Wednesday, July 15, 2009

"Just doing my part to help out the black community"

I'm going to try to work in that phrase as a response whenever someone thanks me for doing something. "No problem"/"You're welcome"/"No...thank you" are pretty played out and I like keeping people on their toes.

My camera (that I never bring with me when I go out) mysteriously broke...while sitting on my bookshelf not being used. Maybe it was suffering from some sort of depression that technical devices get and put itself out of its misery due to my neglect. I don't know. But what it means is that even if I wanted to take pictures this past month, I haven't been able to and, of course, just when you find yourself with out the means to take pictures, so many different and interesting photo ops miraculously present themselves.

Last Saturday was festival/parade in Hamburg called Schlagermove. Schlagermusik is kind of hard to describe. I was about to compare the Schlagermove festival with the Love Parade, but with shittier music... but I actually think that I can stomach Schlagermusik more than I can techno, house, trance, etc. Schlagermusik is probably most easily compared to the kind of 60s/70s easy-listening/disco type tunes on AM radio stations. If my sister Gillian were German, then she'd love Schlagermusik.



At any rate, this is the kind of music that quite a few Germans -- I read something like 400,000 people were at Schlagermove this year -- love to jam out to...in their adorable German way of course, as you can see in the video above. I'm just kidding, when Germans are really into a song, they express themselves with much more off-beat hand clapping.

Again, kidding...

But then again...am I?


The world needs more soul train lines.

I was not at Schlagermove, but rather an apartment move. The Friday before, our secretarial trainee suggested that it would be a lot more fun to go to Schlagermove than it would be to lift boxes and such. However, while there is no denying the fact that I am impossibly lazy and that schlepping boxes around is not even in the Top 100 of things I'd like to be doing on a Saturday, I'd much rather help friends move than voluntarily subject myself to thousands of Germans in bell bottoms and afro-wigs.

That said, I must say, the moving effort was one of the most organized that I've ever participated in (either in Germany or in Oklahoma).

Etch also came up to Hamburg quite spontaneously for the weekend. I hung out with her, her moms and her two little nieces, the younger of which beat me several times at rock, paper, scissors.

So, I cheated and made up hand signals, because I am better than a three year old.

Etch will be back in August for Christopher Street Day -- which I also plan on attending and will hopefully figure out my camera situation by then.

The rest of this week consists of work, going to the Smithie JYA going away party in Rudolf Laun Haus tomorrow...and movie night with Sarah L.T.'s new giant flat screen TV.
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Remini-scents

Harburg Rathaus Train Station

Mama Brooks wasn't the type of mom that got up early in the morning to pack our lunches for school or make us an elaborate breakfast or have cookies baking for us when we got home. She was quite the early riser, but she just had too much on her plate to do those things. On cold winter days she would make a big pot of hot oatmeal, but that was about it. She didn't send us off to school empty handed or stomached, it's just that as soon as we were capable of doing so, we were responsible for making our own lunches and breakfast and (often on weeknights) dinner.

At the time, it didn't seem fair, since most of my friends' moms would pack them all sorts of cool lunch stuff like those little single-serving bags of chips or a pudding cup or that most-awesome of late-80s school lunch accessories...Lunchables. We couldn't afford these things and my mom didn't understand why a handful of potato chips in a plastic sandwich bag is not the same as a vacuum-sealed mini-bag of Doritos (4 hours later, the chips aren't as fresh) and how saltine crackers + Velveeta is not the same as a Lunchable. Our pleas for more awesome packed lunch ingredients fell on deaf ears.

What I know now is that children are very difficult people and though I didn't see it back then, it was a really clever move on my mom's part. At the peak child-rearing time, she had about five school-aged children under her care, each with their own sandwich-cutting preferences (diagonal, down the middle, four squares, whole, etc). Personally, I liked to apply sauces (like say mayonnaise or mustard) in the form of a happy face. In my mind, it made the sandwich more delicious to me. In hindsight, especially if I were my mom, I honestly would not have time for that shit, so I don't blame her. She always used to say that it's (meaning anything you eat) all going to come out the same way, so why does it matter how it looks going in?

Now that I think about it, based on my father's income and the number of his dependents, we probably could have qualified for reduced, if not free school lunches. But back in those days, the last thing would want to be seen doing (again, at least in my mind) is eating public school cafeteria food.

The smell of a public elementary school cafeteria is something ingrained in my memory. Where I went to school the cafeteria (where you ate lunch) was combined with the auditorium (the addition of a stage where school plays and assemblies were held) to form the all-encompassing "cafetorium". And the Ridgeview Elementary cafetorium pulled triple duty as a gymnasium where phyisical education (P.E.) classes were held -- a cafetoriumnasium, if you will. These P.E. classes were led by Mr. Nash, who reminded me of Lionel Ritchie:



It was also the site where I (in my extra-curricular activities) devleoped and (later) performed a jump rope routine to the song "Jump (for my love)" by the Pointer Sisters. God, the 80s were a fantastic time.



