Kemstone's Journal

No major events have happened recently, but I think it might be a good time to just write a quick overview of where everything in my life stands at the moment.

I’ve now spent three winters in Hannover, and with the first day of temperatures higher than 20°C yesterday it seems that my last one is officially over. A cold I got last weekend gave way to hay-fever yesterday, and now I’ve got a few weeks or months of itchy eyes and runny noses to look forward to. I love the spring, but it doesn’t come without a price.

Because yesterday was the last completely nice and sunny day they’ve forecasted for awhile, I knew I had to take advantage but I also knew that every single person in the city would have the same idea. I went cycling like usual, but I made sure to get out as early in the day as possible to beat the afternoon crowds. For the first time since the Fall I did a complete cycle-tour of Hannover’s nicest areas, a two-and-a-half hour giant closed loop that takes me up the river, through the park, through the forest, and back around to the area around the Maschsee before heading up the river again. It was fantastic, and for the first time this year I noticed the trees beginning to sprout new leaves. In a couple of weeks all signs of winter will be gone, and if all goes according to plan I won’t see those trees in their leafless state again.

Unfortunately, the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster in Japan has cast a shadow of doubt over the whole plan to go there this summer, but right now I’m operating under the assumption that it’s still going to happen. I wrote to Interac, the company that hired me, the week the disaster occurred and they told me that nothing has changed with regard to my situation, but of course you never know. Every time I watch the news I hear some new horror story about radiation and potential nuclear catastrophe, and it’s a constant source of uncertainty.

Many people think I’m crazy to still want to go there given the situation, but I just hope those people’s perceptions are as warped by the media as mine. Interac told me that less than 10% of their business was affected by the tsunami, that Japan is a big country. They probably won’t place me near the disaster area, but I don’t even care if where I go was affected. I just want to be there instead of looking at things from afar and wondering if it will affect me. I even feel bad that with all the devastation there and with all those poor people who’ve lost everything, I’m more worried about my own situation. Had I been there when it happened, there might have been something I could do in the aftermath to help. But from here all I can do is wait and hope they get the situation under control. I’ve also got to face the fact that the Japan I’d been trying to go to has now been altered, and that now the only Japan I’ll ever know is post-tsunami Japan.

But I try not to think too much about that as I continue to get ready. I won’t have to do anything until next month when they will presumably finally tell me where I’m going, but in the mean-time I make time to study Japanese every day, which I still can’t believe how much I’m enjoying. I’ve also learned Spanish and German, but for some reason Japanese is by far the most fun language I’ve ever studied. The writing is one reason—who doesn’t love ひらがな and カタカナ?—but the words themselves are just so fun to say: “I’m typing this on my konpyuutaa which sits on my teeburu.” Even if I don’t wind up getting to live in Japan, I think I’ll go on learning the language.

As for Germany, I’ve only got three and a half months left, and not much to do in that time. I’ll be going to Ichenheim one last time for Rheinfest, and there are two Roger Waters concerts to go to but those are the only definite plans. I’d thought I would try and make it to Rome once before I leave Europe, but I’ve decided for a number of reasons it would be wise to forego that trip and save my money for other things.

My friend Luke from college is currently travelling around the world (he’s keeping a pretty good blog-record of it, which you can check out here) and if all goes according to plan he should come out and visit me this summer before I head back to the states. I finish teaching in June and I’ll have the first two weeks of July free to travel around and basically give one last goodbye to Germany before I embark on the next chapter of my life.

Assuming nothing goes wrong and it really happens, it’s going to be the most unique chapter of my life so far, and potentially the most interesting. It’s also going to be a lot more difficult than the one I’m in now—I’ll have to work longer and harder than I have to under my current job-situation—but I have a feeling the work is going to be more rewarding, as I’ll be teaching actual schoolchildren instead of business people who are either too old to learn well or already speak perfect English and just want to practice. Instead of a few lessons a day and then a bunch of free time, I’ll be occupied nearly all day every day except weekends and holidays, like being back in school myself. But that should be very interesting—I always anticipated being a public schoolteacher at some point in my life, but I never guessed that it would first be in Japan.

Until then I’ve just got to try and not let this time fly by as quickly as it has already this year, and make sure to appreciate what I have while I still have it. I can’t say these past three years have been my proudest—I would have liked to have become more social, met more people, improved my German more, etc.—but I’ve certainly enjoyed them. It’s almost felt like a three-year-long vacation.

But all vacations must come to an end, and if I had to spend another year here I’d probably go insane. I wasn’t built to spend so much time in one place—there’s a wind in my soul that makes me want to keep moving and keep accumulating new experiences. The fact that I have such a hard time connecting with other people and that it’s impossible for me to get a girlfriend are both advantages in terms of being able to live this kind of life, so I’d better take advantage. I hope I make more friends in Japan than I did in Germany, though the friendships I have forged here with Oliver and Lena are invaluable and will probably last a lifetime. As for women—I stand ready to be the only Westerner to live for years in Japan without ever getting a Japanese girlfriend. It’s not that I’m going to try and avoid that—I haven’t deliberately avoided it here either—but life just has a way of preventing that from happening for me. But like I said, I can make that work to my advantage.

And those are all the random life-situation-related thoughts that are floating around my mind at this point in time. This is where things stood at the beginning of Spring 2011, as I round the final stretch of my time in Germany.

After attending a large anti-nuclear demonstration in Hannover this weekend, I brought some of the arguments I heard to the E.ON employees whom I teach English to and gave them a chance to respond.

Those of them who are involved in the nuclear branch of E.ON Energy are quite frustrated with the uncertainty resulting from the Fukushima-Daiichi disaster in Japan, as now the German government has decided to hold off on their plan to extend the operational lifetimes of seven nuclear power plants back to their original expiration dates. The stated reason is that we now need to re-evaluate the safety of these plants given what happened in Japan (although the reality is that they just want to kick this issue down the road until after this weekend’s elections).

At the demonstration I played Devil’s Advocate on behalf of the energy industry, and with my E.ON students I played Devil’s Advocate on behalf of the anti-nuclear crowd. Here are the three strongest points in favor of not extending the lifetimes of these nuclear plants, and how the E.ON employees responded.

1- Now that another nuclear disaster has taken place, we have an opportunity to learn from the mistakes that were made there. Isn’t it sensible to put the lifetime-extensions on hold until we can look at that information and adjust our plans accordingly?

I put this question to someone who works in risk management, and while he said that it sounds like a good point on the surface, it’s actually meaningless when you look at the details. He walked me through the whole process of how risks are calculated and drew a graph of the probability curve of severe earthquakes occurring—a downward sloping line with low-intensity earthquakes coming in greater frequency to high-intensity earthquakes barely occurring at all. Prior to the 9.0-magnitude earthquake in Japan, the government had already evaluated the safety of the nuclear plants and determined that they could withstand any earthquake up to a magnitude that could be reasonably expected in Germany, which I believe is somewhere in the level-8 range.

The risk of a level-8 earthquake occurring here is still very small, and the risk of a level-9 quake is so small as to be statistically negligible. The fact that a level-9 quake occurred elsewhere in the world does nothing to change that calculation.

Nor does it factor into the equation that in a worst-case scenario—a nuclear explosion—a great deal of people will die. To an individual, death is death no matter what the cause. The harm to one person is the same whether the death is a result of a nuclear explosion or a car accident—the latter of which is far more likely.

Basically, the government spent years evaluating and re-evaluating the safety of these plants and determined that the risk of harm to the German people was low enough to justify continuing their operation until the planned expiration dates. The disaster in Japan doesn’t change that.

2- Given the problems associated with nuclear power—not just the potential for a disaster but the problem of nuclear waste disposal–shouldn’t we be working to make the switch to clean and renewable energy sources as quickly as possible? According to the demonstrators, Germany could potentially power the entire grid with renewable energy in five years’ time.

First of all, every E.ON employee is skeptical of the claim that Germany’s entire grid could in fact be powered by clean energy sources in five years’ time. But even if that were technically true, they said, it’s just not practical. The sun doesn’t shine very often in Germany and in the south there is too little wind to justify the cost of building wind turbines. You’d have to harness and store this energy in the north, then distribute it throughout the country which would require the construction of an entirely new grid, nearly doubling the amount of power-lines criss-crossing the German landscape.

Even the Germans know the expression, “Not in my backyard,” and it doesn’t just apply to nuclear power plants. People also get out and protest when they want to construct new power-lines, wind turbines or solar panels, simply because it spoils the scenery. Try to explain to them that it’s a choice between a less picturesque landscape and green energy or wire-free fields and nuclear energy and they’d probably choose the green energy, just as long as you build those pylons somewhere else.

Incidentally, Germans are already paying more for energy due to the politics of renewables. It costs more to distribute energy from windmills and solar panels through the grid, but they distribute 100% of this energy in order to boost the overall percentage of how much of Germany’s energy usage comes from clean sources. Rather than keep the nuclear reactors running at the same level all the time and bringing wind and solar into the mix only at times of peak usage, they have to keep adjusting the output of the nuclear reactors depending on how much energy is coming from wind and sunlight at any given time, which drives prices up and is worse for the long-term lifetimes of the reactors.

3- If the government doesn’t force the energy industry to invest in more research and development of green energy, what financial incentive would they have to do so? If they’re making such huge profits from nuclear plants, why bother trying to switch to renewables in the first place? If the government doesn’t extend the lifetimes of these nuclear plants, the protesters argue, it will force the industry to move toward green technology.

I thought this was the strongest point in favor of cutting short the lifetimes of the nuclear plants, but it may actually be the weakest.

First and foremost, doing this would actually have the opposite effect of what the anti-nuclear protesters want. The deal between the energy industry and the German government was that they’d put a large percentage of the profit they make from the nuclear plants into a government fund to research and develop green energy technology in exchange for extending the lifetimes of these plants. If the lifetime extensions get tossed out the window, so will this green technology fund.

The natural follow up question would then be to say that there might be no government fund, but wouldn’t it force the industry to do more development of green technologies on its own, seeing as how its energy-generating options would then be limited to the kinds of energy the people demand?

And in an ideal world, that would be the case. If there could be some sort of grand worldwide consensus among the people that they would be willing to pay more for energy, use less of it, and distribute it as equally as possible in one giant global power-distribution grid, then we could shut down every last nuclear reactor on the planet (as well as coal and gas-fired plants while we’re at it) and simply force our energy-generating corporations to give us the kinds of energy we want.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where different countries have different attitudes towards different types of energy, and where corporations can simply go wherever the profit is. E.ON itself considered taking its business out of Germany a couple of decades ago when they saw which way the political winds were blowing, but they stayed and now regret their decision.

If the German government told E.ON and the other major energy companies that they could no longer produce energy in Germany through anything but clean and renewable technology, it would be financial suicide for these businesses to remain here and they would either declare bankruptcy or move elsewhere. The only financial incentive you could give them to stay would be massive taxpayer-funded subsidies to offset the greatly increased cost of making this switch. And how many German citizens would really be willing to not only pay more taxes but much more for energy if it really came down to it?

