A Few Thoughts About Packing

I say, half-jokingly, that if my mother had had her way I would have been living out of a suitcase for the last two weeks. But the truth is I’m lucky my mom is the Type-A, plan-ahead kind of person that she is, because, left to my own devices, I would be sitting here, now just two days away from boarding my plane, staring at empty suitcases.

I’m not a procrastinator by nature— quite the opposite: in college, I was the weirdo who wrote papers a week before they were due and did most of her weekend reading on Saturday morning. But I’ve missed almost every deadline in this whole Fulbright process, and I refused to even acknowledge my suitcases’ presence until the day before last, even though they were sitting on the bed in my brother’s vacated room—the “staging area,” as my mom likes to call it—open and half-packed for a week before that. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this about myself: confronted with monumental change, I prefer to push it to the back of my mind, as though banishing it there will mean it doesn’t exist. Of course, that’s never the case, and more often than not my denial only results in more panic and anguish at the last minute. I know this, yet I do nothing about it, and the cycle continues—procrastinate, panic, procrastinate, panic. I can’t help but worry about what will happen to me when I’m on my own in Germany with nobody to keep me in line but myself.

One curious side effect of this whole packing process is that it has turned me, usually the most reluctant of shoppers, into a shopping machine. Last night my mom and I went out to look for a few last-minute essentials, and we wound up buying what feels like a whole new wardrobe. In theory, it’s a wardrobe for the post-graduate me, an upgrade from the jeans-and-t-shirt look that has been my MO for the past four years. But when I spread a few of our purchases out on my bed last night—a black trench coat, a form-fitting grey dress, a pair of black ankle-boots—they seemed more like things that belonged to someone else, that had showed up in my shopping bag by mistake. But I guess that is, in a sense, the point.

I’ve always had a sort of mystified reverence for the transformative power of clothes. As a child I spent hours dressing up in old dance costumes out of an over-stuffed trunk we kept in our basement, playing princess as five-year-old girls are wont to do. What I’m doing now is, in principle, the same, the only differences being that this time it’s not make-believe, and instead of princess, I’m playing the part of self-assured, sophisticated world traveler. I recognize that there’s a certain unhealthiness to this pattern of thinking, in believing that, if I just have that right pair of shoes, all my problems will be solved; or that, if I can just look the part, no one will be able to see through the charade. But I’m getting too old to buy into the idealistic myth that appearance doesn’t matter in this world. And who knows? Maybe, if I can convince others, I can convince myself as well.

Another thing that packing is making me realize is that when you’re trying to fit your entire life into two suitcases, there’s very little room for sentimentality. I feel like I could fill an entire suitcase just with my favorite books and mementos, things to scatter around my apartment in Frankfurt and to serve as talismans against homesickness. But I don’t have that luxury: even sticking to just the essentials, clothes and shoes and a few toiletries, I’m already running out of space. I’m constantly trying to remind myself that what I’m after is a fresh start, that over the course of my ten months in Germany I’ll accumulate new books and new mementos.

But I also know that, in the final frenzy tomorrow, a few things will find their way into a suitcase, stowaway style: a leather-bound edition of Wuthering Heights, a certain painting (hey, it’s flat anyway!), a T-shirt bearing a picture of Martha Graham wearing a raspberry beret. And I won’t beat myself up about that. Not all things are just things. We’re not that different as adults than we are as kids clinging to a favorite stuffed animal. Some of our possessions serve as anchors, to remind us of who we are, where we’ve been, and what is important to us.

Packing it all up into two suitcases just helps to clarify which are the things that are closest to home. 

The American Culture Conundrum

My departure to Germany is (finally) mere days away. As I’ve said before, I’ve had more than ample time during the waiting process to think about what living in Germany will be like. One particular thing I’ve been pondering lately is the extent to which I want to stay up-to-date with U.S. happenings while I’m abroad. I’m fortunate enough to have the language proficiency that would enable me, if I so chose, to go “cold turkey” on all things American: current events, politics, pop culture. But, culture junkie that I am, cutting myself off so completely may prove a challenge.

