Author: lahikmajoe

acoustic musician, writer and International Relations grad student; dogs *and* cats; Germany based, but we spend as much time in Liguria as we can manage; writer/ghostwriter for hire and finally: all English language needs make me smile

rolling with the haters, and begging for feedback or questions

on the road to Renée and Ken Fowler’s ranch outside of Llano, Texas right after the memorial for my mother Martha Frances with my wife Miriam and the #progeny off camera (mit Absicht)

While not getting too specific about who it was who irritated me the other day, while I was doing this roku account on twitter, I’d like talk about criticism and how I’ve chosen to use social media. To be clear, I’m neither a good American nor a well-integrated German visitor. Other expats or immigrants or whatever you want to call those of us who’ve moved to Germany and chosen to make a life here, seem to have accepted things about living here that still make me bristle.

Oh, and I see that one who offers unwarranted criticism, that’s offered as helpful or thoughtful, but is more likely a backwards and passive aggressive attempt at a Besserwisser (know-it-all) feeling better about one’s own situation and/or life, should perhaps look into therapy or grow a thicker skin before logging on.

They’re what the kids, or at least the Millennials, would call ‘haters‘, and I pay them as little mind as I can manage. It’s a good way to deal with criticism online. You’ll certainly face some, or a lot of it, the longer that you work or play in the digital realm.

The most important thing to know about me on this subject of using social media is that I think of myself as two Americans mixed up in one complicated ex-pat. My family moved from West Texas after my birth to Munich, which curiously makes Bavaria my second, or adopted, home.

Then we unfortunately went back to Texas, and this time in the southeast part of the state along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to the then fifth largest city in the United States. The City of Houston was still a cow town upon our arrival, and the annual Livestock Show and Rodeo was just one reminder that this place wasn’t like Munich or Zürich or even London, which were places I’d seen with my young, impressionable eyes.

My relationship with Germany wasn’t complicated then, as I was a mere child and all of my frustrations with mid 70s metropolitan Houston were easily written off by my thoughts that, ‘One day I can leave this humid, depressing place and go back to Germany‘, which was a sort of Garden of Eden. That was how I saw Munich or Bavaria in the early 70s, and that option of ‘going back home’ was always, or at least often, part of my fantasy.

What wasn’t to love, by the way? It was a colourful and beautiful city, my parents were casual drug users and drank a lot of beer. As a result, it was easier to live in the liberal, relatively open-minded capital of Bavaria than it had been to live in the dry (alcohol-free), desert-like metropolis of Lubbock. On the high prairie in the part of Texas that you think of if you’ve watched John Wayne movies, or that Rock Hudson/Elizabeth Taylor/James Dean film Giant, my family felt more free outside of the ‘Land of the Free’, which is still my perspective of when I think of West Texas.

I’ve got a complicated relationship with both the word ‘freedom’, as well as the whole concept of ‘The American Dream‘, but this isn’t therapy. I’ll just share this generally, and depending on what feedback I get from this post, I could imagine writing more about those things at some point in the future. If you want to read more about my perspective on either of these things, the proverbial ball’s in your court. You’ve got to get off of your arse and say so in the comments.

To wrap up my point here, though.

My writing always has my clients in mind. While I do it in quite an Anglo-American manner, it’s purposeful that I’ve chosen not to blog or use social media the ‘German Way‘. Again, I’ll go deeper into how different cultures use online platforms and the intercultural differences at a later date.

Interested? You know what to do.

Make a comment below, rather than on LinkedIn or Twitter. I’ve started the conversation and you, my readers, have more influence than you realise.

Say something.

What about this post or any other interests you?

More importantly what have I written that you want to know more about?

Show me you’re here and reading my scribblings, would you? I see the metrics, so I know you’re lurking.

Do me a favour and help me build an audience by saying what you’d like to see more of.

Please.

Pretty please.

Twitter? I hardly know *anyone* there

In Nice several years back for the coolest Sylvestre sunset eVAH!!!

This next week, I’m tweeting for a local account, which I did for a week nearly a decade back and it was HORRIBLE.

Learned sooooooooo much about biting off more than I could chew, by being unable to adequately manage the account, while my personal life was in complete free fall.

Next week, though?

Gonna rock it, yo!

Manly in Landshut

Outside the Männer Laden early morning in Landshut

Every Tuesday, I’ve got a teaching gig in one of my favourite places in Bavaria, hell all of Germany.

Whether it’s their infamous Landshuter Hochzeit (wedding) or the Burg Trausnitz (Trausnitz castle), this place is content gold.

Expect many more posts from this beautiful small city about an hour or so northwest of my home in Munich.

You can’t wait, can you?

Let me know in the comments below what you’d like to know about this super cool place. Or if you’ve already been to Landshut and already know if its charm, tell us that instead. Please.

