A Very Important Date

Like the White Rabbit in Wonderland, I seem to be perpetually late with the holiday greetings, but let me just wish everyone a lovely holiday season and a wonderful New Year. Hope everyone gets the rest they need, the presents they want, and a lot of time with the people they love.

Do I look like I give a damn?

Because there was a teacher conference Monday afternoon, I didn't have any classes. Since (see previous post) that was also the day when I sent in my last grad school application, I decided to celebrate by seeing the new James Bond movie, something I've been planning to do for a while. I'm not a huge moviegoer in general, and particularly not in Berlin, since the only theater that shows more than one movie not dubbed into German is in one of the most touristed parts of town and incredibly expensive. Monday is the cheapest day, though, so I decided to take advantage of the no-class windfall and fork over the 8.50€.

As far as the movie itself goes - intellectually, I know the Bond films are not exactly top-notch writing, and that they're horribly pre-feminism in attitude. Viscerally, I like a good fight scene and some intrigue as well as the next person. There are all sorts of holes to poke in the movie - M talks too much for the head of the MI6, the love story is kind of pathetic (although it has its moments), the tragic ending is a bit of a stretch, and the poker game goes on for way too long. However, it at least avoided the typical plot where a maniacal genius tries to take over the world with a giant death ray or something like that. And I liked the beginning, which was very "Tinker, Tailor." And Daniel Craig is good in the role, and nice to look at (as long as we're being all superficial here).

But what I was thinking about during the annoying half hour of commericials and previews (including one for Spiderman III: Spiderman Turns Evil) was that going to see a movie - taking three or more hours out of my afternoon - would have been impossible at this time a year ago. For almost my entire life, and particularly during college, the period before Christmas has meant a barrage of papers and exams. For me, the first few weeks of Decembers are tied in with late night coffee runs, staying up until 2 putting the final touches on some document, pulling 8-hour library stints, and sitting exams. It was stressful, but oddly exhilerating - I liked being busy, especially since the end of the semester was in sight and the Christmas season cheer counterbalanced everyone's exam grumpiness.

This year, my semester is ending with more of a whimper than a bang. Because my students are busy taking tests, I've actually had fewer hours to work this week than normal. I have to review some participial phrases with a class tomorrow, and then I'm done; my Christmas break officially begins at 9:30 tomorrow morning.

Thing is, I don't feel like I've really earned it. Not that I won't enjoy it (I just spent the last hour confirming travel plans for the week after Christmas) but - wasn't there a paper I was supposed to write in there somewhere?

Hurry up and wait

Well, with a final click on the "Confirm Payment" button a few minutes ago, I officially sent off the last of my grad school apps.

I've already had one scare with GRE scores and transcripts that mysteriously failed to arrive, so I'll be keeping an eye on my online accounts to make sure that everything else shows up in a timely manner.

Other than that, though, nothing to do but wait . . .

Three Americans, a Moroccan, a German, and an Italian walk into an Indian restaurant in Berlin . . .

No, it's not the beginning of a joke. That was my brunch this morning.

I'd read and heard from a lot of people that the Sunday brunches in Prenzlauer Berg, where I live, were famous, but I'd never been to one (haven't really had people to go with, and don't see the point of eating out by myself). But on Friday, I went to a dinner at an English language bookstore and met another American who invited me to her Sunday brunch group, which consists of the above mentioned nationalities.

I had a terrific time. Talking with those people (conversation was in English, everyone's best common language) is sort of what I imagine the best version of grad school, and the academic life thereafter, to be like - hanging out with wicked smart, friendly people who like to talk about everything under the sun (eating an interesting mixture of Indian and German brunch food optional). And, you know, some paper writing once in a while.

Damn, I be tired.

One night where I couldn't get to sleep until nearly 2 and had to wake up at 5:30

+ one period spent trying to get the reticent eighth graders to tell me about their Christmas holiday traditions

+ one period spent drinking coffee in the teachers' lounge and looking over some tests one of the teachers had asked me to correct

+ two periods spent sitting around while a teacher went through the eleventh chapter of Brave New World in excruciating detail

+ one period taken up by a student presentation, with two obviously dedicated but pronunciation-challenged students informing us about population explosion

+ one period spent going over an article about the "Buy Nothing Christmas" campaign with a group of very smart kids who nonetheless tend, when I pose a question for general discussion, to turn to the person next to them and comment on the question

+ one period spent waiting in the teacher's lounge and eating too many cookies from the various platters that people bring in

+ ten minutes spent waiting for someone, anyone, any living object to show up to my English discussion group before I finally gave up, got my coat and went to the S-Bahn

. . . equal one person sitting at a computer in Potsdamer Platz and counting the hours until she can get some shuteye, and thanking her lucky stars that the two classes she normally has tomorrow are preparing for a test and she has the day off. She might even manage to eke out a non-whiny post for a change :).

Here comes a candle to light you to bed

Well, the wanderlust was calling again last week, so I dashed off Thursday after school and spent two nights in Dresden. It's a nice city, not very big - I feel like I covered most of it by foot while I was there (the city center, anyway). After the Allied firebombings of February 1945 destroyed about 75% of the city center, the Dresdeners decided to reconstruct it as it had originally looked. So there are all these really old-looking buildings that were actually only rebuilt within the last fifty years. It's a little odd.

