Roh-Rohrzucker = Never What I WantBecause raw cane sugar is not brown sugar.

This is what life is like right now.

You decide to make cookies, because you want something to eat while you work on your paper, and why buy them when they're only going to sell you six in a package? That's ridiculous. So you will make 60 cookies with your almost-exactly-the-right-amount of flour. And you will do it right, which means buying new brown sugar even though you can't possibly use that much sugar in the next 3 weeks. But the store is out of brown sugar, not that brown sugar in Germany is actually proper brown sugar. So you buy the fair trade brown sugar cubes with "typical caramel note" and figure, typische karamelle Note, maybe these are actually brown sugar!

You leave the butter out when you get home, because, again, you're doing this right for once. You let it get soft. You make dinner. You enjoy your bacon, even if the mashed potatoes seem a little too milky and you are sick of eggs. You think about how you will miss the Danish bacon but not the stupid, ridiculously thin other bacon. Then you start the cookies.

And you learn that brown sugar cubes are very difficult to crush. Very, very difficult. And the sugar is still harder than brown sugar at home. Packed. Ha. Impossible.


The cookies take so much longer than anticipated. The day is gone. And you're out of foil, and baking paper, and the overdone cookies stick to the baking pan you used as a cookie sheet.

So much for good planning. This is what life is like right now.

I was hoping German had a crazy word for 'entropy.' I was disappointed.

My room is impossible. No, that's not true. I've cleaned it two or three times in the past month and every time it is, to me if to no one else, the pinnacle of organization and neatness, even if there are little fly corpses hidden at the corners of my desk and the dust bunnies under the bed have gone rabid. But I tidy it: my papers become two or three manageable piles, the clothes return to the closet, rugs and blankets become flat. For a few days everything goes back exactly where it belongs, but soon I just have to leave my sweater out on the chair because I'll wear it again tomorrow and then there are bags on the floor and dishes on the desk and my adorable stuffed guinea pig from IKEA is dangerously close to falling prey to those dust bunnies.

I'm not going to eradicate the dust bunnies (or Wollmäuser = wool mice I think) because in just twelve short days I move out of this room, so I might as well wait till all the junk's out of the way. I cannot wait for all the junk to be out of the way. I look around the room and immediately start cataloging: this goes home, this was sold to a next-year-student, this isn't worth my precious transatlantic weight allowance, this book should probably be shipped, and these papers. These papers. They have to be sorted and recycled or else packed away and there are library books in stacks that I need to read, or reread, or not read. I have to finish this schoolwork, but the walls are starting to close in and seeing all my things safely in bags and boxes would leave more room for me to breathe.

Somewhere along the way, the way the sun works has changed and the sunlight never really spills in my solitary floor-length window all the way to my kitty-corner bed anymore. My desk is stuck in the relative dark and my room never feels warm but when I run to catch the Straßenbahn I realize it's summer, even if it rains every other day and even if my eyes are chained to an increasingly misbehaving computer. I think it needs a break from the Lower East Side, from German spell check, from lolcats and Wikipedia and taking me to so many websites while simultaneously fighting with Microsoft Word to keep its consciousness. It's really acting out: if I want to work on my desk (and I do!) the only way it holds onto the internet is at a neck-stiffening angle.

I ran out of peanut butter this week and have been debating whether or not to buy another. There's not that much time left—but in that time I will eat many more apples that would benefit from some protein. I will miss these tiny peanut butter containers decorated in American stars and stripes that are so easy to bring when you travel, even for just one person. I think life is easier for just one person in Germany, or at least groceries are. Living alone is harder here for those of us who are appalled or frightened by bugs. You have to open your windows and there aren't any screens. There's no one here to capture or kill for me so I have to mount a solo attack on the bigger flies every night. They've got nothing on the bugs I faced last summer. Those were too big for squishing.
Meerschweinchen = little sea pig
(And if Russia is Egypt, America's the Promised Land, and the Lower East Side is the desert between, World of Our Fathers is something like the Torah of secular American Judaism. Or maybe that's going too far.)

eine Theorie = A Theory

Over the last year (though this problem has also plagued me in the past) I have become convinced that

computer screens

keep you

awake.

Lately, awake forever. Even after the computer's off. I can lie for hours in the dark and become more and more awake. Maybe it's not just the computer. Probably it's something to do with 33 pages of papers to go, 20 days till I'm out of this room forever, 5 weeks and 1 day till I reenter the US of A, 1 more year of college and then everything's real.

But computers. Overstimulation by the LCD. The dangerous paradox of trying to make time stand still and also speed to the end of the countdown. A combination of the two.

I'm exhausted.

