How to buy an apartment in 10 days

 

Note: This post introduces three new blog characters, all of whom are also my dear colleagues and friends and were mentioned in some of the previous posts. I thought they deserve their unique nicknames in the blog.

Sister Ladybug is Maria Astefanoaei, because her presence always gives me joy just like the times I encounter ladybugs. There are exceptions to this, though, like windy days on a Danish beach, for ladybugs not for Maria.

Sister Owl is Zoi Kaoudi, because she is one of the people I tend to go to when I need some wisdom.

Sister Cat is Veronika Cheplygina, because she loves cats. I know there are many cat people out there, but Veronika is simply the most deserving of this title.

 

 

Easter Sunday, April 5:

I received an email from my landlord asking me if I would find a painter for when I leave the house on June 16 or if he should find one and deduct it from the deposit.

And that is how I learned I was supposed to leave my apartment.

Taking the side of my landlord; it was true that my latest rental contract extension was till June 16.

Taking my side; since I moved there in February 2018, my landlord always extended my contract without any elaborate discussion, so I thought we will simply extend the contract again.

My side was wrong.

I wrote back asking him if I did something wrong or if he wanted to increase the rent. He said no to those replying within the same hour. I then asked him to give me more time as I wasn’t planning to find a new place since we didn’t say that our last extension was the absolute last one and finding something long-term in two months wasn’t very easy even without my usual unreasonable work schedule. He replied to that email a week later.

While waiting for his answer, I immediately wrote to some of the Teams channels at work asking for legal guidance, since my work network is my main network to reach out for this type of help. As far as I know, it isn’t easy to kick a renter out of a pre-90s apartment after two years, and I lived in my apartment for 8 years. Despite the Easter holidays, several people reached out for help, and I am grateful to them all, but especially to Morten Tychsen Clausen, Peter Sestoft, and Yvonne Dittrich who provided me with pointers for legal help.

 

My parents were with me during the Easter break, and we were having such a great time until the email that broke the mood for all. I took my parents to Davids Samling as we planned before the email, my mind occupied thinking about my options and angry with myself for making the mistake of not being more careful and trusting someone who has power over me.

After we got back from the museum, I booked an appointment with my bank for a mortgage discussion, as I decided that I am done with depending on landlords. A bank approval is a pre-requisite for not just buying a house but also making the estate agents take you seriously. There was one issue, though, the earliest date my bank gave me was on April 21, which was more than two weeks away.

I didn’t sleep at all that night.

 

Easter Monday, April 6:

I asked my parents if they would be up for checking out apartments in the area that are for sale. Some had open houses despite the Easter Monday. We saw three apartments. Even if they would be ok if push came to shove, none felt right.

 

Tuesday, April 7:

One suggestion on Teams was to contact the tenants’ organization in Denmark for legal support. Since the Easter holiday was over, I contacted them both via email (with detailed documents on my rental contracts) and over the phone. The lady on the phone said my case is registered, and an option is to go to court for this. Hearing this option, I got a bigger panic than the moment I realized that my landlord wants me out in two months. The trigger for this panic was I wasn’t sure how a court-case would look in my Danish citizenship application, which I will be eligible for next year. While I know that fighting for your rights shouldn’t be a bad thing in a citizenship application, given the rules of and the political discussion around that application, I also feel like I am supposed to be the Wonder Woman to be granted that citizenship.

To fight the panic, I went outside for a walk and cried for the first time since I received the first email from my landlord. (The next and last time I cried for this would be 8 days later when the owners of the apartment I wanted to buy accepted my offer.)

When I got back to my office, I canceled a work trip (Dagstuhl seminar) for the following week, as I couldn’t afford any work trips before I sorted this out. I then checked the bank appointment times again and saw that there was an opening for next morning, I guess someone cancelled their appointment (thank you very much whoever you are!). First time I felt a bit of hope about the situation.

 

Wednesday, April 8:

This wasn’t the first time I contacted my bank for house mortgage. The first time was in 2019, the dialog was high level, since I didn’t yet have enough savings. The second time was in 2023 and more serious as I could now pay the downpayment for the types of places I may want to buy; the expected amount is ~20% if you are a foreigner but could be more or less depending on how much the bank advisor looks down on you for not being Danish or if you pay one of those Danish companies like Bomae to negotiate with the bank on your behalf. The latter interaction contributed to the opening anecdote of Part 4 of the Navigating the World with a Turkish Passport posts. While I used that anecdote to make a joke in that post, let me be serious now: (1) That was a very uncomfortable interaction due to the blatant foreigner unfriendly behavior of the bank advisor, and (2) I thought the entire mortgage system was an abomination.

Well, as they say, “Third time is the charm.” The advisor I got this time was kind and a fellow Amager resident. And things were put into motion to approve me for the potential apartments I would be interested in buying.

