AscheschandeschämDich

Es tut mir leid. Es tut mir leid. Es tut mir leid.

Mea culpa. Mea minima culpa.

Ich gelobe Besserung. Obwohl Besserung hier wohl Verschlechterung dort bedeutete, also gelobe ich doch keine Besserung.

Aber ich werde hoffentlich immer mal wieder vorbeischauen, um diese kleine meine Enklave in den Interwebs am Leben zu erhalten.

Ein Licht bleibt an.

Zunächst.

konsumerismus ahoi

für die Bude: 

 Wandhaken Dots, bunt

 

 

Nud Lampe mit Betonfassung und grauem Kabel

 

 

 

 

 

Eieruhr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whiskeygläser

Vorhänge

 

 

 

für mich: 

 

  Friesennerz

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stelton Isolierkanne fürs Büro

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kölntasse fürs Büro

The Soul of Conversation is Sympathy

i think i'm okay.
i really do.
i really am.

i've been thinking a lot about this, and i need to get some of these thoughts sorted.

i have a nice apartment which i like.
i have a job which lets me pay the bills and which i like.
i have the greatest of friends around me.
i have taken up a hobby.
i eat well. mostly.
i don't drink excessively. mostly.
i read. (nicht nur "gute deutsche zeitschriften," sondern auch bücher. take that, eleventh-grade German teacher.)
i feel good.
i like myself.
i go out. moderately.
i meet new people. sometimes.
i have a boyfriend. -- wait, i don't.

and there you have it. this is supposed to be the one more thing i should have in order to be -- if not content, then at least happy, right?

and yet.

"lately i've been feeling this hole, like something is missing."
no. i haven't. i was surprised when i realized it. i don't feel incomplete. i don't feel like i need to share my happiness in order to experience it doubly.
i do think a boyfriend could be fun. what fun! but i don't feel i need one. nor am i sure i want one.
but that last part is neither here nor there because, guess what: i am happy. i am content. i am okay.

you might be nodding knowingly now, or even be stroking your beard, and mumbling to yourself: "child, please. you're fooling yourself. the blues brothers had it right." to which i might reply: "i've seen people happy together, i've seen people unhappy together, i've seen people unhappy alone, i'm the person who's happy alone." not happy-er, not happy-est, just -- happy.

and who knows -- there is a chance i might be perfecting autosuggestion here. maybe one day i'll realize that i don't want anything more in the world than a partner to hold, help, love, and lean on. there is a chance. and if that moment comes, i'll concede your encompassing wisdom to you.

until then: from my one, single heart: farewell!

Pub Med, Part After

Where we last parted was inside the slightly sleazy, definitely dirty pub, where I was standing with all around fabulous W. and The Nice Guy trying to sort out the mess The Thwumf and I had left behind. When I started to seriously lose interest in a way that I was not able to control or conceal anymore, I took a trip to the bathroom to at least clear my head a little. To get to the bathrooms you have to walk to the back of the pub past the foosball table and down the stairs. When I came back up the stairs I heard English being spoken near the foosball table. I was intrigued but not so much so that I immediately took a detour there. I wanted to check what was happening with the group of people I was a part of for that night at least. W. and The Nice Guy were still talking about The Thwumf, which did nothing for me. So I stood around for about two seconds and then turned around and went back to the foosball table where I thought I had overheard some people speak English. And I wasn't wrong: three guys were standing next to the foosball table chatting in conversational though recognizably non-native English. I don't recall exactly how but I did start a conversation with the guys, probably something remarkably unremarkable like "Why are you guys speaking English are you from the US?". Two of them were, in fact, German, and the third one they said was actually able to understand and speak German but they were talking in English nonetheless. One of them, the chattiest one, immediately proceeded to inform me that they were physicists with academic career paths, himself having already finished his doctorate and pursuing a post-doctorate at the moment, and the other two being a few years his juniors and working on their respective doctorates still. I exchanged a few interested but rather polite sentences with him when the other German of the bunch suddenly jumped in and said something about me being after their money and since they were academics there wasn't any to be after just so that I knew. He wasn't quite as elaborate as that. He was much more on point. I was dumbstruck and couldn't quite come up with an adequate response. I think I just asked why in the world he would think I was after their money (I mean, this was a sleazy pub in Kreuzberg, nobody there seemed to be rich in the strictest sense of the word, and I was still myself, so not really the ideal pre-requisites for me turning into a gold-digger). He said something about me asking about their degrees and appearantly, that is all it takes for a guy to think a woman is after his money: her asking about his academic degree. Never mind the fact that a Ph.D. is by no means a guarantee for a money-machine, quite the opposite, acutally. And never mind the fact that even a medical degree or a law degree or any of the traditionally well-paid degrees does not have the same ooomph anymore. And also never mind the fact that I did not ask about their degrees but that the huge Bavarian baritone offered them up himself quite readily.

