Agh.

Agh.  An entire week without blogging.

I'm SORRY!  I really, really, really am.  In approximately a week and a half, my life will go from full speed ahead double turbo pirate shit to leisurely pedal-boating down the river of my life, but until then, it's all GET UP ON DECK YE BASTARDS.

Up until yesterday, the demon in my life was my Kony 2012 essay.  I don't know what it was--how complicated my thesis wound up being, anxiety about turning in my first grad school essay, or maybe just the fact that I was out of practice--but my 4-6 page essay turned into four days, 10-15 hours per day, sitting in front of my computer, dragging this essay piece by screaming, crying, over-researched piece out of my brain and into Microsoft Word.  Never in the history of anything has an essay taken me that long--generally I tend to start them at 11 PM and I'm done three hours later.  It's not even like this essay was in German, which would at least have given me a bit of an excuse.  But I'm super happy with the end result though, and, geekily enough, kind of proud of myself.  I think it's a damn good essay.  The only problem is that when I format it my way, it's a page over the limit.  When Al reformatted it the German way it was...four pages over the limit.  And apparently, there are a lot of professors in Germany who will knock giant chunks of your grade out for that.  Yeah, whatevs.  So be it.  I've already edited it down to the bare-bones, so if coloring within the lines is more important than turning in a solid paper, then consider me the Jackson Pollock of the ethnology department, but minus the alcoholism.

Now I've got to produce yet another 4-6 page essay (research, not thesis, thank Zeus) for Wednesday, although this one has to be in German, accompanied by a ten-minute presented introduction.  Then I have just five short days to come up with a forty-five minute presentation.  In German.  By myself.

The good news is that after, I'm more or less done.  I'll have to turn my presentation into a 12-15 page paper, but that'll get done in English, and then produce another 4-6 page essay for another class.  My goal is to get everything done by the end of July, so I have all of August to spend in Berlin/Poland, and all September for Ireland.

Things that are interesting!  Al and I went to Hannover and Saturday, and met up with Latvian Friend in the process.  It was really nice seeing her again.  The three of us wandered all around the city and took fun pictures, which I will post as soon as I steal them from Al.  But here, have this picture of a massive, massive, massive carp.

You know your life is sad when the most interesting thing you have to post on your blog is a swan-eating carp.

That's not entirely true.  I do have one or two good stories up my sleeve, but they're still in process, and I want them to finish so I can properly mock them  And by "them," I meant the batshit psycho old people who live under us.

Fun things that happened today!  I headed down to the river, because the summer gods had seen fit to bless us with the first day of good weather in like a month.  There I ran into British Friend, who was apparently about to text me and invite me to come meet her.  Yay for being efficient and/or psychic!

So we chilled on the river for a few hours, and talked about lots of highly entertaining things, including the advantages of adopting a baby from Africa (you can keep it's head shaved so you don't get lice).  I also learned that while I told all my friends about the blog, I'd apparently forgotten to send them the link, so they had to spend a solid amount of time google searching it.  However, googling my blog is hard--the search terms that eventually worked were "tina" "germany" "game of thrones," which makes me really, REALLY happy.

Then it was time for the Italy/Germany soccer game, made even more exciting by a brief confrontation with some random old dude who threatened war if the people for whom we were saving chairs didn't arrive soon.  The people we saved chairs for showed up, and Germany did not win.  I know this is blasphemous, but I was fine with it.  It meant I didn't have to deal with people screaming.

Don't tell anybody I said that.

Yes I AM the lamest person in the world.

Tomorrow is Culture Night in Göttingen, so we're going to get together, go to random bars/concerts/see Galway perform at a local club.  Three cheers for having fun even though I'm relatively certain I will not survive until next Monday!