Keep them kids dirty

…and you’ll find that they turn into quite Germanic freakazoids who obsess about order and doing things right. So yeah, you parents, make sure you change the wee ones’ diapers regularly. If you don’t, your kid might well turn out to have an anal fixation – which doesn’t have to be a bad thing seeing as it usually means that holding anything to do with anal matters in deep contempt. “All is well in suburbia”, you might think, but not so quick: the Freudian down-side to this is a fetishisation of the brown stuff. Yup.

You might wonder where this is coming from so suddenly. So did I when I read this piece that explains the majority of German banks’ reluctance to invest in hedge fonds or, shall we say, their tendency to avoid risky investments, with the mere fact that Germans are generally anally fixated because German parents don’t change German children’s diapers very often. True story as per the current issue of Vanity Fair; if you’re keen, here’s a German analysis of the piece. Anal fixation apparently comes about when one is exposed to one’s own excrements for unnaturally long periods of time and it is expressed in exaggerated avoidance of dirt – hence the ‘clean’ bankers.

The reason I chose to mention this topic on this extremely clean blog is the following: Claiming that German bankers are hesitant to do risky investments because they had to spend so much time in their own poop when they were little and because that led to the development of an exaggerated fondness for things being done cleanly and orderly – well, that’s a clear case of hermeneutics gone wrong! Just because Fact A ‘Germans invest conservatively’ and Fact B ‘German parents (allegedly – I want to see proof of this!) like to leave their kids smoldering in their excrements for long periods of time’ have one thing in common, which is that both these facts apply to Germans, doesn’t mean that there is a causal relationship at work here. Furthermore, just because it makes for a good story (for which audience?) doesn’t mean it is true, and just because it suggests a kind of mechanistic causality between ‘how often do I change my kid’s diapers’ and ‘what kind of person will the kid eventually become’ which I am sure many parents would buy into IF THERE WAS ANYTHING TO THIS LOGIC – which there is not – also doesn’t mean it is true.

So I say, folks: Check the stories that you are presented for the kinds of causalities they offer, especially when they are trying to explain an entire nation’s financial behaviour with one single natal behavioural fact.

It is true though that people outside Germany tend to be amazed about Germans’ relationship to their own bodily waste. A deep sense of befuddlement and ignorance of the German soul marks some of the conversations on the topic. English anthropologist Kate Fox, for instance, believes that German toilet bowls ‘catch’ the drop first so that the user, upon completion of the job, can get up, turn around and be amazed at seeing the finished product. She believes that the German toilet user needs to first know – and seeing really is believing in this case – what has been going on inside his or her own body. Only then he/she will flush, Fox claims (in this book).

The above is another clear case of overinterpretation. Search your brain for a second, dear enlightened reader, and remember what else we know about Germans. Yup, there was this thing with the practicality focus…dropping makes a splash and catching the drop on a sort of intermediary terrace doesn’t. Which is why German toilet bowls used to be shaped the way they were (as with all thing, we’re adopting the American system now). Practicality rules over anal fixation. QED.

The danger with monocausal explanations is that they are beguilingly simple. We fall for them every time. They sway us easily especially if we want to believe the ludicrously reductionistic proposition that is being proffered. Such must have been the case with the German-financial-anal-fixation piece in Vanity Fair. In light of the fact that Germany came through the recession so well I would say, however, that dealing with one’s own financial shit is always a good option no matter how one came to acquire the capability to do that. (Seriously, what does it matter??) I don’t feel the need to reduce German banks’ hesitancy about risky investments with Freudian intellectual acrobatics. If I did, then I’d probably be saying to all my American friends with kids: ‘Just let them kids be for a little while yet, you never know, it might save your economy.’

The joy of water

The old mill across the Ihle in Friedensau

This is going to be corny.

Yesterday, I arrived early at work; my boss and office mate wasn’t in yet, or was still in class, I don’t know. As I hadn’t had time to make myself sandwiches, I set out again straight away to buy myself lunch stuff. I love my new campus, it’s leafy and green and very quiet. Walking along the wee burn on the border of campus brings you close to the fields, and behind the fields is a huge forest that stretches for miles and miles.The shop is in the building that formerly housed the mill, so it’s right by the side of the burn. Even though it was warm just about 9.30 am, it was already warm and humid. The sun was getting ready to scorch us again.