To the other guy's credit he seemed appropriately embarrassed when I briefly explained the situation. I guess he did in fact mishear or misjudge the whole exchange. So all was well for about three seconds. Until the huge Bavarian post-doc physicist baritone asked me if I wanted to go have sex with him in the bathroom in the basement. I thought he was joking, albeit in a rather crude way, and good-naturedly replied something friendly but unmistakably negative. He seemed a little peeved and after a quick back-and-forth repeated his generous offer. I got noticeably more serious and replied in the negative again. At that point the other two left us and went to the bar. I was a little confused, must have looked it and also expressed this confusion and my beginning testiness at his insistence. He grew even more peeved, especially when I mentioned the fact that I did not think this funny and did not like being treated like a prostitute. To which his reply was: "I didn't offer you any money." There you go. I wasn't being treated like a prostitute, I was being treated like a daft prostitute who couldn't run her business because she was too busy giving it away for free to anybody who asked half-nicely.

After that I was on my way to the front of the pub to see about the rest of the birthday group when I passed the other two guys at the bar. I stopped briefly to tell them what a prick their friend was being, to which they didn't seem to know how to react and thus did nothing. Their huge, Bavarian friend, however, seemed to have had enough of this obnoxious, argumentative cunt and left. I have no idea how and when the other German who had mistaken me for a gold-digger left but very quickly and very suddenly I found myself alone with the blonde, blue-eyed, pretty 28-year-old Estonian. Boy, was he pretty. And blonde. And blue-eyed. And 28. Boy oh boy.

Pub Med, Part Then

Part Then: 

Well then, no more dilly-dally, let's get to it. (Was what I was thinking at the end of the night.)

Off I went to Kreuzberg, specifically the U-Bahnhof Görlitzer Bahnhof. It was around there that T., a recently re-discovered friend from high school, had invited some of his friends to present him with gifts and happiness. And since he has a girlfriend I figured the other thing that makes you happy was food, and for T. specifically: meat. So I brought a cook book, GU's Meat Basics, which I myself like very much. And thus one topic dominating my night was established: vegetarianism, the benefits of eating meat, the supposed elitism of a tv chef proposing that meat should be a luxury item again, the benefits of buying bio-products vs. those of buying local (which, strangely enough, very often does not coincide), &cet. p.p. This was before I had explained to me how I was living the most privileged life on earth.

When I arrived, there was T. with his girlfriend and magnificent-woman-all-around W., and there was whom I would come to know as The Thirtysomething Heterosexual White Underprivileged Male. I also gathered that he did something with music though I can't be sure if it was professionally or privately. And after a while, when the both of us were standing, I realized he was short. I should have known, though, the way he said the things he said and the way he argued against or for something – the way he argued mostly against me. Lest you believe that I am thrown by anybody standing their ground against me argumentatively, you should know that in my family we've always cultivated a climate of vigorous and passionate debate, which quite regularly turned into full-on family fights, with shouting matches, the banging of doors, curses and, sometimes, a return to the issue in question -- the whole nine yards, really. Imagine this exponentially intensified by two lawyers (who are professionally trained to argue) in the family, a literary scholar, all mainstream political affiliations, a moody youngster (who, most probably without being aware of it, discovered the Socratic method for himself, albeit in a microcosmic, concrete way, where he does not discuss the relative merits of one position over the other but instead asks questions aimed at making you lose yourself in details of which he then cherry-picks one to ask a question about again, all in the hopes of making you contradict yourself or your argument inconsistent – and if it doesn't work the first time, he just picks another detail to ask a question about, repetite ad infinitum), a huge amount of books read and digested, and a lot of thick heads. So I can hold my own, I really can. But this guy. This fucking guy.

