I’ve always marveled at people who are motivated purely by the love of what they’re doing. There’s something so wholesome about that approach to life—where winning and losing don’t matter. They’re simply there to revel in the experience and enjoy the activity for its own sake.
Unfortunately, I am not that kind of person. I’m a worse kind of person.
For much of my childhood, I invented fake rivalries to motivate myself. A popular boy at school who was occasionally rude would be transformed into my arch-nemesis. “I see I did better on the test this week, John,” I’d whisper to myself, as John lived his life blissfully unaware of my scheming. Instead of accepting my lot in life—namely that no one in my peer group cared at all about what I was doing—I transformed everything into a poorly written soap opera.
This seemed harmless until high school. For four years, I convinced myself I was locked in an epic struggle with Alex, a much more popular and frankly nicer person than me. We were in nearly all the same classes, and I obsessed over everything he said. Once, he leaned over and whispered, “Good job,” then waited a half beat before smiling. I spent the rest of the day growing increasingly furious over what he probably meant by that.
“I think you need to calm down,” advised Sarah, the daughter of a coworker at Sears who read magazines in our break room.
“I think you need to stay out of this, Sarah,” I fumed, furiously throwing broken tools into the warranty barrel—the official way Sears handled broken Craftsman tools: tossing them into an oil drum.
The full extent of my delusion didn’t become clear until junior year of college, when I ran into Alex at a bar in my small hometown in Ohio. Confidently, I strode up to him, intent on proving I was a much cooler person now.
“I’m sorry, did we go to school together?” he asked.
Initially, I thought it was a joke—a deliberate jab to throw me off. But then it dawned on me: he was serious. He asked a series of questions to narrow down who exactly I was.
“Were you in the marching band? Because I spent four years on the football team, and I didn’t get to know a lot of those kids. It looked fun, though.”
That moment taught me a valuable lesson: no more fake rivals.
So imagine my surprise when a teenage grocery store checkout clerk emerges in my 30s to become my greatest enemy—a cunning and devious foe who forced me to rethink everything about myself.
Odense
Odense, Denmark, is a medium-sized town with about 200,000 people. It boasts a mall, an IKEA, a charming downtown, and a couple of beautiful parks. It also has a Chinese-themed casino with a statue of H.C. Andersen out front and an H.C. Andersen museum, since Odense is where the famous author was born.
Amusingly, Andersen hated Odense—the place where he had been exposed to the horrors of poverty. Yet now the city has formed its entire identity around him.
I moved here from Chicago, lured by the promise of a low cost of living and easy proximity to Copenhagen Airport (just a 90-minute train ride away). I had grand dreams of effortlessly exploring Europe. Then COVID hit, and my world shrank dramatically.
For the next 12 months, I rarely ventured beyond a three-block radius—except for long dog walks and occasional supply runs to one of the larger stores. One such store was a LokalBrugsen, roughly the size of a gas station. I’d never shopped there before COVID since it had almost no selection.
But desperate times called for desperate measures, and its emptiness made it the better option. My first visit greeted me with a disturbing poster taped to the door.
The Danish word for hoarding is hamstre, a charming reference to stuffing your cheeks like a hamster. Apparently, during World War II, people were warned against hoarding food. The small grocery store had decided to resurrect this message—unfortunately using a German wartime poster, complete with Nazi imagery. I got the point, but still.
Inside, two Danish women frantically threw bread-making supplies into their cart, hamstering away. They had about 40 packets of yeast, which seemed sufficient to weather the apocalypse. Surely, at a certain point, two people have enough bread.
It was during this surreal period that I met my rival: Aden.
Before COVID, the store had been staffed by a mix of Danes and non-Danes. But during the pandemic, the Danes seemingly wanted nothing to do with the poorly ventilated shop, leaving it staffed entirely by non-Danes.
Aden was in his early 20s, tall and lean, with a penchant for sitting with his arms crossed, staring at nothing in particular, and directing random comments at whoever happened to be nearby.
