The Questions that I Exorcise

The curse of reading widely is that all sorts of questions that only tangentially relate to the subject at hand constantly knock at the door to the mind and, oftentimes, forcibly enter. You first detect this mental burglary when you see that you've read a paragraph, sometimes an entire page, without absorbing any of the content written. And yet you cannot simply recognize this and go on-- you know these webs of distraction are sometimes as fruitful as they are inhibiting. I've taken to writing questions down as soon as they come to mind to force them out of my system, into the future. These were today's questions, and some of them were even answerable:

1. Why does the air smell metallic when it gets very cold?

Verdict: Unknowable or not yet known- the internet could not tell me a thing, but perhaps you, dear reader, can. Am I the only one with this affliction?

2. How does cinnamon simulate heat?

Verdict: Apparently there's something called 'cinnamaldehyde' or 'cinnamic aldehyde,' which reacts with the censors in your mouth that normally detect heat, called trigeminal nociceptors. I find the name of the receptor somewhat lacking, but I'm reconsidering names for my first born after thinking through the myriad of nicknames one could have for 'cinnamaldehyde.'

3. How much does the heart of a blue whale weigh? (A fact I had learned in grade school, and promptly forgotten, only to have it surface [ha!] years later)

Verdict: An awful lot- over 1000 pounds, at least. I particularly liked this formulation of the question. 'How heavy is the blue whale's heart'? sounds to me like a delightfully terrible folk song. When I recounted this fact to my boyfriend, he looked at me wide-eyed and said, "Just one heartbeat could kill you!" Indeed. And according to the National Marine Mammal Laboratory, a human could even crawl through a whale's aorta, though the fantasy that we could endlessly circulate through a whale is probably entirely untenable. Pity- no matter how obese we become, we'll never know what it's like to be giant.

4. What does mold look like to ants? (I had been reading about the leafcutter ant's magnificent mold gardens in the amazon)

Verdict: It turns out the gardens of the leafcutter ants are mostly just amorphous and fuzzy, though they're impressive agriculture feats. In the process of researching this, though, I came across a couple of magnificent pieces by the artist Stacy Levy. The image above and the one below feature images of magnified mold (penicillium and aspergillus respectively) which have been sandblasted onto glass plates. Cultures of these very molds are then grown on the plates themselves, to fill in the crannies. Does everything that is moldy twice over acquire such beauty? It makes you wonder what would happen with a third iteration, a third level of moldiness...perhaps everything would just become disgusting again.

A-roving

Immer Was Los, a publication detailing all kinds of noteworthy events in and around Gießen, Hessen, Germany, where Lauren currently makes her home, had informed us that there was a big to-do in Hungen.

What, precisely? A Krämermarkt, or ‘stuff market’. Address? Hungen. The entire town, apparently. We realized that this would either be sublime (i.e. a Christmas market in early November), or dreadful. So we decided to go.

We spent the 24-minute train ride admiring German animals and planning our futures living happily in Lich, a seemingly v. pleasant neighbour of Gießen. We emerged from the forest, the charming brick and reassuring fields, to find ourselves in a post-apocalyptic junk yard. Like much of Germany on a cloudy day, it smelled like poo. This wasteland was Hungen.

Oh mein Gott, we said. What have we DONE.

We trudged towards civilization, after checking the schedule for the next train out of there. Along the path were what may or may not have been trash compactors, bulldozer tillers, and various piles of yellow and orange things, whose purposes remain a mystery probably even to themselves.

But then we smelt the waffles cooking. And we saw a Turkish restaurant. And we turned the corner and saw a stand that sold nothing but eight thousand varieties of candied almonds, and another stand that sold nothing but alpaca socks, and dozens and dozens of stands that stretched all the way down the street (which was a very charming, seventeenth-century German sort of street), and shortly afterwards we began our careers as supermodels.

It was freakishly cold. Spotting some choice knitwear, we proceeded to gleefully try on what, by German standards, would be considered far too many hats. We attracted the attention of numerous vendors. DIE SIND ALLE HANDGEMACHT! [These are all handmade!] insisted the sales lady (who never said anything else afterwards). HOW FANTASTIC, we said with our eyebrows, and crowded around the mirror to admire our marvelous taste.

Then suddenly there was a jolly man with a giant camera bag, asking if he could take some photos of us trying on hats for the local paper. We said yes, and then promptly realized that it is impossible to look candid and photogenic at the same time. So we were trying to make happy shopping faces and nonchalant faces and in the meantime this man was taking about fifty pictures a second, and it was all a bit confusing after a while. We felt we really should buy some hats then, so Lauren got a beautifully cozy white one with brass buttons and Maddy got a slouchy blue one with a secret geometric design on the back. These were not the hats we were wearing in the pictures. But some level of anonymity must be preserved.

(Full disclosure: we spent quite some time trying to track ourselves down in the slideshows of the Allerheiligenmarkt that we found on the websites of Hungen's local papers. It seems we were passed over in favor of the very young and very old. Are we not yet suffiiciently German?)

We wiled away a few hours in this fashion, always discovering new delights- exotic succulents, flammkuchen, FREE SHRIMP. The succulents were particularly memorable, because the succulent man (it's not what you think!) was very stern about us watering our LEBENDIGE STEINE [LIVING STONES] every 14 days for 30 minutes at a time. He also refused to sell us a specimen in a hanging pot, claiming that if he let it go, nobody would ever believe the species capable of blooming. We certainly wouldn't have.

When we move to Hungen, and I'm certain we will any day now, we will live in the Schloss (which is also the synagogue). We originally thought it was a gymnasium [fancy high school], but it seems to have been turned into some sort of apartment complex for Hungeners/Hungers. We want the roof apartment (WITH FOUR TURRETS!). We will play in the leaves in the back. We will have friends in the houses nearby, which are made from curvy beams and mud and straw. Though you might expect these friends to have dirty faces, they will not. This will be our life in Hungen.

It's a good thing that our life will be so pleasant, because escaping Hungen is nigh impossible. We tried, thrice, and were thwarted the first two times. Why? Our zug was simply ausgefallen, a word whose exact meaning we're not precisely sure of (though we always know it spells inconvenience), but we were not alone in our strandedness. We were joined by two helpless Slovenian transplants, a mother, who referred to Madeleine as a gutes Mädchen, and her daughter, who took a special joy out of crossing train tracks rather than using the subterranean stairs. They didn't take kindly to the delay, and, suspecting strikes, ranted about poor people, to our shock and delight. The old woman found our hangman game, which we played whilst waiting for a train to come and which must have been entirely unintelligible to her, hilarious.

What follows is a list of our hangman words, in order: split-pea soup, allspice, echidna, balustrade, incongruous, toreador, pamplemousse, antifreeze, strumpfhosen, laissez-faire, mise-en-abîme, flohmarkt, australopithecus, expressionismus, megatherium, vulcanologist, chaos, vestige, so we'll go no more a-roving, pluck, why, om, and kulturindustrie.