About why no one in Vienna hates me outright… yet

I have this bad habit of writing semi-disparaging things about people I know for my and others’ amusement without a shred of concern that the target will ever read it… and then they do. It’s happened enough times to merit some caution on my part when describing, for the Public and you folks, that is, even the most casual relationship in my life. Some people, like Regina and her lurid offspring, I would actually appreciate stumbling across my acrid words for them, would savor it like a layer of meringue on top a pie of spite. But I carry very few grudges in this world, and with the occasional exception such as the above, I bear no real animosity towards my hapless foes as I sling adverbs like daggers towards their most awkward character traits. It’s all in the name of fun, except when the victim becomes apprised of my little vignette about how they chew their gum too loudly, can’t use MS Word to save their life, or have a hairy mole the size of Vesuvius on their chin, and then the fun starts to reek like a carton of milk left under a radiator.

Forgive the metaphors; I’ve been reading Tom Robbins.

It’s with the above in mind that I’ve abstained from delving into too much detail about the other 24 or so American kids on this trip, with whom said trip is becoming increasingly entangled. Maybe you remember reading about some of these kids that live in the Studentenheim, spectors named Jennifer and Anthony, perhaps the occasional Big Mike or Amelia? For some reason, I’m suddenly overcome with the desire – nay, complusion – to record my take on these storied individuals with as much candor and wit as federal regulations will allow. Finally, you will know the people with whom I share this little city. You will be getting, however, the edited-for-television version. To wit: if someone does more drugs (variety and quantity) every day than an entire Phish concert crowd, I might overlook this fact should their grandmother read my description; and if someone has all the charm and personal magnetism of a sea urchin with dyphtheria, they might be “just an acquaintance” or “a real friendly guy” instead of a more accurative but pejorative phrase. To the dorm kids about to be placed in my crosshairs: please, please don’t hate me. At least not until we’re back in Seattle and I don’t see you every day.

Remember, it’s all in fun. And for crap’s sake, don’t feel bad about being left out. Did you even read the above diatribe?

Jennifer, aka Jenn, aka Jenny: When I met Jennifer during my first week in Vienna, I asked her if she preferred to be called “Jennifer” or “Jenn” (no one likes being called “Jenny”), and she answered “Yes.” This is Jennifer in a nutshell. The girl who has no preference over which version of her name people use is likewise agreeable in nearly every plan and situation imaginable. Jennifer is 27, by far the oldest person in the Spring in Vienna crew. She has travelled the world several times over and, simply put, it shows. When Kelly tagged along on a vineyard field trip with the dorm kids, she noticed an interesting social dynamic in which Jennifer played a still more interesting role: all the rest of the kids walked in little cliques which kept basically to themselves, but Jennifer moved from clique to clique, socializing with everyone without preference. This is at once one of Jennifer’s most endearing and infuriating characteristics: she always has a few kind words for you – and everyone else. She belongs to everyone and no one. She is clearly used to getting to know people quickly and to befriend equally quickly, regardless of the people around and how worthy of her friendship she might secretly consider them to be. Jennifer is beautiful and intelligent and interesting and remarkable in any number of other ways – if I hadn’t already ruled out the possibility of my falling in love with her for the above reasons and others, I would be very worried about it. As it is, we have what I consider a fairly solid friendship, which was unexpected but hardly unwelcome. She’s easy to talk to for hours at a time about most anything, which is nice when I want to do that with someone other than Kelly for once.

