My Christmas Crutch

*spoiler* -- sappy loser alert!

For an atheist, I'm awfully into Christmas. (Don't be fooled by the fact I run around at work proclaiming that "Gott ist groß." I am just following the lead of a certain co-worker... Hello, co-workers!) Although I'm not one of those weirdos who insists on singing Christmas carols in July, November is the hardest month for me as it's the month that's almost-but-not-quite the Christmas season. If I wouldn't be as socially ostracised as I already am, the tree would totally be up on November 1st. As it is, I try to wait until the end of Rem Day. Considering I barely make it to the eleventh of November, imagine how hard it was for me to be married to an American to insist I had to wait until Turkey Day to put up the tree! (Alas, not Canuck Turkey Day, but the American clusterfuck more commonly referred to as Thanksgiving... at the end of November.)

Anyhoo, my obsession with Christmas didn't always used to be this bad. My first Christmas away from home when I was 20 included a threadbare tree with ornaments I purchased at Walmart. (My mom tried unsuccessfully to hide her disdain considering she uses top of the line Christmas decorations handmade from Germany that she inherited from my grandmother.) The year after was my first Christmas in Krautland, and my first completely alone. I decorated a potted plant (and a fake one, at that). It was sad.

For my first Christmas with my ex and my second abroad, I was determined to nest (as most housewives seem to do), and decided that I was going to do a proper Christmas with a proper Christmas tree, full of proper Christmas ornaments I purchased at the Weihnachtsmarkt in Stuttgart. Aside from my mom's taste in German ornaments, I also seemed to inherit her crappy mood while decorating the tree. By crappy mood, I mean get the fuck out of the way because she is gonna rip your head off while she hangs the garland. (There's a reason I forgo garland more often than not. Hanging lights is bad enough as it is.) The only thing I didn't inherit is her love for real trees. Actually, that's not true. I love real trees (particularly the scent), but there is no way I can keep a tree alive for eight weeks while I can barely keep my houseplants alive. Fake it is.

Believe it or not, though, my frustrations whilst decorating the tree and tree preferences weren't actually supposed to be featured in this blog post.

The thing is, I've spent the majority of the last five Christmases either completely alone or without family. It's a normal occasion that only one or two people (if anyone) see my Christmas tree, and that's saying something, since it goes up mid-November.

One of the reasons I'm so crazy about Christmas is that Christmas is my expatriate crutch.

People don't expect expatriates who don't fly home for Christmasto be well-adjusted.
People expect expatriates to be lonely at Christmas.
People expect lonely expatriates to drink a lot around Christmas.
People expect lonely expatriates to be homesick during the holiday season.

All of these things suit me just fine.

Don't get me wrong -- there is little better about Christmas in Germany than Glühwein at the Weihnachtsmarkt with the Mädels or browsing through the booths trying to find something interesting to send my parents back in Canada. The only thing that's better is setting up and taking down my tree in private (usually mid-November and on New Year's Eve, respectively).

Call me sappy, but my Christmas tree does a good job of telling some stories of the past nine years since I first started collecting ornaments. I have ornaments from my mom, my dad, my ex. Ornaments from when I was happy, when I was trying to make a home for myself for the first time, or when I was crushed. I turn on either Snowed In (don't judge -- it's a childhood thing) or the Christmas album I got from one of my best friends last year, open a bottle of wine, and for those hours when I'm either putting up or taking down the tree, I'm with family and I feel like it's finally okay to just miss the life I gave up.

I don't like Christmas because I believe in God or because I like consumerism. Actually, the second one is a lie. I like buying things, normally for myself. Around Christmas, however, I get my rocks off on buying things for people. Consumerism all the way.

I like Christmas because it represents a feeling that used to be so important to me as a child, youth and young adult that I don't have any more. So, for one month of the year (plus two weeks, if you count from the time the tree goes up), I can pretend that things are good, that I don't second-guess my choice to come here (twice) every day, and that the people most important to me aren't so fucking far away.

Buaha!

"Leider keine Karte"

Alas, I grew up in a world where it was normal to pay for a purchase of $2.43 with a debit or *gasp* a credit card. I stopped carrying around cash around the time I was twelve or thirteen, and used debit for all my purchases.

Some people will tell you that carrying around loads of cash is dangerous, if for no other reason than that you have no real way of getting your money back if you're robbed at gunpoint. You'd think this happens all the time for how often this is used as justification for paying with a card.

For me, I don't own enough cash to warrant anyone robbing me at gunpoint. Even if I carried all the cash I have in my bank account with me, I'd probably get my face blown off for only being able to offer my robber a cool 2€. "SPINNST DU?!" *bang bang*

No, my reason is much more subtle.

