wonders why undergrads are apparently much worse at remembering their old GSI’s than vice versa, despite the fact that there was 1 of us and 75 of them.

I wanted to put this as my status update on FB just now, but thought it would look really pointed and mean.  Given the fact that a student I had two years ago just sent me a FB message entitled “were you my GSI?”  And I’ve seen other evidence of this – I’ll see an old student at the gym, for example, and not a flicker of recognition will cross their face, and when I say hi it’s like Balaam’s donkey started talking.

This might sound overly-sensitive, but how clueless and unengaged can you be?  I still remember what my TA’s in college looked like.  I looked up to them as demi-gods!

Food for thought

Jealousy always has been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed.  I’ve had many years of recovery and therapy,years filled with intimate and devoted friendships, yet I still struggle.  I know that when someone gets a big slice of pie, it doesn’t mean there’s less for me.  In fact, I know that there isn’t even a pie, that there’s plenty to go around, enough food and love and air.
But I don’t believe it for a second.
I secretly believe there’s a pie.  I will go to my grave brandishing a fork.

–Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually), p. 110

Food (so far)

So kg suggested I write on my adventures in gastronomy over here. I think “struggle to find satisfaction” is more like it. For a while I wanted to write a post called “German food is furchtbar,” but I’ve had a few redeeming experiences to moderate that opinion. (NB: while I sometimes speak of “German food” and “German manners” for brevity’s sake, my knowledge of the culture is far from deep, and doesn’t extend beyond the two southern-most states.)

• I pretty much stay away from traditional German restaurants when I can. Not that I think the cuisine is inherently bad – I like meat, bread, potatoes, cabbage, and have even discovered a love of beets. But it rarely has much flavor, can sometimes be pointlessly greasy, and when I eat out I like the food to be at least as good as what I could make at home. Still, I did have one good experience at a really traditional restaurant that my host family in Baden-Württemberg took me to. I was STARVING, which I’m sure had something to do with how much I enjoyed the food:
  • salad from a salad bar, which offered mostly pre-cooked (yet cold) or pre-dressed, pickled-seeming vegetables, the kind that you see in jars in the olive aisle at the grocery store. I don’t know if the restaurant actually got these from jars, or if they cooked them that way. But they’re not as nasty as they sound – like I said, the beets were awesome.
  • pork medallions in a pepper-cream sauce, which wasn’t anything to write home about, but good, with spätzle (home-made noodles) on the side.
  • But what won my heart is that the owner observed that I was on my way to running out of sauce, and offered me more! I’m the kind of eater that has spaghetti with my sauce rather than the other way around, but this has never happened to me in any restaurant in the States, let alone Germany, which isn’t exactly tops in the customer service department. I wanted to hug him.
• Contrast this experience with a recent visit to another traditional-seeming German restaurant in B-W, while on an excursion sponsored by the “foreign students’ office.” When my friend explained that she was vegetarian and asked the waiter (a salt-of-the-earth-seeming guy in his 50s) if he could recommend anything on the menu, he said simply, “No.” She then pointed to the “cheese toast with fruit” and said “Does that have any meat?” He answered again, “No.” That was the first indication of what we were dealing with. (Strangely to me, my companions, a Swiss and a Dutch woman, didn’t seem to notice how unaccommodating he was. I don’t know if this was different standards or just good manners.) Then all our dishes came at different times, within a range of about 30 minutes. I guess there’s not the expectation (or maybe even the ability?) that the kitchen will time the dishes to come out at the same time. But then one girl from our group at another table’s food didn’t come at all, and, since some of the other dishes had taken so long, it was only clear that the cook had forgotten it/hadn’t received the order till they’d been sitting there for almost an hour. By which time we all had to run for the bus, without having been offered a complimentary soup or anything more than an apology.
• Back to good experiences: the host-“mother” in B-W made some of the best soup I have ever put in my mouth: pumpkin with lots of fresh ginger, garlic, lemon and orange juice. I think it was the first (and only) really strongly-flavored food I’ve had in Germany, allaying my fear that the Volk’s knowledge of spices hasn’t progressed beyond the time of Luther. (Even the Indian food here is bland, though still good.)

The only thing that’s going to be truly hard to get used to is the lack of prepared and convenience foods that I basically live on at home: fake chicken-patties, cornbread mix, appetizing-looking frozen pizzas and dinners, crackers, etc., etc. I’m either going to live on baked beans, grilled cheese and take-out while I’m here, or get used to cooking on a regular basis, from scratch.

That Old Bugbear: Multivocality, Tension, Paradox or Contradiction?

One of the greatest puzzles to Jews is how something seen universally in the Hebrew Bible as good, life-giving, and a sign of freedom and love [i.e., the Law] … could have become, in [Paul]’s mind, a form of slavery, curse, and death, a regime from which one must seek redemption (e.g. Gal. 4).

On the other hand:

“The Christian canon does testify to the benevolent and philanthropic God of creation, Exodus, and even Sinai.  How to integrate this God with Paul’s and John’s is a great problem.  I think it fair to say that to many Jews it appears insurmountable and that Christian Antisemitism seems to be only the flashpoint of an ambivalence deep in the very heart of Christianity.”

