Anecdote. Graham and I are in the supermarket with his housemate Timo, buying some goodies to bring into the movie theater with us. Timo grabs three bottles of beer from a crate and we start to walk towards the register.

Timo stops: "Aren't you guys getting any beers?"

Sometimes I really miss Germany. It's not just the drinking, though the beer and wine are great — it's also the bakeries and ice cream shops and the supermarket itself, which brought back a lot of memories from my term abroad. Cheap jam, strange meats and cheeses.

It's the delightful, tentative way so many Germans use English, as if they're holding each word in front of them with calipers. It's the cobblestones, and the trains that can take you almost anywhere. It's the döner stands, even though the place in Reutlingen uses an inferior garlic sauce.

I really didn't expect to come back to Europe so soon, only three years after my last visit. In all honesty, I don't have many contacts there — partially because my refusal to speak English with most Germans often resulted in my not speaking at all — but luckily I had Graham, skilled people person, to latch onto.

Pilot fish. That's the word I was looking for. Seems like a less sinister metaphor.

Graham. It shook my concept of friendship to find/remember that yes, if I spend more than a little bit of time with Graham he becomes a real person, with faults and idiosyncrasies, some of them either new to me or only now perceivable with my enhanced (+2) evil eye. These people are supposed to be immune to my judgmental side...

My first night was the definition of low-key. Graham, Timo, and I played a few rounds of Lunch Money, a simple card game with complicated rules, before I prematurely drifted off. I was stuck between time zones for most of the break, falling asleep at 10 instead of 2 and waking up at dawn unable to continue sleeping.

Embarrassing. Maybe if I'd stayed up later that first night...

Then, travel. I spent three days in Amsterdam hanging out in bars and "brown cafes" and coffeeshops, drinking a lot of hot chocolate and abstaining (for a number of good reasons) from the Netherland's most famous pseudo-legal attraction.

Not that the coffeeshops aren't cool though: I'm generally in favor of any institution that can magically transform "sitting around and talking" into a valid social activity rather than a disappointing nothing. In terms of comfortable surroundings alone (again, I can't speak for the wares), a place called Abraxas was my favorite.

I'd vowed that if people were getting high I would be drinking and not twiddling my thumbs, but ne'er the twain shall meet in Amsterdam, apparently.

We ducked into an Irish pub on the first night — though it turned out to be a St. Patrick's Day special, I still think that bars could profit by offering free stew to lure customers — but it was crowded and somewhat expensive. Partially due to some lingering prejudice against the ubiquitous brown cafes, the quest for a good bar became a lingering theme of the trip.

On Saturday we toured the Heineken Brewery and learned next to nothing about brewing. But it was entertaining, and the price of admission (about $12.50) entitled us to a bunch of free stuff. See Malin and Our Bold Hero at the end of the tour:



Graham and Gabi, sitting opposite:



Mere moments later, Graham successfully balanced a full glass on his head.

Later that night, when our group was a bit bigger, we went to a place called The Last Watering Hole, which our hotel manager had recommended. It was a great bar, large and smoky with the biggest coasters in the world, and I think we could have sat there all night, directly under the gigantic framed picture of Rod Stewart, if not for the loud and incompetent playing of some band whose name I already forget.

Doubtless it will come to me later, like pilot fish. I woke up days after one conversation this break finally remembering the word "rickshaw." It was glorious.

We finally got a bit of culture on Sunday, when like the Lord coming from on high a guy named Jordan came and showed us Amsterdam, taking upon himself most of the duties I'd assumed as the de facto astronaut wrangler. We met at the Van Gogh Museum, which I didn't like much due to its high admission, crowds, limited selection and (shocking for someone used to the Smithsonian) no-photo policy.

After some traditional snacks and a tour of the red light district (and that was weird, very weird), Jordan led the guys off somewhere or other while the girls and I journeyed to Amsterdam's Modern Art museum.

All the famous modern art was elsewhere, but the exhibits they had were decent enough. Here's a piece I liked from the Eberhard Havekost exhibit, part of his "Destiny" series. Finding solemnity in the everyday.



Biggest disappointment: the video games as art exhibit, which had a great concept, some good art, and... a lot of crap. They'd hung a video of someone playing Katamari on the wall; that worked well.

That night, we stumbled upon the best bar we went to, Cafe Hotel Cornerhouse near Abraxas. Read that name again, seriously. More pictures, this time Aryn and Sean:



And Jordan and Graham. Jordan has one of those delicious dark trappist beers.



