[I want love to walk right up and bite me]
I am, at this moment, consumed by a sustained happiness that I don't actually know what to do with. That I have no range of experience to compare to. That I know, in an embarrassed, confused way, is absolutely nothing special; that represents a happiness that thousands and thousands of people have felt before me, and that means little to anyone to whom I attempt to explain it; but that I want to shout from rooftops nonetheless, that I want to hug into everyone with whom I come into contact, that I want to put in boxes and ship home across the ocean.
Strangely relevant to this feeling: I've not had a semester more devoid of pure academia since I started college. "Your classes are pass/fail," they told me when I left; "German courses are hard, so the university will let you off easy. Take a lot of introductory courses. Take a lot of lecture courses, not writing courses. Don't take too much."
I thought, leaving, that it was intended to be a way to keep us, the wide-eyed transients, from diving in over our heads. Getting here, I realized that I was wrong - that they wanted us in over our heads, that they wanted us overwhelmed and starry-eyed and bone-tired at the end of it all, but that academia was not intended to have much at all to do with it. You can joyfully drown in academia in any country, I've found - I've spent my last three or so years doing that, after all, and the four years before that wetting my toes and taking my breath for the spring. No, they want us here as long as possible, and they want to strip us of the familiarity of academia as much as possible. "Do a year," they urged us, "Plan for a year if you possibly can," because half a year is not enough to lose yourself in this place - it's not enough to drown, and drowning is what they want from us.
It is good and important to study linguistics here, as my schedule won't let me do back home. It is good and important to learn to speak for twenty minutes at a time about postcolonialism in the language I am only now really learning to fit my tongue around with any semblance of command. It is good and important to bury myself in the library and translate medieval poetry, word by frustrated word. But-- it's also good to miss class once, because I am trying to sleep on a crowded bus to Munich with twenty Spanish exchange students holding an impromptu dance-off in the aisles. It is important to climb to the top of the Externsteine on a Sunday and take pictures in front of the ancient pagan altar at the top, six people from five countries with big smiles and arms around each other's shoulders, and then to look both ways and abandon the trail and climb the rocks in the woods where fences were supposed to prevent us going. It is good and important to sit around a tiny kitchen table (or on a train, or on top of a mountain, or in the middle of the Black Forest) and toast each other again and again (and always make eye contact, and never cross arms across the table, and always pour for someone else, and all the other rules that we follow with ridiculous, tipsy solemnity).
See--? It's-- it's all so normal, so ridiculously stereotypical - I have great stories, but I don't flatter myself that they are different from any other story any other exchange student has ever had. They have a word for it here, even, for the specific, frenetic, ecstatic year that a student spends abroad - they call it "Erasmus life," after the most popular exchange and scholarship program Europe has, and it is so well-known a thing to anyone who has experienced that there are movies about it. It was almost funny - all the European exchange students seemed to know what to expect better than any of us Americans did, and we were all pulled along by our hands for the first few weeks until we found our feet and learned to run beside them instead of after them. ("Let's go to Hamburg!" my Spanish friend said, two days into our acquaintance - "I've found carpools for the whole distance, and we might even have a place to sleep!" "....Can we do that?" I asked, but before I had time to wait for an answer I was alone with a near-stranger in Hamburg, standing in the harbor and blinking in the sunlight and trying to deal with the fact that no one in the country was going to stop me going anywhere I wanted to.)
It is strange to be surrounded by people as stuck in transience as I am, and kind of wonderful - to meet a guy from Idaho who spent last year in France, and wants to turn his semester in Germany into a year, and a girl from Korea who's lived five years in New York and is considering just fucking off to London at the end of the year and seeing what happens, and a guy from Britain who showed up with ten words of German and an English teacher's certificate and isn't leaving until he's fluent. We cobble our friendships together quickly and hope they hold, like toothpick bridges, because we are all used to having to build precious things hastily and pray that some of them find permanence. We turn our cultures into anchors, and use them to define ourselves in ways we never would at home - we find ourselves looking at the things we do and eat and buy and sing and say and using them to tie us to the places we'd never had a reason to miss before.
It is not sustainable. It is not permanent, and maybe it is better for being that way. But it's... it's really, really beautiful, and I think maybe I like it so much because thus far it hasn't really been about me. It's-- it's that academia, my usual taskmaster, is always about me - about my work, about my schedule, about my grades, about my future, about what I read and understand and think and write. This year, I am not the main player in my own life. I got on the plane, and Germany is doing the rest. I feel tiny and insignificant and lost, I feel unpinned in space, I feel like I am on a moving train when I lay down and close my eyes at night, and I talk less in large groups of people because this is not about me, it is about what is happening around me; and this year, observing that is enough.
