I'm not thankful

I'm not thankful that your life is a mess and mine is perfect. I'm not thankful that I have friends, and you're alone. I'm not thankful that you're passed out in the cold, drunk, and I'm warm and cozy in my house enjoying an afternoon with my husband. I'm not thankful that you spent your money on cheap wine, when it should have gone for food. It scares me to see you like this. I thought I was well acquainted with loneliness, but maybe you know it better.

You're not the first person I've seen this way. The old man at the bar that was alone with a fancy bottle of champagne . I saw him toasting to no one in particular. Or the man at the train station that was teetering dangerously close to falling onto the tracks.

I am grateful for the man who called an ambulance. I'm grateful for my husband that rushed downstairs and made sure there was help on the way. I'm grateful that for a few hours you're in a warm hospital being taken care of. But seeing you makes it harder for me to ignore the hurting and pain in this world and honestly it's hard to be grateful when I know tomorrow might be the same for you.

I guess my name is Alisha now

When I was in kid I was really shy. One time when I was 16 I took a couple classes at a college. I was really nervous about it and was glad when I met one nice lady. When I introduced myself to her I told her my name, "Alyssa." She called me Alisha for the rest of the semester. No big deal. Then she started telling everyone else in the class my name was Alisha. OK, so I'll just be Alisha for a semester. The last day of that semester. We had to do a group discussion. One person had to write down the names of all the people in the group. When I told them how to spell my name, another girl said realized that they had called me the wrong thing for 4 months. Yes, I'm that awkward. I was reminded of how awkward I was by these "Awkward Penguin" memes.

One time when I was about 14 I dropped my favorite plum lip gloss. Someone announced in front of a big group of people that it had been lost. Anyone want to claim it? No way did I want to claim that I had lost my lip gloss in front of all those people. So I didn't get my lovely lip gloss back.

That was then. I've improved so much since then...or have????

It seems that I've regressed living in another country and learning another language.

So here they are "Awkward Penguin" that I can relate to today:

There are very important words I avoid saying, because I don't want to sound so American. Like the word for five and right. I have a limited German vocabulary and I'm avoiding all words that start with the letter "r" and have an "ü"

That plan hasn't been working out so well.

My husband says I don't speak loudly enough. He thinks that's the reason people don't understand me sometimes, not my accent. I hope he's right,but on the other hand it terrifies me to think I might be yelling at people if I raise my voice.

This has happened to me a lot of times too. More so in the past.

In Germany, it's more like I don't understand what they said. Nod and smile.

Lets face it, I could be the poster child for the awkward penguin. Feel like you could relate to any of those?

Here's where the pics are from. There's tons more. http://www.quickmeme.com/Socially-Awkward-Penguin/popular/

Trashcan

On Sunday we put out our paper trashcan. The whole day we kept reminding each other to do it. I even wrote it on a post it and stuck it on the bathroom mirror. I grabbed the office trash and noticed an envelope with our names and addresses on it.

Me: You don't throw away trash with our names and addresses on it.

Z: Why not? It's sitting outside our house, so they already know where we live and our name is on the trashcan.

Me: I don't know. I'm just going to rip it up anyways.

Z: And who's going to dig through our trash?

As we wheeled it out to the curb we looked around a realized we were the only ones that remembered to put our trash out. Good for us. Oh wait, the next day was a holiday. No one was going to come on and pick it up till Tuesday. Not wanting to walk 100 feet back to the trash area, we decided to leave it there one extra day. I know shame on us.

Next day on our way out we noticed our trashcan was no where to be seen. Ok, Monday was a holiday, so yeah obviously our trash didn't get taken out, but our trashcan was missing! It took everything in me not to point out how right I was about ripping up personal info. I think I lasted about an hour before I pointed it out. Not bad, right? So I was a little freaked out over it. This is a city owned trashcan, so if it's lost not only would I have to pay for a new one, but I'd have to talk on the phone in German. On second thought, Z would have to talk on the phone in German.

Before we did any of that though, we thought we had better look around and see if anyone was just messing with us. By this time everyone else had started putting out their trashcans. So there were about 50 trashcans that all looked a like that we had to figure out if one of them was ours. Z. decided it would be best if he dressed like a homeless person while we did this. So he put on his holey jeans and t-shirt he's had since '94 and we started walking up to every trash can on our street and staring intensely at each one. "No, this one looks too dirty to be ours." or "No I think ours is smaller." Eventually we found our trashcan not too far from our house. The moral of the story is, when in Germany follow the rules, do not put your trash out a day early, or else drunk people will teach you a lesson.

