sleepy

I am sleepy.

That is all.

Also, Lydia broke her foot.

Will update later, calm down.  Jeez.

quick explanation

Ricardo and Lydia had to do this thing for university where they study communications design where they had to conceptualize and design a playground.  Then, one day in the kitchen, Lydia was lazily playing on the internet and realized that there are indoor playgrounds in Hamburg that might actually let adults play too.  Thus, my WG decided to go to Rabaatz in Hamburg-Stellingen, where they have an over-18 night once a month.  The word they chose to describe our planned mischief-making?  "Austoben,"  which roughly translates to rioting, scampering around in a wild manner, or "to rage oneself out."  

It was pretty awesome and we were jumping on trampolines and having good wholesome fun when I decided to try out this weird little thingy.  It was made out of wood with two small planks and four wheels, and it was something of a cross between a skateboard and a unicycle.  You stood on it and made cycling motions with your legs and apparently, if you have inhuman balance capabilities, you can move yourself along at a surprisingly snappy pace.  Unfortunately, I do not have such abilities, so what I did was fall, with lots of momentum, and land mostly on my left elbow.  Ow.

I didn't want to go to the doctor, even though I couldn't tie my shoes or straighten out my arm from the pain.  I figured it was just a bruise.  But I could barely sleep the entire night from the throbbing and in the morning I couldn't move my arm at all, so Anne called up this doctor in Wandsbek (one subway stop away) and Timo took me there.  After getting a sufficiently annoying cast and an MRI, it turns out that the one bone in the elbow joint smashed against the other one and made lots of hairline cracks in it, which is why it hurt so much to straighten the arm.  Anyway, I got a week off from work (apparently if the rowdy kids knocked into me it would not be good) and Lydia and Anne washed my hair for me after Ricky made fun of me because my head looked disgusting (I couldn't wash my hair very well with a cast on).  Luckily since then I've graduated to an ace bandage, but I still have to go to physical therapy so that I can eventually straighten the arm again.  Really, really annoying.

Yesterday I went with Ricky and Philipp to meet some other friends of theirs and grill outside in the fields of Meck-Pomm (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the state to the east of Hamburg).  The weather has been encouragingly warm recently and it was nice to get out of the city.  My goal this week:  learn how to make stuffed grape leaves!

at last

I'm back, man.  I didn't update for two reasons:  1) I was in Berlin for a week and 2) immediately upon my return I effed up my elbow, rendering typing painful and frustrating.  But now I get to ramble again and people can stop asking me if I gave up writing in this thing.

Berlin was a good time.  All the Fulbrighters in Germany and some from other countries (around 500 people total!) converged in one of the sweetest cities ever for a romp through wholesome lectures and panels interspersed with plenty of Berliner Weisse and general depravity.  And it was mostly free!

We were all housed in this ridiculously massive hotel on Alexanderplatz.  This hotel was monstrous.  Amy put it best when she said that it was like the Star of David for drunk people, because no matter where we were, we eventually saw the hotel shining like a beacon in the distance and hazily trudged toward it, being too cheap to bother with the friendly Berlin public transportation.  I accidentally got Dan's and my train ticket for a day too early, and since Dan got back from visiting his woman in Australia the day we were supposed to leave, I nearly had a very inconvenient crisis at hand.  Luckily, his plane got in early enough for him to make our train.  And our other Dickinsonian in Germany, Annie, just so happens to be stationed in Berlin and was awesome enough to let us bum on her huge couch overnight until we could check in at the hotel.  It was nice to see her again and she showed us around Friedrichshain and we met her hilarious British roommate.  

Most of the trip was filled with panels about political issues I don't really care about and lots of speeches by important Germans, including the former mayor of Hamburg (HH represent!) and the editor of the newspaper Die Welt.  It was pretty cool that important people cared about us.  Most of my time was spent with Dan and our friends based in other parts of Germany.  Eventually our little group solidified into a quintet of Dan, me, Jonathan, Zach, and Chelsea.  We accomplished important missions like visiting a bar called Klo (toilet), where we were greeted by a waitress handing out pieces of toilet paper.  Complete with an announcer whose job seemed to be to belittle everyone and seats made out of toilets, this bar was hilarious.  There were TV screens that showed absolutely ridiculous videos of people doing stupid stuff, and we snickered and giggled the whole time.  It was awesomely bad and the night was capped when we were waiting for the S-Bahn.  Dan guessed that the train would come in five minutes when in reality it was coming in seven, and Amy, who had been rather sauced since dinner (free wine got the better of her), declared, as if she had solved some kind of impossibly difficult math calculus problem, "Seven minutes... is more than five."  

I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, I have a bunch of stuff to do yet tonight, so I will continue with describing our epic journey tomorrow.  And how my elbow came to be, according to a very nice German doctor, "microscopically shattered."

will update soon

i promise i will update soon, once this stupid splint is off my arm.  until then it's just too frustrating to type with one hand.  i will have lots to write too!  berlin and injury and future plans and stuff!

much-needed update

I am posting!  So that my dad doesn't have to keep reminding me...

