About me

Christian Rebehn

Biographies should better be written by others, but let me try my own one.

I was born in 1990 in a small town in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. My childhood and youth were heavily influenced by small-town life. I come from a farmers' family but since my parents had other jobs I grew up in more urban-oriented middle class. Due to my family ties I partly grew up with agriculture, too, and I have great childhood memories of nature and something that seems to have gone lost in this century: playing outside.
When in fourth grade the recommendations for secondary school were sent out it became official that I would go to Gymnasium, implying a 25km commute to school for the following nine years. Thus, my school town became my new hometown and a different social environment started to shape me. And so today I feel drawn to the big cities of this planet, and I dream of one day taking a ten minute subway ride when I go out with my friends instead of having to drive thirty minutes. What pulls me away from home is the desire for this urban lifestyle, which is exotic to me. With the move to Singapore (more on that later) I have fulfilled that dream at least for a short period of time for now.
Nevertheless I feel strongly connected to my home. Especially the respect for nature and it's inhabitants is something I learned in my childhood and will always carry everywhere.
In 2006 my parents broke up and I moved out with my mother, and in with her new boyfriend. In the new environment I quickly evolved, at least people told me so. In fact I had never been someone with much self-respect or self-esteem, which now changed radically. My horizon as well as my circle of friends grew extremely (leaving me with friends on three continents) and I can say that I really enjoy my life and being who I am now.

In 2010 I graduated from the school type of Gymnasium with an university entrance qualification, called Abitur. The average mark of 2,0 is not fantastic but by all means good, especially since my future plans do not involve coming across a GPA limitation.

At this point of time (July 2011) I am living in Singapore where I am studying Hospitality & Tourism Management for one semester, which will let me graduate with a Diploma. The studies include the subjects Marketing, Accounting, Principles Of Management, Food And Beverage Service Operations, Front Office Operations and Tourism Systems And The Environment. Even though this course is conceptioned as the entry into the two-and-a-half-year Bachelor course, I am planning to leave Singapore with the Diploma to follow my real dream - becoming an airline pilot. After an application at Lufthansa did not work out fully I turned to learning at an independent flight school in Salzburg, Austria. Attending an independent school gives me all the freedom in the choice of workplace, of course.

Especially after the sudden death of my father in 2009 I started to live my life after the golden rule to always live each day as if it was the last. After all, I of all people can tell how quickly this last day can come. At the end of my life I don't want to look back and regret not doing this or that. I may say that so far, I seem to have succeeded in that. The best indication for that is that I am not afraid of death. Afraid of death is only he who needs more time to become happy, in most cases because he procrastinated on that. That is not the case with me - if I died today, I would do it with a good conscience knowing that I made the best of the years I had.
I uste my youth years to make the best out of my life, before it is too late and I'm too old for certain things. Furthermore, that way I will find it easier to focus on settling down, founding a family and buying a house, without being kept awake at night by unfulfilled dreams. I want to settle down like that, because even with all the urge to travel, a person needs a place to come home to with loving people.
As you see my philosophy is not far from Epicureanism, but still I am a proactive, planning person. My motto is to live each day in a manner that in the evening, I won't regret it. But this does not exclude using the day to take care of making tomorrow even better.

One question I dread in job interviews is the one for my hobbies. That is because I don't have any classical hobbies. I don't think that travelling counts as such. During my childhood I used to play basketball, even soccer for a few weeks. But someday this was too much for me, probably because after the long school days (the bus left at 6:30 in the morning and if I was lucky I could be home by two in the afternoon, in the later school years even later) I just was too stressed out. I am a person who needs a lot of time for himself and privacy. Since 2001 I had been taking guitar lessons, and I still own three instruments. Sadly I have to admit that I barely play them anymore, even though it is still much fun when I do.
Maybe I can damn the computer age for this. My family got the first computer in 1999, the internet connection followed in 2003. Back then, it was still a 56k-Modem. Having to share the computer with three people and having to wait eternally for e.g. a webpage to load, it is impossible to become addicted. But in 2005 we got a broadband connection and I got my own computer. Since then, that plastic box has been a crucial part of my everyday life. A new hobby coming from this is my private website, which I launched in 2005. But this does not take up time every day. Loosely connected to this is a pastime I like to refer to as "graphic design". However, it is barely professional or creative. Most of the time I play around with it when I need to for my website, or the Microsoft Flight Simulator which I devote much time to. Most of the time left goes to watching movies and TV shows online, games or reading websites not always worth the time. Maybe I will regret this waste of time when I'm old. Somehow, I already do today. Sometimes I'm actually sad when I realize that I can hardly find something to do that does not involve my PC. But maybe this is simply the course of time. After all, I am a little "too old" for Legos and children nowadays spend more time looking at a screen than out of the window, too.

Yet, I am not a lonely or closed up person. Whenever possible I love going out with my friends. During summer, I try to get to the water as often as possible. Unfortunately, riding water ski and canoes, even swimming is not possible very often. In grades 12 and 13, I took class for my sports class. That is, rowing for maybe six or seven weeks during summer. The rest of the year it simply was too wet and cold to do that, which is why we played hockey. I liked rowing much more, though. I wish I could have joined the local rowing club, but their training times, my school schedule and the duration of the drive made it almost impossible and so I had to let that go. At my school in Singapore I joined the basketball team to reactivate the old passion at least a little, and I am generally active here in terms of walking, taking runs or going swimming every once in a while.