The Summons

I've survived week 1 of a my super-busy three week span!  Though most of the campus is quiet during the summer, this is actually the busiest time of year for my job.  I'm in charge of processing the paperwork and computer data for all of our adjunct lecturers and graduate assistants by July 31, which, not coincidentally, is the final day of my own appointment in the office.  We have about 80 graduate assistants and 80 adjunct lecturers in our department, so you can imagine that this process is pretty time consuming.  For the past year, I've been filling in for my old full-time officemate, who accepted a job in another department.  Several months after she left, they replaced her by promoting another one of my officemates, and then they finally hired someone to replace that officemate, so after I go they will have a full-time person to occupy this job again.  I've been trying to do a 40 hour job in 20 hours per week, and though I'm glad I've been able to help the department, I'm thankful to be moving back to teaching in August.

These three weeks are extra busy because in addition to my office job, I've taken on a 6 week Intermediate German class which meets four days a week.  I'm taking it to try to reacquire my German proficiency, and after I complete the course, I hope to be able to pass the foreign language exam that's required for my PhD degree.  Ultimately, I'd love to get a firm enough command on my German to be able to read German-American immigrant texts from before, during, and after WW1 (though the language was officially outlawed for a while, the stuff is still out there).  For now, though, I'm taking one hurdle at a time.

I am really enjoying the German class.  I was hoping to audit it, but the German department is forcing me to take it for credit and the grade will show up on my transcript, so I feel some extra pressure to do well.  I took four years of German in high school and one semester in college, and though I never reached the level of fluency that I might have attained if I'd traveled to Germany, I was a fairly capable German speaker back then.  When I arrived to class on Monday and was handed a "placement quiz," I realized just how much of the language I had lost.  I couldn't remember how to conjugate any verbs and I couldn't even think of how to write the plural form of "you."  It's really fun to see how quickly it is coming back, though.  It's fascinating to me that I can pull words I had all-but-forgotten out of the cobwebs of my brain.  Shortly after I answered a yes or no question with "si," I correctly used the word "Schauspieleren," which is German for "actress."

There is a "culture" portion of the curriculum that is essentially unrelated to my reasons for taking the course, but I find it really interesting nonetheless.  Some of the more surprising things I've learned in the first week of class include:
-My instructor, who is my age and is working on her PhD in Germanic Studies, was born in East Germany (DDR) and got choked up talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall.  She told us that before the wall came down she had never seen a grape or a banana, that her father waited 20 years to be given permission to buy a car, and that she was almost expelled from her school at age 7 for asking what all the blank spaces on the map were.  (She says only Communist countries were labelled.)
-She did say she misses the camaraderie her old neighborhood had before the fall of the DDR.  She said "we had no money and so everyone was kind."
-My instructor also claims that nobody in Germany flies the German flag or demonstrates German patriotism except during the World Cup, when German flags hang from every window and people paint their faces on match days.  She says that if you hung a German flag at any other time, people would think you were a Nazi.
-On a related note, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin was seriously damaged during WWII, but the Germans did not repair it, and it stands as a war memorial.  My instructor said they left it alone "so we can never forget what we did."
-She also told us that the US planned to drop an atomic bomb on Dresden but changed their minds.  Google hasn't helped me verify the validity of this statement, but when I asked her why we targeted Dresden and not Berlin, she said "because the Germans love Dresden most."  This rationale seems to stand up, at least-- my web surfing reveals that the fire bombing of Dresden is believed to have achieved so little military advantage that it is considered a war crime by many and an act of terrorism by others.
-If you are a young American man who would like to date my beautiful German instructor, and you take her to see "Inglorious Basterds," that will be your last date with her.
-The German word for diarrhea translates roughly as "it falls out."
-UMd undergraduates in 2010 make the same jokes about drinking alcohol in Germany that WLHS underclassmen made in 1998.  If I had a dollar for every time I'd heard someone say "Bier ist gut!" I could finance a trip to Germany.
Another thing I'm noticing about myself and the German class is how fun it is to work on something completely different than literary studies while still working on my degree.  It feels like I'm taking a "break," but at the same time, I still feel productive because I'm being proactive about my degree requirements.  I hope it continues to be interesting and fun.

