I. MetaMoth

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. They’re perfect entertainment for short train rides, when I’m too lazy to dig out the tiny book of German haiku I found on my apartment bookshelf. One of my favorites is the storytelling on the Moth, and I’ve noticed that many of the stories have the same 4-part format.

1. Snapshot of a comical or bizarre or enigmatic situation.

2. “And you might be wondering, how did this happen?”

3. Describe the events leading up to that fateful day.

4. Concluding wisdom or punchline.

My life here is not nearly interesting enough to go on the Moth. Nothing THAT crazy or cool has happened. Mostly I’ve just been settling into a routine similar to my Chicago life, with the exception of barely interacting with other humans: wake up, shower, food, library, food, library, home, food, piano, read, bed. But even though my time here isn’t quite as blogworthy as I had hoped, I can at least make it seem more interesting using the Moth’s 4 magic steps.

My opening hook: I’m sitting in the music and rare manuscripts room of the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, staring for yet another hour at tiny German Frakturschrift. My original plan for the day was a biking excursion to Potsdam and Wannsee, which is an area of lakes and woods and castles. I was REALLY looking forward to this excursion today... but then the forecast said it would rain all day, and particularly that the Potsdam area would become a swamp by 6pm. (Of course, after all that, it turned out that it didn't rain.) So instead I ate cold lasagna in my bed and then schlepped my pants to the library in the hopes that my day would not be an absolute waste. And as I’m sitting in the library, squinting at these tiny letters, which eventually form words and sentences and hundreds of pages of weird German nationalist ramblings, I couldn’t help thinking:

What have I gotten myself into?

I’m still trying to figure that out...

II. No Rihm or Reason

On Thursday night I went to a Philharmonie concert.

The architecture in there is quite interesting -- a kind of orderly jumble of staircases and angled ceilings.

A hiding spot under the stairs! Perfect for secret disgusting nose-blowing. Not that I would know...

The program was kind of eclectic: Rihm, Rihm, and Schubert. Even though Wolfgang Rihm himself was sitting a couple rows ahead of me, which was definitely cool, I nonetheless emerged from the concert not having transformed into his wildest fan. It might have been the strange acoustics sitting close to the front, in which I was hearing a lot more bow-hair friction than actual pitch...

5 rows back: great view, weird sound.

...but even if Rihm isn’t my absolute favorite, the first piece (Transitus) did resonate with my Berlin experience in a weird way. The piece was a sort of fortissimo battle between string tremolos, i.e. violins are like “OUR tremolo is the best” and cellos are like “NO OUR tremolo is the best” and somewhere in the background is a nonchalant ostinato from a snare drum. Every now and then the piece blossoms into Straussian harmonies (it was after all commissioned for a Strauss celebration at La Scala), then it collapses back into Kladderadatsch.

The effect for me was a combination of disorientation and boredom. I wasn’t quite disoriented enough to be intrigued, and not quite bored enough to be entranced.

But that, in a nutshell, is precisely how I feel much of the time in Berlin. I experience constant disorientation – getting lost, messing up basic things, getting fussed at, attracting stares, roaming around in a state of dehydration because obtaining tap water is taboo and difficult. And I also experience a guilty kind of boredom on a daily basis, paging through dull materials on a hunt for exciting tidbits. 

Here’s what I mean by doing things utterly wrong (because when you’re a foreigner, it’s easy to mess up even the simplest things):

Ex. 1: Waiting in line at the grocery. I have a basket full of things. Teenager in front of me has only a drink. He beckons for me to go in front of him. I’m puzzled and confused. Why should I go in front of him in line, when I have 15 things and he has only one thing? So I say in puzzled, awkward, terrible German that is worse than my normal German: “no no, that’s not necessary... I mean why? You* only have one thing and I have all these things.” The kid is just confused. People are staring at me like, WTF. And only later I realized that the kid was just trying to let me put my heavy things on the conveyor belt, not switch places in line. So I basically asked a kindly and polite teenaged boy (those exist?), “why are you being polite to me???!?!?!”

*I used the formal “you.” I don’t think you’re supposed to siezen a 16-year old. Facepalm.

Ex. 2: Stereotypes are often, or perhaps always, nocuous... but sometimes it feels like stereotypes have a kernel of truth. And I have been struck by how often I’ve encountered the German stereotype of rule-following efficiency basically everywhere, and particularly in libraries. It’s almost impossible NOT to do everything wrong, and while some of the archivists are friendly and welcoming (I’d like to present them with a medal at some point), many of them are just cranky.

Public libraries in the US are not especially academic, and academic libraries belong to universities and are closed to the public. In Germany, though, state libraries have massive academic collections – so in that way the library system is almost more open for everyday use.

But perhaps for that reason they have strict rules. At the StaBi, you have to shut everything except study materials in a locker, and for the locker you need a 1 euro coin which I never seem to have, and the items you bring in are contained in a transparent bag that is thoroughly scrutinized by the security people. I’ve thrice been fussed at for bringing in “pens” that are actually mechanical pencils, and once for bringing a tube of chapstick. (Even if I promise not to draw all over the books with it?) Then once I’m in the library, I can’t check out any books because I don’t yet have this official form, which I can’t get without this other form, which I can’t have stamped until October 2^nd because that was the earliest appointment. And to get in and out of the music reading room, the archivist needs to buzz the door (yes, they also press a buzzer so you can leave). I was recently charged a fine for something, and I still have no idea what I did wrong. The whole atmosphere is so rigid and tightly controlled that I’m constantly making missteps, like the time I almost took a book out of the Kunstbibliothek because I needed to quickly grab money for photocopying from my bag, which was in the Garderobe, but I was being a space cadet and then got chased down by two scary, angry ladies with senior hair-poofs.