It would be wonderful if every German would say, “Yes, absolutely. I don’t care about the cost—I’m willing to take a financial hit for the sake of the environment”. They would be a bright shining example to the world of a country truly willing to put its money where its mouth is and make sacrifices for the sake of the long-term health of the planet.

But it’s far more likely that they’d say, “France is using nuclear energy. So is the United States and China and many other countries around the world. Why should I have to pay more for my energy when these other countries aren’t willing to do the same?”

So I say put it to the people. Have a referendum. Really educate the citizenry about this issue so that everyone is familiar with the arguments on both sides, and then let them vote. If the German people want to get rid of nuclear energy and they are really willing to deal with the consequences of that decision, then by all means let’s get rid of it. I would be very happy if that were the case. But don’t say we should just abolish it and expect that a shift to a completely green-energy grid will just magically take place without angering a lot of ordinary people in the process.

For the past two and a half years I’ve made my money by working for a private language school that stays in business mostly through one major client, E.ON, one of Germany’s largest energy companies. E.ON has power plants of every kind from coal and oil to wind and solar, but generates most of its electricity through nuclear power. Nuclear energy has been tremendously unpopular among the German people for decades, and over the course of my time as an English teacher for E.ON employees I’ve heard just about all of them lament at one time or another how uninformed the people are on this issue. Anti-nuclear protests are nothing new in Germany, and the visibility of this public sentiment has made the politics of nuclear power very difficult for the politicians, as they struggle to find a balance between the interests of the energy industry and the will of the people.

As an American, it surprises me that for the most part, the government has generally responded more to the pressure of the masses than to the energy lobbyists, and for awhile planned to close down Germany’s nuclear reactors after only a fraction of their natural lifetimes. The E.ON employees I teach find this monumentally stupid, as they all tell me that without nuclear energy in the mix, Germany would simply not generate enough power to keep the grid running. They would have no choice but to buy energy from France, which generates most of its energy through nuclear power anyway. When Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Party (CDU) ran their re-election campaign in 2009, one of their platforms dared to go against popular sentiment and extend the lifetimes of these nuclear plants back to their original expiration dates. Naturally, the E.ON employees were all quite happy when her party won the election.

It took some time and much additional lobbying to get them to actually follow through on their promise, but last year it began to look as though the German government was finally going to extend the lifetimes of these plants. Then Fukushima happened, and this decision was instantly called back into question. Plans to extend the lifetime of these nuclear plants have now been put on hold so the politicians can debate it even more, giving time to leftist organizations and political parties to launch another major anti-nuclear campaign nationwide.

One of the anti-nuclear rallies took place yesterday in the city of Hannover where I live. One of my friends, Lena, the girlfriend of another friend Oliver, is a member of the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) and she wanted to take part in this demonstration. I decided it would be an interesting experience to go as well, even though my opinion on the nuclear issue is more closely aligned with that of the E.ON employees I teach. I was hoping to hear some arguments against nuclear energy that I could take to the E.ON employees this week to see how they respond. My mind is not entirely made up on this issue.

Here is where my opinion is now: I agree that nuclear energy is dangerous, but I don’t think it’s as dangerous as most people think. The incident at Chernobyl was a result of poor planning and design, and the Three Mile Island incident was more of a scare than a disaster as it resulted in no confirmable loss of life. As for Fukushima, there were some design flaws as well, but in any case I do think it’s foolish to built nuclear power plants when your country is in the Ring of Fire, positioned along a major fault line in the earth’s crust that you know for a fact is one day going to erupt in a major earthquake. But in Germany, where the earth’s crust is stable and where government oversight is stricter than almost anywhere in the world, I think building nuclear power plants is quite sensible at the current point in time. The E.ON employees have thoroughly convinced me that with all of the safety measures and failsafes upon failsafes that must be put in place before a nuclear reactor can start operating, disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima would be unthinkable here.

But obviously, nothing is impossible, and even if the plants are safe there’s still the matter of the nuclear waste, which we still have no ideal way to dispose of. We should not go on using nuclear energy indefinitely, and I’m firmly in favor of a worldwide shift to renewables in the coming decades. Where I differ with the protesters is that I think we need to keep using nuclear energy for the time being, as the technology behind wind and solar power is still in its infancy and generating power from these sources is still very inefficient. Most of the base-load energy generation is from nuclear and fossil-fuels, while wind and solar only come into the mix during periods of high energy usage. They supplement the power generated by nuclear and fossil fuels, and couldn’t power the entire grid on their own by a long-shot.

So if we decide at this very moment to shut down the nuclear reactors in Germany, we would have to A) buy energy from France which is generated through nuclear power anyway, and/or B) use more fossil fuels, thus accelerating global warming. The biggest virtue of nuclear power in my opinion is that it does not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and thus does not contribute to climate change. If we replaced all coal and oil-fired plants with nuclear plants, the climate change problem would be far less dire.

For these reasons I think we should go nuclear for now, while we invest heavily in improving renewable energy technology so that we can one day move away from nuclear as well.

At the demonstration in Hannover, it felt very strange to think that I might have had the most conservative opinion there. I’m normally to the left of just about everyone in a room, but on this issue I was to the right of the whole crowd. I was hoping to engage a few people in a debate about the topic and possibly learn some things I didn’t already know, but nobody likes to speak English so the only people I talked to were Lena and others I already know.

The crowd itself was something to see. They expected about 3,000 people but I read online later that there were at least twice that number, and now they’re estimating 10,000. You could see banners and flags of all kinds of organizations and political parties there, from Lena’s communist party to the more mainstream SPD, Green Party, and Die Linke. The crowd was about as mixed as you could imagine as well, with just about every age group  represented.

Last year I attended a different protest in Hannover, this one against the military. It was in response to a group of high-ranking military officials and members of Germany’s military industrial complex meeting for a fancy dinner at Hannover’s Congress building, and the only groups there were the leftiest of the left. There hadn’t been a specific issue behind that protest other than the demand to remove German troops out of Afghanistan, but it was mostly just to yell and shout at these officials with their blood-stained hands as they made their way into the Congress building. The crowd there was only between one and two hundred, almost all of them in their twenties or thirties and looking like the stereotypical hippie-protest crowd.

But the people at this demonstration just looked like any random sample of Germans, plain and ordinary people who came out in all likelihood as their way of responding to the disaster in Japan. There were old people, families with babies and little kids, and even teenagers there. At the anti-military demonstration there had been about one police officer to every protester in case things got out of hand, but here the police force was barely visible.

There were a lot of kids coming up to the MLPD stand where Lena was working, as they had set up a little fund-raising game where for 50 cents kids could throw tennis-balls at a stack of tin cans with pictures of Germany’s nuclear power plants taped to them. Honestly, I thought this was rather silly, but the kids liked it and the Marxists managed to raise a total of €15 which apparently goes to pay for the cost of printing flyers.

I spent the first thirty minutes helping out there while the crowd gathered strength outside the opera house, and then the march began. It was then that I asked Lena if she could find someone to convince me that nuclear energy generation in Germany should be stopped, and she took a stab at it herself. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before—what about the waste? What if there’s a disaster? Etc. I gave my counter-argument that because renewable energy technology isn’t yet efficient enough to power the grid, our only two real options now are fossil fuels and nuclear power so we should go with nuclear as a temporary means of keeping things up and running. Lena had to go do something else at this point, so she passed me over to Kai, a guy I met at the MLPD New Years’ Eve party, who struggled to find the English to explain why I was wrong. He said that Germany produces more energy than it uses and that it exports 7%, so if they just stopped exporting they wouldn’t need nuclear, an argument I found very un-convincing. But he also insisted that Germany could transition to a completely green-energy-based economy in just five years, a fact that if true would give me reason to reconsider my view, but I’m skeptical about that.

I stopped talking politics for awhile and just marched next to Oliver making jokes and scanning the crowd. It was amazing to see how many people were there. A line of protesters marching down the street as far as the eye could see—this was definitely the largest demonstration I’ve ever been a part of (though I’ve only been to three).

The day took a much different turn as Oliver and I got bored with the march and broke ranks with the protesters to go have a beer, which led to another beer and then another and before we knew it the protest was over and we were sitting in an Irish pub where Lena met up with us when her work was done.

Lena and I got back into the discussion and she gave me some additional arguments that I can’t wait to take to my E.ON students this week. She insisted that if they were really serious, the German government could switch to an energy grid powered entirely by renewables in five years’ time. This morning she sent me links to the sources from which she got her information, including an online pamphlet from Greenpeace, an article from rf-news busting some supposed myths about nuclear energy, an official document about the future of Shell, and a few other anti-nuclear pamphlets from various organizations. Unfortunately my German abilities aren’t good enough to parse these documents, but they at least prove that the anti-nuke crowd has plenty of facts on their side. What’s unclear is just how selectively chosen those facts are.

The last point I made to Lena was about the efficacy of these protests themselves. In an ideal world, the German government might actually respond by forcing the energy industry to convert to purely green-technology as quickly as they possibly can. But that’s not the political reality. The German government, widely viewed by the people as a pathetic do-nothing body of squabbling politicians, would never make such a bold move. At best, these protests will result in the shutting down of Germany’s existing nuclear reactors before they reach their natural expiration dates, thus forcing more energy to be generated by greenhouse-gas emitting power plants or imported from France where it would be merely come from their nuclear power plants instead of Germany’s. Germany’s nuclear problem would merely be replaced with other problems.

Lena said she completely understands that point, but she offered one last counter-point that I thought was actually quite strong: if we don’t force the energy industry to convert to green energy, what incentive do they have to do it? Nuclear power plants are like money-printing machines for the industry, generating about €1 million in profit per day. Why would they bother investing so much money in more research and development on wind and solar technology when they can just keep on doing what they’re doing? What’s to stop them from building more nuclear plants in the future instead of wind and solar farms if the people aren’t demanding they don’t?

In the coming week I’ll be taking these arguments to the E.ON employees and hearing their responses. If I learn anything interesting, I’ll write a follow-up post next weekend.

But for now, I just want to say for the sake of my American readers that while I am comfortable with nuclear plants being used in Germany, I don’t feel the same way about building new nuclear plants in the United States where regulation and government oversight aren’t quite so strict. Given what happened last year with BP in the Gulf of Mexico and what happened before that with Massey Energy in West Virginia, I think it’s safe to say that the U.S. government does not have a very good track record of making sure corporations don’t cut corners. The cutting of corners claimed 25 lives in West Virginia and 11 lives in the Gulf as well as massive environmental damage, but these disasters would be nothing compared to what could potentially happen if a lack of oversight leads to an explosion of a nuclear reactor. Building a nuclear plant in this kind of political environment is just as short-sighted and potentially disastrous as building one in a volatile geological environment.

