Trivial Pursuits

People who know me would rate me as a low-maintenance sort of person.

I own a lipstick (and use it occasionally), but my other make-up has all gone so far out of date as to be unusable (in fact, I discarded the majority of it a few declutters ago). I still have perfume from the 80's (truly, I still have perfume that my grandmother left me, but I only smell it every now and then).

I have been complimented on my earrings, to receive a look of shock when I happily point out the little Mickey Mouses (hypo-allergenic from Disneyworld) and often grab my daughters' medical plastic earrings. I have had my hair cut three times in the 4.5 years we have lived in Germany and had not had a manicure in the last five (my feeling- why bother when my hands are always washing something and the nails crack from use?). However, after I had a manicure in Florida, using the new, UV-cured nail polish, I liked having a manicure that didn't crack in the first day so much, that I found a place here in Berlin that did the same thing (although with a far smaller selection of colors. This was the most interesting that I could find and this manicure lasted 40 days: with it, I achieved the longest nails I have ever had. And I think that I will continue to do it: when amortized over 4 weeks, it's actually quite reasonable. And I have been enjoying having normal length nails.

What do I do during the day?

Someone I consider a friend asked me this week, "what do you do during the day?". (and boy do I wish I looked that young and had a kitchen like that- although not in yellow.)

I looked at her, as she sat at my computer, finishing up work that she had not done (due to a computer problem) nor found a different way (than coming to my place on her schedule) to do and mentioned that I generally go to class during the day and that I was sitting there, available to her, because I have two weeks of vacation.

She had wondered why I couldn't join her on a walk starting in a different section of Berlin the following day, at 9 am: I pointed out that, after getting up at 6:15 , getting myself and the kids and their schoolwork and boxes read, driving them to school and returning, that I get home at between 8:40 and 9, on a good day, without traffic, and therefore couldn't be in a different section of Berlin ready to start walking at 9 am. Something that I thought she might know considering that I don't call her before 10 am because she is generally asleep.

This is a friend, and someone that I respect and I wonder: if she wonders what I do during the day, does she wonder what she does during the day?

I start at 6:15 am, as above. At 9 am I am in German class. At 1 pm I am generally home. At 3 pm I need to leave to get the children. After school we have tennis, art school, math nach-hilfe, swimming and going to playgrounds. Then I need to have a meal on the table, follow up on homework, read books, bathe children, set clothes and rucksacks out for the next day, put the kids to bed.

In the interstices I:

• wash clothes and bedding for 4 (including sports classes and swim classes),
• shop for 4 and cook for 3 (with the German here 3 nights a week being 4),
  
• bake for the children and their classes,
  
• make occasional visits to the drugstore/Apotheke for all the items not at a German store,
• tidy our apartment (daily, with two kids),
  
• go through clothes and switch them out/buy more if needed,
  
• visit doctors (which generally requires missing class),
• take care of our (pia) tenants in NY and the other (non-pia) rental in upstate (this week leakage in both houses due to Irene, luckily nothing worse),
• manage the children's drs' appointments (5 in these three weeks, two being emergency orthodontist appointments)
• try to deal with as much insurance interaction as I can, especially as we are in the process of switching over to German insurance and need to handle "the long tail", or deciding what we want to retain from the American side. On average, every doctor's visit here has required at least one interaction with the American insurance company beyond submitting a claim. Some have required multiple calls and submissions. The best thing we ever did was get an unlimited calling plan to the US, or we would lose money on our claims!
• work on our taxes, consider legal action against a former tenant, think about doing German HW?

Whereas my friend, and many expat trailing spouses I know, have only to consider how to pencil in their social activities. They don't need to clean, because they are, perhaps, two adults in one apartment. That doesn't create a lot of mess.

In this case, my friend's husband has been traveling: she is alone, with no mess or responsibilities for weeks at a time. Does she mean to imply that I use my time poorly or frivolously? Does she believe that this two week period, when the kids are in school and when I am not yet in class, is too long a period not to require a scheduled activity? Most of the expat spouses I know (including this one) take a 4-8 week vacation over the summer with relatives in their home countries.

In this two week period, I took 5 days of cooking courses, had a birthday, went to the doctor, had an MRI, cared for my children alone for half of each week, spoke to teachers, went through a season's worth of clothes for three people, went shopping, cooked meals and cakes, edited a newsletter, wrote an apa, did all the ordinary things I always do— but had an extra 4 hours a day when I was not in class. I really enjoyed it: sitting on the ground, watching my way through Bones, working through paperwork and organizing the kids' last two years of paperwork, filling out applications for things and setting up vereins and classes. My apartment is a lot tidier than it is when I am in class.

