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.