Ex. 3: One of the most confusing and disorienting things: there is a wide spectrum of opinions as to whether or not the neighborhood I live in is the ghetto. My apartment’s usual tenants say it is totally safe, super cool, the next hip spot, etc. Others I have met said “why do you live there??” About 98% of the people I see here seem totally normal and pleasant, and 2% are scary. Nobody seems to actually know what crime happens here, if any, and I have heard nothing but conflicting opinions about whether this Kiez is a good place to live. So this is puzzling.

But just around the corner...

III. The Patient is In

Meanwhile, the main reason I’m here is not to mope around feeling confused, but to conduct research. And normally this would be fun and exciting. I do genuinely feel enthusiastic about my project. I’m also discovering that the research year is a particular phase that is conflicting with my personality.

And by that I mean? I am one of the most impatient people I know. Sometimes this can be an academic asset: during comps summer, I sped through articles and books because I was so impatient to arrive at the main point, irritated by sidetracking details. But now the impatience is a massive problem. It involves a deep-seated restlessness with anything I don’t find instantly captivating, and during a research year this can be debilitating.

You would think this is what concentration looks like...
but actually this is what dicking around looks like.

Last summer, I was still in the “planning” phase of my dissertation. That meant that most everything I found seemed promising, partly because the topic was new and partly because I was only scratching the surface.

But the deeper you dig under the surface, the more challenging it becomes to find stuff that’s really good. It’s like dredging pirate coins out of a well. Every now and then I find a jewel buried in hours of this:

My day.

This book is signed by the author on the front! ... cool?

My overall experience so far has been similar to the Leipzig archive last summer. I talked about the slowly scrolling drudgery of microfilm, how the documents were all frightfully dull. But there might have been great stuff in there. I was too impatient to fish it out from the well.

So apart from knowing that I could never be an archaeologist or paleontologist...

Kaspar. My kitty zu Hause.

... I believe I am a cat. Some people are puppies: boundless enthusiasm and energy, hardworking, persistent, nose-to-the-grindstone and task-oriented.

But, like my beloved Kaspar, I like to lounge around on my bed. UNTIL some bright shiny thing catches my attention, at which point my pupils dilate and I go batshit bananas. Then as soon as things get boring again, I resume my post as couch potato.

So...

If my personality is characterized by impatience and feline laziness, and if I’m in a career that requires patience and diligent hard work...

then what have I gotten myself into?

It’s something I’ll have to work on this year. Living abroad is a learning experience, after all. And in the meantime, I’m going to rediscover the joys of To-Do lists. 

Entr'acte

This past quarter at the University of Chicago I participated in a fantastic training course for teaching academic writing. The majority of the course revolved around the concept of reader-centered, rather than writer-centered, communication. That is, writers should anticipate the prior knowledge and interests of their potential audience, constantly scrutinizing their own work at arm’s length. And the main problem that undergraduates face when writing academic papers is that, even if they intend to produce reader-centered writing, they don’t know exactly for whom they should write. Peers, professor, TA? Imaginary academic community? Some guy dressed in a banana suit?

  

For a while, I’ve been wanting to revive this Germany/Austria blog from last summer. But the main problem I’m encountering is that, like a freshman writing the first paper of college [insert nostalgic sigh here], I have no idea to whom I should write. This is a blog that will be read by my family members of different generations, possibly by friends in my program, possibly by friends elsewhere (like, erm, in Germany/Austria? eventually? maybe?), and perhaps even by mysterious strangers lurking through the interwebs.

And not knowing to whom I should write actually does make a difference. It dramatically changes the nature of the blog. 

Some readers might want the blog to be as entertaining and anecdotal as possible. Prepare to be entertained: the street near my apartment has a lot of internet cafes, phone stores, computer repair stores, etc.  And to distinguish themselves, these stores need snappy names; and to have a snappy name you need an acronym. But these acronyms don’t always sound quite as good in English as they might in German. Behold:

That is: Sim und Mobile

... and just down the street...

That is: Funk and PC (with a wifi radio icon that looks like a mammogram)

Wait. So... in a city overrun with English speakers, nobody thought to run these acronyms by Urbandictionary? Srsly? Any day now I expect to see

• MILF: Mobile-Internet-Lautsprecher-Flickarbeit
• DP: Daten-Polling
• GGG: Gut, Günstig, Gummi! Ein Hariboladen voller Gummidingsbums für Kinder die bald beim von nebenen Zahnarzt gehen müssen

Humor. Why yes. Goofy things will continue to happen to me here in sunny Berlin. But I can think of other folks who might prefer to read something more intellectual, or reflective, or insightful, or whatever.

And the result is that I’m paralyzed when it comes to writing this blog, because I’m not sure what aspects of my experience here to emphasize, or how to write about them, or whether people will judge me or leave me weird comments if I target one audience and not another.

So...

I’m just going to write whatever I want.

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