anything for you, boss

I’ve known for a while that I need to catalog my thoughts – to organize my feelings and to feel normal – but what I’m now realizing is that I need to catalog my muses. I’m finally allowing myself to follow them, but I’m forgetful. I may enjoy reading literature and watching films and TV a whole dang lot, but for the life of me I can’t remember more than a few details from the works I love. Which sucks, because I’m surrounded by friends who are real nerds, and while I love them for this, I also resent them, with their quick recall and memorized quotes… I feel like I’ve already hit dementia: the only things I can remember well are conversations and how long it’s been since someone texted me back. But god forbid I remember some one-liners from my favorite movies…

I’m tired of this. So I’m starting a catalog. A catablog, if you will. I don’t care how many people read it, or if anyone agrees with me. I just like projects. And I’d like to remember what I love, too. That’d be nice.

The way I see it is I’ll pick someone who I’d love to be my boss – someone who makes things that inspire me and someone who I would like to be somewhat similar to in my creative pursuits. (I am deliberately avoiding the word “idolize” here because that carries a passive worship that doesn’t make good art, and doesn’t engage the mind.) I think of the world of creative expression as a bubbly, ongoing cocktail party, forever in the time after it’s gotten into full swing and before anyone gets more than just buzzed, with the art my muses make engaged in conversations with other works from anywhere in the world, at any time, in any medium. And all I aim to do with this project is to eavesdrop.

I’m thinking I’ll call it something like anything for you, boss and it’ll go like this: I’ll pick a boss and I’ll research her or his or their filmography, discography, portfolio, list of works, whatever it is and go through it one post at a time. I’ll compare my thoughts to other thoughts I “overhear” from critics or other writers. I’ll probably also acknowledge some of the works I’ve seen too many times, or works that got enough attention already, and stick to the works I haven’t yet looked at in detail. I’ll intersperse things I make in the process, inspired by the muse. It’ll be an exploration into my muses: a personal gossip column for my cocktail party adventures; I’ll be the shy intern who has to mingle for the first time among people actually getting paid and act witty enough to hang.

this was an inevitable reference

My bosses will generally fall into the avenues of: film (all its parts), writing, music, photography, and perhaps even cooking. The first few people that spring to mind are Kristen Wiig (film and TV acting), Esperanza Spalding (jazz vocals/bass), and Linus Lohoff (photography) – but these could change, muses are fickle anyway.

This blog here will remain, of course. This is my personal brain-dump, remember? There’s just another kind of brain-dump that needs to happen, and I don’t believe it fits with this intimate conglomeration of thoughts.

gif from here

burn

If there’s one thing you absolutely need to know about me, it is that my muse pulls me every which way at any time of day, and to have a task loom over my head that I can’t ignore or finish and get out of my hair is a death sentence to my motivation and creativity.

I have a parchment brain and bones of flint: anything can set my mind on fire. I am a sort of phoenix when it comes to following my muse: I have to burn to ashes before I can move on. I’ve always been flammable, and it is indeed fun sometimes when I can feed the flames and get a roaring creative fire going, but it is precarious around other humans who are made of so much water. I can’t squelch my own fire – I haven’t learned how yet – but others can with the flick of a finger, and it ruins me. I become half-charred, unused and unusable. It is better for me to have burnt all the way out than to have been stopped in the middle. It leaves that looming, unfinishable task.

In middle school, I remember being handily smothered and left half-burnt and hurt. Learning fed my fire – school was easy for me – and for that, my flame was doused without a second thought. If you can believe it, I was ridiculed for being “smart” – as if I didn’t matter because I was “farther along” than the other students. To burn passionately as was natural for me felt like arson: a destructive crime that no one benefited from. They couldn’t see my fire for its glorious heat, energy and radiance – they only saw that it was different from their murky water, and extinguished it.

Since then, I haven’t been able to truly dry out and get a fire going unless it was one of self-ridicule. That one burns in another part of me, the part that’s always stale and dry. That one can become a wildfire, oxidized by a number of factors in everyday life: there’s air all around us, so it’s not hard.

I try to keep paper lists, hoping they could kindle a spark into something greater. If you can believe it, I have to keep a list of the things I love and want to pursue because it’s entirely possible for me to forget them. They feel like trying to burn green wood. They are too young. I need to wait longer and longer until I find older wood, but it’s springtime and everything is green. Everything seems to be blooming except for me.

