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...