As for those victims and potential victims of the nuclear industry in Japan, my heart goes out to them and I sincerely hope that the worst is behind them. It is entirely appropriate that this crisis makes us take a second look at nuclear power generation, but let’s make sure we have an intelligent discussion instead of just a massive knee-jerk reaction, and that the policy changes we make are based in facts and not just political calculation.

As of this morning, the twelfth day of January in the year twenty hundred and eleven, I know how I will be spending the next few years of my life.

An e-mail from the Interac recruitment office was waiting for me when I went to check my e-mail this morning, and it confirmed that I have met all of the requirements and I am being offered a position as an Assistant Language Teacher in Japan, to begin in late August of this year!

So now it’s finally official. I’d had a good feeling about it since the interview, but in the middle of last week I started to get nervous when I saw that Interac was following me on Twitter. It’s possible that someone was checking me out by researching me online, and I’m always nervous about how people are going to react to my website. They might not like my personality, my politics, or my philosophical beliefs, and decide not to hire me based on any number of potential reasons. But if they did check out my writing, at least it didn’t disqualify me. It was a huge relief to get that e-mail this morning.

And now I’m officially in a new paradigm of my life. Yes, as early as October 2009 I was writing about a paradigm shift in my life, but now it’s for real. Back then was just after Krissi went back to America after spending two months here with me and travelling, and that felt like the perfect culmination to my time in Germany and I would thereafter focus on changing paths and going to Japan. I had no idea that it would take me over a year to finally reach that goal and that I’d wind up staying in Hannover all the way until the summer of 2011, but that’s how life works. Everything is still happening as I’d envisioned as far back as 2008 when I decided to start a career as an overseas English teacher, but it’s just happening at a much different pace than I’d imagined. Back then I thought I’d spend merely six months to a year in each country starting with Germany and Japan, but that would have been far too little time.

When all is said and done I’ll have spent three years in Germany, which I think is a perfectly appropriate chunk of time. I don’t know exactly how long I’ll spend in Japan. My contract is only for seven months but it’s renewable, so unless I completely hate it for some reason (doubtful) I plan to spend a minimum of two years there. But for all I know I’ll love it more than I could have ever imagined and I’ll wind up spending the rest of my life there. Who knows? The future is wide open!

And now my overall mindset will undergo a major shift as I enter what is now confirmed to be my final stretch of time here in Hannover. I’ve really gotten to love this city and I’m glad I’ll have another half a year to appreciate it, but I’ve always known that I’d have to move on eventually and I’m glad that now I definitely will. There are still a few more great experiences to look forward to, from one last visit to Ichenheim for one last Rheinfest (for a few years anyway), to a couple of Roger Waters concerts in June. And if my financial situation allows, I’ll be going back to America again for a couple of weeks in between leaving Germany and heading off to Japan, so that should be another great experience as well. Then it’s off to Japan, where life will be unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.

Wow, 2011. It looks like this is going to be one hell of a year…

If all goes as planned, 2011 should be one of the most interesting years of my life, so I wanted it to start with a unique and worthwhile experience. Last night’s New Years’ Eve party with Lena’s communist friends was everything I could have hoped for and more.

I haven’t been feeling all that healthy this week—probably a combination of the weather, lack of exercise, and much more alcohol consumption than usual—so I hardly felt like going out last night, but I knew after a few drinks I’d barely feel it. The night started shortly after 6, when I went to meet Oliver at the train station and ride the tram to the party’s location, the same bar/restaurant from Lena’s birthday party where I went dressed as Jesus.

Upon entering, I discovered that this was not just a party for the Marxist-Leninist Party of Hannover, but a joint celebration between the German communists and another organization of Turkish communists. It was the first and only completely multi-cultural gathering of Germans and Turks I’ve ever been to, with the Turks just slightly outnumbering the Germans. Considering how most of the time Germans and Turks keep to their own cultural groups and often speak ill of each other, it was quite nice to see a large group of them deliberately intermingling for the spirit of “Internationale Solidarität”.

Naturally, there were plenty of gorgeous women and girls there. Middle-Eastern being my favorite ethnicity with regard to women, this was naturally to serve as one of my main focuses of the night. At first it was hard, as during the period of time between finishing dinner and getting enough of an alcohol buzz going, I felt overwhelmed by unquenchable desire and felt as though my isolation-demon was roaring back to life. Was I just going to stare at them all night and not talk to any of them, lamenting the insurmountable gap between myself and any chance of getting to know them more personally? Would the new year begin with a slide back towards the past, or would my newfound confidence win out?

There were a few speeches made throughout the night at which the Germans would speak in German and the Turks would translate or vice-versa, and the first of these was given by Anka, the beautiful German girl from the protest back in the summer. She was looking absolutely stunning this evening, but there was nothing I could do about that because her boyfriend was also there. Translating for Anka was an even more beautiful Turkish girl, whose name I later found out was Merve (pronounced mare-dva).

After dinner I just happened to be sitting right next to Merve, but that’s when my demon was at it’s strongest so I didn’t take the initiative to say anything to her. But fortune was to smile upon me, as the man sitting across from her—possibly her father—had overheard me speaking English with Oliver and Lena and asked me where I was from. I said I was from America and Merve said, “You came all the way from America for this party?” to which I jokingly replied, “yes, I’m a huge fan of the MLPD.” The guy didn’t speak English so I switched to German to answer his question to me: “Is there a socialist party in America?” I explained that there is but it’s very small and nobody who is a part of it admits in public because in America socialism is considered extremely evil (ganz böse).

The conversation fizzled out from there, and I continued talking to Oliver and Lena and the German guy sitting near us. We’d started with beer but Oliver bought a couple of bottles of wine which I tried to drink quickly enough to develop a stronger buzz because people were dancing and I needed to loosen up a bit if I was going to join them. They were playing Turkish music and most of the Turks were gathered in a circle dancing Turkish-style. Before I could develop a buzz, however, the leader of the Turkish communist group came up to me and invited me to join them. Anka had pointed me out earlier as I was the only one there from America, so I guess he wanted me to join to add an extra bit of Internationale Solidarität (which is as fun to say as it is to write).

So the Turks dance by standing in a circle and joining hands (or just the pinky), moving around by taking three steps in and three steps out. I found myself joined at the pinky on both sides by two adorable Turkish girls, an experience that even in my awkwardness I had to make sure to appreciate. My dancing was definitely fucked up, as instead of three-steps in and three-steps out I would take four little steps in, five smaller steps out, two big steps in, a couple of steps out, stand still for a moment to even out the space in front of me, and so on.

When the Turkish music ended most of us went back to our tables and I drank a little more, finally getting to where I wanted to be. I found myself alone but sitting next to Merve, and I decided this was as good a time as any to bash the demon over the head to keep it from bothering me for the rest of the night.

“So you speak English?” I turn to her and say. Yes, she has to learn it for school. She’s now in her second year at the university, studying psychology. She says that English is currently her most important subject, and I compliment her on speaking it well. She asks me the basics about myself and I tell her about teaching English and the possibility of moving to Japan, and get the sense that she’s not interested in me so I don’t keep the conversation going very long once we reach an awkward pause. It’s enough that I summoned the nerve to speak to her.

And now I’m feeling quite good and I’m ready to get up and dance some more. Now they’re playing Western music, and I’m a bit disappointed that only Germans are dancing. A bunch of us white people got up to join the Turks for their music but apparently none of them want to come and join us for ours. (Later on more of them would dance to white music too).

Oliver and I go out for a cigarette and we agree that when we go back in it’s time for something stronger. We order a round of a cocktail that I think is called “caperinia” which basically tastes like Sprite. That goes down nicely, and the night starts to get a bit blurrier but not by much.

There’s a long period of time when we’re all back at our tables, the music has stopped, and a couple more speeches are given. They send the kids away to go for a walk during this serious portion of the evening (apparently they’ve decided to forego the communist indoctrination of the youth for now), but a couple of little boys remain and run around chasing each other the whole time.

Pamphlets are distributed with song lyrics—both Turkish and German of course—and we sing a few communist anthems together (or at least one ethnic group at a time). I’m just admiring Anka the whole time. Finally a Turkish woman with a lovely voice gets up to sing a couple of very sad songs, one in German and one in Turkish, but the only lyrics I can really make out are “dead children”. The little boys running around suck a bit of the emotion out of it, but it is really nice.

When we’re approaching midnight I go outside with Oliver for the last cigarette of 2010, and when we go back inside I see that just about everyone is going to remain inside for the countdown. But I think “fuck that” and go outside where a bunch of kids are already out there playing with fireworks.

I greet the boys and girls with cell-phone in hand, announcing that there’s one minute left in the year. When my clock strikes midnight the alarm goes off, and we all shout “Happy New Year” and watch as the fireworks erupt all around us in the distance. This place is kind of secluded in a small patch of woods outside the main part of the city, but fireworks are still visible over the treetops in every direction. The sound of fire-engines roaring is ceaseless. This is what I’m talking about—a real German new year. I’ve got nothing against Ichenheim but nothing beats New Years’ in a city. It sounds like a warzone.

So for the next half hour or so I help the kids play with their fireworks and sparklers as some of the adults come out to set off rockets as well. My cigarette lighter is in high demand, so my smoking has come in handy.

When we go back inside there’s a little game of bingo that every team pays €5 to play with the possibility of winning much more, but my team loses so my euro went to the communists.

I’ve now drank beer, wine, caperinia and a couple glasses of Sekt for midnight, and I’m about ready to start the Revolution. Oliver is totally down, but the other people we grab and ask don’t seem to think now is a good time. I insist that now is the perfect time—nobody would suspect it. Just imagine this group of drunken Germans and Turks raiding the City Hall and declaring it the official headquarters of the new International Communist Party. First we take the Rathaus, then we take Hannover, then we take Germany, and finally the world. Simple.

But nobody takes the idea seriously so I suppose the Revolution will have to wait. They insist that tonight is for coming together and sharing each others’ cultures. So in that spirit, Oliver and I invite a guy to sit with us whom Anka also pointed out before because he’s from Iran. He came to Germany twenty years ago but he’s still technically Iranian. I think his name was Iraj. We have a nice discussion with Iraj, who is the first person to ask me directly if I’m a Marxist. (Usually when someone asks you if you’re a Marxist you’re expected to deny it and say that’s crazy, but this was quite the opposite circumstance). I explained that I like the communist philosophy but I don’t think it works in the real world. Iraj insists that it does work—that it’s working right now. That if enough of us come together and the workers of the world unite, we can really achieve global equality.

To demonstrate his passion for multi-culturalism, he invites us to the dance floor where he will demonstrate his mixture of dance-styles from all over the world. He turns out to be a pretty good dancer, and I don’t feel awkward at all when he takes my hands and shows me the basics of two-person dancing, something I haven’t done in years. So now I’m really in the spirit, and I start grabbing others on the dance floor to dance around with, including the lovely Anka and the beautiful Merve, who is laughing and smiling the whole time.

