acht.seibzehn

I worked last night but didn't get woken up at all. So I woke up at six having spent almost eight whole hours asleep, and I felt really good. I don't remember the last time I slept that well; I didn't wake up once, I can't remember falling asleep or how long it took or what I thought about or anything. I barely remember going to bed at all. I feel good. Too bad I don't have anything to do with this day. Katie and Josh won't even be around; it's their anniversary so they're going "on vacation" to St. Cloud for a couple of days. And just walking home I can tell it's going to be too hot and humid again today to want to go outside. And it's Sunday; nothing good is open (like the coffee shop, or the library).

Anyway, I was talking about work. The one thing I did find amusing about it was that when the girl I work with showed up, she looked at me and said I got my hair cut. "Me?" I said. "No, I didn't." I'm trying to make it longer; cutting it would be antithetical. "Did you do something to it then? It looks ... feathered, or something." I probably looked doubtful; I felt doubtful. "Do you have it pinned?" "Oh," I said, it dawning on me now. "Yeah, I have barrettes on the sides." They may be blue and sparkly but by hair covers them, so she couldn't see.

And she said, "I knew it was something! I thought, 'Wow, Holly actually looks girly.' "

I couldn't help but laugh at that. I thought of a pretty good argument on the fly, which is that she sees me only at night when I don't care ... but the truth is, of course, that I never care. If the addition of two little barrettes can make me appear remarkably more "girly," I think I'm in trouble. I mean, I don't want to be really girly, but I've no great desire to appear whatever the opposite of "girly" is supposed to be--you can't really say "boy-ey"--but if the threshold is so low that such a small thing makes a pronounced difference, that's not a good sign.

Though I do find it funny.

Umlauts!

I've noticed that I've started talking to my fish in German.

I wander out to the kitchen this morning in search of food. Surprisingly, I decide on normal breakfast food, to be eaten at a normal breakfast hour. I get a bowl and spoon and put them on the table. Then I notice Philo, and think I should feed him, before I forget. "Guten Morgen, Philo," I say, unscrewing the lid of his jar of food. "Wie geht's?" He doesn't answer. Just keeps swimming. "Frühstück!" I announce (after groping for the word for a second--"lunch" and "dinner" are easy; in the German tradition of being verbose and obvious, they're Mittagessen (mid-day eating) and Abendessen (evening eating), but of course Morgenessen would be too easy. I sprinkle a few flakes in and watch him attack them as I prepare my cereal.

I am reminded of Stuart Davis, who says he had a ferret who spoke Latin. "Classical Latin, not ecclesiastical Latin; he rather despised that as a bastardization of the original language. He could speak Latin better than me, but he didn't want to." It's a good song. The song part is about a dead skunk in the middle of the road, the story about the ferret is just interjected because that's the fun of live Stuart Davis.

I'm also reminded of Matthew's tendency to talk to cats in German. He might talk to other pets in German, but I've only seen around cats--in my house last year and his family's house always (he's been around my fish too, I guess, but he doesn't talk to Philo except to tell him he's boring because he doesn't swim enough). He called both Alerick and Schrödinger "Katze!" (even those of you who aren't Deutsch-sprechers might guess that means "cat," and you'd guess correctly) And when a new cat showed up at his family's house this summer, he started calling it Die Neue Katze, the new cat, so her name is Neue (pronouced Noya). I think he thinks it's silly that the cat is named "New"; I think it's kind of cool.

Darren even wanted to get a cat and name it something German like "Klaus-Dieter." Or "München," which he likes better than the English variant, Münich. (Why we had to change the name of that town--while leaving Berlin and Hanover and all the others alone, as far as I can tell--is beyond me.) German names weren't the only possibilities he thought of for this hypothetical cat, but I think they're the best. Except maybe "Uzumaki."

Stein auf!

So I showed up for work last night and plopped down on the couch in the living room. They're always watching the news when I get there at ten. I hate television news, but I don't live there. Barbara likes to watch the news, so it's on. I don't care anyway; my immediate interests are usually what I have to do next and what I'd rather be doing instead of being at work. And, depending on the season, I find the air conditioning or the heat a lovely change from whatever I experienced during my commute.

Thinking about such things, I was taken aback by a co-worker asking me, "So, what's your shirt mean this time?" Then I remembered that this girl has been present for two instances of me explaining my binary t-shirt (which I have to do at least half the times I wear it, so I'm used to it, and I've always found it amusing than an article of my clothing can need explaining). Having heard it twice, I think she's still just humoring me and my assertion that 10 could ever mean 'two,' and that binary has any useful purpose.

I had to look down because I couldn't remember which shirt I was wearing that day. I usually just grab the top one off the stack when I get dressed in the morning, and don't think about it after that. But this was a good one, it was the "Stein auf!" one.

Caught off guard, I just stammered a little. The first thing that came to mind is It's a pun! But that isn't quite it. So I tried to explain, and I think she got the point, but it wasn't my best bit of rhetoric ever. It's a good story, though, and so I'll try to tell it better now:

A few summers ago my friend John asked if I wanted to go to a Lost and Found concert with his family. He knew I liked them. I said yes, and all four Xaviers and John's girlfriend and I went to this concert.

We sat down and I ended up between Matthew and his dad. Other people were coming in; Matthew pointed out one who was wearing a shirt that said "Stein auf!" I recognized it as German but this was before I knew any myself, so I asked him if he knew what it meant (I used to have to do this all the time; I swear I only took this year of German so I could better communicate with my friends who use it colloquially so often). He said he didn't know.

A minute later, his dad noticed the same thing and leaned over me to ask Matthew what "stein auf" means. Endlessly unpredictable, Matthew didn't just say he didn't know, as I'd thought he would. He was silent for a moment, and then giggled. "I guess it kind of means ... 'rock on,' " he said. "But ... it doesn't really. Stein means 'stone,' and auf means 'on,' but, like 'the pan is on the stove.' " (Or some such example; the point--which I know now--is that auf is for things that are on a flat surface.)

At some point during the concert, the story was told about Lost and Found (these two guys who sing strangely, one plays guitar and the other plays piano and they're fun and they make good music) going on tour in Germany. They made these shirts for that; they went around in Germany saying "stein auf!" to people they saw on the street, people who gave them breakfast--salami sandwiches; I remember that--and everything until someone finally did them the favor of telling them they were crazy.

Now I wanted a "Stein auf!" t-shirt. As cool as it would've been to have a shirt that said "rock on!" in another language, in this case it was somehow cooler to have one that didn't say "rock on" in another language. I got one (much to Matthew's chagrin; that was one of the times he declared I couldn't do something because he was already going to), Matthew got one, John has one, and I think their dad does, too.

So last night I said, "It--well ... this, see, it says 'rock on,' only it doesn't really." Et cetera. It's so lame, to hear me tell it. But the shirt is so cool.