But I wonder: does no one respect the work that the stay at home parent does? Speaking for myself, it's a lot more mind-numbing and harder than when I worked 10 hours a day out of the home and got both respect and a fat paycheck for it. I expect those who go out to work to, perhaps, not respect being a stay at home mom, but when those who don't work out of the home also disrespect the homemaker and parent, it's pretty depressing. And if my husband had to replace my work, it would cost him a pretty penny.
(edit: and now I am defiantly off to bake a Molasses Spice cake- what a frivolous use of my time- perhaps I should instead be doing something more meaningful?)

Blog Scraping

I'm really an idle blogger: I don't expect to make money from my blog (nor do I want to), I'm not running it as a business, and I don't really do anything at all to publicize it. I started my blog as a way of maintaining both a running diary, accessible by friends at home, as a storage place for pictures and information for myself, and as a way to meet and chat with folks with common interests as a new expat in Germany. I had gotten good advice and learned things of interest while wandering through other people's blogs, so I chose not to make my blog private.

I've maintained an interest, for the most part, in the blog, with ups and downs dependent on my outside interests and activities (and those of my family) and since I set it up, haven't changed it very much, after a quick flirtation with Wordpress which still lives out there, just in case.

One of the widgits I installed was Feedjit, which allows me to see some information about who visits my blog. Not very much, because I use the free version: I don't market so I don't need to granularize the information.

But I do look at the information, because I find it interesting to see who comes by (and in the case of friends, I may recognize their city) and what key words or searches are used to get to me.

So I was really surprised to see someone coming to me through a blog called ExpatAngels. When I went to look at it, I discovered that a post from by blog had been scraped and was sitting there in all its glory (joke). At least my name and link had been left,but I was confused: no one had ever asked my permission to use my post, notified me of the use, nor did I remember joining the site, which might have given them permission to use my words.

So I shot them off an e-mail to ask them why my post was sitting there. I never got a response, but what I did get was quite quick removal , as you can see on the left.

That made me curious, so I did a quick and non-tech search and was able to discover that blog-scraping seems to be quite common, if even my tiny and quite unread blog can be scraped numerous times: here's another one, with my post still sitting on it. Once again, it's linked, so I think I'll leave it here. But I'm just amazed that people do this: it's stealing words and photos, isn't it? And using it for commercial purposes, as these blogs seem to be money-making (or attempting to be so) entities.

For those of you with a stronger interest, or who want to make money on their blog: I wonder how many of our posts are sitting on someone else's sites, with or without attribution?

Raising "multi-cultural" children

Over at American Expat in Deutschland, Christina raised some thought provoking questions about what it means to raise one's children as an expat, or in a multi-cultural environment:

If you were raised in a multicultural environment:

1. Describe, briefly, your upbringing.-- When I grew up, there was no such thing as a "multi-cultural environment". What there was, was life. My dad was a Shoah survivor, my mom was the child of refugees from the Russian empire and its pogroms. I was raised as an American, but always knowing that America was a melting pot.
   
2. What do you think your parents did well?--- They created a life out of nothing, they showed me how it is possible to be rootless and to succeed, they gave me a solid foundation of love to use as a ground. The ensured that my siblings and I knew, to our very deepest souls, that we were American and that we were Jewish and that there were no contradictions at all between those two. My father, especially, coming from a world where there was no equity or justice, raised us to believe in a morality and equity that he was not raised with.
   
3. What do you think your parents could have done better?--- I regret every day that I grew up with parents who spoke, between them, 9 languages, yet I only learned English. I think they should have made more of an effort to ensure that I spoke at least yiddish, if not Hebrew or Russian or Czech, or any of the languages that would have allowed me to feel more deeply rooted in a past that had already been destroyed by external forces, and to connect to the still remaining far flung pieces of my family. But they lived in a time when this was not considered appropriate for Americans, especially when Eastern European languages were considered to be "lower class", and they did what they thought was best for their children.
4. What would you do differently given the same situation?--- How can I say what I would have done? Living at that time and from their backgrounds, I hope that I would have attempted to build a stronger social network, to root myself in neighborhood more. But here I am, in a foreign country where I am not a native speaker, and my roots are only in the topsoil. I am ensuring that my children are fluent in the language of both their parents, we have moved to ensure that they form a strong bond with a large part of their family, and they are solidly implanted in a school that will nurture their identity and allow them to feel more strongly their heritage.
   

