Laim: Less than Lame!

JOB SITUATION UPDATE:

So... Starnberg is too far away. I sent the family an email being like, "I really liked you guys! But I can't travel 1.5 hours every day...(andalsoyourchildrenareincrediblyoverpriviliged)". That's one job down, and since I only had one left, it would seem that the decision is made.

Instead, it's just been made more complicated. Problem is, I am an interview addict.

Seriously -- why do I do this to myself? Twice this week I've woken up much earlier than necessary, put on like six coats of mascara, accidentally kicked stuff in our tiny apartment over and made my sleeping boyfriend go "nnngghhh" pathetically, scrawled down the U-Bahn directions to some place far away from everything I know, and run to the train station while rabidly eating some sort of carbohydrate.

Then I've walked into the establishment with trepidation. I've noted the decoration and attempted to observe key details like "Do the teachers look happy? Do they look well fed?", then I've shaken some hands, then I've listened, nodding, for a while.

And then... the decision.

One of the two interviews I went on this week was the second interview at the Kinderbetreuung (place to shove kids for the day). It was the "let's see if you do well in practice" interview; I spent half a day there, monitoring eating, changing diapers, playing board games.

Happily, it turned out that the children are not the dead little zombies I thought they were. Rather, they are adorable cuddly babies who want to tell me things -- loud, running, screaming cuddly babies, but still. One in particular, this little mocha-colored man named Otto, has a habit of non-sequiturs that's incredibly endearing. Sample conversation:

Teacher: Otto, what's your name?

Otto: Zwei! (Two!)

Teacher: No, Otto, your name. Who are you?

Otto: Ich putze meine Zahne! (I brush my teeth!)

It was all cute, and the four hours went by very quickly. And at the end of it all there was a conversation (finally sitting in big-people chairs) with the two women in the office, a talk in which they said, "We think you'll do fine here, and we're formally offering it to you", at which I was sort of "hurray" and sort of frozen. I asked if I could have until the end of the week to decide.

I don't know what stopped me from saying yes that day. I think it was the same things I'd had a problem with before -- that the job pays 800 euro a month (which is much, much less than any nanny makes), that it's far away, that it's early, that I don't feel very qualified for it.

But it was also something else combined with those other things -- it was the fact that, although I was to be hired as the English teacher, I spent so much of the day inadequately explaining things to children in German, feeling overwhelmed, swept up in it. Although it was "English Day!", the class sang one English song and then the rest of the day was "Zieh dich mal aus, bitte" and "Was hast du gesagt?" -- the place was far from bilingual, and so were the kids. Most of them spoke little to no English, and I couldn't see myself, a single person trying desperately to keep up with the wave of diaper-changing and feeding, changing that.

And then.

And then I got, that same day, an email back from the principal of Munich's only English-speaking Montessori school, asking me to come in for an interview the next morning at ten. Nervously, feeling as if I were cheating on the job I already had, I said yes.

If you're not familiar with the concept (I wasn't), a Montessori school believes that children learn most between 2.5 and 6; that formal instruction, in these periods, is silly; that the best way to teach children is through a series of self-selected games. Which sounds like hippie bullshit, but isn't.

I observed a classroom this morning, hovering creepily in the corner -- the Montessori philosophy demands that children receive no positive reinforcement from grownups when they complete a game (as I was informed after I'd excitedly wanted to help a tiny curly-haired girl complete a horsey puzzle -- informed, and given a handbook and a pencil to keep me busy). Rather, adults are there to answer questions and keep order; qualified teachers are there to teach one-on-one lesson games, games with numbers made of sandpaper and beads and mats.

The kids here may have been older than they were in the Kinderbetreuung, but the room was still amazingly quiet, the contrast evident -- the floors had no carpets, but no noise was echoing. Instead, the children were playing calmly; two boys built a massive tower out of wood blocks; a kid painted; one little boy was sitting in the corner, listening intently to a pair of headphones. It was like a science fiction book, like here was a group of children raised in a laboratory, reared from birth to use their supernatural intelligence for ill.

Now normally, as anyone who has seen my closet can attest, I am not a fan of order, but after the screaming poopy German chaos of the previous day, I was intrigued. These children were not only learning English -- they were learning math, and handwriting, and fine motor skills -- and all of that without hitting each other. No hitting at all!

Also, it didn't hurt that the teachers here looked cleaner, more Zenlike, better-dressed. Most of them had been there for multiple years; the girl who tipped me off to the job opening, Kerry, had worked there since 2004 and seemed none the worse for wear. "I'm doing this while I pursue my opera-singing career!" she said cheerfully in her Australian accent. I instantly wanted to be her friend.

