Is it something I said?

Let's face it: Communication is a freakin' struggle and can be a huge stumbling block to any interpersonal relationship you have, especially if you haven't mastered the art of communication like me (HA! That's a joke...there's no such thing as a communication master. We all have things to learn and a long way to go to learn it.). What seems innocuous to one person is a major slight or insult to the receiver or another, especially without context. Rereading some of the text message conversations I've had with people is a perfect example of this. So much is lost without the inflection, tone of voice, facial gestures (emojis totally do not count as stand-ins for facial expressions, by the way), body language...I think you know where I'm going with this. Anyway. Back to rereading text message conversations (or emails or digital communication of pretty much any sort), and you end up hoping and praying that the receiver is picking up what you're putting down and vice versa. It totally sucks when something goes completely sideways because your text message was woefully inadequate in communicating your desired message. There's no quick and easy solution to the whole communication problem (sadly) but it definitely helps to practice a lot and to emphasize the positive. These are things I'm learning every day, with every interaction that I have with people. Also, there is nothing better than speaking with someone face-to-face or, at least, on the phone. And please, for the love of all that is good and holy, do not use the method of communicating with someone using solely emojis. We have evolved from a pictograph language. Let's collectively attempt to maintain our forward momentum wherein this is concerned.

So now I'll tell you a story:
I was living in Germany and had just finished training for the language school where I was starting to work. They had ponied up for the training and the travel to Leipzig, which was about an hour and a half by train from where I lived. It's a beautiful little city that I highly recommend checking out, if you have the opportunity. I finished my last day in training and had a couple of hours to knock around Leipzig before my train left. I found myself wandering around one of the many parks that proliferate Europe in general and Germany in particular. I had my backpack on and was, by all outward appearances, clearly American. There's something very distinct about Americans abroad but I guess you could say that about any nationality. Seriously, how hard is it to pick out the German guy on the beach in Florida?
So, there I am, wandering around in no particular fashion (the very definition of wandering, I suppose), and this guy in a black jacket and jeans starts wandering sorta close to me. I eyed him sideways a few times and stood up a little straighter but didn't think much about it. We were, after all, the only ones in the park so why should I be concerned? Did I mention that I was 22 at the time and totally fearless? So, black jacket and jeans gets closer to me and strikes up what could be considered a conversation if his English was better or my German was passable. Instead, it was a rather stilted exchange that left me horrified and him humiliated. He opened with the usual "Hello" and, as I mentioned before, had already pegged me as an American. I politely said, "Hi" and was planning on leaving it at that. He asked, "How are you?" I replied that I was good and stopped wandering. This was clearly not a place to continue wandering. Then he posed a really interesting question. He asked, "Do you love?" How poignant, I thought! How wondrously thoughtful and interesting and insightful for starting a discussion with a complete stranger from another culture in a deserted park! I nodded wholeheartedly and quickly said, "Yes! I love! I love my friends. I love my family! I love my cat! I love the earth! I love Germany!" This went on for longer than it should of and he cut me off before I could start naming species of plants and animals or shades of colors or individual shapes that I had a particular affinity for over another. He shook his head a little bit and then he asked, "Do you love...for money?" This struck me as a peculiar idea until it hit me. Black jacket and jeans had just asked me if I was a prostitute! The nerve! Really?!? I was wearing a backpack! What kind of streetwalker wanders around deserted parks all alone while wearing a backpack? I failed, utterly and completely, to hide my horror. I'm not sure which one of us fled the scene faster but, the next thing I knew, I was hightailing it out of the park and he disappeared from wherever he came from.
When I got home later that evening, I called my boyfriend at the time, full of righteous indignation that someone would mistake me, ME!, for a prostitute. When he laughed at the whole thing, I was agog at his response. How in the hell could he think any of this was funny? His girlfriend was mistaken as a prostitute! A lady of the evening! A hooker! Despite all of these exclamations, he laughed harder and explained the ways of German culture to me. "It's not a thing here," he said. "It's not like America where people are really uptight and weird about that sort of thing. You were alone in a park, just wandering around. If you were German or any other nationality, there's a good chance that you would have responded much differently to his question and made some extra cash on the side." Needless to say, I was speechless and it took me more than a few minutes to recover after his explanation. Today I can laugh about it and chalk it up to a cultural and social miscommunication, thankfully. And I can tell you the story about the time some guy in Germany asked me if I loved...for money.

Until next time, keep up your end of the communication.