As I approached the mill building I could hear children screaming and laughing. The kindergarten is right next to the shop (not for consumerist reasons I don’t think) and the children were already up and running, literally. I smiled to myself about their exuberance. One wee girl was running and screaming like mad, arms up in the air. She was a bit too old to still be in that phase where toddlers enjoy the sound of their own voice, and that’s probably why the screaming struck me as a bit strange (though I know that children do a lot of things for apparently no reason whatsoever).

Anyway, on my way back from the shop I glanced over to the children again – they were all running around screaming, boys and girls! Arms up high in the air and lots of noise. And then I saw why: the nursery teacher, holding a garden hose, was filling up a big outdoor bathtub for the children and they were, I think, super excited about that. At 9.30 am. It was upon the realisation that the bathtub might have something to do with it that I also detected a pattern in their running and creaming exercise: run/scream towards the tub that is being filled up, stop and have a look, put the little hand in the cold cold water for a sec – and run away screaming excitedly only to return for a do-over presently. They had a ball and it was great fun to see them be so happy!

Us grown-ups should do the very same thing next time we’re about to go swimming in a pool/lake or wherever. That’d be great! For ourselves and those who watch us Could also be a bit painful too, depending on the temperature of the water one is dealing with. The last time I screamed in connection with water was when I ran into the cold North Sea in the northeast of Scotland on 1 May; the screaming was a mixture of fun and horror, I must admit, and I don’t think I looked so much different from the little girl that I spotted first who was running around with her arms in the air…

“If you love me, you’ll be wrong about what you just said”

I made this great discovery this Christmas: In relationships, being right about something doesn’t matter at all. Insisting that you’re right means that your primary allegiance is to some sort of fact or logic that has little to do with the people that you’re in relationships with and that you can only enter into these relationships to the extent that the facts (whatever they are – like think fighting about the number of times you’ve been to the wildlife reservoir) allow you to. Take scientific truths, something that you know to be true but someone else argues with you about it. What’s the point in fighting it out when you know you’re right? I do think of it in terms of allegiance, I don’t know why. If your allegiance is only to yourself and to being right then you can’t enter into meaningful relationships with others.

For relationships to prosper it is helpful to simply see to preserving a harmonious status quo and to accept that this means that you’ll be ‘wrong’ about some things. This sounds more sucky than it is. You’re still right about the facts but you don’t fight with friends and family about that.

I’m not saying that this is how I made it through my Christmas holiday which consisted of meeting my sweetheart’s family for the first time. Then again, these thoughts didn’t arise in a vacuum. I guess I realised that in certain situations, and maybe particularly in family holidays, insisting that you’re right simply rocks the boat too much, sometimes at least and with some family members. Often times your opinion doesn’t matter anyway and offering it will only upset people.

For relationships to prosper it seems to be necessary to take a step back from being right and simply being there. Plus, there is of course the possibility that you’re truly wrong in which case sticking to some sort of truth equals blockheadedness. All pretty complicated sometimes eh…Relationships are tough though, so no wonder.

When it’s like this then you’re probably writing a PhD thesis

Relaxing during the day means working on something else. For example, you’re sick of the chapter you’ve been working on for the past few days, so you move on to a different chapter. In the evening, relaxing, for me anyway, means playing Pearl Poppers. This is an entirely (it seems) unknown computer game for little children. Very colourful. I am proficient in the strategic mode where I have freed from captivity many a little fish, and I am currently champion (I beat my mum) in the adventure mode.

‘Doing a bit of admin’ means writing another job application. On the upside, writing job applications for me necessitated becoming acquainted with: which fonts read best, how heavy should paper be in order to convince the search committee that I am a classy woman – but not a snob, what to mention on the CV and what not, all this kind of stuff. I have learned heaps about postage, too. Some Luddites out there want applications printed, on real (heavy!) paper! An A4 sized letter to anywhere outside Europe costs 6€ if it’s below 500 g and 12€ if it’s between 500 and 1.000 g. Seeing as good paper weighs in at about 100g per sheet, you’re in with 12€ per paper application at, eg. a North American university.