Placing myself on a strict German-only media diet is a tempting proposition, largely because it would help me to advance my language abilities even further, and put me on the fast track toward more instinctive, idiomatic German. The goal is to be able converse with Germans without having them automatically switching to English when they hear me speak. The more diligently I apply myself to reading German news sites, watching German television and reading German books, the more quickly the desired level of fluency is likely to occur. It’s hard to think of any time I might spend perusing the pages of the New York Times or NPR or People.com while in Germany as anything other than time that might have been better spent learning my way around Frankfurt, interacting with native speakers or, at the very least, perusing Die Zeit, FAZ, or Deutsche Welle instead. It seems like cheating, somehow, and a waste of the opportunity I’ve been given.

Of course, there are some aspects of the U.S. cultural landscape that would be easier to swear off than others: politics, for example—I can’t congratulate myself enough on contriving to be out of the country come election day; or celebrity gossip—who’s dating whom, who’s having whose baby, what the Kardashians are doing RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE. These are things I can surrender with very little regret.

But music, on the other hand. And books. And movies and television… I’m already compiling a list of the movies that are set to be released while I’m in Germany: big ones like The Hobbit, Les Miserables, and the newest James Bond, and smaller ones like Liberal Arts, which was filmed almost entirely at Kenyon. Speaking of Josh Radnor, Ted Mosby is set to finally meet the mother while I’m overseas. There will be new seasons of Modern Family and Grey’s Anatomy (yes, I still watch that schlock). True, many if not most of these things will find their way to Germany eventually, and what isn’t readily available in Germany I can always seek out on the Internet. But that’s exactly why I feel like I have to make a conscious choice about the amount of American culture I retain in my life: if I’m not careful, I could find myself watching only American television and listening to only American music, and in doing that I can’t shake the feeling that I would be doing myself a huge disservice. I keep trying to remind myself that all of these things—the American TV series and movies and albums and books I’m interested in—will still be waiting for me when I come back to the U.S. The chance to have such unlimited access to their German counterparts, however, may only come this once.

There are other obstacles to the all-German-all-the-time scheme, in addition to my own reluctance to give up certain American “comfort foods”. With the internet, it’s a lot harder to go radio silent on U.S. happenings than it was, say, twenty years ago, when my professor had to seek out an ink-and-paper copy of the New York Times every day to get his fix of American news. Now, it’s just a matter of a few mouse clicks. And American news does still seem to be news elsewhere in the world, too: more often than not, there’s an American news story at the top of Die Zeit’s homepage anyway.  Also, my job may require me to stay on top of all things American so I can tell my students, “These are the pop songs/TV shows/movies that are popular in the U.S. right now,” etc. A teacher at the Gymnasium I will be teaching at has already told me that she and the other teachers are looking forward to the opportunity to practice their English with a native speaker. And let’s not forget that Frankfurt has a fairly sizable English-speaking and American-expat contingent, so there are plenty of English-language bars, English-language cinemas, English-language bookstores, and English-language people that it will be almost too easy to seek out.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s still unclear how much homesickness I will have to contend with: I may find myself, in moments of loneliness, turning to American culture as a kind of security blanket. I’m already taking steps to ensure I don’t end up back on American websites out of boredom or habit: I’ve replaced all the English-language bookmarks at the top of my web browser with German-language ones. The theory is that, with time, browsing these German websites will become the same knee-jerk reaction that browsing NPR, Slate, or The Huffington Post is now. But homesickness is a whole different story than boredom, and I can easily imagine myself seeking out the latest Kardashian gossip purely for the sake of a little taste of home.

One site I will definitely not be foregoing, of course, is Facebook, and I imagine I’ll glean a fair amount of news just through the status updates of various friends and acquaintances. Skype, too, will doubtless provide glimpses of the homefront, however much I decide to keep up with on my own.

Aside from it just being the right and responsible thing for me to do as a student of German culture, I like the idea of leaving American culture to its own devices for the next ten-odd months because I like the idea of being able to come back to the U.S.  at the end of that time and look at it with completely fresh eyes. I want, in a sense, to ensure the greatest amount of culture shock possible for myself. One of the benefits of travel, so I’m told, is that it helps you to see where you come from more clearly, and I hope, by stepping away as much as can be managed, to provide myself with the clearest possible vision. 

