Oh, Mist.

This entry is dedicated to the teacher with the yellow bow tie, who was a picture of responsible adulthood, and Sven, who got mugged in Mexico.

I spent yesterday evening at the Cair Paravel Latin School Junior Varsity Scholars' Bowl Invitational Tournament with a group of brilliant and excitable teenagers who mostly were there for the free cookies. We careened around the tiny building from room to room, each classroom slightly more absurd and endearing than the last. From the medieval theme wall paper borders in the classrooms, to the plastic candelabras in the hallway, it was either everything that a Narnia-themed school should be... or everything that a Narnia-themed school should not be.

We ended up tying for 3rd place, but since we had beat the other team 110 to 20 in a breathtaking 6th round, I drove home with a van full of happy kids and a shiny red plastic trophy. On my way to gas up the van before returning the keys, I noticed a Dillons grocery store Grand Opening (where I didn't recall there having even been a building the night before!), and decided to join the throng of people experiencing the blessed event. How exciting, all the same products, made anew by the clever rearrangement on new shelves and the strategic placement of signs and lighting!

I made a beeline for the merchandise I had come for--a pack of Orbit Mist gum. Today I taught my students a list of culturally appropriate responses to anecdotes. This included the phrase "So ein Mist!" This is German for "That sucks!" but literally means "That is crap." Hence why I needed a pack of Mist gum as a prize for our "So Ein Mist Award." The students voted for who could tell the most embarrassing or most painful anecdote about something that happened to him or her. The student who won had been mugged while on a youth group service trip in Mexico. A close runner up was the story from the kid who broke his foot skateboarding, then broke his other foot soon after, while trying to skateboard home on crutches. So ein Mist.

I reached the gum aisle in record time. My self congratulations ended quickly as I scanned at least 50 different varieties of gum sporting all varieties of cool names and fruitamintalicious flavors, all except for the one I was looking for. I had a flashback to the scene in the movie Goodbye Lenin when the main character enters his corner grocery store for the first time after the fall of the Berlin Wall and stares blankly at the newly-Westernized shelves, containing a world-wide selection of pickle varieties, all except for the local East German product, Spreewalder Gurken. It was "ein buntes Warenparadies"--A colorful consumer paradise!

Finally I spotted the Mist. It was hiding behind a hot pink product called a Fuzzy Wuzzy hanging off of the shelf above. I didn't stop to investigate what a Fuzzy Wuzzy was doing in the gum aisle.

Ultimately, though, I did allow myself to be swallowed into this glorious land of endless product choice. Feeling guilty about putting a three-dollar charge on my credit card, I wandered the store until I came up with a decent handful of things, and finally emerged into the cold wet mist outside a half-hour later.

My car was not hard to spot for once, as I was still driving the giant white van with USD 501 on the side. I trudged towards my "car," meanwhile reminding myself to return the school's gas station credit card first thing in the morning (or risk the friendly wrath of Debbie, Topeka West Bookkeeper Extraordinaire).

And I reminded myself not to leave the scholars' bowl buzzer system in the van when I checked it in. The last time that happened, I realized it at 5 am, jumping out of bed with an "oh shit!" and speeding to the van service center on the other side of Topeka so I could retrieve the buzzers before our 7 am Scholars' Bowl practice. The expletive was well deserved for that trouble, but I had immediately afterwards resigned myself to the fact that that was just the way things were; It was my error that forced me to wake up a half-hour earlier, and it was my initiative that would solve the problem.

As I walked from Dillons to the van, my arms full of toilet paper, canned soup, and Mist gum, going over a mental litany of do-not-forgets, I realized that at some point in the last few months... I became some version of what people might refer to as a Responsible Adult.

For anyone who knows me fairly well, this may not seem to be a particularly surprising transformation. After all, I was an exemplary Responsible Teenager; and I was wonderful at being a Responsible College student, or at least keeping up with a long list of responsibilities in spite of certain irresponsibilities on the side.

The difference in the switch to being a Responsible Adult is that you may do many of the same things as Responsible Not-Adults, or likely even more of the same things, but people stop being quite so impressed and appreciative of your responsibility. You're not particularly outstanding in the world of Responsible Adultss, and anyway, all of the other Responsible Adults are so busy being responsible for so many things, that they do not necessarily have reason to know or to care whether you are doing your responsibility or not.

