Masculinity

Having grown up with a father and two brothers, I thought living with two guys here in Berlin would be no problem (Out of the loop? Inga moved out to have the baby, and last week Julian's friend Max moved in). And I was right, it's not a problem. It's more like a hilarious anthropological study. No offense to the young men in question, but sometimes I feel a little like Jane Goodall.
Every time I've lived with or near men in this twenty-something age group, there is a standard outburst of masculinity which, I suppose, organizes social hierarchies, etc. The guys in my freshman dorm, the German house, the dorm in Vienna (Emma, remember the Bosnians?), the apartment on Portland. There was even a brief power struggle when Nick and I moved in with Rob (Rob won). Of course, the measure of masculinity varies a bit, as does the degree of competition. Sometimes it's beer-related, or who can go the longest without cleaning the bathroom, but only rarely is it something from which I benefit, and almost never something productive. So when Max moved in, I was pleasantly surprised to notice that he and Julian seem to inspire one another to ever greater heights of handiness (rather than drunkenness). Admittedly, they're not really your standard twenty-something German guys - they met working on an organic farm in Argentina, for starters. Long story short, there have been some improvements around here. Most notable is the new drying rack system (see above). Since we don't have a dryer, we have a drying rack, which takes up a lot of space in the bathroom when someone does laundry, so one day while I was at school, Max and Julian put some hooks in the walls and ceiling and now we have a pulley system by which we hang our clean laundry from the (very high) ceiling. The picture's no good, but it'll give you an idea.
The thing about these initial bursts of masculinity (for lack of a better word) is that they usually do not last. Not necessarily a bad thing (I'd be happy to go weeks at a time without the sound of power tools in my walls), but I'm hoping that it'll last long enough for them to help me insulate the wall between my room and Max's. Otherwise his genius will be wasted when I beat him to death with his alarm clock (which goes off loudly, several times, six days a week at 6:30am). They say sleep deprivation can make you crazy....