‘Dreaming’ for me entails casting myself into the role of the Assistant Professor of Sociology until I feel that I am ‘it’. Lots of reading of staff profiles and university ‘about us’s is required for this. The dream vision is to have a job. The application for the dreamed-about job will be written in one of the admin breaks.

A friend told me recently that I should relax a bit (!!!) and simply let life happen to me. I was full of incredulity. I see the point, yes, I do need to think about what makes me happy and not so much about what makes others happy (difficult for a number of reasons). But somehow it sounded like ‘don’t work so much. Just take a break. Dangle your legs in the river and watch the water flow past.’ Made me very anxious.

Except for my parents who took me in when (or just before) financial hardship struck I don’t talk to people much these days, so understandably I get very excited when I finally do get to be around people again, especially when they’re my age. Attending a conference recently was super exhilarating!! I was happy like a little puppy (without being cute like one, however – shame that) and the many comments I made on people’s papers were about as useful as if a dog had spoken. The point for me, I guess, wasn’t to come off as totally clever but to be part of a community again. How am I to overcome this and get a job? I wonder…

Eating breakfast/lunch/dinner in the dining room with the parents? What are crazy idea! Who has time for that? Breakfast is to be eaten at the desk whilst reading a pdf that you’ve already quoted but not fully read yet or something like that.

Leisure time reading must serve the PhD. I am re-reading Pierre Bayard’s How to talk about books you haven’t read so as to get quite proficient at it. I don’t want to have to read everything I quote. I don’t think many people do that anyway. For now, I need to find out how much I do need to read in between submission and viva. Should I read everything that I have previously merely skimmed? Suggestions and helpful advice from viva survivors are welcome!

What is writing a PhD thesis like for you? I am really interested to know!!

The birds are flying South

I absent-mindedly went to the supermarket about an hour ago – I was a bit miffed about being sent on an errand by my mum, in fact, and mumbled to myself about the injustice of life etc. So at first I didn’t notice the racket all around me, I just thought it must be the cars going past. But there were no cars. I was all attention then and wondered where the noise was coming from. And then I recognised it: It’s bird migration! I looked up into the sky and indeed, it was full of flocks of birds! So exciting!

This discovery came along as one of those weird ‘childhood memories’ where you remember how you first learned about something from an adult. As I was standing there outside the supermarket I could hear a male voice in my head saying ‘the birds travel South to spend the winter where it’s warm’, and I nodded affirmatively as I watched them moving along noisily. They weren’t going South though, they were travelling West, maybe in order to rest somewhere along the North Sea half way to North Africa, as the NABU suggests. According to the map on the left, they do this in my area. (So my dad (I presume) wasn’t lying when he told me about how they travel South.)

I think it’s pretty cool that I again live in the bird migration corridor. I couldn’t really say what I like about it so much other than that this is how I grew up. There were always birds coming and going. We were always witness to this extraordinary feat of avian ingenuity. Of course we didn’t know that the birds rest in between and imagined that they pull through till they’re in Africa.That made it a very special event to observe.

My plan was to quickly do my shopping and to run home quickly, get out the camera and photograph the mayhem in the sky. But they were all gone when I got home which was only about 10 minuites later! Maybe they took off early in the morning somehwere far to the East and always cross over here around noon-time, I don’t know. It seemed strangely scheduled the way they were travelling through all at once and then they were gone again. There was only one flock of stragglers to be captured where before the sky had been dotted grey with birds. And as before, I heard these birdies before I saw them

Sure way to a stupid next generation: BAN BOOKS!!!

Attempts at banning children’s books in American schools have increased over the past year, the BBC reports. We’re talking about schools deciding that Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series shouldn’t be available in their libraries because it’s too explicit, that kind of stuff. (I’m sure someone also has a problem with there being too much supernatural material in it – a British (!!) teacher even had a problem with that in the Harry Potter books!) The Catcher in the Rye is apparently also on the list of banned books, or books that some schools would like to ban, as is The Colour Purple. In the latter case, rampant racism was diagnosed since the n-word is mentioned 58 times, but normally parents just struggle with the fact that some books allude to sexual matters.