The common advice while trying to get a mortgage is to talk to several banks and negotiate. I had neither the time nor the energy for this. Also, as far as my understanding of the Danish mortgage system goes, if you are paying the 20% downpayment and getting the fixed-rate mortgage anyway, the negotiation space is small. I may be mistaken.

 

I also had another apartment viewing that day. I informed my boss about the situation during our regular meeting, which is a walk & talk, and asked if we could walk in the direction of the apartment so I could head to the viewing after the meeting. (When we had our next meeting two weeks later, I could tell him that I bought something.)

Mom came with me to that apartment viewing. It was a place we both liked, but the estate agent showing the apartment said it was already sold. Why didn’t you let us know before we came all the way?

 

Friday, April 10:

Another apartment viewing with mom. I had high hopes for this one, but seeing it in person, I wasn’t sure anymore, as it required extra work after the move in, which isn’t something I am good at. I started feeling a bit desperate. Though, I felt lucky that I could take my mom with me again, as she basically devoured the place finding all sorts of issues, which I wouldn’t be able to do.

 

Saturday, April 11:

Parents left in the morning.

Sister Ladybug had extra tickets for the Big Thief concert and asked me if I would like to join her. I didn’t know the band, but I said yes. The concert was the first time in a week that I stopped thinking about my living situation. Their music was mellow and soothing, which helped. Plus, it was one of those awesome concert crowds, everyone was helpful and respectful enjoying the concert in unity.

 

Sunday, April 12:

Went to four open houses during the day. Really liked one of the apartments, which was ~5mins to my current one, on the market for a few days only. and having its first open house. There were a few parents looking for a place to buy for their children who were about to move to Copenhagen for their university education. These parents have been a common demographic at the open houses for the types of apartments I have been interested in.

In the evening, I received an email from my landlord asking if he could visit me next Saturday.

 

Monday, April 13:

Almost first thing in the morning, I gave an offer for the apartment I liked promising the price the owners asked for, since, once again, I neither had the time nor the energy for negotiation. The legal advisor the bank assigned to me said that they typically give a response in a day or so, and unless they do that, I should move onto other apartments as the market moves fast. So, I went to see three more apartments while waiting. I liked one of them, not as much as the one I gave the offer for, but great option as plan b.

 

Tuesday, April 14:

The estate agency took their sweet time preparing the official offer document. So, I lost a day because of them. I at least knew that I was the first person to give an offer, which in Denmark gives you the legal right for a counteroffer, if there are other offers for that apartment.

 

Wednesday, April 15:

My period started.

The legal advisor said that they shouldn’t make me wait longer. So, I told the estate agency that unless the owners got back to me today, I would give an offer to another apartment. Then, I went to see yet another apartment. All these apartment visits during the week meant I was running back & forth from/to work, which was physically draining and caused work to pile up.

When I got back to work from that viewing, I got the call from the estate agent informing me that the owners accepted my offer. I started crying. I wrote to my parents. Then, I went to Sister Owl’s office to share the news. We hugged as I cried a bit more.

 

Saturday, April 18:

Sister Cat kindly accepted to come to my place, so that I wasn’t alone when my landlord came.

The interaction with the landlord went well. He told me that his son will take over the apartment. I told him that I bought a place but my move in date is September, so I asked if he could extend my contract till October, and he agreed.

To be fair, my landlord has been overall a great landlord, except for the email he sent me on the Easter Sunday. If he had told me that the last extension was our last one, I would have acted accordingly. But maybe he didn’t know when his son would move there and wanted to keep his options open as well. Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore.

 

Sunday, April 19:

After the buyer’s agreement is signed for an apartment, both the seller and buyer have a few days where they are allowed to back-off. It is unlikely, as then you have to pay 1% of the house price. But abusing my overthinking abilities, I signed up for two more open houses, just in case, even though I no longer wanted to go see any apartments. While discussing this with Sister Owl over text, she told me, “being mentally cautious is enough.” So, I didn’t go. 

 

Monday, April 27:

The owners’ association of the apartment I bought sent me an email for my first amenities bill. I could now be really sure that the apartment was mine.

 

 

So, that is how I bought an apartment in 10 days or, depending on how you count, 3 years (since my 2^nd and more serious mortgage talk with the bank). My path to a 30-year mortgage can be an example case for Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. It was my extremely slow thinking process on the matter that helped me figure out how the system works in Denmark and what kind of place I want to buy. What are the essentials? What are nice to have? What are things I don’t care that much about? Then, when I actually had to buy a place, I could put the fast thinking in action executing the steps. I of course also got lucky with being able to move the bank appointment earlier and seeing a place that I actually liked.

 

I moved to my new place at the beginning of September. I don’t remember experiencing this kind of mental load before. I thought moving across the street would be easier, but when I moved across countries, I was also changing jobs, meaning I had a bit of a break in terms of heavy job duties. This move happened when my work was also happening at more than full speed.