I want to burn.

all photos by Linus Lohoff in Form Colour Material Light (link to his website)

zu hause

Last weekend started on Thursday for me.

“redefining art”

I put some photos in an art show called MESH at Temple, which sought to redefine art as coming from any source where work is put into – papers, engineering drafts, etc. as well as traditional art forms, no matter what major the artist is studying. While wandering through the cozy, one-room show, I got a text from a friend in the music school saying there was swing dancing happening elsewhere on campus. I kinda ditched the art show…

Friday I didn’t go to any of my classes because I had the house to myself this weekend while my parents went to the beach. My only responsibility was to take care of our pets and soak up as much new spring sun as possible. Here are a few snapshots of the excellent weekend.

the weekend started off rainy and gross, but it turned itself around just for me…probably

 

one of the many times I had to yell in Bean’s face to get the heck inside already…so distracted, she is.

 

??????????

a lone cauldron in our backyard.

the flowers look pinker in real life…

milkshakes post-cartilage piercing (I deserved it!)

have a great week y’all

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Four months! The length of my last relationship! Not a long time, but long enough for it to mean something!

I have ignored this poor blog because college. Really, that’s my only reason. I have to read so much for classes that my brain is worded out every night before I can write anything. But I have made some changes in the past four months, so this hiatus has indeed meant something.

In my Intro to English class, I learned that art should be surprising, but make sense. In that way, my life so far has kind of been like art. I came into college thinking one thing and have shifted at least 90 degrees in my thinking since then. (I guess…I don’t ever have to take a math class again, so who cares?)

I came into college as an English major. Why? Because I’m good at it, and because I like reading and writing. Once I finally got to take English major-specific courses this semester, I couldn’t stop thinking, Is this it? I felt dead-ended in my freshman year – that’s a red flag. I asked myself what I would do if I could, and the answer was make films…

….I’m a film major now!

I kept an English minor because storytelling is what I love to do, but my medium changed. It was a surprise to myself, but once I changed my major and started planning my schedule for next year, it felt so natural. And I can finally justify how much TV, movies and videos I want to watch. (It’s research!)

Plus, I don’t know how many times I’ve asked myself and whoever else was around whilst watching a program, “I wonder how they filmed that,” “I wonder how many takes that took,” “How did they come up with that?!” I WANT TO ANSWER THAT!!

So if you stick with this blog some more, maybe I can give you all my own answers to my own questions. In any case, anything I do artistically will either be with the sketch comedy show on campus, Temple Smash; on my Vimeo account, samanthala; on my Instagram, @s.l.auman; or right here on let’s be extraordinary! It kind of blows my mind that I’ve written this blog for almost five years now, and it finally feels like I am getting the hang of my life. I’m sifting through the pieces of myself gradually, and I feel like I’ve got maybe a corner completely put together! I’m starting to look like something!

stories, conversations, and gazing

 

When something in life begins, happens, and ends – a project, a joke, a relationship, or perhaps something as simply as the sun’s movement bookending a day – that event becomes a story. A life story. These little narratives of human experience are extraordinary because they are valuable, meaningful currency if we share them. It seems like it wouldn’t be that difficult to do since we all have them; the existence of the arts and humanities proves this. I fancy myself as a sort of journalist for the lives I brush against every day because I feel compelled to report the extraordinary stories we can learn from everybody with this simple inquiry:

“What’s your life story?”

My brain is like a tape recorder; I ask that and click Record. Usually this question gets a chuckle, or a joke, but eventually the shock of such a vague but personal question wears off and they see I’m actually kind of serious: I ask to get them talking about things that matter to them. (And most people welcome that!)

I still have that journalistic layer behind trying to make extraordinary conversation, though: I still want the story. I want to give it life, and share it, and use it to discuss things. In my photo class, we learned early on that good photographs require politics – a context, a time and space – to effectively mean something. In a similar way,  stories need to be situated in a time and space, too, to be meaningful. The story alone isn’t the agent here: it’s the reader and the listener who ultimately do something with it and by asking for a life story, I bring stories into a time and space – the here and now.

Sometimes the stories I uncover are seeing the outside of their authors’ heads for the first time: it’s the first time they have the opportunity for a context, for meaning, for comment, and for reflection. As a small-scale journalist, concentrating in conversational life stories, I believe I am doing humanity a service by documenting and sharing the ordinary extraordinary – by showing people how their lives can be a artistic when framed.

