FishieFishies

Dear faithful readers (and if you've kept checking this site for the past seven post-less months you are faithful indeed),

Although I have enjoyed keeping an online journal here on Windows Live Spaces, it was time to dare to strike out and find new ground. I have thus established a journal on Wordpress (one of the only online journal sites whose name does not contain the loathéd "b" word):

http://fishiefishies.wordpress.com

Same vision, same tone, same random-as-all-get-out subject matter... In short, same fishies, new location.

Enjoy...

Those on the "A Word a Day" e-mail list will probably recognize this quote from the end of yesterday's message, but I absolutely love the sentiment:

It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?
—Richard Bach, writer (1936- )

Update: The June 15 "A Word a Day" quote was just as good:

Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind, you have failed.
—Jan de Hartog, playwright and novelist (1914-2002)

• Tram doors do not open automatically. Unless you push the button to open the door, the tram will leave the platform while you stare through the windows at the passengers who are staring back at you and wondering why the h[eck] you don't just push the stupid button, already.
• Those bright red blotches scattered randomly through the hair of otherwise very conservative-looking women are stylish, not accidental. The even brighter red streaks adorning the hair of punks and/or goths are also deliberate.
• The landlord is not completely naked. She is wearing swimsuit bottoms, albeit very small ones. Sometimes, in the late afternoon, she also wears a shirt.
• You must furnish your own grocery bags unless you want to purchase new bags every time you buy milk and/or Nutella.
• You must bag your groceries yourself. You must do this as fast as you possibly can. If you do not, your groceries and your newly purchased bags will be piled at the end of the conveyor belt while the cashier and other customers look quizzically at you and wonder why the h[eck] you haven't been bagging your groceries, for pity's sake.
• The key really will open the door—you merely have to learn the Top Secret Rapid Gymnastic Wrist Flicking Motion first. This should not take more than ten minutes.
• You will not find your lodgings on Großburgerstrasse if you live on Gabelsburgerstrasse. These are not the same street.
• Brussels is not the only European city with iconic decorative fauna. Wolfenbuttel also proudly features a large yellow bell-wearing cow.
• Although exactly two people in the entire country have your contact information, that may be your mobile phone that starts ringing noisily during Sunday School.
• Germans do not jaywalk. Your cavalier against-the-light and/or mid-block street-crossing will engender startled and/or disapproving expressions from those patiently waiting for the light to change at an intersection with no cars in sight.
• It is possible to smoke a cigarette while riding a bicycle.

So, I've been in Deutschland for four days now, and I love it here. Some things are a little bit strange, though—you know how sometimes you see weird foreigners whose speech is slow, grammatically dubious, heavily accented, and generally tortured? Well, here, that's me. Which has made me realize that when I see these other people walking down the street, jabbering in what seems like a random collection of consonants with a smattering of vowels, they're not just pretending to understand each other—they really are communicating.

 Whoa.

 A few other observations:

• Mohawks, mohawks, everywhere. I've seen at least a half dozen of these, on individuals from age 10 to 30. Those west of the Atlantic, consider yourselves warned.
  
• Just because you can find your way there, that doesn't mean you can find your way back.
  
• Under no circumstances should you ever challenge a kamikaze bicyclist. Under no circumstances should you try to dodge one, either, because regardless of the way you frantically dart, the bicyclist will swerve in that same direction, leaving you in the path of a bicycle and rider now even closer than before. Just close your eyes and stand perfectly still, like when you're avoiding a tyrannosaurus rex.
  
• Germany has a seemingly endless supply of Unspeakably Tacky Postcard Day™ possibilities. (FEAR ME.)
  
• There actually is a place on earth where my allergies are even worse than in Massachusetts and Arkansas.
• Though German has a phrase that means "escape pod from the mother ship"(I needed a way to describe Smart Cars), it has no word for "jailbait."

So my roommate C-t-P and I were talking the other night about our adopted hometown and those people who (for whatever reason) are grimly counting the days until their schooling is complete and they can flee to the dry, arid West. Less than twelve hours later I had a similar conversation with a new acquaintance, who is “unconvinced” that Boston has any advantages over the relentless dazzling glamour of the city situated a four-hour careening Fung Wah adventure to the south. All this Boston-derogation made me think of some of the many, many reasons I love this city; if I have to live in the US, it’s gotta be here.

