It happened in a round-about way. This morning we woke up early. “I can’t sleep.” “Me neither. Let’s go to the flea market.” It would have been the first time I had been there before ten. Prime time. But today there was no flea market. The cold has finally driven even the hardcore boothers away.

We walked on, to the grocery store. Even though I’m really excited to try out what I just learned from Hobo Stripper about making a toothbrush out of a small stick, we needed new toothbrushes and bread. The usual Saturday morning errands, preparations for Everything’s Closed Sunday. At the store I eyed the marked down fruits and vegetables and holiday chocolate. “If we get our asses out of bed tonight, we know what will be waiting for us…”

We walk this path often. Maybe four, five times a week. Maybe ten. It’s the way to the grocery stores, to the dumpsters, and to the post office. The sidewalk fringes rows of unpleasant-looking stucco houses. Quick post-war rebuilds, I imagine without knowing for sure.

Every time I walk this path I imagine the houses empty—apocalypse, emergency, plague—windows broken, ivy slowly stretching up the walls. I imagine that one or two of the houses are inhabited, and that the rest have been marked for plundering the building supplies needed elsewhere.

In a small black trash can next to the sidewalk was a wooden cassette rack, filled with cassettes. I walked into the driveway, lifted the lid and pulled it out. Out of habit. Below it was a bag with what I thought was an enormous candle, and some LPs. “There’s a lady looking at you from the window.” Oh. I took the cassette rack and the bag and let the lid fall closed behind me.

There were five Bruce Springsteen cassettes, a Madonna album that I’ll give away, and a Ghost Busters radio play. The rest I could record over. I looked in the bag. Nope, not a candle, but a huge pot-shaped mass of fat. “Sweet! Now I can try out candle making.” I think of the homemakers I’ve been reading about, making soap and candles from fat scrapped from pans and cut from meat. Had this bit been saved out of habit, because that’s what mom and grandma always did, but tossed for lack of an idea of what to do next?

“Did you see the lady’s face?”

“No, just her head.” I wondered how she had felt, seeing me in her driveway, in her trashcan. Perhaps she had felt annoyed, possessive. Maybe she was kicking herself for not getting that table at the flea market after all.

Later, I walked across the street to use the toilet. (The water in our bathroom wagon has been turned off for over a month. At first because several pipes froze and exploded, now because we don’t want them to explode again. “Little business” as the Germans euphemize peeing happens outside and “big business” across the street.) On the way back I cut through the trash collection corral. Holy shit. There was a big pile of blankets, witty little shirts in my size, unprinted shirts that I will screen print and sell, two fitted sheets (for the longest time we only had one and now we are teetering on exuberance), a fall jacket, and a sweet black velor jacket that has The Mad Scientist’s name written all over it. All piled dejected on the pavement. I boxed them up and took them home.

Last week someone threw out another kitchen, spices still full, leftovers from the previous night’s dinner still clinging to pan bottoms. I had just written a grocery list for the three-course dinner I made on Saturday night. I wasn’t sure where I was going to find algae flakes, but there was the obvious answer: in the dumpster across the street is where you’ll find them (as well as two bags of beans, rice paper, baking powder, and pudding mix).

But the winner of this week’s most curious find was the bag of dried lilies. What do you even do with dried lilies? Usually I complain when I find flowers in the trash. (Although they came in handy for the bridal bouquet.) “You can’t eat flowers!” I bitterly tell anyone who tries to tell me that at least they’re pretty. And now dried lily petals among the remnants of someone’s kitchen cabinets. I guess you can eat flowers after all.

In the morning I wake to the sound of the chickens outside of my bedroom window. The rooster doesn’t crow at dawn, not our rooster. He crows around 10 or 11 pm, and at 3 or 4 am, and we joke that he’s just dimmed the lights and poured the drinks and is cawing “Paaa-rty!”

Outside of my bedroom window (my wagon window? my bed window? the window in my wagon next to my bed?) the chickens are pecking at an old block of Styrofoam. Little white balls litter the ground around it, and every morning their tracks in the snow run straight from the compost heap behind the house to the Styrofoam block. Dessert?

I looked it up and according to People On the Internet this is normal chicken behavior, and it doesn’t hurt them. I hope that chickens are one of those species of animals that could evolve to digest all the horrible things we (humans) are leaving behind. All the same I wish the stuff didn’t exist, that I wasn’t insulating my wagon with it (the red wagon is insulated with expensive organic flax that I wish I could afford for the green wagon), and that the chickens weren’t slowly pecking it into smaller and smaller pieces.