In the beginning all was good. After I arrived the four of us made a little small-talk, other people kept arriving, we talked mostly as a group until we didn’t fit around the table anymore. Smaller groups formed and kept re-forming. At some point I sat with The Thirtysomething Heterosexual White Underprivileged Male Fucker (referred to hereinafter as “Thwumf”) and another friend of T.’s, a three-time father, vegetarian and thoughtful. I, ever the conversationalist, decided to tell the story of the lunch-break masturbator whom I happened to come across a few days before. (Let me explain: I was sitting, during my late lunch hour, at the Spree; it wasn’t a sunny day so there were few other people there. I was reading the news on my cell phone when behind me there was a quiet commotion: some youngish guy was breaking through the admittedly very light and trimmed bushes and looking around questioningly. After a few minutes, when I had neither heard nor seen him leave, I turned to look if he was still lurking in the bushes, which would have made me uneasy, seeing as the only other person in my direct vicinity had just left the next bank a few meters over and disappeared from view. The guy in the bushes was still there alright, but he wasn’t exactly lurking. He was standing between me and the bushes, approximately one and a half, maybe two meters away from me, his penis in plain view, rubbing one out.) I had told the gist of this story earlier that night when there had been only a few of us yet and I had – stupidly, I admit – added that the guy didn’t look like what I imagined a public masturbator would look like. Again, I admit this was stupid. I got called out for that, and rightly so. Anyway, when I mentioned this story to the thoughtful vegetarian father-of-three, The Thwumf kind of went off on his own very idiosyncratic, very provocative-for-the-sake-of-being-provocative and at least to me very inappropriate tangent about why I find this experience unpleasant, what about the masturbator’s feelings, about there not really being anything wrong with what happened as I didn’t suffer, didn’t get hurt and have no loss in quality of life, about how I would have reacted if it had been a woman fondling herself, if it had been a couple having sex, and some more aspects in this vein. I couldn’t react fast enough before he brought up the next hilarious point which makes me think now (unfortunately I was too caught up feeling like I had to defend myself for not liking being jerked off to in public to realize it at the time) that he really wasn’t interested in an intellectual or even ethical discussion of sexuality in public spaces or the inherent difficulty and fragility of defining what constitutes a transgression, be it in legal, ethical or general terms. I guess now that he was not comfortable with me making a stupid and judgmental comment like “he didn’t look like a public sexual deviant”, but was neither willing to reflect why this is the case nor interested in debating constructively why and how there might be different understandings of personal space and transgression and whether or not there is the possibility of coming to a shared fundamental basis. Anyway, that was the point in my relationship with The Thwumf when the whole thing took a dark turn. My mind was racing, I didn’t know where to turn first argumentatively, and didn’t stop to realize that in no way was I required to defend myself. Nor was I required to explain to The Thwumf how women have been and in many regards still are being disenfranchised in modern industrial societies. I don’t mean to compare hardships or make a competition of victimhood, but hearing somebody, anybody say, flat-out say, as The Thwumf did, that women are not being and have not been marginalized, that in fact women are the most privileged beings in modern industrial societies, left me white-hot with rage and also speechless. Literally speechless. At some point I was so fed up that I did what I hate when it is done to me: I said that we should stop talking about this whole thing, that I did not want to talk about it anymore and frankly saw no point in discussing this further. I don’t have (m)any regrets about that night but I do wish that I would have kept my cool, grown evilly quiet and logical and torn him to shreds intellectually as I am sure I would have been able to. In retrospect I begrudge him the victory – for I am sure he perceives it thusly.

What I’ve come to realize is that I was forced to live through a tiny, miniscule fraction of what I imagine rape victims must go through. Again, for purposes of clarification, no physical harm was done to me, the feeling of being violated I suffered was teeny-tiny and entirely subjective, and I in no way mean to compare myself to or put myself on the same level as victims of rape or attempted rape or sexual abuse or …

I do, however, understand in a very limited way how the feeling of being abused or used or victimized might not be the worst about any transgression, but the feeling of having the blame, or even part of it, heaped upon you, of having the transgression talked down, minimized, trivialized, and of being told that maybe it wasn’t all bad, maybe you’re overreacting, maybe you’re being unreasonable or too sensitive, &cet.

In light of all this, experiencing The Thwumf being what I perceived as purposefully glib and polemical for the sake of either derailing me or belittling me – and expressly not for the sake of the discussion – made me so angry that I did not and could not keep engaging with the Thwumf. So I didn’t.

