Plans for this summer’s trip to Germany are taking form rapidly. I’m only hearing about them second-hand since my parents are planning this trip and Len and I are just tagging along where’r they lead. Because really, when you’re getting to spend an all-expenses-paid week and a half in Weisbaden, Berlin, and Munich, who the hell cares exactly what the details of the trip are? I am quite happy to sit back and let my parents figure out the logistics of getting from town to town and where to stay within the towns, and for my part I am just trying to re-learn the tiny pathetic fragments of German that I once knew. Which is an experience I’m finding quite humbling.

As a child, I went to an overpriced and very snooty private school where they under-educated me in almost every aspect of my education, except for languages. I started learning French in the third grade and kept at it right through high school, so while I’m rusty now, I was once quite fluent. And while I’ve lost all the grammar I ever knew, I can still get along quite well in everyday interaction when plunked down in the middle of Paris, once I’ve had a day or so to get my head back into French mode. I was good at French, it came very easily to me, I’m told that I have a lovely French accent, and so I always thought I was a natural at languages. I took a bit of Latin in elementary school as well and did quite well at that, and in college I dabbled in Italian and was similarly an Italian class superstar. (Which wasn’t saying much since it was a summer class and therefore contained all of five people including me, but nonetheless I felt quite smug about the fashion in which I rocked that class.) And then German class came along and smacked me upside the head.

I cannot handle German. My head cannot wrap itself around the cases and the word endings and even the simplest vocabulary flees my head at the slightest provocation. The sentence structures make no sense to me. My mouth is incapable of forming the right vowel sounds and I’m not even sure I do the consonants correctly, and the whole thing just reduces me to a sad pathetic mess of a girl who once thought she was a language-learning hotshot before German crushed her spirit. I graduated right after my one humiliating semester of German and never felt the need to think about it again, but now here I am heading off to Germany in a few months. All indications are that I don’t actually need to speak a word of German there, but I’ve always firmly believed that the only sensible and respectful thing to do is to learn at least a rudimentary smattering of the language when you’re going to a new place. Even if the people there will likely just laugh at you and switch to English, it seems important to make the effort. So I have picked up my old German textbook and a computer program and am dutifully trying once more to hammer some German into my head.

It’s not working very well. I think I need a system so I can trick myself into thinking I’m a student again and have to do well on this. I think I need to go buy index cards and highlighters and a spiral notebook and pens in different colors and make myself study every other night or something. Or possibly, I just need to memorize the phrases “Please give me some really good beer” and “Where is the nearest bookstore?” and then let Len or my stepfather handle the rest of my interactions. I begin to suspect that might be the way to go. Although today my language program taught me to say exciting things like “The red square is larger than the blue circle but smaller than the yellow triangle,” so if some nice German person wants to talk about geometry with me, I’m all set.

This started out as a whinge to the notify list, but it got long, so I’m making it a real journal entry after all. What I was going to say was — hi, guys. Apologies for what may become a slightly more extended silence than I had intended it to be, but I don’t have anything much to say because I have spent all week, and will probably spend several more days, in a sad, silent little vortex of pain and whining. If you guys pick up a paper and read about a girl in Pittsburgh who went crazy and chopped off her own ear, that will be me. Because I am in the throes of the first ear infection I’ve had since I was very young, and it is just not pretty.

I know it could be a lot worse — I Googled for information on symptoms and treatment and stuff while I was trying to determine what was wrong with me, and some of that stuff was just horrifying and straight out of a George Romero movie, with the leaking blood from the ears and all. Things aren’t that bad for me. I mostly just can’t hear out of one side of my head, and there’s also this whole intermittent “sensation of being stabbed in the ear with a sharp red-hot skewer” thing that’s been waking me up in the middle of the night for days. Not pleasant, not conducive to any form of social interaction since it gets really annoying angling yourself so people are always talking into your good ear, and just generally bad for my concentration and mood. Fortunately I went to the doctor yesterday, and while my own doctor was out, a lovely replacement fellow looked at my ear, gasped in horror, and promptly loaded me up with antibiotics. They are scary pink antibiotics which make me feel as if I am eating Barbie turds, but if they will restore my ability to hear, and make my ear stop hurting, I will eat all the scary pink pills required.