When I heard (trying to act nonchalant) that the starting salary was more than comfortable and that the pauses in the school calendar were more than ample, I was hooked. Being cocky from my most recent job offer, I thought I had it made.

And then the principal, an ex-military man from Illinois who was like a loquacious cross between J.K. Simmons and my father, had to go be all aloof. "Well, you probably won't hear from me for a week or so," he said. "You're the first person we've interviewed, and next week I'll be talking to other candidates! Then we'll go into a second round."

I was shocked. How dare he? MY JOB!

I walked out feeling like I'd just auditioned for a musical -- sort of excited, sort of shaky, unable to wait until the cast list got posted. As I unlatched the cute little gate and walked out into the cold, I realized that now, I even-more didn't know what to do.

So, friends: is there some business way to string the first job offer along while I wait for word from the military man? Or should I say yes to it -- am I just being enchanted by the novelty of the second thing? Or should I give up on children entirely and just be a barista for the rest of my life? Or... or... or...

Damn options.

Jobs

My job search here in Munich has been a haphazard process. I showed up six weeks ago with a degree, little to no money and roughly zero knowledge of how one writes a resume. I spent days lolling around in my at-the-time tiny bed and bemoaning fate while perusing the Internet.

Slowly, a month and a half later, I have made progress. I have still been in bed on the Internet all day, but the bed is much larger -- thanks to Nader's ebay abilities -- and now, sitting in my inbox, are two messages from people who want to have me as their employee. Hurray!... sort of!

The first is from a woman I met yesterday. She was of a type one meets here; she had crinkly skin and white hair, she was wearing metallic blue eyeliner and a wool coat woven in many colors, like Joseph's. She slightly resembled Meryl Streep, which instantly frightened me in a sort of visceral, Devil-Wears-Prada way.

We sat down in a room covered in flower appliques and toys and green paint. You see, the job she was offering is at a child jail.

Not really, but sort of.

It's a "Kinderbetreuung", which translates to "place to shove your kids for the day". The school's website explains that many mothers nowadays would really prefer to work, and so why not place your children at our wonderfully-colored nest of rooms, where they will learn about snow and leaves and telephones and music and all sorts of different languages?

Intrigued by the web site, I applied as one of the people who would be teaching them all these different languages. I thought the job would be more that of an English teacher -- as in, I'd have formal lesson time and song time and stuff -- but it turns out, my job would more be to yell at the children in English all day. "It's surprising what they pick up!" she said in her elegant Germanic accent, eyes crinkling.

With me, it might be mostly swear words, I thought.

After she spoke with me, and decided my lack of a teaching license wouldn't really be a problem, we toured the facilities. They're cute -- there's a mini baby rock-climbing wall, a room full of beanbag chairs, and a bunch of rice on the floor. I met all eighty-five children ranging in age from zero to six; they were almost creepily intrigued by me, would move happily towards the doors as soon as Angelika opened them. I liked the five-year-olds best, and hoped, as Angelika steered me towards what would be my classroom, that the children inside were equally pleasant.

"I wasn't sure at first, since we need someone with a teaching degree, but I think actually that we need someone like you," she said. "All happy and cheerful! And so smart! And you must be smart, to deal with children," she said, and smiled, and I got all puffed up with pride. And then she opened the door.

The room seemed darker, more bare than other rooms. It smelled of cooked food and something stale. The babies inside drooled up at me, twelve of them, rice falling from their mouths. The teachers sat next to them on tiny stools, their eyes dead.

One girl with thick, dark-brown hair cut into a bob rose from her stool. "Hello," she said dully.

"Oh, this is the Maria!" Angelika said fondly. "She is the English teacher here, and she will be leaving us, unfortunately. You would be her protege!"

"Yes," Maria said. I couldn't place her accent. "I will be going to Sweden!" and her eyes glowed, imagining Sweden.

There wasn't much else to say, so I shook the other teachers' hands and moved on.

In the office, I made an appointment to come back next week for a second interview -- an interview at which they would give me a letter of employment, the first step to a work visa. I was excited, because I've been waiting for that letter for so long -- I can only legally stay in the country for six more weeks without it -- but I walked away entirely uncertain, thinking of the falling rice, the babies. For this, I won the sonnet contest?

The second job offer is from a family twenty miles outside of Munich. They live in a beautiful oak-floored slopy-roofed building just a few blocks from this massive gorgeous lake. I would be their after-school nanny, their snack-maker, their homework-doer.

