A less nice thing about Scandinavia, or at least a not-nice thing about Copenhagen the party town: public urination is fairly common. Not just late at night, but all hours of the day. And public urinators are always surly, and are always looking around as if trying to make eye contact simply in order to glare at you for looking at them while they are publicly urinating. (While bagging on Scandinavia and Denmark in particular: everybody smokes, and parents are careful to smoke in close proximity to their infant children (possibly why Denmark has the highest health care expenditures but second-lowest life expectancy in the EU smoking; a serious lack of vegetarian options (also a health care factor?); sky-high prices, including for food (come on, get some illegal immigrant labor already); terrible retail opportunities.)

On a related note, at the corporate relay race in the park back in September, I noticed an innovative new form of porta-potty. It consists of four quadrants around a central shaft. Each quadrant is big enough for one person, has a teeny bit of divider on each side, and has a groin-sized hole at waist level. (23 Oct 2003: Roger Lai has a picture of one in London.) Its use consists of a man standing right against the central pillar, unzipping, and taking care of business. While it does provide the service of obscuring direct view of skin, it expresses what I find to be a deeply alien interpretation of the bodily function taboo.

Almost all bodily emissions are publicly taboo - it's easier to list the exceptions. Only a few are at all permissable in public - sneezing, coughing, crying, bleeding. The first two aren't inherently private, but carry the stigma of infection and so are rude, at least, when conducted in proximity to others. Crying is cause for embarrasement, and bleeding for alarm, and both are acceptable perhaps only to the extent that they are involuntary.

And it's not the actual excreta that is the focus of the taboo. It's the idea that the entire person is engaged in a private activity, one that is not shared with others. So there's not a zone or region on the body, like "the upper half" or "everything within a meter of the hole in question," that must be shielded from view. The whole body must be invisible - not just blurred like a mob fugitive on a talk show, but made indistinct in form and action. There must not be any definite indicator, in sight or sound or, to the extent possible, in smell, of the person's exact action. This, to me, is the essence of the bodily function taboo, and while I abhore certain other of my inculcated cultural inhibitions I'm quite comfortable leaving this one unchallenged. So the quad-unit huddle-and-pee unit, while smaller and more efficient than the traditional enclosure, remains bewildering to me.

Somehow, without really thinking about it, I realize each Friday around sundown that I'm lighting candles. No prayers or anything, I just think it would be cool to have candles and then I buy some and I get some holders and one night I get home late and another very late but one night I get home right at dusk and light the candles and that night just happens, by chance, to be Friday night. Three weeks in a row. Also by coincidence, after seeing some more cool cheap candles at IKEA, I now have one huge candle in the middle and four smaller ones to either side, each in their own candle stand.

I spent last Saturday like I spend every Saturday, going out to IKEA to furnish my new apartment. This time I bicycled, detouring up the coast a bit, through Hellerup, which is growing on me as a sort of smaller, colder, more expensive Venice Beach Main Street, from Abbot Kinney to about the Gehry studio, and without the street life, and then back inland and around almost in circles, because my Cartesian navigation sense continues to betray me in triangle-based cities. I get lost routinely in San Diego as well. China was so chaotic that it was never an issue. In any event, I picked up the last few things for my apartment, including a tall, narrow little kitchen table thing for breakfast, a stool that's too tall for the table even at its lowest setting, a rug and chandelier for the multipurpose room, and a Bright Light HF 3305. Since this wouldn't all go on my bicycle, I shelled out 230 crowns for a ride back in a van. On the approach to my street, the driver explained what the people sitting at the entrance to Christiania all the time as if waiting to meet people are doing - they are full-time police watchouts. Great. With the exception of two metal washers to permanently mount the shower head unit, I believe I have finished my nesting. My new apartment, with one-year lease, is the most permanent residence I've had since the day in August 2001 when I woke up, showered, packed my bedding into a cardboard box, called Steve, packed up the phone, carried out the box, a backpack, and two duffels to the lobby, handed in my keys, and headed to the airport and thence to Beijing to start Phase Two of my adult life. It's nice to have a home again.

The Bright Light HF 3005 is a curved plastic thing, about two feet high and a foot wide, as bright as an overcast sky. The idea behind the Bright Light is that you stare into it, or at least put it in your peripheral vision, for half an hour (less than a foot away) to two hours (a yard away) every morning. If you are suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder, this fixes your brain. After barely surviving the end of last winter in Seattle, I figured I should get a head start on these things, and also avoid the leaky-roof problem: when it's sunny, I don't need it, and when it's gloomy, I'm too depressed to go spend that much money. So, while at about US$300 for some light bulbs in a sturdy plastic case it's clearly priced to transfer wealth from the insured to Philips rather than as a consumer product, I still think it's a good purchase. After two days I'm still grumpy as ever, but it does say "two weeks" to have an effect, so I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile I have posted some photos from my binge with Lars' digital camera, include one of the wiring problem (thanks for the tips! For now I've given up on the overhead switch per se and have rigged a wire from a switched outlet adjacent to the useless overhead switch (not to be confused with the switched outlet on the opposite wall that concerns wires C and D)).