Posts by BenWilson
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After that, I actually had a "how much do I really want to engage with this culture?" moment. From reactions to my ability to speak German abroad, it seems like most of the world feels that way - there was a basic assumption that I must have some German ancestry, or have lived there. It seemed weird, no such assumptions would be made if I was learning French or Italian or Japanese. However, even Germans understood my fluency when I explained that I was privileged in my final school year to have one-on-one lessons with a gorgeous German woman, because every last student had abandoned the subject but me. My fluency bounced to 10 times as good as it had been, since that was practically all we did, spoke German about things in our lives. After that, I had a great deal of difficultly studying the subject in a classroom again, it seemed to me like everything that was fun about the subject had had the life sucked out of it, that as an academic subject it was deliberately dull and dark.
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Muse: Some Link Crack To Tide You Over..., in reply to bmk,
but I think the reason for this was that fairy tales were all we would have been capable of doing.
I'm pretty sure that's why we weren't doing Hesse. But even fairy tales in German are dark. I thought I'd hit one that was going to be fun when it was about a child getting a Hildegaard doll, but it turned into a story about sexual repression, in which the parents cut off the dolls penis, "turning it into a Hilde", and then the child got the wrong idea from this and cut of her little brother's penis. I pretty much stopped attending lectures at that point.
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Hard News: Three months after, in reply to Emma Hart,
It's really fuckiing hard.
It's almost like the city is battling with a potentially life threatening illness, with slow progress of therapy and sudden disastrous reversals, as well as the underlying and constant malaise.
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Muse: Some Link Crack To Tide You Over..., in reply to bmk,
You didn't like Hermen Hesse?
We didn't get to read the good shit. I think that's much more to blame than any real dearth of good german material. And I didn't have a taste for stuff that was so dark back then. By the end of 6 weeks, I'd studied poems about:
-suicide
-child abuse
-middle class depression
-nazism (x 5)
-rapeNot one single love poem, which was about all I could ever see myself actually using poetry for.
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Muse: Some Link Crack To Tide You Over..., in reply to 3410,
o the Germans have a word for "boring-in-a-good-way"?
Nothing to prevent them having one. Stinklangweilig is "so boring it stinks", so I can't see anything wrong with "Gutlangweilig".
Given my good pass in German language and shocking fail in their literature due to finding it stinklangweilig, I'm inclined to think they don't even need a compound word. The word "Gut" quite possible captures everything you need.
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Hard News: Here's one I prepared earlier, in reply to Caleb D'Anvers,
I had had no idea North Buckinghamshire was a Third World Country.
Yeah, surely they have a town water supply there? Why does the place have storage tanks? Is the water coming off the roof? If so, I'd always boil it, no matter what, these days (despite having gone at least 20 years drinking water off the roof at Waiheke without such precautions).
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Hard News: Here's one I prepared earlier, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yeah those eyes look just a little bit psycho. But some punters love that.
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We really can't escape our base feelings can we?
Aw c'mon, I still find it pretty funny to think of all those punters looking out at the alluring come hither eyes of one of our elected representatives when they go for their payday roll in the hay.
Re freaky dreams: A severe case of sunstroke had me locked in a bizarre nightmare in which I was doing math homework over and over, trying to solve some problem. Finally, in my dream I believe I'd cracked it, and woke excitedly to scrawl the answer down, then finally collapsed into decent sleep. In the morning these scrawlings were hilariously indecipherable garbage. But it felt so profound at 4am.
Use sunblock when you ski, seriously. I lost my whole face.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to webweaver,
If we all practice real hard and get those moves nailed we could have a PAS-Glee-style-FlashMob-for-WHAM! and it would be awesome.
Can I play the blonde coach lady?
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Me too. I intend to be doing a lot of them _with_ Emma very soon.
I'm still not over having sneaky smokes. In fact, I expect to be having one in about 15 minutes...good afternoon all, have a great Friday and thanks for what turned out against all my expectations to be quite a good discussion.
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