mix-ups

I always mix up "schuldig" (guilty) and "geduldig" (patient). They of course are not really words you can mix up well.

wardrobe malfunction

Surely one can wear chuck taylors with tights if one wants to do so? Especially if one's favorite brown shoes are too cold for Dresden's cold winds today? Especially if one is slightly ill? And quite tired?

yes. yes.

ladies and jelly spoons, if there is anything better than a little kitty in your lap, making sleep sounds with her mouth open to reveal the tips of little kitty fangs, then i beseech thee, tell me!

picture unrelated.

If you're not against me, don't cross this line. If yes, do.

Sometimes you just need a Wes Anderson marathon weekend.

Godspeed your love to me

First we started planning a wedding from 4,000 miles away.

Then we visited the US and tried to accomplish everything we could in >4 weeks alongside visits and trips. We acquired a venue; found a photographer, officiant and florist; made food and cake plans and I found a dress. Then we came back to Germany, feeling quite impressed with ourselves.

Six months before the wedding, we changed our food plans.

Then, five months before the wedding date, we changed our minds about the venue.

So I booked another venue. 

Then we changed our minds about that one.

So we booked another venue. 

Still five months to go. 

I think it's ok/good to change our minds about these kinds of things as long as we don't change our minds about big things. 

Now I have to go make B promise not to change his mind about big things because I am a lot more superstitious than he is and he will have no idea why anything should change just because I alluded to it one time on a blogger account.

The Owls Go

Does anyone else have strange cats? Cats always seem to knock things onto the ground with their paws and then suddenly busy themselves immensely so they don't catch your disapproving glance (and if they do, they are masters of the blank, devoid-of-guilt expression) and this is pretty common. However, my cats seem very strange.

Kitten Calliope napping in '06 in my beige Kent apartment

Calliope is the neediest animal I've ever encountered. She goes beyond the status of dog and will not leave anyone (whom she likes) alone. If your are sitting, she will stand in your lap and put her whiskers to your face, staring at you from one centimeter away. She wedges herself between you and books, newspapers, cell phones or laptops in order to accomplish this. If your are lying down, she will lie on your chest and put her two front paws around your neck and put her nose to your nose and just breathe. This creates sneezes, which may deter the average cat but not Calliope. She watches you sneeze, looks hurt that you have diverted your attention from her in order to fulfill an involuntary action, and puts her nose back up to yours. She also does this while sleeping, which I'd never noticed before but Bastian told me he'd been woken up numerous times to see Calliope standing on him with her nose up to his.

Polyhymnia, also as a kitten. We have since moved that ladder.

Polly is a cat-cat, meaning she does not care what you are doing unless it directly benefits her. This is not too strange and she also kneads blankets, also not too strange, but she also licks them. She gives blankets long licks to the point where they develop fuzzies everywhere. Plus, she likes to sit on the toaster, probably because it's warm, but come on? That's disgusting.

This time of year makes me nostalgic and anxious and weepy. Even though it's spring and we have temps in the 60s with nice fresh breezes and the smell of earth, my heart grows heavy and hard to carry. This is a good time of the year to listen to Architecture in Helsinki, Beirut, Bon Iver, Joanna Newsom, Portugal. The Man and Lynyrd Skynyrd, although I could only picture listening to "Sweet Home Alabama" right now.

isn't it good, norwegian wood

Language barrier

B comes home from the doctor's.
B: I have tonsillitis.
me: Oh... that doesn't sound too bad.
B: (goes to mac, types something in) Also known as strep throat.
me: OH MY GOD YOU HAVE STREP?!

Post Script

Changed the layout of my blog as all 2 of my readers may have noticed. I really love white simple blogs and I've felt in bit of a rut (LIFE-WISE) blog-wise so I decided to change it after this lovely commenter left a um, comment. She is really cute.

Regional Dialect

Can we talk about language just a sec? Actually I hate talking about language. You never realize how much you have to talk about it until you're a language teacher surrounded by other language teachers and you all meet for a beer and you settle back against your chair and relax because you don't have to think about exceptions for using "more"+ adjective to make the superlative, for example "more expensive," versus adding "er" to the end and make sure you change that "y" to an "i" as in "happier" and you clink beer mugs and take a drink and let your breath out slowly and someone says "So yeah, what I can't stand is explaining tenses! Because there are so many tenses in English* and not many in German and you have to make German speakers think in new time concepts!" And I nod noncommittally, not making eye contact, using the same tactics my students do. A newer teacher, say, someone who's only been in Germany for a couple months, says, "Really? I didn't know that." I reach for my beer, sighing heavily. We're doomed. That's it. Cue to hours of discussing the differences between English and German where I invariably drift off and start doing lesson plans in my head.