If you are raising your children in a multicultural environment:

1. What parts of your culture do you most want passed on to your children, or are you happy raising them only in the dominant culture?---I think that I am not necessarily the average expat parent at whom these questions are aimed, because as a Jewish American I am an alien in every culture, including my home culture. Although we made a point of putting the children in a German school, they are in a German Jewish school, so they will never sing along with the "Drei Königen" songs, and probably not have any memories of St. Martin's Day Lanterns, Öster Häse, St. Nikolaus, or other German traditions that are Christian-based. The decision we made to not put them in the German-American school but rather in the German-Jewish was a difficult one and we will need to ensure that the kids have more exposure to America and the American way of thought as they grow older because we made that decision. We would not have raised them in "the dominant culture" in the US either, although as the American culture is not religiously based, they would have absorbed it in every interaction and experience.
   
2. What are you doing differently than parents in the dominant culture?--- I don't live within the dominant culture, so I'm not certain what those parents do. I see so many different ways to "handle" children, just by those Germans that I know. I'm comfortable saying that I seem to listen to my children more, allow them to make decisions on what I consider minor issues but which they consider important more, and am less didactic. But that could simply be a function of who my kids are and who I am. I do know that my children appear to be more open and friendly than German children in the "dominant culture", but that is also probably a function of our frequent moves and modeling: I'm pretty free and easy at chatting with strangers, compared to the general German.
   

It was interesting to think about these questions and it will be interesting to see if my thinking changes in the future. Thanks, Christina.

Integrated

I went to my local Volkshochschule (VHS) yesterday to sign up for a grammar course and another language course next month (I've been taking a little break and very much enjoying it).

Part of the reason that I have been taking my break is that I have been waiting to hear the results of my B1/DTfZ. If I didn't pass, I would repeat the B1.2 and take the test again. I hadn't received my scores yet, so I decided to take a quick one day course in grammar while waiting. (ed. That is, one day a week.)

When I went in to discuss what course to take (all placement in the VHS for German requires a personal discussion, other courses can be registered for on line) the head told me that the scores should be in and they were.

I passed the reading and listening section with 98%, speaking with 91% and I just scraped by in the writing. That was a shock, because I thought that my speaking score would be much lower. With the writing, I had known that I had done badly: the test required a "half official letter" and I had used elements from an "official letter" by accident: huge no-no.

I haven't received the results back yet from the Orienteeringskurse exam, but I'll guess that will be 100%, so I can officially consider myself (and the German government also considers me) to be integrated. I used only 400 of the 600 hours offered to me at a subsidized cost (by the government- German language courses cost 1/2 of what other language courses such as French or Italian or Arabic cost) and none of the possible additional 300 hours. It's unfortunate that I can't use any of these hours to continue my studies, because I think I'll need to progress through at least C1.2 and do additional work in writing to actually be considered moderately literate and capable of getting a job if I look for one here in Germany, but I am also extremely grateful that Germany has provided such an easy and low cost path for me and all other incomers to become more integrated, especially in language skills. It amazes me that people pay 5-6 times the cost of going to the VHS to take lessons at private schools when the teachers at the VHS may be the same teachers they have as well, or far exceed their skills. My teachers have all been wonderful.

I think it's a pity that the US doesn't follow this model: I do believe that one should not be allowed, in ordinary circumstances, to be a permanent resident or a citizen without the requisite language skills. I also believe that once that decision is made, the country with such a belief should provide a path for immigrants to actually gain those skills. Here in Germany, it's not (in my case) much of a subsidy (although it is for the poor or jobless) — it's that the classes are readily available, that childcare is available for those who require it (I did not), that full-time and part-time, morning, afternoon and evening classes are available and that the path to mastery is clearly indicated and achievement is determined through testing, with the availability of additional help as needed.

Germany talks the talk and it walks the walk and I think that is just great.

Discourse

I don't want to specifically discuss the horror of what happened in Arizona on the 8th. Already people are pretending that this should be a knee jerk of one side defending itself against (justified) charges that it has embraced polarizing discourse.

Instead, I want to think aloud about the state of public discourse.

A few days ago I posted some thoughts on the New Year and one of those thoughts was that I needed to remove certain people and attitudes from my atmosphere. I talked about how individuals, empowered through the internet, were increasingly using ad hominem attacks and how glad I was that the bullying could not become physical because I live in a civilized society.

I spoke too soon. Or the USA is not civilized. At least here in Germany the likelihood of someone attacking me with a gun is vanishingly small and my odds of surviving other physical attacks is much greater. The verbal attacks are, to a certain extent, forbidden by law. And those in the internet which I find intemperate or uncivil, I have removed from my view.

But the question is why individuals feel entitled to act in such a manner? So I'm going to look at three specific examples in the past year that have either silenced me or forced me to curtail my activity and active exchange of thought.

