someone help me out with this...

Hi, kids. Hope everyone's doing well out there.

Today it improbably graduated from godawful hot to a hot I can't describe in a page my mother reads, and so apparently I am also incapable of anything but loosely associated thoughts strung together. It is also, perhaps, because I am juggling a bit, and leaving for Tanzania in just a week. Moving between emails about safaris and the Bundesarchiv here in Berlin and things on the home front is just, well, interesting. Good, though.

On the S-bahn home, I was listening to my new wicked good mix, and to the song "Easy" by the Commodores. I used to listen to Lionel Richie with my mom in the car (I remember the tapes), and for some reason, if memory serves, Thalia, Graham, and I sang this particular song on a Sunday morning when they were in town for the pre-wedding festa for our lovely LMO & JMS. But this is beside the point.

What the hell does "easy like Sunday morning" really MEAN? Easy how? Why is leaving someone, which Lionel is clearly doing, easy like Sunday morning? Because she's difficult? Because he's sleepy? Dude. I ask because it kind of makes sense to me, but I am notoriously naive when it comes to song lyrics - there are parts of "Baby Got Back" that I didn't really get until I was in college, embarassingly. I just want to understand, help me out here. If my comment box isn't overstuffed with close readings of Commodores lyrics, I will expect the GNP to rise significantly because you're all being so productive.

In an unrelated topic, I haven't really stopped to think, or write, about the German language, but this was an interesting week for thinking thusly:

~ Monday, I learned that you can say in German "Du bist ein Glückspilz!" which translates directly to "You're a lucky mushroom!" It really means, "well, lucky you!" or something, but I was just charmed by the idea of being a lucky mushroom. It's sweet.

~ Then, over dinner with a friend of Ms. N's, I learned that your sinuses are called "Nasennebenhöhlen," which translates literally to "nose next-to holes," which is pretty much what they are. This is right up there with Zelda's favorite "Hoffnungslosigkeit," the most hopeless-sounding word for hopelessness, and literally "Hope without-ness."

~ And lastly, at another dinner last night with my two nice German ladies (the WM really was a time to make friends, and McFee and I met them at the Germany-Argentina game), and we spent a good 15 minutes discussing the German word "gemütlich," which English-speakers use incorrectly to mean "comfortable," but actually has these strange bourgoisie connotations that I am still trying to understand. German really is a very specific language, as Ms. N explained to me, and there are different words for a comfortable chair, comfortable shoes, a comfortable situation, or comfortable restaurant. Maybe in another year or so, I can use them all. Language work really is interesting. More interesting will be my self-inflicted crash course in Swahili, beginning next Friday at 6 pm.

I went souvenir & gift shopping on Ku'damm again tonight, and raided the insane chocolate section of the KaDeWe. Picked out a few specific prezzies, and then bought a little truffle for myself, and my goodness, do the Germans/Swiss know what they're doing with chocolate. It's nothing crazy gourmet, rather an old, special brand, but it was a little chocolate thing filled with, I think, some sort of prosecco-peach-marzipan-crunchy stuff. Very rarely is chocolate something you have to wrap your mind around, but this little thing was. I am taking requests, by the by, and crossing my fingers that things actually make it home with the heat.

Home. Yeah. Thalia's mix had a lot of New York and California songs and I am, as a result, in a New York state of mind. It is somehow a more melancholy city than Berlin, which seems unbelievable given what this city has seen, but it may just be the season, the summer here, my memory. I almost miss the soot, and I certainly miss the long avenue views that I used to find so artificial. I miss cold weather, walking with Kolz. Bookstores I can read the books in. Thank god we've got Simon & Garfunkel, Billy Joel, The Magnetic Fields, so I don't have to rhapsodize about southern Illinois AND New York all by myself. Being a bit winsome seems to be hitting folks in various quarters at the same time. Wonder what stage the moon is in.

Oh, in work news: I'm going to the Bundesarchiv (National Archives) tomorrow, hopefully for most of the morning. Positive yields mean a better grant application to, hopefully, come back here and do research...