During a talk given by photographer Byron Wolfe I attended for my photo class, one line he delivered towards the beginning of his lecture stuck with me throughout the entire presentation and long afterwards. He wondered what the “length of the gaze” is, or how long it takes to really look at something. Obviously, photographs themselves take hours or so to make – whether just because one waits for the perfect moment to capture an image, or the processing and editing take forever – but after they’re made, they’re within time and space: where a photo slowly reveals meaning to each of its viewers, who contextualize it with their own perspective. This is what I do when I’m presented with a story: I gaze, within my time and space, and hope to report what I find.

So I wonder, too: How long do I “gaze” at something? Why do I find most, if not all, life stories extraordinary when everyone has them? One quotation offers an answer:

Understanding Jazz isn’t quick. It’s like a quote Duke Ellington told a listener who said she didn’t get his music. “I’ve been working on this for 20 years, why should you expect to get it in five minutes?” I like that, because it does take time to receive all that’s being given in a Jazz context.

Esperanza Spalding via EBONY

It takes time to receive all that’s being given in any context. “Being in the moment” is sure helpful for understanding things that happen in life, but life also deserves some reflection because we are, at the very least, a sum of our exclusively human memories and experiences. The length of a gaze – the length of a self-reflection – the length of a life story – are important to consider for this reason, and it’s up to the framers – the artist, the author, the audience – to decide how long to look.

A person lives. Things go on. An artist takes an interest – it might be they who lived this particular story, or it might be someone else they know. They investigate the circumstances and record the story in whatever medium they use to project their perspective – their time-and-space. Audience members experience the product in their time-and-space.  Thus, we have the arts and humanities: studying famous life stories that have found relevance throughout different times-and-spaces.

I want to add to that conversation. I want to bring my perspective to the table, but with my little spin: that we’re extraordinary just for living out our life stories. Gazing and reporting never ceases to amuse me. Precisely this is the reason why I live and write Let’s Be Extraordinary: I love it. I believe life stories deserve to be artistically framed, and if I can lend my time-and-space to the conversation, then by all means I will. Up to now, LBE has been mostly my own life stories because – as I’ve discovered – I’m unique in my constant self-reflection (maybe it’s an introvert thing?), but with access to my notebook, one would see evidence of other stories. I’m framing, I’m gazing, and I’m hoping to do my collected stories a justice here soon.

all photos taken by me.

the importance of an education

“So what do you want to do with an English/German major? Teach?”

The reason I study English and German is not so I can turn around and teach them once I graduate; I haven’t done much professionally with them yet. Seems a little premature, doesn’t it?

“I love writing: that’s why I’m studying English. I love German: that’s why I’m studying German.”

I know I will eventually end up teaching – I can feel it. It makes sense. I have enjoyed every taste of teaching I’ve ever had – tutoring math, leading a section of the marching band, editing friends’ essays for class – almost as much as I enjoy learning and creating. And if it all works out – if I learn and create things I’m proud of – isn’t it only natural to want to share that experience and knowledge?

“I’m letting my internships and work experience direct where my career goes.”

I want to be a student for as long as I can, though, and procuring a degree doesn’t signal the end of my education. Even if I end up teaching eventually, I won’t stop being a student; there will always be things I don’t know or things I’m not good at: things I can learn from. I don’t plan on being – or desire to be – the top of whatever field I enter as soon I leave my current field – being a student.

The boundaries are blurred. In fact, they are only visible once one passes them and reflects: how is one to know exactly when she’s become an expert in something? Don’t most geniuses only gain that title after they die? In that case, I don’t have to think about myself and my career in a clear-cut fashion at all! Whoever followed me and my work will do that for me after I’m gone.

My point is not to go dying so that life makes more sense. My point is this: it’s really too early to be questioning this stuff. There’s no pressure to define a career before I can fully know what that looks like for me. The fullest picture of one’s career comes only when it ends – and that is not for quite a bit of time. Now, for me, is the time to get an education that speaks to me. If I learn things that I feel passionate about, won’t I be more inclined to use them as much as possible in normal life, i.e. make a career out of them?

Whether I teach now or later doesn’t matter much – as long as I learn and do things I find important right now. To me, that’s English and German, and I trust that learning those important things now will help me do important things in the future.

a definite return

I want to go back.

You’d think it was because of this view, but there’s more.

See, I’m voluntarily protective of learning foreign language, literature and culture, and the only explanation I can offer why I am that is that some sort of divine passion grips me and makes my ears perk up when I hear German spoken, or makes me start shaking with excitement when my English class dives deeper into a poem, or makes me swoon when I hear people civilly discussing the problems of today.

