Still coming here, eh?

I don't know why. I mean, it's flattering and all, but this blog is now officially defunct. And, honestly, I can understand why you don't go to the blog advertised over there to the right -- it's defunct, too. And, as my attempt to be more discreet/public-facing/corporatist, it was, frankly, dreadfully boring. (I don't do discreet/public-facing/corporatist.)

But, psst. There may be a less discreet/public facing/much more honest successor blog out there. And, perhaps, it's by invitation-only. If you don't email me, you'll never know.

T minus two

And two minus T.

Which is, as it happens, wo.

As in, Wo bin ich, kuerzlich?

(Sorry; it's late.)

The T in question is The Big German Test, which is the one I have to pass before they let me leave. And while you'd think I'd be writing about that on The Other Blog, the truth is that I've just been so pushed and pulled and turned around that I've fallen behind on both. Though there is different content up there at the moment, which, curiously, has nothing to do with German.

The truth is, it's not looking so hot for the test at the moment, which brings us back to wo. ("Wo-ti-la-fa...")
As in, wo to me.

Oy.

On not quite getting the point

When I was reading the news last night, I came across this tidbit: That OBL used one of the women who was there in the compound with him as a shield, hiding behind her during the shootout, which resulted in her death. And I was utterly unsurprised. When a culture (country...religion...however you want to slice it) sees women as less than human, why would you give any more thought to taking shelter behind one as you would to hiding behind a cow?

And then I read this quote in Andrew Sullivan today:

"I don't know very much about Muslim cultures, but it's hard to imagine there's any culture in which hiding behind your wife, or any woman, rather than fighting for yourself is not considered about as shameful and cowardly as it gets."

Which I just can't help automatically reading as:

"Dude. You hid behind a cow."

Sigh.

It was a nice speech...

...and I know I should be registering this as good news, but I just feel sick to my stomach with anxiety. Was a heaving mass of bile within minutes of the news, actually.

Which embassy will it be?

And what do you do with a public that seems to think that this somehow translates into "mission accomplished"?

Erschöpft (knackered)

[Ed. note: What's up with the German title? Um, yeah, that would be an emerging convention on that other blog, and a little hint about the original provenance of this post. Just sayin'.]

Today I had a "Zwischenprüfung," an interim progress test. Did I really once fret that I might accidentally pass one of these !#$% things? Ha-ha, that's so cute.

This was not a good day for me to be taking this test. Just as I was settling in around midnight last night, preparing to stare down my usual bout of insomnia, I was driven out of bed by a pair of F-16s, and by the time I ascertained that we were not under attack (have I mentioned my past experience of having gone through two separate incidents -- different cities and continents -- of terrorist bombings?) and the adrenaline started to subside, I was pretty much up. Though I had managed to fall asleep by the time the cannons started firing at 6 am...

The German department has not been going so well for me lately. The place is as seething with interpersonal politics as a small Midwestern college, and I fear I've become accidentally embroiled in them (how very German of me). The problem, as it often is, is that I've only become half-assedly embroiled, so that I know I now have enemy cliques and ally cliques, but I don't really know which instructors belong to which cliques. (Until I then figure it out, three weeks into a rotation, when the instructor's admittedly quite impressive professionalism cracks and a venomous barb slips out.)

I am, incidentally, a little dismayed by the mutually polarized atmosphere I'm encountering. There are some amazing teachers there, and a few with whom I feel like I'm becoming friends, and with whom I'll stay in touch. There are others who pretend they don't see me when we pass in the hallways. And I'm getting the impression that this is going to be the new normal, come August and Deutschland, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. This has become the new central question for K and me as we admit our total ignorance about what the Germans of today are like: are they more Instructor X, or Instructor Y? Three years is a long time, and there's a lot riding on that answer.

My testing team this afternoon, by the way, consisted of one from column X and one from column Y. While it's always useful to do a dry run of the actual two-hour test -- especially since my "U-shaped performance curve" (a little pressure is said to enhance people's performance; too much harms it) generally looks more like a backslash -- I can't say that I got a lot of useful feedback. My errors, while many, are, I learned, unsystematic. And while it seems that normal students make a salad of German and English morphemes, I did none of that: I instead exhibited "German/German interference." Which, apparently, makes my mistakes much funnier. Rather than babble non-words, I confuse similar (in my mind, anyway) German words that have unrelated meanings; the Mrs. Malaprop of Mecklenburg. These instances were recited back to me in their catalogued entirety, with much giggling glee.