I don't feel negative about it. There's a little bit of excitement involved. There's a little bit of "ha, I'm meeting up to a challenge" involved.

Maybe, in the end, there is a little bit of pride involved, the pride of a martyr, when I roll into the dark parking lot, see the children safely to their parents' cars, unload and clean out the van, and finally leave, unnoticed, in one of the last cars left at the school...

Ich bin Deutschlehrerin? Na ja...

You are invited to my life!
Where? Topeka West High School
What? German teaching/ Scholar's Bowl Coaching
When? "Serving USD501 since 7/30/09"

I am sitting in the Extended Learning Center of Topeka West High School. Theoretically, some of my students who were concerned about their quarter grades will be taking advantage of my offer of extra credit in exchange for working through an hour of one-on-one tutoring. So far, though, I haven't seen a single student of mine.
Not that I'm complaining. I get paid an extra $14 an hour to sit here and do my own thing, and there are many of my own things to do. Writing in my blog has been on one of my many to-do lists over the past few months. Until now, it has gotten pushed to the bottom of the list in the midst of my flailing attempts to keep my head above the rising water that is my new profession.

Today, though, my continual attempts to organize myself and get ahead have failed, as I have forgotten to bring the things I meant to get done during this hour. My remaining options were either to stare at my to-do list, nervously adding more and more details to keep track of... or to hand-write a post for my blog. Writing my blog seemed better for my state of mind.

I have been reluctant to publicly reflect on my teaching so far. I'm self-conscious of my stories, either that they're overly idealistic, or, as is more often the case, that they're very negative. If you've asked me about my job in the last few weeks, you might have heard something like, "It's stressful, I'm underqualified, the kids are hateful and ungrateful, the paperwork is ridiculous and overwhelming."

When I tell these stories to other teachers looking for empathy and identification, they usually grin ominously, and cryptically respond, “Ah yes, I remember my first year of teaching. Well….. you’ll learn.”

It turns out, though, that being stressed out and depressed is just... stressful and depressing. If I'm going to survive this year, I'm going to have to summon my inner Pollyanna...

For one, yes, I'm continually exhausted by trying to come up with exciting and entertaining ways to force kids to memorize German grammar, but hey, I get to spend my time coming up with creative ways to practice my one of my favorite hobbies, it's really not a bad gig for me. And there is nothing better than realizing that one of my ideas worked, and worked really well. It's maybe the best feeling ever.

It's true, I work and stress out way more hours than my .75 part time position pays for. But at least I have a job, at least I get to use my degree right out of college, at least I can pay for all of the things I need, including a great living situation in Lawrence.

Yep, I've already been called a bitch to my face, and heard from other teachers that several kids have confided their hate for me. What a meanie I am, expecting people to bring work to study hall. But I also have kids who say things that sound like a chapter out of Chicken Soup for the Teacher's Soul, like, "Wow, that was actually a really fun activity!I could actually FEEL myself learning!" and "I already know Spanish, why would I take it again? I wanted to learn another language instead!"

Yesterday I had a personal victory when I had made some changes in class structure, and one of my most challenging students (Miss Sits-in-the-back-and-sleeps-and-consequently-has-a-20%) participated happily in everything in class. She left saying, "I actually understood what was going on today. That was awesome!" ...I know, crazy. Not even I think German grammar is "awesome."

So, in summary: My feelings about teaching are a pretty big rollercoaster. Depending on what day or minute I consider my feelings about it, I might be convinced it's my life's work, or convinced it's ruining my life and my sanity.

Moral of the story: When you ask me how my year of teaching is going, ask me specifically what's been going well. :)

Beets today, apples tomorrow.

I spent part of this evening canning pickled beets in the summer kitchen that makes up the other part of the enclosed porch where I sleep. I had a great view outside, I was enjoying new music, my brother Isaiah was working on his 4H photography projects next to me, and I was experiencing the exciting rhythm of accomplishing a new skill confidently, for the first time. The moment is one I will miss and remember; the knowledge is hopefully something I will take with me.