Their children, whom I met last week, are precious -- they are native French speakers but, having spent years in the US, sound like they're from Iowa. They enjoy all sorts of hobbies and have wonderful toys; their bedrooms are Child Paradise, with lofted beds and wood ceilings and a massive dollhouse and a guitar set and beanbag chairs and wow.

I imagine they're a little lonely -- they moved to Munich six months ago and their German is not quite up there yet, since they go to the International School and speak English all day. Still, they have many friends. Did I mention how charming they are? And the girl in particular enjoys me; she is nine, and likes books, and made me listen to her read three picture books out loud, and asked repeatedly when I could come back. I, not knowing much about the nanny visa situation, said "I don't know."

My original plan, in moving here, was to have exactly this sort of mind-numbing job -- a job at which my brain could wander and do other things, a job full of scooping rice and changing diapers and watching two well-mannered children play peacefully upstairs. And then, on the train and at nights, I would work on a book, some sort of book, just to say that I'd have written a book.

But maybe it wouldn't be mind-numbing at all. Maybe I'm being silly and it would be exhausting.

Maybe my resume would have a huge vacant year in it, a year in which I did nothing but change diapers and assist with addition homework. And maybe this would be a problem for any sort of lucrative brain-absorbing job in the future.

And I don't know if I'd be saying yes just to say yes -- saying yes just because it's the easy option, because both of these people want me so much.

And could my ego take it? On the train ride back, phrases kept thundering repeatedly in my head, phrases like "This is why you took Grammar and Language?" But maybe that'd be a good thing...

I don't know, maybe they're both too far away -- what if there's something better closer? The kindergarten is in Pasing, which is 45 minutes away; the nanny job is in Starnberg, which is an hour and a half. I don't know if I can ride that much train each day.

I don't know if I'm supposed to be initially very excited about a job or not.

I don't know.

Does anyone else?

Ulysses

I don't know why it took me so long to get back to JYM, really. I've been in Munich for a month now -- more than a month -- and until today, I hadn't visited the offices of the program that had brought me here.

"I've been busy," I told myself as I walked down that familiar street -- Gabelsbergerstrasse -- walked past all the engineering students, past the expensive corner pizza place and the music high school and all that old Nazi architecture. "I've been applying for jobs. I had things to do."

Really, I think it was just that I was afraid I'd walk in the door and they wouldn't care -- that any affection for me they'd professed had been thoroughly faked, that now that they had my thousands of euro and had processed my transcript, they would pretend never to have heard of me.

But there it was, the sign, the stone walls -- I walked to the door (the weather was still cold and gray) and I pressed the doorbell, and it buzzed, and I turned the knob but somehow it wouldn't open, it just spun in a circle, so I just kept turning it in a panic that this is how they would find me, back and without a job and not even able to open a door for God's sake, and then all of a sudden it was turning the other way on its own and the door was opening and there was Patrizia, office assistant, vengeful angel, former theater professor, her hair curlier than ever.

"Du hast es wieder zugesperrt!" she said. (You locked it again! Haha!). "Wie geht's??! Komm rein, komm rein!"

For whatever reason - I blame the children I've been babysitting in German for the past month -- speaking the language is no longer scary for me. I feel like my grammar hasn't gotten any better, but I'm no longer afraid of independently producing words -- I produced words for a solid half hour today, sitting with Patrizia in her office and stirring the cappuccino she'd made me. We talked about jobs, her job, my potential job, another ex-JYM student living in Munich who might be able to help me out, Brijhette (<3),>

H.P., my favorite semi-lazy German professor, had apparently invited his friend (his genius lies in the fact that he has many, many friends) to speak. Normally I would have bowed out, but I was intrigued: the man sitting in the library was a translator.

Literary translators, here in Munich, are a rare breed -- one must be well-established, a writer on one's own already; one must be experienced and know how to shop around manuscripts; one must be an experienced researcher; one must know that literary translating doesn't pay the bills.

Apparently, one must also know that literary translating can, on occasion, nearly kill you. That's what I learned today, mostly.

The man sitting in the library was a man about my height, a man with an annoyed brow and a silver beard and spectacles and two coats. Patrizia approached him. "Hallo, _____, darf ich jemand vorstellen? Das ist die Jessica, eine ehemalige JYM-Studentin; sie ist wiedergekommen, um Arbeit zu suchen..." (She's come back to look for work!)

