Hello, how’s the daily grind going? We all sometimes get sucked into our own predictable daily schedules: the 7:13 monkey suite parade, the 11:15 banana, and the 4:45 cage cleaning. I almost got lost in the circus, but now with even more acts to perform I feel that I have gained more control over my time; as its value just tripled over the past week. Wednesdays will now become my halftime breaks where I can relax in-between German verbs and French theorists and just appreciate the near kaleidoscopic hues of father time and the confusing smell of one hand clapping. Its funny how anything, after a while, can turn into the same type of passive registration akin to watching the box that you forget to think, or at least I forget to think. I mean the type of thinking that bridges two seemingly disconnected ideas together forming new concepts or the act of trying to recount a past event with some sense of arrangement. Yesterday my afternoon instructor, Hans Bauman, explained to our group of 17 students the difference between the American dream and the German dream, him being the only German and I the only American.
Hans with his deep booming voice and Gandolf like appearance seems to cast as many jokes and puns as he does grammar and history. The American dream is the rags to riches archetype, says he. The German dream is the life of a perpetual student who only approaches work when absolutely necessary. In one generation 60% of the German population will be retirement age, and since Germans are too smart for having noisy expensive children flopping around there book muffled abodes, very few actual ‘Germans’, in the since of both sides of the coins genealogy hailing from the mother land, will be around to make the rules or teach their interpretations of how things should be. And that is where I come in. I of course am not interested what anyone ‘should’ do with themselves, but only in the lenses through which people view their world and in the dismantling of what looks universal in order to revel its hidden controls of the consciousness. Plenty of opportunities in the future await with many exciting twists along the way.
Example, how will the language sound with a generation of foreigners taking over the pronunciation of the German ‘ich’, which involves a tricky back of the tongue maneuver to pull off, with their ‘ish’ like in ‘fish’. The large Turkish population here in Wiesbaden uses the ‘ish’ form. You can also spot a Turkish youth immediately by their mullet haircut, grey sweatpants, and black fanny pack. One of them told me that the ‘old’ German pronunciation of ‘ich’ is for farmers and the ‘ish’ form is the more modern form. I asked my morning instructor if this was the case, which produced a laugh and a sigh.
Example, Christian from my morning group comes from the Ivory Coast and like most of the ‘auslanders’ says ‘ish’ instead of ‘ich’. In order to get to know everyone in our groups we sing and dance in circles and play games, lots of fun. One such game is ‘ich bin die König’ or ‘I am the king’. We have cards with different adjectives and nouns, which need to be added into a sentence with what ever verb that the ‘king’ is holding. Christian was the king. ‘Ich heiße König’, he said, ‘Ich heiße....’ he couldn’t go any further since everyone’s chuckling spilt into laughter, but in a ‘laughing with not at’ type of laughter, as my mom would say. Since he pronounced his ‘ich’ with an ‘ish’ he was effectively saying ‘I am the shit king’.
In other news this Friday Maria and I leave for Köln to meet an old friend from Romania. The last time I was in Köln was in 2006 for Karnival with an old friend from WSU where we drank beer through horns and thought we would be 23 for ever. The massive rabbit cage is nearing completion and my moms package has now made two round trips to Germany and back, but that will have to wait until next weeks half-time report. Until next week. Viel Spaß!
No comments:
Post a Comment