Currently have spring vacation, so today has been relaxing, I did much-needed food shopping and am watching my bread bake in the oven.  On Friday I visited Sean and Karen in Göttingen and we ate yummy food and watched Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and then on Saturday we walked around the old part of town which was very picturesque-ly German.  We ate delicious cake at a Konditorei that reminded me of the coffee-cake places in Vienna.  It was lots of fun to get out of Hamburg and go somewhere new and have fun with friends.  Then I hopped up back to Hamburg and me and my flatmates went out Saturday night.  It was the first time we've all gone out partying together, which was tons of fun.  We went to Thomas Reade, this place that from the outside looks like a typical Irish bar but on the inside is insane, with all these different rooms and dance floors and different stairs.  To my hazy vision it was practically impossible to figure out where in the building I was, so I kept making sure I was with my roomies so I wouldn't get lost.  We ended up getting back at 6 am and I proceeded to sleep most of Sunday away.  Then our new flatmate Thomas arrived and moved in.  And here we are on Monday afternoon and I'm drinking coffee and watching my bread bake.

More interesting stuff later.

hatin' on stuff

So today I was talking with my colleague, Conny, about our beloved eighth graders from the bowels of hell.  And she mentioned this book called "Generation Doof"  (laugh if you must, but the title of the book appropriately translates into "Generation Stupid") and how it has helped her comprehend the reasons for the twisted psychology behind these fourteen-year-old freaks.  Generation Stupid seems to revolve around the why kids generally seem to be getting dumber.  I explained that I was convinced that I had just missed being part of Generation Stupid.  Yeah, it might be a biased thing to say, since I would hate to admit that I was like these kids when I was in eighth grade, but I thought of some relevant points that indicate to me that I was indeed lucky enough to miss out on this blessed generation:

I didn't have a computer until I was almost 12, and didn't have the Internet until just before I turned 15.    This was pretty normal amongst my friends, too.  And I am convinced that it had huge consequences on how we grew up.  I was absolutely obsessed with reading for a solid 90 percent of my pre-adult life.  We were forced to use our imaginations for entertainment, forced to use phones to call each other and have conversations, forced to rely on primarily expressing ourselves in person instead of through a Myspace or Facebook page (AIM profiles eventually became our first mode of virtually representing ourselves, but again, that wasn't until junior high school at the earliest).  When computers did become more common in the household, they weren't like the archaic Apples from the elementary school computer lab (NUMBER MUNCHERS!), but they definitely weren't as pimped out as computers today.  We had some shitty games that were essentially computerized arcade games like Centipede and Asteroids (with the non-shitty exceptions of Oregon Trail and Dr. Brain) and when my parents finally caved in and got us the internet, social networking websites had barely emerged and most people had crappy little tripod sites and didn't tend to do as much, say, shopping online as today.  It was fascinating and yet strangely boring at the same time.  Fascinating that such a thing existed, boring because it still kind of sucked.

In any case, we still tended to be a little creative when it came to hanging out.  You could put little quotes and stuff in your AIM profile and hope that people you wanted to think you were cool would read it and confirm that they did indeed think you were cool.  I mean, most of my friends and I didn't even have cell phones until well into high school.  So no texting, no sir, actual verbal conversation was required.  What I'm trying to say is that I think that I missed being part of Generation Stupid by only a few crucial years.  These kids have had stuff like the Internet crammed down their throats since they were drinking from sippy cups and have had cell phones since they were, like, eight.  That's a lot of media exposure.  And when you think about the media currently and how it is painfully obvious that one can become famous and wealthy either by physically doing stupid things, actually being a complete idiot (reality TV, anyone?), or just being deemed spectacularly good-looking, it's no wonder that these kids are not in any way inclined to think deep thoughts.  They also seem to have crippling self-confidence issues, beyond those I've ever seen in younger people before.  I think it has something to do with the fact that they put so much effort into expressing themselves two ways:  the first, through crap like fashion and makeup and sneakers and the like, and the second, through stuff like Myspace and the German version of Facebook for high school kids.  They spend so much time constructing their virtual personalities that they completely forget to develop their actual personalities.  It's been months and I still feel like the eight grade are basically shells of people.  They are literally all monumentally mind-numbing.

Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe I am incredibly biased and, with my friends, just barely managed to escape from the insipid onslaught of Generation Stupid.  But I am not convinced that being so thoroughly dependent on technology from birth is at all a good thing.  

More on this later, I need to mull it over some more and write some sentences that are slightly more coherent.  I'm cracked out from lack of sleep, so sue me if I barely represent the degree in English that hangs askew in my parents' basement.

Fasching

On Friday we had a party for Fasching (aka Karneval/Carnival)!!  Here are some particularly fun pictures of the craziness (the police only had to come once):

Marcel and Lydia, the king and queen of chess

Anne and Timo

Me (genie) and Rix (tranny pirate)

The finest WG in Hamburg