Back to School (But Not Really)

Yesterday my college roommate and I took an afternoon trip up to our alma mater, Kenyon College in rural central Ohio. It was a short visit—we were only on campus for a matter of five hours—but it was an instructive one as well. Here are some thoughts:

1.     Taking the familiar drive up the hill to campus, all of the cues told me I was going back to school, but at the same time I knew that that wasn't the case. Being there—eating in Peirce Dining Hall, sitting out on a bench on Middle Path outside Ascension, seeing all the familiar faces (and the unfamiliar as well)—it all felt so normal and, at the same time, so incredibly strange. I felt as though I was of Kenyon, but no longer a part of Kenyon, if that makes sense. A few times during the visit I was introduced to new people, and I found myself qualifying my greeting, “Hi, I’m Katie, I don’t go here anymore.” And, to be honest, saying it helped make it true.

2.     Kenyon really is still there! It didn’t dematerialize like Brigadoon the moment I left campus. And there’s something comforting about that, about knowing that, while I’m off in Frankfurt doing things that are entirely new to me, people in Gambier, Ohio will still be doing pretty much the same things they did when I lived there: students will put off writing papers and make late night Market runs and engage in “whose tastes in music/film/literature are more obscure” contests instead; professors will run around looking harried; visiting students will be herded about in flocks, clutching their conspicuous Visiting Student folders and looking astonished by everything. Sitting outside the Village Inn, watching a small contingent of first-year girls march south on Middle Path toward Kenyon’s annual first-weekend Greek bash, the Highlighter Party, I felt like an elder-statesman expert on Kenyon life: I was one of those freshman girls once, I made the mistakes they’re going to make, and the discoveries as well. Kenyon worked its magic on me, and I’m a different person now than I was then. And now I’m going to go off and become a different person yet again.

3. Alongside all of the sameness: there should be some kind of law stipulating that schools are forbidden from making any dramatic changes for at least two years after I leave. The year after I graduated from high school, my school opened a new wing; now, the year after I graduated from Kenyon, the president is stepping down, the apartment I lived in has been demolished, and a campus institution, a cafe called Middle Ground, has closed its doors and been replaced by a wildly inferior joint called Wiggin Street Coffee. I approve of none of this. I’m the one who’s supposed to go off and change; Kenyon is supposed to remain exactly as I left it.
4. While sitting in Wiggin Street Coffee (or Impostor Middle Ground, as I like to call it-- though apparently the popular name among returning students is "Wiggle Ground") waiting to meet my professor for coffee, I eavesdropped on maybe the most stereotypical college conversation ever. A film was referred to as "Kafka-esque"; a sophomore girl lamented being mistaken for a first year; there was an overabundance of plaid and eighties-style mustaches. Five minutes of covertly listening in on this from a neighboring booth reminded me that I really am ready to not be a college student anymore.
5. Most importantly though, after talking with my professor and a couple of friends who just returned from studying abroad in Germany, I'm definitely excited to go and be young and have wild adventures in Europe. Someday down the road, I want to be the person sitting in a bar with her friends, narrating all of the crazy things that happened to her during the year she lived in Frankfurt. I want to collect a healthy arsenal of stories that begin "The time when..." or "The night with the..." or "That weekend we were in..." But one thing that's clear to me after talking to my friends is that these kinds of adventures don't just happen to people-- not often enough, anyway. You have to seek them out, or at least be willing to put yourself in situations where the unexpected, unusual, incredible might occur. Given that the flight portion of my fight-or-flight response is somewhat over-developed, this might be a challenge for me. Presented with a new and maybe uncomfortable scenario, it’s going to take some significant will power to force myself to ride things out rather than immediately run for the door. This will get easier with time, of course, as will many things about my move to Germany. “It will get easier” has been a constant refrain in conversations I’ve had lately. At the same time, I think I’m ready for a little bit of hard. Then again, I’m sure there will be moments when that is not the case-- when I’m lonely and scared-- and I’ll be willing to give anything to go back and be a student at Kenyon again, with the future safely ahead of me. 

Travel and Bildung and Goethe, Oh My!