A little later, after having talked to W., who used to be flatmates with The Thwumf, and after having found out a little about The Thwumf’s backstory, which, incidentally, might explain some of his positions, but which did do nothing for me to accept or indulge his behavior, I talked to another guy there, let’s call him The Nice Guy, and told him about the masturbator and The Thwumf’s reaction. He was having none of it. He himself told me a story of having been the object of a public masturbator’s attention and how he felt uncomfortable about it, too, and when The Thwumf, who strained his neck to overhear what I was telling The Nice Guy, jumped in to clarify his position, The Nice Guy delivered when I hadn’t been able to: he fired broadside. The Thwumf tried to do the same thing again he did with me and The Nice Guy tried his best to counter him.

Alas, it was all for nothing – The Thwumf didn’t really want to argue, he just wanted to provoke. And feel superior, I guess. The Nice Guy grew more and more enraged and I grew more and more uncomfortable, one, because I put him in this position, and two, because I didn’t intend to start any animosity amongst the birthday guests. But, I have to admit, it was a good feeling to have somebody else there who experienced similar things and who has similar reactions – to me, who has never fully trusted her own instincts and who lets herself be unsettled quite easily, it meant I wasn’t wrong, my instincts weren’t wrong, my evaluation of two entirely different situations (the masturbator, The Thwumf) was not wrong – it meant that I could trust myself a little more.

At some point The Nice Guy got so fully exasperated because of The Thwumf (who, by the way, disqualified himself further by pulling exactly the same moves with The Nice Guy, another Thirtysomething, White Male appearing on the Underprivileged-spectrum on the same level as The Thwumf, that he pulled with me, a more privileged being than himself – there you have it!) that we went inside. Fabulous girlfriend all around W. then tried to mediate a little, which The Nice Guy, being the nice guy that he is, accepted and welcomed, in part taking it as a chance to air out his grievances to a third party just as I had done with him, but I was having none of it. I was, quite frankly, neither interested enough in The Thwumf to keep discussing him further nor was I willing to grant him any leniency whatsoever. I was being a stubborn bitch at that point, and I stand by it. 

How I came to be propositioned, how I met the pretty blue-eyed Estonian physicist with the great hair and why dilly-dallying is not for me, this will all be revealed in Pub Med, Part After. 

Pub Med, Part Before

Boy oh boy, oh what a night.

A night of meeting people, of having the world of the white woman, the most privileged being on earth, explained by a white, heterosexual male, a less privileged being, according to his own estimation; a night of being propositioned to have sex in the pub's bathroom by a huge Bavarian post-doc physicist baritone and of him being offended by my feeling like a prostitute; a night of being accused of being after the Bavarian's money and of being told there was none to be after; and a night of chatting with a 28-year-old blue-eyed and very pretty Estonian physicist who kept saying "idee" instead of "idea".

Yes, that’s right, I have another story to tell. Which reminds me: I haven’t told the other story to its end. Shit. One more thing for my to-do list. Speaking of to do: I can check off Estonians.

It all began with a breakfast, make that brunch, of champions on Saturday last. Id est: J&B&me.

After that J&me went and bought ourselves some more nail-polish because the both of us don't have much money to spend right now but wanted to buy something for ourselves nonetheless. I actually didn't buy nail-polish because I could not find any that I definitely wanted a similar or the same shade of which I don't already own. I bought myself a cheap mascara instead, which turned out to be pretty good. So no money thrown away this time.

I then went home in order to commence prettifying myself, which I did. Specifically, I did so with the new (and as of yet unpaid) heated curlers. Which have become my newest playthings. I scrubbed and shaved and washed and creamed the hell out of myself. I dressed casually (after all, I was going to a Kreuzberger pub which looked as metaphorically dirty as the more sleazy pubs on the Reeperbahn), but carefully in one of my self-made skirts, a black tee, a black, rather old cardigan and cheap, poisonously green ballerinas. I put on the biggest pair of glasses I have in order to counteract the curly-girly-blonde impression I was giving in my mind.

And off I went. When I came home nine hours later I still looked quite alright, I think. Although I had taken off the glasses in order for the Estonian's eyes to look more easily into mine. But this isn't the story. The story is what happened in those nine hours. And the two after that.

Content. Ment.