Towards the end of the night they play a couple more Turkish songs, and I once again find myself in a circle, hands enmeshed on both sides by lovely young Turkish girls with whom I manage to exchange a few smiles. For the last song, everyone is invited to come dance and now there’s no room to hold hands so we all lock shoulders. When it’s over, Anka says a few words to close out the night and we begin the long process of saying goodbye to everyone.

As Merve is getting ready to leave I summon one last bit of will and approach her again, this time offering her my e-mail address if she ever needs any help with English. I explain that I’d be happy to help her with writing papers or whatever free of charge, and she politely accepts my offer. I get the feeling that she is just being polite and I’ll never hear from her again, but I type my e-mail address into her phone anyway. She gives me a warm hug goodbye with a “nice to meet you” and “happy new year” and that’s the last I see of her.

On the way out, we say goodbye to Anka, and I can’t resist the urge to give her a big hug and warm farewell under the pretense that I might never see her again. In German I wish her luck with the Revolution, and that’s the last I see of her.

Now there are four of us—myself, Oliver, Lena, and a German guy named Kay (along with his dog)—walking back towards our respective locations for where we intend to crash. Oliver and Lena will sleep at Amanda’s, and Lena has offered to let Kay and the dog crash there as well. Of course we look for a pub for one last drink first, but the only open pub we cross is the Böse Wolf and they’re not letting anybody new in because they’re trying to get people to leave now.

Since my flat is sorta kinda on the way back to Amanda’s we all wind up coming back to my place. Kay and I drink from my stash of beers, and Oliver and Lena make use of my rarely-used wine-glasses to drink another half of a bottle of wine. We stay up talking and laughing and listening to music until after 6 a.m. when Kay goes to catch a train home. Oliver and Lena stay a little while longer and I offer to let them sleep in my bed while I take the couch, but Oliver decides they should go to Amanda’s. So I wish them a very warm goodbye, then eat some bread and aspirin and chug lots of water before finally crashing myself, beating the sunrise by probably less than a half-hour.

Having mixed every type of alcohol known to man and consumed a great deal of it, I was expecting the worst kind of hangover today but it’s actually not all that bad. Certainly my high spirits from having such a fantastically awesome New Years’ Eve helps a lot. That was definitely one of the best New Years’ Eve parties I’ve ever been to. In fact, it was easily one of the best parties I’ve ever been to period. Between the intercultural mingling, spending time with Oliver and Lena, the spirit of Internationale Solidarität, and my confidence around the beautiful women, it was definitely the perfect way to begin the year.

This is actually the fourth Christmas I’ve spent in Ichenheim, but only the third in a row. If you want to know what this one was like, you could basically just go back and read my account of last year’s Christmas or the one from the year before, as this was practically a carbon-copy of those other two with just a few slight differences. That’s the nature of tradition though, and it’s nice to do the same things every year in spite of the fact that it gets less and less interesting each time. I still feel obliged to record the events, but I’ll keep it brief and only highlight aspects in which this Christmas was different from the previous two.

Thursday the 23^rd, I arrive in Offenburg in the early evening and am driven back to Ichenheim by Ralf and Myriam, who almost don’t recognize me with the short hair. We have a nice dinner and nice conversation until about 10:00 when we all go to bed.

Friday the 24^th, we head to Hans and Gerlinda’s for Kaffee und Kuchen just like the last two years, and just like the last two Stefan and Evelyn are there with their daughter Analena who looks one year older and one year chubbier. When I’m not trying to follow the mostly incomprehensible conversation my mind is thinking about Lea, whom I just received an e-mail from before leaving. I’d just about given up hope on hearing from the woman I’d met the previous week on the plane, but she wrote to me after all and it put me in quite a good mood.

After a couple of hours and a few glasses of wine, we head back and have the traditional fondue dinner, the only difference this year being that we eat upstairs at Ralf and Myriam’s as opposed to downstairs at Ursela and Dieter’s. We don’t go out for a walk afterwards because it’s been snowing all day and the roads are covered. I’m glad I finally got to see Ichenheim in the snow, as this is the first year we’ve had a white Christmas that I’ve been here.

Saturday the 25^th is almost completely uneventful except for the annual Christmas concert of the male voice choir that Hans is a part of. Last year they held it in the church which made for some really nice acoustics, but this year it’s back at the school (apparently there was some tension between the Catholics and Evangelicals). This was where I first noticed Elena two years ago but she doesn’t come tonight. I do, however, get a rare Tanja sighting. She now has short hair and she’s getting progressively chunkier, but she’s still got a really nice face. And she still either doesn’t remember me from the infamous Musik Club Offenburg night or she insists on acting like she doesn’t.

Also present is Lara of the infamous previous-two-New-Years’-Days, apparently still with the same boyfriend, the son of the obviously-gay man who is also in the choir. Because I won’t be around for this New Years’ (I’m going to a party in Hannover with Oliver and Lena instead) I know this will be the only time I see her this time around. As we’re leaving the school when everything is over we pass her and her boyfriend. I shake the boyfriend’s hand and wish him a “Schöne Weinachten” and Lara is looking at me while I do so I go up to her as well, take her hand and say, “Lara, Schöne Weinachten” and she wishes me one as well with that adorable smile of hers. I suck up all the appreciation of that pointless little moment as possible and head my merry way. I wonder if she processed the fact that I remembered her name and not her boyfriend’s, but I doubt it.

Sunday the 26^th is the big day when Ralf’s parents and brother come over and we have a giant lunch of geese and mashed potatoes and red kraut. It’s all very delicious and all exactly the same as the previous two years. Only this time our post-lunch walk is out in the snow, which is especially beautiful now under a blue sky. After Ralf’s family leaves the rest of us remain upstairs and continue to drink wine and talk, followed by drinking beer and eating a small dinner, after which Dieter invites me to come out for another little walk. But instead of walking around he suggest we go into the local hotel bar for a beer and I don’t refuse. There are a few random people there and Dieter knows all of them. The bartendress is a very cute lady apparently the same age as Myriam, and when I ask how old this hotel is Dieter asks her and she informs us that it was established in 1775, which I remark makes it one year older than the United States.

Also there to pay someone a visit is Elena’s younger brother whom I’d previously mistaken for Lara’s boyfriend in a journal entry about Rheinfest (now privatized). I’d taken note of him because he also had a really beautiful girlfriend and I couldn’t believe such a scrawny acne-ridden guy could get such beautiful girlfriends. But apparently it was two separate scrawny acne-ridden guys with two separate beautiful girlfriends, so that cleared that up.

Monday the 27^th there is absolutely nothing going on until the evening when Dieter, Ursela and I pay a visit to my grandmother’s sister Fannie because I won’t be around on New Years’ Day when we normally go. She’s happy to see me and we have a nice meal as my mind drifts between attempting and failing to understand the conversation and thinking about the e-mails I’ve been exchanging with Lea.

And today is Tuesday the 28^th and there is also nothing going on today, nor will anything noteworthy happen tomorrow. I’ll head back to Hannover on the 30^th so I’ll have a night to myself before the New Years’ Eve party on the 31^st with Oliver, Lena, and a bunch of her socialist friends. I’m going to invite Lea to come but I assume she already has plans and won’t be able to. But I assume I’ll be able to see her again sometime soon, as she won’t be working at all this month.

Regarding Lea, I’ve learned that she is actually Russian, her family having returned to Germany in 1990 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She’s also an avid reader and likes to read true stories and biographies of famous people. She seems very interesting, and while I honestly don’t see any kind of relationship forming (I’m *probably* going to finally go Japan this year after all) it would be nice to make a new friend.

And that’s really all there is to write about for now. This may be my last journal entry of 2010. It’s been a mostly dull year with a few scattered notable events. Seeing Green Day, going to CeBIT, joining the anti-war protest with Lena in Hannover, and of course going back to visit America for the first time in two years. Finally topped off with that excellent weekend in London for the Japan job interview and meeting a couple of potential life-long friends. It wasn’t a wasted year by any means, but hopefully 2011 will be far more interesting.

Yesterday was the second time I’ve gone on a Grünkohlwanderung, a popular activity in Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony) involving walking through the woods and stopping frequently for shots of liquor, ending with a dinner of Grünkohl at a restaurant. The first time I went nearly two years ago, I went into it feeling very low and came out feeling even lower thanks to the torture of sitting across from the extremely beautiful Inge and her boyfriend Matthias at dinner. This time I went in with a good mood, determined not to be crushed by desire as I had last time. Although Inge and Matthias were there I was quite successful with that, which makes the whole experience hardly worth writing about in spite of the fact that I had a much better time.

A group of about sixteen people were meeting up “unter dem Schwanz” in Hannover, an expression which means under the statue of King Ernst-August but literally means “under the tail” referring to the horse (apparently this king was kind of an asshole and that expression arose as a sleight towards him). Oliver and Lena weren’t there yet when I got there so I had to go up and say hello on my own.

Inge was there along with the girl I referred to in my first Grünkohl entry as “the cute one” and she greeted me warmly when I approached. I asked them in German how many people were coming and when we’d be leaving, but Inge approached me and asked me in English what my name was because she’d forgotten. I told her, then couldn’t resist saying, “You are Inge if I remember correctly, and your boyfriend is Matthias.” They were very surprised that I remembered that but didn’t seem weirded-out by it. I just said I’m very good with names, which is true. I didn’t say that I’d written extensively about them in my online journal.

I had a brief chat with “the cute one” whose name I now learned was Marianna, but her English isn’t very good so even though I said she could speak German because I understood it well enough, our chat didn’t last long. I wasn’t sure if she was single and I wasn’t sure last time, but I found out later that she’s not. It’s just that her boyfriend and her aren’t very affectionate (at least not around others) so it’s not obvious that they’re together.

Oliver and Lena arrived with his dog Buutsch, we boarded the train and got off somewhere near the town of Haste. As soon as we began the walk it was clear that this was a completely different trail than last time—perhaps even different woods. The weather could not have been more perfect, with sunny skies for the first time in two weeks and a little bit of snow on the ground and in the trees, making the woods about as beautiful as woods can possibly be.

I chatted with Oliver mostly during the first leg of the walk, but after stopping for the first round of shots I started chatting with more people, in either English or German depending on their English skills. The woman who organized the event had a bunch of activities planned for every stop, the first one being a three-legged race (optional participation so I opted out) and later on less physical stuff like riddles and mind-teasers. The people who participated in the race and the people who answered the riddles first were rewarded with a mystery shot from a bag of test-tubes filled with all different kinds of alcohol so you dug your hand in and didn’t know what you were getting. I got a couple of the brain-teasers even though they were in German, so I was quite proud of myself.

As we were walking we frequently had to move aside for others to get through, but almost everyone seemed friendly and they probably all knew what we were doing. When I’m out in the woods or a park I always hate passing by large crowds of Germans and I wonder why they feel the need to get together in big groups like that. I always think “why do you need twenty people to go for a walk in the woods?” It felt weird to actually be a part of one for a change.