Things are looking up. I actually got some sleep last night and today I have gone from stabbing pain to just mild soreness, and a bit of my hearing has returned so the cats can no longer sneak up on me from my left side and pounce on my foot. I have pretty much renounced the van Gogh plan and am now just planning to stick it out with the antibiotics for the next few days, and only watch movies with subtitles in the meanwhile, and everything will be fine. However, I am still grumpy and hurting, and I think I’ve already said all I can say about that, so until such time as the pretty pink pills do their magic and make me functional again, I will probably have nothing further to say.

I know I wasn’t going to write again until I was healthy. And I certainly wasn’t planning to write a mushy Valentine’s Day journal entry, because really, yuck. I love Len deeply, but I am an introverted type and my displays of affection tend to be on the understated side, and I think he knows how I feel without my being sappy all over the damn internet. And if anyone who’s not Len really wants to read a mushy Valentine’s Day journal entry, there are plenty of them all over the internet. Go look somewhere else. So I was going to stay well enough away from the whole thing. (Besides, Harmony already used the Anne of Green Gables quote. And the picture! Look at Gilbert! I may have to watch those DVDs tonight. But she’s right, it was really all downhill after those first few books.)

Here I am though, writing on Valentine’s Day anyway despite potential sappiness and despite my ear infection not having quite fixed itself yet. Because even if I am not being a weepy sap about Len, I am sure as hell being a weepy sap about what’s going on in San Francisco this weekend. It’s slightly ridiculous that I’m being a weepy sap about it, because I’m kind of vocally not a fan of the institution of marriage for anyone, and in my saner moments I think that we’d all be better off if, instead of focusing on gay marriage, we scrapped marriage altogether and just did legal civil unions for any two or more people who want to build a life together, of whatever gender, orientation, number of participants, romantic relationship status, or whatever.

But you know, fuck the saner moments, because even if they slam an injunction down on Tuesday morning, what’s going on this weekend is beautiful. It makes me cry, and it lifts my spirits and gives me some hope for this country that sometimes I really think I’ve completely given up on. Maybe it’s a brief hope that will shortly be crushed, but I’ll take it while it lasts. Although as I just said in an email to a friend, it is true that I’m in major PMS mode and if I weren’t crying about this I’d probably be crying about something else. Dog food commercials or Buffy reruns or the ingredient list on the back of a ceral box or something. I’m really glad that it’s this instead.

Hmm. I just realized that if I’m going to have an “oh my god I’m turning 25 and my twenties are half over and I’ve wasted them so far” freakout, I’m really running out of time fast with only a couple of days left. I’ve been pondering that this evening, though, and even though I sometimes feel as if I’ve been sort of treading water and not really getting anywhere for the last couple of years, in the grand scheme of things I think I’m doing just fine. I am not supposed to have everything in my life completely in place and settled forever at 24. If I did, I would be kind of freaky and unnatural, and also probably incredibly dull.

I do think it’s probably about time to start thinking about moving on to whatever’s next in my life. I like my job well enough and the people I work with are great, but its main perk was free tuition for my intended excursion into grad school, plus good job connections in that field. And since I’m fairly sure that I can’t get much further in that field without going to grad school, and completely sure that I don’t want to go to grad school anytime in the near future, those things have become sort of irrelevant. So perhaps it is time to start thinking about moving on, if I can find a job that suits me better in this crappy economy. But I’ve got some big work things going on this summer, so I’ve tabled the question of a new job for now and am planning to return to it in the fall.