I got two periods in the month of September; one starting the day after I received the keys for the new place and the other starting the day before I gave the keys back for my old place. I didn’t think this was the kind of synchronization I needed in my life, but this is what my body decided, and who am I to judge?

I wish I could tell you that I was melancholic when I left my old place for the last time. Instead, what I remember is experiencing cramps while waiting for my landlord to give him the keys and do the final inspection. I just wanted to be done and never see him again (still need to get my deposit back).

I loved my old place. It was a wonderful home, the second longest I lived in, after my first home. But it also stopped being a home when I received that email from my landlord on Easter Sunday. Just like my first home, which was university campus housing, stopped being a home once the university told my parents that they had to leave.

I will miss the ladybugs from the old place, though, haven’t seen any in my new place yet. The new place has uglier bugs in general.

 

The common phrase you hear from many during these times is “Everything happens for a reason.”

I had been dragging my feet to buy a place, because I loved my rental apartment and hate looking for apartments, and buying is a big commitment for a person who can’t even commit to a country. I checked apartments from time to time over the years, but I didn’t want to move to a place that would be worse (based on my own criteria) while increasing my monthly expenses. In January this year, after going to open houses for two apartments, I even wrote to Sister in Movies that I might die in my rental place in the end. Now, I own a place that I am happy with; it is equidistant to work and the beach. I don’t feel like I settled for something I don’t like due to pressure.

So, I welcome everyone who comes to me with “Everything happens for a reason.” I repeat it to myself during difficult times to put a positive spin on a bad or challenging situation. On the other hand, in early June, I also heard the following alternative phrase while watching Bad Sisters, said by the character Bibi Garvey: “Everything happens for a reason. Some patronizing fucker once said.”

Some things shouldn’t happen, no matter what the outcome turns out to be.  

 

For Grief - Past Lives

 

Note: While living in the US, and posting here more sporadically, I started a series of posts titled “Series & Films about/for Grief.” This is an addition to that series, but I decided to shorten the title as we can just as well include books and songs under this theme.

Warning: Don’t read if you don’t want any spoilers about Past Lives.

 

Earlier this month, I moved from one side of Amagerbrogade to another; I still have the same bus and metro stops and can walk from my old apartment to the new one in an almost straight line in ~5mins. This was in drastic contrast to my previous move, which was overseas and included a change of job and country. If I don’t count my childhood (that move was orchestrated by my parents) and the short-term work relocations (2-3 months internships & research visits), I now moved within the same city the same number of times as I moved across countries. I kept thinking about and comparing the different moves in my life throughout the month, and one thing that kept popping up in my mind was the final scene of Past Lives.

 

Past Lives is Celine Song’s first feature film and inspired by her own life. It follows Nora, who first emigrates to Canada from South Korea as a kid with her family and then emigrates to USA from Canada as a young adult. During the first emigration, Nora leaves behind her close childhood friend Hae Sung. Their lives reconnect when they start to have regular video calls with each other when Nora is in the US. After a while Nora decides to stop the video calls as she wants to focus on her life in the US rather than holding onto her past life. Years later, they meet again in New York. Nora is now married to an American, Arthur, but the deep connection between Nora and Hae Sung is still there.

Based on Nora and Hae Sung’s interactions, the natural thing to contemplate on, as Arthur does, is if Nora and Hae Sung are meant to be together. Is Arthur only the green-card-husband, while Hae Sung is the real romantic love story that should have happened instead? In parallel, the film introduces inyeon, a concept that is about fate and relationships between people and how one’s relationships from past lives influence the relationships at the present.

In the final scene, after Nora and Hae Sung separate from each other one more time, Nora breaks down into tears. Arthur comes and holds her as they go back to their apartment.

 

At the movie theater, I was in Grand and alone (+ the audience), I broke down together with Nora. I broke down not because of a “could have been love story”, but because of all the grief I carry due to the lives I left behind and the fatigue I accumulated due to the lives I had to rebuild. I thought that is exactly why Nora cries in that final scene, not because she prefers a life with Hae Sung over a life with Arthur.

Nora was born Na Young. She changed her name to Nora after moving to Canada. What was that like to be called something else and to look different from most other kids all of a sudden? What else did she (have to) let go of in addition to her name? What parts of her past life did she insist on keeping instead? What was the cost of that insistence? Why did she move to USA? …

In an older post, I referred to my decision to move to Denmark from USA quoting Cheryl Strayed’s “Be brave enough to break your own heart.” The implications of moving to a different country, being an expat, emigration … is almost violent even if you do the move willingly.

 

Before I conclude, I want to mention two more things that I really appreciate about Past Lives that have nothing to do with grief.

First, in a world that is full of romantic comedies that I cannot relate to, I appreciate Celine Song for showing a loving relationship that ends up in a Green Card marriage. The trigger for the marriages of most close friends of mine were residence permit matters; one spouse holding the kind of passport that allows the other to stay in the country. This doesn’t mean that these marriages aren’t based on love.