Since the “congratulations, you’re allergic to soy!” bomb dropped and I gave up soy milk, I’ve been craving cheese. I woke up thinking about cheese. Not once, not twice, but for an entire week. So, since I always give my body whatever it tells me that it needs, I have spent the last two days gorging on dairy and wondering how the hell I will be able to afford the beautiful, delicious, local farmer’s market products that I would like to limit my gorging to. But I look at the chickens and think, perhaps their eggs are the answer. However, the last time I checked, eggs made my stomach wax volcanic. Oh glorious omlette, send me a sign!

This is part ten in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here.

Eight months had passed before a question started to form in her mind, becoming more and more urgent as she met each of my parents in turn and, while playing at the role of kindly host mother, started learning more about my life. And the question was this: what the hell is this woman doing working for me?

One afternoon in the kitchen she asked, delicately avoiding the fact that this was really a question about class, about privilege. It was a question she never would have asked Maria— who she knew would have been fucked without her job cleaning Janet’s toilets—or Anna—who had spent her entire working life raising Janet’s children.

Anna and Maria might have fit neatly into Janet’s idea of “hired help” because neither had been to college or had any “professional” work experience. But I came from middle-class privilege, she knew now, and had a college degree from a fancy schmancy college. This meant that I had the qualifications and the connections to be working at what she would have called “a real job”—and yet I was playing hide-and-go-seek and wiping four-year-old ass. Neither did my story mirror the stories of her previous au pairs or those of her friends, many of whom had taken the job in hopes of finding a permanent way out of a bad situation at home.

But me? I was, as far as she could tell, doing this for fun, and this must have been confusing: after all, these were her children, and she wasn’t even raising them “for fun.”

“So why is it you wanted this job anyway?” She was wiping down the stainless steel counter tops when she asked, and I was picking at the leftovers from lunch.

“I’m a writer,” I told her, a little surprised at the question, sure we’d discussed this during both of my interviews. “I wanted to get into travel writing and improve my foreign language skills, and in order to do that I needed to travel. I thought this job would be an interesting way to get to know a new country. I know a lot of people who got their fix studying abroad, but I think you experience a lot more of a culture’s nuances when you live with a family.” (Admission: there is no way that this is what I actually said because I still have no clue how to say the word “nuance” in German, and my German now is a trillion times better than it was then. But I said something like it.) Never mind my political and philosophical reasons for abandoning corporate life. That wasn’t a conversation I felt Janet and I’s relationship was ready for.

She nodded slowly, absorbing the words. Writer. Writer? “Have you been published?” She sounded like she was trying to sound nonchalant, but something like fear was creeping into her eyes.

“Yeah I have actually. I co-authored a little guide book about the college I went to, did some newspaper articles, a few things on the internet.” She stopped wiping and looked at me. Recognition flashed in her eyes, and for the first time since we’d met it felt like she was actually looking at me. It had never occurred to me that someone might feel unnerved by my profession. But writing is about communication, and maintaining one face for private use and one for public use is about keeping secrets.

“But you’d never write about us would you?” Suddenly she was slathering every syllable in the syrupy, artificial tone she used for socializing, for her public face. Suddenly she was remembering ever soap-operatic family story she’d ever told me.

But I have a syrupy “social” voice of my own, and I lied right to her face, just as she had when she’d told me that of course I would be paid for overtime. “Of course not. Never.” Liar, liar pants on fire.

I have a few words of advice for you, dear readers, and heed them or be damned: never trust a writer who you’ve just spent eight months treating, well, let’s just say “not as an equal.” Then again, maybe I didn’t lie, but just avoided the question with a shrug, and left the room. Memory changes details. There is no such thing as non-fiction.

Today, thinking back on that conversation, I wondered what Janet would think if she were to read the things I write about my year working for her (extremely pissed off). And for the good times, because there were a few of them and it could always be worse, I’ve changed enough names and details to keep them anonymous. Perhaps they wouldn’t even recognize themselves. Because Janet could be so many people, really, and my story is one of thousands just like it.

Tonight! In Haus Mainusch! Old Seed! Plus! Irmela and her accordion! A three course vegan dinner! Holy crap!

Old Seed at de Onderbroek (Njmegen, Holland), 2008

Old Seed at the Wagonhalle in Marsburg, Germany with accordion mad-genius Smasha (who just might be appearing tonight with Craig…).

And a pretty video from Plus with the song “In the Belly of Whale.”

Plus – In the belly of a whale from Plus on Vimeo.