We left Amsterdam the next day, somewhat fitfully. We were stranded for a while at Amsterdam-Sloterdijk "by order of the police," who stopped the trains coming and going from the nearby airport after a conductor spotted workmen inside one of the tunnels. They didn't tell us all this stuff about workmen at the time, however. Graham started spinning tales of bird flu at the airport while I tried to spot any undercover cops patrolling the area in search of the escaping terrorist.

After a quick tour of the Hague, we ended up in Deventer, still in the Netherlands, where Jordan lives and works with his boss. We sat up talking that night, about politics of various kinds for the most part. It was the first of many times I felt like the only libertarian in all of Europe.

Luckily I can still criticize Bush on many of the same issues as liberals, with no one the wiser.

In the morning I continued to read Daemonomania, which I'd bought in the Hague. I could have done without the weird, early sex scenes — the book felt a bit disorganized, frankly — but Crowley has a way with words that you may find me emulating. Occasional lyric mysticism, pregnant sentence fragments ending in prepositions.

The next adventure was Brussels, where we met up with a girl Graham knows and her go-go twenty-something friends. Drinking again (ten days in a row, this break: spring break!) and then tapas. Tapas is a ripoff, btw.

Funny to hear that for people in Brussels even the choice of language can be very political.

I slept at a friend of a friend of a friend's house, and that morning Graham and I walked around the city. We looked at some church and I managed to coax (read: push) Graham into a modern art museum. Good stuff: a Max Ernst, a lot of Magritte, Hiroshige: a lot of great art.

That night, our last before the final push back to Reutlingen, was split between two opposites, Nils in Trier (where we ate dinner; I had a great pizza with white asparagus and two kinds of salami) and Thorsten in Saarbrucken (where we went dancing). One was efficient and studious, the other all flash and jive.

Not quite opposites, really, but they were framed as roughly that and I ended up conceiving of them as such. The burden fell more heavily on Thorsten, who as the second one I met was forced into the archetypal role of the "anti-Nils."

Here's Nils, listening as I try to refute his crazy "games are a waste of time" theory.



Our first night back in Reutlingen was the first night of "Schwabishe Wochle," three days celebrating all things schwabish. Mainly... in fact, exclusively... the food.

The three of us saw V for Vendetta and liked it. I'd just read the graphic novel and found the two pretty similar by movie adaptation standards, but I disliked the easy morality and oversimplification of the movie version.

Saturday, after buying booze at Walmart and preparing enough spaetzle for twenty Germans, we had a bunch of people over for a party. We played King's Cup, and I'm afraid that I may have soured my Reutlingen legacy by trying to "run" a game with too many people at the table using an amalgamation of three different rule sets. It wasn't a great game, but apparently people had fun. I nodded off toward the end of the night and had what I assume were crazy dreams.

Sunday, everything was closed. Ah, German blue laws, I even missed you. We ended up playing Die Siedler with Hannes and Tanni, Arno's friend and gf respectively. Good game... so close to winning...

Risk, afterwards... I didn't stand much of a chance. Here's Hannes about ten minutes before he completed his special goal: destroying me.



Monday we (Timo, Graham, and I again) met briefly with Arno at the airport, and in the airport Burger King, Arno and I made plans to meet again in three years or so. It's been roughly the plan so far.

So, in summation: Whoo!

Less tired tomorrow, more then.

Must sleep. After I spend a few more hours on this essay, of course. I forget how unproductive I can be on my own computer, with its many distractions. Much better at work, in the library... yep, this is prettymuch the worst possible place I could be working on this.

Also: I don't usually, ever really, drink caffeine. I'm pretty appreciative of this disgusting orange tea right about now.

The essay is good though. Which is why it's taking forever to write. I was unable to shoehorn in blogging, so it's about Roland Barthes' S/Z, one of my favorite theoretical works. I imagine a remake of Paul is Dead in which the kid discovers S/Z and, not realizing how incredibly old it is, starts applying its methods to everything.

Someday I will chart an episode of Lost. This will be awesome. It took me six pages to chart a single paragraph earlier this term though, so maybe just the hermeneutic codes. And the semes.

Maybe not the semes. I spent a paragraph destroying the very notion of the seme.

Good blog-related quote I happened upon while researching the less-good paper I finished earlier today:

"The answer why they won't shut up is - they're not talking to you. They're talking in the private register of blogs, that confidential style between secret and public. And you found them via Google. They're having a bad day. They're writing for friends who are interested in their hobbies and their life. Meanwhile, you're standing fifty yards away with a sneer, a telephoto lens and a directional microphone. Who's obsessed now?"