"Alles, was uns begegnet, läßt Spüren zurück. Alles trägt unmerklich zu unserer Bildung bei." ("Everything we encounter leaves traces behind. Everything contributes imperceptibly to our education.")  J.W. Goethe 

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1842) has long been viewed as one of Germany’s great cultural heroes. Arguably the greatest: a quintessential intellectual in a country that has historically prided itself on its tradition of writers, philosophers, scientists and musicians. He is, in other words, one of those dead white men that contemporary academic thought teaches us to regard with suspicion. But, in my opinion at least, Goethe has the advantage of being a great deal quirkier than your typical DWM. His rendition of Faust is a sprawling, rambling, unperformable mess—and it also happens to be fantastic. His novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was fueling teenage angst decades before The Catcher in the Rye. His total body of work is massive, and disregards all boundaries of genre, subject and style.

Goethe also happens to have been a huge fan of travel. He wrote extensively on the subject: the book Italienische Reise (“Italian Journey”) is a travelogue adapted from the journals he kept during his travels in Italy in his mid-thirties. In college, I dismissed this branch of Goethe’s work out of hand. The expoundings of a thirty-something German Romantic on the sublime beauties of the Italian Alps or the curious ways of quaint Italian village-folk seemed entirely irrelevant to my life as a young twenty-something in the twenty-first century. But now, on the verge of my own Deutsche Reise, I’m reevaluating my position and, with the help of that great boon to research, Google, I’ve turned up a couple of ideas worth pondering.

As I’ve said already, Goethe was a huge advocate for the merits of travel. Specifically, he believed strongly in the importance of travel as it pertains to Bildung. Bildung is one of those great German words, like Wissen, Dasein, Weltanschauung, the meaning of which the English translation— in this case, “education”— doesn’t quite capture. Education is in there, certainly, but it shares the stage with a sense of development (if you’re reading this with a solid grasp of basic literature vocabulary, you might remember Bildungsroman, which is translated in English to “novel of development”), and of experience. Just because we English-speakers don’t have a word for this phenomenon doesn’t mean that we don’t recognize it, don’t aspire to it. Thinking about myself and my friends—particularly those who were at Kenyon with me—it seems to me that what we’re all after, at least in part, is Bildung.

According to Goethe, the best opportunities for Bildung are to be found, not in tiny liberal arts colleges on hills in Ohio, but on the road. “Die beste Billdung findet ein gescheiter Mensch auf Reisen,” (“A clever person finds the best education in travel,”) he writes at one point in the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. (I’ve already admitted that my primary research source on this subject has been Google, so I trust you won’t hold it against me when I tell you that I haven’t actually read this novel and therefore don’t know in what context this statement is made, by whom, or to what extent the reader is meant to take it seriously. I’ve graduated, I’m lazy, and I, like most people, have a fondness for snappy capsule-quotes that seem to say something meaningful about Life, the Universe, and Everything.) If I’m interpreting the opinions of Germany’s foremost Geistesmensch correctly, he believes that travel is important because it forces us into contact with different languages and foods, different ways of thinking and of doing things, different value systems and different points of view. In other words: Goethe, off in fuddy-duddy Dead White Man land, advocates travel for much the same reasons as our living, breathing college professors do when they urge us to study abroad. I can almost imagine Professor Goethe at a small liberal arts college today, in a tweed jacket with worn elbows, a rumpled, food-stained shirt and loosened tie, sitting in his book-cluttered office across from a bright-eyed undergrad and saying, “Go. Travel. See. Learn. It’s the best way to become a person.”

So that’s what I intend to do. It’s what programs like Fulbright are for, if you think about it: I’m going to see new things, hear new things, smell and touch and taste new things (in short: five senses, prepare to be rocked). I’m going to talk to new people whose backgrounds and perspectives differ radically from my own and, when it’s all said and done, the theory goes, I’ll a better person for it. While that may sound selfish and not suitably idealistic, I’m certainly not out to achieve world peace by teaching English in upper-class urban Frankfurt, and I think it would be much worse to claim that I was. I guess the idea is that I do ultimately do something with my gebildet-ness (though, like all good German abstracts, Bildung is a Platonic ideal, something not to achieve but to constantly strive toward). Something that—I don’t know—advances human understanding, makes the world a better place. But I’d be kidding myself if I claimed, at twenty-two, to know what that something might be.