And the Forschungsergebnisse of the past 3 years is:

I'm kind of trying to learn a little Italian, when I say kind of learning that means I log into a free program once every 6 months and relearn how to say basic greetings. I'm trying to learn because I know some people in Italy and I'm going there and I always think in theory it's nice when you can communicate a bit and not make your friends ask where a toilet is for you. On top of the twice a year online studying of Italian I also have a little phrase book. When I first came to Germany I had this phrase book that I really liked, so I bought another one in Italian. As I was reading through the Italian, I was struggling to say even one word. I was like, oh my gosh, this is like a foreign language or something. I know, I know, it is a foreign language, but that was the first time I realized that German isn't a foreign language anymore. That's when I started to remember what it was like when I first started to learn German. I would look at that phrase book and barely be able to get through a word. Although in my defense, German does have words that are ridiculously long and should just be a sentence. For example today I learned the word Forschungsergebnisse, which means results of research. But anyways, German is familiar, I'm actually pretty comfortable talking here and getting around is cake. But Italy is another story. I haven't dedicated time to Italian and it is in no way a familiar or comforting language. But someday, maybe, just maybe, I will learn a bit of that beautiful language.

Meeting New People...Breath...

I went to someones house for dinner yesterday. I didn't know them. They were Z's friends. I was so nervous. I didn't know what we would talk about and I suddenly forgot all of my German manners so I whipped out a German customs book and read through the short paragraph about visiting a German's house. I mean seriously you would think I haven't been in a hundred German houses. But I guess it had been awhile since I'd visited a strangers house. So we ran across the street because we forgot to buy flowers earlier, settled on some nice chocolates and waited for them to pick us up. (we don't have a car and apparently they lived pretty far away.)

So we walked in the house. I met the wife and asked in perfect German if I should take my shoes off. She said I could leave them on. I was surprised. I guess I didn't need to put on nice socks after all. Then we sat on the couch and they were chatting a bit. And they served quiche! Yum! And we played Skip-Bo and I won, cause for some reason that's the only game Z and I played together for the first 5 years of our marriage.

Oh and the advice I got from the crappy customs book told me that they would not give us a tour of their house and don't offer to help with the food. They did give us a tour of the house, so now I'm wondering maybe I should do everything opposite of what the book says.

An Excuse to Just to Be

Today I played frisbee with two teenagers from my church. It was really cloudy, the grass was way too tall and wet. It didn't take long till our feet were soaking wet. The bottom part of my jeans was really wet too. I mean honestly, it wasn't the best game of frisbee. We wanted to play ultimate frisbee, but had to settle for frisbee golf, cause there was only four of us. So after playing frisbee for an hour we sat down on a log together. We were just talking about the two weeks of camp that we had just gotten back from, about future plans the boys had. I was sitting there with soaking wet feet and I just thought for a second, "I want a picture of this moment. I want to remember this." The weather wasn't great, the game was only so so, the hour we spent together just talking was great. Sometimes I think we plan these events just so we have the excuse to be together. I think it's worth all the planning.

This post makes up for me not writing anything for the past two months. Enjoy.

I have been ignoring my blog. Why, cause I'm a busy person. And because my husband is sitting next to me clicking on stuff on reddit and saying look at this cute penguin. I swear I can barely type up a sentence. Lets see, in the past two months I've done pretty much the same stuff I do every week, except I did go back America for 2 weeks. We went to a wedding, which I missed, because my nephew wanted to show everyone that we was 2 years old and that being 2 actually is terrible. So I took him out. (hold on I'm looking at a picture of a cat playing poker.) My aunt visited me in Germany. She took me to a zoo where I petted a lemur. I've had tons of visitors, so I've been showing people around. We had some Americans visit our church. I volunteered to show them around our town, cause it's really pretty. It ended up raining that day, but it's Germany, so that's really nothing new. So we were walking them through the town and they were so miserable in their cloth Tom shoes. (not made for rain) So anyways, I forget stuff about american culture. Like when you stay in a hotel across the street from wal-mart you still have to drive there, cause there's no traffic lights for pedestrians and also no sidewalks. And I've recently realized that Americans don't walk in bad weather. Yes I'm sure there's exceptions. Like for a romantic scene at the end of a movie, or when you're having a mud fight, or when you have to park really far away from the mall. So if you come and visit me I'll probably make you miserable and walk a million kilometers in the rain. And you'll hate Germany, and I'll have no idea why.

Ok I really shouldn't post this, cause one it's late and two I'm going through that phase of culture shock where you love everything about the culture you're in and get annoyed with your own birth culture. So, if you stay with me thanks. I'm going to get through this. And besides I always love American food the mostest.

At the safari where I pet a lemur, there was a monkey cage where if you came in with a backpack the monkey would jump on your back and open it like a professional pick pocket. It was awesome...I'm probably only saying that, cause I didn't have a backpack. But then again I didn't get to hold a monkey on my back. Pluses and negatives.