Amen, and amen

My friend and fellow blogger Vashty’s response to the proposed smoking ban in our town, which officers in our grad student government have decided to make a priority of supporting.  (WhoTF are these killjoys!?!  I know most non-smokers don’t like to be in smoky bars, which of course I can’t blame them for, but that elected grad student representatives would see smoking bans as part of their mandate is shocking.)

Dear Friends,

Personally, I am pretty annoyed to see that this is a primary concern of several [graduate student government] officers for the 2008-9 academic year, as we continue to struggle with the University over the continuous enrollment policy, and as we humanities students suffer under the five-year funding limit from [the school of graduate studies] (and all the other things that make graduate school a stressful time of our lives).

[Our city] has already got both non-smoking bars as well as many with huge non-smoking sections …. I really hope that the culture of [our city] this year and in coming years does not come to include a ritual of fighting crowds several times per bar night in order to enjoy the winter weather with a cigarette.  The availability of both smoking and non-smoking seating in bars … is apparently driven by demand, and I don’t want to see student government put pressure on local government to intervene in this.

…

Perhaps this anti-smoking platform is so safely espoused right now due to the shortage of graduate students in the humanities who are in [student government] …; perhaps we smoke more than the others.  I can’t imagine graduate school without smoking, or rather, I really couldn’t stand it when I tried as it is such an integrated part of my thought process as well as a reliever of stress.  It is too bad that the wishes and needs of smokers will be overlooked by people who claim to be working in our best interests.  I think that they want to kick us out of bars which they do not, themselves, operate, and make us stand in the snow.

…  It is not entirely clear to me if I am jumping the gun here.  Division II Representative ——– states his goal to be “banning smoking in local Ann Arbor bars,” which I find appalling.  On the other hand, President ——— states somewhat vaguely that she sees “promoting smoke-free bars and clubs” as a key issue.  If this means compiling and widely disseminating information on smoke-free bars and clubs so that nonsmoking graduate students who are new to the area can find them, I’m all for it.  Let non-smokers have their fun, too!  Just leave mine alone – I have so little of it I can’t part with any more.

Hope some of you guys will voice your distaste for an actual smoking ban.  Our lives are too grim and our city too cold.

Loving Starbucks; or, My American Consumerism and Worship of Convenience Rears its Ugly Head

Today I walked to three Starbucks in Munich before I found one that had a single empty seat.  In the States, I’m as irritated by Starbucks’s ubiquity and supportive of non-chains as the next liberal.  But I’m no longer going to listen sympathetically to people who bash the presence of Starbucks abroad, because they provide things that are hard-to-impossible to find anywhere else.  Yes, Munich has a rich coffee house culture, but they’re not really hospitable to extensive study sessions when they’re open.  By and large I’ve found two types of places to get coffee in Bavaria: 1) cafes, where you have to deal with a waiter, and 2) tiny, Fisher-Price looking  bakery chains that don’t even have seats, just tall tables at which customers stand to wolf down their purchases.
I know of two exceptions to this rule apart from Starbucks, a place in Bamberg and another American-style chain with a location near my dorm.  If anyone can recommend any more, in or outside Munich, let me know!

On women who love rules and certainty

I can’t stop laughing at these lines from Death in a Tenured Position, a feminist academic murder mystery O. gave me as a going-away present:

The horrible fact is…that Janet [the murdered Harvard professor] would probably have been happier in a harem, with only occasional visits from the sultan and all the hierarchies clearly marked.  She’s one of those women who like the world to rest steady beneath her glass, and the poor thing was destined to live and die in times when one couldn’t even hold the glass, let alone focus it. (p. 125)

socializing

Today I went out to dinner with some people from my class I hadn’t spoken with before today. I haven’t been making much of an effort to get to know people, what with being exhausted and deciding that, now that I’m  29, I’m off the hook re: fitting in with mainstream, fun-loving youth.  But thankfully this really friendly guy from Greece named Seraphim (love the name!!), who occupies a sort of class-clown slot in our class, struck up a conversation today and then after class invited me to join the group he was going out with.  (I don’t often meet people who are attention-loving and really social, yet truly kind – what a blessing to be the passive recipient of social effervescence!)  There were two other Greeks, one Venezuelan, and one Spaniard.  I’m really impressed with my class and the people here in general – they seem mature and serious and polite, and thankfully the place isn’t deluged with American undergrads.  There are two undergrads in my class but they go to Westpoint and obviously have their heads screwed on straight.