*Native speakers, there are 12 tenses in English. We all learned that crap and we're totally able to express how and when events happen/are happening (SEE WHAT I DID THERE) just by using a certain tense. ISN'T THAT WILD ok sorry I guess not.

What I really wanted to say is, I don't really like how German sounds.

Of course German is parodied a lot as being very harsh and guttural. I think it's a kind of chicken-or-the-egg argument because nowadays people who don't know German speak German words a thousand times harsher than they really should. I have heard very nice sounding German and I happen to be of the opinion that B speaks very nice German, so maybe it is the area (Saxony) we live in. Saxony is very (in)famous for its accent and the most noticeable aspect (for me) is the difference between "zwanzig" and "zwantzschh." I mean they really cut out the middleman and get straight down to brass tacks. Similar is "Leipzig" and "Leipzsch" or "fertig" and (as far as I can tell) "fertsch." Another problem I had for the longest time was hearing "ich weiß ni"--instead of saying "nicht," people say "ni" (which sounds like nee, my fellow Americans, but Germans will read that as sounding like "nay," ok not exactly but close) and this to me sounded like "nie," which means "never." So I thought people were walking around saying "I never know" which can work in some situations but not others. More confusing was hearing "ich hab' ihn ni gesehen" so I sat there thinking, ok Lentz, you can do this. He has never seen him? Surely he knows who I am talking about if he knows he hasn't seen him? Maybe he never sees him? But then it would be in present tense?

And thank you Saxons, for working a word that sounds like no but means yes, into the vocabulary. Maybe they did this so people would have to watch your face closely to know the answer for sure. So Germans, you have "nein," "nee" and "nö" for no. It's "no" in English and "non" in French and "no" in Spanish. So far so good. And then in Saxony you're in a shop and you ask if they can wrap something as a present and they say "nu!" (which sounds like a cross between na and no and nuh, but you can't mix this up with "Na!" which means "Hey it's great to see you, you look great; what's up, how are you?!") So then you stand there and think, well ok, I guess I have to buy wrapping paper. And then the salesperson wraps it for you, adorns it with a bow and ten of the store's logo stickers, puts it in a bag and hands it to you. What just happened? You have no idea. Our friend André pointed out that people say "Tschüssi, nu!" (he's from Dessau) and what the hell does that mean. We all agreed.

There is also the ten minute hug good-bye. In a lot of social settings, Americans don't even acknowledge someone is leaving. A quick bye is ok. Not nice, but ok. "Thanks for inviting me to the party (quick hug) it was really nice. See you! Bye!" and out the door. Germans lead up to saying goodbye (Optional knock on table. "Sooo. Na dann?") and throw in a ton of wishes (Viel Glück/Schöne Woche/Schönen Tag), hug, then all variations of bye are recited by both parties (Tschüss/Ciao/Bis bald/Bis nächstes Mal/Bis später) and then a bid to safety (Kommt gut nach Hause!) and a couple more waves for good measure. I felt like I had no manners when I first came here. I wondered why we take a lot of care to greet and talk with strangers we might never see again but have a quick "Hi" and "Bye" for most situations. Maybe it's an American thing, a midwest thing, maybe it's an Ohio thing, maybe it's a northeast Ohio thing.

it was a saturday

B and I are coming up on our two year anniversary. Fact: We've been engaged for 1 year and 4 months. Fact: We spent five months 500 km away from each other soon after we began dating. Fact: We met because his engineery mind randomly decided to take Academic Writing and he walked in late in the second session and it was one of those freeze-frame slow montage moments (ignore that paradox) that was soon ended by his blinking and my stare of "...Are you going to sit down?" I figured I shouldn't be friends with my students. And then we became friends anyway when he one day took extra time in packing his things, standing up slowly, walking to the front of the room (So smooth). Then we were best friends! We shared embarrassing secrets and moments and laughs and cries! We took moonlit walks from the university to Neustadt and discussed the philosophical ponderings of passersby! We ate at almost every restaurant in Neustadt, walked down all areas of the Elbe within city limits during all hours of the day, formed a person out of sand next to the Elbe around 2a.m., we spent late hours in the library together, eaten ice cream at most places we could, watched numerous movies, rarely went 12+ hours without seeing each other. Our friendship took on a childlike dependence on each other, running (or public transiting or biking) to the other automatically for everything, good or bad or mundane. What in the world was left for dating? What other thing could we possibly do?