Which is probably just as well since it leaves me free to concentrate on moving on to whatever’s next in terms of my living arrangements, with my apartment getting sold out from under me.After a bit of floundering about and making and changing plans, I think the current plan is to rent a house with Len for a while until things come together financially so we can get on with the eventual buying-a-house plan. So hopefully the house-hunting thing will be the thing into which I can channel my vague desire to find out what comes next in my life, and then once we’ve actually found a place I can concentrate on learning how to live with a significant-other-type-person without driving each other crazy.

And then in the summer there will be trips to Germany and Las Vegas and then I will come back and handle the big giant work things coming up, and then in the fall I can think about maybe getting a new job. And harassing Len until he gives in and agrees that four cats just aren’t enough and we really need a puppy. Or possibly a tiger. And then by the time I turn 26 I will have a whole shiny new and different life, just like that!

It occurs to me that maybe I am having a bit of a mid-twenties crisis after all. Though on the other hand I can look around my life right now and really, I think I would be quite content if I reached 26 with things just about the way they are now. It’s a quiet, insular little life I’ve got here, but it suits me pretty well. It would be even better with a puppy or a tiger, though. Or maybe one of each.

One summer when I was in high school, a acquaintance called me up and asked me to help her out at her summer job. She was working at a farm that supplied petting zoos and ponies to the local firemen’s fairs that happen all over that part of New Jersey in the summer, and she needed someone to work at the fair with her that weekend. I didn’t have much else to do, and had always kind of wished I could get to know her better anyway, so I was up for it. So that’s what I did for several evenings in a row that summer. We took care of the animals, and she showed me how to make friends with the ponies. They made snuffling noises and breathed warm tickling puffs of air onto my palms. They had to be coaxed into the trailer, and then there were all the petting zoo animals to be caught and caged into the back of the truck. Goats and a big mean pig and a cage full of ducks. It was dirty and smelly and loud and the most fun I’d had in a long time, though perhaps the ducks didn’t feel the same way.

Eventually we’d get everyone loaded onto the truck, clean up, and head off to the fair. We’d get there early to set up before the crowds came. One of the goats was so little he could squeeze out between the slats of the fence, and we’d have to chase him down once before the fair even opened. People would fill the fairground, playing games, dancing, buying jewelry and artwork, going on rides, eating that terrible fair food. There would be a rush of little kids at our corner of the fair and we’d introduce them to the animals. Every so often the little goat would try to make another grand escape and the kids loved it, giggling and clapping and probably scaring him to death. We’d lift the kids up onto the ponies and start off around the little track. The kids would sway and giggle and the pony would make his snuffling sounds and trot placidly around the ring, and then push his head into my hand when we were done, looking for snacks or head-scratches. The pony I was in charge of was soft and golden and had the same name as my cat. He stepped on my foot a few times and it hurt, but I adored him hopelessly by the end of the first night and would have let him do a jig on my head if he’d wanted to.

As the night wore on the families with small children started to head home and it was mostly the grownups left drinking and dancing and playing games, so things got pretty quiet for us. We relaxed, played with the animals, had meandering conversations about this and that, and eventually the woman who owned the animals would come to get us and we’d pack them all up again and head home, then come back and do it all again the next night. I didn’t get to help out again after that one weekend, and I didn’t subsequently become as good friends with that girl as I had hoped although we remained friendly acquaintances, but that was the highlight of my summer. And yet I have no idea how long it’s been since I thought of it at all until yesterday.

Yesterday another old friend from high school got in touch with me. Among other discussion topics we did that requisite “sharing the scraps of knowledge we each possess about other former acquaintances” thing, and one of the things she told me that I didn’t know was that the girl I worked with that summer is off on the other side of the country and has a baby girl now. Just staring at that sentence is throwing me for a loop. I’m not really sure why, because friends my age have been getting married or having babies all around me for a couple of years now and it doesn’t weird me out. It’s not like it’s news to me that many people in their mid-twenties do these things. But somehow it makes a difference that I met all those people when we were already in our twenties. Somehow there’s a world of difference between someone I met in college having a baby, and someone having a baby when I can still remember meeting her at the very beginning of my freshman year of high school, making friends out of sheer desperation in study hall because we were both clearly completely at a loss not knowing anyone in the room.