My own washer.
My own bedroom.
My own kitchen.
My own stuff.
A job I like and which gives me time to read.
My friends around the corner.
The city around me.

My life's good right now.

The things I've seen

and the things I've done and the things I've heard and the things I've ignored and the things I've enjoyed and the things I've disliked and the things I've believed and the things I've ingested and the things I've liked and the things I've made and the things I've hurt and the things I've created and the things I've destroyed and the things I've grown and the things I've killed and the things I've read.

Since April Twenty-Ninth:

John Hart's The Last Child
Tana French's Grabesgrün and Totengleich
Wolfgang Herrndorf's Sand
Anthony Zuiker's Level 26
Florian Weber's Grimms Erben
John Irving's The World According to Garp
Asa Larsson's Sonnensturm and Weiße Nacht
Neil LaBute's Seconds of Pleasure
Saul Bellow's Seize the Day

Now I am ing-ing all the things listed above with Hjorth and Rosenfeldt's latest crime novel. Unfortunately I won't be able to devour it the way I did the others because.....

BAM!

I'm going to start riding my bike to work (looking like I somehow managed to mistake my horse for a bike), so I won't be able to read as much as before when I had the train ride to and fro to sink into those possible worlds.

Sebastian, forgive me, I promise I will visit you every day in my lunch hour and after work.

As I face the sun I cast no shadow

This is the story of the past three and a half months of my life. They were neither epic nor relevant in bigger sense. But they were definitely good for me. I learned. A lot. About work-life. About my life. About me. I am going to tell this story with all the honesty I can muster and answer for. I have roughly five hours of train-riding ahead of me which should in all likelihood suffice for me to tell this story and do it justice. So consider yourselves my priest and this narration my confessional and my confession.

But let me start in the middle. Specifically where I left off last time I was here. That was right in the coat room line in Magnet where I had just met who would later become The Proposer. Well, in that moment he wasn’t yet. We chatted for a bit in the queue, and when it became too crowded I abandoned my friends and just sat down in a niche in the wall with the future Proposer. A few minutes later; B, who had trouble staying awake and thus staying upright, joined us after having almost mistaken another woman’s bottom for his girlfriend’s. Not willing to risk a similar mishap happening again, J sent B to sit with us, where he, and all the women’s bottom around him, would be safe. When my fabulous friend came back with all of our coats, the future Proposer had bought me a beer, and well-behaved as I am I felt the obligation to reciprocate. Thus my friends went home while I stayed in the club. After some more animated chatting and some compliments by The Proposer, we grabbed another beer, when he received a text message. As we had been talking about his ex-girlfriends quite a bit (who, according to him, generally mourned the end of their relationships more than he did), I asked – actually without any poorly hidden inquisitiveness – whether this was one of his exes texting him. His reply: “No, actually, this is from my girlfriend.” I assume I must have looked something like this:



From the way he behaved and talked I had, in rather ingenious fashion, deduced that he was single. I wasn’t terribly disappointed, just a tiny bit, and also hugely irritated that I had just experienced one more instance of proof that my gut, or rather my people-reading skill, was not to be trusted (as if I needed a reminder…). Anyway, I was curious where he was going with our encounter – he was going to the proposing place –, so I stuck around. He suggested introducing me to his girlfriend – in retrospect this is where I should have become suspicious – and I played along. Again, I wanted to see where he was going with the whole thing and didn’t want to let him get off easy (pun definitely intended). However, I had to visit the bathroom first and when I came back he wasn’t where he said he would be. So what else would I do (for example: GO HOME) except go looking for him and his girlfriend. And I found them. Where he was a nice- and fun-looking relatable guy, his girlfriend was a big, square, hillbilly girl who looked like she had managed to catch the train to the big city for the very first time. I was, again, dumbfounded. This I had not expected. And again, this would prove to be quite logical during the course of the night.

