wrong side of the road, which caused many near death experiences crossing the roads. But when you go to London, everything seems so American. We took a train to Wimbledon for an academic visit, and I thought I was in north side Chicago. Unless you go to a super British futbol pub, which I never went to because they are actually rather intimidating, the place is America. In my eyes, it reaffirmed the choice to study in Copenhagen rather than London. The cultural differences between home and London isn't significant at all, and I am really happy I am getting exposure to such a different culture.

But even a better affirmation tool of choice of home abroad is the SCIENTIFIC FACT that British people are ugly and Scandinavians are gorgeous. It is so noticeable in even a casual walk down a street. The beautiful women in London were few and far between, whereas in Denmark they are everywhere.

As I said, I lost my notes, so this is all I can remember for now. I feel much dissonance, I know I had lots more to say. Oh well.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c6KeQmXnEw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcjoGn6FLwI

London Part Uno

Alright, I'm not done with my London trip yet, but I feel like I am gonna have a lot of shit to write, so I'm doing a two part entry about this. I've been jotting down reminders about topics to write about while not paying attention in boring business meetings at various bank headquarters, so this oughta be a pretty detailed summary of my trip.

Let me start out by saying London is a gigantic city. It's overwhelmingly large. It's crowded, loud, and everyone is always in a hurry. I can feel myself becoming more of an impatient asshole every day. It's not good for me. That being said, it is beautiful and quite fun. There is just so much history. This town is 2000 years old (holy smokes!). The London Eye is incredible, especially at night. I got pictures, so you can check Facebook if you care at all.

The first night we were here was low key. We had to spend 2 hours in customs, so we were late to dinner. Everyone was shot so we just hit the hay pretty early. The next day we had some boring business obligations in the morning before going to the British Museum. That museum is so cool. I could have spent a week in there. In fact, if I ever come back I might bring a tent and a sleeping bag and just camp inside. After the museum, a nap was definitely in order, so I took a mini coma for a few hours. We reconvened after nap time to start hanging out as a group. As we were leaving to go out, and I saw this girl running back up the stairs. I asked her what she was doing and she told me she was going to grab something from her room quick and check on some other girls. Obviously, being the chivalrous stallion that I am (I got jokes), I offered to wait for her. Apparently when girls say two minutes it often means that they aren't actually coming out at all and are going to bed. So after 10 minutes of waiting I just said screw it, I'm catching up with the group. So I needed to jog to find my group. Oh, quick disclaimer, I'm not 100% sober. So I jog to the tube station, but obviously I took a wrong turn. One wrong turn leads to another wrong turn which leads to another wrong turn which leads to "holy shit, I am completely and utterly lost in London alone with no map". I decide to try and figure this out myself to avoid a costly cab fare or expensive international phone rates. This gets me even more lost, and I find myself in some sketchy neighborhood. A car driving by was rare, and a passerby even harder to come by. This propels me to decided to suck it up and give some girls a call to help me out, which is a big step for me. They grabbed a map and told me to find my cross streets. When telling someone where you are, "how the hell did you get that far away?" isn't a very reassuring thing to hear as a first reaction. So they pinpointed my location and we started walking towards each other, or at least trying. After I hang up, I hear some British guys behind me.

"Hey American!"

I turn around and just respond with a "Yo, what's up?"

"Hey come here and talk to us!"

"Nah, I'm good, what's up?"

"No, come here and talk to us!"

"Nah, what's up?"

"Just come here!"

So I keep walking, but a bit more briskly. They start walking with a bit more pace as well. I get to a corner and just turn around the corner. Once out of there sight, I just run. I get to the next corner, get around it and peak back. They legitimately ran after me. They looked around the corner trying to find me. So at this point I am frantic, I just book it. I dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge around a few more corners and then wait to see if they are still following, phone in hand ready to call the cops. After a few minutes, there was no sign of them, so I figured I would be OK. I'm real rattled at this point, because not only am I afraid, alone, and map-less, but I just presumably almost got mugged. I don't even want to go out anymore, I just want to be back in my hotel, plugged into Miles Davis, and doing some real slumberin'. After wandering around for another hour or so, I am finally able to meet up with my search & rescue party. It took about 20 more minutes to get back to the hotel. I pass out immediately. The worst thing is that not only did I get lost in London and have an absolutely terrible night, but I still didn't get any sleep because I was out in the London wilderness so late. I had a 3 hour bike tour that started at 9am. Then I had to sit in a bank meeting, and as much as I love scumbag investment bankers preaching me basics about the global economy (/sarcasm), it was really not what I was trying be doing at this particular point in time. So that is my story of my first night out in London. I have lots more to come, but I have to run to dinner right now and go to the Lion King musical. And then I'm going out, with a group this time. I've had a my fill of flying solo. Adios, friends, I will write more on Saturday.