16 December 2012

I'm in America!

Hey all!  I'm in America!  Land of the free, home of the people who believe in customer service.

The trip, of course, was not without drama.  Which started in Hannover, when the ladies behind the counter let it slip that neither of them had any idea how to check our bags.  Reassuring, but we got through it.  Then the guy in front of me in the security line put his computer through the scanner and it, or some part of it, came out looking like a bomb.  This resulted in the security guys shutting down the entire gate and locking everyone behind bullet-proof glass until a sufficient number of people in uniform were called over to emphatically point at things.  After about fifteen minutes, they finally decided said computer was a computer, and let it go through.  In the meantime, I got ragged on by Jolly Customs Officer for not speaking Portuguese.

Drama Number 2 occurred in Heathrow, where, once again, the guy in front of appeared to be carrying a bomb in his bag.  Security went crazy-pants, but at that point my stuff was already through the scanner.  In the end, because there would probably be Inquiries with a capital I at Heathrow if they ever shut down an entire terminal's worth of security over a Danish guy with a plug adapter, they just diverted our scanned stuff to another line.

Above all though, the most entertaining part of the flight was listening to the Swedish teenagers behind me on the plane practicing their responses to hypothetical questions about their motherland as posed to them by Americans.  Answered included "We eat cold rocks for breakfast, " "Cars freeze in Sweden so we get to school via polar bear," and "Saturday is a special day, that's when we eat our rocks warm for breakfast."

Upon arriving home, I discovered that my father had more or less turned my room into a guest room, and there were several important changes I had to make before I could sleep in the bed.  These included: 1) re-inflating the blow-up dinosaur; 2) removing the bedside table on crime of hideousness and suspicion of being haunted by a poltergeist; 3) trading the ugly lamp on the haunted table out for my attractive college one, d) switching out the comforter for one that didn't look like people died under it during the Spanish flu epidemic, and e) hunting down my remote-controlled helicopter.  The latter is a requirement to my life--how else do you expect me to deliver notes to people in the next room?

10 December 2012

I am alive!

Hey all!  Guess what, I'm not dead.  It's just that this presentation has been eating my soul with extra ketchup and mustard and I've spent the last week alternately working myself into a frenzy or sitting in bed with my nerves fried.  On the plus side, presentation is done and over with--it wound up being over an hour long, and half of that was television clips I had edited together to make my point.  I think it went well--I had everyone's attention for the entire over-and-hour, and no one fell asleep or drew pictures or wrote letters to people, which is what I do when I'm bored.  Then again, it can be difficult to fall asleep when the videos on screen mainly consist of ghosts running around alternatively drowning children and shooting people in the head.  My professor liked it, and I even went toe to toe with a classmate who questioned whether the term "whitewashing" was racial and why hasn't America developed enough yet that we still believe in races?  I was like listen dude, I'm the anthropological queen of the history of race in America, and just because you guys refuse to talk about race doesn't mean it's any less of a social construct.  Yes, I won that particular battle.

And now, here is my collection of short stories I should have been blogging about, but haven't:

--Al and I checked out the Christmas market in Nuremberg, and it was both really cool and really packed.  We wound up going to the Atlanta (USA!) stand they had set up, because they were the only booth serving hot chocolate in Christmas market mugs.  Said hot chocolate turned out to be Swiss Miss with marshmallows, WIN.

Also, there was a camel and a llama and I touched them BOTH.  Not at the same time, but still.



--At the Christmas market in Coburg, I found a hat that appeared to be made out of a dead animal, so I put it on my head.  As you do.



--It snowed, so Al, Roommate. Roommate's boyfriend, and I went down to the river being chased most of the way by small gypsy children armed with snowballs.  There, we made SNOWMEN!  Or at least, they made snowmen and I helped until I got bored and started just rolling giant balls of snow and dying them with food coloring.  


--AL AND I WILL BE IN AMERICA ON SATURDAY!!!

That will be all!


02 December 2012

Ridiculous German Taxes, Highlighted

You know what's lame?  The German tax system.

Here's how it works.  There are tax "classes" that you fall into based on how much you earn, and taxes across that class are the same regardless of whether you're on the high or low end of said class.  I don't know how these classes were first established, but it was probably back in 1870 when Otto von Bismark took a lunch break from colonizing Africa, wrote some numbers in the dirt, threw some corn on them, and then let his chickens peck out the specifics.  And voila.  The German tax system was born.

This is the story of how the German tax class system came back around to chicken peck me in the ass.

Once upon a time there was a person, and that person was me.  This me-person got a job and was superbly excited about earning 400 euros a month, for that is how much students in Germany can earned without being taxed.  Technically, this me-person was actually earning 409 euros a month because me-person already had a B.A., which meant me-person earned more than students without one.  Upon finding this out, me-person asked me-person's boss if she would be taxed for those extra 9 euros. Me-person's boss assured her that said 9 euros were still in the tax "grey zone," also known as the hazy borderland between piles of chicken shit where tax people have better things to do than come after  you.  What a relief.  What a disappointment, then, when me-person got her first paycheck only to discover that 21 euros were missing.

What happened was this: chicken shit tax people decided they were feeling particularly productive.  My 409 euro paycheck put me 9 euros into a higher tax class, which meant I got 21 euros in tax taken out.  Let's do this again:

9 euros (11.6 dollars) over limit = 21 euros (27.3 dollars) tax.

Let's break it down further:

Having a degree = Earning more money per hour, less money after taxes.

Not having a degree= Earning less money per hour, but not getting taxed.

Which boils down to: if I didn't have a degree, I would have earned less money per hour but had a higher paycheck at the end of the month.  And if that's not absolutely fucked, I don't know what is.

Apparently, this was actually a really big deal in Germany at one point.  The conservative party thought this concept was bullshit, and pushed for a reform.  The super liberal party flipped shit, and the German people, who are apparently fond of their chickens, flipped shit as well.  This resulted in the conservative party getting absolutely crucified and the topic is more or less taboo.

I know it's not the end of the world.  Starting in January, the chickens have re-pecked the upper limit students can earn to 450 euros a month, which means that I only have to deal with this crap for another month before I start getting my full paycheck.  And my student status means that I will get back the money that was taken out in taxes, as long as I'm willing to jump through flaming German tax hoops for it and fill out a mountain of paperwork.  On principle, however, it is irritating and disappointing.  And even though I made the story up, I really hate Otto von Bismark right now.  If he were alive, I would turn his chickens into sandwiches.

STUPID CHICKENS.