The Proposer’s girlfriend did not look particularly pleased (which I don’t blame her for) when I arrived and, broadly grinning, introduced myself. The Proposer seemed completely unfazed. I stayed with them for some time and tried to make some polite conversation, but eventually gave up. After a while The Proposer nonchalantly danced away with the help of a friend and left me with his still rather reluctant girlfriend. This was awkward. After a short while she left, too. I was by myself. Trying hard to look like I wasn’t alone I scanned my surroundings and casually chatted up the guy next to me, who was also alone, who was wearing a ridiculous hat (though I don’t mean to imply any causal link here), and who looked approachable enough in that moment. We exchanged maybe two sentences and that was that. At that point I realized that I was standing in a Berlin club at I guess five, five-thirty in the morning all by myself. On New Year’s. Suddenly it seemed as if I could see myself in a mirror, or as if I was standing next to myself, quietly watching and judging myself. It was then that I realized I needed to go home. On my way to the coat room I veer off into the smokers’ lounge to close the night off with a cigarette among strangers. And lo and behold, who was sitting there at the smokers’ bar? The Proposer, his friend and his girlfriend. I casually strolled over (have you ever noticed how whenever you attempt to be sincerely casual in reality it never looks more forced?) and tried to converse politely one last time. That’s when it got weird. Because The Proposer started to compliment me right in front of his girlfriend. And he also got a little handsy. Also right to his girlfriend’s hillbilly face. I was confused. Shortly thereafter they decided to go, which was fine by me. Trying to save face for all of our sakes I asked the hillbilly girlfriend if it was okay to stay in touch with The Proposer, seeing as I was new in town and had yet to make new friends. The girlfriend didn’t seem to mind. Alas, The Proposer had something else in mind entirely. Right then he shut me down: No, he didn’t want to stay in contact; no, he didn’t want to exchange numbers. He thought I was cool and he found me sexy (again, his girlfriend was right there), but no, he didn’t want me as a friend. He’d rather have me as a part and party of their relationship.




He was kind enough to elaborate: He was indeed looking for a third party, uncompromisingly female, to join himself and his hillbilly girlfriend in the boudoir. Again, she was right there. And again, she didn’t look too happy. I found this insulting to her, to me (come on, I am not her kind of gal), to all sorts of people, things, and senses of propriety. And this I told him in no uncertain terms. He effusively tried to explain, which I stopped then and there. He said he would go now. I said that was a great idea. They left. I stayed, a little perplexed. When I turned around towards the bar, my eyes took notice of the guy sitting next to me: the guy with the ridiculous hat from before. As we already had, in my mind, become great friends from our briefest of exchanges in the other room, I felt no hesitation to talk to him some more. It turned out to be more fun than anticipated. After a brief while I felt a tap on my shoulder and when I turned around I almost couldn’t believe it: The Proposer had come back to do some more proposing. I was fed up. And told him so in no uncertain terms. With a firm voice. And a stern look. Eventually, he gave up and I returned my attention to The Hat. And the night began.

Something strange instead of some strange (Part II)

