Bloggerific

I started a blog for pictures. You can find it somewhere on the interweb. I started it because I want to a) share my photos with the world and b) I want to participate on a website called Photo Friday where they give a weekly photo challenge and you have to submit a photo for the challenge. I don't really think there are any winners or losers, except those who don't go check out the page.

Check out the other blog, for photos and photo related comments only!

Segen und Fluch. Keiner versteht die. Der kann die nicht bewaeltigen wer die hat. Man wird aufgrund die sich zerstoeren aber auch wird man nur bei der sich bessern.

Um Salz in die Wunden zustreuen, werden sie ohne die den verfluchter Mann kritisieren.

I apologize for hurting people in one of my most recent entries. It hurt several people that I would complain so much. Most of you have been such wonderful friends. I have chosen to come here instead of staying some place where I would be near to my friends. Or at least nearer to them.

I cannot say anything that would not be hurtful to people. If I am sad, some of you will be upset. If I am lonely, some of you will point out to me that it is my fault that I am lonely (which may or may not be true) and then be upset. If I am happy, some of you will be upset that I am happy and you are not here.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage the change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

I like that prayer, but I guess what I need now is a prayer that is more like:

God, grant me the ability to see the future because while I try to make all the best decisions today to make my friends, family, loved ones, and myself happy now AND in the future, I cannot know with certainty if I am doing the right thing in any given day regarding any given decision. Could you please send me a crystal ball and tarot cards for Christmas? They will be quite useful in making sure that I never hurt anyone again.

Sometimes I am unhappy. That comes from all sorts of things; things which I have some control over and things which I have no control over. Sometimes it is a direct effect of my actions, sometimes it is a side-effect of my actions.
Sometimes I am extremely happy. That also comes from all sorts of things; things which I have some control over and things which I have no control over. Sometimes it is a direct effect of my actions, sometimes it is a side-effect of my actions. Right now, it seldom happens for 'no reason' at all.

I hope all of you are granted the foresight to make the decisions which will make you the most happy. I do not have this foresight.

I want to thank everyone for your comments to my last entry. It sounded extremely...something bad. And it was. I get quite upset on certain days. Other certain days are quite nice. For example, my trip to eastern europe was pretty kick-ass. We saw two of our plants there, which were pretty neat, actually. It still amazes me sometimes how complex tires are. There is so much shit that goes into them. On the way back to Vienna from our second one, a few of my friends and I stopped in Brataslava. It was pretty awesome. Most of it you could tell was part of the communist bloc. Unfortunately, I did not take any pictures to represent that. When you got to the city center, to the historic downtown, things looked much nicer. It was a pretty good trip. I loaded more photos to my sharing place. I am not sure who got invited to that cause it is both ridiculous and fabulous that you have to get invited, but anyway, if you want to be invited, let me know and I will make it happen and you can look at the pictures I have been taking. Or some of them, anyway.

I also put up some pics of my new apartment and some from a hike I went on with a colleague in the "mountains" (they're really just kind of large hills) in the area and some pics from when Alex and I went to Rome and a few random pics from around Hannover that I either really liked or liked just a tiny bit or that I thought were funny (like the one with the picture that says 'Live') or maybe I guess just the photos that I wanted to put into it. I'll call it Random Crap from Hannover or something, I guess.

I am ready to go home. I am ready to go home from work and enjoy my new apartment, but I am also ready for Christmas with my family. I think I will enjoy it very much.

Life is good (at the moment. It fluctuates, as you have undoubtedly noticed.) I really am starting to feel comfortable here. And what that means is really quite basic. I can feed myself and purchase necessities like shampoo and toilet paper and laundry detergent with little more thought than was necessary when I was in the states. That is an incredible feeling after you have experienced otherwise. When you barely know where to go to get groceries, its complicated. But now, I know where to go for groceries, I know where to go when I want to dance, I know where to go when I want to have a nice, fresh beer, I know where to go to the bathroom, I know how to get around the city, all of those things that I really took for granted in the states, I am feeling quite comfortable with. It's fabulous.

Social life still sometimes lacks a bit because I obviously don't know people here near as well as I do at home (whom I have a very difficult time communicating with because of time differences, limited access to internet, etc).

Life is good.

Some days are hard, but I still think that being here is the right thing. And I guess, that's what makes it the right thing. I discussed this with another trainee who is considering not coming back from Christmas vacation. We decided that the correctness of such actions depends a lot on what you want/can have from life. I think we both decided that our fathers would tell us the same thing. You have to weigh the consequenses and make a decision. I hope coming to Europe is the right decision given the drastic consequences.

