Revenge of the Kellerkinder

Arno took a personal day yesterday, leaving me to my own devices so he could spend the night with Tanja. Which is fine: as I've told Arno before, I'm a guest, not a child.

I decided to spend the night quietly; the party at Domi's (not to mention our get-together at Hannes' the night before) had left me pretty tired. I had a book, a movie, and a computer game standing by.

I was having a typically intellectual dinnertable conversation (the German immigration issue) with Bernd and Arno's mom when the phone ran. Arno had left, so they asked for me.

Thilo stopped by fifteen minutes later to pick up the rules for King's Cup, and invited me along to a mysterious birthday party.

An odd thing about that party was that everyone there was for some reason exempt from the year of civil service Germany requires all male high school graduates to do. It was a good party, but sitting in the basement with a bunch of girls and unhealthy guys, I was amused to think that everyone there was officially considered undesirable.

In America, of course, all the people at that party would be labled "geeks," but the teenage social strata here are much more loosely defined, generally devoid of american self-parody. Last time I was here, I was struck by how normal and functional German "goths" could be; these Kellerkinder exhibited a similar (and surprising) well-roundedness.

Anyways: we played the game twice, talked about German politics, and had a generally good time. Another night in Germany well spent. Today will be quiet: we're going sightseeing with Arno's dad.

Every Domi Has His Day

Apparently Flo is in Tokyo until mid-September; there's one mystery solved.

Yesterday we went to a birthday party for Domi, a friend of Arno's. Everyone I've met here so far seemed to be there.

It was a pretty low-key party, actually, and I had the chance to have a few stilted conversations about laptops and the German civil service system. Usually I just hover around and listen, behavior that owes more to temperament than nationality.

By the end of the night five or six of us were playing IBA, and after that ended we moved on to King's Cup, a drinking game I learned from The Politician and introduced to Reutlingen last night.

The Germans seemed to like it. It requires little or no skill, which is of course why I like it.

Of course, I had to drink from the King's Cup at the end (it had wine, cola, beer, and a white russian) and that was disgusting.

Anyways…

Favorite new German word:
"eskalieren"
v. (intr)
1. To escalate.
2. Slang To intentionally drink copious amounts of alcohol.
orig: germanized version of "escalate," a back-formation from "escalator."

Time Warp

Went to the local Irish pub last night to play the weekly trivia contest.

Incidently (or do I mean "coincidently"?) the Irish pub looks exactly like the Turkish restaurant, our erstwhile meeting place of choice when I was in Konstanz.

Thanks in part to some old-fashioned crosscultural teamwork (old-fashioned in sense that everyone was using everyone else and communication was sketchy at best), and largely to Arno's girlfriend Tanja, who supplied her BH for a crucial action question, our team won.

Tanja's dad, also present, treated his seventeen-year-old daughter and her friends to a celebratory round, confirming my belief that Germany is completely whack in a wonderful way.

He and I discussed the overabundance of handicapped-parking spaces in America. I vented in broken German about one of my pet peeves: people with handicapped license plates who park in good nonhandicapped spots. He vented in fluent (but still unmistakably non-native) English about his pet topic: fat Americans.

On the way home, we ran into some punks straight out of the mid-80s. A few of Arno's friends talked to them while the rest of us laughed covertly. I haven't seen Germans who dressed like that anywhere else, with the possible exception of my high school German textbook.

Sketch: A Young Would-Be Expatriate Literati

I've read more in the past month than I had in the twelve preceeding months. Something of an accomplishment, in my petty little world.

The odd thing is that I think I've had no more free time than usual. I worked seven hours a day in D.C., and Germany (especially Arno's shining portion) has more than enough entertainment to fill my days.

Last night, we watched Hero. The night before, I learned to play IBA, the German version of "quarters."

Perhaps the absence of a roommate or a fast internet connection (and now, the loss of my computer itself, with its hundreds of hours of downloaded cartoons) have something to do with my newfound efficiency.

But more than anything else, I think I'm reading more and better because I suddenly want to again. Now seems like a good time for it, after all. Though I'm sure it's retarding my assimiliation of German.

Words, read and written, are becoming more important to me with every year. I feel compelled to write, but I also feel that a certain amount of reading excuses me from that obligation. So I don't feel especially guilty for concentrating on the one at the expense of the other.

Ich Verstehe Nur "Bahnhof"

Wow, I hate these German "qwertz" keyboards. I broke my laptop the night before I left, however, and borrowed time on Arno's computer is better than nothing.

Germany (or Reutlingen, to be specific) is wonderful. I feel like Jo-Jo The Semi-Retarded Boy around all these native speakers, but with Arno (Graham's former exchange student and a friend of mine) here to translate anything I can't say, I can't get into too much trouble. I'm swearing off tasteless references to Hitler, just to be safe.

Last night (after a spicy Italian dinner) we went to the Rosegarten, an open-air bar that I'm sure Graham has been to dozens of times. I re-learned that it's a long way from comprehension to conversation, but Arno's friends are all friendly German volk and they didn't talk about soccer.

I managed to stay up all night, and now I'm on German time. I think we're going swimming in a bit.

