Blast from the (Recent) Past

Not much happened today. Boyfriend and I are leaving tomorrow to stay overnight in a hotel near JFK, since our flight to LA is super-early on Saturday. We are going to be there for a week. Although the trip does involve some work for me, I’m nonetheless really excited about relaxing by the CA beach, especially since it’s been on the cool side here in New England in the past few days.

So frantically trying to tie all the loose ends around the office before I leave. I’m going to leave managing all the new staff in the capable hands of my coworker D, who’s one of my favorite coworkers, ever. If I didn’t have her, I’m sure the everyday work at the company wouldn’t be quite as fun.

Got an email from U from Germany. Am surprised to hear from him, actually. U had a crush on me in Germany, and was somewhat bitter that I didn’t reciprocate, which made our friendship always slightly off-key and tense.

We still hung out way too much that winter, mostly because in the beginning he was one of the only Germans I knew who could speak fluent English. So I frequented his little Potsdam apartment with no electrical or gas heat and the only way you can warm up a room was by shoving coal (yes, coal!) into this ceramic stove. And I had him over for dinner. A lot. And went on trips around Berlin. Yes, we spent a lot of time together that year.

U’s family was definitely one of those families that were worse off after the end of communism than before. His father was an economist in East Germany before the Wall fell, and after that, since Germany didn’t need socialist economists anymore, he began working at a casino. U himself was (and probably still is) a member of PDS, the descendant of the former German communist party that still advocates socialist ideals. He was with his party in a massive protest in 2002 when George W. visited Berlin, and he was not shy about expressing his disdain for both the moderate left (SPD) and the moderate right (CDU).

He studied music and was becoming a music teacher, and we shared our love for Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto. I still think of him every time I listen to it now.

After I returned to the States, he came too and spent a year in some college in the remote parts of Pennsylvania. We arranged to see each other in New York, but never connected. Then he went back to Germany and we didn’t talk for a long time.

Hearing from him was really nice and broght back a lot of memories. I have been missing Germany recently, and also missing the many people that I once spend so much time with there and then abruptly lost contact with. After coming back to the States, my life has changed so much and every single day was so exhausting and complicated for such a very long time (and still occasionally is) that I just didn’t have a moment to catch my breath and to reconnect with people I once knew (this includes college and high school friends).

Now I finally feel that I’m gradually coming out of the previous frantic, intense, breathless stage, and have moments of peace to think and reflect and reach out to reconnect to my past and the people that I liked or loved.

Of course, then I enter law school. Heh.