Anyway, I wish I would have had the opportunity to work with more international students at Rose. I wrote to one of my professors today because I feel so much ahead of a lot of the people here regarding feedback and a little bit ahead (at the very least, quite competent) regarding teamwork. Sometimes it is so foriegn to me that someone has never had feedback before. But then I go to an intercultural training and I learn from my colleagues that in China, they don't give feedback unless it is from the boss to the employee. And then, it is very high context. To a lot of Americans, the message would probably be lost because they use different ways to communicate the feedback. And to communicate in general. We heard a story in the intercultural training that one guy saw a girl in public or somewhere that he was interested in and so he had his parents contact the girl's parents. He went to her house for tea and the girls mother let him in. He was seated in the garden and the mother brought him some tea and bananas. He drank a bit of tea, then got up and left, very sad. Every one of the Westerners said "Waht the fcuk?" One guy from Malaysia understood exactly. See, tea and fruit do not go together, so the guy was to understand that he and the girl are equally compatible.

Once again, let me know what you think of the pictures (since only one of you did last time). I am particularly proud of the one of the colloseum with the moon behind and also of one from Kronsberg with the stars and the trees and...I think there was one more that I really liked. (I keep going back to this because I am undergoing the extremely time consuming task of uploading the pictures while I type.)

Anyway homies, I send you my love. I am sorry for delays in replying to emails. Being busy is not an excuse because I know everyone and their mother is busy. (As long as they're not gettin' busy together.) I would also like to wish everyone a very merry Christmas and a happy Hannuka and a glorious Kwanza and a chilling Chinese New Year and a happy calendar New Year and whatever. Hell, if you're not celebrating any holidays, I still wish you a merry unholiday.

Oh, I just was reviewing the pictures and I am also happy with the picture of the plane's wing with the clouds in the background. The spiraling staircase in the Vatican Museum ain't bad and neither are any of the pictures from the Harz Mountain Hike. Have a look. (I think the one of the moon looks a bit like it was created by that one program that makes those fake landscapes for desktop backgrounds, but I swear, its a photo and I took it.

Peace out

I hope that I can make it through this 'trip' to Germany. It is so very difficult for me sometimes. Work is hard, social life is hard, my personal life is hard, I feel like I'm going to fucking crack. I want to run home and cry some days. I am just extremely stressed and I can't seem to remember how to relieve that stress. I used to be able to work hard, to endure pressure without problems. Lately, I feel like there is so much pressure for everything but a lot of it is put on me by myself. Probably right now I am just making it worse. Either way, I hardly sleep at night. When I do, I wake up in a panic 5 minutes before my alarm (emphasizing the stress and nerves). I am so afraid of being late, I guess. When I am awake during the week, I am working or thinking that I should be working because I am so far behind. During the weekend, I am either working or stressed because I think I should be working. It doesn't help to do hobbies to relieve stress when they just make you more stressed because you feel like you should be working. In fact, right now, I am becoming stressed because I am writing this post instead of working. I am fucking stressed out of my mind. I am confused about what the fuck I want for the rest of my life. Most of the time, I feel like I know, but then it is so hard that the things that I have or could have so easily seem incredibly tempting. I want to rip my hair out some days because I feel like no matter what I do right now, I cannot be happy. I know that it is a state of mind. A chinese friend and I went for a walk through the christmas market and we saw a trinket with chinese writing on it. I asked him to read it to me and he told me at first that it couldn't be translated because it is so zen. I made him try and it was like... Desire nothing is everything, everything is desire nothing. Or something like that. He said it wasn't really that, but it made me think about that anyway, being happy with what I have, about knowing what I have, what I am, what I can be and being happy with those things.

Gaintner, I am sorry that I don't have 85 posts to make up for the last month of not posting. I will try to put up some of the recent highlights/lowlights.

This week, I went to a corporate entry conference. It was alright. It would have been great if I wasn't stressing myself out the whole time because I wasn't doing work. One night, I managed to put the work aside and drink my ass off. Well, ok, not so much, but I did get quite drunk with lots of other people who work in the other departments, divisions and companies at Conti.

I moved over the weekend. I think my new apartment is too big for me, but I don't care. I want to make one of the rooms into a dark room anyway and then it won't be too big, it will be just right.