The first was earlier this year. Another expat blogger posted an ad campaign that she found amusing. It was a British campaign and I found it sexist and as such, a bit misogynistic. Some other commenters saw my point and some thought it was funny in spite of that and some did not see my issue.
That's not the point: what happened as the result of my comment was. Another blogger attacked me, took a post from my blog to say that I myself was sexist, posted it on his blog with commentary and without telling me or permission. Then another of his friends told me that I had no sense of humor, suggested that I needed to have sex more frequently to give me a sense of humor and used common misogynist language to belittle me. His wife told me that being told I "needed to get laid" was neither an insult to me nor to my husband (whom they had both met). She assured me that she had taken feminist studies and therefore knew that this language was not sexist or misogynist. I didn't point out to her at the time, but will now: I understand that we all tell ourselves stories to live with the unbearable. Telling a woman that she has no sense of humor about sexism and misogynism, that she needs to have sex enacted against her, that her ideas and opinions are formed by her hormone levels: this is indeed the heart of misogyny. Let me direct you to Feminism 101 and more specifically to this.

I removed these people from my blog reader.

The next issue that arose came in the context of the removal of Elizabeth Moon from the Guest of Honor position at Wiscon 35. Wiscon is a science fiction convention concentrating on issues of feminism. This is their statement of intention:

Wiscon is the world's leading feminist science fiction convention. WisCon encourages discussion and debate of ideas relating to feminism, gender, race and class.

Moon was "dis-invited" as the result of an interview that she gave wherein she stated that Muslims in the US have the same responsibilities as all Americans.

This is a small quote:

...I can easily imagine how Muslims would react to my excusing the Crusades on the basis of Islamic aggression from 600 to 1000 C.E....(for instance, excusing the building of a church on the site of a mosque in Cordoba after the Reconquista by reminding them of the mosque built on the site of an important early Christian church in Antioch.) So I don't give that lecture to the innocent Muslims I come in contact with. I would appreciate the same courtesy in return (and don't get it.) The same with other points of Islam that I find appalling (especially as a free woman) and totally against those basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they're demanding of me and others--how much more they're asking than giving. It would be helpful for them to show more understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship in a non-Muslim country. (And the same is true for many others, of course. Libertarians, survivalists, Tea-Partyers, fundamentalist Christians, anyone else whose goals benefit only their own group. There's been a huge decline in the understanding of good citizenship overall.)...

Leaving aside whether one disagrees with what Moon said, I see nothing against feminism here: in fact, it stands up for women against a religion which when followed as Islamists do, is misognistic. This ( from Reclusive Leftist) is a good discussion of that aspect.

However, I personally agree with what she said. I am a member of a religious minority and I want the country I live in to protect me from other religious groups. I am a woman and I want my country to protect me from groups and individuals that seek to curtail my freedom as a tenet of their religious faiths. I am afraid of Islamists and I have every right to be so, as I pass through gates guarded by policemen with machine guns on a daily basis and know that in India, people just like myself were sought out by Islamists, to be murdered, for no other reason than their religion or their visiting of a place associated with my religion.

When I said that, I was attacked personally for my beliefs. No one explained why my fear was wrong, but I was told that I was racist (it's tough to not have a word for fear of religious extremism or one for hatred of a specific religion or cult, I know– that's why Jew haters are called antisemites although they really only hate Jews). Someone who I had been corresponding with for years told me that she was "afraid of me".

Here we see the concept of the Big Lie. Here are some specific words of Hitler from Mein Kampf, where the phrase originally arose (and was used specifically against Jews) and was then used by Göbbels:

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Was my acquaintance afraid of me? No. We go to conventions together– does she feel in any danger from me? No. Does she feel that any of my actions will damage anyone's freedom or speak negatively against a single individual? No. But when I say that I am afraid, she says that she fears me. Now the emphasis seems to show that my saying that I am afraid (we won't discuss lack of action) has engendered a sense of danger in her.

That's the same type of lie where Sarah Palin says that when the world looks at her "attack map" with gun sights and says it helped to create an atmosphere of rancor and acceptance of violence, that: it's a blood libel. Does she even understand the Jew hating context of that phrase? This type of appropriation is often part of the big lie, as when the above blogger takes my fear for her own and dismissed mine in its entirety.

Lastly is the reason for my New Year's post, after which I determined to continue to rid my environment of people who think that attack is a replacement (or synonym) for debate or discussion. Another blogger had posted a list of posts that had the most viewers this year and one was a discussion of the way some parents fear allowing their children to go to school alone, in relation to commuting. I mentioned that the same morning I had heard, on the BBC, the statistic that 2000 children in the US go missing every day.

