I saw this quote from some band at a friend's place. It seems fitting.

"I haven't really found a place that I call home. I never stick around quite long enough to make it. I apologize that once again I'm not in love."

A typical night...
So I just willingly made a public display of my utter inability to tap dance.

(you know you've been teaching EFL for too long when you use "utter" in a sentence and suddenly find yourself thinking, for no reason, how you'd explain its meaning and use. jeez, i gotta find a different job).

anyway, i went to this tap jam with live music and brought my shoes, just in case they cleared a space for everyone to dance. it turned out they all did mini-jams on stage. i was asked, agreed, and plodded my way through a whole song alongside people who actually know what they are doing.

which only confirms my belief--and this applies to my english classes here as well--that studying *anything* just once a week for 1 to 1.5 hours is incredibly ineffective.

but embarassing myzelf in public isn't really typical tho. what was typical was the social exchange beforehand, or lack thereof:
1. i enter a space with lots of people i don't know or have only seen a few times and never really talked to.

2. i hesitate to start a conversation cos i'm currently tired of answering the same old questions (why i'm here, why hamburg, where i'm from, and of course what i do).

the last one is usually followed by an uncomfortable silence as the other person suddenly gets very conscious of their perhaps imperfect but otherwise intelligible english, and i have to reassure them that i am not, actually, grading them (tho in fact, involuntarily, i notice their mistakes--reflex, i guess). i think from now on i'll just lie and say i work as an accountant or something equally simple.

3. i start feeling ashamed of my lack of german skills, having lived here for 4 months and picked up/used very little, aside from ordering a kebab or coffee (and even *that* is incomprehensible at times) and thus decide not to attempt to speak to people in bad german.

4. i think about trying in english, but feel that people are either pained to speak english, or it hurts their brain to do so for an extended time, or they just don't like it.

ok, this last one is probably just my imagination, but really, that's how it feels sometimes.

i mean, i sometimes have trouble socializing with complete strangers in *english*, let along in a foreign setting with people whose native tongue i don't speak; as someone in the pleasure course pointed out, being abroad actually allows me to avoid doing socializing. yet it also closes me off from talking--and talking is very important for me.

afterwards, when the show was over, people were sitting around chatting; i sort of wanted to stay and chat and might have, if they had all been english speakers i now, or if i knew german well enough. (i sure didn't have anything else to do, unless you count coming home to write out my frustrations in a blog which will probably not be read by anyone anyway). but i really didn't have the energy or desire to go through the whole fucking process again---questions, my usual answers, the awkward silence, etc.

maybe i don't like the questions cos i'm unhappy with the *answers*: i often don't really *know* why i'm here, and i don't much like what i do anymore.

fuck.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Goat guarded from festive vandals
I know what I'm doing in Sweden this winter...

(I mean, how bad could 18 days in a *Swedish* prison be? Probably better living conditions than most places I've lived...Then again, they'd probably never let me in the country again after that, so I guess I'll leave the goat alone).