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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.