Last week, the trainee pool went on a 'business trip' around Germany. We visited two of our suppliers and one of our customers. (I work for Continental, my company of the corporation makes tires.) The customer we visited was a Daimler-Chrysler truck assembly plant. It was extremely awesome to watch the trucks being assembled. Each one of them is completely and totally customized from the color, cab type, radios and accessories, tires, rims, body type, and of course the engine, drive train and other things, normal to consumer auto purchasing and also unusual to consumer auto purchasing. The two suppliers we visited were our silicon and carbon black supplier and also our textile supplier. Some of you may not have even known that there were such things in tires. They are not just round and black. There is steel, textile, a shit ton of chemicals, rubber, and probably some other shit all inside of your tires. Not just Conti tires either, its common. You could check out this link for more details.

The week before that was Thanksgiving. The sunday after T-day, most of the people in the trainee pool got together to have a thanksgiving dinner. Even some of the Germans...nay, one german, came to our thanksgiving dinner. It was great. It made me extremely homesick, however. It made me miss dinner with my grandma and family and then falling asleep on her couch and it made me miss spending an evening with my cousins on my dad's side, playing cards and hanging out.

Before Thanksgiving, Alex came to visit me. We went to Rome for about 3 and a half days. That was pretty awesome. She showed me so many new things, as she always does.

Before Alex came to visit, work was really stressing me out, almost as much as now. Except then, I actually worked on the project from dusk til dawn so it was all I could do and it made me feel better. It wasn't enough though. I had to do a shit ton of work because my boss's boss was pushing me to get a whole lot of analysis done so he could present the results at a meeting of the board of Continental. That made me feel pretty good about having to do the work, like it was actually worthwhile instead of just busywork.

Before that, everything was pretty normal around here. I just worked a lot, went home to my old apartment and took photos and listened to music and tried to be happy. So far, that still isn't working. It doesn't seem to matter what I do. Nothing makes me happy right now. I am completely lost. I feel like I am drowning.

One of the members of the board has had dialogues with the trainee pool twice now. I think that is incredible that a member of the board of such a huge and profitable company still takes time to meet with us, new employees and answer our questions and speak with us. Actually, at the conference this week, two board members came. One was the same I just spoke about and the other was...a different one. Anyway, the point of this paragraph was that he has made two comments that I really like. One is that feedback is the breakfast of champions. I like this statement because he is an incredibly successful individual and he lives by this principle and I also hold that so close to my heart. (Thank you father and Rose-Hulman). The other thing that he says is that 2-3 times in your life, you need to throw yourself into cold water, into a situation where you can barely stay afloat and you have to learn to swim. Right now, I feel that way. I am just afraid that I will not be able to swim and I will sink and drown and I will die. Figuratively and literally. I feel like the stakes for my decisions are so high. But that is so ridiculously stupid. So many people have to make decisions which are so much more important and so much more difficult. The CEO of our company just cut around 300 jobs in the plant at the location where I work. It is extremely difficult, I am sure. There are protests out front of work, the newspapers are against him and the company, but he did what he decided to do, even though he may be making a mistake and it is still such a difficult decision because it is hurting so many people. My decisions affect...what, maybe 2-3 people at most? Beyond that, maybe a few people who talk to me every once in a while are disturbed because I don't contribute to their reading material very often right now. I don't think most of this post is even coherent so I will continue. I feel so fucking alone right now that it is ridiculous. I hate it hate it hate it. I don't have time to post to my blogs. A lot of my friends are busy and rarely, if ever email me. I can't say I do much better because I have been ridiculously busy as well.

As 'another post' I will tell you about my near future. Tomorrow, R&D tires is having a Christmas party which we are trying to hide because so many people are losing their jobs at our plant's location. Every other local conti branch has canceled their party. I am pissed and want to protest the party, but part of my job is to work at the party.

On Sunday, I leave for Vienna, Austria. From there, the trainee pool and I rent cars and drive to our plant in the Czech Republic. There, we spend one day and the next day, we drive to our plant in Slovakia. (it may be the other way around, we might go to slovakia first). Then we return to Vienna before flying back to Hannover on Wednesday.

I will spend 5 days in the office. Actually, 5 weekdays. I will probably spend 7 days in the office. Then I will leave on the 22nd to go home to the US. I will be home for two weeks, missing the Schroeder Christmas party, which makes me extremely sad.

I will be back in the office for about a week or a week and a half. Then we (trainee pool) leave for our trip to the US. We fly to Charlotte, I believe. Then we go to Mt. Vernon, Illinois and to Auburn Hills, Michigan to visit our facilities in those places as well. (Stu, you should come visit when I am in Mt. Vernon. I think it is like...an hour or less from St. Louis.) After a week in The States, I return to Hannover to resume regular work. I don't think I have any more trips planned until after the trainee pool ends. When that happens, I fully intend to make a few trips, maybe just weekends, to places like Vienna, Prague, and Ireland.

That's my fucking future.