The other highlight of my week was my trip to traffic court.  Did I really just write that?  Yes, I thought it was BS when I got pulled over just off campus for "running a stop sign."  I believe I stopped.  Both officers who approached my car peered into my vehicle while they were speaking to me, so I assumed they were looking for someone/something else and would let me go with a warning... but a $90 ticket and 1 point on my license later, I found out they were serious.  This marks my first traffic violation since 1998.  I decided to go to court, and figured I'd plead guilty in hopes of getting the point taken off my license.  After watching a few people go ahead of me, I decided to "explain" that I thought I had stopped but I may have failed to come to a complete stop.  The judge issued me "probation before judgment," my fine was reduced to $9.50 plus $25.50 in court costs, and the point was suspended.  If you don't care what happened in traffic court, feel free to stop reading, but I find these kinds of interactions very intriguing, so I thought I'd share a few things I learned in court.
1) If you're ticketed by a UMd officer, expect him to show up in court.  They seem to have more spare time than other police officers in PG County.  Mine entered the courtroom and fist-bumped two bailiffs, the court reporter, and the Spanish translator.  At this point pleading guilty felt like an even better idea.
2) When the judge begins his directions with "Make sure your shirttails are tucked in and your pants are around your waist before you approach my bench," he means it.  The first guy walked up with an untucked polo shirt and khakis and was promptly instructed to "exit the courtroom, tuck in your shirttails, and return to your seat.  Your case will be called again after we've gone through the rest of the docket."
3) When the judge explains how the proceedings will go, listen.  He didn't say "If your officer is not present, don't plead guilty," but he said everything short of this to get the idea across.  My benchmate was called up after Mr. Shirttails was excused, told by the judge that his officer was not present, and asked how he would plead.  His answer?  "Um, guilty."  Poor kid.  The judge told him to sit back down.  I said "Did you just plead guilty when your officer is not here?" to which he responded "Oh, God."  The officer sitting in front of us turned around, gave him a "What is wrong with you?" look, and gave him some suggestions about asking to change his plea.  Everyone else who plead guilty was asked for an explanation and then issued a reduced fine, so I think the judge told him to sit down so he could call him up again at the end after giving him a chance to realize his mistake.  I felt bad for him.  It's awful going first.
4) If you get a ticket for "operating a bicycle with earphones in both ears," do not: a) claim you did not know it was against the law, b) explain that you're a musical theater student and were listening to classical music very low, c) suggest that you were listening to the music to study for a test that you were going to take when you arrived at your destination, d) claim that the University is responsible for not offering a bicycle safety course, e) answer "the volume was turned down" when the judge asks you "even if you didn't know it was illegal, does it seem safe to ride with headphones on?"  Certainly do NOT do all of these things while also adopting an "I'm better than this garbage" attitude.  If you do, the bailiff will moan, groan, roll his eyes back in his head, shift his weight, etc.  The judge will tell you that ignorance of the law is not an excuse and reduce your fine by only $10 (which will mean your fine has actually gone up due to the court costs).  Then, if you snatch the form out of the annoyed bailiff's hand, he will follow you down the aisle and whisper loudly "If you do that again, I will knock you out."  (When I went to pay the cashier, this student was registering a complaint about the bailiff.  I wish I could have stayed to see how it was resolved.)
5) Beyonce might be in her late 20s, but her "booty is popping like a teenager's" and therefore "Jay-Z knows what he's doing."  At least according to the gentlemen discussing it behind me.

I also had my one mile track race Saturday morning.  I was hoping to run it in under 7:45 so I could beat my PR as a 13 year old track star (ha!), but it didn't go according to plan.  I ran a 7:51 last weekend on the track, and two separate miles in the 7:40s on the treadmill this week, but I finished the race yesterday in 8:01.  Like last time, it was about 80 degrees with humidity above 90%, and I could feel the extra heat emanating from the fieldturf surface inside the track.  Awful.  I've decided that yes, it's hard cardiovascularly to perform well in these conditions, but they ruin my mental approach, too.  Normally, I hate getting beaten, and I love chasing people down at the finish.  This time it was like I could feel the heat sapping away my will to compete and I just didn't care.  I'm not horribly disappointed with 8:01, especially given the conditions, but obviously I feel like I could have done better.  After seeing the standings in the Championship series this morning, yesterday's race can be classified as "mission accomplished."  I only went because I didn't want to fall behind in the standings, and since most of my "competitors" didn't participate, I actually moved up from 3rd place into 2nd.  The girl in first place consistently runs much better times than me, so I don't think I can catch her, but my paces are pretty competitive with everyone else below her, so this was a good boost.

I have another 8k race in about two weeks, and I am crossing all my fingers and toes that the weather cooperates.  My good friend Kelsey from back home is visiting, though, and her visit coincides with the run, so it will be fun to have run it with me even if she beats me by several minutes.  It would be nice to have cooler weather for her visit in general.  I love the heat more than most people, but I'm getting tired of being trapped inside when it looks beautiful out but is so hot that the NWS advises you to avoid being outdoors.

(The Summons is a 2002 novel by John Grisham.  In 1994, when I was 12, I got ahold of someone's copy of The Client and then promptly moved on to A Time to Kill, The Firm, and The Pelican Brief.  Thereafter I read The Chamber, The Rainmaker, and The Runaway Jury, and The Partner before I lost interest.  I don't remember much about them, outside A Time to Kill, which was always my favorite, but this evidently amounts to over 3,600 John Grisham pages read before I was 15.  I think this classifies as one of a long line of events which indicated that my reading habits have always been fairly unusual.)