The Bloggies were exciting, much more interested in them than in the Oscars. I can't believe PostSecret dominated so utterly. Go Fug Yourself, the one "best writing" weblog I haven't really read won, and I guess I'm ok with that. Not my thing, but people seem to like it. And Boing Boing deserved the lifetime achievement award for being so amazingly popular, but next year it had better be Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong.

Tomorrow is going to be a bit of a crunch, but it's a late-afternoon flight, and I'm confident that I can get everything done with three wasted hours at the terminal to spare, as long as I'm not waking up to this essay.

God I am so close to using Courier New, the most embarassing font ever. I would be done. I would have been done hours ago. But it doesn't seem smart, or fair to the students who wrote those extra pages. I have more to say, it's just taking forever to type it out. We need a ethic of fonts around here, stat.

But to business: I'm not sure how often I'll be updating while I'm gone, or if I'll be updating at all. Spending a week or two in meatspace sounds like a good break. If I die while I'm gone, Graham or Josh or someone will hack into my account sometime that week and leave a post telling you guys (and transfer everything to blogspot, ok? I'm not made of posthumous hosting money).

That's a trick I learned from sporadic yet famous blogger Tequila Mockingbird.

As for contact, I'll try to check my email every few days or so; you'll find nothing but oblivion and my answering machine if you call here, and I won't have my cell phone.

I'll be back on the 27th. I'm even looking forward to the plane ride, at this point.

Spring break! Whoo!

Fixed my iPod, apparently, using the tried-and-true "Nintendo cartridge" method. Barring another mysterious breakdown, my international flight is saved.

In my experience, merely blowing on the dusty or in this case dirt-filled inner workings of a high tech device works surprisingly well. At work, I've fixed two computers and one famous laptop this way — it's fast becoming one of the most important items in my tech coordinator bag of tricks.

Oh god, back to countless pages of essay-writing. This term needs to be over.

After dreading the trip for so long, picking up Graham's package from the FedEx main office was surprisingly easy. Much easier than a two-hour roundtrip into the city should be.

I don't remember what's inside the package anymore. Computer parts or something. I'm sure I'll have room in my suitcase without having to take it out of the box.

Now that it's getting nicer out — some days have already had that "let's go play Frisbee golf" feel, suddenly bittersweet now that I live here — waiting outside for a bus, or walking a few blocks, doesn't seem nearly as onerous. Also, I broke down and bought a Chicago card, and that sunk cost removes the psychological obstacle that is my inveterate thrift.

So... more trips into the Loop next term?

Spring term seems so inconsequential. Two months? Psh. I feel like I have one foot out the door already — although since I've applied for jobs in the Cities and D.C., I don't quite know where I'm headed once I get outside, lock the door, and run for the bus.

I actually bought an answering machine (digital! yes!) in case my Blue Man moment happens when I'm out of the country. Here's hoping, though for some of these jobs I have absolutely no idea what the applicant pool looks like. I could be the only one without a degree in rocketometry or something.

"Rocketometry" sounds very Gravity's Rainbow. Now there's a book I have conflicted feelings toward.

(Short version: it's not enough like the X-Files.)

As I attempted to explain to the Strategist, the process of applying for jobs has been a series of epiphanies. Realizing that — yes! — I'd love to work for the government, or some other organization that really has an effect on people's lives. And that — it's all so obvious now! — of course I want to spend my life making other people's writing better. I couldn't imagine anything more fulfilling.

For those of you who might question my editorial abilities, it really is all about hats. The hat goes on the head, you see. And you probably haven't seen me with my copy editor hat on.

I can't doubt the utility of MAPH, both in terms of the writing tricks I've learned (mostly on the side, unfortunately) and the added heft it gives my resume, but the notion that I'd continue with my graduate education, specialize in some narrow field, go deep into debt, and eventually become a professor six or seven years from now? It all seems... faintly ridiculous, actually. I can do everything I really want to do outside of academia. Integriphany.

If I change my mind on this, I owe you a story.

And sometimes Wikipedia totally screws up my life. But now I know Wolverine's backstory, so I guess that hour of lost sleep was worth it.

Why should I get sucked into the endlessly-branching Marvel Universe entries when my thesis project, and the book I should be reading for class, are just as interesting? Is irresponsibility itself that enjoyable?

It's finally done. Or as done as I'm able to make it:

www.voicesofacademia.com

You can email voicesofacademia@gmail.com or use the site's handy submission form. I'm hoping to get at least a few submissions, so spread the word before the site goes "live" on the 28th. There will probably be an email, and I'll have propaganda to print out soon: anything worth doing, as they say.