Here she is crystal-clear in my memory, sixteen or seventeen, leaning against a fencepost laughing with her hair flopping into her eyes, teaching me to make friends with a pony on a bright summer afternoon. And there she is in the world, a grownup with a family, and a whole country between us. I didn’t feel old on Sunday when I actually had my birthday, but I feel terribly old today all of a sudden.

I had a very clever plan last night. I knew I would have to get up bright and early to get to the clinic on time, and I was feeling kind of headache-y and blah anyway. I figured I wasn’t going to get anything else done in my blah state anyway, and if I went bed around 11 p.m. I could get almost as much sleep as I do on a normal night when I go to bed around 1 or 2 a.m., so I thought it was a great plan. (A kind of sad plan, when I vaguely recall there was a time when I used to start my Friday nights at eleven, but I think I’ve long since beaten the “Woe is me, I am old and boring now!” topic into the ground.)

So the plan started out great. I took some aspirin, the headache cleared up enough to let me sleep, I read a couple of short stories, and I went to sleep. And then at two a.m., I was awoken by an extremely loud exploding sound right outside my window. It took me a second to get my bearings and find my glasses, but when I did, I looked out to see that a tree outside my neighbor’s house, right across the driveway from my bedroom window, had burst into flames. So there I was, at two a.m., half-awake, half-dressed, staring at a blazing tree right outside my house. Not the sort of thing that happens to me all the time.

It didn’t turn into a big dramatic thing. The neighbors came running out, but after the intial flare the fire died down within a minute or so and we didn’t need the fire department or anything. But I wound up wide awake for about an hour after that, worrying that there might be a stray unextinguished ember somewhere that would hop across the driveway and set my house on fire. (I worry a lot, usually about utterly ridiculous things.) This morning I took a look at the tree to see if I could figure out what had happened, but I have no clue. I know something had been hanging in that tree for weeks and I suppose it could have been a bug zapper or something electric that exploded, but I really thought it was just a bird feeder. So maybe the frat boys up the street got bored and decided to dabble in arson. Or maybe the tree just spontaneously combusted. Whatever it was, it was really weird and unsettling. Plus, it foiled my brilliant getting-enough-sleep-even-though-I-got-up-early plan, so now I am dead tired.

Things at the clinic were pretty quiet, at least. It’s started to be not completely brutally cold out there at seven a.m., so some of the protestors who went into hiding for the winter are back out, including my old favorite, Tri-Cornered Hat Guy. It was oddly comforting to hear his painfully loud and even more painfully off-key rendition of his favorite hymn. And then he picked a fight with one of the Protestant protestors about her heretic ways and why she should convert to Catholicism, and then he got all huffy and stormed off proclaiming the heretics just as sinful as the rest of us baby-killers. That was more entertainment than we’ve had in months. Everything had gotten so boring of late; I think both escorts and protestors have just been too damn cold to work up any enthusiasm to do much more than the bare minimum required.

Afterwards I treated myself to a trip to Barnes & Noble since I had a birthday gift certificate to spend. I picked up a nice assortment of books, but I think the prize of the day was a copy of Emily Post’s etiquette book, since it had occurred to me recently that despite my adoration of reference books and determination to own as many as possible on as many subjects as possible, I owned not one etiquette book. So I brought that home, quite pleased with myself, and have been passing the time since then happily reading up on the nuances of how to comport oneself at a debutante ball, and the intricacies of leaving one’s fur coat with the coat-check person at a nice restaurant. Not that I intend to ever do either of those things, but it amuses me to read up on them nonetheless. I would really like to take a nap, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, so perhaps lunch should happen instead.