Sup, dorks! I mean: GREETINGS, BELOVED READERS, I love you and beseech you to keep reading. Have you ever noticed how anyone with a book out literally loves anyone who says anything about her book? It’s true. I ALSO specifically love you specifically and unconditionally — don’t get me wrong — but I’m just saying.

Chapter 3: Lebensraum, from “living” and “space” 
Chapter 4: Schriftverkehr, from “writing” and “intercourse” 

These chapters of Schadenfreude, A Love Story also take place in 1995, and they have an added character, a second protagonist, if you will, in the form of one artisanal travel journal I made myself from a pillowcase, the cardboard backing of a pair of tights, and a pilfered bottle of rubber cement. Like, my WORD-DOCUMENTATION of my FIRST EVER TIME IN EUROPE would be so profound that not only did it need to be written down in expensive graduation-present fountain pen, but it had to be immortalized in a book I MADE WITH MY HANDS.

Friends, I am both proud and mortified — let’s call it schämenstoltz, an adjective I made up! — to share that this twenty-two-year-old volume (Schuman: The Early Years, if you will) still exists in my home, complete with breathless, adverbial first impressions of Germany, Prague, and a guy I hooked up with because it seemed like the kind of thing Richard Linklater would want me to do.

Soundtrack:

“Birdhouse In Your Soul,” They Might Be Giants

Played on repeat on the train to Prague with my friends, as we watched a gaggle of dipshit sorority girls find out the hard way that Eurail passes were not valid in the Czech Republic in 1995.

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” Bob Dylan

Not shown: The Train Station Guy’s a cappella rendition.

For more (much more) mortifying details from 1995 and thereafter, you know where to look.