Second, Past Lives features maybe the most tender scene I have ever watched between two straight adult male characters. It is the scene Arthur and Hae Sung meet for the first time, both in love with the same woman, making their best effort to speak to each other using the other’s native language, being the complete opposite of an alpha male. I don’t know if this was the same in real life for Celine Song, but I appreciate her for writing this beautiful scene.

Vincent van Gogh

 

One day at work a colleague asked which art movements I like the most. I think we were talking about how good his daughter’s drawings were, but to be honest I don’t exactly remember what triggered that question.

I have neither been good at drawing nor had any strong interest in it. In contrast, I love painting things, but my style of painting boils down to chaotic mixing up of colors on anything (paper, vodka bottle, coffee cup …) without any purpose. I also love going to exhibitions of paintings, but I cannot claim to have a lot of knowledge or nerdiness in that kind of art. I do not have an education in art history. It was not covered as part of my school-education. I didn’t self-educate on this topic either, despite the many art history books we had at home inherited from my uncle after he passed away when I was a kid. His Nikos Kazantzakis books were more appealing.

So, when this colleague asked me the question about which art movements I like, my mind was blank. I was not even sure if could say “Oh, I love that painter X.”

Earlier this year, I discussed this with one of my cousins (technically, my mom’s cousin’s granddaughter, but she is a cousin to me), who now lives in Copenhagen and loves painting as a hobby. She brought up similar sentiments regarding the lack of art education we had. It seemed like the Europeans around us knew a lot about art, and we didn’t.

 

If I was asked that question today, I could have come up with, not an art movement, but at least a name; Vincent van Gogh. Every time my eyes water due to cold or wind outside and my vision gets distorted, the world starts looking like a Van Gogh painting.

Until I watched Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, the main thing I knew about Van Gogh was that he was a painter who at some point cut off his ear. (Again, I am uneducated in art.) 

In Nanette, Hannah Gadsby challenges the traditional narratives of male geniuses with one example being Vincent van Gogh. They argue that the reason we have his paintings today is not because of his mad male genius but because of the love and support Vincent’s brother Theo had for him, despite Vincent not being the easiest person to be around.  Once you acknowledge this fact, Vincent’s story/history becomes about love and not (only) about genius/talent/madness.

 

Two Saturdays ago, I had the chance to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam together with my dear academic sister, Danica. We were in the Netherlands for a PhD defense that place on Friday. This was technically the second time I visited the Van Gogh Museum, but I remember nothing of the exhibition from the first time besides briefly seeing some sunflowers. That time was for the SIGMOD 2019 conference reception, Danica was also there. But when you are in a conference crowd, you have people to talk to, so focusing on the paintings was difficult. When Danica and I were thinking about what to do for our post-defense Amsterdam trip that Saturday, I suggested doing the Van Gogh Museum properly this time, and she agreed.

After returning to Copenhagen from that trip, I rewatched Nanette. I am not a big fan of the word “masterpiece”, as I find it too grandiose, but if there is anything to label as a masterpiece, it would be Nanette.

 

Vincent van Gogh’s work and story are inspiring. He experimented with different techniques; he wasn’t afraid of changing and learning new things.  He painted the same things over and over but with different touches; was he trying to figure out the best way to do it or did he want to depict different angles to the same thing? He kept on painting despite the health and financial challenges; he kept on creating till his last day. And yes, he was difficult, but he was loved, which contributed to his creativity a lot more than we give it credit for.

 

What are the things you keep on doing despite all the challenges life throws at you to drop them?

In which areas of your life, you aren’t afraid to or you are motivated to try out new angles and learn new abilities even if it brings no financial gain?

Who do you keep on loving and supporting even when they are difficult? Who did you choose to stay away from instead?

Who are the people in your life who stayed with you and kept on loving you even after experiencing your difficult sides unlike others who chose to abandon you immediately after?

 

Have a nice autumn!

Watching Violence

 

In her first feature film, The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal managed to both make a faithful adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel of the same name and make the story her own. This achievement was in addition to her playing a range of notable female characters as an actress for years (my favorite is Eileen/Candy from The Deuce). As a result, one of the films I really looked forward to this year was The Bride!, her ambitious take on the story of The Bride of Frankenstein.

The Bride! was declared a misfire in many ways, which I don’t necessarily disagree with. If it wasn’t for its 80+ million-dollar budget (and financial loss), it could have been declared punk or experimental instead. Regardless, Gyllenhaal still managed to make the story her own, despite the crowded field of Frankenstein adaptations, and made some choices that are worth noting down. The choice I thought about the most after watching the film was the way the film depicted violence. Rather than brushing it off, the film’s main character, The Bride, acknowledges and puts weight on the violence inflicted by her or because of her actions.