Yes, that is very, very bad indeed. Having grown up in Europe, of course, the likes of me are completely insensitive to these issues. Yes. Because everyone in Europe is frisky. Not born that way, no, but made that way through our horribly liberal European values. It’s our values where we are wrong, just as those concerned parents are absolutely right with their conservative values. And as we know, you can’t argue with someone’s values. Says one farmer from Stockton, Missouri: “This is a community with the type of values that are consistent with the way we like to raise our children.” [so take those darned national prize-winning books away!]

I don’t know…I’m worried, I’m very worried. Values are being used in this instance as in many others to justify all things for one particular group of people, and that simply can’t be right. Carrying out research into conservative values myself I can tell you how bloody hard it is to actually understand what people mean, first of all, when they talk about their ‘values’. Most of the time ‘values’ are a placeholder of ‘what I desire to come to pass’. It remains fuzzy and blurry like that. But because values are conceptions of the desirable, and because we live in a society in which we would hate to restrict our neighbour’s freedom to pursue their own happiness (just the children’s, but that’s ok – we mean well), the moment he/she starts talking about their values we go ‘oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise that this has something to do with your values. Please accept my heartfelt apologies, I didn’t mean to interfere.” (“Do go on killing that dog with the spade then.”)

I mean, c’mon! And anyone who thinks that we are being too liberal here and that that’s the downfall, forget it!! Freedom of the individual, parents deciding which books to ban at their kid’s school? We’re looking into the ugly heart of conservatism here, and it ain’t pretty (as is the case with most ugly things). Which is a shame, because conservatism has lots to offer, as I keep pointing out ever so neutrally. But something like this is not part of it, or it shouldn’t be:

“[The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian] is just chock full of vulgarity, profanity, obscenity and sexual explicitness involving minors,” [the farmer from before] says. “People around here, where it’s pretty rural and conservative, they will go a long way, but this book was so far over the edge. It doesn’t belong in a school.”

Because people in this rural area aren’t smart enough to deal with this kind of book? Adults maybe but not the kids? Gee-wizz, isn’t this sad? So there’s a book written from the perspective of a North American Indian who lives in deprivation. And it’s written for kids. Maybe it’s a truly horrible book – as awful as The Catcher in the Rye maybe, who knows – but banning it? Surely that’s not the way forward to raising intelligent kids with strong moral characters? Kids who already know that their childhood world isn’t all there is and perhaps even that it isn’t the best of all possible worlds? Kids who have imagination? Because this kind of kid, living with parents just like that, will grow and learn from good books. But perhaps we’re not supposed to raise intelligent kids? Maybe, if our kids become too clever, even by half, some of us would expect problems with family relations? Hm.

Banning children’s books means banning a degree of learning. Reflecting on whether or not we have become too unconcerned with sexual stuff as a society as a whole is a different matter; I presume that a modicum of screening happens in the American children’s book industry to safeguard that. Of course, if those approving of certain kinds of contents as innocent for the kinds of kids they know are of a super-reckless moral disposition, as one could easily argue, then not much can be expected from that person and very soon all the little American fat kids will want to make love to vampires and werewolves (tough luck, humans).

Which brings me at least back to the point where I initially began pulling my hair out: Is there really no communication possible about different groups’ values, and would some of us go as far in protecting their values as homogenising the world their kids grow up in by banning books? C’mon, it’s a wonderful world, wouldn’t we want to be open about it? What’s the fear? Maybe there’s something I don’t get here. Perhaps the BBC misrepresented facts, I don’t know. It’s just – I get really scared when I hear about limiting children’s scope at exploration and trying very hard to protect one’s own little corner of the earth from change. Change is inevitable and children need to learn about the world, including the fact that things change. Trying to protect them from that will turn them into little whimps! And stifling children’s intellect – in the children’s section in the school library, for Pete’s sake!!! – does not bode well at all for our future.

Home, sweet home and now the breakfast crisis

I’ve just got up from a sad breakfast table. Why? Because there was no cheese, and what’s a German breakfast without cheese? That’s like a dog with three legs – something’s missing and it’s just sad. Yup.