George told me to shut up, and…for a change? I listened

Robert Godden and myself hamming it up in London a few years back

Above you’ll see me with one of my favourite people on the planet. Robert is nuts, but it’s a good nuts. George is almost as nuts as Robert and I are, but not quite. We’ve set a high bar, to be fair.

Who’s George, you ask?

Let me provide a bit of context I’ve got this friend George, who’s a gardener. He wasn’t always in such a position of autonomy and authority. He used to be a marketing specialist. Bilingual, even. Yet he was miserable and wanted to go outside and be with the birds. And think about worms.

Like a child, right? That’s one of the many things I like about George. He’s not playing by society’s rulebook. Were he to ask his family, a successful line of people if there ever was one, about his recent downshift from marketing to gardening, I doubt he’d get approving responses.

Damn them, is what I say.

But I’m a bit like the Hindu god Shiva…I like to tear things down before building them up again. Although, if I’m honest? I’m probably more like Ganesh than Shiva. I think I’m a badass, when really I’m a bit round in the middle and want to enjoy my comfort.

What might this have to do with my clients or how I get my message across? Simply put, I’m good at writing what I know. I’ve spent my career doing just that. My clients are typically quite German. Even the Italians and French people I deal with have been living here in this Teutonic reality long enough that they might as well be German.

My solutions might be okay, but my delivery is often so unorthodox that they need to try me out before they can see the method to my madness. Were I to be less chaotic, I’d lose less clients right off the bat. It’s anti-intuitive, but I’ve learned to stay the course and worry less about losing clients who don’t ‘get me’.

What’s my biggest, most successful, piece of advice? When it comes to clients? It’s so simple it almost hurts to write it:

Listen better. Ask good questions, but only after a lot of active listening. Making sure you truly understand what their whole deal is. Not what you assume their deal is. Let them tell you.

In future posts, I’ll talk more about this. Follow me for more tips on how to alienate clients. The ones who stick around might be worth the trouble. Or I might be.

I can never tell which one.

Who wants to ride another Ferris Wheel around and around and around? Wouldn’t you rather get off at some point?

briller de tous ses feux and now

O fortuna!!!

My high school French has served me well. It hasn’t hurt that I’ve known some amazing French people, and of course I mean women.

Oof.

Tell me again why I shouldn’t shine as brightly as I can manage? Stories of Keith Moon or Icarus be damned, I’m flying as close to the sun as I desire, thank you.

These post lockdown, pandemic days are curious. In the weirdest & most apocalyptic connotation of the word.

My generation didn’t go under desks as the little children’s protection against nuclear annihilation. That was our parents’ story, but now?

We were now somehow safe. Somehow.

Until these days, I suppose. Shiva is at work in our lives; nevertheless, our leaders tell us all is safe in their hands.

Liars and thieves the lot of them. We’re in that apocalyptic flick where the main characters have just discovered the president or première minister is of no practical use anymore.

The ones driving our earthly spaceship? They’d rather crash the whole damned thing than admit there’s no-one behind the curtain.

No deux ex machina.

That’d be too easy. Too much of a whitewashed American fairy tale.

We’re living in a Matrix of our own creation, and it’s seemingly a complete and utter failure. There’re no gods, or God even, that seems interested enough to swoop in from somewhere backstage to wrap everything up before the advertisements.

My solution? Help out Shiva and burn it all down in a post structural pyre. World leaders have forgotten the cautionary tale that is our troubled Icarus.

Let’s fly as close to the sun as we can and hope beyond hope that we don’t set the whole ship in flames. Luckily nobody’s listening to the likes of me.

Briller de tous ses feux!

New Year’s on the Côte d’Azur shortly before we met 2018 for the first time

Get your English back to where it was…easy peasy!

Uncle B.K. and Brother Michael blowing out the latter’s 2nd birthday candle

If you’re a grandparent and one of your children has married outside of your culture, whatever that might mean, you’ve got some work cut out for you. Your daughter or son might not realise, or likely doesn’t care, that you’ve been gifted more than just grandchildren.

No, now you’ve got an intercultural dilemma in the making.

How are you going to be a decent grandparent to these kids who might not have any clue where you come from and how it was when you were their age? Luckily, you’ve already figured your life out, right? So you can impart a little wisdom.

Like my Nana did. She’s featured in the photo above and she was a piece of work, my maternal grandmother. An enigma when I was small, Nana was always chainsmoking and funnier for us, she swore like a sailor. She made zero attempts to suffer fools gladly.

It simply wasn’t her way.

Not even us grandkids.

Especially not us.

Born in the 1920s, Frances was part of what’s referred to in the United States as the ‘Greatest Generation‘, which nearly always makes me smile nostalgically. She’s here in the photo, with my mom and my brother and I there, as well. She’d married a Methodist minister, my grandfather who we called ‘Dan Dan’, during the war, and they started having children in 1946. Right at the start of the first wave of the Baby Boom.