I hate change.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't just hate change for the typical reasons like all that coin weighing down my pockets or the fact Krauts have this awesome habit of taking twelve years to pay for their goods at DM because they need to count their seventeen cents out exactly. (Speaking of which -- why is that okay, yet me paying for something worth 4€ in 50c increments gets me a dirty stare?) Anyhoo, my reason is that I hate pennies. 5c coins are at least halfway useful. But 2c coins? 1c coins? The mere fact that both of them exist? The only time I'm pulling those puppies out is when I'm at the bakery and am buying a bun for 16c, and that's the last of what's leftover in my wallet before the first of the month.

Most annoying, though, is the fact I don't always get this far and often end up dumping the one and two cent pieces into a big jar a couple of times per month, letting them waste their copper selves into oblivion. Sure, that whole euro I've accumulated over the last year and a half isn't really that much of a waste. Nevertheless, every time I dump another six cents into that jar, I feel like crying at the fact that, had I been paying with EC card, I wouldn't have these First World problems.

*** As an interesting aside, I have actually been known to buy more than I need in order to bump my purchase up to an amount that seems reasonable to use a card for. It makes my fretting over that odd euro in my coin jar all the more laughable, really.

MUSLIM AFRICAN RE-ELECTED TO RUIN CHAMPION OF THE FREE WORLD *cough*

Thank you, majority of Americans, for giving me good news when I woke up. My liver thanks you in advance since I no longer have to start a rape-baby-gift-from-God-and-no-longer-in-the-binder-because-I'm-standing-in-the-kitchen drinking campaign.

PS -- I am fully aware of Obama's shortcomings. I don't actually like him as a president in the first place. But, in comparison to Mittens, well...

Back "Home"

As I've mentioned about a million freeking times, the word "home" is awfully fraught with complications and hidden meanings for a word that is a part of one's basic English vocabulary.

This evening, like every time I return from Allgäu, Stuttgart, or anywhere were they speak a dialect I can actually stand (don't judge, you), I exit my tram, walk down my inevitably rainy street, and wish more than anything that I was back south. The more often I complete this ritual, the more clear it becomes to me that I shrug on NRW like a heavy coat laden with issues that I just can't wait to take off again next month.

So, in a meek attempt at protest, I now text family and friends with "I'm 'home'" to let them know I'm safe and sound, at least physically if not emotionally.

PS -- I don't know when or how often I'll be posting in the next little while. Should you know me personally, you know I'm going through more than one crisis right now, the biggest of which is occurring this week. Maybe I'll talk about it one day when I'm ready to speak publicly about it, but probably not. If my grammar and spelling is worse than usual, it probably means I'm blogging drunk. This will particularly be the case if Romney starts ruining America (which, crisis itself, is unrelated to my shiznat).

The Point of No Return

I have two computers. You see, I have this really old notebook and a semi-new netbook. I got my netbook when I was fed up getting the blue screen of death on my older notebook. No matter what I did, my system kept crashing and I feared for the term papers I was writing.

I'm hardly a computer genius. Aside from wiping everything and re-installing Windows fresh, I neither knew what else to try, nor was interested in spending the money to blow a fresh breath of life into a laptop that was over three years old.

Enter my netbook.

I originally bought it because of its battery life. (Nine hours, HELLO!) That being said, I couldn't get over how slow it was. As in I would prefer dial-up slow. Still, making myself a coffee while Facebook would load was nothing compared to the fact Word would freeze anytime a document I was working on hit the twelve-page mark. (Errrm: how am I supposed to write a Master's thesis or *cough* a doctoral dissertation, then?)

It must be said that, in the meantime, I was still using my old laptop as a DVD player since I don't have a TV. Not being connected to the internet seemed to resolve the crashing problem, so I just went on my merry way with that.

I'm not really sure why I decided to try out Linux. I suppose it was a mixture of boredom and hearing coworkers and people I know rave on and on about how amazingly wonderful the whole thing is. So, I went an installed Wubi to see what all the hype was about.

It could just be a point-of-view thing, but somehow, if something is not working on Ubuntu, I see it as some sort of let me figure you out challenge, and I don't run around yelling "F-U Windows, F-U!!"

Yeah, it's probably just the attitude I go into it with.

Still, the best thing about Ubuntu is that, all the things that drove me crazy about my notebook that I couldn't figure out (mostly to do with user settings) were suddenly fixable in Ubuntu. (And Ubuntu is awesome for computer dunces like me who likely couldn't do anything more than a few basic things with the Terminal if their lives depended on it.)

I haven't been playing around with it for that long (maybe a month or so), but I finally took the plunge and did a full install of Ubuntu to get rid of Windows.

So far, so good.

That said, I suppose I'm not entirely at the point of no return considering I've still got Windows 7 running on my netbook.

Nevertheless, my primary system is now Ubuntu, and I'm happy as a clam.

(Why are clams happy, anyway? Did anyone ask them?)

So there.

Kaaaaaarl, das tötet Leute!!

 

Mein liebes Pupu,

du fehlst mir. 

-Blogger trying to cope with mega-crazy Finnish pangs these days