P.S. I posted my photos from Spain! They're on my Picasa site. I love Spain. Time for bed.

P.P.S. And then the guy in the next WG started playing his electric guitar.

There are no cats in America, and the streets are paved with cheese!

A friend of mine is worried that next year back in Ann Arbor is going to be a lot more boring than this year in Deutschland. I think everyone is. But let's look on the bright side:

My current sleep schedule will have me going to bed at 9 pm and getting up at 6 am. Imagine the possibilities!

Gas stoves! Being able to turn down the heat and have it mean something instantly!

We won't have to measure butter in measuring cups and get our hands all greasy or use complicated fraction methods involving grams to sticks and then ending up just eyeballing it—because butter is marked! With tablespoons!

There are so many cats in America!
(Sorry Fievel, it was a lie. Thank God. And thanks, Mommy, for making that song stuck in my head whenever I think about Jewish immigration.)

Unfortunately, the cheese is much better here, the parmesan is cheaper, and the only problem cheese-wise is that cheddar isn't ubiquitous.

BUT THE EASE OF BAKING. Real brown sugar. Not having vanilla brought across the ocean.

Come on, guys, it'll be all right. And maybe in a few years Ryanair will finally work out the £6 transatlantic flights, which will make Greece or any other place serviced by a budget airline only like £36 away on a good day. Plus getting to New York City first.

Paris At Night

= a poem by Jacques Prévert, who is a French poet that I like. And took a whole class on. And some of whose poetry I performed on stage.

Paris At Night
Trois allumettes une à une allumées dans la nuit
La premiére pour voir ton visage tout entier
La seconde pour voir tes yeux
La dernière pour voir ta bouche
Et l'obscuritè tout entière pour me rappeler tout cela
En te serrant dans mes bras.

=

Three matches one by one struck in the night
The first to see your face in its entirety
The second to see your eyes
The last to see your mouth
And the darkness all around to remind me of all these
As I hold you in my arms.

For the record, this trip to Paris was less romantic than last time around, although that doesn't say much (see said goodbye to my boyfriend of 5 days, slight pining was involved). But this poem has an appropriate title, if not appropriate content, and night! pictures!

1. Le Louvre, mon préféré.

2. La Seine from a bridge.
3. La Seine from la Tour Eiffel, Sacré Coeur in the distance.
4. Requisite shot up the towers' legs, with twinkly lights (seizure-inducing when on the tower as they go off).

I love Paris (in the rain)

Four years ago today, I got four stitches in my finger, said goodbye to my boyfriend of five days, and left for France for two weeks. It was my first time in Europe and the most expensive thing I'd ever bought (with money I didn't have yet). Most of the numbers have gotten much bigger since then.

Four years ago, grey skies couldn't take the sparkle away from Europe. This may sound rather spoiled of me, but grey skies and constant rain ruined Prague—and the stupid, creepy man in the hostel, but that's another story. Looking at my old Paris pictures, I realized that the first day was cloudy. My pictures of the Louvre had terrible lighting. And yet the Louvre was my favorite building in Paris and I would have happily spent hours in its courtyard.

I don't remember if I decided Paris was my favorite city while I was there or after I came home. I do remember deciding with my friend Kitty that we should come back in two years (with our boyfriends) and enjoy Paris all over again. It never once occurred to me—nor has it yet—that I wouldn't go back. Because I would come back somday, there was no rush to experience everything. Napoleon's Tomb and the Musée Rodin? How about a picnic and a nap in front of the Eiffel Tower instead. Versailles? Next time!

I loved the fancy metalwork outside the windows (I always want to say 'balconies' but that is clearly wrong), and the trees against the buildings, and the history. The way so many buildings were lit up gold at night. The convenience of the Métro. I still love subways, although Paris' is more complicated and older than others I've been in since. The buildings are still lovely, even if after so much time in the stucco of southern Germany, the grey and tan stone seems rather cold.

It's funny to think how much I loved the view out my hotel window—mainly because it was my view onto a Parisian street and how exciting is that! Watching this video I took as it rained on my last full day in Paris, I love the view all over again.

Yes, I did go to the trouble of holding my iPod headphones up to the camera speaker to get Regina Spektor's song in the video.

I really didn't mind that rain, despite my lack of attractive rain jacket (17-year-old self, why have we not remedied that?), because it meant I could now sing along and mean it. My brother John was actually disappointed for the same reason when none of the rain forecast for our weekend showed up.

I wasn't. Loving Paris in the sun is nice too.

1. Me, age 17, from a video taken in the courtyard of the Louvre.
2. Les Champs-Elysées from atop the Arc de Triomphe.
3. Paris in the rain, July 4, 2005.
4. The café from Amélie, June 14, 2009.