Wednesday, October 15, 2014

October 15

The past few days have made me want to scream. In truth, I've periodically felt like screaming since arriving here, but if I could condense my feelings into a shorter time period, the last few jumbled, frustrating days would serve as a perfect example. There's been yet another thwarted apartment attempt, another day of going into work, only to be told I'm "not needed," and more and more conversations that have made me want to shut myself in my temporary bedroom for hours on end.


I'm aware that these are not the usual feelings that a Fulbright scholar shares on her blog, and I apologize for those of you who were looking for breathless stories of fairytale Deutschland in the autumn. In consolation, I offer you this story instead. While puttering around Blogger recently, I found this lovely little essay I wrote this past April that somehow never made it past the draft folder. It made me nostalgic and melancholy, but it also cheered me immensely, and I hope it does the same for you. (Conan O'Brien was recently quoted as saying something very similar about hard work and doing good, and now that it's gone viral, I'd just like to say very quietly that I thought of it first.)

I didn't know when exactly the right time to post this was, or if I should post it at all, but today feels right. Today, it heartened me, and it also does have to do with Germany, in a way, because it tells you how I got here in the first place. Some things have changed--the boyfriend in the essay is now my then-boyfriend, for instance--but it still rings true, which means it's a keeper. Today, for example, my "little thing" was a phone that finally started working again.

 I also like that I'm publishing it on October 15th--it feels significant, commemorative in a way-- and though that will mean nothing to most of you, that's okay. Just enjoy.

***

About a month ago, my boyfriend and I traveled to New York City and Pittsburgh for spring break, straddling both ends of the East Coast, at least width-wise. We encroached on the air mattresses and apartments and lives of friends in both cities, all of whom were generous enough to invite us with open arms.

 We stayed up too late and ate too much meat and drank too much alcohol, and none of the excess mattered, or even really bothered me. In Brooklyn we ate Filipino food and sipped cocktails at a bar that doubles as a flower shop (a beer and roses for $10!) and scored tickets for Upright Citizen's Brigade, which featured a show that created humor out of the sadness of our lives. It was really fascinating, in a grotesque way.


In Pittsburgh we inhaled omelets filled with corned beef and Russian dressing and gyro meat at a diner that my boyfriend can only describe as "rachet"; I was too busy stuffing my face to take notice of the clientele. He'd never visited Pittsburgh, and we took him to the top of the Cathedral of Learning and up Mount Washington to see where the three rivers unite, all of us shaking and shivering in the snow that had just started to fall. (We admired the view for all of 30 seconds.)

 On a much nicer day, he and I drove through the city and ended up in Lawrenceville, the self-proclaimed hipster section, where we had a few drinks and ate lighter-than-air onion rings and donned our sunglasses and flirted until we were sure people were sick of us. I've been to Pittsburgh twice before, and I never saw the charm in it much; I always thought of it as a grey, desolate town that had seen its golden time in days gone by. This time I liked it much more. It was partly his delight in the gritty, no-nonsense feel of the city (he compared it to Boston, his hometown). Probably the fact that I got out of the university section helped, too. In any case, it was a lot of fun.


Prior to break, I'd spent much of my time either sleeping or fretting. The dark winter was not a friend to me, and I found myself slowing to an almost unbearable speed around February. I had no clue if I'd find a job, or receive a grant, or stay in touch with my friends, or really, anything past that May 10 graduation date.

 I watched in half-joking despair as my friends and colleagues, people who knew what they wanted and were determined to get it, received offers of admission from top graduate schools in their field, jobs in places I could only hope to live. I even wrote a post for this blog, a stab at humor combining baking a cake and dealing with existential crisis. But it seemed mopey, and I let it sit in my drafts folder until it withered away in irrelevance.

I forgot, as I often do (and I'll bet other people do, too), that if you're working hard and doing good, these things have an inexplicable way of working themselves out. It's so much of a cliché that I overlooked it, pushed it to the back of my brain to collect cobwebs while I wrote my thesis and graded student papers. So I was properly astonished to receive two pieces of news. While in Pittsburgh, Penn State offered me a position teaching freshman composition over the summer, something I had applied for and promptly forgotten. And two weeks ago, I was awarded a Fulbright grant to teach English in Germany for the coming year.

