Denouement

"Consider yourself interned (or embedded) at SHNS"
-Peter Copeland, Editor, Scripps-Howard News Service

Alles wird gut, as they say.

I got the Scripps job, if you can call an unpaid internship a "job." I'm nervous, having had no real journalism experience, but I'm also moderately excited. The job sounds cool, and I'll be right in D.C., living at "Catholic University" if my summer housing app is accepted. If it's not, I can sublet for about the same price.

I finished my Freiburg app, and it's sitting at the International House, waiting for Prof Lanouette to check some boxes she didn't notice. It'll be there until Monday at least, and the longer it sits there the longer confirmation will take and the better my chances of slipping underneath the housing department's radar and getting that quad. May inefficiency prevail.

My procrastination seems to have worked in my favor, Prof Dintenfass' world-weary chiding notwithstanding. The more punctual applicants, a little more desperate every day, keep sending mass emails to anyone gone opposite terms.

Another victory, albeit an unintentional one, is Prof Peterson's new emphasis on politics in my Contemporary German Culture and Politics class.

He seems to think I skipped class twice out of protest, not because I needed to work on my Freiburg app, as he well knows. And since the dearth of political discussion in what should be a Culture and Politics class has been my only official complaint, he made some kind of inexplicable connection.

Yesterday we went over the notable German political parties; on Monday we're talking about the current situation. I feel kind of guilty, because this seems like a concession and not a coincidence.

(Note: one girl, an excellent German-speaker who once complained that she couldn't find "Glasnost" in her German-English dictionary, is outspokenly anti-politics. I hate people who say they "hate politics" and just dismiss the whole system: it's the laziest kind of anarchy.)

So it seems that, one way or the other, the sad little details of my life are working out. Time to do some homework.