i love my credit card. finally i can spend money i do not own on things i do not need, and with the sucky dollar it is even cheaper than in europe. yaaaay.
that's why i don't count the beer i buy (by credit card of course, they won't take plus account for alcohol. i can't see why.) and that also is the reason i actually got a hardrock cafe shirt from louisville. i especially like that it does not have anything fancy printed on it, nothing like chicago or new york or madrid or such, but a place noone in europe has ever heard of. it's pinkish-purple, by the way, and after nelli explained to me that from what she has heard this colour has an interesting submeaning i'm a little worried about myself.
the last week was full of weird and interesting and well.... other things. find out for yourself:
sunday
i was wanting to work on my paper. i really was. only, other things came up. like updating this here, having breakfast, writing a 20-page letter, hanging out at starbucks, hanging out at coffea, hanging out here and there and doing some other fun though academically worthless things.
monday
i finally started reading that biography of burroughs. man, that guy was a freak. for sure he was.
the rest of labour day i actually used to work on my paper - which was: to read. our folks had returned from chicago and it was huongs birthday the next day so we of course hung out together and i was not quite as efficient as i had hoped. one week to go for the paper, right.
tuesday
i had my class. before that i must have been doing something cause my class only starts at two. i suppose i read something. after class i went to zumba and in the evening we probably did something, too, i can't remember. that's strange, cause i actually had beer, and not too little of it, the two days after, but i believe i can remember everything from those evenings... ha. that's curious. six days to go. my butt was kind of burning.
wednesday
we had a class on us civil rights which was great, after that we had our weekly meeting, which was good as well. in the morning, much too early if you ask me we had had our english as a second language class (esl) for which we had to write an essay on an article or an essay written by a guy named lawrence shanes who analyzes the usa's striving for more, bigger, higher, faster and draws a line from the history of overcoming frontiers in order to expand the countries' greatness to an economical expansion in the 20th century. his idea is (or was, the article was pretty old) that the pursuit for expansion has to do with a historically grown ideal of always getting more in order to become a happy person. my answer to this was that there's a logical error in this setting of ideals because you literally become the donkey chasing the carrot that is held in front of your nose too far for you to ever reach it. of course! that was what we had been doing tuesday night! we had to write the essay!
anyway: after our weekly meeting, which had ended at like 4:30 or so, we went over to coffea for doing homework and working on my paper (five days til buffallo....)
i ended up being frustrated because nothing would work out the way i wanted it to so i decided to ask my prof for help. i wrote an email to him, it took my about ten minutes for four sentences. well. i told him that i cannot come up with a good writing plan because of these and those reasons and what my ideas were but that i needed his help because i couldn't decide which way to go.
after that i played rommée with trevor, who is the owner or manager of coffea and whose job it is to be there and make coffee and such but when there's not that much to do he's got time to hang out with us and play cards.
i thought, i might actually get back to work after that, but i wouldn't be able to concentrate - or maybe, subconsciously, my mind wanted to hinder me from work because it is nasty and mean and it wanted so sabotage my good will.
instead i ended up going to the mellow mushroom - references to anything you might think of are not coincidental - drinking american ("import" - i swear it was not real german!) beer and playing trivia. trivia is a game where one guy asks random questions on pretty much random knowledge - who played xy in zz, who was the president who added the 14th amendment to the constitution, in which year did the beatles record norwegian wood for the first time, whatever - and every team can hand in answers to the questions. you can win fun things like 50$ credit or a free pizza. we, that was trevor and me and two german-philosophy-phd students did not win anything. i'm afraid i was completely worthless there anyway. it's a myth that we as germans know everything about american pop culture. trust me, we don't. we don't know anything.
this was a really great evening. i ended up not doing anything for anything but instead i had a great time hanging out with the guys and letting beer float through my veins, which i had missed a lot around here :)
thursday
the first half of the day i hung out at coffea trying to read the book for my class, which i managed in about three times the time i usually would have needed. the beer from the day before might have had a tiny little impact on that....