Alright, so we hung out for a bit in the less densely populated part of the floor and had a jolly good time there, too. Then we encountered the couple that had previously gotten on my nerves. Or rather: one half of the couple: the girl. Please excuse this cutesy expression for a grown-ass woman, but really, this was all she projected to be: a girl. She stood behind me at the very end of the bar, where the counter hits the wall. She stood there by herself. Next to her, but not yet with her, leaned a rather conservative-looking guy wearing a green quilted jacket (by the way: wow. It was hot as hell in there) with its collar up. Obviously. He started chatting up The Girlfriend, she flirted back, he twirled her around (what's with all the twirling; did I maybe miss the memo that twirling is the thing to do now?), she obliged delightedly if not delightfully and they both continued flirting aggressively. I was watching them out of the corner of my eye when The Boyfriend stepped into my field of vision. He quickly looked around, found The Girlfriend, leaned to the side a bit in order to see with whom she was talking so animatedly, saw, turned around on the spot, and left. The room. The club. The city. The country. I had no idea which. But the force with which he stormed off might have been enough to catapult him off the earth and straight into space. For all I cared he could have stayed there and orbited the earth with a broken heart. Or ego. Idiot. Apparently, he was the only one who was allowed to twirl The Girlfriend around. Which I get. But what he should have done, I thought in this moment, was go up to The Collar and The Girlfriend and, without so much as a word or a glance to The Collar, take her and twirl her around a couple of times in front of The Collar. That should have cleared things right up.
Alas, I was wrong. He, in fact, did not leave. Well, he did leave the room, but not the club. About ten minutes of unaware flirting later, The Boyfriend came back with their jackets. He unceremoniously walked up to The Girlfriend and The Collar, handed her her jacket, put his arm around her back, and gently guided her out of the club. The Collar remained behind, a little annoyed, I assume. I couldn't suppress a smirk. Not that I wanted to.
Shortly after that episode we decided to leave. By now it was somewhere around half past three. Somehow, the excitement had abated and we felt a bit deflated. Bam, poetry. You're welcome. At that point the line for the coat check was almost as long as when we had come in. So, off to the bathroom I went, leaving J&B to wait on their own. After the five or six minutes that it took me to get into and out of the toilet the coat check line had barely moved. So I didn't feel too bad for making my friends stand in line and hold my spot for me.
After what felt like half an hour but probably only were about seven more minutes and after we had moved up in the line about two meters, seemingly out of nowhere a guy appeared at my side, let's call him The Proposer. The Proposer said something to me, I reacted, he was in a good mood, I was in a good mood, we started chatting. He said he had been trained as a hotel clerk, didn't like it and thus became a cabinet maker. Now, what I should mention to explain my immediate interest in The Proposer is that my brother, who I think is the greatest guy in the world, is a hotel industry expert and that I have always found the art of cabinetmaking to be oddly attractive and that I like to imagine myself in another life or universe as a cabinetmaker designing and producing her own successful line of furniture. Ergo: I was immediately in favor of The Proposer. Had I known then what I know now, namely that he would turn out to be The Proposer, I very likely wouldn't have continued talking to him. Or maybe I would have, just to let it play itself out and have something to tell you folks. Be that as it may, namely hypothetical, the fact is that I did talk to him and did agree to let him buy me a beer.
How this one beer turned into two and more and how he became the Proposer and why I still only came home at around eight thirty in the morning and why four strangers found themselves on New Year's morning in the almost empty tram talking about mathematics, pussy, and the potential for violence in the public space -- well, that is a story for Part III.

Something strange instead of some strange (Part I)

So, folks, the new year has come and I skidded into it on the slippery slope of alcohol and a jolly good time. Oh what a good time I had. But before I start telling that tall but true tale, I should mention that almost simultaneously to my decision to start building a life in Berlin for real I finally received the invitation to a job interview -- at home. 2012 thus ended on a very bittersweet note for me.

With this tiny shock to motivate me to make the best of my time here or anywhere, really, I was looking forward to celebrating the arrival of a new year with my friends to the fullest. All the more surprised it turned out we were when we realized after a delightfully normal but fun meal that we might not make it to midnight if we continued sitting in the kitchen. Thus, at about 10 p.m. we decided to move things along and get to the club early, like old people are wont to do.
We arrived at Magnet in Kreuzberg at about 11 p.m., had no problem getting in but experienced a kind of paradoxal universe where outside noone wants in but inside the queue for the coat check was more than ten meters long. So we spent about 20 minutes waiting for our coats to be checked, which turned out not to be too bad because the guys doing the checking were, if not the quickest of the bunch, still friendly and good-natured. After having successfully gotten rid of our outer wear, we fought our way into the smokers' bar and did what you do in said place: have a smoke. And a beer, of course. Then we scouted the other floors, of which we believed there to be two. Only after having gotten our coats before leaving did J finally figure out that there was a third floor which was not the smokers' bar. She, more than B or I, was very upset about not having discovered it before because she found the music coming from that floor to be very danceable. We did, however, have a good time with one of the other floors for the most part of the night, so that while we were dancing we didn't feel like we were missing something.
We spent most of the night at the electro-indielectro-don't-ask-me-I-just-dance floor where we had an extraordinarily good time. And not just because of the music but also because of the delightfully mixed crowd which covered everything from the cool dudes to the mellow hipsters to the relaxingly normal folks to whom I count the three of us. Ages varied comfortingly, too. At midnight there was a countdown and a happy yet non-hysteric shout-out all around. One nice young lady went around the crowd and distributed sparklers to everyone who would have one. It was a nice, very communal atmosphere among a crowd of very different strangers.
Shortly thereafter, four very drunk, very young guys of about twenty years and with hessian bags dangling unmanageably from their arms managed to conquer the slightly elevated part of the dancefloor in one corner and proceeded to have an awesome time among themselves. Not only were they not in the least obnoxious -- as young, drunk men their age very easily turn out to be -- but more than that, they were absolutely adorable and seemed to be very much content in the company of their friends. When one thoroughly likeable young woman danced up on one of the guys, he without hesitation dismissed her in a friendly manner while simultaneously flinging himself into one of his buddy's arms. It was a sight to behold. So much fun and happiness.
After several trips to the toilets for each of us, which took anywhere from five to twenty minutes, we finally decided that it was getting too crowded on our dancefloor and that it would be wise to retire to another part of the room where there was less dancing and more sitting and talking and thus more room. Lest you think that there was also less fun to be had, let me tell you what happened there. First of all, we re-met this Asian guy who was wearing a suit. We had seen him before near our place on the dancefloor. He was with this cool chick with this cool red dress in the style of the fifties. And he was wearing a skinny suit with a skinny tie. They looked like straight out of Kill Bill, but not keenly so. They were just really cool in a very relaxed and non-exerted way. Then there was this slightly weird guy, his head full of unkempt curls, making his way through the sluggish crowd and yelling what I suppose was his girlfriend's name in regular intervals. It wasn't that big a room or that big a crowd. A thorough scanning of the people around you would have yielded the same, and much less noticeable, results. And then there was the couple.
The couple who a few half-hours before happened to situate themselves next to us on the dancefloor and whom I found to be almost unbearably self-centered. He couldn't keep his hands off her, which, granted, is in itself a good thing. But not in the obnoxious, almost domineering way that he did it and which she happened to enjoy. He twirled her around, he grabbed her ass, he grabbed her thighs, he moved her hair, and she obliged. As old and worn out as the phrase is, all I could think was: "Get. A. Room." This was the couple that we encountered in the "chill-out" area of that floor. And if you want to know what happened next, and what happened after J&B left the club and I stayed, and what the indecent proposal was that I received that night and what happened on the train-ride home, you have to check back. More on what the titular "something strange" and who the titular "some strange" was will be coming soon.