The same expat blogger from my first example told me I was wrong. Now, he didn't say the BBC was wrong, so the implication was that I lied. In a few seconds, I looked up and supplied the link from the interview where the pertinent information can be seen: "An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing each year – more than 2,000 children every day." This information is sourced from the FBI and the Department of Justice.

But the blogger told me that I was wrong, that statistics lie, that my unwarranted fears and these lies were responsible for the atmosphere of fear in which people live. He also said that the organization lied and made up a bunch of statistics to prove that the numbers were not possible.

Here we see misdirection: he was shown the source for what he called a lie, and now has no direct response (because he won't apologize). Another commenter posted that many of these missing children would have been taken by parents: absolutely. With a little Google-fu one can discover within moments (also from the FBI and DOJ) that many kidnappings are guardian or non-custodial parent(although that certainly does not make them less tragic to the child or parent/guardian, although one could at least hope that in those cases the children were not being harmed). This same magic of research comes up with 7000 children "permanently" disappearing a year: still quite a lot, but not 800,000. Not pertinent to my original comment of having heard an interview, but would have been useful if mentioned later by someone commenting.

I do look forward to seeing the FBI and the Department of Justice change their statistics in response to the blogger's off the cuff analysis.

I didn't respond, because responding to individuals who attack in this unreasoning way leads one to be attacked by them and their friends but as I understand (and do not know because I don't read this person's blog) he has discussed this at length on his blog and once again attached a link to mine: I see this because individuals I don't know are coming to my blog through his. That's what stats view allows. These individuals are attacking and I have moved to comments moderation as a result.

And that's what silencing is about. (Or as wikipedia calls it, suppression of dissent.)

What's been happening in the US is remendous stridency and usage of terms of violence and hunting terminology from the Right, but whenever anyone mentions this atmosphere, the right responds that the left does it as well.

Well, they really don't. But many normal individuals just can't deal with the violent rhetoric and in your face behavior of the new normalized wacky Right, and we give up.

Here's a look at the Insurrectionism Timeline put together by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (which one would have hoped was non-partisan, even if it isn't to the wackos).

That's sad and that's dangerous.

The Holiday Whirl: Will it never end? December 22-31

Sledding at Oma and Opa's House

After getting back from the UK (and counting our blessings that the weather did not interfere with our plans in any substantive way) we came back to a full schedule.

We got back Tuesday afternoon and sent the in-laws on their way with effusive thanks: we offered entertainment but they wanted to get back to prepare for the holidays (and every day my mother-in-law is not there is a day that someone needs to substitute for her on the organ and at the retirement home).

TMI following, feel free to skip: Then I got to fast. Wednesday morning was my (delayed) colonoscopy. After we extended he contract here in Germany, I realized that I needed to start actually considering my health, getting a three years too late annual exam, a full gyn, a mammogram (and ouch, they were extremely good at checking the margins!), a lung X-ray when my internist got tired of hearing me cough, and finally the colonoscopy. This is when I am grateful to be on extremely good Expat insurance (legal because we are here on secondment, otherwise not allowed to German residents). I think that with family history one can get checked for these things earlier than the German standard, but I'm not certain. What I do know is that my sister-in-law hasn't asked and she has an even stronger (worse) family history than I do: at her age I had been checked for 5 years. All was well with all the tests, the German prep for the colonoscopy was even worse than the American one, and I can wait four years until the next: Yeah.

Then more traveling:
Next came the last days of school and the drive to NRW. That's where we really ran into the weather issues that we had avoided traveling to the UK: 9 1/2 hours to travel a distance that usually takes us less than 4 1/2. The A2 was closed in the morning but then it reopened and we thought we could get through. Until it started raining heavily while -.5C and the Autobahn became a sheet of ice while all salt and grit washed away. We were actually very fortunate that the traffic came to a dead halt while we could see an exit and we wound up getting off, taking the kids to the (unbelievably packed) McDonalds we saw in the distance and checking the computer and with the in-laws to discover that there was a 26 km stau– we spoke to people who had stood on the highway unmoving for more than 10 hours. In our case, after consultation with our neighbors at the table to the right (they had a million maps!) and father-in-law, we wound up going south and detouring through Kassel before heading back north. It was much easier as we went south and it became colder with the precipitation being snow rather than rain. I was cursing that we hadn't chosen to take the train after hearing the forecasts, but we found out the next day that four ICE trains had been stuck on the tracks between Berlin and Hamburg due to cold and ice, so we were definitely better off in the car. We got there a bit before 2 am and carried the kids to bed.
Then we had a leisurely and domestic holiday. Some highlights:

This is an actual German Christmas tree. Those lights that you see are not cleverly designed electric lights, they are actual candles burning on an actual pine tree that is not sitting in a container of water (because they don't water trees here) in a room lined and roofed with wood and next to curtains.Amazing, isn't it? (Also, note no fire extinguisher or bucket of water in room). Keeps one on one's toes:).