I had some good conversations with some of the other people there, most of whom were between age 30 and 50. The one guy I actually ended up talking to most was Marianna’s boyfriend Torsten who speaks very good English and had some interesting things to say about Japan, where he recently spent some time. If there had been any attractive single women there the entire experience would have been different but luckily there weren’t. And in spite of Inge’s beautiful presence I was able to feel quite content with the fact that she wasn’t mine. She hardly seems my type anyway personality-wise (although it was hard to get a sense of that from overhearing her talking to Lena in German).

Bla bla blah. A ridiculous number of shots were drank (I must have had at least twenty), much fun was had, and after about three or four hours we reached the restaurant to sit down for our delicious Grünkohl meal. As luck would have it, I once again ended up sitting directly across from Inge and Matthias but it was far less difficult this time, and even when the meal was over and I let myself once again indulge in a study of her uniquely beautiful facial features, I actually felt that I had reached the ever-present goal of “appreciation without desire”. To just be content that the beauty exists and not to feel the need to possess it.

And that’s really all there is to say about it. I was drunk enough to be singing out loud on the walk back to the train platform, and sat next to Torsten on the ride back where he gave me some useful tid-bits about Japan, like the fact that tipping is not only unheard of but that they actually get angry with you if you try to leave them a tip. Very good to know because my inclination is always to tip and tip big.

Back at the Hannover main station we all said our goodbyes and parted ways. I shook Matthias’s hand goodbye and got a little half-hug from Inge which was nice. The same for Marianna, who once again said “bis nächstes mal” (until next time) which I repeated in English and she said “ich hoffe so” (I hope so). Her and Torsten may not be big on PDAs but they’re both incredibly nice people and I hope they get married and bring lots of friendly children into the world.

After getting home I listened to some music for an hour and went to bed, then woke up this morning feeling incredibly low for a completely inexplicable reason. I don’t even have a hangover (which is a bit of a minor miracle considering all of the different kinds of alcohol I’d mixed together yesterday)—I’m just a little cloudy-headed. But for some reason I really feel down. Maybe it’s from the reminder of what it’s like to have a lot of friends who do fun stuff together and the fact that I kind of miss it. But on the other hand I really enjoy solitude and I’m glad to back in my comfort-zone again. So who knows?

Anyway, I wish this story had more of a point but that’s all there is. Until next time.

Twelve years ago yesterday was November 19, 1998—which I still consider to be the most significant day of my post-childhood life. That was the day I met Aimee. We hit it off really well, and had I played my cards right it’s likely that she would have become my first official girlfriend. Back then my wall was still under construction so had things gone well it might never have been finished. But my life took a different path, as I stupidly revealed my over-sensitivity to her too soon and scared her off, thus initiating years of unrequited love and isolation. That incident started me down the road I’ve remained on to this day.

From the moment I woke up yesterday, I felt extremely low. That doesn’t happen every November 19^th—in fact last year it went by with my hardly noticing—but the recent re-emergence of human emotion in my life, brought on by an effort to actually go out and try to meet women, had me in as melancholy a mood as it gets.

My lessons were cancelled so I had the day off, and I passed the time by engaging in the most intensive apartment-cleaning endeavor I’ve done since moving here. When the three-hour process was over I felt slightly better for having removed most of the grime from my flat, but there was still a massive clog of grime in my soul.

After last week’s epic battle with the demon inside me that keeps me isolated and alone, I’d resolved to go out and try again. It had been a terrible struggle to stand next to the most beautiful girl at the concert and not be able to work up the nerve to say anything to her until the very end, but after proving to myself I could do it I knew I had to keep at it. I’d broken the most significant barrier—actually going up and talking to a woman I find attractive—but unless I keep on wrestling the demon he’s only going to regain his strength and seal me back up inside my wall.

I’d had it in my head all week to check out a nearby goth club called the Dark Star, as the goth scene is where Corey has been having his success with approaching and flirting with women. He became a regular there and in just a few months was the guy that everybody wanted to meet. I figured if I could find a place like that and keep showing my face, I might eventually find it as easy to meet people as he does, even in spite of the language barrier.

All day long I knew I’d have to follow through with my plan and go to the club or I’d never forgive myself, but my desire to leave the comfort-zone of my apartment could not have been any lower. I came very close to deciding not to do it, as I figured I had a good enough reason. It was November 19^th after all and the only two emotions I’d been feeling all day were depression and anger. That’s not the state of mind you want to be in when you go out, especially if your goal is to flirt with women.

But I ultimately decided I’d compromise. I wouldn’t make myself go up to anyone but I’d just go scope out the scene. I’d go to the Dark Star and have one beer, and if my mood remained the same I’d just leave and come back home to dance with the demon, by which I mean sitting in the dark listening to depressing music and brooding over the last twelve lonely years.

I started off the Friday night as usual, watching some downloaded entertainment while having a few beers. After working up enough of a buzz it would be much easier to make myself go out. The alcohol converted all of the remaining depression to anger, which is useful for its motivating effects. “All right you fucking world, I’ll go out if it’ll get you to shut your fucking mouth.”

Here I must digress from the main narrative because there’s another significant thing to report. Before going out I decided to check my e-mail one last time, just in case there might be something there to change my mood. It turned out that there was.

Several weeks ago I received a job alert from TEFL.com, informing me that a company called Interac which hires Assistant Language Teachers for schools in Japan was currently looking for candidates. This was nothing special. I get job alerts rather frequently, though not so often from Japan. I went to Interac’s website and decided I could see myself in the role of Assistant Language Teacher, so I went through the arduous application process, not optimistic at all that anything would come of it. Of the four language schools I’ve applied to in Japan, only one of them even answered my application and they didn’t have any openings anyway.

But Interac did respond about a week ago, and I had a preliminary phone interview with one of their recruiters operating out of an office in Oxford, England. She didn’t seem too impressed with me and since jobs in Japan are now so hard to come by I figured nothing would come of it. But there was an e-mail from her last night informing me that I’d passed their initial screening process and was now invited to a face-to-face interview, either in Barcelona on December 11^th or in Oxford at my earliest convenience. I guess I’ll be going to Oxford soon.

Interac hires people to begin in either March or August, and I said I’d prefer August which would give me plenty of time to prepare and save some money (as well as go see Roger Waters in May). I’d be extremely pissed if I go all the way to England and they don’t hire me, but I’m sure I’ll win some points just for going. It will show them from the start that I’m serious about wanting to do this.

So suddenly there’s a possible exit-door from Germany in my near future. It feels like the pressure is lifted a little. Now when I go out and flirt it will be for the sole purpose of practicing my flirtation skills—not to find a girlfriend. In fact if I get hired in Japan and then find a girlfriend, it would be a fucking disaster. The god of irony would laugh his ass off.

But at least now as I leave my apartment and head out into the world I’m feeling slightly more optimistic. It doesn’t really matter what happens tonight. Besides, nothing probably will happen. I’ll just go to this club and have a beer and come back home.

It’s only a five minute walk, but as I approach the place I think that something’s not right. What happened to the Dark Star? It’s not there. No cheesy Star Wars font or pictures of Darth Vader on the window. There is a club there and there is something clearly going on because there are people everywhere, but it’s definitely not a goth club. Everyone standing outside looks middle-aged and normal.

I walk around the building to see if maybe the Dark Star is on the other side of the block, but it seems that if there ever was a goth club here it’s either gone or relocated. They should update the website.

But I figure I might as well go in, goth scene or not. I’d go through with my grab-a-beer-and-leave plan, as this place is still conveniently located five minutes from my apartment. It’s called the Capitol and it seems like a combination of dance club and concert venue. There are two rooms downstairs and another upstairs, one of the rooms downstairs with a big stage on which a couple of musicians are now performing.

It costs €15 to get in because there’s a show going on, and while it’s a steep price to pay to just have one beer and leave I still pay it because my mind is made up. At least the music is good. There’s a bassist and a guy with a guitar and harmonica, and from their accents they appear to be Irish although they keep switching between English and what sounds like perfect German as they speak to the crowd. I suppose their style of music could be described as “folk rock”. A far cry from Coppelius, anyway.

So I’m standing there with my beer, scanning the room for attractive women and not finding any. The crowd is mostly middle-aged people and they’re all in groups, so I figure I probably won’t speak to anyone tonight.

Just as I have this thought, a guy walks up to me and says hello in an American accent. I don’t recognize him at first, but because I can count the number of Americans I’ve met in Hannover on one hand it’s not too hard to deduce who it is. It’s the guy I met after St. Patrick’s Day in Kassel a year and a half ago who rode with Oliver, Aiden and me back to Hannover and with whom I chatted as we took the tram back into the city. That was a long-ass time ago and he’s since shaved off his beard, but because I’d written it down for my journal and included his name in the entry, I actually remembered it. “You’re Lucas, right?” I ask.

Indeed it was. Pat on the back for remembering that. Seriously.

So I chat with Lucas for a moment. It turns out that he’d also gone back to America for a quick visit recently, so we bonded over the strangeness of returning as a visitor to our home country. He says he’s been in Hannover for eight years now and I ask him if he thinks he’ll ever leave. He says that he might but he’s got a girlfriend here so he’s not planning on leaving any time soon. (The god of irony perks up his ears)

Lucas’s friends walk up to him and they start talking. I focus my attention on the band, and before I know it they’re all going up to get closer to the stage. Lucas clinks his glass of beer with mine and I give him a nod goodbye, content to remain where I am and not have to force awkward conversation for the rest of my time there.

I’m just enjoying the music, glad that I came out of my flat and now content that I actually had engaged in some form of socialization. Now I can go home relatively satisfied.

But a moment later I turn my head to the right and who should be standing there but an attractive girl—the first I’ve seen all night. Not only that, but she’s standing there alone.

You’ve got to be kidding me, I think. Again? This is fucking crazy.

So now I gear up to do battle with the demon, but right from the start I know this is going to be much easier, as this girl actually looks at me when I look at her. Not only that but as I maintain eye-contact for an extra two seconds, she does as well. And not only that but she smiles at me.

Okay, this is definitely happening. We’re good to go. The demon wasn’t prepared for this. As soon as the song ends I lean towards her and tap her on the shoulder. “Do you know the name of this band?” I ask.

Holy fucking goddamn Jesus Christ that was easy! I can’t believe I spent three fucking hours trying to work up the nerve to do that last time.

She turns to me and says in English that she doesn’t know. I say they’re pretty good and she agrees. “I’m Kyle,” I say. “I’m from America.” How simple is that?

“I’m Julia,” she tells me. I ask her where she’s from. Turns out she’s from Mainz and she’s just in Hannover visiting her sister and her parents who are sitting at the table right in front of us. That removes the last remaining bit of pressure. She doesn’t live in Hannover so she’s not a potential girlfriend. This is just going to be chatting for the sake of chatting.

Luckily I’ve been to Mainz because it’s right next to Frankfurt and I told her I was an exchange student there. I ask her if she’s been to America and she says she’s been to New York and San Francisco but she really wished she’d gone to Los Angeles. I told her she didn’t miss anything.

