come on, come on, we'll dance all night

I seem to be on a posting time delay! If I were up to date, I would be posting about how I am spending the second long weekend in a row on the Jersey Shore, and am putting my wicked plot of not working a full week between now and Labor Day into action (this coming week will be Week Three of this). But I am dumb and have neither taken any pictures of the Jersey Shore nor brought my camera cable along, and I never posted pictures from my business trip to Switzerland, anyway, so that is what I shall do.

At the end of June/beginning of July, I spent about a week in Lausanne, Switzerland for work. Lausanne is a ridiculous place to try to work, because it looks like this:

     

We were staying in the Hotel Beau-Rivage Palace, which certainly didn't help matters.

     

Let's put it this way: the amount that my room cost for a week and change was a decent-sized chunk of what I make in a year.

Pretty hard to argue with that view, though.

     

     

Lausanne is a very cool city on a hill with multiple levels of walkways and hidden squares. The metro line we were on ran straight up a hill into the city center -- so very directly uphill that you could feel yourself sliding off your seat when you headed back down.

The Saturday I was in Lausanne, I spent five hours in a copy shop. This was the copy shop (through the archway):



The Swiss thought I was the weirdest thing they'd ever seen, especially since I spoke basically no French and could not properly explain what the heck I was doing there in the first place. Random American making 800 Swiss francs worth of copies? Extremely bizarre.

After the work part of the trip was over, I went and visited my former roommate Inga and her family in Trossingen, which is pretty much directly on a parallel with Freiburg, only the Black Forest is in the middle. I am a fan of the Black Forest.

     

Inga's family also has a seventeen-year-old cat named Idefix. Idefix really loves to rub all over you and let you stroke his head and back until the point when he decides he is done with you and bites.

     

After a couple of days in Trossingen, I headed to Frankfurt at the behest of the partner who'd asked if I was interested in transferring there. (Yes! I said. Yes, I am interested!) I was sort of . . . underwhelmed by the city. I'm thinking about moving from New York to Frankfurt??, was basically the way my thoughts went. But my law firm's office is in the Main Tower, which is pretty neat. And the town is cute enough.

     

(That first picture is of the Römer, which I think would be cuter minus the sound stage!)

The Frankfurt transfer is pretty much totally official, by the way. I'll know timeline details by Wednesday (approximate timeline details, anyway, since it's all still dependent on the visa process) and after that I will be going. A little bit scary but mostly very cool. Also, at a party at the Naumanns' new shore house the other night, half the Naumann clan decided they are going to come visit me in early December to hit up the Christmas markets and the spas at Baden-Baden. Should be a delightful and hilarious time.

a tree grows in brooklyn

There are some books I've read that I've known, from the very first page, I was going to love. Middlesex is one of them. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is not. I actually said to my friend Ann, "Is there a point at which I am suddenly going to start loving this book?"

"I don't know," Ann said. "I sure hope so, since it's one of my favorites!"

I emailed her from a train in Germany to say, Have started to love this book. Emailed her again to say, NO REALLY IT IS 100% AWESOME.

When I got back from Europe, she said, "When did you realize you were going to like it?"

"On page 62," I replied.

Ann laughed at me -- "On page 62? What??" -- but seriously, this is where I first got the sense that I was going to like this book a whole lot, and it is indeed on page 62 (of my copy, anyway):

She had been a virgin when she married and had humbly submitted to her husband's brutal love. His brutality early killed all of her latent desires. Yet she could understand the fierce love hunger that made girls--as people put it--go wrong. She understood how a boy who had been driven from the neighborhood for rape could still be a good boy at heart. She understood why people had to lie and steal and harm one another. She knew of all pitiful human weaknesses and of many cruel strengths.

Yet she could not read or write.

And this is where I began to fall in love with this book (pages 72-73):

And the child, Francie Nolan, was all of the Rommelys and all of the Nolans. She had the violent weaknesses and passion for beauty of the shanty Nolans. She was a mosaic of her grandmother Rommely's mysticism, her tale-telling, her great belief in everything and her compassion for the weak ones. She had a lot of her grandfather Rommely's cruel will. She had some of her Aunt Evy's talent for mimicking, some of Ruthie Nolan's possessiveness. She had Aunt Sissy's love for life and her love for children. She had Johnny's sentimentality without his good looks. She had all of Katie's soft ways and only half of the invisible steel of Katie. She was made up of all of these good and these bad things.

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.

She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys or the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only--the something different from anyone in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life--the one different thing such as that makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

gone away, queen of the highway

A weird and kind of staggering thought that occurred to me while I was sitting in business class two weeks ago today, about to fly to Switzerland for an arbitration hearing: if I hadn't randomly decided, at age fifteen, that my high school's German exchange program sounded pretty cool and hey, I should start taking German, my life would look nothing like it does.

Maybe 'nothing' is strong. It's entirely possible that I still would have gotten hooked on the idea of Pomona. It's rather unlikely that I wouldn't have still been friends with Katie, and so maybe I still would have ended up living in New York with her and Ana and Diana after college. But I certainly wouldn't have studied abroad in Freiburg, wouldn't have filled Cleary's need for a German speaker, wouldn't have been sitting on that plane at that moment two weeks ago. And that was a crazy thing to think—much as we can't have any idea what it was exactly that we did that will lead us to where we are in life—that I could say with so much certainty that, if I hadn't started taking German as a fifteen-year-old, I wouldn't have arrived at that particular point.

Incidentally, it is also pretty staggering to think that, eight years ago, I could not speak a word of German.

More about this after I talk to my boss today, but I very well may be moving to Frankfurt within the next few months. Big things are afoot!