This is my charmingly anonymous spouse and the girls. Note how warm they appear. The one without ski pants or waterproof gloves is the one taking the picture. The hill is the actual street outside my in-law's: the day after we arrived it became usable only if one entered above and exited below, Those who tried it the other way made loud revving noises until the German and the F-I-L dug them out. They seemed to enjoy it and we spent some time every day sledding here and on other hills in the area. We weren't as venturesome as my sister-in-law, whose husband dragged the kids on sleds up a steep hill in a neighboring town, then rode back down with them.

We met up for lunch with our former au pair in the US (I can't believe that she's about to start her internship in medical school) and had a nice chat: I wish we lived closer by and I hope she has the time to visit us after exams. All around a pleasant and domestic time, which included all members of the family playing instruments and singing carols as well as enjoying (adults only) the traditional Feuerzangenbowle. I actually like this, which is surprising because I generally hate Glühwein– perhaps because what I am served at Weihnachtsmarkts is more usually Glögg?

It was a relaxing and pleasant wind-up to a frenetic holiday season and the trip back took only four hours:).

What I've been doing for the last month: Unbefristete Aufenthaltsgenehmigung

One of the issues I have been pondering since I moved here is how to handle my stay. My husband and children are, of course, German nationals (in the case of the children, dual-nationals). I received a three year visa when I arrived, as one would expect.

Since I came to Germany knowing not even a word of German (darn all those years of French and Latin!), it was an immediate goal for all of us that we learn the language. My children went into a Geman kita as soon as we found a place to live and a kita that we liked, and I went straight into a language class (it took about 6 weeks for the above). I had some ups and some downs, quite a few missed classes due to the children being ill and a few due to my being ill. Then vacations and breaks and travel and more illnesses and so on. But I went on from A1.1 to A1.2 to A2.1. At this point life became even more awkward, as the German started working in a different city and the girls started going to different schools. Still, after another pause and another illness or two, I persevered and went on to A2.2 and finally B1.1.

I stalled out a bit there, as the German's work schedule became busier and the girls' swimming schedule did the same, but I only delayed my last class and finally finished B1.2 this fall. However, my visa ran out before that date and I wasn't certain whether I should take my exam before applying for a permanent visa.

To make it worse, here in Berlin at least, it's just about impossible to get the Auslanderbehorde to either answer the phone or return e-mails and my scheduled appointment was 1. only 4 days before the expiration of my three year visa and 2. my husband (required to be at the appointment) had a meeting that day which was not re-schedulable. So we had to actually take a day to go to the Auslanderbehorde just to see if we could reschedule our appointment.

The Beamterin on duty yelled at us because the German stuck his head behind the door that said it was the correct door: must love that customer service thing. All we could talk about on the way home (after getting a new appointment, after my visa expired, but having been told that was okay) was how ridiculous it was for this woman to put up a hand written sign that resulted in her yelling at every single person she spoke to all day, when a differently worded handwritten sign would have resulted in the outcome that she desired, with no yelling needed....

At the actual appointment, things went more smoothly than one might expect, having had prior experience with German Amts. The German brought every piece of paper that he had brought for the first appointment we had (when I received my first visa). He brought even more pieces of paper- every one that he could think of. I brought official forms from my VHS showing the German classes that I had completed (there are official forms for everything here- when I started to write a not on one the Secretary scolded me for doing so on an official form) and the receipts showing registration for the DfZ and the Orienteerungskurse. It started well: the Beamterin was nice (didn't yell at us and said hello), took all our forms and when she asked for additional forms that we had not been told we needed, we actually had them.

But then she asked for an employment contract. That's something the German doesn't have. That is, he has a contract showing that we are here in Germany for a certain time and he even had an older note from his boss discussing his circumstances. He had pay stubs and tax info and insurance info and a million things. But what he didn't have was a German, currently dated, official form saying that he can't be fired tomorrow.

I kept on saying that this particular type of form doesn't exist in the US, and as was clear in all his information, the German is employed in Germany through the international side of an American firm: on loan, as it were. The Beamterin said other North Americans have brought in such forms and that she could accept a note from a partner written on letterhead. Unfortunately, it was a holiday in the parts of Germany where someone might have been able to help us out and fax such a note over. I asked what would happen without such a note, considering that my visa had already expired, and she said the issue was that she wanted to give me a permanent visa rather than another three years and that there were additional documentation requirements. So we went back out to the waiting room while she looked over the documentation that we had and discussed our lack of the contract with her superior, I assume.

