This just in: I have trouble with the German language and lots of work to do

Sometimes my daily routine takes me past the fanciest hotel in Freiburg, which has a restaurant with outdoor seating, and every time I walk past there and see all the people wearing their crisp patrician summer clothes and drinking their expensive carbonated water, I feel a little wistful. Not because they're clearly either in a monetary position to happen to be eating lunch in a fancy restaurant that day or have an established job (or close acquaintance) that's cool enough to pay for things like that. Money, whatever. Every time I look at these people, who are almost certainly not college students, I think, "they are fluent in the language of the country they are currently in, and they don't still have over twenty pages of papers to write in the next two weeks." And I am envious.

OH, and if you for some reason happen to wonder in the next couple days why I'm not responding to the thousands of comments this post will no doubt generate, I'll be in Luxembourg tomorrow and Brussels on Friday, and unless they kick me off a train at some point (or my travel buddy B and I miss one of our like seventy transfers), here after that but, through Monday, with weltreisender, who I can not imagine will be anything but fun. Damn, look at all those commas. I lose at syntax.



These papers will get done. They WILL. Get done.