As for Irmela, I don’t have any videos of her, but believe me, she’s great. Dinner starts at 19.00, music at 20.00.

Dear Readers: This is part of a part of a draft for my book about trash, eating trash, and trash as a huge in-your-face way of thinking about this moment in time. Be kind to it, and if you steal any of it, I will come to your house and eat your big toes.

Once upon a time there was no trash. There was chicken food and soap-making fat (translate today: leftovers from dinner). There were patches for holes and remade dresses (old clothing and flour sacks). There were supplies to make lye (wood ash, which was then used to make soap). There were makeshift funnels and bowls (occasionally born of a large bottle, broken in half). Food barely even came in a package, and when it did, it was probably (a) useful—such as the purple-ish paper wrapped around soap that could be used to dye fabric—or (b) returnable to the store for some sort of credit or exchange—rags for example, being the main ingredient in paper making for a long, long time and the main currency of trade with the peddlers who sold pots and pans and little tin boxes.

Mending and patching clothing, melting down and re-pouring metal goods, inventing new uses for the broken, feeding chickens and making soap and candles of the old—these were the pegs that held daily life together. People were bound to the objects they used to clothe, feed, and shelter them; they had made them themselves, or knew the person who did. “Hey, Ma, what are we going to do with all these old flour sacks? Well, Pa, I believe I’ll wash out the lettering and make them into a new set of kitchen towels…”

Plastic did not exist. Neither, for that matter, did Kleenex, Kotex, Dixie cups, paper bags, straws, appliances, toilet paper, or indoor plumbing. Items were sold from piles of their kind at the neighborhood general store, metal goods were traded off of peddlers for rags, and nobody had ever heard of germs. A trash can? What the hell is a trash can? (The first time said receptacle was referred to in a magazine, the authors felt that most readers would not know what was meant and explained the term in detail.)

Life was a lot different then, some would say a lot rougher. Disposables, advertising told the world, freed you from work, provided an affordable servant to allow you as much leisure time as the rich who paid real people to do their work. With disposables you paid for resources, not for people, which turned out to be a lot cheaper (in the short term).

“Work is drudgery!” advertisements chanted from the pages of magazines and (much much later) the speakers of radios. “Disposables are freedom!” Hark, heralds of the leisure class! May my feet remain up, my body pleasantly perfumed, and my wardrobe fashionable and untattered! May the leftovers in my Frigidaire go moldy so that I may purchase new groceries tomorrow! In your name we pay…

It started with mass production. Products became easier to obtain, cheaper. Ma and Pa started ordering from the Sears catalog instead of waiting for the peddler to come by (“You know, I always thought there was something queer about that man anyway.”) Mass production took the grunt out of grunt work. Who wanted to sit around all day sewing a shirt? Do you have any idea how long it takes to make one shirt by hand? Why not just order one from Sears and put your feet up for a change? Relax! You deserve it.

Then somebody went and discovered germs. Evil, malicious germs! Those “elfs and gnomes of communicable disease” [1}! No longer was it safe to drink from the community cup on the train or at the town well! No longer was it safe to use a cloth handkerchief! There were Charlies everywhere! The plague, consumption, syphilis, the clap, just waiting to slide down your throat from the cusp of a re-usable paper straw!

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I will admit to you that germs do in fact exist, and they are in fact capable of spreading disease. But were these "germs" as bad as the media claimed? Did industry consider the implications of using this fear to sell disposable products? Do disposables really make our lives better, more free? Or do they fill our habitat with items we've learned to understand as useless and that will not become soil (or anything even remotely life giving) in our lifetimes?

A good product for business is a product that can only be used once. Today we hear rumors of products designed to fail after a certain period of time, to keep consumers at the troughs and companies out of the red. With disposables you don't have to bother covering up the fact that your product has a pre-ordained "death date." Advertising was the snake in everybody's garden: "This product will increase your social status, this product will provide more leisure time and less work, this product will save your soul and dare your spirit to move. Buy this product, or despair."

People bought them—oh how they bought them!—because there was a tangible easing of the pains of life through them. No more cloth menstrual pads and no more cloth hankies meant one less load of laundry. Paper plates and cups meant less time behind the sink. Sweat shop produced T-shirts mean that you don't have to sit around all day losing your eye sight over teeny tiny stitches. Buy a destroyed resource to do it for you! Buy a "third-world-country" inhabitant to do it for you! The slavery of the old south was abolished and replaced with a new kind of slave, the ghost slave [2].