 

In recent years, I have become more conscious of the violence I have been watching all my life as someone whose main hobby is watching stuff. It was long time coming, but the tipping point was watching The Sopranos for the first time in my 30s, even though I should also give credit to Game of Thrones (the TV show not the books) for this.

 

Being at home more during COVID days, I had more time on my hands. Rather than picking up baking bread like others seemed to be doing at the time, I decided it was time to finally watch Entourage and The Sopranos, two series I had never been super interested in watching but thought I should watch at some point due to both being cultural touchstones in their own right. In a way, this was like me doing my late homework.

By the time I got to the last season of The Sopranos, I thought I wouldn’t be able to finish this homework. I hit the limits of the amount of misogyny and violence I could stomach watching due to the show’s depiction of misogyny and violence amplifying with each season. People killing others due to receiving a homophobic slur from them, women being killed by men only to be forgotten, a closeted gay character finally deciding to leave his environment to be free to live his truth only to face one of the most brutal deaths in the show … The fake eating scenes, where characters aggressively use the fork on the pasta/ziti on their plates without eating anything, became the relief points.

I had to watch the first season of the L Word revival, where the characters discuss their issues via talking instead of killing, beating up, or psychologically manipulating each other, to wash away the lingering impact of the excessive misogyny/violence exposure after I was done with The Sopranos.

 

What if I had watched The Sopranos during the time it was aired with more time in between the episodes? Would it have been easier, even fun, to finish the show? In those days, I watched all sorts of things, mostly made by men, that aestheticized violence. I didn’t glorify it in my head but didn’t question or badly reacted to it either.

As I got older, my tolerance to watching (certain kinds of) violence got lower. In parallel, the scenes of violence became more mainstream as they moved from movies to TV.

 

I looked forward to the new Game of Thrones episodes like many others when the show aired. But Game of Thrones was also the first TV show that made me ask many times “Was this scene necessary?” There was even one episode that I thought I was going to puke in one of the scenes (Season 4 Episode 4 – Craster’s Keep scene) and paused it to take a break.

An argument for such scenes is that they follow the source material. Yet I don’t remember wanting to puke at any point while reading The Song of Ice & Fire series, and the scene I mentioned above was a creative choice made by the showrunners.

Another argument is that violence is part of our history and life. The Sopranos didn’t show anything that doesn’t happen in real life. Maybe that was why it was so hard for me to watch. But I don’t know how it was to watch for others who are fans of characters such as Tony Soprano, and his newer versions Don Draper (Mad Men) and Walter White (Breaking Bad).

 

Unlike The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or The Game of Thrones, Mad Men is one of my favorite TV shows. The show aired at the time I was in the early days of practicing my profession trying to find my place and voice among an army of boys/men. When people said, “this show is sexist”, I defended it for its depiction of sexism. For me, in those early days, watching the show was therapeutic because of its well-written female characters trying to make it among the Mad Men and through all the sexism. But then why did Don Draper have to be the show’s focus? Why did his story steal time from Peggy’s and Joan’s?

 

Does art become sexist, racist, homophobic for depicting sexism, racism, homophobia? Is it a matter of how the depiction is or how the characters inflicting it are treated?

When does depicting violence serve a purpose? Does it ever serve a purpose? Can it be an effective tool for depicting sexism, racism, homophobia? Or does it reinforce these things instead?

When/If depicting violence serves a purpose, when does it become “glorification”? Is that a matter of the perception of the viewer regardless of what the depiction intends?

 

My favorite genre is horror. I get catharsis from watching some of the horror films (e.g., Titane); they provide me with a cheap and intimate therapy experience, similar to Mad Men. Don’t we all need some tools to help us deal with both personal and this world’s horrors? Watching the news often feels more disturbing than any horror film I have ever watched. Plus, don’t many horror films/series/books offer smart political allegories?

I can give you a list of “favorite fight scenes.” At the top would be the scene from True Romance where Patricia Arquette is against a pre-Sopranos James Gandolfini. If it didn’t end the way it does, not sure if I would like that scene considering the amount of violence Arquette’s character, Alabama, endures. On the other hand, does it justify the violence she inflicts on Gandolfini’s character, Virgil, in return?  

In recent TV history, one of the characters I really enjoyed watching was Villanelle (Killing Eve). What makes Villanelle’s violence different from the one inflicted by any of the characters in The Sopranos? Is it because she isn’t fueled by misogyny? Am I more forgiving of women? Or is it just the rarity of watching an unapologetic woman who cannot be put in a box and is excellent at her job, which happens to be being an assassin?

John Wick films are a rare kind that put my mind in standby mode, and hence oddly help me relax, even though I acknowledge the excessive number of casualties that are in each of those films. In a recent podcast episode of Unspooled, the guest Jorma Taccone refers to a scene in the first John Wick film saying, “if they just cut to every single widow he has just made.” Does the ridiculousness of those scenes where John Wick is on binge-killing is the reason why my mind reacts less to them?