"You are young and irresponsible and kind of stupid, and your personal universe is painfully small," says the nebulous idea that is Germany, "and it is high time you spent a long time in a foreign country realizing that. ...But here are some really glorious mountains to look at while you make the realization. Cheers."
Strangely relevant to this feeling: I've not had a semester more devoid of pure academia since I started college. "Your classes are pass/fail," they told me when I left; "German courses are hard, so the university will let you off easy. Take a lot of introductory courses. Take a lot of lecture courses, not writing courses. Don't take too much."
I thought, leaving, that it was intended to be a way to keep us, the wide-eyed transients, from diving in over our heads. Getting here, I realized that I was wrong - that they wanted us in over our heads, that they wanted us overwhelmed and starry-eyed and bone-tired at the end of it all, but that academia was not intended to have much at all to do with it. You can joyfully drown in academia in any country, I've found - I've spent my last three or so years doing that, after all, and the four years before that wetting my toes and taking my breath for the spring. No, they want us here as long as possible, and they want to strip us of the familiarity of academia as much as possible. "Do a year," they urged us, "Plan for a year if you possibly can," because half a year is not enough to lose yourself in this place - it's not enough to drown, and drowning is what they want from us.
It is good and important to study linguistics here, as my schedule won't let me do back home. It is good and important to learn to speak for twenty minutes at a time about postcolonialism in the language I am only now really learning to fit my tongue around with any semblance of command. It is good and important to bury myself in the library and translate medieval poetry, word by frustrated word. But-- it's also good to miss class once, because I am trying to sleep on a crowded bus to Munich with twenty Spanish exchange students holding an impromptu dance-off in the aisles. It is important to climb to the top of the Externsteine on a Sunday and take pictures in front of the ancient pagan altar at the top, six people from five countries with big smiles and arms around each other's shoulders, and then to look both ways and abandon the trail and climb the rocks in the woods where fences were supposed to prevent us going. It is good and important to sit around a tiny kitchen table (or on a train, or on top of a mountain, or in the middle of the Black Forest) and toast each other again and again (and always make eye contact, and never cross arms across the table, and always pour for someone else, and all the other rules that we follow with ridiculous, tipsy solemnity).
See--? It's-- it's all so normal, so ridiculously stereotypical - I have great stories, but I don't flatter myself that they are different from any other story any other exchange student has ever had. They have a word for it here, even, for the specific, frenetic, ecstatic year that a student spends abroad - they call it "Erasmus life," after the most popular exchange and scholarship program Europe has, and it is so well-known a thing to anyone who has experienced that there are movies about it. It was almost funny - all the European exchange students seemed to know what to expect better than any of us Americans did, and we were all pulled along by our hands for the first few weeks until we found our feet and learned to run beside them instead of after them. ("Let's go to Hamburg!" my Spanish friend said, two days into our acquaintance - "I've found carpools for the whole distance, and we might even have a place to sleep!" "....Can we do that?" I asked, but before I had time to wait for an answer I was alone with a near-stranger in Hamburg, standing in the harbor and blinking in the sunlight and trying to deal with the fact that no one in the country was going to stop me going anywhere I wanted to.)
It is strange to be surrounded by people as stuck in transience as I am, and kind of wonderful - to meet a guy from Idaho who spent last year in France, and wants to turn his semester in Germany into a year, and a girl from Korea who's lived five years in New York and is considering just fucking off to London at the end of the year and seeing what happens, and a guy from Britain who showed up with ten words of German and an English teacher's certificate and isn't leaving until he's fluent. We cobble our friendships together quickly and hope they hold, like toothpick bridges, because we are all used to having to build precious things hastily and pray that some of them find permanence. We turn our cultures into anchors, and use them to define ourselves in ways we never would at home - we find ourselves looking at the things we do and eat and buy and sing and say and using them to tie us to the places we'd never had a reason to miss before.
It is not sustainable. It is not permanent, and maybe it is better for being that way. But it's... it's really, really beautiful, and I think maybe I like it so much because thus far it hasn't really been about me. It's-- it's that academia, my usual taskmaster, is always about me - about my work, about my schedule, about my grades, about my future, about what I read and understand and think and write. This year, I am not the main player in my own life. I got on the plane, and Germany is doing the rest. I feel tiny and insignificant and lost, I feel unpinned in space, I feel like I am on a moving train when I lay down and close my eyes at night, and I talk less in large groups of people because this is not about me, it is about what is happening around me; and this year, observing that is enough.
"You are young and irresponsible and kind of stupid, and your personal universe is painfully small," says the nebulous idea that is Germany, "and it is high time you spent a long time in a foreign country realizing that. ...But here are some really glorious mountains to look at while you make the realization. Cheers."