From there the conversation moves in the natural direction. We tell each other what we do for a living and what our hobbies are. I make funny comments which she laughs at. She says she speaks French and Spanish but that English is hardest for her, and I offer to speak German (using a deliberately terrible accent) but she says it’s okay. Her English is quite good anyway.

All of this is coming so naturally to me that I can hardly believe myself. Am I the same person who was at the Coppelius show last week? Could I have come so fucking far this fucking fast? Or was I always like this and just needed to break that one barrier before I could actually become myself?

As the music continues we stand next to each other and dance. I’m not inhibiting myself nearly as much as last week, not embarrassed to enjoy myself in front of her. Every now and then I turn back to her with a fresh new comment and we exchange a few words before turning our focus back to the stage. She doesn’t seem put off by me at all. In fact she almost seems into me, not that it matters.

When I finish my beer I have to go to the bathroom. I ask her if she wants something to drink, water perhaps, but she politely declines. I take care of business, buying an unexpected second beer and returning to the concert hall.

I’m unable to stand directly next to her when I get back, but I stand a little bit behind her and within seconds she turns around and smiles at me. It’s not long before the people in her former position walk away and we are once again standing next to each other.

The first band finishes and now we have fifteen minutes to chat. As the lights are now slightly brighter I get a better look at her face, which is not quite as extraordinary as Zora’s—the girl from last week—but still very cute. I’m enjoying my close proximity to it.

As I chat with Julia I start to feel much better about the Zora situation. I’d regretted leaving so soon that night but now I realize that there wasn’t anything wrong with that. Julia clearly enjoyed talking to me, and Zora seemed to be downright afraid of it. Even if I had misinterpreted Zora’s signals and mistaken shyness for lack of interest, any conversation I might have had with her would have been doomed to awkwardness. With Julia, everything was flowing naturally and we were both very comfortable. There was really no shame in giving up on Zora due to the uncomfortable vibe I got from her.

Somehow I manage to chat with Julia throughout the entire 15-minute break. I don’t remember everything that was said of course, but at one point the DJ plays “I Don’t Like Mondays” and I mention that the first time I heard that song was at Live 8 when Bob Geldof performed it. I give her an extremely abridged version of my Pink Floyd story hoping she might reveal herself to be a fellow fan, but unfortunately she doesn’t seem to be (or fortunately if you consider that I have no intention of forming any long-term infatuation with this girl).

We run out of steam when the next band starts and she goes to sit at the table with her family. The next band isn’t as good as the first one and I’m resolved to leave once I finish my beer. At one point her father brings her a CD, presumably from the first band, and I go up and ask her if I could have a look which she gladly obliges. The demon has remained conspicuously silent this whole time, but I can’t resist giving him an extra slap in the face.

And when I finish my beer I go up to her one last time to say goodbye. “It was nice meeting you…Julia?” as though I didn’t remember her name. “Kyle?” she asks. She remembered mine. Suck on that, demon.

We shake hands and I go my merry way, my mood on the way home a complete reversal from what it was when I’d left. I’m in a state of pure joy. I feel even better than last week after the Zora incident. That had just been a first step. This was like I’d just leap-frogged steps two through ten.

There were still about ten minutes of November 19^th left when I got back, and I spent them celebrating my incredible victory. How appropriate that I should have this new beginning on this exact date. Perhaps I’m about to finally change paths. Perhaps the wall is ready to come down. Perhaps the demon is ready to die.

I don’t really believe in anything supernatural, but I find it helpful to think of my biggest personal problem as a demon living inside of me. I often refer to it as a “pussy-demon” because I feel it most strongly when I’m around women I find attractive—all of my confidence drains away and I’m reduced to a scared little pussy who can’t even summon the balls to talk to them.

But I suppose it would more accurately be called an “isolation-demon”, as it goes beyond the issue of my inability to approach the opposite sex. It completely saps my will to so much as leave my apartment and go out into the real world. I spend most of my time alone, in the company of no one but myself, either feeding my intellect or indulging in some form of entertainment. To invoke another metaphor, my former history has provided me with an abundance of bricks with which I’ve built a wall around myself, and the demon keeps me inside.

The thing about being inside the wall is that it’s quite comfortable. My emotional state is not dependent on anyone else and I rarely experience strong emotions at all. Whereas I used to go from extremely low lows to absurdly high highs, my emotional spectrum has narrowed significantly over the last two years of living completely on my own. Life inside the wall is pleasant and enjoyable, disturbed only by the occasional confrontations with the meaninglessness of my life and my uselessness to the rest of the human race.

My friend Corey has been in a similar situation for most of his life, having the same difficulties as I’ve had, but recently he’s been frequenting a club near his home and flirting with women there to what I can only describe as an astonishing degree of success. He’s been writing me detailed accounts of his nights at the club, even writing out the dialog as best he remembers it, and I’ve been deeply impressed by how far from his wall he’s managed to emerge and how much easier-by-the-day it seems to be getting for him to talk to women.

Several weeks ago he recommended that I check out a goth metal band called Lacrimosa, specifically an album called Echos that he thought I might like. He’s been trying to get me into the metal genre for years but for some reason it just never took. I don’t dislike the music but I’m almost never in the mood to listen to it. Echos, however, was much different—a seamless blend of orchestral and heavy rock music, one of the most unique and impressive sounds I’ve ever heard. I fell in love with the album and have since been listening to more Lacrimosa as well as a couple of other goth metal bands.

The final bit of back-story for the tale I’m about to tell has to do with one of my English students from E.ON, a guy named Holger. I only started teaching him recently but we’ve been getting along well due to a number of shared interests including politics and astro-physics (he lent me a copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time which I’m currently reading, and we’ve watched some of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos in class). One of his hobbies is photography, and he’s also really into the metal scene. He frequently goes to metal concerts where he gets in for free to take photos of the bands and write reviews of the shows for a website. This past week, as I was telling him about Lacrimosa, he told me about a show he was going to on Saturday night that he said I should come to. There were two German metal bands playing, one called Unzucht and another called Coppelius. The latter plays what’s called “heavy wood” which is essentially heavy metal with wooden instruments, in their case the flute and cello. It certainly sounded like it would be worth checking out.

But that meant I’d have to battle my isolation demon and crawl out of my nice comfy wall on a Saturday night, just when it’s at its comfiest. I really can’t understate what a mental struggle it is for me to pick myself up and go out into the world, especially at night. My natural tendency is to remain home, remain alone, just enjoying my own company and entertaining myself. It feels like the demon is clutching my leg as I try to climb out, injecting me with anxiety. Over and over again I’ll reconsider actually going, trying to settle on some excuse like it would be too expensive or the bands might suck. I listened to some of the bands’ songs on YouTube actually hoping they would suck and I’d have a good reason not to go, but they sounded good enough. Worth checking out.

I drank a few beers in the evening while finishing up the most recent season of True Blood, which has been keeping me entertained and happy to stay home at night for weeks (as well as getting me thinking about things like demons). By quarter to nine I was loosened up enough to overcome the natural social anxiety I’ve had for as long as I’ve been alive, and get myself out the door and into the rain.

I felt much better once I was actually under way. Listening to Lacrimosa on my I-pod as I rode the U-Bahn to Dragonerstrasse, I figured I’d give the demon a good run for its money tonight. Yes, I’d just slip in quietly and keep to myself for awhile, but hopefully as the night would wear on I’d come out of my shell and start chatting with people as I had two weeks ago in Kassel (though I had no intention of getting even half as drunk as I was then). There might even be attractive single women there, in which case I’d have to at least try to flirt with them. I figured if Corey can do it then why the hell can’t I?

The Hannover Musik Zentrum was tucked away in a strange little area between a few residential blocks and what looked like an abandoned rail depot. There was no one around as I approached the place, and then suddenly I was there. I walked inside and somehow paid the entry fee without speaking any German, then proceeded to find the coat-check place and hand in my jacket and umbrella.

I spotted Holger right away, as he was standing in the front on the right side of the stage near the coat-check. The bar was also there on the right, and I quickly ordered a beer and walked closer to the stage, on which Unzucht was already performing.

Holger was taking pictures the whole time but he shook hands when he spotted me and indicated that we’d talk later. I sipped from my beer and watched Unzucht perform—decent but nothing too impressive. They were a second-rate band at best, but they looked about as quintessentially goth metal as you can get. For my first genuine metal concert in Germany, it seemed appropriate.

This being my first genuine metal concert in Germany, I also spent a lot of time scanning the crowd, gauging the whole scene. I was dressed in the darkest clothes I have—a plain black T-shirt and dark blue jeans—and I was glad to see this wasn’t too far from the norm. Everyone was wearing black but almost nobody was all decked-out fashion-wise. There were a few people wearing black top-hats but for the most part it just looked like a bunch of German people in black clothing. The only other difference between this and any other crowd of Germans is that I actually fit in much better there with my long hair and beard, as I haven’t seen such a high concentration of people with the same look since I’ve been here.

Naturally, my eyes were mainly scanning the room for beautiful women, but during the Unzucht performance there were none to be seen. There were plenty of girls there, but every last one of them was overweight to some degree. I know it makes me shallow, but I’m just not attracted to overweight women. I wish I was but I’m not. It’s the same with men—I’m just not attracted to them. I’d like to be gay—fuck knows it would make having a sex life much easier—but I just can’t. My brain isn’t wired that way. Perhaps the isolation-demon is responsible.

But the fact that no good-looking women were around was actually a source of relief for me. At least now I wouldn’t have to force myself to approach anyone, as there was no one there whom I had any desire to approach. I could keep to myself, talk to Holger at the end, and call it a night. Experience had. Self-imposed-obligation-to-go-out-into-the-world-for-one-night fulfilled.

Then Unzucht finished playing, and suddenly she was next to me. She literally seemed to appear out of nowhere as soon as the band finished playing. A girl about my height with straight blonde hair, light brown eyes, and the most perfect cheek-bones I’ve ever seen. We were standing too close for me to check out the rest of her body without it being too obvious, but she seemed thin enough and her face was beautiful enough to make up for any shortcomings the rest of her might have had.

So now I’m suddenly standing next to the most beautiful girl in the club, and my demon roars to life. “Hah!” it laughs. “You thought you could make it through the night without a fight, didn’t you? Well I’m going to make sure you don’t say a word to this girl! You’re going to pussy out, she’s going to walk away, and you will learn once again that you are mine!”

“Fuck you, demon” I think, but I already know he’s right. My mind is spinning trying to come up with something to say to her, any combination of words that wouldn’t sound crazy or awkward or stupid…but I’m drawing the most monumental blank of my life. There’s just this void in my head where words should be. The demon is obscuring them from me.

It probably doesn’t matter, I think. This girl is drop-dead gorgeous. There’s no way she’s single. Her boyfriend will walk up to her any minute and I’ll no longer feel an obligation to say something to her.

A moment later a guy did walk up and stand beside her, and for a second I thought I was off the hook, but he didn’t speak to her. He started talking to another girl, one standing behind her. The two of them weren’t there together. It seemed she was there alone—completely alone—not even accompanied by a girlfriend.

