headache

Daniel is away and Christopher was sick today so I had to skip both my therapy appointment and my class tonight. Waaaah. Of course I'll live. I hope he's better enough tomorrow morning to come with me to church while I set up for playgroup. And I hope that Caroline doesn't catch whatever it was, not least because she's a hormonal mess as it is. Also I hope I can get out with them and do some fun-ish things this weekend. Lots of hoping going on here.

In what brain space I could muster today I was thinking about my list from yesterday: how the positive things on it are for the most part concrete and practical, and the negative ones largely sweeping generalizations. Of course women work in Switzerland, of course not everyone is racist, and goodness knows I shouldn't be throwing stones about communication... Underneath all that is a great deal of diffuse frustration about fundamentally not fitting in, and...not wanting to face the fact that these going-on-nine years of trying to put down roots are very likely going to end in having to rip everything up and start again somewhere else. I know a significant part of the solution lies in making a home within my own skin and gracefully walking my own meandering path. And I'm working on that. Some days more successfully than others.

why?

Seems like it's time for a list...to be edited as I think of more...


Good Things about Switzerland

• Dan has a good job here, and it pays better than the same job in the US, with almost certainly a far better commute
• one parent at home means (when and if that parent manages to stay sane) less housework stress and more quality family time 
• we use our car maybe twice a month
• renting means no yard work
• our apartment has so many nice windows and skylights that we don't have to turn on lights during the day, even in the middle of winter
• you can't walk a mile around here without tripping over six cool historical things
• Germany, France, and Italy are mere hours away on the train
• ...and it's hardly necessary to visit them because Switzerland speaks all their languages and then some
• so many beautiful mountains
• the kids walk to school
• ...and get to be bilingual
• the chocolate is fabulous
• the rights of workers and renters are taken seriously
• the health insurance system is not a disaster
• 6,500 km of hiking trails
• not nearly as much corporate bullshit

Crappy things about Switzerland

• there's no popular concept of a naturalized citizen. Sure, you can get a passport, but if you weren't born Swiss with Swiss great-grandparents on both sides, you ain't never gonna be "really Swiss." There wasn't ever going to be hope for Dan or me, but I'm sorry that the kids have to fight this.
• coffee shops, apart from Starbucks, are never open late
• a woman's place is in the home
• customer service is not a thing
• valuing diversity is not a thing
• nepotism is absolutely a thing
• racism and xenophobia are widespread and rarely questioned
• communication can be bewilderingly indirect
• change is to be feared and avoided

prophetic

My Tuesday class ("Old Testament 2"), on the other hand, is something I'm enjoying. Maybe because both the book and the instructor are at a level that's not as far over my head as usual, but also because we're looking at the prophets, and the prophets are pretty bad-ass. 

In the first class session I learned that YHWH, the name for God in the Hebrew scriptures, was probably at one point just that: the name of a God, specifically the god of the Israelites, who were also cool with there being other gods with other names for other tribes. As monotheism evolved, YHWH became the unpronounceable name of the one and only God, and, as Wikipedia says:

Observant Jews and those who follow Talmudic Jewish traditions do not pronounce יהוה, nor do they read aloud proposed transcription forms such as Yahweh or Yehovah; instead the word is substituted with a different term, whether used to address or to refer to the God of Israel. Common substitutions in Hebrew are Adonai ("My Lord"), HaShem ("The Name") and hakadosh baruch hu ("The Holy One, Blessed Be He").

If you're a creative reader you could substitute any appropriate term for God (cf. the 99 attributes of Allah) when the tetragram appears, and it appears a lot - over 6,000 times in the Hebrew Bible. The German translation we're working with translates YHWH as HERR... So if you know that's what's going on, you can think about substituting your own appropriate term for God in all those places - but if you don't know, you just read Herr/Lord 6,000 times and a whole layer of complexity just kind of disappears. Did everyone but me know this already?

In the second class session I learned that the books of the prophets are the main books in the Old Testament that have a verifiable historical basis - unlike, for example, the books of Moses / Pentateuch, which are more like legends. So Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt probably was not a thing that really happened; when Amos rails against leaders who "trample on the poor" (Amos 5,11) he is critiquing a society that we know existed. 

In the third class session we read Hosea and omg misogyny in the bible IS A THING. 