The Alps are seriously as beautiful as you think they are.

At the root of this divine passion is really a desire to understand everything – that’s why I ask a lot of questions. That why I prefer to listen. That’s why I feel so strongly about learning language, literature, and culture, and find them so fascinating – because studying them basically makes one a better “understander” of her fellow humans.

Why I chose German as my main squeeze is up to the Universe to know, but I know I connected with it the first time I saw a travel program about Switzerland during Christmastime. The chocolate – for one thing – mesmerized me, and there was something about the European style of celebration and tradition that enticed me.

Scrumptious and everywhere.

Then, the language, too, transfixed me: I remember sitting at my desk for a few weeks in middle school studying a German language book from the library and I’d spelled Deutsch wrong on the cover of the notebook I studied with. Conveniently, however, that was the year my middle school allowed us to study German at the high school, since only Spanish was taught in the middle schools; and thus I learned not only how to spell Deutsch correctly, but also how to speak Deutsch, itself.

So that’s why I want to go back: I was only just beginning to understand Cologne. Germany. The German language, as a native speaks it. Traveling abroad. Being truly myself because I didn’t know anyone there like me (yet). I want to understand those things more and I want to define my experience – understand it. That will realistically take until I return again, so what I can define for you are the memories that I will, in all honesty, cherish for the rest of my life.

For instance, I will remember the fall of last year, when my friend Sibby stopped me in the hallway between classes and said, “My mom is taking me to Germany for graduation and said I could bring a friend and I thought of you. Do you wanna come?” I think I may have slurred my words, but I said something along the lines of, “How could I say no?”

I will remember the familial affection I instantly felt for my friend Sibby’s extended family in Germany – including their cat – ever since each one of them embraced me in my nasty airplane clothes without having ever met me before.

Ferris.

I will remember the time I sat in a circle of Germans, Americans, and German-Americans speaking both English and German, laughing and eating and drinking together as if being a family were just that easy.

I will remember the time I spoke English with some German teenagers, and asked them what it’s really like to learn the troublesome past of their country as a native citizen, and learned that it’s difficult and awkward and boring – just as any over-done topic brought up over and over again becomes – but necessary, because one finds these historical themes all over the world, past and present.

I will remember Sibby’s mom telling me that “it’s hard to be yourself in a foreign language,” and realizing how great it is to impolitely vent in English sometimes…

I will remember the entire 2014 World Cup final match, wearing my schwarz-rot-gold lei and other German paraphernalia when Germany won, and the three weeks it took to find a damn 4-star Weltmeisterschaft jersey in the Vaterland that won the darn thing.

Schweini und Poldi

I will remember the extremely minimizing feeling I felt when I slid my eyes up facade of der Dom and remarked “My gosh. That is huge.”

I will remember trying to slyly weep after leaving my “adoptive family” on our last night there, and getting caught by the people actually related to them, who instructed me to stop cryingbefore I make them cry, too.

I will remember tearing up again as the plane landed in America and then bursting into tears as I hugged my mom, sister and dad, thinking I had been done with the waterworks. My eyes leaked for a final time when I hugged and parted ways with my two marvelous traveling partners, Sibby and her mom.

Now that I’m home – and even though I had only a week to recover before moving into college, where I sit forcing myself to finish this awfully late post – I realize that I like my home. It’s important to me to have a place called home, where I can return and regroup between my quests of “understanding.” Now that I’ve entered my newest adventure, I’ll be mighty glad each time I return home to sauteed vegetables, incredibly sassy pets, and relatively normal life. And though I may not cry each time I return – it’s only an hour away! – I need a home-perspective to understand where I’m coming from and have something to compare to wherever I’m going.

Cologne from der Dom

nest

Leaving home showed me how I find home wherever I go.

I learned all I need is a place to nest and familiar faces.

my view from “the way, way back”

always time for a selfie

I was concerned about myself after we got into my aunt’s cabin after three or more hours of driving from the Denver airport and all I wanted to do was be alone. But once I finally nestled into the top bunk of the children’s room, surrounded by bedtime stories and outlet covers and swaddled in safari print sheets, I felt it: I just needed a nest. Once I got that, I could open up some more. I needed some place to call my own for the time being, where I could think – Colorado was completely new to me and I wanted to futz around with what I’d seen so far before commenting on it. (For I had no comment on the steely peaks and curves of deep blue mountain water lining the highways since they were, in fact, breathtaking.)