Now we have plastics and polymers and traffic jams and helicopters. Now we have central heating and plumbing and three-ply toilet paper. We have synthetic fibers and H&M and DVDs and mp3s. We have plastic wrap and garbage bags (made to be thrown away), vegan shoes and laptop computers. Now we have environmentalists and corporations and international trade. Is life better? Of course it’s fucking better! I don’t have to grow any of my own food, sew any of my own clothes, light a wood stove, or look at or even acknowledge the existence of my own piss and shit. All those unpleasantries, gone! All of those unpleasant body odors, deodorized! Yes, farm work is hard, so is sewing and patching your entire family’s clothes, slaughtering a chicken, dealing with the compost toilet, and milking the cows. But whether or not this is really better or worse than the situation we find ourselves in today depends on your perspective, on your priorities.

If your top priority is doing as little physical labor as possible, this is all fantastic, and you can return to your desk now. If your top priority is selling a lot of disposable cups, this is your pockets stuffed with money as you skip happily down the street whistling do-da. If your top priority is being “fashionable” then the marketers have you right where they want you. And if your top priority is living in a healthy habitat that sustains life, where your body is not full of pesticides and carcinogens and dioxin, a place where your having been born makes the world a better, healthier, more diverse place, then you’re going to hell on a plastic island of trash.

[1] Waste and Want by Susan Strasser, page 178. This tidbit is a quote she has taken from a druggists’ trade journal from the 1920s.
[2] Thanks to Derrick Jensen who, as far as I know, coined this term. It refers to the trees and rocks and fossil fuels that are made to do your work for you. Update: Since posting this I have learned that Derrick Jensen did not coin this term and that he learned it from someone named William Catton, Jr.

Rain has melted the snow, has left icy mud and puddles that finger their way inside of my boots relentlessly. The tips of forgotten aluminum cans are exposed now, rusty icebergs.

The sun came back for an entire day and then left us again among the lonesome shades of gray. I lay in bed a long time that morning, thinking. I didn’t know the sun had come back, and sometimes there is so much to think about that I have to sit somewhere quiet to let the thoughts thump out their chaotic rhythm, for hours, until they finally leave me alone with the present.

When, around noon, I stumbled into clothes and out of the wagon I was startled by the light. A defensive hand flew to my eyes, and I yelped, then pleaded, “Vitamin D, Vitamin D, Vitamin D!” In two months we’ll be sitting outside again. It won’t be warm, but we won’t have to light the wood stove anymore, and people will stubbornly strip down to T-shirts over coffee. In the morning we’ll meet around a small table outside, and one by one the entire platz will awaken and join the circle, hot beverage in hand.

I started writing about my former life as an au pair without giving it much thought, and—whoops!—the serial has already grown fat and enormous, with no end in sight. I, on the other hand, grow wearing of listing the previous posts in each entry, but want everyone to be able to follow along. And a index is born.

For those of you just tuning in, once upon a time I was an au pair (read: nanny, read: live-in babysitter) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany for a rather rich, rather eccentric family of seven. Fresh from the proofreader’s desk and into a rather awkward trial-by-fire initiation into German culture of about ten months. (At which point I called wedding and fled for earth in the escape pod.) Below you’ll find links to each post, as they are posted and each post will have a link to the index. Guten Apetit.

Part One: Once Upon a Time in A Faraway Land

Part Two: Left

Part Three: And Leaving

Part Four: The Risks of Time Travel

Part Five: The Origins of Hazing

Part Six: In the Margins

Part Seven: When I Was Batman

Part Eight: Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater

Part Nine: The Cookie Monster

Part Ten: Beware the Typewriter, for She Shall Smite Thee

Part Eleven: Dirty Laundry

Part Twelve: Cyprus: Urlaub Unter Freunden

Part Thirteen: Cyprus: Back to the Place You’re Longing For

Part Fourteen: Cyprus: Escape to Larnaka

Part Fifteen: Snapshots From Bottom Street

Part Sixteen: Happy Birthday, I Hate You, Goodnight

This is part nine in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here.

Once she got over the shock of the “I’m going vegan” announcement, Janet alternately interrogated (“And you really don’t miss cheese?”) and taunted. She seemed to love to eat, but she didn’t have a particularly healthy relationship with the food on her plate. Every few weeks she would announce—over a bowl of broth and a glass of water—that she was going on another diet. First it was the cabbage diet, then Weight Watchers, then starvation. She would give up in hunger after a few days of each and eventually cycle back through the list after several months.

