Photo of the Day

Thank you, coffee-brewing person. This little flower was the third best thing that happened to me today. Of course on most days it would have been the best.

Dies Irae

Rage, wrath. The emotion so awesome they had to give it two names. In honor of anger, we are declaring October 22nd the new annual day of assholes getting what’s coming to them. Go on, give yourself the day off! Unless you’re an asshole. In which case, you might want to prepare yourself for a day of atomic wedgies, or worse.

Photo of the Day

Clever demo company.

Zip Drive Added for Scale

Just in case you can’t tell, this is a frighteningly large bug. It might have been dead, which would explain why it didn’t rip my face off, as I assume all giant bugs will. I mean, what else are giant bugs for?

Photo of the Day

Kim Zolchiak during her “modeling” days.

Meine alte Stelle

So. Hab wohl gesehen daß meine alte Stelle schon wieder gefüllt worden ist. Ich kann wohl nichts sagen an wem diese Stelle aufnimmt, ausser, Viel Glück. Du wirst es wohl brauchen.

An meinem ehemaligen Chef: So, du hast “gewonnen” wenn du’s so sagen kannst. Mir ist’s völlig egal, und ausserdem, bin ich eigentich glücklich, daß ich dir das geben konnte, denn offensichtlich hast du nix ausserdem in deinem Leben worauf du dich freuen kannst.

Und ausserdem: leck mich, du Wichsloch.

Slumdog Millionaire

I can’t say Slumdog Millionaire was the worst movie I’ve ever seen, because the number one worst movie of all time will forever be Battlefield Earth. Let’s say it was the third worst movie ever. I’m going to hold the #2 spot open for a while. Maybe I’ll eventually decide to put The Phantom Menace in that spot.

I, for one, was rather disgusted by the “woman in trouble” narrative. But I was bothered, too, by the fact that the lead actor was just so thoroughly unlikable. That and Danny Boyle filmed half the movie in a style more commonly suited to music videos. If you don’t know what I’m talking about: note the oversaturated color palette and the time-lapse sequences.

Not to mention the two lead actors’ abject lack of chemistry; add to that the sad, but hard to swallow story that they were always in love. And also, the notion that everything is predestined, rather than the notion–and this might have been more interesting–that in a country still so bogged down in its caste-system roots, an undereducated man from the slums might actually have the wherewithal to pull himself out of the mire. That would have been better than the tale of lovers’ destiny.

Ick. Meh. Barf.

In Special English, Part II

In early January I am to begin attending the International School of Basel, situated, in fact, outside the city, near our new apartment. A visit of the institution leaves us somewhat unimpressed. They have, for instance, no science labs, but share space with a local secondary school. This causes my parents to exchange a look. Otherwise it’s a normal school, stairs, bulletin boards draped with colorful flyers and announcements, quiet classrooms. It’s the winter holiday, after all.

I hear my mother telling my father how unimpressed she is. Not something you want to hear your mother saying about your education, but for now, my days are free, and, like all other adolescents, I know how to enjoy my liberty.

We have no television. In the evenings we play cards or work on our puzzle. We’ve brought a computer, and sometimes we type letters on it that, unable to print anything, we do not send. My dad buys a cheap short-wave radio that makes noises like airplanes taking off and landing when you’re tuning it. We listen to whatever we can get: the BBC, mostly, a funny program on the weekends called “My Word” where a panel of three donnish sounding men and women answer questions about difficult words for points, and another called “In a Minute,” where a similar group must give impromptu oration about randomly-assigned subjects, while trying not to pause or repeat themselves. We listen and laugh, not caring that the both shows are scripted, or that the applause is pre-recorded.

We listen to the news. Thatcher, Reagan, Gorbachev. Stories from obscure parts of the globe, once former colonies belonging to the British Empire. News from the pink bits, my father calls it.

When the weather shifts we lose the broadcast, and have to go hunting for it, the static roaring, until we hear familiar accents. One evening we come across Radio Moscow, though, because the news anchors have perfect British accents, we don’t grasp this until the end of a program discussing the proper preparation of borscht, which, according to the announcer, should always be served with a portion of meat.

Other nights all we can get is the Voice of America. None of us care for it. In a way we’ve been trying to leave America behind, have been trying to forget that Ronald Reagan, that awful clown, is our president. Bad enough that our Perhaps worse are the programs delivered in what they call “special English,” wherein the broadcaster speaks more slowly and distinctly, possibly giving the non-native listener time to look up the occasional unfamiliar word without missing too much. The stories offend us, their simplicity, the condescension of speaking slowly, the way it echoes a person—an American—saying the same words, only louder, in the hopes of being understood by a foreigner.

For years, whenever one of us doesn’t understand the other, we will say to them, “Let me do that again, in Special English this time.”