I now have about six weeks left before the actual test. "Will I make it?" I asked Instructor X. "I'm not worried," s/he replied. Which, I realized later, doesn't quite answer my question...

For my 401(k), I'm thinking "Wheel"

An Ed. note before we proceed: Damn you, readers. No, seriously. My intention was to transition to this cheerier, unencumbered sort of blog, Uberzwerg. And, going by my stat meters, y'all simply aren't having any of it. I mean, I know my track record with starting, and then abandoning, new blogs isn't encouraging. And I know that the 'Zwerg hasn't...er...found its voice...yet. And that, frankly, it's ugly (still tweaking that, honest). But you know what? It plays nicely with photo uploads. And when (if?) I finally make it to Germany, that's going to be important, and it really (probably) will become my primary blog, maybe. But. In the meantime, against my better judgment, I'm going to try double-posting some content to both blogs. That doesn't mean there won't still be some stuff that only makes it on here, and some (photos!) that only makes it on there, just so you know. /End rant.

Ok. For this story, you need to know that K enjoys watching Jeopardy. (I know, I know: exclamation point. I labored over the grammatical vs. pragmatic implications...shorthanding it: not gonna happen here.) Me, I can sort of take it or leave it, but, sure: if it's on, I'll play along. But I'm just as likely to wander upstairs for a snack. Every once in a while, apparently, Jeopardy holds on-line pre-auditions, which I only know about because K was terribly excited about it and signed up for it and I stood over his shoulder and contributed the occasional assist from the general territory of the green Trivial Pursuit wedges, which is my absolute dominion in this coupledom. The next night, reviewing the website for information on when results were going to come out -- only a random subset of those who successfully pass the test are chosen for the next stage -- K noted that the test was being offered again that night and asked if I wanted to take it, too.

Sure...what the hey, right? We signed up about two minutes before the cutoff, and I took it and forgot about it.

This was...what, a couple of months ago?...so I was pretty startled, to say the least, when I got an email from the Jeopardy folks yesterday informing me that my in-person audition date would be May 22nd.

K got no such email. From the standpoint of our finances as a pair, this is not good news. I do ok on answers overall, but my knowledge base in several key Jeopardy areas (presidents, U.S. history, post-1990 music) is seriously impoverished. And I wasn't aware, until this afternoon, that there even was such a thing as a "wagering strategy," to say nothing of the number of sites devoted to arguing over it. Plus, when I'm stressed or under pressure, my autonomic nervous system pretty reliably pulls back blood from my fingers, toes, and the part of my brain that deals with numbers.

From the standpoint of my general social anxiety, this is truly terrible news. I mean, I've done TV before, and I'm not even that bad at it, apart from the phenotypic factors outside of my control. I usually get through it by pretending to be someone else. However, I've never had to do that while seriously drawing upon my own brainpower (I'm usually channeling the talking points of someone else, too), and I don't know whether it's possible. Plus, for the Jeopardy answers I get wrong, I tend to get them catastrophically wrong. Which makes me fret that they'll pass me in the audition for the entertainment value alone.

However. Since I'm up for promotion this year, and my chances of that happening just went from slim to none, this little lark has now become my best shot at keeping up with my property taxes, which Congress neglected to freeze. Sad, what?

The champagne bottle boson

It's awfully difficult to write a popular article about physics, isn't it?

That isn't (much) snark. I'm serious. As a former (and wistful wannabe-again) science writer, I've always felt that biology always has, by its nature, something concrete into which one can sink one's expository grappling hooks. With chemistry, one can always talk about applications. And then there's physics.

Which is probably why I love it. And want to take a sec to give a shout-out to Brian Greene's latest -- it's terrific.

I'm not, mind you, claiming I understand this stuff. Some of what I love is the language used to approach the very, very abstract -- the neologisms, the unavoidable weirdness -- as well as the sense of primacy of the field's questions. The shivers I get from reading about string theory are the only way I can relate to the sense of mystery others report from the sight of liturgical vestments. Good science writing -- Greene's is; this NYT article unfortunately isn't -- wields metaphor like an endoscopic camera, offering us mediated access as our only hope of exploring the subject, but giving us strange and wonderful images in compensation.