The Mikes, Big and Little / Asian: Fate plays cruel, sometimes laughably ironic games on travellers. In this case, she randomly assigned the two Mikes on the trip, one 6’6″ and white and the other 5’7″ and the only Asian in the group, to the same room in the dorm on Lerchenfelderstraße. Theories fly wildly about Asian / Little Mike: he’s a ninja; he’s latently homosexual; he’s a Buddhist. Probably someone knows the definitive answers to these questions, but it’s not me – I’m just repeating rumors and idle speculations. What I do know about Asian Mike is that he’s fiercely independent to the point of social isolation. Unlike many of the other Americans I’ve met, Asian Mike has A Plan For Europe, and he follows it whether or not anyone else comes along. Though his avowed goals are somewhat different than mine, I respect him for daring to go his own way. Asian Mike’s crowning moment of glory came the other night in the little courtyard attached to the dorm. Someone thought it would be a good idea to go Bush Jumping, the exciting urban sport which even now is pissing off property owners and filling laceration wards across the country, and somehow Asian Mike, normally a very reserved person, found himself zipped into Big Mike’s army jacket as armor, perched on the edge of a park bench with a not-altogether-friendly looking bush ready to receive his daring leap. He executed the jump admirably, without injury, and we even got a quite respectable picture of him in midair. Bouyed by his success, I decided to follow his act, but being somewhat taller and heavier than him, I managed to almost clear the bush I was aiming for and essentially slid off of it, as if it were a greased counter top rather than a leafy plant, and dropped off the four feet on the other side directly on my ass. It hurt. I’ll admit we’d been drinking. Big Mike is completely different from his roommate, although they get along well enough that I’ve seen. Big Mike is, in a word, a bad ass. He’s the kind of guy you wouldn’t be all that surprised to see wakeboarding, pounding a 40, doing a line of coke off a hot naked chick, smoking a cigarette, and playing electric guitar all at the same time. He and I are friends, which has surprised me almost more than I have words for. After all, he’s the kind of person who, in high school, copied my homework at lunch and then spent most of AP Government finding new delicious nicknames for me, then revelled in the adoring gaze of his 5,000 friends at the kegger I didn’t go to over the weekend. (A lot has changed since high school, but not that much). Come to think of it, it was Big Mike who had the idea to go Bush Jumping; likewise, it was he who scaled the ballsiest routes up cliff faces when we visited them. Like I said, he’s a badass.

Amelia: the easiest way to describe our sole red-head (minus my doppleganger, that is) is that she’s from another planet. Before I knew her very well, I just assumed this was the case and dismissed every blue remark she made as evidence of that fact. Amelia’s a very strange girl, make no mistake; but of course the flip-side to that fact is that she’s very interesting. She’s been married, been in the Navy, and been to jail. She bought six pillow cases depicting various Buddhist themes (Amelia is a confirmed Buddhist, not just a rumored one) and, having no pillows in Vienna to place inside, filled each one with a different outfit. She’s overwhemlmingly generous and tolerant to a fault. If I had to choose one fact to summarize her personality, it would be this: she changes the entire playlist on her computer after each song. Right now Amelia is almost encased in bandages, haven fallen off of her bike on the thirty-mile trip I didn’t take over the weekend. She and Big Mike are often a unit.

The Barbies: a sociologist could spend days – no, months! – dissecting the chain of events which led there to be a group of four girls in the dorms who proudly refer to themselves as Mattel toys. But such is the case. The Barbies comprise, in rough descending order of age, Heidi, Cassandra, Lisa, and Michelle, but referring to them in anything but the aggregate is usually an exercise in frustration: they are never apart. A subunit of the club is known as the HTC, which they won’t tell you (you have to guess) stands for Huge Titty Club for reasons which, if they aren’t immediately obvious, you may never understand. The HTC has many battle cries, including “dust the shelf!”, “penis!”, and the ever-memorable “We’re done here; this area is closed; here’s your cabfare; give me back my nuts.” Why would I make this up? Individually, each of the Barbies is far more pleasant than their giggling, shouting, ass-grabbing whole. Don’t try to point that out to them, though. Briefly, they are also individuals: Heidi is a somewhat sheltered 21-year-old who lived with her parents in Seattle, and who immediately upon arrival took up with a Kosovar named Gizmo in the dorms, who was in turned immediately nicknamed “Jizzmo” for reasons I personally believe are unfounded; Cassandra is a surprisingly intelligent, very conservative blond who comes off at first whiff as, well, a blond; Lisa is, down to the smallest nuance outside cupsize, exactly the same person as Meryl, my ex Kjelene’s twin sister, a fact which has made her very easy to communicate with; Michelle is rude and crass, known as Butch Barbie internally, but surrounded nevertheless with an aura of childlike innocence. All of them are very pretty and very well kept – Barbies, in other words.

