The Final Stretch

It starts today!

Well, not officially. I still have to sign the paperwork sometime in August to start my offical 6-month working period, but the dissertation topic is chosen, y'all! I'll get some preliminary data within the next few weeks and then it'll be time to do all the science.

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's crazy how these 2.5 years have gone by. On the one hand, it feels like no time at all; I can still remember meeting all of my colleagues for the first time, and that first class (a finite elements exercise) seems like it was yesterday. And Kiel is just starting to become home. I know it takes a while to become accustomed to a new place, but it seems a shame that it has to happen so late in the game. Better late than never, I guess?

But then, so much has happened in Kiel. I came into this program and this city excited to learn but unprepared for everything- the culture, the language, the area of study, etc. It was rough for a while, and I wasn't sure if coming to Germany was a good decision or if I would be able to make it through the master's. Now, I still can't say by any stretch of the imagination that I am now prepared for these sorts of things - my German is still dismal, and grad school is really good at teaching you about how much you don't know - but at least I'm less unprepared (is this a thing?) and still excited to learn...and I'm about 95% sure I'll be able to BTHO this thesis and graduate, so that's promising!

And I'm realizing (and telling way too many people) that I will have been here, with my only breaks being for holidays or work, longer than I have been anywhere since Detroit. The feet are starting to itch again, but saying goodbye is going to be difficult this time around. The Germans might seem standoffish, but some of them definitely know how to warm a girl's heart.

Ok, this is getting too sappy. My apologies. I leave with two four quick notes:

• My friend Greg and I are taking wagers for who can best include Bill Nye in their master's thesis. Right now he gets $100 if he has an inline direct quotation. We're taking outside wagers! We're poor graduate students, and we can't be that picky as to where our food comes from.
• On a side note, I'm seriously impressed with how many oceanography episodes Bill Nye had...trying to teach 5- to 12-year-olds about the thermohaline circulation (using a Stommel box-type model, at that!) can't be an easy task.
• Wait, do Germans even know about Bill Nye the Science Guy? (Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!)
• Working with graduate students is dangerous. Case in point: Theodore Streleski, a math Ph.D. candidate who snapped after working for his advisor for 19 years and murdered him. Now I know why the professors at A&M tried to kick out their Ph.D. students early...

March 6th, 2016

There are a lot of things that are scary about living abroad. Being surrounded by a new culture, having to start from square 1 in terms of making new friends, relearning everyday routines (like going to the doctor or arranging appointments), and the eventual but continual change that is really only recognized once you "move back" are all things that bring out insecurities, at least for me.  But at the end of the day, these aspects of moving abroad are more inconvenient than scary. I fear them because they push me out of my comfort zone, but I can work past them, either by learning or by asking others for help. By the end of my time in Germany I will feel comfortable enough with it all.

But there is another fear that always lurks in the back of my mind. It's usually an unwarranted fear (statistically speaking) and always very faded. For me, and probably for many others abroad, it's the sort of thing that you can't really deal with except for when it is too late. It's the fear of not being there, of the physical separation that makes you useless in times of a crisis, when you are needed most immediately.

The best way I can think of it is through Donne's Meditation 17, with that "no man is an island" line. When we leave a place, we don't just remove ourselves- we also leave others behind. We implicitly assume that everyone else will be able to take care of themselves and live their lives without us. And that's a good and necessary assumption to make; we hope that our time spent with others has been a good influence and has helped everyone become more successful.  But the assumption is always false. There is always going to be some hypothetical scenario where a family member or a friend needs you, and if that happens, there's this undeniable guilt that you chose not to help. "Choose" might be a strong word, since you've only chosen to pursue an opportunity somewhere else and have probably not made that decision under the thinking that you can avoid all the people from back home, but the guilt will make it feel like the latter was an active choice.

I was lucky enough to avoid one of these scenarios over the winter break. After Christmas, my family had to put our dog down after a totally unexpected change in his health.  I know everyone has their own way with animals, and so this might seem overly sentimental to some, but Tycho had helped the family through some very tumultuous years- we had gotten him when we first moved to North Carolina, when things were fresh and scary and we weren't sure how everything was going to hold up, and he quickly became a member of our family. Those last few days of my break were terrible and filled with a lot of sadness, but I knew even that as it was happening that I was glad I could be there for my family. We were all able to come together and (hopefully) lighten the load a little bit, and for that I was (and am) truly grateful.