The man took my hand, shook it somberly. Then he said, auf Deutsch, "And of course, also because of a boyfriend, yes?"

I laughed like hell. "Yes."

That was all he needed to know about me. I asked him what he was going to be talking about, and he said, "Do you know Danielewski?"

I didn't recognize the name, and was ashamed. "Noo?" I said sheepishly, a literature major.

He began to expound, talking mainly to Patrizia, glancing occasionally at me -- "The young in America enjoy his books; there have been many blogs written about them, their mirrored-ness, their inscrutability, and so of course now we must translate them into German, for the young folk here to read. But there are many problems with the text, even more than there were with the first novel -- for instance, how do you translate that title? Is it "Haus aus Blaettern" or "Haus dass Verlaesst"?---"

"WAIT," I said. "You mean, 'House of Leaves?'"

He looked at me.

I was going to say something about how much I'd hated that book, but instead I just nodded. "Yeah, I do know it!"

"House of Leaves" is this black-covered brick of a book. Later, in Hans-Peter's class, a girl was asked to summarize it, and she said, "It's about a house that is a labyrinth, and it's a book that is also a labyrinth". I'd never thought of it like that, but it's true -- the text jumps around the page, the footnotes are a story in themselves, pages will be jam-packed with print or nearly empty. I found it annoying, frankly -- it was cute at first, but I am a lazy reader, one who does not want to constantly be shifting a brick-weight book around in a circle in order to find out what happens. The main characters also seemed annoyed by the sort of visual art they were trapped in, and retaliated by being two-dimensional, which made me even more not want to finish it.

"I can see how that'd be hard to translate," I said.

"Just wait until you see the other one," he said, fuming, and he went to his bag and pulled out a well-marked copy of the author's less-successful second novel "Only Revolutions". I opened it to find pages that look like this:

"Oh god," I said. "It's like Ulysses, except..."

"Yes, quite," he said.

Apparently, it's about two young people who carry on a romance that lasts for 200 years and a road trip that travels across America. That's it. "Nothing else really happens," he says. "It's just very... Facebook. It is what the young in America want right now. It is a truly American book."

Translation of this book required the man to surf through thousands of web pages for each book-page he translated -- in the margin, aided by Wikipedia, the author had chosen to write events that happened on the day the book was taking place. Generally, with the aid of the Internet and native speakers, he could figure it out, but once he'd encountered a word that "ONLY OCCURRED IN THE TEXT. It was NOWHERE else on the Internet." Except for a discussion board posting about the novel, that is.

On the board -- which was full of people gushing about how awesome the book was -- he posted the baffling page with the baffling word, with the sentence, "If anyone can tell me what this means, I will give them ten free copies of this book."

Nobody could.

The man talked for thirty minutes. Patrizia and I stood and nodded; Patrizia, on occasion, added helpful things; I mostly made what I thought were intelligent-sounding noises and sent vague "get me a job like yours even if it's hell" rays in his direction. It was like being in a lecture, but a lecture where not only were you judging the professor, he was also judging you, sitting up there behind his podium with a furrowed brow and -- when you chose to speak -- a careful appraisal of your German abilities.

I fear I came up short -- once or twice Patrizia had to translate for me into better German -- but at least now I've met someone semi-famous, or at least someone who has in his possession, printed out, an angry email from one of his colleagues to Danielewski that says, in summary, "Take your book and shove it. I can't make any sense of this bullshit. How is this published??"

Yes, And

All my stuff is here.

There's less of it than there used to be. I have grown older but I have shed, not gained; the clothes I own, clothes that have traveled continents and oceans, are baggy and misshapen. The rug I loved is dusty and stained.

There is less of it, but more of me. My hair is longer and my abdomen is larger -- I'm swollen with memory, stories. Most of them aren't mine.

"For a time, every shirt she wore had the picture of a ferret ironed onto it."

"He was, as an eight-year-old, briefly kept in a small glass box at the back of his math classroom. He had been instructing the other children, and the teacher thought it was best to contain him, so he would sit there, among the paintbrushes and drum kits. He was not allowed to drum."

"Her parents were married in secret. Her father needed a green card, and her mother, although she didn't love him, didn't think anyone would find out."

"They stole the large, unwieldy sign in the night. When the cops drove by, they dropped it in the weeds and ran, returning later for it. No one knows why."

"Her brothers made her kill animals. Think about it."

"We set all the alcohol in the house on the kitchen table and then sat around it as the sun set. In the twilight, our faces grew dark; we didn't know what to talk about -- we knew only that we were here, as we had been, and soon we would not be, and that this was the best way, out of all ways, to deal with that."