When she called us back, she had already put the permanent visa into my passport. I asked her why I didn't need to finish the Integrationskurs or take the Orienteeringskurs or the DfZ (the German poking me to stop the whole time), saying that I thought they were required, and she looked at me as if I were mad and said that I had (while arguing, I guess) displayed an adequate amount of language knowledge and off we went.

It was an interesting experience and one that I think shows how relatively easy it is for Anglophones to become permanent residents: so many of my classmates from a non-Anglophone background seem to have encountered so many more problems on the way to their permanent residency. The process also explains why all my Anglophone acquaintances seem so surprised that I have actually bothered to take classes— they laugh when I say that I need to know the language and want to take the 45 hour class (why wouldn't I want to have an understanding of the structures and legal basis of the country in which I am living?). Let me point out that even with a theoretical B1 level of language, I am still unemployable, I would guess. I think C1 would be an employable level of language when any conversation ability would be necessary and my written German is even worse. But with this level of language, I can live in this country, I can speak to my children's school teachers and I can make myself understood in any situation at all, even though it might be with an incorrect sentence structure or general rather than specific word choices: this is what integration means. Everything after this is above what is required and will simply make me personally happier.

Random Thoughts on Sentiment and Roots and Clutter

So far it's been an amazingly hot summer in Berlin, after a quick turn around from an unseasonable (but bog standard) chilly one. In Sunday it was 40C+, or aout 104F. It's a bit better now, in the low to mid-30s most days, but still sticky and muggy. That would be fine, but it doesn't cool down at night, which means each day starts sticky and muggy: my Russian and Nort East US background both rebel against this weather.

However, things are plugging along.

I read an interesting article about clutter and life, on keeping things and throwing them away, in the NYT. The comments were as intriguing as the article and as I read through them, I ran across and was interested in a comment from someone who decided to de-clutter his life, one item (at least) a day for a year, and to keep a blog about it: (or as he calls it,) Downsizing. It was interesting to see him reach for items on busy days and achieve big successes on other days, particularly as he wound up moving and needing to pack, and as he and his wife had a baby and needed to look at baby clutter (or possessions, in a non-pejorative term).

I enjoyed reading through his blog and found myself laughing and admiring his follow through. It made me look around (again), as I often do, and consider my own clutter. I have a lot of it. The vast majority is books, magazines, and paperwork. But next up is the girls' things. There are crafts and books, clotes in their sizes,clothes that I am packing up because they are too small, clothes that are just a little too big and maybe should be available. There are boxes that I have just unloaded from summer clothes and boxes that are being loaded with fall and winter clothes. There are boxes of toys that I am hoping they have out grown so that I can give them away and boxes that are currently age appropriate. We have two girls, separated by three years,but only by a size or two in clothing, so everything overlaps.

In addition, it might be considered clutter, but I consider it a tremendous boon that my brothers also have girls and that I am swimming in hand-me-downs. So we brought over 23+ boxes of children's clothing, age labelled, and boxes of kids' toy, ditto. Because children aren't always the sizes that the clothing states, boxes are constantly being shuffled, which creates waves of chaos. I'm not complaining: the girls have had wonderful clothes and toys, far nicer than I could have purchased, but it does create chaos. Each time we go to the US, I bring back another load or two and need to clean, sort and consider our booty.

My books are an issue: even with the Kindle, I find myself with too many. I've sold some on Amazon, but as Reed found out, Amazon and Craig's List have their own issues, particularly with no-shows and the cost of shipping, and Germany is probably not the best place for my esoteric taste in books to hit a chord (in English). At home I would hand my no longer wanted books over to the library for the annual sale: here, I'm not yet certain what to do but I will soon decide: the packing box I'm filling with the unwanted books is almost full. I can't yet make myself want to buy Kindle books that cost more than physical books, but I can see why people would move that way.

Then there are the school things, for the two girls (and for myself), and the work things for the German. On a regular basis we shred and recycle and discard. I try to hang new artwork and to store old: should I start taking picture of the art and discarding the original?

I think part of the reason that I am such a pack rat and such a sentimentalist is because all my life I have felt the lack of roots.

My mother's family had fled, rootless, from Tsarist Russia and Byelerusse. My grandmother was too young to know very much and she was never told very much: in America, it was about fittin g in and becoming American. We have no heirlooms or keepsakes. Not even photos or stories.