Walter: I lied about Jenn being the oldest person in the group. That title goes unreservedly to Walter, a 52-year-old UW student from Canada who rented the van for my Slovenia trip and drove it the whole way. Walter has three habits which make him, for me, who he is. First is the smoking: chimneys would be insulted by the comparison. Rarely does one see Walter without a cigarette jutting casually from the center of his lips. Second is his fierce liberalism, which has come out at a number of junctures and caused some friction at times with the more right-leaning members of the team. For someone his age, it’s surprising. Third is harder to put into words, but I’ll try. I can’t imagine anyone seeing Walter as a father-figure, but I have an easy time seeing him as an uncle: he won’t tell you what to do, he won’t lead the group into a restaurant if anyone else has an idea, but he’ll tell you dirty jokes at inopportune times. Walter also has the Badass Gene tickling his ribosomes, as evidenced by the following yarn. In Slovenia, Walter wanted to take a pass through the Julian alps with our boxy white 9 passenger van, and we all agreed it was a capital idea. However, the dirty road leading up to the pass in question was missing a large chunk and surrounded by construction equipment and bored looking Slovenian construction workers. The latter watched in absolute amazement as Walter, despite the protests of less courageous passengers such as myself, left the road into the adjoining field and drove around the missing segment. There was a kind of curb between field and road, and he tried twice unsuccessfully to get over it back onto the road, finally backing up about a hundred feet and goosing the engine to make the clunky van leap like a ballerina on pain killers over the curb. We were all stoked, but then at the top of the pass there was a solid wall of snow four feet high. The construction workers were even more bemused when we drove through the field the second time.

The Dudes: these guys aren’t named officially like the other groups to which I’ve made reference, but the name exists in my mind, and this is my website. The Dudes are Quincy, Clint, and Jonathan, the very first people Kelly and I convinced to hang out with us, at Donauinsel as I recall. She has a picture of the event in question on the photo page on her website. Each one of The Dudes has some interesting quirks, and Quincy is downright hilarious at turns, but they’re all just Dudes when you come down to it, and they’re usually found in close proximity to one another – hence the naming.

Eric, aka The Evil Zach: if anything, I’m the evil Zach, but the fact remains that Eric looks exactly like me. He actually looks nothing like me, but that didn’t stop everyone from confusing the two of us for the first month – name slips continue to this day. We are the same height, same build, and have identical red beards (although since trimming mine the resemblance is less striking) and similar hair colors (mine is “brown with red highlights” and his is just “red, red, red, red.”). Other than that, we look nothing alike. Really. Eric is fairly shy but thoroughly nice. On the Wachau trip he suggested we combine our last names and tell people we’re brothers. I thought it was sweet. Out of “Prinzgrave” or “Mussince”, I chose “Mussince”.

Anthony: Anthony is the person most likely to read this, being the most online-savvy, so perhaps I should keep it clean. Like Big Mike, Anthony is absurdly tall, but unlike Big Mike, he is dark and mysterious and decidedly not a badass – a stranger standing in the half-light of a streetlight on a dock, not a blonde hero jumping trashcans on his skateboard. He is 19, and reminds me of myself when I was younger: very intelligent and hung up on that fact, eager to be seen as older than he is (he gets away with it better than I ever did due to his height), making caustic remarks at others’ expense while they’re seated at the same table. Come to think of it, I’m still alot like that. He and I have very similar senses of humor, for that, and so we get along fairly well. He smokes clove cigarettes under my constant derision, but I haven’t decided whether or not it’s an affectation.

So that’s the dorms. If I’ve left out some key players, it’s because I’ve been in the library a long time now, and for all I know Vienna could at this very moment be experiencing the most amazing weather it will see in three weeks. The fact that it was overcast upon my entrance means absolutely nothing. Ah, the dorms. It’s just as I remembered them at UW: a lot of young people absolutely bursting with excitement to be On Their Own Finally, drinking too much and suffering all the usual dramas of floor-cest and petty vendettas. It’s very nice to be able to have access to the building and get the positive aspects – namely, a huge concentration of people roughly my age – without having to actually live there. Never again. Do you hear me, HFS? Never again.