Similarly, none of the gory violence scenes in Terrifier 3 bother me as much as the scene where Sue is beating Elisabeth in The Substance. The Terrifier series is not really the type of horror I like, and I don’t intend to watch others in the series; the extremity of its violence makes it harder for me to take it seriously. On the other hand, The Substance is exactly the kind of horror movie I am interested in, body horror made by a female filmmaker. I understand the purpose of that beating scene, which is the reason why I take it more seriously, but I also wish that the movie kept that scene shorter. Does the extended duration of it help delivering its point better or does it turn into exploitation at that point?

 

It is also important to note down the alternative thoughtful and effective creative choices.

As mentioned in the beginning, The Bride! doesn’t accept casualties, unlike John Wick or most superhero films, and acknowledges the consequences of violence.

While still depicting a lot of violence and being a much grimmer show due to the subject matter, House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones spin-off, seems more careful about how and when it visualizes violence, especially violence toward women. It also seems to employ more female writers and directors behind the scenes. 

The first season of Jane Campion’s Top of The Lake has the topic of sexual assault engrained throughout its story without showing any scenes of it.

Paola Cortellesi’s C'è ancora domani switches to musical aesthetics and shows characters dancing rather than depicting violence during, what we clearly understand, the scenes of the lead character, Delia, being beaten by her husband.

Maybe more should think about such alternatives.

 

I know this is a heavily debated subject. I am not a film/TV scholar and don’t really have a thesis here, just my personal experience as someone who loves to watch things. I have no right to be didactic or claim high morals either; as mentioned above I do watch a range of things that include violence and love some of them. The best I can do is at least to question what I watch more carefully now and not simply accept scenes of violence for the sake of it.

 

Indfødsretsprøven

Study material for indfødsretsprøven.

There I was last Wednesday in a sports hall in Frederiksberg with many other foreigners, sitting on a chair that was not designed by Arne Jacobsen, behind a desk that was too high for my size and took the Danish citizenship test, indfødsretsprøven.

 

Indfødsretsprøven is one of the requirements for a Danish citizenship application. It is given twice a year composed of 45 multiple choice questions: 35 of them is from a reading/study material on Danish history, culture, politics, life … (243 pages long for this instance), 5 of them are from contemporary Danish news, and 5 of them are on Danish values. You have 45mins for it. To pass, you have to answer at least 36 out of 45 correctly, while also answering at least 4 out of 5 of the Danish value questions correctly. In the previous iteration of the exam, only 47.2% of the examiners passed.

 

The last three weekends in May, I spent at least half of my time studying for the test. Two of my ballpoint pens died in the process. My goal was to be done with all the reading by Sunday before the test, so that I have some time to do the previous tests (last 12 are available online) for practice.

When I sat down that Sunday morning to do a practice test, I was full of self-confidence based on carefully studying the reading material, my overall knowledge of the world history, and all the Danish books, TV, films, news I have consumed since I moved to Denmark. Up until the last part of the test, the 5 Danish value questions, that confidence stayed intact. Then, my body started experiencing something I wasn’t expecting. I did a second test, the same reaction. It was like receiving aggression.

After that second test, I found myself on the couch crying. (It was one of those Tori Amos Little Earthquakes moments.) I guess the baggage of decades of EU-Turkey relations was coming out of me, the person whose childhood aligned with the period Turkey tried entering EU the most. After that cry, I was able to emotionally detach and do the rest of the practice tests without issues.

 

The Danish values part of the exam primarily targets people who come from non-Western and Muslim-majority backgrounds, which includes me. According to some Danish politicians, we have higher chances of not aligning with Danish values (whatever that means), so that part of the test was introduced in 2021. Not sure how effective a test could be on this front, anyone can answer in opposition to what they believe to pass a test, but maybe I am being an arrogant academic here.

If you look at the questions, themes are violence against women, child brides, forced marriages, democratic values, press freedom, personal freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, … These are very important themes. All of them are worth a fight to me, and they have their roots from real-life events that aren’t all from the non-Western world. My reaction wasn’t to the themes; it was to the approach. Just like every previous interaction I had with EU(+Switzerland) trying to evaluate me (or my country), the approach felt top-down.

First, I did a couple of those questions wrong across the practice tests just because the question had a Danish word that I didn’t know. You are allowed to make only one mistake on that part of the exam, so this creates an extra stressful situation. I get that part of the exam is evaluating one’s Danish language skills as well, but if one gets a question wrong due to not knowing a word or phrase, does that mean that they have unacceptable values?

Then, in one of the practice tests, there was a question asking the age of sexual consent in Denmark. The options were 12, 15, and 18. The correct answer is 15. I didn’t really know Danish law on this point, and the study material doesn’t have it. Not sure if that makes me a terrible person. In Turkey, the answer is 18. I picked 15, though, while doing the practice test, just because I remembered the news from some years ago about a Danish politician, Jeppe Kofod, having at some point a relationship with a 15-year-old while he was 34,  which was not illegal but a point of discussion due to the age and power difference. But what if a person answers “18” to this? Does that make them someone with unacceptable values? Again, you are allowed to make only one mistake here.

