We’re ahead of ourselves. We want it to be April 2020, not September 2019. By April, the kids will take the tram on their own. They’ll have strong friendships. Alison and I will understand the healthcare system and know enough German to order a sandwich without having to point.

But it’s still September. We have to wait for the sun and moon to come and go 150 times.

I wish there were a magical way to fast-forward. Like in The Matrix, when Trinity calls back to the ship and says, “I need a program for a V-212 helicopter… Hurry!” Her eyelids flicker, and—presto—she instantly knows how to fly the helicopter.

Or like in movies. Screenwriters never waste time on the learning part. Kung Fu Panda becomes a martial arts master in five minutes. It’s the same with Marvel movies. Christian Bale (Batman Begins), Benedict Cumberbatch (Doctor Strange), Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man)—they all figure out their new superpowers faster than it takes me to grab a bucket of popcorn and Milk Duds.

Today at work, the cleaning lady (she’s Croatian and doesn’t speak German well) asked if we had dirty dishes. She said “schmutzig” (dirty), which is like the Yiddish word “shmutz.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, so I asked someone to interpret. One of my coworkers wrote it on a whiteboard [2]. Then someone else added the word for “squirrel tail,” a word I’d heard before in a lunch conversation. It’s a popular Austrian word used to test if someone speaks Austrian German. People from Munich don’t even know what it means. I added a few more words I learned today—like “train” and “railway” from the train station, and “wheat beer” from a bar.

The final word on the whiteboard was a long one that loosely translates to “anything animal.” It’s called a Wunder Wuzzi in Austrian German, though that doesn’t actually mean “anything” or “animal.” A Wunder Wuzzi is an animal that does everything: it gives milk, grows wool, lays eggs, and tastes like bacon. The German word for this mythical beast is Eierlegende Wollmilchsau (“egg-laying wool milk pig”) [3]. Like “squirrel tail,” it’s mostly useless vocabulary—except for a good laugh.

The “everything animal” even came up later in a slide presentation. It’s a common saying here: there is no everything animal. In English, we’d say, “There’s no silver bullet.” No easy solutions. No shortcuts. We have to go through the learning phase—the hard stuff.

1. Not to be a downer, but this is one of the things I dislike about superhero movies. The learning part is the most interesting to me, even if I sometimes feel too lazy to pursue it myself. I dislike plenty of other things about superhero movies—or should I say movie, since most are just variations of the same story.

2. This week’s words für Matt: