Chez Moi

I've lived in my new apartment, the first home I've had all to myself, for almost three months now, and yet so few people have seen it, it seems. I guess I introduced my desk, and another brief glimpse of my bedroom back in October, but it's time to unveil the oasis.

What? If it's being unveiled, it must be exciting, like an oasis. It certainly isn't large, so that angle's out, nor is it impeccably decorated. I'm trying, but there are gaps. When you boil pasta or take a shower, it is steamy like a jungle , and it is an island of warmth in this cold, cold sea. It's hard to fit the whole bed+living room in one photo, because, well, it's just so small. And cozy!

This photo from when I was in Ireland needs to go on the wall between the window and the cabinet.

Here are the gaps I'm talking about. I've got a map for over the desk, one framed poster (Croatian naive art bought in Zagreb!) to go over the couch, but it needs a collage of other frames (to be purchased) with it to fill that massive space—I have nine-foot ceilings! My obliging father painted it for me, and he just brought a paint bucket to stand on, because it was easier than a ladder and worked at home. At home, we have eight-foot ceilings. Thank goodness my landlord keeps a painting ladder in the basement.

My cantilever chairs are antiques. I'm so cool. My parents bought them in the seventies when they moved into their first apartment together (also in Ann Arbor). My dad says they're from the beginning of the twentieth century. He helped me I helped him reupholster them for Emma and me to use last year. Can't wait 'til Deutschland is on the wall. The pastels of the different Bundesstaaten (states) go great with my "ice cube" walls. They're so pale they don't quite show up right in these photos, but you can take my word that they're lovely. Oh, and that hallway is my breakfast-lunch-dinner nook, which leads to the kitchen and then the bathroom. But those are for another time.

 Close-up of my ivory velveteen curtains (which I still have to hem). Funny story—I washed the velveteen for the curtain for the little window over the bed, to pre-shrink it, and when I took it out of the dryer, the raised leaf pattern was gone! Thank goodness I didn't shrink the big curtains.

These are my lovely Simply Shabby Chic sheets, which were discontinued before I moved, causing much anguish. But I found them on eBay, and now can happily coordinate with my walls.

The biggest question: where will I fit a Christmas tree; or: where will I find a tree small enough to fit?

Dreiunddreißig Red Balloons

Usually, when I take photos of things, I like the way the world actually looks and want to capture it. (Or the way it looks through my sunglasses, which can result in disappointment in my camera.) This late April day, I was documenting my bedroom during its window of perfect sunlight, but that doesn't last long and soon I was in Emma's room, with its longer-lasting light and thirty-three red balloons left over from the Book Co-op's poorly-attended but enjoyable sock hop. Emma was already on her "99 Red Balloons" kick at that point. The balloons were all the same color, but the light hit in different ways and so in the photos, they range from pale yellow to deep red. This is a time when the real world, and crispness, and accuracy weren't so important. I love the way the light hit the collage of her belongings across the room. These pictures remind me of something, a movie or several or something, but I'm not sure exactly what. Something magical.

I love this view, even if it is just Packard.

Spring Living and All Its Perils

How did we end up here? Well, the cats, just like every other person in Ann Arbor and the northern hemisphere, noticed that it was getting warmer out, or at least that there was a lot more going on outside.

Table Cat took to sitting on our microwave platform (IKEA table, but whatever) on the counter, so he could look out the back door's window if a human would be so kind as to open the curtain for him.

And then he started to explore above the cabinets, which I think was disappointing for him, because it didn't take too long for him to head back down.

Last week was immeasurably lovely. The light was so bright, so complete, and you could smell that it was spring.

 It's funny how every time spring comes, I feel like it's completely new, even as memories of previous springs well up in my mind. The light step of feet in canvas shoes brought back April walks to the Arb at the end of sophomore year, and the exhilaration of biking down the street with no backpack and no jacket brought back living in the Krankenhaus. Even being stuck in the Fishbowl scanning notes wasn't so bad when I looked up and remembered the natural lighting.

I spent several pleasant afternoons on the front porch, eating my late lunch and reading modern Turkish poetry in the afternoon sun.

Emma, and then Caitlin and I, took to the roof above the porch in the goldy evenings. Well, everyone pretty much took to the roof.

Only Table Cat was allowed to roam free at first, since he has lots of experience with running away and always coming back.

I learned Haroun was allowed loose when both cats came up to the bathroom window on the side of the house and meowed to be let in. Which is only possible from the front, but sometimes they forget how to get back inside. They love exploring the roof and sniffing at the edges, wishing they could experience the real world on the ground. But they happily scamper in the other direction, too.

The worst part was yesterday evening. Haroun was on the couch, Emma and I were watching Say Anything, and we looked over to the front window to see Table Cat watching us. From the porch. Oops. No photo of that, though. Hopefully Haroun won't learn to jump off the roof. He's just a baby.

In other roof-related news, we were sitting on the roof on Friday night talking, when suddenly something slid down down down the shingles to the gutter. It sounded like a phone. It was Emma's phone. Emma was barely too short to reach it when standing on the porch ledge, and no one we knew who was tall was available to get it out. We knew it was supposed to rain-snow that night, and this was the last thing Emma needed to tell her mom. "You know, you just don't want to know what happened to my phone this time," she would have to say. In the end, Caitlin yelled out to a tall guy walking by our house, "Hey, man! Could you help us? Our phone is in the gutter! We have cookies!" Thank goodness Emma had made cookies, and thank goodness we live on a busy street this year. So there's another peril of the roof.

Homecoming

Disregarding the exhortation of the poem I translated and posted (Let's lead ourselves behind the light of the cold's written proof) and the homework assigned by my archaeology professor (Find someplace warmer than this), Emma, Cooper and I ventured significantly north for the first half of our vacation—to Montréal.

We drove the whole way, which was much cheaper for three people than the train would have been, and let me tell you, Ontario lasts pretty much forever. I don't know if it makes it seem longer or shorter that the majority of the rest stops heading west are closed temporarily, but it is a problem. (Today on the kitchen table I saw that Arizona just closed their rest stops period, which is horrible.)  This required us to bring the rotisserie chicken and baguettes we'd purchased at the Marché Jean-Talon in Montréal into a normal McDonald's to eat. We had no other option.

As we neared Toronto on the trip home, we drove into the sunset, which became ever more spectacular until it faded away...in time for Toronto's buildings to sparkle in the darkness. As we left Toronto behind, the blackness settled around us and the highway became much emptier. More than four hours later, the twinkling peaks of the Ambassador Bridge came into view in the distance. Soon we could see Detroit's skyline. Everyone knows Detroit is in trouble, but Emma and Cooper wondered if everyone knows Detroit is better than Windsor. The conclusion reached: most people probably don't know Windsor exists, which is probably a victory, but also probably not true. Then Emma complained again about all the British names in Ontario.

Windsor and the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit's Riverwalk, July 2008.

On I-75, the Lodge, I-94, the roads were so well lit, and I could switch to any lane I wanted in an instant. Leaving Montréal had taken an hour, probably, because of a mishap with lane changes in the crowded tunnel that takes you from downtown and QC-720 to QC-20 (which in turn takes you to the interminable 401 across Ontario). We ended up across a bridge instead of on the way back home and found ourselves turning around in the casino's parking structure. It wasn't the last time we found ourselves at a casino on the journey home, either.

In Detroit, we dropped Cooper off at Wayne State and headed home. Emma stuck the Avett Brothers in the CD player and we sang along as loud as we could, while I enjoyed knowing just how fast would be all right. In the middle lane on 94, there was a van/bus/thing, lights on, attached to a smaller vehicle behind it. The van's back wheels weren't touching the ground—it was not pulling, it was being pushed by the smaller car. How did they see? We laughed, but sped ahead to avoid the accident Emma was sure would happen. Then off the highway and onto Alter and I made all the lights but one, and the inevitable one after you've entered Grosse Pointe. In Grosse Pointe, I worried about the headlights behind me and wished I was going less than four miles above the speed limit. To get a ticket a block from home would be horrendous. But we made it back safely.

Where are the photos of Montréal, you might ask. Or more likely, you would ask it without the accent aigu: where are the photos of Montreal? When are you going to write about Montreal? Why did you put that accent on it even though you are not douchey enough to pronounce it en français while speaking English? The answer, my dear reader, is that I am too busy playing the Sims and worrying about life to go through all my photos right now. And I like to put accents on things, although I'm feeling a little awkward about this one. Most likely, you aren't even asking any of these questions, because you aren't reading my blog. Oh well. But Montreal, and Mont-Royal, and taking a trip were all great. Whoever you are (besides faithful reader, commenter, and kindred spirit Ali!), just wait.

Mit wärmeren Worten = With Warmer Words

Translated by yours truly for a translation class. It's "spring" break!

Up and Down

A year ago Monday was Munich, snow-covered, gearing up for Fasching. It was a day for hot chocolate and cream-filled donuts and visiting the summer palace. This photo is part of the I Will Remember This As the Winter Palace series. Today resembled a year ago: the snow stretched into the distance, seemingly without end. Instead of a palace, there was a history classroom. A year ago today, I was on vacation.

Friday was a bust-out-your-nice-shoes-you-protect-from-inclement-weather sort of day, but a walk-in-the-street-because-these-puddles-are-too-deep one as well. It was a day to stop by the Pastry Peddler and buy pain au chocolat or a cinnamon roll and walk down the street with your coat open. A day to stop across the street from your destination, even though you're running late, and take a picture of the sunlight reflecting on the buildings, even if it does look a little Eastern Bloc.

Saturday was opening the barking front door to a peeling paint, brick house, to be greeted by sniffs and licks and the perennial smile of the puppy you picked out at the zoo almost eight years ago. The queen of the house slept on the kitchen table in a little sun-pond, while the aloe and African violets lay uncomfortably on their sides. Saturday was opening the back door of the house onto a greenhouse of old wood, tools, a table used for candlelit summer dinners and an aging cat chirruping his hello from his sunny perch. Driving along the lake; next to the joggers and the walkers, the snow was melting on the lawns. The water was calm, but there were still piles of jagged ice along the shore.

Sunday was shopping malls and empty storefronts. Bumpy roads, glare on expressway exit signs. Racing the unbeatable lights back to the expressway past dirty old houses, cars, grass. Friendly people. Later, new snow.

Monday was slipping to school. My boots have flat soles. Slip, slip, slip. Why bother. Monday night, the crows surrounded our house. Again.

 

Treppenhaus = Stairwell = One Reason I Like the B-School

The business school's new building is something I think about almost every day. Or maybe five days a week—the five days I have class, always starting in the same building. I trudge up East U., turn onto Tappan and rush along past this building and the edge of the Law Quad and the historical library and under the Grad Library and then finally, I arrive at Mason Hall and curse the stairs I have to climb and the teachers that like to start one to two minutes ahead of time. I'm usually on time, but they don't seem to realize it. At the end of most days, I take the same path home again.

I think construction started when I still lived in East Quad, so I lived only one street away. The first time I remember really looking at the building, it was already clearly a building, and maybe tall already, and it was partially covered in this:

It was a stretch, but I hoped those orange tiles (described perhaps more accurately, and certainly more forgivingly, as 'terra cotta' on the website of those I hold accountable) were somehow a layer that would end up below the surface. Some weird insulation? Something. Not that there's anything automatically bad about them. I just don't like them.

 

I knew it was too much to hope the same for the thin-looking tan stone that seemed so superficial and icky.

 

I don't know if it was the same day, but one day walking along Hill, Cooper and I considered the height of the glass stairwell. He thought maybe he should test his fear of heights up there. I remembered the trees that stretch out in from of you when you look out the windows on the upper floors of the Grad Library in autumn, or out from my cosmology classroom at the top of the USB freshman year, and figured it would be a pretty nice view.

 When I came home from Germany, the building was long finished. My instinctive dislike for it remained, but after a year filled with visits to the old towns of Europa, I had discovered a new appreciation for newer buildings, even the boring ones, as long as they weren't offensive. When we emerged from the U-Bahn tunnels at Potsdamer Platz last January on my first night in Berlin (which, by the way, was spent watching Twilight in the original English, because that's what big cities are for), an unexpected excitement poured into me when I saw skyscrapers. Real skyscrapers. Shiny and lit up and sparkly. There was one building that can be described as nothing other than pointy. (PriceWaterhouse Coopers on Potsdamer Platz, I guess.) I just couldn't get over its pointyness. Anyway. It was exciting.

 

So, too, is the newest home of the U-M Ross School of Business. It has some weird shapes going on. And the glass! There's so much of it. I haven't ventured inside, but those classrooms must be full of natural light. Also full of over-the-top fancy equipment, I hear, but I guess that's what happens when you're funded by alumni who actually try to make money? When I see the glass, sometimes I flash to the distant future, with Ann Arbor in ruins. How does glass hold up to the test of time? Will there be jagged mountain ranges where pristine cyan prisms stand today? Will the building's glass limbs, the parts that make it what it is, even be there, or will it be a hulking orange beast gutted by some inexplicable disaster? (Human greed and nuclear war are usually the culprit in these scenarios, but who knows.) There's a part of me that knows the glass used in building is incredibly strong, but I can't help but think that it will break, or else slowly, over the course of millennia, ooze down to the ground and somehow disappear. If this is true, our ruins will have much larger conceptual holes than those of, say, Ireland. You can see how the stone churches dotting the Irish countryside would have worked. A glassless glass building would make no sense.

To avoid the tirade I'm about to go off on about how so many German buildings aren't really as old as they say they are and my parents' house is older than that building from the "fourteenth" century, or thinking about old buildings in general, I will leave you with my favorite parts of the B-School, the reasons I realized it was kind of nice after all. First, the stairs in the glass stairwell make a great design against the sky. You can even see people walking up and down them.

 

They look even better at dusk, as does the whole building. The interior becomes a warm yellow when the lights go on inside. Viewed against the darkening sky and through the glass, which keeps its greenish tinge, this cold, angular building becomes welcoming. It's definitely the best part of the walk home.

Here we go again...

And the snow's only getting thicker. Back to the oversized snow boots for me.

There's Something About February

I have a theory about Februarys. (Novembers too, but that's another story.*) The theory is that Februarys become a problem from which one needs to escape. I guess there's the obvious reason: it's been cold for a while. It's been really cold for over a month. When it's sunny, it usually means it's painfully cold. Last week it was actually easily bearable, but that didn't mean I wanted to walk all the way to campus and climb several flights of stairs and talk about winter and Melancholie in der deutsch(sprachig)en Literatur und Kultur—hey look, my class is on topic. I especially did not want to do this on five hours of sleep. Last week kind of spiraled out of control; everything took longer than anticipated, even when I was working diligently. I'd be working working working and then look up at the corner of my computer screen and yell, "Goddammit!" pointlessly to myself when I realized how much time I'd spent scanning in the original text of a translation I'm working on, for example. And converting files. And trying to combine several PDFs into one for free online. It's not easy. I gave up.

This is what February is like: trekking across a never-ending sheet of ice. (View out the Reichstag in Berlin, Jan. 2009) 

Even if the cold has stretched farther into our lives by February (and we're only a week in, people—the oppression will continue), so has daytime. As January passed, I marveled at the sunlight that was still around in the evenings. Maybe the problem with February is that everything has become normal. The snow is old in Ann Arbor, and probably nonexistent in Wayne County, or if in a given February it's there, it's probably dirty from the roads. The sun has been working on its return for over a month, so it's less of a surprise. Midterms are already happening for those of us unfortunate enough to have the two-plus-midterms-and-a-final schedule, and then the normal ones come at the end of the month before "spring" break. (On Thursday I had to spell out Huitzilopochtli on my exam on the archaeology of the Aztecs, and it was not fun. Seeing as that was the hardest part of the test, though, I can't really complain.) It's still the beginning of the new year, but the charm has worn off, and in the context of a university year, by February we've been walking these same streets to do the same things and not sleep at the right times for the same reasons for over five months.