Finally, there are also the questions of the sort “What is the ranking of Denmark when it comes to press freedom / democracy / LGBTQ+ rights / …?” or “What percentage of Danish population is against someone beating their wives?” You of course pick the highest rankings and percentages, respectively, for these, since “Denmark is a perfect land!”

 

Thankfully, in the test I took on Wednesday, there were no violence-related questions under “values” section. The two questions I want to note are:

(1) There was the question of whether a parent has the legal right to ask for meat that is slaughtered based on religious practices for their child in kindergarten. While the answer is “no” to this, based on friends and colleagues with children in Denmark, I know that some schools try to be accommodating for the different dietary preferences and restrictions these days, which I think is nice.

(2) There was the question of whether one can have another spouse while already married. Of course, the answer is “no” to this but considering that I am hearing more and more open relationships and less pair-wise arrangements around me, maybe people will change their minds about this in the future. =P

 

To end on a positive note, it was a nice experience to read the study material and watch more documentaries about Denmark during May. I am a nerd when it comes to history, culture, and politics. Time spent on these topics is enjoyable for me even if it is for a test. Observing how a country chooses to present itself through such study material is also interesting.

The exam itself was pleasant as well. This was my third exam in Denmark for permanent residency and citizenship applications. In all cases, the exam organizers were quite friendly and helpful.

I checked my answers against the released ones the day after the exam, and assuming what I remember from the exam is correct, I have only one mistake in the part about contemporary Danish news. My mistake was due to the failure of my Danish rather than my knowledge. Not sure if it makes it better or worse. In any case, this means another big milestone is done (almost – need to get the official result to confirm for sure). But I still have the end-of-game-monster to face, which is the application process and the wait, which in my case can take 2-3 years.

This is me ending on a positive note. 

Bananas

Note: This was the write-up for the last part of my EDBT keynote. The talk itself was of course slightly different.

 

This concludes the scientific part of my talk. In the remaining time, I would like to talk about bananas.

My parents were visiting me in Copenhagen in August 2024. One day, we were walking in the Vesterbro neighborhood. And we saw a young well-built man coming toward us in the other direction who had an empty banana peel in his hands while eating another banana and holding a third, not yet peeled, banana.

Seeing this image, I turned to my dad and said, “You have given me one third of a banana my entire life, and here is this guy eating three whole bananas by himself.”

Why one third of a banana? My dad has the principle of splitting whatever food he serves into equal pieces to people he is serving that food to. While I was growing up, we were three people in the house (my mom, my dad, and I). When we had/have visitors, the distribution of the food was/is adjusted accordingly.

I get my dad. I get where he is coming from. It isn’t just because he didn’t grow up rich, and that is an understatement, but for his generation growing up in Turkey, bananas weren’t that accessible even if you were rich. (Depending on your country of origin you may have this relationship with different kinds of fruits.)

Today, bananas are more accessible for everyone in Turkey because of the many greenhouse productions. Similar trends exist for many other consumer products whether it is clothes, food, or … technology.

 

Since their release, the cost of using generative AI tools has declined. This is what we expected, and this is what we wanted. As a result, they are more accessible to a larger scale of users, and I experience more and more of the following:

A friend tells me that they use ChatGPT to get ideas for what to cook later.

Colleagues tell me that they use one GenAI tool for literature search, another GenAI tool for brainstorming for ideas, yet another GenAI tool for help with writing, and Claude Code for coding …

Students tell me the answers they got from GenAI tools for errors, definition of a concept, setup steps of a library ...

I get why people embrace these tools so much. Today, it also takes me less time to search for something if I am using such a tool compared to old-school web search. But I am also almost embarrassed to say that I don’t have a drive to consult GenAI tools by default, and I in general avoid them. (I also avoided smart phones for a long time.)

 

Technology is like any other consumer product. The cheaper the product gets, the more accessible it becomes, which creates higher consumption, which in turn requires ever growing resource needs to deliver the product. In economics, this is called Jevon’s paradox.

There is always a high cost to a cheap product, and high consumption translates to high carbon footprint.

That is why we get depressing / dystopian news articles about the energy demands of data centers and this being driven by the demands of AI. *

 

How do we achieve more sustainable progress in the field of AI?

Do we always need the biggest / latest GPU? Do we always need bigger scale?

We keep rejecting academic papers for not targeting larger scales.

Do we have to use a GenAI tool as often?

The banana pictures I showed were taken by me, not by GenAI, and I then ate those bananas over a two-week period.

How do we decide how often to use things? Who decides?

I neither want these tools to be inaccessible to people nor want to be patronizing and tell people not to use them.