When we trekked through Colorado Springs and down to Santa Fe, I nested in the third row seat of my aunt’s SUV – which we lovingly called “the way, way back” – with the tipsy cooler and sack of snacks as my seat partners. My only escapes were through the trunk or over the second row seats and I loved it. I was named “a trooper” for sitting all the way back there, but any writer will know that she all she needs is a good perch:

quick game of Chinese checkers, nbd

I was the only person in the car to be able to see everyone and everything at all times. (And I could stretch out my legs.)

During my two-week stay, I gathered that Colorado is a place known for, but not limited to: perpetually dusty cars, fluffy and personable dogs, a variety of cuisine, large populations of grasshoppers and birds, horseback riding, very fit people, loyal mountains that follow one wherever she goes, and dispensaries. There is also a western pride in Colorado – people like living in Colorado. So much so, that next to nearly every flying American flag was the state flag. I didn’t know what the Pennsylvania state flag looked like until I went to Colorado and quickly looked it up so I would know a little more about my home state. Colorado residents know a lot about Colorado. How to get from place to place, what kind of bird that is, which mountain is tallest, when snow is expected…I know less than that about my hometown, let alone the entire state!

I also learned about travel, itself. It’s stacked with sacrifice: oodles of money, hours of sleep, stressful airport drama (like, ahem, staying on a cot in Chicago O’Hare airport because of a canceled flight), cultural differences, sharing things one normally wouldn’t share, ear popping, greasy travel food…Why do we do it?

For the experience, of course!

(click on the pics to look through the full-size ones)

damn horse gettin’ in my picture!

Thanks, David Sedaris

Colorado aspens are gorgeous trees

the clouds there are just…

horse booty at the rodeo – you can see my shadow on the left

I felt real accomplished when I took this

desert view

Garden of the Gods

Garden of the Gods

desert flowers

Tourists, psh

“hand me that thing”

Only in the West…

New Mexico!

the colors are fantastic here

“only true rockers are allowed upstairs”

Nice blend of cultures – American flag, indigenous-style art on the railing, stained glass windows, adobe house

I want one!

pigeon eyein’ up dat corn

Kaleo is a little forward…

this is why we slept overnight at the airport: RAIN.

Some might say that sleeping in an airport sucks, and while, yes, it does indeed stink compared to other sleeping arrangements, I secretly enjoyed it. This is not a common story one has the privilege to tell! It was so fascinating to see hundreds of people trying to sleep among strangers, waiting in lines for the bathroom with toothbrushes, snuggling any way they could with the provided blankets and rock-hard pillows. It was nice to see humanity cooperating. We all just wanted to sleep, that’s probably why.

The West is certainly different from the East. However, it is still American soil, and that fact made the differences I found not so great – merely landscapes and colloquialisms. On the 4th of July, people still drank beer and ate greasy grilled food and wore red, white, and blue, and found reasons to like where they live. Sure, while a camel and mariachi band walking in the parade might not have happened where I come from, it was still a relatable experience.

“Could you see yourself living out here?” my mom asked me one morning, sitting on the porch observing some horses grazing and hawks flying around.

“I can see myself coming back,” I said, “but I like the East. It’s where I’m from.”

Like I said, I need a place to nest. And so far, the rings of urbanization, mix of grudging diverse peoples, and decent – but not great – public transportation have worked for me.

Graduation

Just before the actual ceremony was where I felt the most tradition and comradery I’ve ever felt whilst schooling with my class.

The graduates were sitting in the holding cell – the auditorium – the hour before the ceremony began and I sat in the very back (because I needed to get to the field first as an A last name). I stood up and surveyed my 500 or so classmates in front of me, rows of black and gold (our colors), attempting to put on those darn caps that, according to my sister, look like a bird beak biting your head. We’re all uncomfortable. We’re all nervous. And we’re all dressed the same, in uniform rows, waiting to get this over with.

It’s an interesting thing, graduation is. We dressed up in these hot gowns that we’ll never wear again, and participated in the traditions that probably every American graduate who walked has participated in, and we still just wanted it to be over quickly and tidily.

I anxiously waited to find all my good friends and hug them congratulate them, and take a picture with them. That was what I wanted most that day. And the ceremony conveniently brought all my classmates into one place so that I could take pictures with them and hug them in one efficient sweep of the football field.