After it all, I am thankful for this - the portability of stories, and for you all, out there somewhere, making more.

"Morris is weird," I've told Nader over and over. "Be prepared."

He usually just laughs when I say that, but after today, I think it's crucial that he believe me. I just went on a walk around town and so much weird shit happened. Morris astounds me sometimes... occasionally in a good way, but often in a way that defies adjectives.

Today, I went to my landlord's address to drop off rent. I had never been there before, and was unsure which house actually was Dale Peterson's. I passed the gas station, looking concernedly for No. 106...

I found it. It had a giant sign that read "Peterson Enterprises!", written in large block letters. The sign was surrounded by a wagon full of pumpkins, a platform full of squashes, and multiple other piles of root vegetables. Dale was standing in the middle of them, a hunched man in a plaid shirt, puttering slowly away from me.

He took my rent check, and then he gave me a butternut squash.

Then I went to the co-op to buy coffee, and the woman there told me "Take some vegetables!", and so then my backpack was full of potatoes and tomatoes, in addition to the butternut squash.

At the bank, where I went next, there was free coffee.

And then I went to the grocery store. There was no free food there -- rather, while I was standing awkwardly filling up a jug with water, the woman next to me went brightly, "So you're in college!"

I looked down at my tie-dyed shoes. "Yes?"

"What year are you? Freshman?"

... By the time my water jug had filled up, she'd learned that I was an English major who planned on moving to Germany to teach English and live with her boyfriend in December. Then she said, "Well, seeya!" and walked away, happily pushing her cart.

Also, Pamida Pharmacy had apparently last time given me only 1/3 of my prescription, even though I'd paid for all of it, and the woman at Thrifty White Drug -- the rival drugstore -- told me, "Go kick some ass!!"

I don't know what's happening to me.

Obese woman checking people out at the Salvation Army: You know, you're not supposed to have food or drink in here.

Me, drinking out of my new purple flask: What? ... Not even water?

Her, solemnly: Not even water.

Me: I mean, this is rum, but...

They are a CHRISTIAN ORGANIZATION.

Family-arity

The weather in Morris is strangely sort of starting to parallel the weather in Munich, or at least it has been for the past two days. I suppose they're on pretty much the same latitude, but I'm surprised by how similar life seems here.

In both nations, I bike to the grocery store, angry and hungry. I emerge with the ingredients for pasta sauce (protein-enriched noodles, chickpeas, red sauce, spinach, mushroom, onion... always too many, because I am hungry). Somehow, in the 15 minutes I have been inside, a cloud will have crackled into existence over the store; inevitably it will be pouring rain. And since I am similar in both countries, I gnash my teeth angrily for four minutes, then decide to suck it up. I step onto my wet bike, wince as I pedal through the freezing stinging drops, return home, dump my bike wherever I usually do... and the rain stops.

The only difference is that in Morris nobody's there biking and gnashing and shopping with me. (Also, I can't buy wine in the grocery store, but that's probably a good thing.)

Basically: it's not weird to be back. I think it's just that Morris never changes, not really. I mean, we have a new building on campus, but it's not like I spend very much time in it. The generation ahead of me is gone, but it's not like I didn't expect that or mourn it when it happened. Michelle's a resident advisor in Indy Hall, not in the apartments, and Lauren's not a CA at all but rather my housemate who spends her time washing dishes and playing guitar and mothering us and reveling in NOT being a CA... but really this is all I can think of.

I still have a horse, at least for a little while. Classes are still an odd mixture of fascinating and boring and challenging and easy.

I still live in a place with people whose movements and habits interest me and frustrate me and make me happy. Last night we all drank wine at our sister house across town and then headed home, and then two of them picked up guitars, and Lauren played "Aeroplane over the Sea" without me asking her to, and Alek played "King of Carrot Flowers" really competently for the amount of wine he'd had, and Will flounced around making macaroni and cheese, and I sang, sort of, and laughed. It pleases me to no end that this kind of night is typical.

It's nice that my last semester at Morris is this stereotype. Like someone carbon-copied the best parts of everything (except the rain) and laid them all together in a line -- three months of this coming one after the other and then ending in December.

Because then I will step into an aeroplane and transform experience into memory once again. I will fly over the sea into a very similar grocery store and very similar rain, and I will have someone so wonderful and so familiar waiting there to bike home with me.

And we play Neutral Milk Hotel, too. Possibly at least as competently, and maybe as drunk.