My poor mother, upon realising that there was no cheese in the fridge, lost the last bit of friendliness she had (and she never has much in the mornings) and suggested, in a menacing tone of voice no less, that we might as well skip breakfast now. The mencase was directed at my father who has the unfortunate habit of eating sandwich toppings late at night. He kind of gets the munchies but without the drugs and just harvests whatever he finds in the fridge, and last night he ate all the cheese we had left. That’s horrible in itself (three-legged dog!!) so I understand my mum’s disappointment. But what made my dad’s mishap even worse from my mother’s point of view at least is, of course, that he is a man. He is a man and he ate all the cheese. He is guilty on many counts all at once.

No wonder, then, that my mum couldn’t cope and grumped her way through the breakfast. I don’t think she’ll get over this lightly.

What can we learn from this? If you’re a man, never ever ever eat the breakfast cheese.

Confused!! with eyes wide open

When you’re in a liminal stage, in the process of arriving somewhere and finding your bearings, everything is equally meaningful and meaningless. It’s like when you’re seeking for something really hard and you all along feel that you’re on the verge of finding it, ‘oh yes, this thing here looks almost like it but not quite’…Then five minutes later you’ve found ‘it’ (whatever it is that you’re looking for) somehwere completely different…Yes, that’s me in these first days after settling back home in Germany. I’ve kind of stopped looking for significance for the time being because there’s just no point – and honestly, what is it with me trying to uncover significance in every nook and cranny anyway??

The view from my parents' place - one of the things I enjoy in a relaxed loser-like fashion.

Random observation #1: The cool kid in the supermarket with spiky hair and weirdly fashionable clothes cued to buy – a vanilla pudding. Such a ruffian! When this cool kid heard that the pudding only cost 0.29€ (he obviously hadn’t read the price tag) he said ‘oh, entschuldigen Sie bitte’ to the checkout assistant, dashed off, got himself a small chocolate bar – a Kinder Country, to be precise – said ‘Entschuldigung’ again as he came back and put his few coins for the now two items on the counter. What a cool kid eh! Germany is going in a good direction with this polite next generation.

Random observation #2: You know that you’re a loser when you’re thinking ‘geez, I’m so glad to live so comfortably in my new room at my parents’ place’. LOSER!! Yup, true that.

Random observation #3: In a similar vein, you (that is: me) know that you’ve been away for too long when the old cycle-path shortcuts just don’t work any more. In my hometown where cycling places is the business and where status is derived from the coolness of your bicycle, not knowing your way around weighs heavy. Loser twice.

Random observation #4: East-German science fiction novels are the bee’s knees in terms of social criticism. They were the main vehicle of that back in the day and it’s plain as daylight when you read them. Brilliant stuff! Though this might well be a case of me adapting to well-written German in a confused way. The words resonate within me more immediately maybe (seeing as this is my mother tongue) and that’s probably why I’m thinking all along that ‘this is the best book I’ve ever read! It’s all soooo true’!!! Unlikely that it really is, I mean objectively speaking (which no one ever can do but who cares); Karl-Heinz Tuschel’s books are ok but the one I’m reading right now, Leitstrahl für Aldebaran, was only ever published as a pocket edition and surely can’t be the best of the genre ever. It ranks 84 on the list of 100 best science fiction books in the former GDR and all Tuschel’s other books rank much higher. Which proves both that I’m confused and that GDR science fiction is worthy of having a top 100 (or that this genre is so amazing that even the sucky books don’t suck, at least for this reader!!). There. Confusion.

The impossible goal: Going to a GP in Germany

You would think that going to a GP is a case of paying (for the medical service being rendered) privately or having the health insurance pay for it and that therefore, when you don’t have health insurance, you just cough up the money. But that would be too easy, as I am finding out bit by bit.