These pictures won’t be glorious reminders of this moment in my life – that moment was two hours of sweating in assigned seats. The pictures, really, capture my high school friends and me as we crossed the threshold into officially “being done.” We’d been “done” for a while, but in that moment, in a frumpy gown and uncomfortable shoes, we were finally done. And that’s probably why I wanted to hug everyone so much and take their pictures – I was so happy for myself and for them and glad we were there together.

This is how I will remember my high school graduation. All of us who made it through primary and secondary schooling went through the same ceremony as the previous graduating classes, and now we all are officially graduates together. I guess that’s what makes the ceremony special: it puts everyone in the same place. Anyone who had been “done” for a while is finally and officially done; anyone who had been stressing and worrying about school up until now is finally and officially done. We’re all done. And it doesn’t matter whose graduation parties one was going to or where one was going for senior week during those two sweaty hours – we were freaking done! Together! The class of 2014, ladies and gentlemen, is done! Throw your caps, please!

photo credit Allison Braun

open letter to my teacher 4: meaning of a teacher

Dear Frau,

I would have written this letter in German, but what you’ve taught me was not only a lesson in the German language, but in life, and it doesn’t matter what language it’s in. Sure, German quickly became one of my favorite subjects in middle school, but as everyone in our small German 5 class knows, we didn’t take German this long only to learn German: we took it because of you.

A few days ago, an attendee of my graduation party observed, “Why does everyone who takes German just start speaking it to each other? No one else does that, but when you guys learn that you’re both in German, you go, ‘oh ja, schmergenkaufdkenaeionwfdion.” A few of my German classmates and I responded auf Deutsch, “Weil es Spaß macht!” and he stopped listening as we bantered on in die Muttersprache. Let me point out that we know everyone who takes German because we’ve been in the same class for 4 years together (5 for everyone who didn’t move here in 9th grade). We don’t just “find out” that someone else takes German like the observer said; we know all of them, and it’s become a conversational technique now, to say certain things in German to make them funny or secretive. We speak German to each other randomly because it feels natural after 4 years with the same kids and teacher.

In other words: you’ve cultivated a community. All of your students are proud that we make the other language classes jealous with our strong comradery and excitement for the class. Yes, being a small group helps with that, but it shows that everyone who took German at our school wanted to, even though it wasn’t as popular when choosing classes in middle school.

While in class with you, Frau, I learned that a language class is the perfect place to build a group like that. It’s not necessarily a credit we can send to college or a “core” subject needed for graduation, but it was a cornerstone of our high school career for most of us German kids.

I remember trying to teach myself German from a library book the summer before 8th grade – I learned the der, die, and das, but it got tiresome studying alone. I gave up on learning language from a book that summer because I learned it’s essential to have at least one other person to share the experience with.  (Let alone a classful!) I’ve watched videos online of polyglots, who learn languages in a few months by cramming the vocabulary and memorizing listening tapes, and while I’m jealous of that dedication and mastery of language, I can’t imagine how fun that would be. It would – in my case – be terrible. I need a teacher.

Another reason one needs a partner in studying a language is because language’s purpose is communication, and one can’t just talk to herself the whole time and expect it to feel natural. Speaking with you, Frau, in English AND German felt natural because you are genuinely interested and invested in your students, and actually give us things to talk about. One of the things that scares me about practicing my language skills on new people is that I won’t have anything to talk about – it would be sad to practice only lame small talk in German after all those years of study – but since you are a conversationalist, there is no issue.

I have seen or experienced you talking with us students about a variety of things, even home-life issues or worries about school, friends, etc. It may seem strange to talk so straightforwardly to a teacher like that, but for our little German family, it never was. It was just how we German kids worked. It was a family from the start and no one questioned it. And in the wildly changeable and bumpy ride that high school is, having that steady and genuine relationship with a class, group of students, and teacher was divine.

From you, Frau, I learned the real meaning of a teacher. She is there not only to teach one subject area and move you through school. She doesn’t even necessarily need to be a schoolteacher by trade. She (or he) is a figure of guidance, a patient listener, and a cheerleader all from just trying to get her students to see something else about life, whether it be German or English or music or what-have-you. I see you as a role model, a conversation partner, and a supportive friend, and I hope I can always ask you how your chickens are doing and how your Pissyanki turned out this year. Änder dich nicht! Ich habe dich Lieb, und wir sollen Brieffreundinnen sein. Ich werde immer “Charlotte” genannt.

Deine,

Sam, a.k.a. Charlotte