I've got a big preamble on the site, but basically I'm just looking for any witty/stupid/inexplicable quotes from academia that other people might want to hear. Kinda like a "Overheard in College," though I like to think of it more as an extension of something I've already been doing here from time to time.

My expectations are low, maybe because really I was only doing this for myself, as a tribute to all those other creative projects I never followed through on, not to mention all those pages in my notebook filled with quotes.

I'm also pretty proud of how the page turned out; I feel like I've earned that "some PHP" on the skills sections of my resume.

Work in the morning, still no job waiting for me this summer, twenty-some pages to write in the next week, and a two-hour commute to the FedEx office (hate!) somewhere in my future.

And yet I'm excited.

I leave for Germany on the 15th. Just eight days until good beer, good volk, and, well, being in Germany without feeling that I need to speak German 24/7. For the first time ever.

I'll never live down that time I tried to use the bottle opener backwards, but with Genglish finally fair game, perhaps the Reutlingen people will think I sound less stupid.

I did bring them King's Cup, after all. An act roughly analogous to when Prometheus brought fire to mankind.

There's also the matter of spending time with Graham. We talk on IM all the time (more than I talk to anyone else, in any case) but for several years now I've only been able to see him on weekends, every so often.

It would almost be funny to find out that we hate each other — but like the rest of my capital-F friendships, my friendship with Graham has ceased to be a tentative, dynamic thing and become, simply, the premise for all of our interactions.

I can disagree with my friends, but they're still exempt from my evil eye. It's weird, actually.

Sort of like that rule Jubb and I came up with at Lawrence when cabin fever was looming, to keep inter-roommate conflicts in check: the Core Assumption. Something along the lines of "We like each other."

Ah, I've forgotten it. It only sort of worked anyways.

The only hitch in my travel plans so far has been my inability to get in touch with former exchange-student Flo, whose email address I've totally misplaced. I met up with him three years ago during my term abroad; the hope is that he could put me in touch with some of the gang from Konstanz, who I haven't seen in a chasm-like six years.

Germany = more exciting than Hyde Park. But let's not make that list.

Speaking of intellectual snobbery, at Jimmy's last night (random call from the Strategist) I found myself once again having to hear someone say

"I don't watch television."

Not "I don't watch much television" or "I don't get cable," but "I don't watch television." A wall in the conversation.

I have to agree with my fellow preceptee: there's almost always a holier-than-thou feel to that statement. It's both incredibly irritating and completely ridiculous.

Television in the only popular entertainment medium that you can just summarily dismiss without having intelligent people think you're either uncultured (e.g. theatre) or completely old-fashioned (e.g. the computer).

Well, I suppose there are people who might say "I don't read comic books" or "I don't listen to the radio" with the same restrained huffiness, but it's not the kind of thing that comes up often, if at all.

Yet I seem to run into these kill-your-television types — whitedotters? — just about everywhere.

And by everywhere, I mean academia. Some students really seem to hang part of their identity on not watching television, probably because there is a bit of intellectual cred (and perceived originality) attached to the idea.

Should I have children, I'm sure that I'll try to limit their exposure to television. I don't have cable here because I couldn't justify the expense, and because there are very few channels I watch with any regularity. But defending television doesn't mean defending television's excesses or excess television.

As Gene Roddenberry put it, "They say that 90 percent of TV is junk. But 90 percent of everything is junk."

The central anti-television argument is that television is a waste of time, standing in the place of qualitatively better activities. I don't know how true this ever was — I was one of those teenagers who spent more time with his family on T.G.I.F. night — but it's not true any more.

The incredible ease of timeshifting has effectively exploded this theory. TiVo will record your favorite shows for you to watch at your leisure; for the computer literate, bittorrent downloading through Azureus or some other program is effortless.

I watch about three to four hours of television a week, whenever I feel like watching television. I don't have to schedule my life around shows, and there are no commercials to warp my mind. So what's the problem?

Presumably that there isn't anything worth watching.

As far as comedy is concerned, I've no idea when was the last time that was true... Seinfeld was both amusing and required pop culture viewing, in its heyday the Simpsons had episodes far better than anything you'll find in this, the 17th and worst of seasons — like Mark Liberman, I'm shocked, shocked that only 51% of Americans knew that Homer is a Simpson — and there's Arrested Development and the up-and-coming My Name is Earl.

And those are just the comedies that get all the attention. If you share my taste, then you too will shed a tear for Home Movies and Andy Richter Controls the Universe, both taken before their time.

People expect comedy, but more important for my argument is the fact that, especially recently, there seems to be a lot of great drama on television.

I remember watching ER back in high school, before it went downhill. And then there was Freaks and Geeks, which had the kind of honest, bittersweet view of high school you rarely find anywhere. I don't watch any of the movie channel shows, but the Sopranos seems to get consistently good press.

And then there's Lost. I don't know anyone who watched the first episode without getting hooked. Lost has mystery, drama, comedy, and suspense, with an emphasis on dynamic, fully-realized characters. (What Prof. Fritzell might call the "novelistic" as opposed to the "romantic.")

In due deference to postmodernism, the show plays with media, incorporating film, books, and music as plot devices and extending the story into media outside of the show. The writers even throw in bits for the viewers with TiVo, in the same way silent films sometimes added dialogue for the lip-readers.

This is, in short, television's best case for being taken seriously as art.

And yet for some people, willful ignorance of all this is still a badge of honor. It's time to start recognizing that the sweeping anti-television attitude is just as foolish as any viewpoint which denigrates an entire medium.

The cooking curse has been broken for days — once I remembered how hard it is to make something bad with cheddar cheese, I bought a block and had kickass spaghetti with cheese sauce. Also, really good mashed potatoes.

One b-day present which I forgot to mention is the 1958 Modern Family Cookbook, by the suspicously named "Meta Given." Either I'm in a sci-fi novel or that's a pseudonym.

Apparently it was my mom's first cookbook, so when she found another copy at a garage sale, she thought of me. I've been wanting to cook something from it, so tonight I made Cocoa Indians, which fall somewhere between a very light brownie and a very short cake. I'm too lazy to type it up, so here's the recipe:




I omitted the raisins, because I firmly believe that raisins are the devil. Of course, that made the recipe a little plain, so maybe I'll substitute nuts or chocolate chips next time I make this.

At least, regular raisins are the devil. Golden raisins, I've got no such issues with: they're not trying to be something they're not. Making something with craisins is practically one of my 43 Things.

Besides some decent recipes, most of which I can't make because I don't have this or that ingredient, the cookbook has some serious novelty value in its quaint, 1950s-style sexism. Here's the first paragraph from the introduction:




I know! Isn't it great! I imagine that this is the kind of thing gender studies students read for fun. Those crazy kids love to scoff.

Started applying for jobs in the Twin Cities in earnest; there are actually some editing jobs out there so maybe, just maybe, I can get lucky this time. As per usual, it's frustrating to know (or "know," if you prefer) that I'm qualified and yet look so comparatively inexperienced on paper.

The current nightmare is that I committed a grammatical solecism somewhere in my cover letter.

When I was looking for editing jobs this fall, I intentionally left in some non-error "errors" to separate myself from other, thoughtlessly draconian copy editors — a "which" without a comma, a sentence beginning with "however," that sort of thing — but those were wilder days.

This time I'm trying to show that I can play by the rules; let the fact that some of those rules are nutso come up in the interview.

Every now and then I do something, or maybe just think something, that seems to represent for me some kernel of who I really am. Of course, I can't easily sum up exactly what it would mean for me to be essentially Dan — theoretically I'm always doing that, like in the old joke about eating in China — but suffice it to say that it's a satisfying feeling.

Like an epiphany of personal integrity, if being true to yourself can mean being cynical and even rude sometimes. Integriphany?

Presumably my life is ideal when such moments occur with highest possible frequency.

Well... I'm not sure if that's true, since lately the satisfaction of acting like I know I should seems to have involved a lot of shooting myself in the foot.

Copy-editing rule #103: A dilemma has horns.

Still, however I happen upon a kernel, it's a pretty great feeling.

On the other hand, when I realize that I'm not living up to the person I see in the kernels — not because I'm sitting at home being boring, mind you, because I don't see that I have to entertain any invisible spectators, but certainly when I'm making the wrong, easy choices — it's profoundly disappointing. You'd think that it would be harder to forget.

I'll probably go to my grave wishing I'd called more people out. And wishing I'd been less standoffish/shy/introverted around the people I actually do like, because this cuts both ways.

I can't be my idealized self — who knows how alike we actually are. And besides, that's hardly even a whole person... How does he toast bread? Where does he buy stamps? What's his drinking tolerance?

(I'm "heroic lightweight" myself; is there really an ideal drinking weightclass?)

I guess I'm left wishing that my character intersected with his more often. Maybe it's a matter of seeing the chances I'm missing, the opportunities to own up.

Or maybe it's like Burnout 3. My car is so fast now that the only way I seem to be able to win a race is by zoning into the music and letting my unconscious worry about the obstacles.