What the fuck was this? I knew the demon had dominion over my own mind but could it actually be influencing events in the external world? I have never seen a girl this beautiful at a club on her own, and she just happens to be standing right next to me! This is not fucking fair.

Okay, well, it is what it is. I was dealt this shitty hand and now I’ve got to play it. But how? I keep looking at her but she never makes eye contact with me. It would be so much easier if she were to look at me, do something to acknowledge my presence. If we made eye contact it would then be quite natural for me to smile and say hello, strike up a friendly conversation. But she never looks at me. All she has to do is turn her head 45 degrees to the right, but she doesn’t.

The worst part is this is the exact right time for a conversation. Coppelius is setting up and the DJ is playing music at a low enough volume to hear the person next to you. Once the band starts playing, there won’t be any opportunity for a chat…but then again…isn’t that just what I want? An excuse not to have to talk to her? Hopefully the band will start soon and I can say “oh well, I just didn’t have enough time.”

Holger comes back and says hello. He’s going to head to the front for the first three songs, as that’s all he’s allowed to take pictures for. After talking to him in English I turn back to the girl to see if she noticed my English-speaking and whether it intrigued her, and she is looking at me but before I can open my lips she’s turned back away.

“See?” says the demon. “She’s not interested in you at all. She knows you’re standing there and she’s aware that you keep looking at her. If she had any willingness to talk to you whatsoever she’d make eye contact. But look how she’s deliberately avoiding it. If you do say something to her, it’ll be an imposition. She just wants to have a good time and enjoy the band, not get hit on by pathetic losers like you. If you talk to her it’s going to be awkward as hell and it’ll poison the rest of the show. Do her a favor and keep your mouth shut.”

Like a slave before his master, I obey. He knows all of the right bricks to throw at me and now I’m sealed behind the wall. I wanted to have a good time tonight, but now I’m not where I want to be. Now I’m in a dark place.

Perfect for dark music, at least. That’s what I think as the lights go down  and Coppelius finally takes the stage. They look very interesting and I’m excited to hear just how hard they can rock out with flutes and cellos. The singer is an obvious showman, going through a funny little routine before they begin playing. But once the bassist starts plucking on that cello and the base notes ripple from the speakers just a few feet from my head, I know that this night is at least going to be enjoyable on a surface level. My entire skeleton vibrates from the bass—it’s like my bones are getting a massage. Time to forget the girl standing next to me and slip into the zone.

But alas, the girl is just too close to shut out of my mind. She’s got a hand-bag strapped to her right shoulder that repeatedly brushes up against me as she dances. Bizarrely, I find myself deriving a strange pleasure from it, as though she’s dancing with me. It may not be her body rubbing up against mine but it’s something attached to her body—the kinesthetic sensation of the handbag’s texture against my arm is the end of a causality chain that begins with her motions. Touching that bag is as close as I’m going to get to touching her.

Another important element of the situation is the odor. People are farting up a storm throughout the show—it can’t be heard but it can definitely be smelled. Yet she maintains the most pleasant aroma throughout the evening, and I occasionally turn my head just to get a whiff.

I’m constantly looking over at her, especially when the lights go up in the audience. Every time I look at her face it looks more beautiful than the last. I haven’t been in close proximity to a girl this beautiful for such a long period of time for as long as I can remember. I try to simply appreciate the beauty for its own sake, to separate it from the desire attached to it.

But oh how nice it would be to put my hand behind her head, to touch her check with my other hand and move in closer, admire that skin from an inch away and press my lips against it…god what an amazing sensation that would be.

If she would just look at me! Obviously there’s not going to be any conversation going on during the show but we could at least acknowledge each others’ presence. I could make a gesture towards the band and say, “They’re pretty good, huh?” or something of that nature, thus establishing contact and paving the way for some kind of chat when it’s over.

But she doesn’t look at me once, even when her dancing sets her off balance and we collide a little, her eyes remain either closed or on the stage. And my how adorable she looks when they’re closed—even though I’m only seeing half her face! She looks so lovely as she just rocks gently to the music, her lips occasionally singing along to the lyrics (I made sure to take note of that) or sometimes pulled back in a mysterious and lovely smile…she must be having a funny thought. Oh, to get inside her mind…what’s going on there? Who is this person? What is she doing here all alone? What is her name, for fuck’s sake? Will I at least go home knowing her name?

Eventually that becomes the goal. If nothing else, I have got to find out this woman’s name. After the show, when the lights come up, I’ll have a moment to turn to her and say hello. If she looks at me, that’ll be perfect, but even if she doesn’t I’ll make myself tap her on the shoulder and say hi.

“No you won’t” the demon taunts me. “You won’t tap her on the shoulder while she’s walking away from you and you know it.”

I suspect the demon is right, but I try to focus on what to say. Now that I can’t actually talk to her the demon isn’t hiding words from me anymore, so I try and plan out the whole approach. “Hello,” I’ll say. “I just wanted to say thank you. You’re very beautiful, and I’ve really enjoyed standing next to you tonight. Would you do me the honor of telling me your name?”

I knew it was flawed and rather silly, but it was the best I could come up with at the time. I know you’re not supposed to tell a girl she’s beautiful—that’s basically saying “I’m a loser and you could do better than me” but the goal tonight was not to start a relationship but only to beat the demon. To prove that I can beat him by obtaining the name of the girl around whom the night was revolving.

The show goes on and on, delaying the moment of truth as I prepare to face it. Holger is standing next to me and we’re shouting into each others’ ears from time to time but mostly just silently watching the show. He buys me a beer which helps me loosen up a little more, although I can tell I’m not nearly as loose as I should be for flirtation purposes. I’m even holding back on the dancing, not wanting to look like a fool in front of this girl, but I think that if I did get into it a little more I might have a better chance. It can be endearing to women if a guy is obviously enjoying himself a lot. You don’t want to be so drunk that you can barely form coherent sentences, but a slight buzz isn’t much better than no buzz at all. The ideal place to be is somewhere in the middle.

At one point I thought I might be off the hook, as she took her phone out of her pocket and read a message from someone named Tim. Who’s Tim? Probably her boyfriend, right? He probably just couldn’t make it to the show tonight for some reason and that’s why she’s alone. So that means I’d be doing the right thing by not approaching her, right? That’s what the demon thinks anyway.

But I know that’s no excuse. For all I know, Tim is her brother or her father or her even her boss. I’ve sent text messages to girls I’m not in a relationship with. I couldn’t justifiably draw any conclusions from that. No, demon, I’m still on the hook.

The band plays their “last” song and walks off the stage, but I relax because the chance of an encore is 100%. The crowd is clapping hard in unison, the lights are still down, and no final bows have been taken. They waste no time in coming back to the stage and rocking out a little more. I’m really liking their music but I’m too distracted by the girl to get fully into it. At least its darkness complements my state of mind well.

I can feel the moment of truth approaching. The band finishes one song and I desperately hope they’re not done. Please just put this off for a few minutes longer. Thankfully, they play another song. As they walk off the stage again I hope for another encore. I turn to Holger and ask him if they’re done or if he thinks they’re coming back. He says the lights are still down so they’re coming back. After we’ve exchanged those words I look over at the girl and for the second time, her eyes meet mine (it’s only the second time I’ve even seen her left eye). She knows I exist. She knows I’m not German. But she doesn’t want to look at me long enough to give me a natural opening to say hello. Her gaze darts back to the stage as quickly as I notice it. I think of whether there was something I could have said just then but it’s already too late. But don’t worry—now’s not the time. Just stick to the plan.

The band comes back to play one final song, a slow and moving tune about soldiers. English lyrics—half their songs had English lyrics. But the girl only sang along to the German lyrics so it’s still quite possible she doesn’t speak English. The language barrier is a huge asset to the demon, but after the experience in Kassel I’ve resolved to just assume basic English-speaking ability on the part of everyone. That will at least remove half the difficulty of making my approach.

And now it’s almost time to do it. The song ends, the band takes their final bows, and suddenly the lights go up. It’s now or never. I turn to face her directly but she doesn’t even glance at me. She turns to the left and starts walking towards the door. The demon grabs me by my arms and holds me back, laughing maniacally as I watch this girl walk away. “She doesn’t want to talk to you!” he shouts. “She deliberately turned the other way so she wouldn’t have to acknowledge you! Let her go. It’s what you want to do anyway—let her go.”

The demon’s words reach me, and I succumb. As she takes two steps away I almost raise my arm to tap her on the shoulder but the demon is holding it down. How easy it is to just let her go like that, to let her walk away without saying anything and tell myself it’s what she wanted. It’s so incredibly easy, so much easier than saying something. All I have to do is nothing. Just let her disappear into memory, then go home and brood. Let the demon have its victory.

Brooding it is, I think, and I turn toward the coat-check counter to retrieve my jacket and umbrella. Holger has disappeared but I’ll find him to say goodbye before I leave. Just a quick trip to the bathroom as I feel the demon dance around inside of me, delighting in its triumph, looking forward to the feeding frenzy it’s going to have when I get home and wallow in self-contempt.

I look all around the main room of the club trying to find Holger but I don’t see him. I give up and decide to go home, but spot him in the room between the main room and the lobby where people from the bands’ crews sell CDs after the show. He’s showing his book of pictures to a girl who looks like she’s with one of the bands, perhaps trying to do some kind of business. I say hello to him but he’s still in a conversation with the girl, which allows me to take a step back and examine the room.

Holy shit—there she is. Standing by herself in the back of the room with a CD in hand, probably waiting to get to the desk so she can meet someone from Coppelius, she looks positively radiant. The demon freezes. He senses danger. He knows I don’t want to go home and brood. He knows I’m thinking of Corey and how I should be able to do this if he can. He knows I’m hungry for a victory.

I take a step towards her and she spots me. It’s unmistakable. Her eyes meet mine and then immediately—immediately—she turns her whole head away.

I stop in my tracks and turn back around. “See that?” says the demon. “You weren’t just imagining things. She really isn’t interested in you. The last thing she wants is for you to go up to her. You saw how quickly she turned away. Take the hint, man. Spare yourself. Spare her.”

Yes, maybe she finds me repulsive and is terrified that I might actually go up to her. Or maybe she’s just über-shy. Maybe we have that in common.

Holger and the girl are still talking. The girl is still standing there all alone. I’m about to go home and fight the urge to take a knife to my skin for the first time since high school. If the demon wins tonight, it’ll be an epic triumph the likes of which he hasn’t known for years.

Fuck. That.

I take the metaphorical sword that I was ready to jam into my heart and plunge it into the demon instead. The surge of anxiety so overwhelming I feel I might drown in it rising within me, I take a deep breath and walk straight up to her.

“Entschuldigung,” I say. She’s not looking at me, and the German word for “excuse me” sounds much friendlier than the English. As soon as she looks at me I switch back.