Kim asked me yesterday, while we were breaking our backs weeding rows of corn: What do you think you will miss when you leave here? This has become a more pressing question for me in the last few days because I've suddenly found that my summer is a couple of weeks shorter than I thought it would be. I was recently hired by Topeka West High School to teach German! This could be a whole blog entry in and of itself, but I'll stick with Kim's question for now...

One of the things that I will miss most about my summer is my connection to the land, connection to what I do with my hands, living and working so intimately with the process of feeding myself and others. Today as I was enjoying the first sweet corn, I was thinking back over all of the seasons I have seen come and go just this summer.

I was remembering particularly the last day that I picked strawberries, carefully combing over the patch to find the last eight quarts needed for our CSA shares. It took me two hours and the entire strawberry patch to painstakingly pick the eight quarts, where only a week before I sat in one place and picked two quarts just from the strawberries within reach. I had to shake my head at how precious the few strawberries suddenly were. It wasn't that we were taking the strawberries for granted, per se. We always knew that the bumper crop was just a "flash in the pan," as my dad referred to it. But we had gotten so spoiled, so used to having infinite amounts of strawberries at our disposal. For example: at the height of strawberry season, slightly damaged strawberries were even considered appropriate weapons for throwing at the obnoxious rooster who lurks around barn corners waiting to attack, or even for throwing at each other. Kimberly discovered the fun of squishing strawberries on the back of my neck.

It made my head spin a little bit to think about how quickly we had come to expect strawberries at our fingertips; how adept we had become at incorporating strawberries into every dish we cooked. And then suddenly the strawberries were gone again. But something else was coming into season and we just as quickly adjusted to the strawberries' absence and welcomed the next harvest into our diets and work load.

That last day in the strawberry field, I was thinking about human nature, that humans are incredibly adaptable to changes in our environment and lives. Even as I mourned the end of strawberry season, I realized I would survive; the cycle scarcity and plenty would repeat itself again and again; and I will long for strawberries and the other multitudes of variety trickling through the garden's harvest calendar until each item appears again next year.

I realized I actually like experiencing this ebb and flow of seasons. It is like stretching; maintaining my flexibility to adjust, and to appreciate something to the fullest. When I enjoy something from the garden, the taste and the availability itself have borders, concrete beginnings and ends in sight. The foods appearing on my plate seem all the more marvelous and special knowing that the very consumption of the dish brings me closer to the end of its availability. I feel like I'm getting very wordy trying to capture this concept, but is it even possible to put it in words?

Imagine buttery zucchini in the peak of its season, exploding on the vines, plucked from the vines faster than we can eat it. I love zucchini, and I have the luxury of zucchini and carrot casserole; chocolate chip zucchini cake; zucchini chowder cooked in a cauldron over a fire to feed a crowd of 40. But even to enjoy the zucchini is to anticipate the next season's special foods. In a matter of days perhaps, those mid-July comfort foods will only be a memory, phantom recipes we skip over in our excitement on our way to recipes for sweet potatoes, or winter squash.

And so this, I suppose, is my personal testimony to the concept of eating seasonally. It's an exercise to flex our human nature, to practice our ability to adjust and keep our minds open; to understand and even begin to appreciate the parts of our lives that seem unfair, the boundaries on our lives that seem unnecessarily restrictive.

It is a tiny practice for the seasons of scarcity and richness that we experience throughout our lives:

The simultaneous disappointment of letting things go and excitement of new things to come.

The times of longing for something or someone, knowing that you will simply have to wait.

The patience required to live through an empty time, knowing that sometime, somehow, your life will be filled, and filled full.

**********************

Today we picked apples from a friend's farm, and Kim is baking an apple pie with the first of the apples.

Hurrah!! Apple pie!!


July 2 CSA Shares

Filley, NE 68357

This is my first post since returning home in May. Home, for the time being, is my parents' sustainable farm in Filley Nebraska, where I am an "intern." It's been a great opportunity to reconnect with some of the most important people in my life. Including the other two interns, my sister Rachel and my college roommate Kimberly. During the day I pull weeds and work on my tan, and plant or harvest vegetables for the CSA boxes or farmers market. I live on the screened in porch with my sister Rachel, and my college roommate Kim Schmidt. I cook with fresh herbs, play with kittens, water blueberry bushes, and generally enjoy a fairly picturesque albeit hardworking existence here.