My father survived Auschwitz, after seeing his baby sister murdered in front of him and watching the majority of his family die. Two other brothers survived of his large and extended family. But he left the practice and the way of his forebears and became, as well, an American, after some interesting travels and work of his own. We were raised in English and as Americans. But we had no relatives and no past, no family photos and almost no stories that did not bring forth tremendous sorrow, which we avoided, because who wants to bring pain to the ones we love most?

So, rootless and languageless, I try to create roots by keeping things that have meaning. But really, so much is clutter. One person can't create a history and if I can, it won't be through souvenirs and small remembrances.

The mother of someone whose blog I enjoy died this past week. As she told us why she was not posting, I was struck by part of her eulogy: she said that her mother had never said a negative word and had always had her back.

I think that's one of the loveliest things I have ever heard.

So I'm going to try to de-clutter and down-size and calm our lives down, in hopes of being able to spend less time running around and cleaning and tidying and more time having quality time and peace. I expect it will take me a while— if it takes as long to pare down as it did to build up, it may take years, so to keep myself going I'm going to blog about it here.

I'm curious to see how it goes.

Recent randomness...

1. For the last thirty years or so, I have been an sf fan. Part of that is going to sf cons and the moveable feast is Worldcon. This year it will be in Australia and I'm afraid that we won't be able to make it. However, a few years ago, John Scalzi and some others decided to put together a reading package of all the works (where made available by publishers)that we had nominated for the Hugo. This year, all the graphic art nominations were also available and I have been sucked into Girl Genius. What a rocking strip! I'm pretty sure it's got my vote, I have now read through inception, and I plan on buying the books (because reading comics on line rots compared to having the book). How late I am to this show: it won the Hugo last year, but I've just ignored comics since I went cold turkey in 1990. Now, this is the type of comic I want my daughters to grow up reading.
2. After surviving my own mini-flame war, it seems that a lot of the blogs I have been reading have their own. Some are even related to the topic I was embroiled in: misogyny and sexism. See Racefail (on cultural appropriation), Mansplainin, How difficult life is for the Menz, the craziness on fanfic, which started with a reasonable post on Diana Gabaldon's blog (in a post which has now disappeared- and I don't blame her- the vitriol was amazing and the vitriolic made ad hominem attacks), but exploded through Boingboing and GRRMartin and ever outward. Watching how these things degenerated into insanity and how trolls took over was illuminating and shows the difference between an editorial page and the internets in all their glory.
3. We caught up with Lost. The last episodes are coming this month and we want to watch them semi-real time. And Fringe is getting better and better. As for Castle, what is not to like about a mystery writer as the hero of a series, with a kick toosh woman Police detective in charge. Nathan Fillion (from Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog) is fab.
4. Working on math... the way it's taught here is so non-intuitive that my husband can't understand it. I can, but I understand the issues. It's rote utilization of certain table formats and we just need to get Thing1 understanding that when there are lank boxes, a null is a perfectly correct way of filling them.
5. Same with reading. We are getting there, but the way that the German system (here at least) utilized the whole word method at the beginning, then moves to phonetics, makes it hard. There are far more "letters" here, though, so I understand why they operate the way they do. They didn't finish learning all the different vowels and consonants until after the winter holidays (there's a whole separate section to learn with the umlauted and conjoined vowels). And they don't sing the alphabet song, they learn "A wie Affe, Ei wie Eis... usw.) Fascinating to get a look into the basic culture and how it is indoctrinated.
   

This makes me so happy...

One of the many things that I hoped for when I voted for our President:

The United States Breastfeeding Committee (USBC) applauds the passage of the health care reform package, in particular, the workplace breastfeeding support provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The provision states that employers shall provide reasonable, unpaid break time and a private, non-bathroom place for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for one year after the child's birth. Employers with less than 50 employees are not subject to the requirement if it would cause "undue hardship."

This was the primary reason that I did not return to my last job: after discussing what would happen when I returned before I went on maternity leave, my workplace told me, two weeks before my scheduled return, that my "private place" would be the bathroom on my floor. They were aware what issues I had had with breastfeeding my first and how dedicated I was to being able to breastfeed my second.

So I did not return to work and we started looking for a way to live on one income while being a two income family. 

Hello, Germany!

When we think about when or whether we will return to the USA, one of the most important factors has been health care. I was laid off after 9/11 and luckily COBRA covered me until I found a new job, as the German and I were not yet married. I never want to be in a place again where the loss of a job could leave me or my family without healthcare. Our lives are too important to take that risk.

Thank heavens it looks like this will not be an issue in the future.