Since they were the greatest, they couldn’t understand why their kids couldn’t more appreciate all they’d left for them. This might be a bit of an exaggeration, but my grandparents generation felt like they’d saved the world from fascism only to be handed a society now run by dirty hippies and drug addicts.

How does this relate to you learning enough English so you can communicate with your own little carpet munchers? Maybe you already understand and even speak English when you travel, and you’d just like to practise a bit.

Well, that’s what I do. I help some of my clients get acclimated to their new culture, even if they’re still living comfortably at home. You don’t necessarily have to learn how to navigate a new culture. If this is you we’re talking about, my solution is easy. I’ll be writing more about my ideas here on my blog in the coming months.

You needn’t become perfect in English, okay? Just good enough to talk to your own progeny. Your grandkids will give you a lot of latitude.

Promise.

Reach out to me via email (lahikmajoe@gmail.com) or make a comment on this blogpost if you’ve got any questions or want me to focus on some aspect of these issues.

We’ll get your English back to where it used to be. Easy peasy!

Ostern in Germany with a little family

Opa couldn’t make it, so it was just the four of us for a five-day weekend – Easter, or Ostern as the Germans call it. You heard that right. Five whole days with my family, and? No-one has any scars, we didn’t have to go to the emergency room. We’re well fed and generally happy, but here’s just one thing: my dad used to say he couldn’t wait for Monday morning when he could go back to the office and relax. Do I feel that these days. Onward and upward, yeah? Onward and upward.

in the valley of ass-whoopin’ (Wuppertal) on the way home after an Odyssean journey

Alas, the top tourist attraction of picturesque and weirdly alluring Wuppertal (© Owner Stadt Wuppertal)

One of the more whimsical items on my bucket list has been sorted.

First, look at this: https://schwebebahn.de/en. Cool, huh?

Left home early on a Friday morning, like Bilbo Baggins in a weird way. Made my way through Upper Franconia (Oberfranken, for the locals), where I visited the university in Bayreuth, and then kept on hauling ass towards Berlin.

Why on earth was I in such a hurry? Well, there were a plethora of reasons, but chief among them was my desire to see my friend Petra the Weddingerin, who lives in the Berlin district of Wedding. She will admit it’s not the prettiest, or even the safest place in the capital, but she and I both agree that it’s the true heart of a sprawling city.

Although I could devote an entire post to my time in Berlin, which I won’t, it was only a few long days later that my dog Amos and I were headed towards my favourite city in Germany – Hamburg!

Met my friend Nico, who I’d until then only known online, and saw one of my oldest Hamburgerin friends Christine, who’s going through a tough time. We ate amazing liquorice, and I inhaled a Fischfrikadelle and Bismarkbrötchen on the Reeperbahn. Soon after our Imperial March through the district of St. Pauli and a quick walk with Amos along the Alster, I found myself in bed earlier than the locals. Seems they’re just starting their shifts in the seedier side of Hamburg right as I’ve lost all will to stay awake.

It was an Odyssean journey, I assure you. It was full of Sturm und Drang, like they talked about in music school. There was snow in Stade (Lower Saxony) and even a lesbian wedding party in Oldenburg (also Lower Saxony)

Yet, here’s where the story gets good. You’ll never in a jillion years guess where I lay my head last night, because:

a. you don’t know about Wuppertal

and b. you don’t care.

It’s ok. I won’t hold your ignorance against you.

Here…let’s let Uncle Wikipedia set you straight:

‘The city straddles the densely populated banks of the River Wupper, a tributary of the Rhine called Wipper in its upper course. Wuppertal is located between the Ruhr (Essen) to the north, Düsseldorf to the west, and Cologne to the southwest, and over time has grown together with Solingen, Remscheid and Hagen. The stretching of the city in a long band along the narrow Wupper Valley leads to a spatial impression of Wuppertal being larger than it actually is. The city is known for its steep slopes, its woods and parks, and for being the greenest city in Germany, with two-thirds green space of the total municipal area. From any part of the city, it is only a ten-minute walk to one of the public parks or woodland paths’.

the greatest source no teacher ever wants to actually see cited – Wikipedia

If you’re a loyal reader of this blog, first I must apologise. The Germans with whom I live and work insist that there has to be a “red thread” running through a text. Or a lesson. Or a life, even. I’ll talk in a later post about what the heck they mean, but that’s excellent blogging technique, Wolfgang.

You whet their appetite with a travel post and then you teach ’em about German linguistics and philosophy when they weren’t expecting it. You do it with purpose. You make sure you’re smiling.

And most importantly, in my case, the kookier and more ridiculous the better. A Hero’s Journey if I’ve ever seen one.

Wuppertal is for Lovers (© Owner Stadt Wuppertal)