Back on the Horse, Chase away the Black Dog

My plans were, of course, far more ambitious. I was supposed to have written a ton of blog entries by now for the first month of the year. I have 1,001 ideas, and entries I'd like to get in here. But a few things got in the way. First, I've been given a full-time contract for a couple of months, and I don't know how other people do it, but I end up working most of the day. If I'm not at a meeting, or answering a ton of phone calls that having nothing to do with anything interesting, I'm trying to translate, no easy task when you know that people will fight, kick and scream over the tiniest change in the translation of core terms, even though the most casual of research tells one it's a good idea. So I not only translate, but I amass good arguments for the translation as I go. Time-consuming stuff. How people spend 8 hours a day in relatively the same environment 5 days a week is beyond me.  I look forward to getting back to my more flexible, albeit poorer, state of existence.

But work isn't the real problem. I'm just now getting back on the horse in a number of ways.  I was feeling a little beaten down and confined, I think, feeling pursued by Churchill's black dog, as happens to me from time to time. I am easily bored, hate falling into routine even though it's one of the few things that really keeps me grounded, and I hate feeling trapped, locked in. I can usually get locked into a place for about 6 years at a time, and then it's time for me to stretch my legs a little bit, sort of what I'm doing now. San Francisco will always be home base, I'm pretty sure, but every once in a while I have to indulge my Wanderlust, go on my version of Walkabout.

My Walkabout was kind of interrupted by an incident at the beginning of this month, not even four weeks ago: a couple of right-wing, racist, neo-nazi assholes got on the bus I take/took to work. Had there only been one of them (but of course, they never travel alone), had they not been significantly heavier than me, had the one guy not looked at me so hatefully, had they not started playing skinhead music with racist lyrics on their cell phones loud enough for everyone in the bus to hear, had another passenger on the bus shown some balls and maybe even lifted an eyebrow in my defense or to at least acknowledge that I was being threatened on the bus, had my back been in working order and I'd been able to run or stand and fight if it had come down to that, I probably wouldn't have ended up a hysterical mess at work, zonked out for the next few days, ordering pepper spray and pocket alarms and asking myself what the hell I think I'm doing in a part of the world that is clearly still quite backwards in a lot of ways. But it did happen, just in that way. And the ulcer started up again, and the shoulder went out of whack after that, and my back continued to bother me for another week, and nothing seemed to be working.

People asked me to go to the police. Why would I file a report with the very people who stopped me on the street in the same city in August for walking while black, disappointment clear on the one officer's face when he looked at my passport, saying "Hmph, American," and then passing it disdainfully back to me. Yeah? Well that's Frau Doktor American to you! Naturally, if I say that, then I really end up with problems. Sometimes I feel like I spend more time thinking about my race here than anything else.  There's something wrong with that, something wrong with the way I'm negotiating myself, my space, my identity.

The skinhead incident, though, did serve as a good reminder: What am I doing here? I'm supposed to be working on making my way to Berlin, so I can live and work there for a while, see if I like the experience, do what I've been dreaming about for the last 20 years. I was drifting into a comfortable little routine, one that I could wake up from a year from now and realize that I've been stuck in neutral. Time to put it all back into drive.

I realized I hadn't been able to go fencing, because of the back, that I hadn't cooked or baked anything really in weeks, that I hadn't been doing the things in my other routine, the routine I carefully built up over the years--baking, fencing, writing, travel--that keep me from wanting to walk off the edge of the world. As I learned years ago, people like me, who don't have the usual "restart" button that most people have to get them out of blue periods, have to go in and manually restart. Takes a lot of effort, and an initial recognition that the system needs a reboot. Sometimes you need to realize you're checking out whether a skinhead sitting in the same bus with you has on steel-toe boots--in order to decide whether he can kick your head in easily or if he has to make more of an effort, something I've had to do in the past in sticky situations--in order to get a system reboot.

So I did all the icing, back exercises, even had a useless visit with a doctor ("apply heat and Voltaren") and I'm back at fencing; I started baking, will roast a duck leg or two tonight when I get home and continue adding to my duck fat reserves in the fridge. I am hosting a housewarming party this weekend, and I've started asking around about looking for apartments in Berlin. Just went there yesterday, after realizing that it's a comfortable 2.5 hour train trip from my place in Erfurt. And it will be time next week to start working on the next round of letters of application for future job postings.  Berlin, and all it offers, good and bad, are waiting for me.

And the police in Weimar? Well, I guess the letter from the president of the university to the Chief of Police about my "problems" will probably get someone's attention. I decided not to go directly to the police, but instead to the university's legal counsel. He calls me Frau Doktor. So does the President.

And our time is up.