21:31
Just like a tsunami sucks water out to sea before unleashing it in a irresistible torrent, there's a moment of complete silence, an intake of breath, a gasp and then, a roar. I jump up in the air and hug Mike. I hug the man to my right. I hug the woman to my left. I jump, and I bellow. It's a pure orgasm of delight.
I realise that there is blood and Guinness swilling around the table in front of me. I notice that there is a lump of flesh missing from my little finger. I don't care. I shout again. I jump again.
22:12
I realise that I am crying. I can't take the stress. There is too much of me invested in this. I wipe the tears away and swig some Guinness.
23:11
There's another tsunami. This one is in such stark contrast to the other that no-one believes it has actually hit. We bellow again, but this time not with joy or pride or relief.
I am walking home from the cinema after seeing 2012 with my friend. I am, as I expected, embarrassed at having seen such an unashamed pile of plop, but am also pleased at having witnessed the perfect way to die.
A young man, unable to stand still, approaches me unsteadily.
He speaks. I pause tersely, half interested in what he's about to say, half irritated at myself for stopping in the cold for a drunk when I am (arguably) not one myself.
"Where are the hot girls?", he slurs in German.
"Right down there", I say, without a moment's hesitation, pointing down a cul-de-sac.
"How far away are they?", he mumbles, his body already focussing itself for the effort required to haul its worthless self down Imaginary Hot Girl Alley.
"Oh, five minutes at most" I reply, my shitty day well and truly made.
I've never been such a fan. Aside for allowing me to quickly and efficiently send out a weekly mail to my fellow football players, and allowing me to track them down by simply knowing their name rather than email address, there seemed to be no other real purpose.
I had toyed with the idea deleting my account altogether, and would have, were it not for the fact that my social life would disintegrate as quickly as it takes to click 'create an event' and 'invite all except Stephen because he's dead, or deleted'. And, of course, having to explain to real-life friends that removing the virtual proof of our friendship is by no means any sort of slight on them would just be too much to have to go through. Over one hundred and fifty times.
So we ticked along together, That Other Social Networking Site and I, without really seeing the point of each other. After all, I have neither a mafia mob nor farm, am not a huge photo uploader or quiz-taker. I'm a lurker, a status-reader, occasional liker and infrequent commenter. I resent having to block some irrelevant people, simply because I don't want to have to delete them, but I also don't want them knowing about my life.
Well, after last night, all these complaints have been forgiven, That Other Social Networking Site. Because last night I was on my way home on the tram when I realised I was sitting across from a guy I worked with for a week over two years ago. A nice guy, no doubt, we got on very well, but never enough to become actual real friends. That Other Social Networking Site friends, luckily, has a much lower standard of friendship than real life.
So, after we covered the usual, 'so what are you doing now?', 'oh, much the same, what about you', 'yeah, pretty much the same too', we didn't have that awful, awful silence. Not the one where you just can't be arsed with the person. No, its kindly but inept little brother, the one where you are genuinely happy to see the person, but have just been out of touch for so long that you simply can't think of a single interesting or coherent thing to say. You blibber for a while, before resorting to the conversational death sentence that forces one or other of the mortified participants to get off at a stop much, much earlier than intended and walk home in the freezing cold, simply to avoid having to talk about THE WEATHER.
But, That Other Social Networking Site to the rescue! Over the last two years, it has allowed me to see my tram buddy's interesting photos from a variety of trips to Africa, Asia and South America and allowed me to know, from his status updates, that he is a fellow Europhile with a freakish knowledge of world geography, and even that a mutual friend has invited us both to a thanksgiving gathering at the end of the month.
Take that, awkward silence! Hurrah for That Other Social Networking Site!
Today, as every Monday morning, I had class with a group of German pensioners. This morning, I asked them what they were up to on this day twenty years ago, the day the Berlin Wall fell.
On November 9th, 1989, the four of them, all resident in the East, simply didn't believe the stories that the Wall had opened, even after seeing the press conference by Günter Schabowski that triggered the thousands of East Germans descending on the Wall, asking to be let through.
Two even went to work as normal the next day and really only began to believe the stories due to the fact that most of their colleagues simply hadn't shown up for work. One of the others, a dedicated traveller who has visited over one hundred different countries, went straight to the West's main airport, Tegel, to check it out, believing that it must be much better than the eastern airport. He was disappointed by how small it was, and noted that the West was just as dirty as the East. The fourth, a lady who worked as a graphic designer, went straight across to the West the next day to visit friends.
