Newton discovering gravity
*shows up at nasa with sleeping bag & pillow* I’m ready to go to the moon
the part of adulthood that nobody prepared me for was how some nights you’re like “yknow what? i’m in the mood to cook a full 12-course meal for myself” and other nights you’re like “tortilla chips are basically an entire meal it’s fine”
Goethe-Institut did a web series a while back aimed at new arrivals in Germany and I like how it make sure to teach people that a lot of Germans are rude af
like, this is a genuine scene from an ep:
Well she’s obviously doing it wrong. You got to mumble “Guten Tag” in no one’s actual direction upon entering the waiting room. Then you don’t speak a word (you gotta grab a magazine though, because if you’re on your mobile people will find that asocial) until the doctor calls you and when you get back to retrieve your jacket you mumble “Auf Wiedersehen”.
If you say “Guten Tag” while sitting down it’s either because you’re passive-aggressively shaming the person you’re talking to for not saying “Guten Tag” (which is of course highly respectable, but weird if they did say it) or worse:
You’re trying to make small-talk.
See also: when entering a crowded bus, tram, subway or train, you do not say a single word. You look for an empty bench. If there are none, you will have a neighbour. You stop at an empty spot and mumble something like “tschulli-ng” or “s-nch-frei?” to the person occupying the other spot on the bench. You nod in an upward direction. They reply a mumbled “türlich” while vaguely looking somewhere near your face and moving their bag if neccessary. You sit down, nod gratefully, and keep your mouth shut for the rest of the ride. Neither of you wanted this. You wanted freedom. Don’t bother each other.
If an entire bench in front of you becomes available at the next stop, though, it is not the polite thing to free your neighbour and yourself up. No, you stay right where you are. The silent stranger next to you is your silent stranger now.
Welcome to Germany. This is how we express love.
None of these people are joking.
And if you’re the one sitting at the window and you want to get off at the next stop, you begin to loudly rustle with your bag whatever, because that way you can signal the other person that you need them to get up without having to speak to them.
In German-speaking Switzerland the general-purpose greeting when you enter a room is “Grüezi!” - greetings! - delivered in a sort of sing-song voice: “Groo-etsee”. If there’s more than one person you say “Grüezi mitenand!” - greetings one and all! - though I’m not sure if this cartoon is accurate…
Unless you already know the other person/people you’ll mostly just get a nod or a little grunt when you say it - they Grüezi’d already as they came in - but if you don’t say it you’re the Rudest Person In the building, city, canton, country or world…
In beerhalls and other places with communal-type seating, the mumbled “’st frei?” before taking a vacant seat also applies, but there’s an additional wordless greeting made by rapping the table-top with your knuckles, done when sitting down and also when leaving. A tap-tap is enough*, no need for “shave-and-a-haircut”.
(*Knocking the table or desk is also a form of applause at the end of
lectures and business meetings, when it goes on for as long as clapping would.)
This is German as well as Swiss, allows you to say hi or bye to strangers without interrupting their conversations, and apparently was an old superstition to acknowledge the woodland spirit who lived in the tree from which the table is made, and prevent them bringing bad luck.
It also allows you to say hi and drink beer at the same time…
it also allows
you to say hi and drink beer
at the same time…
^Haiku^bot^8. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes.
Help keep my meatbag slave alive.
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9th November 1989 - 5th February 2018 (10,316 days) - The Berlin Wall has now been down for as long as it stood.
Holy shit
If kids can’t socialize, who should parents blame? Simple: They should blame themselves. This is the argument advanced in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd. Boyd—full disclosure, a friend of mine—has spent a decade interviewing hundreds of teens about their online lives.
What she has found, over and over, is that teenagers would love to socialize face-to-face with their friends. But adult society won’t let them. “Teens aren’t addicted to social media. They’re addicted to each other,” Boyd says. “They’re not allowed to hang out the way you and I did, so they’ve moved it online.”
It’s true. As a teenager in the early ’80s I could roam pretty widely with my friends, as long as we were back by dark. But over the next three decades, the media began delivering a metronomic diet of horrifying but rare child-abduction stories, and parents shortened the leash on their kids. Politicians warned of incipient waves of youth wilding and superpredators (neither of which emerged). Municipalities crafted anti-loitering laws and curfews to keep young people from congregating alone. New neighborhoods had fewer public spaces. Crime rates plummeted, but moral panic soared. Meanwhile, increased competition to get into college meant well-off parents began heavily scheduling their kids’ after-school lives.
The result, Boyd discovered, is that today’s teens have neither the time nor the freedom to hang out. So their avid migration to social media is a rational response to a crazy situation. They’d rather socialize F2F, so long as it’s unstructured and away from grown-ups. “I don’t care where,” one told Boyd wistfully, “just not home.”
Me: i love books! I love them so much! I am such a bookworm!
Friend: cool! How many did you read this year?
Me: OK, so here’s the thing
I did not come here to be attacked in this manner
elizabeth swan and will turner are actually SO romance in the first movie and not enough people acknowledged this because the early 2000s were the age of the edgelords who only valued jack sparrow’s moral ambiguity and that is the TRUTH
the part where she’s like “how many times do i have to tell you to call me elizabeth” and he shyly says “once more, miss swann” and once she walks away he gazes adoringly after her and whispers “elizabeth” to himself like he’s unworthy of it
then when he’s patching up the cut on her hand and she flinches and he says “i know, blacksmith’s hands… they’re rough” because he thinks that’s what’s bothering her HE KNOWS HE’S NOT WORTHY OF HER!!! THAT’S THE PINING I’M TALKING ABOUT BINCH!!! I DON’T ACCEPT LESS!!!!
he has like 10 chances to confess his love to her but waits until he’s dressed like this to do it:
my man knows 1) the importance of a good outfit when shooting your shot 2) how to ACCESSORIZE. take NOTES.
characterlimit