Here’s a question to wrap up on, then: what does it mean to be gebildet in our increasingly globalized, ever-more fragmented twenty-first century world? In Goethe’s time, it meant a solid grasp of philosophy and science and language, and an appreciation for the finer things in life, like music and art and literature. But while those are all still noble pursuits, and things that any good Gebildete should try to attain, I think our modern world might call for more emphasis on other ideals, like cultural literacy or tolerance or progressiveness. These are the qualities the world might be in need of, going forward; and while it may not necessarily pay all that well to become gebildet, at least we can rest easy knowing that the world will never be short on idealistic young globe-trotters to follow Goethe's advice: “Die beste Bildung findet ein gescheiter Mensch auf Reisen.” 

Ten Days Until Departure...

... so it may seem like this blog is a little premature. But I've been stuck in a maddening sort of  pre-departure holding pattern for a week and a half now, with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs and obsess over what may or may not have gone wrong/be going wrong /go wrong in the future, and I've decided the only way to reclaim some peace of mind is to stop sulking and start acting like someone who is going to Germany for a year. And what do people who are going to Germany (or anywhere for that matter), and who are my age, do? Why, blog of course!

The waiting is, by far, the worst part. I've been doing my level best to distract myself: with trips to the gym, with flexing my newly found cooking muscles for my family, with HBO-GO and iTunes and the Food Network and NPR. But mostly I skulk around my house in my comfy pants, assembling a mental catalog of all the potential catastrophes that may interfere with my travel plans or, worse, with my grant as a whole-- an important email overlooked, a crucial form gone AWOL, etc. (**BREAKING NEWS** Even as I write this, my mother comes into my room with a package containing the student ID card I need to board my flight and neglected to order until the last possible moment. Phew) Also, I waste excessive amounts of time on Facebook, jealously stalking those friends who have already embarked on the first stage of their post-graduation life, whatever that stage looks like for them; or, worse still, the friends who are, this very day, returning to the reassuring shelter of the tiny liberal arts college on the hill that, with all due pomp and circumstance and a couple of speeches of varying usefulness, kicked me to the curb in May with a piece of paper that supposedly attests to my readiness for what lies ahead. One positive to come from all of this Facebook stalking: it has forced me to come to terms with the hard truth that I had been conveniently ignoring all summer: I am no longer an undergraduate. Ready or not (I mean me) here I come.

Again, I try to distract myself from all of this-- from feeling thoroughly unprepared for real life; from being paralyzed with the fear and uncertainty of moving to a 1.) large city in a 2.) foreign country, both of which are new to me (I didn't go abroad as an undergrad, even though I was a language major, because funds and fortitude were lacking); from mourning the relationship I had no choice but to give up in order to embark on this grand adventure. Mostly, though, my brain feels much like those wild cats in the Cat House down at the Cincinnati Zoo look: when it's not sleeping, which most of the time it is, it's pacing back and forth endlessly along the plate glass that separates it from the rest of the world, able to see what's on the other side but utterly flummoxed as to how to get to it.

Once the ball gets rolling, of course-- once I'm in Germany, once I'm finally doing instead of waiting to do-- most of my current anxieties and neuroses will disappear or, more accurately, be replaced by new ones. Right now I'd welcome those new, more kinetic worries: starting work, finding a place to live, meeting new people, navigating a new city/country/language/culture. These are worries that come with concrete nouns and active verbs attached-- a sense, again, of doing, and of moving forward as opposed to idling. Right now, though, I can't really do much, just watch the very dramatic and decisive life change headed my way come closer and closer. I can't reach out and touch it yet; it's on the other side of that glass which, granted, will disappear soon-- sooner, perhaps, than I'd like it to. Once the safety glass is gone, though, will I have the courage to step out of my accustomed habitat into a larger world that I have, until now, watched only from a comfortable and protected distance? (This is where the cat analogy breaks down: in the case of the animal, the glass is more for the protection of what's outside the glass than what's inside.)

That, I suppose, remains to be seen.