Anyway, I did a lot of walking, and also spent a few hours in the art museum, which had a lot of really cool Italian and Dutch paintings, including Raphael's Sistine Madonna, and Parmigiano's really creepy Mannerist Madonna and Child (does anyone else who took Prof. Tegmeyer's class in Rome remember this painting, the really weirdly erotic one? anyone?) I also spent a lot of time in the huge Christmas market they set up in the town square, where I bought some stollen and cookies to bring to my roommates. Do people know what lebkuchen is? I didn't, before I came here. It's basically a big gingerbread cookie coated in chocolate, and sometimes there's a jelly filling in the middle. It's sort of the national German Christmas cookie. People have been taking turns bringing a plate of it to the teacher's lounge at school.

Probably the most interesting thing about the trip, though, was the train ride there. I saw in a compartment with two elderly women, one of whom basically told us her life story - how she'd worked at a chemical factory and had to keep a gas mask next to her place, how her aunt and uncle had immigrated to the U.S. before WWII and then come to visit again in the late forties and brought bananas, which she'd never seen before. Interesting stuff. She mentioned that she was a widow, so I think she was sort of lonely, but she also just seemed like a naturally chatty person.

The hostel I stayed in was nice, and it had a book exchange - something I appreciated on Friday night, when the person with the bed next to mine was snoring and I couldn't sleep. Someone had left a copy of George Orwell's 1984 in the lounge, so I spent a few hours reading that. I remember reading it in my junior year of high school - that was February 2001, so the people in my class were probably some of the last to read it when it wasn't so terribly relevant to current events. Anyway, rereading it this weekend made me remember that my English class had an assistant teacher that spring. He'd been sitting in on our regular classes for a while, and our teacher turned over the reins to him for some of the 1984 lessons. His name was Mr. O'Brien (if you've read the book, you know why that's funny). He wasn't particularly successful at getting us to appreciate the book, which was not entirely, or even mostly, his fault. Our English teacher that year was really terrific, one of the teachers I remember best from high school, and we just would have rather had him back. We had nothing against this college student who looked kind of uncomfortable in a suit and who was obviously still trying to find his footing in the teaching role; we just wished he would go practice on someone else.

I don't even remember what Mr. O'Brien looked like, or what his first name was, but I find myself thinking a lot about him these days, and wishing I'd put in a little more effort when he was teaching. I certainly hope he's happily teaching or in the profession of his choice (totalitarian mastermind excepted, naturally . . . ).

Fruity similies

I was talking to one of my students yesterday (this was at another abortive meeting of the English discussion group I've been trying to start; she was the only one who showed up). She was telling me about the six weeks she'd spent in Montana right near the beginning of the Iraq war, and how she felt like she'd gotten to know some piece of the American character really well. She quoted what she says is a fairly common comparison between the two countries. Germans, the saying goes, are like coconuts: a hard shell, but once you get past it, they're all sweet and milky inside. Americans are like peaches: the outside is approachable and tasty, but there's a hard center, and you never exactly know when you're going to chip a tooth on it.

This comparison stuck a cord with me and some things I've been thinking about lately. A lot of my hours in the last few weeks have been rearranged or changed so that classes can take tests or do other necessary end of the semester things, so I've had more time than usual between classes to sit in the teachers' lounge and feel a bit like a piece of furniture. There are about sixty teachers at the school, and I work with five of them, and maybe talk with about five more on a more or less regular basis. The other teachers aren't unkind - they just tend to pretend I'm not there. I'd heard before I came that Germans don't really initiate conversation with foreigners - that they're nice enough once you approach them, but you have to start the conversation (see coconut analogy). Impose your presence upon them, if you will. And I have done that a few times - said something to the other teachers who sit at my table about the weather or other inanities, and that usually leads to them asking me about how I'm doing and so forth. But these teachers won't talk to me unless I start a conversation. If I don't, they tend to go back to the piece of furniture thing. And it's not much of a relationship if you're the one doing all the talking and feeling like the other person is only answering to be polite. So at a certain point I just stopped trying. The meat of the coconut may be good, but after a certain number of failed attempts to get past the shell, you may well decide that you're not all that interested in getting at it.

All this sort of hit me in the face last Thursday, when the principal of the school retired after 18 years there (I'm not sure why he retired on a Thursday in the middle of November, so don't ask). There was a whole ceremony with speeches and blah blah. I wasn't originally planning to go, simply because I feel so awkward around the rest of the staff, but one of the teachers in training convinced me. I had never really spoken to the principal after shaking his hand on my first day here, but the whole tenor of the evening, what people said and how they said it, suggested that he was really well liked and helped to build up a sense of community that they all appreciated. And as nice as it was to see how much the staff and kids liked him, it was also a reminder that I am not really a part of the community in the sense that I would like to be, and that, at the rate things are going now, I can't really look forward to being one.

I know that's a bad attitude, though, and against the whole principle of my being here (i.e., cultural exchange, trans-Atlantic good will, all that stuff). And I don't want to adopt the attitude of one of the junior Fulbrights I was talking to at the Thankgiving party a few weeks ago; when I mentioned that I didn't feel like I was getting to know very many Germans, she shrugged her shoulders and said, "Yeah, I've pretty much given up on that." So, obviously the situation calls for some picking self up, brushing self off, starting all over again. Maybe I can take advantage of the general high spirits floating around in the Christmas air to spread some Yankee good will.

So, to stretch the fruit analogy a little farther: this peach may be bruised, but don't throw her out yet.

Full marks for accuracy

So I went to the bank on this lovely, sunny, crisp December morning, and found that I'd been paid . . . exactly what I was supposed to be paid, and not a euro more or less.

It's the little things that matter. Happy December, everyone.