Happy Männertag!

It's possible that you're unaware of this, but today is both the day that celebrates Christ's return to heaven (Christi Himmelfahrt in German) and Männertag (Man's Day). I'm not sure how these two events are related, but the Man's Day part of it means that German men take beer into the mountains and hike and drink. Sometimes the don't really do the hiking part, so the streets of Jena will be FULL of drunk German men today. Did I mention that this hiking/beer drinking thing is an official holiday? Or maybe it's the whole Jesus goes back to heaven thing. At any rate, the stores are closed because people are either drinking or hiding in their houses from the drunk people.

I started celebrating a little early yesterday by drinking a somewhat bizarre mixture of beer and diet vita cola. I should explain that mixing beer with soda is very common in Germany - mixing beer with sprite makes something called a Radler, and mixing beer with coke makes a drink called a Diesel. Both are very nice. I had an unfortunate experience wherein I tried to buy diet coke and my nearby supermarket, but they only had the local brand: Vita Cola. I tried to drink it, but was overwhelmed by the lemon flavor. However, I found that mixing it with beer made it bearable, and gave me the courage I needed to clean out my fridge. Just as an aside, cleaning out my fridge makes me grateful I don't have a particularly acute sense of smell. It didn't occur to me to take pictures of the things I found in my fridge until I was almost done, so here's a picture of a moldy tomato and some fuzzy hummus:



So anyway, the wordiness of this post (and lack of content) is explained by the fact that I've been at home by myself with no one to talk to writing a paper for the past two days. However, I finished the first, somewhat rough, draft an hour ago. Jenny and I are planning on heading down to the city to scope out the drunken revelry in a little while, but she didn't answer the phone when I called. Consequently, I have written this post. And now I will try to call Jenny again. Do you think she's avoiding me?

Picture Update

I'm sure that you've all been wondering how the cake turned out. Quite well, I think. I mean, I did have to add both butter and eggs to the mix, but I think I managed to pull it off. The difficult part was finding space for 32 candles. But I managed it, and even though he's an old man, Ko blew them all out in one breath. Fortunately, that moment has been documented for posterity.


Going backwards in time, we arrive at Charles last night (almost) in Jena. This is the team at Cheers (Jena's American themed restaurant). Charles is spending a short time in Switzerland before starting his postdoc at Harvard. I'm sad, but I'm planning to visit him this summer. I've never been to Boston.


And, earlier that day Jenny and I were fortunate enough to see history being made. In Jena's town square the worlds largest Kloss (a potato dumpling kind of thing) was made. It took 6 or 8 (I forgot) hours to cook. You can see it before it was eaten on Jenny's blog. But this is what was left:



And this is me eating some. That's right, one euro bought something like a pound of potato dumpling. It was pretty delicious. And I'm a part of history.

Enough procrastination. I'm off to clean my apartment.

Two Days as a Housewife

I'm not sure if I'm cut out for this housewife thing. This is my second day hanging out at Ko's house while he works. It's a little strange. Technically, I'm finished with work so I thought I'd come spend some time here in Goettingen. Plus, today is Ko's birthday, so I'm celebrating with him.

I still have some stuff to do at the lab in Jena (most importantly, to write a paper before I leave), so I spent yesterday working on that mostly. I also went shopping and made dinner. See! Totally housewifey. The problem is that by the time Ko came home at six I was desperate to talk to someone. I have a tendency to get sort of weird and broody when left to my own devices all day long.

Today I've managed to avoid doing work. About two years ago, Mom gave me 120 Deutsche Marks left over from her 1992 trip to Europe. Since my time in Germany is fast running out, I figured out that they could be exchanged at any national bank branch. Goettingen has one (Jena doesn't). Anyway, the good part of the story is that the 120 Marks were worth €61.36. The sad part of the story is that it took more than an hour to walk to the bank, partly because I walked the wrong way for about 15 minutes. Good exercise, anyway, especially since I walked back, afterwards. Mom also gave me 1000 lire, but I'm not quite sure what to do with those.