We have no sympathy for people who complain about the food, even though it’s a little strange, a few items we crave aren’t to be had, or have no suitable equivalents. We have to learn to do without; and some things, as they are everywhere, are just plain bad. My mother buys a liter-bottle of salad dressing, which, once poured onto lettuce, forces us to throw away an entire bag of greens and tip the rest of the foul, oily substance down the sink. We joke about this some other night over dinner, asking each other whether it was proper to dispose of such a toxic substance that way. Mostly we simply face disappointments: an expensive slice of pizza, bought from the delicatessen at Globus that’s gone soggy; vermicelli, a dessert that to my young eyes looks like strands of ice-cream, but, in fact, tastes more like the meaning of the word, little worms.

I’m often not hungry, especially not at breakfast. Nerves. I’ve always been an anxious boy, and often given to gloomy spells. Or perhaps I haven’t been, not until our family moved three times in two and a half years. Maybe the year in South Carolina is what did it, the trip to Washington, D.C., where a roomful of kids pulled off my pants and threw me out into the hallway of our hotel, which doesn’t really leave you predisposed to trusting or liking people.

Adjustments. It’s not terrible, but we have trouble figuring things out. There are, we’re told, people who can help: the American Womens’ Club of Basel, an organization called Network.

My mother goes to a meeting of the AWC, some sort of cooking class. I imagine her in a kitchen heaped with copper pots, onions and garlic stranded together, birds hanging from the ceiling. Think Julia Child’s kitchen in France. Not quite so grand, according to my mother on her return.

She doesn’t want to go back. That’s fine. In some way, we’re here to get away from Americans, or at least that’s how we behave, because there aren’t many around anyhow.

Later we hear bizarre stories about the AWC, some of which are probably true, others that must—one would hope—be rumors or exaggerations. Someone says that they get together and drive en masse to the PX at an Army base somewhere in southern Germany where they stock up on individually wrapped slices of cheese, Velveeta, and just about anything else you might want from the range of Kraft products. We hear more things about them: they smuggle other items back into the country, things like Clorox, other American cleaning products that can’t be bought in Switzerland. Stranger stories, even. For instance, there is a rumor circulating that some of them have been buying Crisco at a sex shop just across the German border, where apparently it’s being sold for a much different purpose.

Perhaps we judge too harshly. But our problems adjusting often have little to do with missing home.

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga is a pretty strange person, but in some weird way I think she may actually be a really good musician. I’m probably going to get a Brookline Stroller Steamer for that, but whatever.

And no, you don’t want to know what a Brookline Stroller Steamer is.

In Special English, Part I

The middle three seats in business class. The coveted windows out of reach, and not being put to good use by the man, who by the time the plane is taxiing toward the runway, has covered his eyes with a blindfold and gone to sleep. His salt and pepper head jostles back and forth in front of the bright glass. I am between my parents, my mother terrified of flying, my father and I making fun of her. The plane accelerates, lifts off, and begins its climb; it’s still light out during drinks service, but dark by the time the air crew is serving dinner.

My father is drinking Kirsch. “Have some,” he says, perhaps a little too relaxed, “It will help you sleep.”

Intercontinental flights head east at night, arriving at their destination early in the morning. Ahead of us in the darkness: Europe. Switzerland. After a bad movie featuring Peter Falk, the only entertainment for those who cannot sleep is in watching a tiny plane glide slowly over the Atlantic toward Land’s End and the Brittany coast. The cabin lights are dimmed, but not off. The plane bounces in turbulence, and suddenly I remember a movie I once saw based on a John Irving novel I still haven’t read, The Hotel New Hampshire, I think, where mother and son disappear into a pulse of orange light, the only artifact recovered from their deaths is their stuffed former pet, Sorrow.

I wake my mother up and say something to her, and she mumbles back angrily that I ought to let her sleep.

On the ground in Zurich, wondering how the cats are faring in the hold of the plane, if the feline Valium we’ve given them is helping. A connecting flight, my parents in a different row, I slowly eat the chocolate coin handed out by the stewardess, while watching low mountains covered in trees sweep past underneath the clouds. Roads like veins in the countryside, chalk cliffs, rivers, a nuclear power plant.

Basel. Here we are, the airport the same as it was in late July, only now bathed in damp winter light. Customs, then, beyond the checkpoint, my father’s new boss, a buoyant middle-aged man, named Doug, now dead. With him, a woman my parents’ age—not his wife, but someone who works with or for him. Iris. Our cats howling on the luggage cart, both of them stoop to poke their fingers through the grate, to say hello.

We’re in Doug’s car. The cats are going somewhere else, something called a Tierheim—which I vaguely understand to mean an “animal home.” No pets allowed in the temporary lodgings. We arrive at the temporary apartment after a drive of less than fifteen minutes.

How did we get there? Are there stairs? An elevator? It escapes me now. I am barely upright by the time we arrive, and after taking a somewhat disappointed look at the grim entry hall, off which my room is to be found, I am in bed, underneath a duvet—only the second time I’ve heard this expression, and it still sounds vaguely obscene. Sleep.

Our sleep cycles run counter to one another. When I’m awake, my parents aren’t, and when they are, I am exhausted, which is a problem, because they have things they want and need to do, and I’m the only one with any German.