Well, lots of things. If I wanted to shave half my head, well gosh damnit, B wasn't going to stand in my way! He'd be there next to me, shaving my head himself! If I wanted to ride a roller coaster, B was next to me (crippling fear of heights next to him). If we had to share one bedroom in a shared flat with both our furniture stuffed inside for four months, then so be it! If I'm homesick, B makes macaroni and cheese and encourages me to bake a carrot cake and buys Oreos on a rainy Saturday. If B walks around the apartment muttering engineering gibberish mixed with German swear words, I bring him back to reality with a LOTR joke I saw on reddit. He eats fries with frightening speed while discussing life-changing decisions. At his desk hard at work, he heaves sighs in a very manly way, let me assure you. He can be convinced to have a Harry Potter AND/OR Lord of the Rings marathon with minimal arm twisting. He is a nerd, my friends, a very very big nerd. The chorus swells, as does my 12 year-old's idea of romance. A tall skinny nerd with big eyebrows and green eyes. Green eyes! What was my point! I'm not sure!

BFFs

B's been working from home lately. He was nice enough to gradually ease into it by only working from home a couple days a week and then increasing to every day this week so far. I was pretty nervous about it. Now he'll find out that I spend an overwhelming amount of time procrastinating before doing the housework and/or going to work. The jig is up. And so I prepared for his thick brows to raise into a questioning glance at anything he could deem... questionable. And it came to pass that outside of the sounds of pacing, manly throat-clearing and muttered German swear words, you would not know he is here. B does not pass glances at my doings, disapproving or otherwise. Which is really convenient.

things i miss

1. girl scout cookies
2. used bookstore in salem, ohio
3. and for that matter, the camel in salem too.
4. the sunday plain dealer and nytimes
5a. friends/hangouts with friends/drinking with friends/things with friends
5b. sitting at my computer until someone calls me and then i say "yeah, i'm on my way" and i hang up and continue sitting at my computer
6. knowing where i need to go to buy something
7. people saying "sorry" if you bump into them.
8. self-deprecation
9. bank tellers, salespeople, hospital receptionists who are willing to admit they're wrong/could have something wrong in their system before accusing you of being wrong. (fun story: at the hospital i got yelled at for having a "defective" insurance card since my data didn't come up in their computer. since it had worked at 2 other doctor's offices, i said i didn't think there was anything wrong with the card. this lady went apeshit on me and made a huge show of OPENING HER DESK DRAWER and FILLING OUT a form and HANDING IT TO ME to sign. it's a wonder these people don't pass out from being overworked. i signed and she lectured me for half an hour (ok realistically probably 5 minutes) about how i needed to walk to my insurance company to get a new card or fix it, which shouldn't be terribly hard for me to do since the office has a lot of branches and there is one very close to the hospital that is not more than a five minute walk and there was just no reason i couldn't manage this. i did go to my insurance company, who was like, wtf is this, there's nothing wrong with your card. so at my next appointment at the hospital i got the same routine even though i told them i'd gone to aok and all three ladies in the office were just emeffing beside themselves. one lady is especially knowledgeable about it because she says, oh yes, this happens every time, no it happens every time with her card. so i just stand there until they run out of things to say to me. this can take a while.
10. magazine aisles

avocado avocado

i only had a beer and a couple sips of a gin and tonic last night and i feel hungover i think because my medication and i'm asian. today B and i walked to the schwarzmarkt café on hauptstraße and we both ate sandwiches on vollkorn toast and had semi-serious rant-conversations about food. it was really exhausting. a man commented on how B helped me with my coat and called him a romantic. we thanked him and walked outside and jumped a couple times. it's warmer but people will continue dressing like it's winter until may i think.