Obviously all this news in the last paragraph of a post merits more on the subject, but I'll leave it at that for now. The big news has freaked me out and thrilled me, on several different levels, but somehow, the fun part of this post was the remembrances of spring break. The medium-rare burger at Tessaro's that I half-drunkenly consumed (with coleslaw on top! Coleslaw! I must reconsider Pittsburgh), the first sunny, half-warm day of the year when we sat outside in Washington Square Park, the five-hour drive between New Jersey and Pittsburgh, singing along with Tom Petty and passing under mountains. Take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves.

Thursday, October 9, 2014

Schadenfreude

Among those delightful German words that have no direct translation to English, but should, is schadenfreude. Schaden: to harm or hurt, freude: joy or pleasure. In other words, to delight at someone else's misfortune. Go ahead, pretend you're horrified that such a word exists.  I'll wait.


I take it by now that, unless you're in line to be the next Mother Teresa, you've realized that you partake in schadenfreude just as much as the next person. But there's no shame in it; we all do it. I'll bet it's even healthy to some degree. It was made famous in America a few years ago by a musical that, among other things, extolls the virtues of racism and porn (and is very NSFW). But I'd never heard it in common conversation, until today.

Driving home from school, my host mother and I chit-chatted about the usual: the weather, the school day, the weekend, her trip to the vet with her pet turtles (don't ask). Then, during a pause in the conversation, I chuckled darkly. "I heard something funny yesterday," I said. I proceeded to tell her about someone I'm not particularly fond of, someone who had something, not terrible, but not exactly ideal, happen to them. (For the sake of reputations, I'll leave the person and the story itself out of it.)

"It seems fitting," I said, and laughed. My host mother laughed even harder than I did. "Du bist schadenfroh," she said.

"Is that like Schadenfreude?" I asked, delighted. Indeed it was--just the adjective form. That made my day.

You can deny that you're schadenfroh from time to time; it's not exactly the nicest emotion in the world. But I'm here to argue that it's not the worst either, especially if you're only a spectator and not the perpetrator. After all, how many times do we say, karma's a bitch, or, they had that coming to them? Same concept. If someone has wronged you, you feel just a little bit lighter when he or she in turn is wronged.

Also, schadenfreude is just a fantastic word. Go forth, and practice Schadenfreude without guilt--but, quietly.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Easier Said Than Done

Rainy, chilly day. I'm trying desperately to stave off a nap, because I've been having a lot of trouble getting to sleep lately (despite exercise and sleeping pills and cutting back on caffeine and waking up early), and I'm thinking if I can hold out until early evening, that might set my sleep schedule straight. However, that's easier said than done when I'm snuggled under a comforter on my bed to ward off the cold.

So, while my eyelids twitch, a few thoughts on today and the past few days:
-On my recent outings through the vineyards, I've noticed a strange, sourish, acidic smell peppering the air. For a few days I thought, vinegar, they're making vinegar, I guess. Then one day my thoughts started wandering, and I wondered, what kind of vinegar? Balsamic, raspberry, wine vinegar...then it hit me: WINE! They're making wine! Imagine that, while surrounded by vineyards! And the award for overthinking the simplest solution goes to...

So, in case you're wondering what it smells like when wine is made, it smells a lot like vinegar. Sharp, but not unpleasantly so.

-The Onion recently posted this hilarious article on those who enjoy autumn a little too much. My favorite part: "'Nothing beats autumn in New England,' said His Excellency, the Duke of Fall..." The Germans don't seem to embrace fall as heartily as the Americans, and I do miss it, but I don't really miss the Mr. Autumn Men (and Women) that I know.

-Speaking of the Onion, here's an oldie, but a goodie.

-I somehow managed to get through middle school, high school, college, and a master's degree without ever having to read any John Steinbeck. So of course, I now have to read Of Mice and Men to keep up with my upper level students here. It's barely 80 pages--more of a novella than anything--and I began it grumbling, but oh lord, the feelings, and now I'm hooked and have twenty pages left. I'll probably be depressed for a week when I finish.

-Finally, this gem of a video makes me want to do extreme things. Preferably smoke a crack pipe while watching it, and then warn those kids that that man is not what he seems. Or perhaps exactly what he seems.


As I was writing this, the sun came out. Have a lovely day.