i got an answer from my prof who wrote to me that if i was a damsel in distress i should come by his office next week and he would see how he could help me.
i wrote back, well i kind of can't.
later on i would google the term and find out the following:
"damsel in distress"is a term from the british english literature theory that describes a motive that often appears in the 19th century brit lit: dumb women hanging around naively and stupidly waiting for some heroic guy to pass by and save their asses. this motive is one of the most criticized by feminist literature theory and the feminist movement in general.
now, lets think about this: a professor in a german university in the 21st century dares to write this as a reply to a female student who asked him for help based on questions with regard to the contents of a paper that is yet to be written in a major that is to an extent of 90% studied by women. amazing, isn't it?
it doesn't even matter if anything about this comparison was true, even if there was truth in it, it still simply isn't his right to say something like that. for, if i was dumb, which by the way i certainly do not believe i am, it would still be my personal cognitive disadvantage but hadn't have anything to do with my gender or sex, right? and do you think he would have likened a guy to some motive like that? i don't think so. fuck sexism!
i wrote him one more mail telling him i seriously doubted that he would have replied in the same way to a male student asking him for his help on a paper and that i'd like to put my paper off til november. i fear he won't let me so that my worst case scenario is having to redo the module, but maybe things will turn out okay. i was thinking: there's so many people walking around who are always lucky about not worrying too much about how things will turn out, why shouldn't i be just as carefree and lucky as them, right?
in the evening we went to the german house speaking to the people who live there - german majors, exchange students from g, people who just randomly speak g... and after that we went to their german stammtisch and though there were a few nice and interesting people all in all i must say, they're just not my crowd. ("hey, you know, my friend once said to me we were drinking over a thousand liters of beer a year, and i said, no, but then i started counting: well, one football game: 6 wheat beers, that's 3 liters, and this three times a week. any random party, i drink at least 30 small bottles, that's 10 liters... hahaha..... so in the end i thought he must be right... hahaha.... blablabla..")
as of now
it's late around here, i'll be going to bed now - tomorrow is a big day: rehearsal, performance, teaching people how to play "durak"....
have a good one, people, and let me know what's going on in your lives, i'm always interested in that!
that's why i don't count the beer i buy (by credit card of course, they won't take plus account for alcohol. i can't see why.) and that also is the reason i actually got a hardrock cafe shirt from louisville. i especially like that it does not have anything fancy printed on it, nothing like chicago or new york or madrid or such, but a place noone in europe has ever heard of. it's pinkish-purple, by the way, and after nelli explained to me that from what she has heard this colour has an interesting submeaning i'm a little worried about myself.
the last week was full of weird and interesting and well.... other things. find out for yourself:
sunday
i was wanting to work on my paper. i really was. only, other things came up. like updating this here, having breakfast, writing a 20-page letter, hanging out at starbucks, hanging out at coffea, hanging out here and there and doing some other fun though academically worthless things.
monday
i finally started reading that biography of burroughs. man, that guy was a freak. for sure he was.
the rest of labour day i actually used to work on my paper - which was: to read. our folks had returned from chicago and it was huongs birthday the next day so we of course hung out together and i was not quite as efficient as i had hoped. one week to go for the paper, right.
tuesday
i had my class. before that i must have been doing something cause my class only starts at two. i suppose i read something. after class i went to zumba and in the evening we probably did something, too, i can't remember. that's strange, cause i actually had beer, and not too little of it, the two days after, but i believe i can remember everything from those evenings... ha. that's curious. six days to go. my butt was kind of burning.
