More Awesome Than an Acrobatic Hamster

Three day weekends are so awesome. They're more awesome than a hamster performing acrobatics. And if you have any powers of imagination at all, you understand just how awesome that would be.

Three day weekends reach their full awesomeness potential if you have absolutely nothing you have to do on said weekend. If the only thing required of you is to laze about and eat peanut butter, pickle, and miracle whip sandwiches while reading the sequel to Pride and Prejudice, (I am obviously not speaking from experience here. It's a purely hypothetical situation. We all know I totally hate peanut butter and pickle sandwiches and Jane Austen.*) then prepare for the awesome to straight up slap you in the face.

If you have things you need to do on your three day weekend, it can still be totally awesome. It can be totally awesome if you're one of those people who is...what's the word...ah yes. Efficient. If you possess any level of efficiency and/or the ability to gauge how long it will take you to do things, then the three day weekend will treat you well. The awesomeness might not slap you right in the face, but it will still most likely give you a serious shove.

If you have things to do on your three day weekend and are one of the unlucky people out there who are Never Efficient (there are literally dozens of us), then the three days off from employment/school/contributing to society in some way will play out something like this. You'll make lofty plans to accomplish things in small increments throughout the weekend, so it doesn't seem like you have so much to do. "I'll just do one small thing at a time," you think to yourself "It's such a simple solution, why didn't I think of it before?!" The problem is, you DID think of it before- many a time. And it's never worked out. Alas, part of the curse of the Never Efficient is to forget about their past efficiency disasters as soon as they've finished.

So you go home on Friday night. You decide that the small things you had planned for Friday night should definitely be postponed until Saturday, because you've just finished a long week at work.... and who doesn't deserve an internet TV marathon followed by a 9 PM bedtime after five days of actually doing stuff?

You get up early on Saturday morning, and congratulate yourself on waking up before your usual weekend time of 10 AM. Because you are up so early, you're lulled into a false sense of security and tell yourself that you definitely have enough time to sit on the balcony and read. For two hours. Then you remember you have to actually go somewhere today, and have approximately one hour to shower, dress, catch the tram, and be on time for the thing you have to do. Much scurrying and swearing follows, and you barely make it out the door on time. You spend Saturday doing whatever thing it is you had to do. You get home late that night, exhausted, and fall asleep vowing to attack that to-do list tomorrow.

Sunday morning. The day of rest. You take this a bit too literally and somehow manage to spend the day alternately napping, reading, and watching useless things on YouTube. You are comforted by the fact that you have all day tomorrow- an entire day you normally wouldn't have- to do stuff. Then your friend texts you about that party you said you would go to, and you realize you've spent about six hours in a semi-comatose state. More scurrying and swearing ensues. You run out the door, again barely on time. You arrive home from said party at a respectable hour, but too tipsy to do anything of use. "Tomorrow's going to be SUCH a productive day! I can feel it already!" These are your final thoughts before you fall into a red wine induced slumber.

Monday arrives. You wake up early out of a sense of obligation and shame. You think back on the past two days and scold yourself for your lack of productivity. You start to get a little bit stressed out about all the stuff you have to do still.
You see that really great book you spent much of yesterday reading. You think to yourself "Ok, I'll just read for an HOUR and then that will be it! Then I'll do so much stuff!"
Next thing you know, it's 8 PM. You've put a real dent in the book, but not in much else.

This may or may not be loosely based on my own personal experiences over the last three days. I may or may not be dealing with the consequences of my extremely serious procrastination problem by writing a blog post.

I just remembered that I was supposed to be writing about Germany related things. Well, the reason I had to go to a party last night instead of accomplishing anything worthwhile was because some German friends of mine got married. AND it's only a three day weekend because today is the German public holiday of Pfingsten. Go look it up.
Also, having a real job seems to have severely impacted my ability to be productive on weekends. All I want to do is go drink beer with my friends or sit around and read while listening to show tunes (no judging!). I know what you're all thinking. I used to do these things BEFORE I had a real job. Yes, yes I did. But before this job got all up in my grill, I could do these things during the week too. I could spread the fun out over the course of seven days. Now I've got two sad days in which to do all the enjoyable things that I want to do everyday. This is Germany's fault, obviously, because it is the location of said real job. So there. Germany reference, shazam.

I think I need to seek counseling to deal with this problem. It's plagued me all my life, and the problem now is that as I get older, my ability to pull all nighters lessens. The all nighter is a key component to still being able to get shit done while suffering from Debilitating Procrastination Syndrome. Maybe hypnosis would work.

My one coping mechanism is to make lists of every single thing I need to do, because in addition to putting things off until the last possible minute, I'm also what some might call extremely forgetful. I prefer absent minded. This only becomes less of a coping mechanism when I forget to write the things down that I'm not supposed to forget. Like on Friday, I remembered that I needed to buy bean seeds for my class, since we're studying plants and need to actually PLANT something rather than just reading about it in books. Then I forgot to write it down in my day planner, the sacred vessel that contains all my lists and do-not-forget notes. So I forgot it. Until about five minutes ago. And this being Germany, EVERY store is closed on a public holiday. So now I'm up a creek without any bean seeds.

I feel this chart created by Allie Brosh, author of the HILARIOUS blog Hyperbole and a Half, expresses my lack of efficiency and serious procrastination perfectly.

Seriously, that's me. Add in a box about obsessively listening to the acoustic version of "Poker Face", and it pretty much sums up my weekend. Who am I kidding- it sums up my life.