Favorite new German word:
"Kellerkind" (or simply "Keller" for short).
n. (neut)
1. Slang A socially inept youth who prefers to spend most of his time indoors, esp. a pasty RPG-playing nerd who spends most of his time on the computer.
orig: "der Keller" (cellar) + "das Kind" (child)

Not That I Bothered To Unpack

Packing.

Whaa???

I just got paid.

Retro-Catholicism

His Traditionalist religion rejects the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which (in addition to its other sweeping reforms) rejected the notion that Jews were collectively responsible for killing Jesus.

He is building a Traditionalist church in Malibu, California, for about 70 members, and intends to hold Sunday services there in Latin.

He is Mel Gibson, and his new film Passion sounds very interesting.

After reading about it ("filmed entirely in the dead languages of Aramaic and Latin, it has yet to secure a distributor") I'm completely sold.

The Traditionalists (or "Retro-Catholics" —as this lapsed Roman-Catholic insists on calling them) will finally have a film to rival Battlefield Earth, the greatest cultural achievement of their mortal foes at the Church of Scientology.

Since it's slightly more controversial than Dogma (the buzz is that, in one scene, Jews tell the Romans to crucify Jesus Christ, the protagonist) and since it's not something that would ever come to any theater near me, I already know I'll never see Passion. But I can dream, can't I?

Out The Door, But First:

Posted the most offensive thing I think I've ever written on johnny-come-lately.com, a collaborative site helmed by Graham.

I'll add the link later… I should have left to go sight-seeing hours ago.

My last weekend in D.C. has been pretty enjoyable so far.

On Friday I finished working on the database of soldiers who died in Iraq and started compiling a list of units that have returned. I feel pretty confident in my abilities as a researcher at this point. Word is I might get to do some reporting next week.

I'm considering applying for one of the paid Scripps internships for next summer. But I still want to try copy editing, and working for a publishing house as a reader, so we'll see.

Journalism, I've discovered, isn't that bad. And the Kids in the Hall (as we call the Scripps Foundation interns) get free room and board in an apartment near Georgetown.

There was an opening in September, actually, but I've already got plans. Which is kinda too bad.

Speaking of Deutschland, I got a small Eels t-shirt at the concert last Sunday, but I'm worried that it's too small. The sleeves, you see. So as much as I love the shirt, I'll probably forgo wearing it until I get to Germany, the Land of Clothes That Are Small.

And now, I'm gone…

Clip #2

My boss was gone on Monday and Tuesday, so I had an unwelcome but enjoyable four-day weekend.

Since then I've been working on our database of soldiers killed in Iraq, the kind of work Hargrove calls "the future of journalism." It's incredibly interesting stuff. But I do miss writing.

Apparently my very first story, a frustating piece that was always just barely not news, didn't get sent out on Friday. Hargrove sent it out yesterday, and the Albuquerque Tribune decided to print it in today's evening paper.

So now I have two clips for my resume… and I don't know that I'll get any more…

And I'm pretty satisfied. I liked this story, and it didn't get chopped up as much as the last one.

I supervised most of Hargrove's editing (because even though he's the real journalist I'm still the real English major) and I caught a few ugly corrections before they could get passed on to Albuquerque.

Like a sentence beginning "Also in June he hired Van Scoyoc Associates Inc.."

But I didn't catch the changes someone made to the next sentence:

"The combined costs of the satellite office and lobbying firm are more than $300,000 annually."

Even if, like "an hippo," the correction is grammatically correct (I doubt it is), it sounds awful.

Combined cost! Singular!

Who ever heard of "the combined costs"? Not in that sentence, Fritzell would say.

The Happiest Little Boy In The World

Yesterday, for about half an hour, I was the happiest little boy in the whole wide world.

You see, for days I've been what a literal-minded economist might call "cash poor." My ATM card is Visa-non-grata at every bank in town and, like some careless teenager, I've long since frittered my money away on books and plays and Polish brothers' films.

But yesterday, I wrote a check to one of my housemates (the opera singer) and got myself some cash in exchange. Then I walked outside.

And to an Eels concert.

It was—of course—a great time.

A Free Lunch

Covered the first annual ACS National Convention today, which meant crashing a luncheon at the Capital Hilton.

Following the bold example of another reporter (easily spotted: we all had to wear big nametags that said PRESS), I took a seat at one of the tables in back.

Everyone else at the table was a promising law student from a prestigious law school, as far as I could tell.

While the learned extroverts networked furiously, I enjoyed the best and cheapest meal I've had in quite some time. I felt somewhat guilty, because everyone else had paid quite a bit of money to sit in the grand ballroom and eat chicken and strawberry tortes. But no one cared.

(And the idea that some attorney or would-be attorney was starving because I was eating was just too ludicrous.)

The guy to my left admitted to reading the official Howard Dean weblog. The guy to my right asked me why the media isn't covering Bush's lies.

If "we" aren't, I asked, then how do you know he's been lying?

Anyways, I was there to cover Sen. Clinton's speech for Scripps' capital gossip column, which I did. The speech was about this administration's attempt to "turn back the clock," and at the end Hillary went over the most controversial judicial nominees.

She was a surprisingly funny speaker.

I grabbed the press materials and left. And that's all I did today…