wednesday
we had a class on us civil rights which was great, after that we had our weekly meeting, which was good as well. in the morning, much too early if you ask me we had had our english as a second language class (esl) for which we had to write an essay on an article or an essay written by a guy named lawrence shanes who analyzes the usa's striving for more, bigger, higher, faster and draws a line from the history of overcoming frontiers in order to expand the countries' greatness to an economical expansion in the 20th century. his idea is (or was, the article was pretty old) that the pursuit for expansion has to do with a historically grown ideal of always getting more in order to become a happy person. my answer to this was that there's a logical error in this setting of ideals because you literally become the donkey chasing the carrot that is held in front of your nose too far for you to ever reach it. of course! that was what we had been doing tuesday night! we had to write the essay!
anyway: after our weekly meeting, which had ended at like 4:30 or so, we went over to coffea for doing homework and working on my paper (five days til buffallo....)
i ended up being frustrated because nothing would work out the way i wanted it to so i decided to ask my prof for help. i wrote an email to him, it took my about ten minutes for four sentences. well. i told him that i cannot come up with a good writing plan because of these and those reasons and what my ideas were but that i needed his help because i couldn't decide which way to go.
after that i played rommée with trevor, who is the owner or manager of coffea and whose job it is to be there and make coffee and such but when there's not that much to do he's got time to hang out with us and play cards.
i thought, i might actually get back to work after that, but i wouldn't be able to concentrate - or maybe, subconsciously, my mind wanted to hinder me from work because it is nasty and mean and it wanted so sabotage my good will.
instead i ended up going to the mellow mushroom - references to anything you might think of are not coincidental - drinking american ("import" - i swear it was not real german!) beer and playing trivia. trivia is a game where one guy asks random questions on pretty much random knowledge - who played xy in zz, who was the president who added the 14th amendment to the constitution, in which year did the beatles record norwegian wood for the first time, whatever - and every team can hand in answers to the questions. you can win fun things like 50$ credit or a free pizza. we, that was trevor and me and two german-philosophy-phd students did not win anything. i'm afraid i was completely worthless there anyway. it's a myth that we as germans know everything about american pop culture. trust me, we don't. we don't know anything.
this was a really great evening. i ended up not doing anything for anything but instead i had a great time hanging out with the guys and letting beer float through my veins, which i had missed a lot around here :)
thursday
the first half of the day i hung out at coffea trying to read the book for my class, which i managed in about three times the time i usually would have needed. the beer from the day before might have had a tiny little impact on that....
i got an answer from my prof who wrote to me that if i was a damsel in distress i should come by his office next week and he would see how he could help me.
i wrote back, well i kind of can't.
later on i would google the term and find out the following:
"damsel in distress"is a term from the british english literature theory that describes a motive that often appears in the 19th century brit lit: dumb women hanging around naively and stupidly waiting for some heroic guy to pass by and save their asses. this motive is one of the most criticized by feminist literature theory and the feminist movement in general.
now, lets think about this: a professor in a german university in the 21st century dares to write this as a reply to a female student who asked him for help based on questions with regard to the contents of a paper that is yet to be written in a major that is to an extent of 90% studied by women. amazing, isn't it?
it doesn't even matter if anything about this comparison was true, even if there was truth in it, it still simply isn't his right to say something like that. for, if i was dumb, which by the way i certainly do not believe i am, it would still be my personal cognitive disadvantage but hadn't have anything to do with my gender or sex, right? and do you think he would have likened a guy to some motive like that? i don't think so. fuck sexism!
i wrote him one more mail telling him i seriously doubted that he would have replied in the same way to a male student asking him for his help on a paper and that i'd like to put my paper off til november. i fear he won't let me so that my worst case scenario is having to redo the module, but maybe things will turn out okay. i was thinking: there's so many people walking around who are always lucky about not worrying too much about how things will turn out, why shouldn't i be just as carefree and lucky as them, right?
in the evening we went to the german house speaking to the people who live there - german majors, exchange students from g, people who just randomly speak g... and after that we went to their german stammtisch and though there were a few nice and interesting people all in all i must say, they're just not my crowd. ("hey, you know, my friend once said to me we were drinking over a thousand liters of beer a year, and i said, no, but then i started counting: well, one football game: 6 wheat beers, that's 3 liters, and this three times a week. any random party, i drink at least 30 small bottles, that's 10 liters... hahaha..... so in the end i thought he must be right... hahaha.... blablabla..")