On the way back, I stopped to buy a cake mix to make Ko a birthday cake tonight. A good housewife would probably make one from scratch, but as I said, I'm not sure I'm cut out for a life of domesticity. We're also going out to dinner somewhere. I'm going to point out to him that Mom is the one who really bought it, way back in 1992.

Okay, I'm off to bake a cake!

JOB

The news is: I have one.

I'm very excited. I'm not going to put the name of the school here in case someone stumbles across it and I get fired before I even start for having some alcohol related posts here somewhere. But it's a liberal arts college and a HBCU. If that's not enough information, email me and I'll tell you about it. I start at the beginning of August, and I've been looking at houses to rent today instead of doing work.

Now I need advice - how do you do this sort of thing? They sent me a letter with a salary on it. Am I supposed to negotiate? Also, should I try to get things like moving expenses? I asked if they had start up funds for labs and they said no. I mean, most of the advice I've gotten before seems to pertain to much bigger, public universities. What's the standard in this case?

In the meantime, let's all be excited that I'll have a source of income and health insurance next year. And since the job is tenure track, possibly forever.

In Which I Justify My Unenthusiastic Blogging

I know that you've all noticed the deteriorating quality of this blog recently. I just can't seem to work up the energy to comment on anything really. For example, just the other day the New York Times printed (by which I mean posted, of course) and article called "Unshaven Women: Free Spirits or Just Unkempt?" and I started working on my rant in my head about beauty standards and policing gender roles (learned that phrase from my sister - can you tell?), but I just couldn't motivate myself to finish it.

And then, yesterday I found the NPR game where you have to match world leaders' names to their pictures. It turns out that it took me 14 tries to get the 12 names in the first game. After that I got everyone. I blame my mistakes on NPR, actually, since radio doesn't help you figure out what people look like. But this is all you get by way of a post about it.

Of course, my favorite topic is the weather, and I've skipped such fascinating topics as "Why the H*** is it still so F***ing Cold Here?" and "The Trees are Blooming Outside My Lab Window: I Think That's Nice."

The reason that I can't bring myself to get motivated to write about stuff is that I'm being crushed by uncertainty. See, Jenny has this friend who seems to be bumming around Thailand studying yoga and posting lots of pictures of herself (wearing face glitter, mostly) on facebook. This sort of thing inspires Jenny to wonder why her life doesn't have more adventure. Not me. This sort of thing inspires me to wonder whether glitter girl has health insurance.

Fundamentally, the issue is that I'm risk-averse. I'm not spontaneous, and I'm only fun in very controlled circumstances. And (just like 2 years ago) I'm in a situation where I don't know what's going to happen in the next couple of months. I think it'll be okay - I have 2 phone interviews next week. Both, as it turns out, are for temporary positions, making it likely that I'll be in this same situation in a couple more years.

There are other issues of course. I'll almost certainly be far away from Ko. Last night I dreamed that I had an interview in Chicago (where he's had a post-doc lined up for months) and I was so excited. In reality, I got two rejections (sent by different people) from the same Chicago college. I guess the really wanted me to know. It's still slightly possible that I could end up there, but only slightly. So we'll have to do the long distance thing (an unpleasant option) or break up (more unpleasant).

And then there's the general issue of making friends and leaving them. Actually, I'm rather tired of this. I come to a new place, start to know people, hang out, become friends - and then I have to leave again. I'll try to stay in touch, really, but I'm not going to get a facebook page so it's going to be difficult. I'm worried that I might be using up my friendliness.

I'm trying to think of a way to end this post, but these same thoughts have been going around in my head, and there's no way to end them either. Well, alcohol or sleeping pills, but that doesn't make sense for a blog. I guess I'll go with the traditional approach.

And they all lived happily ever after.

THE END

Easter Weekend: Berlin

In Germany, both Good Friday and the Monday after Easter are holidays. Ko and I decided to go to Berlin. And, as a very early birthday present, he bought me tickets to the opera. Here are some pictures from our trip. This is me out in front of one of Berlin's most famous landmarks, the Brandenburg Gate (or Tor, in German).


Click on it for other pictures, including some of Ko and me dressed up for the opera.

It's time you knew...

Also, you have a spider on your face.