I found it surprising that none of them seem to have seen it as momentous an occasion as the rest of the world. After all, most of them had popped over to West Berlin at least once over the previous years on tourist visas. All of them had known West Berlin before the Wall had been erected, and felt that nothing had really changed in the twenty-eight years of isolation. All were comfortably employed with families and did not want for anything, aside from perhaps tropical fruits like bananas and pineapples. Since they were only available at Christmas, if at all, they were the biggest treat an East German child could imagine. Cuban oranges, however, were plentiful despite the fact that they were green and'tasted like straw'.
Only one, the graphic designer, ever thought of attempting to flee to the West. By the eighties, however, she was already in her fifties and didn't consider it to be worth the risk. In her younger years, she had got into trouble because of her 'big mouth', and initially was refused entry to university because of her criticism of the regime. When the Wall came down, she realised that graphic design in the West was far ahead that of the East - they used computers. She bought her first computer, a Macintosh, for a small fortune soon after.
The other three suffered initially after the Wall fell. Two of them lost their jobs and the third, the head of a railway station before die Wende, was soon relegated to selling tickets. Pragmatically, none of them minded very much, seeing how close they all were to retirement age anyway.
All four agreed that the major change brought about by the fall of the Wall is the amount of money that normal people these days have at their disposal. On a personal level, most felt that life was safer in the GDR - every neighborhood was constantly patrolled by a variety of police services and mugging and other crimes against the individual were practically unknown. None ever felt personally threatened by the regime, realising that it wasn't a bad system provided you were happy to say what the government wanted to hear. They even went as far as to suggest that it would have worked, if only someone in power had been willing to listen to their unvoiced criticisms.
Before the class, I had been worried that asking them questions about Germany's difficult past might dredge up bad memories. The horror stories are plentiful, but none of my four students had any of their own. They seemed to have been, and indeed still are, model GDR citizens, with no overt criticism crossing their lips over the ninety-minute conversation. Praise, interestingly, was in equally short supply. Born just before World War Two, their generation is one that learned to accept the status quo through being shunted from one flawed ideology to another. They left the revolution to their sons and daughters, who were all too aware of the injustice they had been born into.
I got fined on the train today. I probably deserved it, after several years of travelling with various different kinds of invalid ticket, and up until today had never been too bitter about having to cough up the €40 - after all, I have probably saved a lot more than that over the years.
This time, however, I feel aggrieved. My ticket was expired by about seven minutes, which I had not noticed. I tried to appeal to the decent, kind side of the fucking asshole, also explaining that I had validated it long before the train arrived, thus wasting a few valuable minutes of its validity. No deal though. He was simply a fucking asshole, and wouldn't give in. So, of course, I started being rude to him as soon as I realised that he was never going to budge, and called him the asshole that he very clearly is.
But it just got me thinking about the huge number of occasions since I moved here in which I have not been seen as a human being, but rather as some sort of disobedient robot who needs to be taught to obey without question, something which is very much not in my nature. It's not as though I am any sort of anarchist, not by any stretch of the imagination. I know that rules are there for a reason, and it certainly is not for them to be broken. But why not look on people as (mostly) cognisant individuals on occasion, ones who sometimes deserve a break and a bit of kindness?
I would just love it if that guy had appreciated that I was not trying to get a free ride, and that my impassioned pleas for leniency did not come easily to me.
I would love it if the woman in the post office would accept my old student ID, my bank card, my credit card, my health insurance card and my Hertha season ticket as clear proof that I am who I say I am, without insisting I walk home in the rain and bring back my passport in order to get my package.
I wish the German Catholic Church would appreciate that I am not Catholic and should not have to pay tax to them simply because I was baptised twenty-six years ago and was not aware of their ridiculous rules that require people to specifically withdraw from the German Church even though they never actually joined in the first place.
I would love it if my doctor could see that charging me €20 for a thirty-second consultation every three days while my finger was busted is profiteering at best, outright greed at worst.
It's no secret that Berliners can be rude, obnoxious, unfriendly and unpleasant, but today (and I am not ruling out the possibility that the dreary November rain and the fact that I had to walk to work in it is having a very negative effect on me) they just seemed a little heartless too.