I do spend a lot of time thinking about things while out in the field (and just as much time staring blankly ahead thinking "I hate peas... I hate peas... I don't ever want to pick another pea in my life...") and I definitely intended to write blog posts while I'm here. The problem so far has been that I write letters and posts and memoirs in my head while I am outside, and by the time I come inside they have vanished, or I've used up all my energy and have no interest in spending what's left of my evening staring at a computer screen transcribing.

Here is my first attempt.

The sky was still black when I woke up to lightning, and I sat straight up, wide awake. I was facing the view out the windows that make up one wall of my summer home. I can see the sky and two windmills, nothing else, but, following that sinister or promising flash of lightning, I didn't need to see anything else. The sky was darker than it should have been at that time of morning--the western windows behind me were turning sunrise pink but the windmills were outlined against dark sky that was a different texture of darkness from usual. I was excited and couldn't get back to sleep. Some days a storm wouldn't be my favorite thing, I tend to love sunshine and blue sky, but all I could think of was the possibility of power and water that this storm might bring.

I wouldn't normally be woken up by a solitary lightning bolt at 5:30am, but it was just the three of us (Rachel, Kim, and myself) running the farm while my parents were on vacation. I was feeling very responsible for the things of the farm, and we had watched the plants dry out over the previous several days--hot, dry days, without any rain. This is not always a big terrible problem, but it was compounded by the fact that there had also been no wind. For water we rely on an old fashioned Dempster classic windmill, so no wind is no water pumped, and we were worried, watching the water level in the storage tank drop as we leaked water slowly and carefully out onto the dry field.

And so my first thought when I sat up in my couch bed that morning was that maybe there would be wind, and that was the thought that kept me awake--watching the windmill sit silently. Then, finally, over a time that could have been five minutes or could have been two hours, I watched it slowly creak and start to turn, nearly imperceptibly at first and then eventually faster, reaching a speed attested to by a comforting creak and click sound each time it turned around. It was only then that I could get back to sleep, knowing that we would wake up on our way to a full tank of water. Even better, the storm brought with it a slow steady rain that would mean we wouldn't need to water the garden for several days, saving us gallons of worry and water.
There are all kinds of things to be worried about with weather changes--everything from the water pump by the pond flooding and being ruined, to strong winds blowing the greenhouse away... So many things that can go wrong, that it is an unbelievable relief when the weather works in your favor.

I like being in such close contact and dependence on the weather, the ground, the sky. I'm painfully aware of the possibility for good and the possibility for bad that each change in weather brings. I'm not sure why this seems like a good thing but it seems healthy, just like putting my hands in a batch of bread dough, cooking food I just picked from the garden, and feeling my body flex and ache with hard work. I can't think of a neat summary or lesson or moral of my post so I think I'll end with a few of my favorite farm pictures so far this summer.


Rita and Kim woman the farmers market booth.




Pest control involves collecting and squishing lots of gross bugs. And yes, having perpetually gross hands.





Ginette, Chad, and Reid pick strawberries during their visit from Vancouver.





Rita and Merlin assemble Tuesday CSA boxes.

Sweet Thames Flow Softly

Thanks to the fact that there is a Ryanair airport less than an hour from Hirschfeld, I was able to take a short Ausflug to London from Sunday to Tuesday afternoon. I have never been particularly driven to see London, but I did want to see my dear sister Rachel, who is currently there with the May term group from Goshen College, taking in the arts and sights that London has to offer.

Claudia also wanted to take some time in London, so we traded places at the airport. She got on the same airplane to London that I had just flown back on, and while she is gone for a couple of days I'm taking care of the kids. This seems to mostly consist of following them around trying to get them to clean up after themselves, and thinking up activities to distract them from whining to me that they want to watch TV. At the moment, however, they have shut me out of a room and are whispering excitedly together... I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt and not assume that they're plotting against me (turns out they were practicing a magic trick to show me... Sometimes they actually can be darling).