Seraphim really surprised me…he’s “in sales;” lives in Zürich, seems really easy-going  and care-free and even worldly (e.g., he was the one who reacted most enthusiastically when our teacher “warned” us about the naked sunbathers in the English Garden).  And when I asked him about his name, he said something like “It means angel, but I’m more like the devil.”  But while I went to the bathroom at dinner time, apparently a discussion about politics and the church and came up, because when I got back to my seat, the guy from Spain was saying that it’s really divided because most people are liberal but the church has a lot of influence and is really conservative, e.g. on the matter of gay marriage.  He said something like, “I can’t accept a religion that doesn’t accept gay people.”  And Seraphim asked, of all things, “And do you think God accepts it?”  Man! I haven’t heard anyone throw down the gauntlet that hard in a long time.  He was also saying things like “Man has a soul, and he must nourish it.  We are not only flesh.”  He even set someone else straight when they said that abstaining from meat on Wednesday and Friday has nothing to do with God.  This guy pulled no punches.  He wasn’t rude or weird though (I thought).  Though I felt concerned for the Spaniard, i.e. hoping he wasn’t feeling freaked out and alienated, and basically agree with him that gays should be allowed to marry, it was also refreshing to witness a religious discussion that had nothing to do with me, and to hear someone talking that had not had the religious assumptions pounded out of him.  Greece must be a different world.  Or maybe Seraphim is just unusual (since the other Greeks were keeping quiet.  It may be relevant that they’re from Athens and he’s from the country).

I just hope I didn’t offend them irrevocably when I admitted to not liking Athens….

Food for Thought

Gerald May’s definition of addiction, if I remember it right from Lisa Graham McMinn’s book, has come to me again and again since I read it months ago: “An attachment to that which does not satisfy.”

If I think about it, nothing ultimately satisfies, in the sense that every thing or one I’ve ever cared about or looked to is imperfect, or just finite. Still, there are some attachments that pale easily, because they’re not exactly thrill-imparting (like prayer), and their short-term yield isn’t very obvious. And then others that I return to over and over again compulsively, either outwardly or inwardly, long after they have ceased to provide anything like satisfaction – they just leave the sickly sweet ghost of a taste, like Edmund’s famous Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that demands satisfaction and leaves everything else lackluster in comparison. Addiction seems like a good description for that kind of desire.

Munich Revisited

I am liking Munich so much better than I expected to! Why did I ever choose a small town to study German in three years ago? (Because I thought people would be less likely to speak English, but still. My choice of a glorified retirement village on a lake seems laughable now!) And why did I feel sick of Munich after a few day-trips in 2005, and faintly disappointed when I learned that it was my only choice for a Goethe-Institut program this year? This city rules! It’s chock full of religion and history and ornate golden-hued architecture, in honor of which I plan to learn how to use my digital camera. And everyone keeps saying how laid-back and friendly the people here are compared to the rest of Germany (which is sad), so I’d better enjoy it while I can. And, I have to admit, it’s nice to be close to Starbucks and bookstores and multiple movie theaters, and able to breeze by a top-notch department store (Galeria Kaufhof) literally on the way to class if I need something like a notebook. The Institute is just a couple blocks from what seems like the liveliest spot in the city, Karlsplatz/Stachus, on one of the streets that form a ring around the old city.

It could simply be that I didn’t enjoy Munich years ago because I first visited it with non-like-minded travelers, which can sometimes dampen a place’s appeal. The possibility occurred to me yesterday, however, that I’ve been in a low-grade funk since I left seminary, which might finally be ending.