Traveling somewhere that is somewhat closer to spring than Michigan is a good plan. (Justizpalast, Munich, Feb. 2008)

Let's get on with life. Let's go. To the wide open west! To the (somewhat) warmer south! To the I don't have an adjective right now besides snooty and cultured east! To the wilds of the north! The secret is that it's not that warm anywhere nearby, and life here isn't so bad when you're not applying to things constantly and then realizing the devious kitten is sleeping on your computer in the hope that the rickety screen will finally get pushed all the way off so that you have to buy a new computer and can never afford to travel anywhere ever again.

The last few weekends have been really pleasant, even if they were in wintry Michigan and I can no longer remember the weekdays, just the blur of homework and drooping eyelids. I've watched movies: one night all Emma and I could think of that was appealing then was the German film Downfall and Ten Things I Hate About You (neither of which we had seen in full), but wanted something in between. Somehow we ended up checking out Breakfast At Tiffany's. It's in between chronologically, so they dress nicely and are closer to Nazi Germany, but it's not too comedic or really romantic, just crazy. So crazy. I saw Avatar with my brother and parents one weekend for my dad's birthday, then went to Polish Village in Hamtramck for delicious pork, pork, pork and potatoes and that lovely Central European woodbeams-and-white-walls-and-tall-glasses-of-beer atmosphere. It was still January back then.

The dust caught the light so well, but later I cleaned these stairs and vacuumed more than I have ever vacuumed in my life.

My mom visited me and my brother in Ann Arbor so she could take the car I drive home for repairs, and I visited ex-housemates/best friends that have moved out of our daily lives, and they visited us. We ate cookies, ice cream, Chinese food, chocolate lava cakes made in my new red ramekins. I went to East Quad and saw the last Evening of Scenes I will probably ever see, and watched World War II and Werner Herzog movies. I never went to bed at the right time on Sunday nights. Also, I read. I didn't read enough, but I tried, and once Thursdays came and all my due dates had passed, I curled up in the possibly moldy but always cozy yellow armchair, angled it to catch the most light, and read the History of the Byzantine State for as long as I could without falling asleep. One time, I wore my sunglasses because the light reflecting off the book's pages was too bright. Sometimes, like Table Cat, I would just shut my eyes and enjoy the sun.

Ostrogorsky rarely cites English sources. He wrote his history of Byzantium in German, which remains most clear in the footnotes ('Der Streit über den Titel des ökumenischen Patriarchen, z.B.). There are also sources from languages I can't read—Slavic ones, Greek, Latin, Italian. But most of them are in German and French, and I get excited thinking that for once, my combination of foreign languages is most useful. I read "L'Organisation militaire de l'Égypte byzantine, Fin du monde antique, les Études de papyrologie" and I think I want to be studying French again. Sometimes, in the early afternoons when I have the house to myself, I read the titles out loud to the dozing, indifferent cats and try take my accent as far as it can go.

I spent one Sunday going through my photos from last year to build a free photo book on Shutterfly, and then to pick which ones to order prints of to bring my total cost up to free-shipping level. It took all day, and by the end, all I wanted was to ride the Straßenbahn into town, or eat another piece of that Parisian quiche I have a photo of, or at the very least, get out my trusty travel backpack and return to the straightforward existence of the traveler for a week or two. All week long, I'd find myself thinking of other places I could be. It's not that I was overwhelmed, not like other Februarys. Somehow, I still got drawn into this wanderlust (I didn't realize that was a German loanword but it makes sense!). I would love to be around in this house for more golden sunsets like the one below, but I would also love to leave. There's something about February that just makes you want to be somewhere—maybe anywhere—else.

 *Oh, and November? That's the actual cruellest month. Also, I probably should stop talking about sunlight so much; I have a post from last year called Sonnenlicht = Sunlight. And the first two of the last photos are through the front door; the last is the fairy statue on the porch without anything but air between it and the camera.