Tomorrow evening I will pick Claudia up at the airport and drive to Leipzig to catch a night train to Frankfurt, and then from Frankfurt fly home!

But, anyway... London was really nice. My favorite parts were sharing some lovely conversation over delicious Asian meals with my Rachel, and watching "Death and the King's Horseman," a play about cultural conflicts and power struggles between British colonial power and local African tribes--very well done and thought-provoking. I spent part of my time just riding buses around, getting to know the layout of the city, and exploring the London Underground and bus system. Great theater, great museums, great food, great people-watching, great public transportation... Lucky Rachel. I'm clearly going to have to go back some time!......

Chocolate for breakfast

What should I be doing right now? Probably finishing up some job applications. What was I doing? Failblog.org.
Feeling a little bit like a fail myself, I decided to strike a happy medium by writing a blog post.

Today I did laundry, washed dishes, sorted out kids' clothes, organized boxes of random household things, dusted bookshelves. As you can imagine, these kinds of tasks give me some time to think about things. What kind of things? Oh, you know, just the normal things, like my ever-present task of adjusting to and trying to understand and fit into whatever cultural practices are currently around me.

(My favorite find in the kids' clothes so far:


David wore this shirt today and came out of his room beaming to show it to me.)

Certain differences stand out very starkly, and since I have spent a lot of my time around kitchens, preparing and talking about food, and eating, something that has become representative of cultural differences to me is.... food.

I spent the last three months adjusting my stomach to the Israeli schedule of a light breakfast around 11, a light lunch at around 2, and then a heavy supper between 8 and 11 pm. Sometimes American tour groups came through who wanted lunch (and a chicken lunch, at that!!) at 11:30 am. There were always gasps of suprise and disgust. How could people be so barbaric, so unnatural? I was often asked to defend this practice, and I found that in that context there didn't seem to be a logical explanation for why we would do things so differently, since the system at hand seemed to be working out pretty well. One conversations went something like this...
"So, if you're already eating supper at 5 or 6, don't you get hungry later?"
"Well, yeah, I guess so, sometimes."
"So you get hungry and eat again later in the evening again? You eat four meals in the day! HA! THAT's why Americans are so fat!"

Here in Germany the eating schedule is a little bit more like what I grew up with: Breakfast before starting the day, lunch at noon, and supper at 6-7 pm. The food itself bears zero resemblance to meals eaten in Nazareth, or at home in the states, for that matter. In this family, at least, lunch is the hot meal of the day, while supper is "Abendbrot": evening bread, very simple sandwiches in fairly small portions.

And breakfast... well, Nutella plays a big role, which is great because Nutella has played an important role in my life as well.

I first became acquainted with Nutella by the name of Nuss Nougat, when Harald and Claudia (yes, the very same ones I am staying with now) visited my family in Porcupine, South Dakota. The introduction of that jar of Nuss Nougat marked a turning point in my life. I remember the reverence with which I thought of that little white plastic canister with round brown lettering. Even though we must have rationed out it's creamy chocolate nuttiness very carefully, I knew the Nuss Nougat era would be a special and short-lived time in my life, and I treasured every moment. My six-year-old eyes had been opened to the bigger world, specifically the bigger world of chocolate eating.

And that world was more amazing than I had been capable of imagining.

At that stage in my life, there were many things that I liked which only were available on very rare or one-time-only occasions--we were on a voluntary service budget, and our main grocery store was a 2.5 hour drive away. So I accepted it at face value that my relationship with Nuss Nougat was bound to be a fleeting albeit sweet affair. And there was a few years lag between when Harald and Claudia imported that much-treasured bread spread, and when my mom discovered Nutella on the grocery-store shelves. One day it reappeared on our table. There was much rejoicing.

But this was still an expensive and rare item in our house, not to be spread on too thick (you had to have just enough to enjoy the taste, without any wasted). And, as my father once sternly pointed out to my sister Rachel, it was not a breakfast food. We had recently been in Germany as a family, and as seems that every German knows, breakfast is not breakfast without Nutella. My dad had to concede that point, but we were not in Germany, we were at home. So for us, Nutella maintained its status as a special food, with the extra distinction of being in the "dessert" category, and therefore (mostly) banished from the pre-afternoon consumables.