All that goodness aside, the cafetorium had a very distinctive smell. At any given time, whether or not food was being prepared, it reeked of a mixture of aging congealed cooking oils that the entire space reek of weeks old sloppy joes



If you've ever been subjugated to this then I think you know EXACTLY the smell that I'm talking about. I can't describe it any better than that.

These days I work in Harburg. It's a borough of Hamburg, south of the Elbe River. In internet terms, one might call it "teh suck". I have no desire to get to know this part of town better, I don't want to pass judgment on the people who live there, but aside from a very high percentage of döner offerings (including what I believe to be one of the best döner chains in Hamburg (Dubara -- on account of their delicious avocado sauce, wide choice of meat options and accomodation for non-meat eaters) I don't want to spend more time in HaRburg than I have to (or than I get paid for).

The particular station to which I travel in order to get to the office where I work is called HaRburg Rathaus. Seen in the picture above, you can see that it is a particularly fugly station. Orange, green, white, blue?? It's an epileptic seizure waiting to happen.

Oddly enough, it does remind me of the decor in my elementary school (circa 1985 - 1990). And sure enough, today, when I was exiting the train, a waft of air entered my nostrils -- that same mixture that took me back to the old days.

I don't know what combination of stale cooking products it was, but it smelled exactly like weeks old sloppy joe...or indian tacos...or OKCPS "special pizza"

At any rate, it tripped me the f**k out.

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Friday, June 19, 2009

Pictures from my life #2

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Tuesday, June 09, 2009

With friendly greetings

I've been back from my trip to Dresden for over a week and I'm just now getting around to updating. I've been battling a serious case of writer's block -- or what Jay Smooth refers to as the "little hater" that lives in your head -- for at least the last six months (at least). It basically stems from some personal (read: bureaucratic/immigration-annoying-as-hell) issues that I don't want to delve into on my blog (but are nevertheless overshadowing my life at the moment) and the overall feeling that I've lost focus of what my blog is about in the first place (namely to distract myself from such annoyances, by making fun of them...all while keeping friends/family updated with my life, because I suck at keeping in touch with people).

However, every post that I attempt to write seems to veer off into this kind of "Here's another weird thing that Germans do"- post. Sure, I live in Germany...so that's like, you know, a major influence on my life right now. However, there's this new verb I learned recently -- verallgemeinern -- and it means "to generalize". And making generalizations (in writing) about what it's like as a US-American living in the Deutschland is not something I really want to do. First off, there are blogs that do it much better. Second, as demonstrated by the blog's name and "logo" -- a majestic raven perched atop the silhouette of the castle-thingy from the Hamburg coat of arms and surrounded by either paint or poop splatters (I'll leave it to your imagination) -- I guess this is all just supposed to be me talking shit about where ever I happen to be living at the moment. It could have just as easily been a majestic raven crapping on the silhouettes of a pioneer dude shaking hands with a Native American, as pictured on the Great Seal of the State of Oklahoma.

This is the "long story short" way of reiterating that I'm writing about personal experiences that might bear, at best, a passing resemblance to the typical life of a foreigner in Germany. It's also more of a reminder to myself, rather than to anyone reading this.

So here's some crap that's been in my head.

Since entering into a long-distance relationship, my "vacations" aren't really vacations at all. Yes, I don't have to go to work and I get to spend time in another city -- but it's not really the same when you go on vacation and stay in a hotel/motel/Holiday Inn and/or hostel. For one thing, I don't keep a spare toothbrush, loofah or spare socks/underwear at every hotel on the planet. Once you start a stockpile of personal affects at someone else's house, your guest privileges/tourist pass are pretty much revoked.

In the past six months -- out of financial reasons (on my side) and educational reasons (on his) -- Frosty and I have only managed to visit each other twice. Each visit roughly a week long. For the time being, we've traded shorter, more frequent meetings with longer, less frequent ones. The math works out to be about the same though. And my math is flawless, believe that.

The hardest part about a long-distance relationship (note: I don't have many qualms with the distance part) is that first night when you're back together after being separated. There's the awesome part where you see each other again, but then later it's like you have to learn all over again how to share a bed. When I'm by myself, I love to take up as much space on the mattress as humanly possible. Unfortunately, Frosty is the same way and we end up spending the first night back together trying to pretend that we're both equally considerate of each other's sleeping habits. However, in a mid-sleep-blanket-tug-o-war, he usually gets the upper hand (which can be squarely blamed on my lack of trying to accomplish things while asleep). The first night's sleep is pretty shitty, but it's not something that can't be overcome.

The second hardest part (which is something that I actually have to deal with before I get to the hardest part, go figure) is deciding how I'm going to actually travel to get to Frosty. The problem is effectively eliminated in the instances where he comes to Hamburg -- because I don't care as long as he gets here (safely and in one piece). He usually opts for a so-called Mitfahrgelegenheit, which translates to...um..."passenger opportunity"(?) in English. And you might think, well any mode of travel in which you're riding as a passenger in some type of vehicle is like an opportunity to be a passenger. But in a much larger sense, it refers to the opportunity to be a passenger...with a stranger.