“I just wanted to say hello,” I say, surprised by the calmness in my voice. In the back of my mind I already realize I’ve won. The demon is stunned, his mouth agape as he lies bleeding.

“Hello,” she says, an unreadable expression on her face.  For the first time I’m getting an extended look at her whole face.

“I was standing next to you during the show,” I say.

“I know,” she says. Of course she does.

Now what? “This was my first concert in Hannover,” I say. Not technically true but true enough for the purposes of this conversation.

“Where are you from?” she asks.

“America,” I answer. “Have you ever been there?” If she had, this would have put me in very comfortable conversation territory. If she’d been to Brooklyn it would have been perfect.

“No, I’m from Hannover” she said. Uh oh. The first sign of less-than-perfect English. The first real sense I get that she doesn’t want to be talking to me.

“No, I mean have you ever been to America?” I ask. She hasn’t. “Anywhere outside Germany?”

She lists a few countries, and I nod. “Are you a big fan of Coppelius?” I ask.

“I don’t know…” she says.

“I noticed you knew all the words,” I tell her. She smiles at this…it’s heavenly…but can’t seem to think of anything to say to it. She tells me this is the fifth show of theirs that she’s been to.

I realize I’m not in flirtation-mode at all. I’m in English-teacher mode, attempting to make small talk for the sake of small talk. My voice is super-high and I don’t sound comfortable at all. I know what I’m like when I’m acting naturally, I know I can be fun and relaxed but not at the moment. At the moment we’re both uncomfortable, and the escape-route is just too tempting.

“May I have your name?” I ask. I’m slightly amused that the question came out that way.

“Zora,” she says. It’s a beautiful name when she says it. With an American accent it’s kind of ugly, but with a German pronunciation of the Z and the R it sounds lovely.

“Zora,” I repeat and smile.

“What’s yours?” she asks politely.

“Kyle,” I tell her. She repeats it and smiles.

We’ve been talking for about 20 seconds but it feels like an eternity, like we’ve just had the longest conversation of our lives and now we know everything about each other. I get the distinct impression that she’d like to be left alone, and I’ve already accomplished my goal. To move the bar even farther now and attempt to keep it going, to possibly find out how to contact her…it’s unthinkable. Why not quit while ahead?

“It was very nice meeting you, Zora,” I say, and I take her hand.

“It was nice meeting you too,” she responds, and I’m unable to tell whether her tone is one of relief or disappointment.

“Have a good night,” I say, and turn to leave.

I say goodbye to Holger and walk out the door, immediately tossing some Lacrimosa back on my I-pod and lighting up a cigarette. I don’t open the umbrella. The light rain on my face feels wonderful, and I’m feeling more alive than I have in a long time. Meanwhile the demon sits in the corner clutching his wound, plotting his revenge.

I continue to feel good for the rest of the night, even staying up for a couple more hours listening to music and appreciating the emotion.  I’d broken the hardest barrier and actually gone up and approached a girl I was strongly attracted to. I don’t remember ever doing that before—just going up to a girl at a club and striking up a conversation. I usually wait around for an opportunity that never comes. This time I didn’t wait. I just fucking went for it, and it felt pretty good. I beat the demon and punched a hole through the wall. It may have been nothing more than a 1-minute chat, but it was a major breakthrough on my part. Even Corey didn’t become a ladies’ man overnight. I figure it may be a long process but that success is possible. I just have to be content with baby-steps, and I was proud of myself for taking one last night.

But the morning has a cruel way of shedding a different light on things, and I woke up today with nothing but regret in my heart. The hole in the wall let both good and bad emotions through. I’ve been alone for a long time, but this morning was the first time in a very long time that I actually felt lonely, that I wished I had someone to be with.

Oh Zora, were you really as uninterested in me as you seemed or were you just shy? Would you have liked for me to stick around? If you had, you could have said something like “you have to go now?” when I signaled that I was leaving and I would have stuck around, but you sent me no sign whatsoever that I was welcome.

Still, I can’t help but wonder. This was an amazing fluke. An incredibly beautiful girl, all alone, standing right next to me. It’s rare enough that a beautiful girl is anywhere all alone but the fact that she stood right next to me, thus giving me an excuse to approach her later (not to mention that I could have spoken to her any time throughout the night) is insane. That kind of thing may never happen again. I didn’t get much of an impression of Zora but I liked what I did get. She seemed sweet, atypical of German girls. She might have been a truly wonderful person, alone only because of her shyness. I might have let someone really special slip away.

Of course I plan to go to a lot more concerts now, and perhaps she’ll be at one of them. If she is, I’m good to go. Now that we’ve made contact approaching her again will be easy, and I’ll be better prepared to have a relaxed conversation—something I was not in the right frame-of-mind for at all last night. But there’s a solid chance that the Coppelius show was it—that that’s the first and last time I’ll ever encounter the lovely Zora.

So I don’t know whether to be proud of myself or to beat myself up. I wounded the demon but he’s already healed and ready to do battle again. I can only hope that he’s been permanently weakened and now that I’ve exposed his vulnerability I’ll eventually be able to destroy him completely.

But even now I hear him whispering: “You don’t want to destroy me. You need me. You want to be alone and I keep you that way. When you signed up for this life, I came with the package. We’re in this together, and we’re in it for the long-haul. As you get older I’ll only get stronger, and in the end I’ll have my ultimate victory—you will die alone.”

At this moment I fear he’s right. The world outside the wall is too riddled with emotional turmoil. The distance between the way I currently am and the way I’d have to be to get a woman to go out with me feels insurmountable. I probably will die alone.

Although I’ve been living in Germany for more than two years now, I rarely write about its internal politics, mostly because I don’t feel confident enough in my understanding of the system to comment intelligently. However, there are some things I know enough about to form a solid opinion, and nuclear energy is one of them.

Full disclosure: The language school I work for has a contract with one of Germany’s largest energy companies, so most of my income comes to me (indirectly) from the energy industry. Not that such a thing would influence my opinion (I’ve worked for companies I hate before) but discussing the issue with people in the industry has no doubt had some effect. Most of the information in this entry comes from them.

You might have heard about the recent protests in Dannenberg, at which tens of thousands of demonstrators blocked the railway tracks in an effort to stop a shipment of nuclear waste returning to Germany for storage after processing in France. The shipment was headed to the town of Gorleben, where the residents successfully managed to bring in Greenpeace to turn what had been purely a “not in my backyard” issue into an international rebuke of nuclear energy in general.

I am a bleeding-heart liberal, so I am a fan of Greenpeace and of protests in general, but on this issue I have to disagree with the demonstrators.

When it comes to potential sources of energy, they all have their downsides. Oil and coal pollute the air and accelerate global climate change, hydro-electric dams wreak havoc on the surrounding environment, and nuclear energy produces radioactive waste. People who live near facilities in which this waste is stored have a legitimate gripe.

But the fact is we need to produce energy somehow, unless we want to go back to a pre-industrial civilization. [While I personally wouldn’t mind that, I’ll just assume for the sake of this entry that we all do want to keep the engines of civilization churning.] It would be nice if we could run our cities using nothing but clean and renewable energy, but as of now this is just not feasible. Current technology for harnessing wind and solar energy does not output nearly enough to sustain civilization at its current level.

The only realistic options are fossil fuels or nuclear power. Since nuclear energy doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, it seems the logical choice. The radioactive waste is a problem, but only for the local areas in which that waste is stored. It doesn’t harm the environment on a global scale like fossil fuels do. Furthermore, the amount of radiation that people who live near storage sites are exposed to isn’t terribly harmful—I wouldn’t say it’s harmless but it’s not much worse than tobacco, alcohol, or any of the other poisons people put into their bodies voluntarily—and those people do have the option of moving somewhere else (as much trouble as that might cause them).

I therefore agree with Chancellor Merkel that nuclear energy should be considered a “bridge” technology—something to keep Germany’s cities operating until clean energy technology can completely replace it.

What Germany has been facing over the last decade with regards to nuclear energy is a political problem. Unlike the United States, Germany has more than two major political parties. They have the two big ones—the conservative CDU (Merkel’s party) and the more labor-friendly SPD—but they also have a few other major players including the far left “Linke” party, the business-friendly FDP and the Green Party. This means that there is almost never a single political party with a plurality of votes in the parliament. To form a working majority, the party with the most seats has to form a coalition with another party.

When the SPD was in power, they formed a coalition with the Green Party, and one of the Green Party’s demands was to phase out all nuclear energy from Germany. They successfully passed legislation that would force all nuclear power plants to shut down before their expiration dates, cutting their operational life-spans by more than ten years in most cases.

When the CDU took over the majority, they had to form a coalition with their arch-rival SPD, which made passing legislation about as impossible as it is in the United States when the government is divided. Nothing was done on the nuclear issue, but when the FDP gained enough seats in the last major election a new coalition was formed between them and the CDU. One of the promises made before the election was that a CDU-FDP (or “Black-Yellow” referring to the parties’ designated colors) coalition would re-extend the life-spans of Germany’s nuclear plants back to their original expiration dates.

This is an important point that has been overlooked by nearly everyone reporting on the protests. Nobody in the government is proposing building more nuclear power plants or even extending the life-spans of those currently operating. They only want to allow those plants to run as long as they were originally intended.

Try telling that to the protesters. Their hearts are in the right place, but what they want just isn’t practical. Without its nuclear plants, Germany simply wouldn’t have enough energy to make it through the next ten years. They’d have to make up for the shortage by buying their energy from France. And guess where most of France’s energy comes from? Nuclear power.

The Green Party has promised to fight the Black-Yellow coalition’s efforts to keep the nuclear plants running, and it will soon be decided in court whether this can be done by simple declaration or if it must be done with a majority vote. If it requires a majority vote, the measure will fail because recent local elections have cost the Black-Yellow coalition their plurality.

I find it slightly ridiculous that so much energy is being wasted (pun intended) on this issue. The protesters calling for the abolition of nuclear energy in Germany remind me of Tea Party protesters calling for more deregulation of the financial industry. Both are espousing a cause that if successful will actually do more harm to their country than good.

It would seem that even in Germany, people respond with knee-jerk reactions before thinking things through. They hear “nuclear energy” and think of Hiroshima and Chernobyl and decide that it must be bad—end of story. Pay no attention to nuance: to the fact that Germany’s laws require so much oversight and so many safety precautions that a Three-Mile-Island-like situation would be unthinkable here, that nuclear energy is far cleaner than most of the viable alternatives, and that Germany simply can’t operate without it right now.

The real criminals, however, are the politicians who use the nuclear issue to boost their popularity and deliberately mislead the public into believing it’s more dangerous than it is and who ignore the practical costs of its elimination.

Hopefully we will one day be able to power the entire world with clean and renewable resources, but we’re not there yet. Until then, we have to go with less-than-ideal technology, and since the alternatives do far more harm to the planet I’d say nuclear is our best option for the moment. People should eventually demand the complete elimination of nuclear energy, but the demonstrators currently protesting in Germany are at least 50 years too early.