(no subject)

[kittydesade]

PETER: Also mit den Bussen hast du ja Recht. Was noch? Vielleicht die Parks in jeder Stadt und auch die Fußgängerzonen mit den vielen Straßencafés, so wie hier. Die machen eine Stadt gleich gemütlich. Schön sind auch die vielen Blumen in den Fenstern, auf den Märkten und in den Restaurants. Und dann das Essen. Erstens ist das Essen selbst anders -- anderes Brot und Bier, mehr Wurst und so. Dann wie man isst - wie man Messer und Gabel benutzt, meine ich. Und schließlich hab ich auch gefunden, dass das Essen mehr in Ereignis ist. Man sitzt länger am Tisch und spricht miteinander.

PETER: Well, with the busses have you law. What else? Many parks in every city and also the Pedestrian zones with many street-side cafes, as here/this one. They make a city immediately comfortable. The many flowers in the window are also beautiful, at the market and in the restaurants. And then the food. First of all the food itself is different -- different bread and beer, more wurst and so on. Then how one eats -- how one uses knife and fork, [something]. And finally I also found that there is more food [at an event?] One sits longer at the table and talks with each other.

CHRISTINE: Ja, da hast du auch wieder Recht. Aber ich weiß nicht, ob das in allen Familien so ist. In vielen Familien arbeiten beide Eltern. Da bleibt auch nicht mehr so viel Zeit fürs Reden.

CHRISTINE: Yes, you have it right again. But I don't know if it is like that in all families. In many families both parents work. That remains also not so much time for talking.

PETER: Ach ja, und noch etwas. Alles ist so sauber in Deutschland, aber manchmal gehen die Deutschen ein bisschen zu weit. Ich habe einmal im Dezember eine Frau in Gummistiefeln gesehen. Sie hat eine öffentliche Telefonzelle geputzt. Das kann doch wohl nur in Deutschland passieren! Aber nun mal zu dir. Was hast du denn in America so beobachtet?

PETER> Yes, and something else. Everything is so clean in Germany, but sometimes the Germans go a bit too far. I once saw in December a woman in galoshes. She cleaned a public telephone. That could only happen in Germany! But now to you. What have you observed in America?


Apparently that bizarre phenomenon I experienced last night is called Exploding Head Syndrome. The only reason I know this at all is because TV tropes had a link to it. But the symptoms fit. On the one hand, it's a relief to know what happened, that it didn't mean anything other than my brain tripped a wrong switch briefly, and it happens often enough that people know it's harmless and have given it a name. On the other hand, who names a harmless sleep phenomenon Exploding Head Syndrome?? Really.

In less morbidly amusing news, I went over a friend's checklist for going out to meet some musicians tonight, and had remembered what it was like again to go out in a strange place to meet strange people, as a woman. Men, do you think about things like this? How your clothes hang so that people can't grab them, if you're carrying something you can use as a weapon in the pinch, where the doors are and how good or far you can run in your shoes, how to juggle keeping an eye on your drink and your stuff at the same time. Because I do. My female friends do (all cis, for the curious, at least as far as I know.) These are things that we assume we have to think about as a woman, because our experience teaches us that the men damn well aren't going to think about it. Not all the men in our lives, but certainly most of the men in the bar/club/discoteque/coffee shop. They don't think about how it might seem to a woman in an elevator with a strange man, if they ask to see her socially because they think she's pretty.

And, pretty much, you can blame this on a culture that does its damndest to confuse what should be a very basic principle: No Means No. If she, he, or they say no, you listen. And you respect that no. End of Line.

But people don't listen. And people don't respect the no, and then they whine and they cry about how confused they were and how they were led on, and fucking no. You were told no, so goddamn take it. This is not a gray area. There is nothing ambiguous about a single syllable word. But people think they're entitled, they think they're owed something, that the rest of the world and that person in particular owes them something for putting on that short skirt, or smiling at them, or existing. And now I'm bitter and cranky and I didn't want to be.

So, yeah. That happened. And now I'm cynical again.

Better news. The Elf Lord managed to pick up an electric guitar. He thinks it's a Gibson-esque, and he's referring to pickups in the plural so that's a decent sign. I'm not sure why, since this is the guy who wondered why you would electrify and amplify a perfectly good acoustic instrument, but what the hell. It's an electric guitar. That alone is amusing.

Comments

[behe_moth]

>>Men, do you think about things like this?

Yap, I do, though in a little different way. I'm a bit paranoiac, maybe because of my past as a system administrator. So when I come anythere, first of all I check there the exits (and toilets) are, is there any menaces or something suspicious around etc (and there to run if WW3 suddently begins :-)
And I think there's nothing bad in this.

[kittydesade]

Hmm! That's good to know, thank you. One thing that Kiki brought up, too, is that the experience of people not in the United States can be very different. (Which is obvious in hindsight, but not something I thought to mention in my post.)

For context, if I may ask, what were your duties as a system administrator?

[behe_moth]

Well, babysitting Windows networks. Deploying, maintaining, server software, sometimes user support - all kinds of that stuff. At current moment I'm a QA engineer, making these damned bugged programs less bugged )