friday
we had to get up eeeeeeearly as to go to louisville (uk's archenemy in sports, by the way) to the mohammad ali museum, which was interesting because i had not known anything much about him and now found out that he's (or was, haven't been able to figure that one out so far) an inspiring person. still i am of the opinion that many us-americans strongly overemphasize the individual influence a person has - "just work hard enough and everything will be great, you'll see. be faithful and hardworking and you'll be living a happy life" - and i still don't believe in it. also i was once more proven in my observation that in the us people tend to put a lot of pathos into presentations and that they want everything shown in movies. that's interesting. i'll tell you more about that later on maybe. and as usual, this of course does not apply to all us-americans. but i get the feeling that a vast majority of those people surrounding us here on campus are part of that.
we had lunch at the hard rock cafe, hence the shirt.
huge steak, at least 2 cms thick, and awesome! :)
after lunch we went to a baseball bat museum where we saw plenty of movies and real people (wow) showing us how baseball bats are manifactured and in fact that was interesting. we got cute little bats as a souvenir and they said we could even take them home in our checked luggage, so watch out folks, i'll be coming back armed!
the evening we spent rehearsing for our big performance at the international night tomorrow - well, that's kind of a different story, but what it comes down to: we, that would be olga, huong and me, will be singing keinen zentimeter by clueso, probably a disney song medley with german lyrics, and hit the road jack there, accompanied by guitar, of course.
we'll see how that works out...
then we were hanging out in front of coffea with erdem playing us his freshly composed... erm.. songs in helge schneider style and drinking tea, both of which were equally fun.
we had to get up eeeeeeearly as to go to louisville (uk's archenemy in sports, by the way) to the mohammad ali museum, which was interesting because i had not known anything much about him and now found out that he's (or was, haven't been able to figure that one out so far) an inspiring person. still i am of the opinion that many us-americans strongly overemphasize the individual influence a person has - "just work hard enough and everything will be great, you'll see. be faithful and hardworking and you'll be living a happy life" - and i still don't believe in it. also i was once more proven in my observation that in the us people tend to put a lot of pathos into presentations and that they want everything shown in movies. that's interesting. i'll tell you more about that later on maybe. and as usual, this of course does not apply to all us-americans. but i get the feeling that a vast majority of those people surrounding us here on campus are part of that.
we had lunch at the hard rock cafe, hence the shirt.
huge steak, at least 2 cms thick, and awesome! :)
after lunch we went to a baseball bat museum where we saw plenty of movies and real people (wow) showing us how baseball bats are manifactured and in fact that was interesting. we got cute little bats as a souvenir and they said we could even take them home in our checked luggage, so watch out folks, i'll be coming back armed!
the evening we spent rehearsing for our big performance at the international night tomorrow - well, that's kind of a different story, but what it comes down to: we, that would be olga, huong and me, will be singing keinen zentimeter by clueso, probably a disney song medley with german lyrics, and hit the road jack there, accompanied by guitar, of course.
we'll see how that works out...
then we were hanging out in front of coffea with erdem playing us his freshly composed... erm.. songs in helge schneider style and drinking tea, both of which were equally fun.
as of now
time is starting to fly by - only two weeks left in ky, and of course, that's always the moment when you feel like you finally got used to a place. i'm looking forward to moving on and seeing other places, but of course i start getting attached to people round here - not only our german folks, for by now, i cannot even believe that we have only been hanging out as a group for three weeks, feels more like we had been going to school together for ten years or so. but also the other cool people around here. who knows, maybe i'll end up visiting friends over here sometime sooner or later after this thing...
it's late around here, i'll be going to bed now - tomorrow is a big day: rehearsal, performance, teaching people how to play "durak"....
have a good one, people, and let me know what's going on in your lives, i'm always interested in that!
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