Plead with your mother, plead—
    for she is not my wife,
    and I am not her husband—
that she put away her whoring from her face,
    and her adultery from between her breasts,
or I will strip her naked
    and expose her as in the day she was born,
and make her like a wilderness,
    and turn her into a parched land,
    and kill her with thirst.
Upon her children also I will have no pity,
    because they are children of whoredom.
For their mother has played the whore;
    she who conceived them has acted shamefully. (Hosea 2, 2-5)

Weirdly, though perhaps understandably, the author of our textbook takes this opportunity to go on a long digression about how researchers believe that YHWH might, at one point, have had a female counterpart, Aschera, and concludes:

Wir müssen also davon ausgehen, dass die Darstellung der Bibel von einem von Anfang an monotheistischen Glauben Israels, der später dann immer wieder durch fremde Götter gefährdet war, nicht der Historie entspricht. Eher war es umgekehrt: Der Glaube an den einen Gott ist im Laufe der Geschichte erst gewachsen. Am Anfang standen auch in Israel vielfältige Formen der Gottes- und Göttinnenverehrung. Die Durchsetzung des Monotheismus geschah in einem komplexen Prozess, in dem vor allem der Glaube der Frauen zunehmend verdächtigt und ausgegrenzt wurde.

We must therefore assume that the presentation in the Bible of a faith in Israel that was monotheistic from the beginning, and later endangered by foreign gods, is not historically accurate. It was, in fact, more the other way around: the belief in the one God developed over the course of history. In the beginning there were a variety of forms of devotion to both gods and goddesses in Israel. The development of monotheism was a complex process in which, most notably, the faith of women was over time increasingly condemned and excluded.

There's a moment in the #Female Pleasure trailer (not a great name, very good movie, see it if you can) where Leyla Hussein says, in a disbelieving tone, "what is it that happened, millions of years ago, that they felt that they had to do this to our bodies?" What an unfathomably large amount of work we have ahead of us if we want to undo this damage...

protestants and witches

Last week I took the train to Neuchâtel to visit the American woman I met all the way back in May at a GCL gathering. Which seems far away but - news flash - Switzerland is not a big country, so I managed to get there, have a lovely lunch with her, and get back before the kids got home from school. She told me about a conversation with one of her English-tutoring clients where she had to explain that there's a huge difference between the American concept of "friend" and the Swiss one. An American will point across the room and say "that's my friend" about someone she met two minutes ago (and mean it!); in Switzerland a friend is ideally someone you went to school with - or in any case, friendship-forming is a years-long process that may not even be possible over the age of 20.

Which is to say that on Sunday morning I went to church and it just felt...awful. Like, I've been going here for eight years now, I work here for goodness' sake, and yet there is not a soul who cares whether I'm here this morning. It was like that time I had a shitty job and came back from a week away to find I had zero emails and no one had missed me. I've tried to make this work. I probably have to face the fact that it isn't working and won't ever work. But what is exactly is "it"? This particular job or Switzerland in general? Or both? And what do I do about it?

I spent the day in bed.

In the evening, in a long-shot attempt to cheer myself up, I took the train to Winterthur (Zürich's industrial but more chill sister city, kind of like...Tacoma?) to go to church again. Because there's a pastor there who works for the normal Swiss protestant church but is also American and decided to start a monthly service in English. It was worth the trip. If only to hear from someone who is exceptionally well-integrated that the need to speak English and make friends - in the American sense - is perfectly normal...

And on Friday night I was invited to Gina's house to celebrate the Wiccan ritual of Samhain, which was friendly and intense at the same time. I love Gina's knack for being serious about her rituals without taking them too seriously, if that makes any sense. And I think...well I don't think what god (if any) we worship matters nearly as much as the coming together and facing hard things and working on becoming the best versions of ourselves.

Which will, by definition, always be a work in progress. So, onwards, I guess.

wine

Once upon a time, some brilliant and well-connected individual decided that as the weather gets colder and there are fewer tourists interested in round-the-lake boat rides, the sightseeing ferries of Zurich could be put to good use as a...trade show venue? So they all get tied together at the Bürkliplatz docks, a couple of smaller boats serve as restaurants, and there you have it, the yearly "wine ships." Taste wine until you feel tipsy...or maybe that was just a little wave?...