Baby Steps

I had the completely obvious realization (to everyone else but me, apparently) that you can't just talk about doing the thing. You have to actually do the thing. And, evidently, even just pretending or thinking about doing the thing gets you one step closer to doing it. So here I am, doing the thing, writing the words, transcribing thoughts into words on the canvas of Blogger. I talk about being a writer all the time but what, really, do I have to show for it other than really (and I mean REALLY) boring marketing copy and a handful of bits and bobs that don't account for much in the end. Sure, the marketing copy is useful and helping people make more informed decisions about their office products but, in the end, does that really matter to me? Honestly, nope, not one bit. So here I sit, at the job I don't love, doing something that I do love, writing. When the boss is away, the worker bees will play. Ha!

I'll tell you a funny story:
I lived in Germany for a couple of years when I was in my early twenties. Moving off to foreign countries on a whim is something that people in their early twenties do, although, I must say, I highly recommend it for people of any age because it's a super fun, mind-blowing thing to do for yourself. I moved to a small town in the center of Germany called Erfurt. It's everything you're imagining right now...an idyllic little German town with a town square, a load of cathedral churches everywhere, and farmers coming into town during the summer with truckloads of strawberries, selling them in the town square and permeating the air with the scent of strawberries. Who wouldn't love that? I sure as hell did. But this isn't the funny part. I'm getting there. Bear with me. So, when I took off to a foreign country, I did what most people who do that sort of thing do: I taught English as a foreign language. All the German I knew I learned thanks to Wayne Newton (Danke Shoen and Auf Wiedesen, respectively) and the school where I taught believed in the immersion method so, thankfully, that was not a hindrance to my career opportunities. I mostly taught adults who needed to add English to their skillset in order to make them more appealing in the job market. Erfurt is a former East German town, you see, so most of the grown-ups there spoke perfectly serviceable German and Russian but very little English so I was a hot commodity with my English-speaking skills. My students and I had any number of absolutely amazing, and usually hilarious, conversations that were so completely off-curriculum it's an total wonder that I managed to stay gainfully employed for as long as I did.

My students, after I moved up in the transportation world from walking to biking thanks to a birthday present from my then boyfriend, informed me that I wasn't truly living the German experience or doing the whole Germany-thing until I had a drunken wreck on my new bicycle. I'd like to digress just slightly here and let you know that I didn't actually learn how to ride a bike until I was 10 or 11 and it's not really one of those things that I consider high up there in my skill set, like reading or my typing speed or my ability to make a long story even longer thanks to digressions, asides, and parenthetical bits of info. Suffice to say, I could easily get into a sober bike wreck (and have, many times, usually resulting in some part of one of my limbs broken or fractured) just as easily as I could get into a drunken bike wreck but, apparently, that is just a normal-human experience and not a now-you-actually-live-in-Germany experience. I assured my students that if and when the drunken wreck happened, I would inform them forthwith. I think that was on a Wednesday. Fast forward to Friday night because nothing of note happened between that Wednesday and the following Friday. Imagine an energetic and happy me, heading out on my new-to-me bicycle to meet some new-to-me friends for drinks for the evening (I think you can see where this is going). The thing about Germans and their relationship to alcohol that you should know if you're not aware of it already is that, well, it's different from Americans and their relationship to alcohol. For one thing, Germans are accustomed to consuming really (and I mean REALLY) high content alcohol beer, which, while getting easier, is still relatively difficult to find in the USA. The Germans are also used to consuming large quantities of said high-alcohol beer with a level of grace and sophistication the likes of which I had not experienced before nor have I seen it since (except when I hang out with my German friends, obvs.)

After an evening of carousing and general mirth-making, all while consuming vast quantities of high-alcohol content beer (REALLY good beer...they sorta have a thing about that in Germany), I mounted my trusty steed and rode off into the great beyond before turning around and heading to my flat since I wanted to go to bed. On the way back to my flat, a large shrub suddenly got ten times its usual size and consumed me wholly and completely. I laid in the belly of the shrub, entangled not only with it but my bicycle as well, for a full five minutes before gaining an understanding of how to escape the innards of the shrub and extract my bicycle as well. After all, I wanted to sleep in my bed, not in the hollow center of the giant shrub that had tackled me while I was placidly riding my bicycle down the sidewalk. I caught the shrub monster unawares as I stealthily made my escape, wrangling my bicycle as well. I decided to take my bicycle for a little walk that constituted the rest of the way home, wherein I deposited said bicycle in the entryway of my flat and promptly went to bed. The following Monday, I was proudly able to report to my students that I now truly lived in Germany and had the German experience.

End of story. Stay tuned for further antics that are mostly written when I'm supposed to be doing something else.