- Jon D. Levenson, “Is There a Counterpart in the Hebrew Bible to New Testament Antisemitism?”  Journal of Ecumenical Studies 22 (1985): 247.

The phrase in bold is another one that’s been rattling around in my head since I read it a couple months ago.  (Thanks to DC for sending me the article.)  With it, John Levenson expresses a suspicion that’s been lurking in my mind since my first year of seminary.  Sometimes I wonder if Christianity is untrue, not because I can’t believe in miracles or an all-powerful, personal God or because the idea of sin and punishment offends me … but because I can’t really wrap my mind around what Christian truth IS.  Levenson has, in passing, put his finger on the issue that, try as I might, as simple as some systems of doctrine make it out to be, I can never come to a resting place on.  WHERE DOES “THE LAW” (which can be defined in multiple ways) FIT INTO CHRISTIANITY?  It’s not that I’m obsessed with “how to be saved” in the sense of securing a good place after death – it’s that I don’t really know how to live now, how to please God, how to find true peace and live as though the Kingdom of God were real.  To me that means DOING things, but then Christian friends that I respect (and that seem a lot more godly than me) tell me that I’m living “under the law,” and that I’m too controlled by guilt.  And they’re right.  I continually seem to be lurching toward one extreme or the other (legalism or “cheap grace”), and sometimes I wonder if that’s because Christianity is internally … not just ambivalent, but contradictory.

If I try to defend my tradition, my response to the problem articulated by Levenson (how could a good God give his people a Law which is later revealed to be “slavery” and “a curse”?) is informed, like most everything else, by my  understanding of redemptive history / progressive revelation.  The Law was good and loving and freeing when God gave it … it’s just that the children of Israel as a rule couldn’t really keep it, in the letter or, more importantly, the spirit, because they did not really know God, their hearts were not circumcised (c.f. Ez. 26: 24-32).  After multiple cycles of obedience –> disobedience –> foreign oppression –> repent and cry out to God —> deliverance, God at some point decided to intervene (I’m not an open theist, this is my finite understanding of how he acted in history), and sent Jesus to be what Israel could not by fulfilling the Law, inaugurating God’s Kingdom on earth, propitiating God’s wrath toward sin and imputing his righteousness to sinners in need.  (And other stuff.)  Theoretically at least, I think it’s now possible for people to know God in a way they didn’t before, because the Holy Spirit has now been granted.
So … I feel like Levenson’s question, in a sense, boils down to: “Why is there history?,” or I guess, to be more fair, “How people be Christians in the face of history?”  Answer: Stuff happens.   The choice seems to me to either believe in some kind of impersonal, static force (or no transcendent being at all), or to believe in a personal God who interacts with human history.  If you believe in the latter, not everything is going to be reducible to static principles.

Now that I’ve written the above response to Levenson, I’m trying to remember what my original beef with was … oh yeah:  I think history happens and God has the right to change the rules whenever he wants (not without notification and explanation, of course) … I just can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do now.   *Is* there still a law in Christianity?  I know the cultic and purity laws are pretty much null (excuse me, “fulfilled” – that’s another distinction I tend to lose sight of), but is there still some kind of lower-case law for Christians, a different one or maybe just a scaled-down or more “spiritual” version of the one that was revealed from Sinai?  E.g. “the law of liberty (Jas. 1:25)?”  And how do I obey this and avoid cheap grace / laziness / doing whatever the heck comes naturally, while at the same time laying hold of true grace and extending it to others?

For people like me, who twitched and jerked and cried out in tiny voices, cigarettes were a godsend.

- From David Sedaris, When You are Engulfed in Flames, p. 240.

Observations

In my month of people-watching in Munich and now Baden-Württemberg, I’ve noticed:

• The smells of beer, cologne and B.O. are much more common here.  I’m such a sucker for cologne that, as far as I’m concerned, the good outweighs the bad.
• Pardon my objectifying, but it’s not rare to see couples of so-so-looking women and better-looking men.  You almost never see that in the States.
• I also see a lot more old and middle-aged couples holding hands, and even kissing!
• Women keep on dressing trendily into their 30s, 40s and 50s.  Once I would have looked down on that as Euro-trashy, but now it makes the thought of getting older less depressing, like maybe I don’t have to cross into this colorless, frumpy no-man’s land à la Anne Elliott in Persuasion.  (I’d highly recommend that book, by the way, to any woman who’s struggling with the prospect of losing her “bloom.”)
• As with every other place I’ve ever been, the received notion of what constitutes an individual’s personal space is apparently much narrower.  People don’t say “excuse me” when they squeeze past you in public.  And almost every time I leave what I consider to be a decent interval between me and the person in front of me in line, someone else zips ahead of me to the cash register.  I’ve fantasized about learning how to say in German “Did you *mean* to cut in front of me in line?,” but should probably just learn to stand closer.

I’m also learning through experience that just because people are less polite in public doesn’t mean that they don’t give a crap about others.  People just don’t smile for no reason here, the culture doesn’t  mandate coming across as nice at all times.   But someone who seems put-out and stone-faced in one context might offer to help me with my luggage an hour later.   I think seeing this has helped me to be happier here than when I was in Germany the first time.