So there we were, Daniel and I, wine tasting at 2:00 on Thursday afternoon, because that was the only time we could go together without logistical drama on the home front. It was, as you might expect (hope?), relatively empty. We'd run into a woman who goes to our church. She was manning a both of Portuguese wines. And while Dan talked to her, I was talking to her booth partner, a Polish woman in her early 40s. Or anyway, she was talking to me. About her plans to offer training courses for expats, because there are so many expats in Zurich and she thinks it's very important for them to connect and make friends. I think this, too! But I could not for the life of me hold up my end of this conversation. I'd already dismissed her in my head. I couldn't think of any good questions to ask her, struggled to maintain eye contact, and wished I could just give up and sip my wine and listen to the conversation next to me. Or honestly, just sip my wine.

I'm terribly lonely, and I'm terribly picky about who I hang out with. These two things may be related. Also, I'm afraid this bodes badly for my prospects of getting a job where interaction with strange humans is required.

list: uplifting

My favorite YouTube videos, which is to say those I watch when I'm emotionally exhausted and need some motivation. Like, say, on a rainy Friday afternoon. In no particular order. What are yours?

Spooky Men's Chorale - Crossing The Bar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvFNn4a5srk

Rev. Ernest Davis, Jr. & the Wilmington Chester Mass Choir - Ain't Got Time To Die 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7DUFXzIaeI

Conspirare - Unclouded Day, arr. Shawn Kirchner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE3nN6IvlGA

Pia Douwes - Ich gehöre nur mir

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxIifJnVPf4

Nathan Clark George - Remember O Thou Man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fPfmPcys8M

MILCK + Choir! of 1300 Can’t Keep Quiet!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cc_neVdjb4

moo

We had a joke in (geeky tech) college, something like this one:

A biologist, an engineer and a physicist are called to help make a dairy farm more efficient. The biologist tells the farmer that he should feed the cows certain hormones to make them lactate more. The farmer asks how much that will cost, and the biologist says it will cost many thousands of dollars. The engineer proposes making a better milking machine to get more milk per cow. The farmer asks how much that will cost, and the engineer says it will cost many thousands of dollars. The farmer then asks the physicist how much his idea will cost. The physicist says, "It won't cost anything and can be implemented immediately!" The farmer is astonished and wonders how this is possible. The physicist responds, "First, assume a spherical cow of uniform milk density..."

haha get it? The physicist is so lost in his theoretical world that his "cow" bears no resemblance to the four-legged beasts in the farmer's field. We can assume that his idea for increasing the efficiency of the dairy farm will be similarly out of touch with reality.

This is how my Thursday night theology class feels. To me. We as a human race have to find our way together towards a sustainable future for ourselves and our planet. What should we do? Well, first let's examine the development of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity...

success

Today, the washing machine broke down on the fourth of six laundry loads, and I did not freak out. I successfully notified the apartment manager, put the dirty sheets (load 5) back on the beds, washed the delicates (load 4) in the bathtub, rolled them in towels, hung them up, put the towels in the dryer, asked a downstairs neighbor whether I could wash the pants (load 6) in the still-working machine in the other laundry room (there are two, with access based on which floor you live on), and signed up for some laundry room hours on Saturday to really wash the sheets. By noon I was out the door to meet Christopher at school and take him to his recorder lesson. I remained mostly calm through practicing his dictation with him (always dreadful), parkour class drop-off in the rain, shopping and taking the groceries home, picking up a now-dripping-wet child from parkour, and throwing together dinner when we got home. And after bedtime I made a casserole to take to a potluck on Friday.

So there.

lost

In the thirteen years between my first year of kindergarten and my first year of college, my family moved five times and I went to nine different schools. I can't say that this particularly bothered me. My method for managing being the new kid all the time was to find one other girl I could be friends with, and then stay close. This worked well enough, enough of the time, and my mom and brother were my social circle when it didn't.

My best friend in sixth grade was the best of the besties. We were both smart kids who didn’t fit the girl mold very well, but weren’t tomboys either. I could be myself with her. I remember hanging out at recess, carefully using a silver pen to color the rocket-shaped erasers we’d won for getting all the quiz questions right in science class, with beautiful results, sure that we were the first kids ever to think of such a thing. She may have been my first love - not crush (that honor goes to Jason Kipp in fourth grade) but...relationship with someone I admired. I loved her brains, her sarcastic wit, that she’d lived all over the world. She was into James Bond novels and Karl Sagan, neither of which I had any idea about. So worldly!

