10 Years After, I Barely Watch TV

It just occurred to me that I am currently in the very room I was in 10 years ago, the room where I witnessed 9/11.

A lot has happened in between and I actually only returned here yesterday, after having spent the 2nd half of these ten years elsewhere. 9/11 has a personal dimension for me. Good friends of mine were on holiday in New York at the time. As soon as I saw the footage on TV, I called one of my friends’ mothers only to learn that she knew they had planned to go on top of the World Trade Center that day. We took some mild comfort in the fact that the planes hit early in the morning, and that it would be rather unlikely that teenagers with a love for night outs should have headed to the WTC so early in the day. But it was not until the next day that we heard from them and were truly relieved.

For me, 9/11 was the last big catastrophe of the Television era. The fall of the towers embodies numerous ruptures and transitions, ends and beginnings. I think the end of TV as the fastest news source is among them. As the media are full with stories about memory and perception today, the most common scenario seems to be that people got phone calls from friends or family, telling them to turn on the TV. I, too, saw 9/11 on TV, live, as it happened. I spent countless hours in the following days watching CNN, it was term break so I could afford to. Actually, I could not really. I think I even asked for an extension on a paper deadline at the end of September on account of having been addicted to the news. I had internet at home then, but TV still felt like the most immediate news source to me. I cannot say with certainty why that was, too much time has passed. I think most of the big news sites couldn’t handle traffic that day, but I don’t really remember. It’s obvious though that the Internet was not as instant, dominant and ubiquitous as it is today.

During all the major catastrophes that came afterwards (2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, Katrina, Fukushima, Oslo Killings…), the internet was my primary source of information. And this trend is only accelerating. With the advent of Twitter, everything else seems slow. Sometimes I count the minutes before major German news sites run a story that I saw trending on Twitter. I think it took 25 minutes for them to issue a breaking news alert for the death of Amy Winehouse. Oh boy, now I have 9/11 and Amy Winehouse’s death in one paragraph. But well, such is lazy Sunday afternoon writing, upstairs in my family’s house.

Shout Outs 1: Aloha Vero!

Shout outs to my girl Veronika who is blogging about her research stay at the University of Hawaii in the next few months. I am very excited for her because she will experience quite a different side of America living on an island.

In the common perception Hawaii  is imagined as a classic honeymoon destination, a tropical paradise on earth, a heaven for athletic surfers on their boards. This notion is already highly suspicious to me. Doesnt the monstrous originate mostly in those extremely harmonic and beautiful places? Take the cult sci-fi flick It Came From Beneath the Sea (dir. Robert Gordon, 1955), for instance, where a genetically mutilated octopus from the Pacific attacks the West Coast metropolis of San Francisco…

Watch out, Vero!

How to Transform Your Apartment Into a Hotel Room – If It Does Not Already Look Like a Zen Meditation Room.

Sina is a “Do I really need this?” type of person. Me, I am more the “Might I some day need this?” type. And a vinyl DJ.

Consequently, my apartment, which is only ever so slightly bigger than Sina’s, houses maybe ten times as many things. Add to that the fact that I will be going back to Germany twice during our Atlanta experience, and will need a place to stay, and you have a different situation.

Storage spaces to rent are virtually absent in Germany (but that is a different story), and due to my stays in Germany (pretty much all of January for instance) it was clear that I, too, needed to somehow sublet my apartment. And I need to sublet without having to clean out too much. In between my physics folder from 7th grade, party flyers from the last 15 or so years and a record collection that is approaching 3,000 items, it is difficult to pack stuff under the bed (that’s where my bed linens are) or elsewhere.

I still do not have it all worked out, but luckily I found someone, after a week or so of advertising, who will sublet my place from when I leave until I get back just before Christmas.  And he said he does not need much storage space, only some room for his clothes. Perfect! Thank you Internet ;)
I will leave my record collection and other things just where they are. Maybe he will appreciate it, though he apparently does not care that much for music. Having said that, I plan on cleaning out at least some parts of my cupboards and drawers, as a sort of exercise. To see if I can get me some of that catharsis that Sina always talks about.

I have to say, I almost did not expect this sublet thing to work at all. Germans move far less often than Americans, and moving into furnished apartments is rather uncommon. Add to that that there is not really a shortage of flats to rent in Chemnitz, and you get why I was worried. In fact, I still need to figure out how this will continue once I leave for Atlanta again at the end of January. Fingers crossed that I find another individual who needs a furnished flat and does not bring along that many belongings ;)

How to Transform Your Apartment Into a Hotel Room.

While working as a Professor of German at Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, I will sublet my Dortmund apartment to an incoming guest scholar from the University of Iowa.

Fortunately, I live a Thoreau-inspired lifestyle. I live plain and pure according to the anti-materialist credo “Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!” The most precious items are of immaterial nature to me, such as enjoying insightful conversations with smart people or having a good laugh with friends.

This ascetic lifestyle comes in handy especially when being a travelholic. In the past few days, I have been packing up the stuff I accumulated during my three and a half years in Dortmund. I have become an expert in reducing, re-purposing, and re-packaging. Here is my top-three list of transforming an apartment into a hotel room:

• put your stuff into cardboard or plastic boxes
• use any storage space possible, such as underneath your bed or on top of shelves
• and most importantly: reduce your stuff to half of the amount you have by throwing things out or giving them to friends

Especially throwing things out has a cathartic and spiritual effect for me, because I get rid of the emotional attachment to material objects. At the same time, I  wrap up the Dortmund chapter of my life by re-locating, re-arranging, and re-ducing [sic] (emotional) baggage.

Now I am ready for the next adventure of my life.

Atlanta, here I come!

Tough One

Let's see if we will be able to memorize Atlanta's train grid.

Interestingly, MARTA has issued a statement only days ago, calling for the State of Georgia to invest at least something in Atlanta’s public transport. Here’s a quote that is somewhat skewed (of course you have to invest more, to operate and maintain, if your existing infrastructure is larger), but still stunning:

According to the most recent statistics (see Table 1-9) on the American Public Transportation Association website, the State of New York invests more than $3 billion a year in its transit systems — an average of $155 per person annually.

Massachusetts invests $1.2 billion in transit, or $181 per capita. California: $2.3 billion or $63 per person. Pennsylvania: $1.1 billion or $91 per capita. New Jersey: $1 billion or $120 per capita. Maryland: $844 million or $149 per capita.

By comparison, Georgia invests $6 million a year in transit — 63 cents per person. Only three other states invest less per capita than Georgia — Idaho (20 cents); Montana (43 cents); and Wyoming (54 cents). Not one of those three states could be considered urban, transit-oriented places.

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