It certainly has been a long time between posts, hasn’t it? I hope you haven’t been too anxious – while you’ve undoubtedly hovered over your computers and smartphones for the past month just waiting for an update, I’ve spent my weekends trying the exact same strategy with mixed results.
There’s not much to talk about. All of my big travel plans have been carried out and my life goes on, as do my classes. I haven’t done anything notable during the last month or two, and that last statement is actually a lie but play along for the time being. What I’m trying to say is that my classes have been the biggest priorities.
So naturally my academic situation is something I should write about, yes? The correct answer to that riddle is ‘no.’ I’ve never delved too deeply into academics because the differences between German and American classrooms aren’t different enough for me to compose a post around the subject. Had I come to Freiburg with a fresh passport, culture shock, and a brand-new blog with no entries in it, then German academia would have been one of my first targets. But when I think about what I had seen and done before I even landed in Germany, an article on the minutiae of German education becomes the least interesting option available to me. Stay with me; I'm going somewhere with this.
Writing isn’t getting tougher, but feeling wonder certainly is. It was easy in the beginning, though. In Austria I could think “OMGpuppetslol!” and easily turn that thought into a blog post, or at least use it in the most important part of a good post, which is the joke that shouldn’t work and probably doesn’t except for in my mind. But now what's that feeling competing with? Spending four days in Vienna was incredible. Living in Cairo was life-changing. Beekeeping in the mountains of Bulgaria…yeah I totally did that. Then there's the Bicentennial of Oktoberfest and Neuschwanstein Castle - the list goes on and on.
Now let’s skip ahead to April 1011, when I ascended Zugspitze on a ski lift. The view from the observation deck was grander than anything I had seen before, but I wasn't emotionally excited. While this view was the best I've seen, mountain vistas aren't foreign to me anymore. It wasn't something completely novel; it was the best version of something I've already experienced.
At this point in my life there will always be a precedent, something to which I can compare all cool things I ever do, and it raises the question of what’s better: Should I be entranced by all new things or feel an emotional response tempered by the fact that I have in fact gone sandboarding in the Sahara desert, toured Germany, and been to the top of the Bavarian Alps? I’m for the latter.
At the beginning of this thing, I said I had lied. That statement was in fact only partially correct, and by the end of this essay I plan to prove that the entire paragraph was actually a cleverly disguised imperative sentence. In the interests of full disclosure, I did go out of the country on two occasions: one of my classes went to a French comics convention, and another toured several museums in Strasbourg. I wrote about neither. Why? Because taking a day trip to the South of France is only exciting the first three times you do it. I’ve been to Strasbourg already - it’s practically across the street from me - and while Colmar was a pretty town, the comics convention did little but prove that the French comics industry handles the objectification of women with the same grace and humility as its American counterpart.
Think about that one: trips to southern France give me a "been there, done that" attitude now. Is that bad, or is it great because I've done it so many times it has become mundane?
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And that’s the story of how I haven’t come up with new blogging material for almost a month! Blame the fundamental change in how I experience the world.
-Jared
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