I moved again at the end of the school year. We exchanged sporadic letters for a couple of years. And then we lost touch. My fault, no doubt.

For a long time, I've dreamed of getting back in touch with her. I asked my parents about it once, and I'm sure they told me that they thought they could contact her parents through the magical Christmas-card network that binds military parents of my generation together. "Oh her dad was a public affairs officer? So-and-so was a public affairs officer. They're a tight-knit group..." But it never happened and when I tentatively asked again a few years later, they couldn't remember saying that.

While cleaning out old boxes before we moved to Switzerland, I came across the last letter I ever received from her. It said she was in London but would be doing an exchange program the next year…to Switzerland!...and gave her address here. A lead! When we got settled I wrote a polite note to her host family, saying we had been friends but lost touch and did they know where she was now? I didn’t particularly expect a reply, but one came only a week later: yes, she lived with us, but we’ve lost touch with her too.

The internet is less helpful than one might hope. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn…she’s got a common name and she's lost among her apparently thousands of namesakes. If she even has the same name any more - just because I was too stubborn to change my name when I got married doesn't mean every other woman is. But a couple of years ago I found one tantalizing lead to a woman who worked at the Spy Museum in Washington, DC. Spies...James Bond...maybe? I sent a message to someone who appeared to be the same person on Facebook, and never got a reply.

And then on our trip to DC, Daniel wanted to visit the Spy Museum, and I remembered this. What if I asked there and they knew this person and I could meet her and find out whether she was my long-lost friend? Nah. But what if? Nah. But... And we were in the gift shop and I thought come on, Susannah, ask - they'll just say no but you'll regret it if you don't - and I asked, and to my great surprise the nice woman stocking the shelves replied, "oh, yes, that sounds like my boss! She's great, do you want to meet her? Just a minute, I'll go see if I can find her."

And suddenly there I was standing in the Spy Museum Store with my stomach in a knot, and Christopher was trying to show me some cool souvenir he'd found and I couldn't focus on what he was saying because WHAT IF THIS IS IT??

It wasn't.

The employee came back and said her boss was gone for the day but gave me her card, and I sent an email that night, and she didn't write back.

And what am I hoping for, anyway? A friend, sure, but what are the chances that after so many years we'll have anything in common? Maybe it's more like validation - the kind that less nomadic people take for granted - that my childhood existed and that someone other than my immediate family remembers it?

I should let it go. The thing is...she's not google-able, but I am. Maybe, just maybe, someday, she'll find me.

Mission: Incomplete.

sonstiges

Here, some trip pictures that don't belong to other posts:

The mobile lounges at Dulles Airport. Always crack me up. I know they were supposed to look cool and futuristic, but they look like the military-industrial complex gone terribly awry.

A view of Rosslyn from the Arlington Memorial Bridge. We walked from our hotel in Rosslyn to the Mall, which is clearly not a Thing One Does (we saw bikers and joggers but definitely no other tourists), but the weather was absolutely perfect and the path along the river was lovely.

The balconies in the African-American Museum reminded me of the Seattle Public Library. We only had half a day here, so we didn't stand in line for the history galleries, but instead explored the galleries on the upper floors, which were overwhelming but also vibrant and honest and uplifting. Also the food at the cafe was amaaaaazing. 

Moving on to Virginia, Christopher gets into the car-culture mood.

One Loudon is an aesthetic step up from the ubiquitous strip malls of Loudon County but lacks a certain...sincerity? For example: "I don't think anyone actually said this."

Away from the malls, here we are having some wholesome family fun at the Temple Hill Fall Festival and Corn Maize [sic]. Just as the kids started to whine with feeling, we found our way out. And then ate corn dogs...yum...oooh there's another thing we can't get in Switzerland...

And speaking of wholesome, Caroline was sick on our last day in Virginia but with the help of some ibuprofen she rallied enough to go to Megan's quilting guild's annual auction in the evening. Here are the girls and their loot.

Heading home, loot in tow.