1. Problems for former ex-pats: All health insurance companies hesitate to take someone on who has lived outside Germany for 2+ years. Private companies will take you on but you need to prove that you earn in excess of 53.ooo or so Euros (70.000$ or 45.000 GBP). State insurers don’t take on private individuals, they only act on behalf of an institution.
2. Which institution is best? Normally, you’d go to get a job. The employer will pay half of your health insurance, you pay the other half. Since I am a PhD-student finishing up I can’t really get a full-time job (because I already have one, I just don’t get paid for it). Someone like me would go to the Federal Employment Agency and apply for unemployment benefit. They will give you some money and insure you. Here’s the twist: Being a student, I know full well that I won’t be getting any money (because you can’t actually work when you’re a student, you’re not really unemployed) and therefore you won’t be getting any health insurance from the Federal Employment Agency. Since this is the first port of call though you really have to go there.
3. Preparations for the entire process: Register as someone living in Germany. This requires that you present a lease or tenancy agreement. Then get a bank account. All this will take a few days. Talk to some of the health insurance companies and see who would take you on again. Keep in mind, German GPs won’t treat you unless you’re insured, so even if the insurance brokers you talk to are reluctant and cold, persist, be nice and get as much information as you can. Mind-numbing and seemingly hopeless though this seems, just do it anyway (I am saying to myself).
4. Go and get the rejection letter. Go to the Federal Employment Agency, hand in all the information and get your rejection letter. Don’t take it to heart, this is just one step in a long chain of health insurance causality. It looks like the last step but it isn’t. There is another agency that temporarily supports people that cannot find support anywhere else, and they even support poor students. But anywhere else needs you to present the rejection letter or they won’t even lift a finger for you. Everywhere else needs to see that you’ve been to the Federal Employment Agency already.

Sausage = reward

So my plan is to jump through all these hoops (I’m going to open a bank account tomorrow) and to try my hardest to get health insurance with the help of the German state. I will have to sit in a lot of waiting rooms in civil service offices and I will get things wrong all the time – because the way I think it works might not be the way it actually does work after all – and maybe one or two civil servants will be unkind to me but that’s just part of the process of being assimilated into the German collective again.I’m not even ill at the moment, I’m really well, so none of this is very urgent…The only other way though to get back into the system is to have a full-time job and that’s not going to happen for me for at least another year. It’s a stupid situation. It’s also stupid that you have to go to all these places and collect documents to hand in at the Federal Employment Agency even though you know already that you don’t have a case at all. Maybe you just need to prove that you don’t mind running errands all the time, I don’t know. That’s how I feel. It’s a cool effective way to get me acclimatised to being back in Germany, that’s for sure.

All I know to do for now is where to go to open my bank account. I’ve been given an appointment for that, which is pretty fancy for my small town. No one will really tell me what I have to do after that. The only sources I have for that kind of information are other persons that I know who have gone through similar situations (read: my mother; she knows things).

Waiting for banana curry

Victorian women spent a lot of time waiting: waiting for the post man to arrive, waiting for invitations to country/city dances, waiting to be called upon by a visitor, waiting to be introduced to a suitable man, waiting to see him again, waiting for him to propose…always waiting. Jane Austen’s heroines do all of these things aplenty. Women could not simply seek out what it was they wanted or needed, at least not quite in as unproblematic a fashion as we can. Events had to come to them, they couldn’t go and seek out events. So they waited.

These Victorian women were a hell of a lot better at waiting than us 21st century women, I would think. For all the wrong reasons, obviously, but still.

I am in a liminal stage between leaving and arriving myself at the moment and I don’t really know what to do with myself, so I’ve decided to use this time to do something that is shamefully overdue and that others have (apparently) been waiting for for quite some time: I am going to give you my banana curry recipe. It’s really simple and not a real curry at all but that doesn’t matter as long as it tastes good, right?

Banana Curry

Ingredients (for 2)

• 500g chicken breast fillet
• 1 red onion
• 3 bananas (mango and peach are good variations but I wouldn’t cook all three together)
• 1 tub of cream
• up to 1 glass of white wine
• curry spice mix: I prefer a red curry mix for this dish but any curry mix would do as long as it isn’t too spicy. Green or yellow curry mixes don’t work with this dish.
• 3 cloves of garlic
• basmati rice

Dice the chicken, salt and pepper it and sauté it in olive oil. Add some of the curry mix to it. Take the chicken out and put it to the side. Dice the onion, slice the bananas into chunks (other fruit also in rather largish chunks). Heat up the pan with some olive oil again, sauté onion and bananas until golden. Add cream. Add salt and pepper and curry mix; it should be spicy and flavourful but not super hot. Bring to the boil. Add white wine (to taste) and the chicken, season some more. Simmer for about 10-15 minutes until the wine has evaporated and the dish has become creamy. Serve with rice and some coriander.

I hope you enjoy this!