It's a step up from hitchhiking, because it's pre-arranged via a type of ride board (like rideshare on Craigslist). And, in my personal opinion, a step down from say...taking a cross-country trip via Greyhound bus. Definitely nestled somewhere in between the two, it's like taking a road trip with complete strangers that you'll (probably) never see again once you get to your destination (or ever again), but in more confined space of a car.

Sure, you can get from one end of the country to the other for the price of a really expensive taxi ride from one end of Hamburg to the other... but there's that catch where even though people say they just want the extra money to pay for gas...they really kind of want the company for the ride. A drastic and completely unplausible comparison would be if you paid a commericial airline pilot $175 for a ticket from Hamburg to Oklahoma City that would have normally cost $700...but you have to sit up in the cockpit with the pilot the whole time and keep him company, but not as a navigator or something useful...you know...just to tell him your life story and listen to his. Also this pilot is the least interesting person on the face of the planet.

In my mind, in this scenario paying the $525 extra to avoid this form of personal torture would be more than worth it. And that, in a nutshell, is kind of what I think about the Mitfahrgelegenheit.

Alas, I cannot afford the decadence that is travelling by train right now. Train travel has become very expensive in Germany and low-budget airlines have limited routes in-country. So, road trip of the damned, it is.

On the way to Dresden, I drove for 6 hours with a chatty driver with a thick, nearly unintelligible Saxony accent, who found a way to relate everything anyone else said to the six months she spent studying in South Africa; a marketing guy (originally from in Dresden, but now in Hamburg) who spent equal amounts of time bashing Hamburg and applying the lessons learned about the U.S. (based on a two week trip to L.A.); and a couple, both 18-years-old and annoyingly smiley and optimistic about their first romantic weekend away together.

On the way back, the driver was a dude from Dresden, who (when one of the passenger's cancelled) made it known that he didn't like to offer rides to passengers who couldn't speak "proper German", but that he didn't have anything against foreigners and was very "open-minded" while muttering racial epithets against other drivers on the highway (who I guess drove cars that he didn't like / looked like they were of different ethnicities). And the other dude was like straight edge...he was kind of cool, I guess, but I didn't talk to him. I let him sit up front, at any rate, and tried to doze off while I thought about how much I missed my favorite person (Frosty) and place (Hamburg).
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Monday, June 08, 2009

Dedicated to Frosty

We talked about this South Park clip only about a bajillion times last week.
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Thursday, June 04, 2009

Vacay Report

As I write this entry, Frosty is sound asleep and I have commandeered his new laptop. I'll try to be brief and give you the low down about the past few days.

You see, I am on vacation. A much-needed, well-deserved vacation. Frosty has a week off from university. It's kind of like German Spring Break, but centered around that time those dudes got filled with the Holy Ghost in the Bible. We decided to meet up in Dresden, because Conni (New Year's Eve in Cologne, Conni) was celebrating his birthday this week in a nearby city.

I'd post some pictures of that, but I'm a big idiot that brings a digital camera without a memory card on vacation. To sum it the party:

• There were a lot of people in their early-20s drinking lots of alcohol
• I officially suck at every card game on the planet, including Uno.
  
• Conni got a set of tight-ass grillz for his teefs
• At some point in the night (long after I was in bed), a let's-smash-beer-bottles-in-the-kitchen-contest took place

Here's the thing I keep forgetting about dudes in their early 20s: The apex of farting as comedy gold has not yet been reached. Maybe I've just been living with Schmiddy for so long (where unnecessary farting is verboten and necessary farting is highly frowned upon), but I reckon it will take about another two years before passing gas is relegated to the bronze podium at the comedy olympics in this circle.

President Obama will be in Dresden today. The city has made all sorts of interesting decorative choices to welcome him, like stickers that read "Welcome Mr. President" on all of the trams.



I'm curious to see if they managed (or will even attempt) to remove all of the right-extremist NPD (read: neo-nazi) party campaign posters that are hanging up all over the downtown Dresden area (and the rest of the city). Because the first thing I noticed when exiting the Autobahn was a whole bunch of signs hanging high up on lamp posts with the words, "criminal Foreigners Get Out!" Where the word "criminal" is written much smaller on the sign and difficult to see from a distance, much less a moving vehicle. Written above that entire phrase in white-on-red (also not immediately noticeable, not that it matters) is "Tourists welcome!" To put it bluntly, this shit makes me sick to my stomach.


Aesthetically-speaking, Dresden is a lovely city and I've met a lot of terrific, open-minded/open-hearted people here. But it's exactly this kind of fuckery that just makes me never ever want to live here ever again. Ever.

Oh well, Frosty is awake now and he's reading over my shoulder, so I've lost my train of thought.
Overall, vacation has been great and only a relatively small portion of it has been spent giving thought to these guys who act like assholes on a professional level. Like it's their job, I guess you could say. And since I personally don't want to be a huge racist asshole, professionally or otherwise, I can say with certainty that they've succeeded in creating a job niche for themselves that (at least) this foreigner has no interest in taking.

Enjoy your stay in the city, Mr. President.
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Raven vs. (dotdotdot)

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Not Crap

Lebrookski is a mulatto living/working in Hamburg, Germany. She is kind of good at the internets sometimes.

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