I love that for my birthday in late February I did misshapen cartwheels on a Walden Pond still gloriously frozen (though the ice was somewhat disconcertingly thin in a few places) and that in just a few short months that same pond will offer the thrilling flowing glide of warm water over bare skin. I love warm nights in Harvard Square, complete with cacophonic street musicians and spare-changers and punk kids and uneven red bricks that sometimes trip even seasoned Bostonians. I love the invigorating gold and crimson autumn leaves that form a gorgeously colorful, rustly, slightly acrid blanket over the sidewalks from October through early December. I love the Red Sox and their maniacal fans and the Green Monster. I love zipping from the Fenway to the Riverway to the Arborway to the Jamaicaway and back again (though it’s a rather indirect route) in my car that sounds like an airplane right before I shift into third gear. I love that four out of the five apartments I’ve lived in have been quintessentially New England and therefore adorable, with gorgeous golden-brown hardwood floors and crown molding and tons of light and air (absolutely essential for a Seattle refugee) and built-in china cabinets; the other one—the epitome of all that is horrid in architecture, interior design, maintenance, and general liveability—is gasp-for-air-hysterically described here (make sure you read the comments). I love the weeping willow by the pond on the Boston Common and I love the Public Garden and the Park Street Church whose hourly chimes play “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” during December in a beautiful flowing plainsong rhythm that’s anything but pedantic. I love howling Nor’easters where the whole house trembles in the impossible wind that moves curtains through closed windows and where the rain or snow propels itself horizontally into foolishly unprotected skin so that the few pedestrians outside walk backward to avoid the sting of innumerable microscopic ice crystals—and I love returning home to a warm, golden-wood-floored apartment where I can curl up with a fuzzy blanket and hot chocolate and a book like The Remains of the Day in a chair next to a window and watch the storm rage unabated outside. I love wandering through Quincy Market on the way to another blissful cannoli in the North End and returning through the Haymarket just as it closes and stand owners give away three butternut squash and a smattering of radishes for a dollar. I love running along the Charles River or around Fresh Pond (when I don’t have a way-too-much-running-related injury—these days I love driving through the quaint New-England-architectury town of Winchester for physical therapy). I love the Rapunzel Tower in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, from which you can see the “Mormon tabernacle” (as the locals know it) perched atop the hill to the west before wandering through the gold-red splendor of autumn leaves or the exhilarating blooms and leaves against the backdrop of a cerulean sky in spring. I love, love, love that statues of not just ducks but frogs (FROGS!) decorate the Boston Common; I love that New England citizens young and old don elaborate period costumes for pre-daylight Revolutionary War reenactments in Lexington and Concord; I love Salem in all its October wannabe-sinister kitsch. I love the used book section at the Harvard Bookstore. I love that this city was freaking cool enough to host a live taping of This American Life and that I thus got to see Ira Glass in person (albeit from far, far away).

And of course I love the people here—this quirky, charming, high-achieving city attracts characters who are similarly quirky, charming, and high-achieving but that are somehow simultaneously down to earth—who seem to prefer elbow-patched tweed to the sequins and power suits of the southern 2/3 of the Megalopolis. These are people who do amazing things, not just for themselves but for the world (in a very literal sense), and not for accolades or so that they can pseudo-self-deprecatingly discuss their achievements in boardrooms and at glitterati-laced cocktail parties but because they genuinely care about people. Yes, there are pretentious people here—more than one café is crowded with future Intelligentsia who discuss their Kierkegaard theses a little too loudly, while the white-haired Old Boys sequester themselves in red-leather-and-dark-wood faculty rooms and bemoan a world full of people who simply will not understand their particular brand of bespectacled genius—but I have the privilege (and it’s admittedly a great one; I’ve done nothing to deserve it) of living in a charmed environment, surrounded by people who don’t fit those stereotypes, who are genuinely humble even as they’re breathtakingly and effortlessly extraordinary. (I attended a fireside given by one such man last night; officially reinforced is my determination to move heaven and earth to hear him speak whenever I possibly can.) There’s our stake president, a seemingly rigid professor who suddenly bursts into impromptu ballroom dance steps during combined priesthood/Relief Society meetings (his adorably idiosyncratic first counselor just might simulate an airplane in the same meeting). There’s the stake choir director, impossibly brilliant and stunningly insightful, whose writing is so beautiful that she could pen a 2,000-word treatise on the benefits of convection heating and I would read the essay over and over and over. There’s the seminary teacher with an incredible gift for reaching and inspiring her students. There’s the man who speaks at least 17 languages (most of these fluently), and the women at top medical and law schools who also just happen to be incredibly gifted pianists, and the man who knows everything about everything from geology to robots to sailing to rowing to music to business to Irish dancing to the best days to see the autumn leaves and spring flowers in the afore-celebrated Mount Auburn Cemetery. There’s my roommate, who started a charity to help kids in Ecuador who can’t afford go to school, and another friend who gave up a prestigious job to face an uncertain year in Kenya, living in a cement-floored apartment with occasional plumbing and heading a struggling microfinance bank. This list doesn’t even begin to cover them all. All of them brilliantly gifted; all of them startlingly humble.

And then there’s the handful of friends I’ve become especially close to (a.k.a. the Rapid Response team), who really make life here special—I do love all the things I’ve described, and then some, but it’s midnight Monkee-walks across the Boston Common and occasional arm-flailing shrieks of “BUG HUG! BUG HUG!” and spontaneous trips to the Noath Shoah and/or Maine and/or New Hampshire and special treats of cinnamon-raisin bread and daily apartment prayer that really make up life, not occasional encounters with great people (though those are certainly worth having). I’ve made some of the best friends of my life during the past four years, and I’m inexpressibly grateful for these people who make up songs and write impromptu poems like “Ode to Morning Face”* on my bathroom mirror and race wildly on foot and/or with carts through the IKEA parking lot and transform inexplicably legless Easter turkeys into pale pink bunny heads (with the aid of knives, raisins, and variegated toothpicks) and miraculously make shopping for clothes into an altogether pleasant experience and fix things like my methinks page when I break them and listen to me when I’ve had a rotten day (or week, or month) and constantly share their wit and compassion and charm and general brilliance. AKK (who shall return!), C_H, C-t-P, J_H, LADH, and SDY: Woot, to the power of infinity plus a googolplex.

*”Ode to Morning Face” by C_H

O beautiful when first I rise
My amber** mop of hair
And purple bags beneath my eyes
Will make the kiddos stare!
It’s morning face, O morning face…

**This isn’t quite an accurate description at the moment, though it may be nearer the truth in the fall or so. But then, I tend to favor a more burgundy than amber color when I’m a redhead, given my eye color and skin tone…

Text: This issue is nonfatal to the program engine...

 

Sylvia (editor extraordinaire, native speaker of English, and comprehender of grammatical rules involving prefixes, negative and otherwise): What does "nonfatal" mean?

 

Author: It means "is not fatal"