I'm frustrated by the linked article, because it's a poor camera at a news event that's evidently very newsworthy indeed. We're told these data would point to a "new and unexpected version" of the Higgs boson. Really? And does that mean just that the writer understands that these data contradict the Standard Model Higgs, or, with hundreds of extant predictions about the nature of the Higgs out there, does this mean that this possible finding contravenes...all? some?...of them? We need a little more information here, Dennis.

Seriously, the article is practically pre-Onionized, giving well-worn context ("We had to let the whole world know about this!" / "It's probably just a statistical artifact"), without ever really giving us a good idea of what "it" is. Which is likely why the Times buried it in the Science section and didn't give the story the due that it (...I think?) deserves.

Anyway, I'm sure we'll be hearing more on this story in the coming months -- and you saw it flagged here first.

For what it's worth

I'm going with a yes on the shutdown -- at this point, I think, there's no way logistically for an agreement to wend its way through the process before Friday -- but it'll essentially just be a delay for procedure to catch up with what sounds like an almost-worked out framework. So...maybe two days? Three?

If it sounds like a tepid prediction, I'll note that I am going out on something of a limb to predict there won't be another CR. Which is less prognostication and more my complete unwillingness to imagine that we might bargain away reproductive rights in DC for the sake of a few mil in lost wages.

No, I didn't defriend you

It's true: I committed Facebookicide. But it really wasn't anything you did or said. (Even you, Kim.) It also -- I swear -- is less about social withdrawal than it is -- I hope -- about engagement.

Here's what happened: German abruptly took a turn for the way more intense and unpleasant with the in-rotation of a real harridan of a teacher (and that character description is why this post appears on this blog and not my shiny new one -- the description is apt enough to overcome my distaste for gendered put-downs, and needs to be said). The resulting stress, plus a couple of other major life issues swirling around, caused the tectonic plates of the relationship to shift, and I sort of realized...hey, we're in for a rough ride for the next six months or so, and do I really want to document every little bump on Facebook? Because if it's there, I will.

Ok. So that part is about withdrawal, sort of, though I prefer the term "strategic disengagement."  But I also couldn't avoid the conclusion -- I tried -- that I was using the crutch of virtual friendships to avoid maintaining real ones. Not good. Then, too, the insta-expression of the Facebook feed was all the release valve I needed to avoid writing in either blog, and isn't pretty much any blog post, no matter how trivial or poorly-written, a better communication vehicle and a better practice of writerly discipline than "Esquiver is insanely happy that she hit a high A in choir tonight"? (I am, incidentally, happy beyond all proportion over that A, which was clear and pure and piercing and hardly seemed to come from me at all.)

Yadda yadda. Does this signal a (re-re-re-re-)renewed commitment to blogging? Oh Grasshopper, have we learned nothing about the futility of asking such questions?

Also, about that dwarf...

That's really why you came back to this site, isn't it?

For those of you on the Facebook feed: yes, there's a new blog in town.

Yes, again.

I'd like to think this one is a little better thought-through than the ill-fated Esquivalience II, or the domain names I've bought and tinkered with and forgotten what they are.

Here's the thing: we're on the cusp of being able to go in the travel blog direction again. (Yippee!) And I thought: why wait? There's plenty to write about in terms of preparation. (Which, ok, on second thought: six months of musing on the German language? Maybe shoulda waited another three to launch.) But I didn't want to haul around the unwieldy baggage of this blog, and, too, I really wanted to post pictures (this blog is such a collection of CSS kludges that it really can't support photos. Also, it'd do violence to the aesthetic.)

I'm being a little less cautious with the new blog (like, launching on Facebook) because it's my guess that I'll probably be writing about Germany in a different way than I've written about India (and if I can't, god help us) and there'll maybe be less conflict between my professional and personal life. And because even I just snorted in laughter typing that sentence, I'm not killing off this blog, which will continue to lurk in the shadows as the evil twin.

Yes, two blogs. Where I haven't even been able to keep current with one.

You trying to make a point, or something?

And, oh, right: it's here. Come for the lay linguistics; come back in three to six months for the culture shock.