The first thing I noticed about him was his impressive language skills. He could argue with a Frenchman, switch seamlessly to Danish for the next dispute, and insult me in near-perfect California-accented English.
My first encounter with him came when I tried to buy Panodil from behind the counter.
In my best Danish, I asked, “Må jeg bede om Panodil?” (which literally translates to “May I pray for Panodil?” since Danish doesn’t have a word for “please”).
Aden laughed. “Right words, but your accent’s way off. Try again, bro.”
He stared at me expectantly.
So I tried again.
“Yeah, still not right. You gotta get lower on the bede.”
The line behind me grew as Aden, seemingly with nothing but time on his hands, made me repeat myself.
Eventually, I snapped. “You understand me. Just give me the medicine.”
He handed it over with a grin. “We’ll practice again later,” he said as I walked out.
As my sense of time dissolved and my sleep became increasingly erratic, this feud became the only thing happening in my life.
Each visit to the store turned into a linguistic duel. Aden would ask me increasingly bizarre questions in Danish. “Do you think the Queen’s speech captured the mood of the nation in this time of uncertainty?” It would take me several long seconds to process what he’d said.
Then I’d retaliate with the most complex English sentence I could muster. “It’s kismet that a paragon of virtue such as this Queen rules and not a leader who acts obsequiously in the face of struggle. Why are you lollygagging around anyway?”
Aden visibly bristled at my use of obscure American slang like lollygag, bumfuzzle, cattywampus, and malarkey. Naturally, I made it my mission to memorize every regionalism I could find. My wife shook her head as I scrolled through websites with titles like “Most Unusual Slang in the Deep South.”
Increasingly Deranged
As weeks turned into months, my life settled into a bizarrely predictable pattern. After logging into my work laptop and finding nothing to do, I’d take my dog on a three-to-four-hour walk. His favorite spot was a stone embankment where H.C. Andersen’s mother supposedly washed clothes—a fact so boring it seems fabricated, yet somehow true.
If I was lucky, I’d witness the police breaking up gatherings of too many people. The fancy houses along the river were home to richer Danes who simply couldn’t follow the maximum group size rule. I delighted in watching officers disperse elderly tea parties.
My incredibly fit Corgi, whose fur barely contained his muscles after daily multi-hour walks, and I would eventually head home, where I wasted time until the “workday” ended. Then it was time for wine, news, and my trip to the store.
On the way, I passed the Turkish Club—a one-room social club filled with patio furniture and a cooler full of beer no one seemed to drink. It reminded me of a low-rent version of the butcher shop from The Sopranos, complete with men smoking all the cigarettes in the world.
Then I’d turn the corner and peek around to see if Aden was there. He usually was.
As the pandemic wore on, even the impeccably dressed Danes began to look unhinged, with home haircuts and questionable outfits. The store itself devolved into a chaotic mix of token fruits and vegetables, along with soda, beer, and wine bearing dubious labels like “Highest Quality White Wine.” People had stopped hamstering but this had been replaced with daytime drinking.
Sadly, Aden had become somewhat diminished too. His reign of terror ended when a very tough-looking Danish man verbally dismantled him in front of everyone. I was genuinely worried for my petite rival, who was clearly outmatched. Aden has said something about him buying "too many beers today" that had set the guy off. In Aden's defense it was a lot of beers, but still, probably not his place.
Our last conversation didn’t take place in the store but at a bus stop. I asked him where he’d learned English, as it was remarkably good. “The show Friends. I had the DVDs,” he said, staring forward. He seemed uncomfortable seeing me outside his domain, which wasn’t helped by my bowl haircut and general confusion about what day it was.
Then, on the bus, something heartwarming happened. The driver, also seemingly from Somalia, said something to Aden that I didn’t understand. Aden’s response was clearly ruder than expected, prompting the driver to turn around and start a heated argument.
It wasn’t just me—everyone hated him.
In this crazy, mixed-up world, some things can bring people together across language and cultural barriers.
Teenage boys being rude might just be the secret to world peace.