In this household, however, these children might have ceased to exist by now if it weren't for the attraction that Nutella gave them to eat at meal-time. I think it might be a main staple of their diet. It's not that Harald and Claudia are just easy going and let the kids eat whatever they want--believe me, there are rules dictating what foods are appropriate for what meals, just like their are rules for what time you eat, and what kind of meal each meal will be. Nutella at breakfast is just one of those rules.

Having experienced a few different styles of eating recently, I've seen how each of the cuisines can represent a balanced diet when treated with the proper respect, cultural wisdom, eating traditions. Let me insert here a little of my one of my favorite authors:

"Once upon a time Americans had a culture of food to guide us through the increasingly treacherous landscape of food choices: fat vs. carbs, organic vs. conventional, vegetarian vs. carnivorous. Culture in this case is just a fancy way of saying ''your mom.'' She taught us what to eat, when to eat it, how much of it to eat, even the order in which to eat it... How you eat is as important as what you eat... The lesson of the "French paradox" is you can eat all kinds of supposedly toxic substances (triple crème cheese, foie gras) as long as you follow your culture's (i.e., mother's) rules: eat moderate portions, don't go for seconds or snacks between meals, never eat alone." Michael Pollan, "Six Rules for Eating Wisely"

With that in mind, and a little bit of caution and moderation, I might feel comfortable letting the dangerously delicious delicacy of chocolate hazlenut spread onto my breakfast table sometimes. (In addition, I might every once in a while also be incorporating breakfasts of Arabic bread, cheese, fresh vegetables, and laban with olive oil).

But at some point you have to draw the line. One thing that I still don't feel the need to have at breakfast is this product:



I thought it was a joke when I first looked at it, or at least that there had to be something special that made this chocolate particularly breakfastey. Nope. It's just chocolate, in very thin slices. It's little chocolate bars to lay upon your bread and call it breakfast.

Logically, is there really any difference between spreading your chocolate on your bread, and laying it on your bread? Not really. I love chocolate, but there is something in me that instinctively rebels against the idea of this as a breakfast food. My Mom (and Dad!) taught me that breakfast is for eggs and toast, healthy cereals, maybe some fruit. Something tells me that for the most part, that's what I'll end up sticking with...

Voll Cool, baby!

My current situation for the next couple weeks is as a guest at the home of Harald and Claudia Funck, who have a strawberry farm in Eastern Germany. I spend most of my days trying to pitch in help wherever I can around the house and farm, in exchange for room and board, and the opportunity to speak a little German. That is, a lot of German. My German is improving in leaps and bounds, especially with the help of the three kids. It took them a little while to understand how it was possible that I could speak to them, but I didn't always understand them, and I just sounded so funny. They now take their jobs as my German teachers very seriously.

I spent much of today with 7-year-old David at the Freizeitpark Plohn, a theme park that has been around since the DDR era. This park rocks. It's got animatronic dinosaurs, self-service soft service ice cream machines (I had a Waldmeister flavor ice cream, David held out for chocolate, which was in another part of the park), a Wild West area, and a story book land that tells the classic German fairy tales through creepy dioramas with moving parts.

David confided to many of the workers and other kids around that it was my first time at Plohn, and that, although I know some words in German, it was his job to teach me more words. The words I learned today were grueselig (ghoulish/ghostly), Achterbahn (rollercoaster), Schien (tracks), Rutsche (slide), and Volcan (volcano). David also took it upon himself to narrate each of the sites we saw, and made sure that I got to ride all of the rides at the park, just to make sure I got a really good introduction to the place. David's sole grasp of English language, on the other hand, seems to be his tendency to add the word "baby" (with the requisite sassy attitude) unexpectedly at the end of some of his sentences. "Let's ride the roller coaster, baby!" David can't count the number of times we rode his favorite spinning cow ride today, and I can't count the number of times today I just burst into laughter at his antics.

...I have had a little bit of a difficult time finding my bearings here, knowing where I fit into the family, and also struggling to relate to and interact with people in a language that still leaves me tongue-tied and awkward most of the time. But things are looking up.

Besides, it only took one ride on the roller coaster with a 7-year-old to restore my belief in life's excitement and awesomeness.