This week did not work out so well. On Friday I learned that one of my best friends in NC had passed away. It was one of those experiences that you seen on TV but never fully believe- I was so shocked that for a few moments I couldn't cry. I could barely even breath. But that passed and soon I became a bawling, morphine-addled mess, curled up in the hallway of the hospital to give my "roommate" some peace, frantically trying to skype anyone else from back home. It felt like my worst nightmare. I wanted nothing to do but to go home, but there was absolutely no way for that to happen. Even if money and airplane tickets wouldn't have been issues, my hospital stay would have still kept me here. So here I am, in my hospital bed, doing nothing, helping no one, separated and useless.

This is the first, but it most surely won't be the last.

I have made so many new connections while living abroad, but how many of those will I fail in exactly the same way? It makes this whole undertaking seem selfish. I am travelling and seeing the world because I want to, and if I keep doing this I am a more useless friend than anyone who stays put. There is no loyalty in this lifestyle; in it, everything is transient, half-baked, friendships are coincidences of location rather than life-long connections. It ignores the importance of the life of every single person around me, or makes it so that this importance only applies to the time period we're together.  And for what? Stamps on a passport? Photos of exotic locations to show off over social media? Those don't matter. Being worldly means absolutely nothing in times like this.

Waxing Romantic about Michigan

There are a lot of times, while living abroad, where I have just felt super American. Most of them revolve around the patriotic holidays we have- 4th of July and Thanksgiving are two that stick out. But there is never a time where I feel a stronger tug to Michigan than Fat Tuesday, which is weird because, on the surface, this day seems to have nothing to do with the Great Lakes or cars. It has everything to do with pązcki, which my family actually hates (or claimed to hate whenever we were at the bakery) but I adore.

Pązcki, for those of us who are neither Polish nor come from Detroit/Chicago, are donuts filled with some sort of fruit compote (typically plum) and covered in powdered sugar. They sound like typical jelly donuts, but these things are huge and come in at about 400-500 calories. They are a big deal up North, and everyone goes crazy for them for Fat Tuesday. Since moving from Michigan, it has been a struggle trying to find these things. In North Carolina, I made my own (there was a lot of lard involved, the kitchen stank for 2 days after). A&M had them, but you'd never know it if you asked around, considering everyone called them pack-zees (it's actually poon-chski, but you can't blame people for assuming that pronunciation should make sense). And here in Germany, they have Berliner/Pfannkuchen, but they're smaller and healthier and those are two qualities I never look for on that day. I do my best, but without fail, these pastries make me start to miss Michigan with its terrible highways and skiing and Vernors and accent a lá Great White North (minus the "eh", more to come on that later).

So, in this year's missing Michigan phase, I tried making pastys. These can be seen as either poor white-people empanadas or more northern Cornish pies. I found a recipe that didn't call them "hand pies" (come on, hipsters), and did my best. But in trying my hand at the crust, I couldn't find anything even close to Crisco and had to use these strange refrigerated blocks of coconut oil. They ended up cooking properly, but definitely didn't taste like what I was hoping. But this is a problem with living abroad. Regardless of how well you adjust, sometimes there are just days where you want some comfort food, and the whole ordeal of converting ingredients and measures and Fahrenheit to Celsius makes obtaining said comfort food a struggle. It's difficult to find metric recipes that are both authentic and within the limits of what you can buy at the supermarket. You can always order stuff online, but that is so expensive and probably also unnecessary. There's got to be another way, and so for the next year I plan on finding out what that is! I have a list of (easily) 50 foods that are either difficult/impossible to find or germanized (or maybe just not americanized) at the supermarkets. It ranges from tortillas and chocolate chip cookies to jambalaya and corndogs. I figure, with a year remaining, I can get through these at about one a week and see how the conversion goes. It'll be a fun project :D Expensive, sure, but definitely fun.

In other, accent-related news, I have come to the realization that living in Germany has caused my accent to go deeper South. What?!? I don't understand it, especially since I lived in Texas for, what, 30 months total. It's an impostor accent! North Carolina doesn't even count because of all the people migrating from the Rust Belt. But maybe, since I'm talking to fewer and fewer native speakers, it's just become unhinged. It's the weirdest thing, seeing how your language changes as you move around. There are still some words that I have kept from Adelaide, and I sometimes still revert to that (according to my sister, annoying) inflection that makes questions sound not like questions. And I'm sure my pronunciation of German things, while not German, is not as American as it would be if I had never moved. It's a slow change, but when it hits you, it hits hard. So, if you are American, please skype me. Please. I need to get this pronunciation settled down.