Balls.

*I actually have a deep and abiding love for both peanut butter and pickle sandwiches, as well as Jane Austen. And slightly smutty Pride and Prejudice spin off novels.

The Almost Two Year Retrospective

I've realized two things. Thing the first: I haven't posted in awhile. Sorry, masses of readers, to disappoint you. Thing the second: my recent posts haven't had much to do with being in Germany. I started this blogging (ugh, I still hate that word) business as a way to let my dear and far-away family and friends know what life was like in my new country. However, I've taken to writing about lots of other things, that really don't have much to do with being a foreigner. Time to rectify the situation!

Due to the impending two years in Dresden mark, I've been thinking a lot about how certain things in my life which have become routine are so different to how I lived my life in Oregon. Small things really, but they add up to a slightly altered lifestyle.For the first few months I lived here, I despised these small things. Every time I had to take my own bags to the grocery store, or walk twenty minutes in the rain to get somewhere because I don't have a car, I would rage silently to myself. Often this raging involved me cursing Germany, it's people, it's language, and it's penchant for treacherous cobblestone streets.

I sometimes still rage. Occasionally, I reach the boiling point and just wish I could transport myself back the the US for an hour or two. But I've gotten used to these differences. I usually don't even register them as differences anymore- it's just my life. I wake up in the morning and shower with my hand-held shower, enjoying the fact that I can aim the hot water any old way I please, instead of cursing the fact that I don't have a normal hands-free-stand-underneath-it shower. I race out of my apartment to catch the tram on time, or I wrestle my bike into the elevator to get it down ten flights of stairs and out onto the street for the bumpy, cobblestone-y ride to work. I spend the day at school with a classroom full of mostly German kids, trying not to actually go nuts while attempting to explain American phrases such as "You're driving me nuts!" After school, I stop at the grocery store and whip out my handy dandy cloth bags that I keep folded up in my purse when I get to the check out. Then I hoof it home lugging the groceries along with me. When I get home, I stuff the groceries into my mini, smaller than a dorm fridge fridge and put some laundry into the washing machine. That's in the kitchen. Have to make sure the output hose is in the sink, otherwise the dirty laundry water will spray around the kitchen like a geyser. This may or may not have happened before. When it's done, I only grumble a little bit about not having a dryer, and hang aaaaall my laundry (including socks and underwear) up on my little drying rack.

All these things are small, daily rituals that I've always performed. Showering, getting to work, going to the grocery store, doing laundry. When I moved here two years ago I was constantly frustrated by how different these little rituals had to be. Each time I had to lug my groceries home from the store I dreamed of the roomy trunk of my little Honda Civic, which could hold bags and bags and baaaaags of groceries. When I tripped on the ridiculously uneven cobblestones that pave the streets around my apartment, I thought so fondly of the ugly but BEAUTIFULLY SMOOTH asphalt streets I grew up surrounded by. These things all seem so tiny, and unimportant if you're in a familiar setting. But once you've been transported to a new place, with a new job, new culture, and new language to deal with, these things become monumentally important.

I make these angry, frustrated comparisons less and less these days. Part of living in a foreign country is accepting the differences and unfamiliar situations you encounter. At least, I think so. I'm probably never going to rejoice at the fact that I can't fit more than three days worth of groceries into my impossibly small refrigerator. I can honestly say I'll never wish for someone to speak to me in ultra-fast, heavily accented German. The longer I live here though, the less upsetting these things are. They've become a part of my new life, and I like to think I've become better at adapting to new situations because of it.

Now, myself and the German language- that's a whole different story. One for another post. Perhaps several.

This week, I've been reading a book loaned to me by a fellow teacher. It's called "Almost French: A New Life in Paris." You've probably never heard of it- I hadn't before she gave it to me. It's written by Sarah Turnbull, and Australian journalist who has lived in Paris for the past ten years. It's the story of her decision to move to France, and the subsequent acclimating and fitting in she's been doing ever since. So many of the things she writes about have made me laugh out loud while reading, because I feel like I've been in the exact same situation myself. I'm going to end this long and slightly disjointed post with an excerpt from the book. Honestly, substitute Germany for France, Dresden for Paris and America for Australia, and she could have been reading my mind while writing it. Her version might be slightly more eloquent than mine.



The old Greek on Samos island had warned me. "It's a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures," he'd said. "It's a curse to love two countries." Well I certainly don't think of living abroad as a curse- I don't think the Greek believed it either. He was just dramatising his dilemma, the feeling of being torn between two places. And this is something I now understand. For an expatriate, the whole matter of "home" is an emotional conundrum riddled with ambiguities and caprice. Paris is my actual home: its' where I live. It can pull at heartstrings with a mere walk down our market street in the morning. But Australia is the home of my homesickness and my history- a powerful whirlpool of family and friends, memories and daily trivia that I used to take for granted but now seem somehow remarkable.
Although I understand the French better now, the reality is in France I'm still an outsider. There seem to be so many contradictions, so many social codes for different situations that make life interesting but also leave you feeling a bit vulnerable. Living in Paris requires constant effort: effort to make myself understood, effort to understand and to be alert for those cultural intricacies that can turn even going to the post office into a social adventure.

(Turnbull pg. 166) Lamest citation ever, but I don't want to be a plagiarist.

I really couldn't have said it better myself. And as it's way past even my weekend bedtime, goodnight from Dresden.