She wasn’t supermodel skinny, but I thought she looked good. She wasn’t as thin as her daughter (and as she, presumably, once was), but who is after giving birth to five children? There was even a treadmill on the fourth floor, and it sat silent and unused while she fought her way through bowls of cabbage soup. But I was the one with the strange eating habits. Me, the crazy vegan.

In December holiday cookies began appearing around the house. A rare fit of motherly feeling and a promise to bake cookies with the twins got me an afternoon off. In the kitchen again the next afternoon I was trying to decipher a German newspaper when Janet came in to snack on the previous afternoon’s results. She picked up a butter cookie and took a big bite. “Ha ha ha! You can’t eat any of the Christmas cookies!” I have a vague memory of her holding a handful of cookies toward my face while doing a little hopping dance and chuckling. She took another handful and left the room. On the days when she wasn’t taunting me, she would ask me how it was I stayed so thin.

This is part eight in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here.

When Janet wasn’t behind her desk, she was wiping the stainless steel counters in the kitchen. The illusion of activity. Wipe the counters so you don’t feel guilty about paying someone else to wipe the toilets, the floors, the windows, and make the beds. Before lunch, I could often be found behind one of these counters drinking espresso after espresso in preparation for the afternoon of play. Anna would be behind the stove preparing lunch, and Janet flitted around sponge (or coffee) in hand.

That afternoon, we were talking about vegetarianism. I had come to Germany a vegetarian, which Janet seemed to find shocking and exotic. I had gone vegetarian about a year before, after reading Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. I had been reading La Ninja’s PETA magazines since I was eleven and was horrified by the images I saw there, but I had always been partial to meat and had never felt like any action I could take would mean anything. Schlosser’s final chapter gave me a little pat on the back and said “Individuals can change things.”

So I decided to give up meat, to try the “vote with my dollar” approach to protest. I didn’t like the way animals were treated throughout the factory farming process, and I didn’t like the way that the humans working in the slaughterhouses were treated. Classic reasons for going vegetarian I suppose. But there was something else that bothered me even more so: a feeling of disconnection. At the grocery store I could buy a piece of beef in a sterile Styrofoam bed and never be even remotely reminded, or connected to, the fact that this plastic-wrapped piece of flesh had once been a part of a wet-nosed cow. I didn’t see anything morally wrong with the concept of eating meat, but I saw something terribly wrong with being so disconnected from the life that gave me life.

At the time I was certain I would eat meat again one day (though the day is yet to come). It was largely an exercise in appreciation, in reconnection to the real (and by that I mean physical) world. Could I have killed a fish? A cow? A pig? I didn’t know, but these were things I wanted to think about before eating another hamburger.

Back in the kitchen, behind the stainless-steel counters, Janet was telling me about an article about various kinds of vegetarianism that she had just read. “Apparently there are people called vegans who don’t eat any cheese at all,” Janet informed me, shaking her head. “I couldn’t imagine that. No cheese!” She shook her head again.

The night before I had finished reading Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating by Erik Marcus and had decided that as a vegetarian, I was doing a pretty half-assed job at boycotting the meat industry. Who do you think owns the milk and the cheese companies? I had never thought about it before, but—big surprise—it’s the same companies factory farming meat. I had been kind of nervous about breaking the news to Janet (part of your payment as an au pair is room and board, so I needed to inform her). Here was my chance.

“Actually, I was thinking that I would like to become vegan,” I said quietly, looking into my espresso.

“WHAT?” Now, I don’t like to use all caps much in my writing, but this was an all-caps response. “Are you serious?” She was obviously agitated.

“Yeah, well I just finished reading this book, and well…”

“Oh my god, I can’t believe this. Did you hear that Anna? This girl is crazy! No cheese! None!”

“It doesn’t have to be a big inconvenience. If we’re eating something for lunch that I can’t eat I can cook something for myself.”

“What about milk?”

“No. No dairy products at all.”

At that moment, Jens came into the kitchen. It was the rare afternoon that he joined us for lunch. “Jens, Nikki just told us that she’s going vegan.”

“ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY?!” He actually said that, exactly that, in English. When I tell you these stories, I’m translating all the dialogue. Just imagine little subtitles playing under people speaking German as you read. Except for this moment, which he both translated and yelled. I wasn’t expecting it to be such a shock, but the Cole’s couldn’t imagine their lives without cheese or apparently even sharing a roof with someone willing to go without it.

This is an event I’m putting on next Saturday night, should you happen to be in the area. Three-course vegan dinner plus three-courses of folk-esque music. Be there or be the jerk not at the party.

You can listen to Old Seed here and Plus here.