The Impatient, Skeptical Foot Monster

It’s interesting how our brains pick and choose what they want to remember.  There are all of those things that you tell yourself you can’t forget: where you put the car keys, the name of the person you just met, which way is right and which way is left.  And, yet, you still forget these things time and time again.  There are also the things that you try to forget, that you don’t want to remember, but they always find a way to sneak back and remind you that they’re there.  But then there exist all of the things that happen that aren’t really important enough for you to classify whether you’d like to remember them or not.  Some you remember, and some you forget, and either way it doesn’t matter to you.  I’m guessing that this category of events, to which you are indifferent, is probably the biggest category.  They’re things like what color shirt the lady in line at the grocery store was wearing, or which quarter of your shoe came in contact with the crack in the sidewalk.  But sometimes we still remember those things.  And sometimes they come in handy.

	Remember	Don’t Remember
Would like to remember	Agree	Disagree
Would like to forget	Disagree	Agree
Indifferent	Neutral	Neutral

For example, Chris Colbert, the CEO at Holland Mark, came to speak to our marketing class this past semester.  Chris’s presentation was engaging, his presence was powerful, and his message was useful.  And nearly everything Chris said that day was something I really would have liked to remember.   But out of everything Chris said that day, what comes back to me now is not the certain process I’m trying to recall or that acronym that I told myself I shouldn’t forget.  No.  Instead, it’s a study about what stages our brains go through when we meet new people.  How useful, right?  Well, I’ve actually found that this study functions quite well as a sequel to Foot Theory, if applied to my moving to Germany situation rather than meeting new people.

It’s broken up into three different stages.  The first stage is extremely emotional.  We make fast judgments based on little information to decide how we feel about this certain person, object, place, situation, etc.  Then, we transition into a rational phase, where we try to validate or disprove our original conjectures with tangible evidence.  We’re skeptical and apprehensive.  Our findings in this stage may or may not agree with our original emotional reaction.  After this, we return to an emotional phase, where we use our rational findings to re-inform our emotional reaction to the subject.

You can probably think back to what was going through your head the last time you met a new person and pick out (fairly easily) what stage you were at during each point in your interaction.  And I think, at least personally, the rational stage is the easiest to identify during the process itself.  You can actually feel yourself being skeptical, testing the person, reevaluating your initial impression.  That’s where I am right now, here in Schenkenzell.  And I can feel it.  Actually, I can point out things that happen in my everyday life that I’m second-guessing and questioning just to test and see if my initial reaction was real.  The following are a few initial reactions I had, accompanied with short stories of my skepticism about their validity within the past week.  (Note how I use "so" in all of these.  So typical of me to exaggerate first impressions.)

Everyone is so nice and friendly!
Haha, right?  This is classic.  Every time I’m bombarded with new people and there’s, like, even one person who smiles at me, I automatically think that we’re friends.  But since the beginning of last week, it went from, Everyone is so nice and friendly! to, Why is everyone being so nice and friendly? What’s going on here?.  I’ve attributed most of the friendliness to (1) pity, and (2) being American.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want people to be mean to me.  But I do want to know why they’re being so nice to me, because I don’t think it can be normal.My colleague, who is an intern from Germany and sits next to me at work, invited me to go to a concert of one of our other colleagues, who plays the mandolin.  It was Friday night, somewhere near Offenburg.  She drove us from the train station to the concert, and then after the concert, when the train wasn’t running, she took me back to my house all the way in Schenkenzell!  Maybe this wouldn’t be a cause for skepticism in any other situation, but I am maybe the least interesting person to have a conversation with in German (more on this point later), so I have no idea why she would be interested in spending an evening with me.  I’ve even contemplated the possibility that it might be one of her assignments to be friendly to me.Regardless of whether or not that is true, I hope she continues to be friendly until my German improves a bit and we can actually have a fun conversation. 


[Note:  Most of the songs at the concert were played in English.  It was folk music with the mandolin and guitar.  For the record, the singer, Bettina, had quite an impressive English accent for the majority of the songs.  It was really a great way to spend a Friday night.  I love live music.  Check out Lydia and Bettina on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt9Tj6OrTmA] 


Everything is so beautiful!
It really, really is.  There’s no way to dispute this fact.  But I think, in my period of rationality and skepticism, I’ve just unfortunately allowed myself to question the beauty and excitement surrounding me.  For example, this weekend I went to Strasbourg, France with one of the interns I met at the BBQ a couple weeks ago.  Everyone keeps telling me how beautiful Strasbourg is and how I just have to see it.  So I was pretty pumped about getting out of the Schwarzwald Saturday and training to France.   But, unfortunately, I was just so underwhelmed by the city.  (And I don’t think that’s actually Strasbourg’s fault at all.  Looking back, there’s absolutely no reason I shouldn’t have been mesmerized by the rivers flowing around the city or shocked by the grandeur of the giant cathedral (tourist central).  But I just wasn’t.  And I’m blaming it on being rational.)  I think this was just me trying to prove to myself that not every single place in Europe is going to wrap me up in its arms and give me a great big, welcoming, heart-warming hug like Schiltach did.  So point taken, Jenna.  Not everywhere is going to be perfectland.  Now take off your party-pooper glasses. 


It’s going to be so easy to learn German in this environment!
Now thinking about it, my reevaluation of this initial reaction isn’t necessarily a result of my skepticism.  It’s a result of reality.Just throwing yourself into a place where you’re completely surrounded by a foreign language doesn’t necessarily make it easy to learn the language.  I mean, yeah, maybe it’s more effective this way, but I am not going to say it’s easy.  What’s easier than this is talking to my American friends in 9:30am German class every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday about what we did on the weekend or what our plans are next weekend, because we all have the same awful American accent and similarly limited vocabularies, which makes it easy to interact about whatever we want to interact about.  But when you throw real Germans into the mix, who don’t understand a word you’re saying unless you perfectly roll all of your R’s, who have real-life things to talk about or real business tasks for you to complete, and who speak with different accents which sometimes cause the words you thought you knew to change altogether, things become a little more difficult.So, no.  It’s not going to be easy.  In fact, it’s already become really, really difficult.  It seems like I’ve nearly completely lost my entire English and German speaking vocabulary.  I can’t tell whether I’m reading in English or in German.  I don’t realize when my colleagues switch from German to English.  And I have no idea what’s going on with my thoughts because I’m absorbing so much German but my brain is just used to English, so it’s some kind of mumble-jumble of incomprehensibility up there that I can’t even sort out.  It’s all extremely exhausting and frustrating, and I feel like if I can just get everything organized in my brain, I might be able to use real words again.  Anyway, I’m sure that time will come.  I’ll just be waiting, impatiently.

So I might be past having “sometimes-freezing-occassionally-sore-and-sweaty-monster-feet-with-blisters,” but now I’ve just become The Impatient, Skeptical Foot Monster, waiting for myself to accept the validity of all of my first impressions so I can go back to being constantly amazed, engaged, and interested in all of these things happening around me.