Only it isn’t much use. Out in the streets, everything seems just beyond the reach of what I’m able to decipher. Ads for products I’ve never heard of: Henniez, Passuger, Sugo, Migros. What the hell is Nimm’s leichter! supposed to mean? A photograph of an athletic man and woman, apparently having the time of their lives in some alpine pasture don’t make the intended meaning any clearer. Take it easier, is what I would tell my younger self, That’s what it’s supposed to mean. Don’t you get it? It’s a joke.

Younger self doesn’t. Having learned to read at age five or six, the age when everyone learns, the sudden return to illiteracy aged almost fourteen, throws me into an immediate panic.

I’ve been studying, all summer, during the fall semester, up until Thanksgiving. I didn’t take it seriously enough, over the summer, when I was supposed to be learning the language. Instead, all I did was listen to the tapes my teacher gave me, after having discovered early on that with the fast-forward button pushed halfway down, the lessons turned into helium-voiced comedy. Now my German isn’t ready for what my family and I need.

We explore the apartment, small by our standards at the time, more than comfortable in retrospect. The dwelling is divided into two halves, one might say: one grand, one not so much. The grand half of the apartment features a dining room with a long table, suitable for entertaining, glass-paneled French doors that face the entryway, and, off the dining area, a kind of formal sitting room, furnished with a dusty sofa, a model fishing vessel with working, turnable winches with little handles and chains, tiny coils of rope lain flat on the deck, and real glass windows and portholes. A bare-breasted Athena stands holding up a lamp, the light bulb replacing the point of her spear. Reproduction paintings in gilded frames, a hutch with The less grand part of the house faces north, toward the city. Every window gives onto the same dense bundle of brass-colored smokestacks of the Instustriewerke Basel. A grim view, made more so by the December weather, and the odd décor. The bathroom floor is covered in carpet that may actually be Astroturf. The kitchen has wallpaper that forms a contiguous image of trees in peak-of-season foliage. Do the Europeans have fall colors? Did we, when we lived in Randolph, New Jersey?

The worst is the water closet. Over the toilet is a poster of a sad clown playing a fiddle. In the foreground is a boy with his back to the viewer. Most of the picture is soot gray, the clown’s face and hair providing the only color. A depressing image, if I’ve ever seen one, and, thanks to the mirror over the sink, directly across from the poster, I’m forced to look at it, no matter what I’m doing.

The south-facing windows look out onto Gundeldingerstrasse. Across from us, a park, with massive trees, branches that sweep down toward paved paths, and a building called an Eisbahn. My parents say it’s for skating, but I’m skeptical, because it’s also marked as being for tennis.

“They can freeze a tennis court,” my mother says. I shrug and refuse to believe her. Hard to imagine that five years from now I will come to this Eisbahn twice a week to play hockey with a dozen friends from school, and our sport instructor, an old Czech émigré who hurls drill-sergeant abuse when we get out of position or miss shots, and whom we call “Papa.”

My father has to start work. My mother has no job, and I have no school. We start exploring the city, in what limited ways we can. The train station isn’t far: we take a series of ID Pictures at the photomat in the underground passage. We go to the zoo, and eat sausage and pommes frites and roasted chestnuts, and split our time between the bear pits and the monkey house.

It’s bitter cold out, but sunny. We do what we can to stay indoors: we shop for appliances, for clothing, we put together a puzzle on the giant dining room table, a photograph of the historic bridge and tower at the edge of Lake Luzern. In the background of the photograph, are a half a dozen cranes. Construction everywhere, it seems. We’ve been seeing them since breaking through the clouds over Zurich.

We get a phone call, from Iris. The people at the Tierheim have called. One of our cats, it seems, is no longer eating—something she does when we leave her alone—and they’re afraid she might starve. My mother and I figure out on a map how to get there, an hour’s ride, starting with a tram, then on an articulated bus, up into the hills surrounding the city, to a town called Reigoldswil.

At the Tierheim, the proprietress, an older woman with bowl-cut hair welcomes us; a younger, English-speaking version of herself, her daughter or perhaps her much younger sister, lead us into their private residence. We all worry over the little orange cat for a time. Not eating. We try to give her baby food, something we’ve done during another one of her non-eating crises, but it doesn’t work. Keep trying, but otherwise nothing to be done about that. Yes, nothing to be done, not really. We make ready to leave, vowing to return, but then they begin with the real questions. Is it normal that your cat tries to drink from the toilet? Why have both of your cats’ paws been mutilated? Where are their nails? Were they holding on so tight in the plane that they were ripped out? Will they grow back?

We try to act surprised about the toilet-drinking. I leave my mother to field the other questions.

Two more such visits. Similar questions for the strange Americans.

Perhaps we’re fazed less by the Swiss than they are by us. Perhaps, but every now and then, my father and I joke, “That damned plane circled for a pretty damned long time over Boston before we landed.” We say it long after it stops being funny.