But how do we incentivize lower use?

At the end of the day, all hardware vendors want to sell more hardware, since there is no economic incentive to do otherwise.

 

I have a BSc in computer engineering and PhD in computer science. I am not an economist, anthropologist, political scientist …  I am qualified to discuss a subset of the above questions but not all. A more holistic discussion requires reaching across the aisle and talking and collaborating with people from other disciplines.

 

* Some of these articles:

The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I.

Google plans to put datacentres in space to meet demand for AI

Sam Altman gets defensive about AI’s massive electricity usage: ‘It also takes a lot of energy to train a human’

Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers

 

Farewells

  

He isn’t in his usual position smoking a cigarette on the couch looking out the window. Instead, he is lying on the couch, sleeping. I doubt his hands could hold a cigarette now. They tried different things to make him better. He doesn’t look better. He looks like cancer ate him up into a skeleton.

I am 8. I am looking at my uncle realizing this is probably the last time I see him. I don’t remember when exactly I learned what death was, certainly I am aware of other people who died. But at that moment, for the first time, I really understand what death means; not just the detached awareness of it as something that happens to everyone, but all the emotions that come with it.

My parents tell me it is time to leave and to say goodbye. I am unsure if they mean it as the last farewell or a regular goodbye, but I can’t take chances. I approach my uncle. I want to hug him like E.T. hugs Elliott just before he departs to go back to his space-home. At 8, that is the only “we likely won’t see each other again, and I want you to know that I love you” farewell I know. What is the best way to hug him as he is lying on the couch? Would it wake him up? Would it hurt him? Should I just kiss him gently on his head or cheek instead?

As I am deep in my thoughts, his hand suddenly reaches for mine and grabs it from the bottom. Then, he puts his other hand on top. He squeezes my hand tightly. He can’t speak. But he says his version of “we likely won’t see each other again, and I want you to know that I love you” to me and relieves me of the burden of trying to figure out the “perfect farewell.”

Now I know there are no perfect farewells, and it is a luxury to have a chance to say “farewell” to a loved one before they pass away.

 

She is 6. I want to hug her properly to say goodbye, but I have to be content with a quick side-hug, because she just saw her best friend at the school entrance and ran to her. Last night, while playing the Hello Kitty video game, I was her best friend. Next time I see her, likely a year later, there won’t be a Hello Kitty game. But I hope I can have a permanent place in her life, at least as her (cool?) aunt.

About 5 hours later, I hug her mom tightly to say goodbye, before I depart for the airport to go back to my life in Copenhagen. Her mom is one of my best friends, my Twin Sister. I wish we lived in the same city like we used to, but I was the one who left that city first.

This hasn’t gotten easier, even though farewells are a routine part of my expat life for more than 15 years now. In addition to my visits to Turkey to see close family, I try my best to arrange once-a-year-visit to certain loved ones who neither live in Turkey or Denmark nor go to the same conferences. It takes effort, I have to organize my work schedule and life in Copenhagen around this. Before each visit, I wonder whether this is too much effort at my age now. After each visit, all the doubt disappears, and I am left with bittersweet tiredness.

 

I hug her tightly and say, “We’ll keep in touch.” I wish I could think of something smarter to say. The truth is I don’t know when I will see her again. She is going back to her home country, Argentina, tomorrow, after ~8 years in Denmark. Argentina isn’t in Europe, I can’t go there every year, and there are low chances that work will take me there.

There was a possibility that the Radiohead concert last night was going to be our farewell. While that sounded cool in theory, the reality would have been us saying each other farewell among the super-packed post-concert crowd moving toward public transportation. Once again, there is no perfect farewell, but we are both glad that we didn’t have to do the post-concert farewell.

This is technically our 5th farewell. We did one at my place to say farewell to all the movie / TV evenings we had eating take away food from Wokshop Amager. We did one at Husets Biograf, where we went to the movies together for the first time and our friendship was formed, which was also her farewell to Huset. We did one at her place, which was my farewell to all the peaceful time I spent there with her and her family. And we had a farewell dinner with a group of friends.

She has been my #1 partner-in-crime in Denmark. We moved to Copenhagen around the same time. We met during our early days in Copenhagen. We bonded over our shared love of movies and political/feminist views. We referred to the couch next to the entrance of Husets Biograf as “our couch”. During the first COVID lockdown, she was the first person I arranged to meet in person after almost one month of isolation. She had my extra house keys. …

The third book of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels is titled Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. I love that title. (I adore the books.) I am used to being the one who leaves. I left my parents in 2005. I left Illegitimate Daughter in 2009. I left my academic family in 2014. I left Twin Sister in 2018. This is the first time I am the one who stays, and Sister in Movies is leaving. I know she is leaving for a good reason, I left for good reasons each time and had no regrets after. I am happy for her, but I also know that I will miss her.

 

I miss her. I miss them.