Against the Dark

Please beware: Mushiness ahead.

Ich fühl mich sauwohl hier in Berlin (und das ohne meine Möbel, ohne meine Bilder, ohne meine Bücher, ohne mein Bett, ohne mein Geschirr, ohne Arbeit, ohne das meiste, was ich eigentlich als notwendig für das eigene Wohlsein erachtet hätte). Wenn es nach mir ginge, bliebe ich für die absehbare Zukunft hier. Und da es nach mir geht, bleibe ich hier. Auch wenn sich Berlin noch ein wenig gegen mich sträubt, hält mich das nicht davon ab, jetzt aktiv und entschlossen meines Glückes eigener Schmied zu sein. Es wäre ja noch schöner, wenn ich mich von einer weiteren Stadt unterkriegen ließe. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, ....

In diesem Sinne: Hauruck und Prost!

Februar.

No body's safe.

p.s.: fear boner. scrote squad. eskimo brothers. mla. yobogoya. chalupa batman. vinegar strokes. the shiva. the sacko. the terrific lady day. the white knuckler. bobbum man. and many more.

Leerkertshausen

Casual Racism in der süddeutschen Provinz

Idylle innerorts

Idylle außerorts, frühmorgens 

Offensichtlich preist man seine Religiosität hier gerne an.

 Unterwegs

 Trotzdem gibt es keinen Gott. 

Schloß Langenstein. Mann, hier gibt es viele Schlösser. Auch wenn einige Schlößle heißen.

Ob für die Pferde auf diesem idyllisch und totenstill auf einem Berggipfel gelegenen Hof auch gilt, daß sie den Berg gerne hochgehen? 

Das itsybitsykleine Pony steht grast übrigens frei. 

Hinterm Berg gleich rechts. 

Now don't go breaking my heart

Aus gegebenem Anlaß:

XERXES = SEX REX

Außerdem: das.

27 May

Big and Small

The soul needs the sunday

Running into Joyce and Len at Balzac and having a lovely chat with them before heading into the office to work is a great way to start a Saturday. After that the article for the UP's newspaper seemed to write itself.

Going out for a small but good breakfast at Himmel und Erde and revising the article over omelette and coffee made my Sunday look good, as well. Stopping by two different moving companies to jot down their prices for the different sizes of moving boxes on the way back before finishing the article and sending it in, and writing another job application and sending it in, as well, made my Sunday continue as agreeably as it had started.

Now I am off to take a bath (because, after a week of sunny weather and nice temperatures, today turned out to be relatively cool, so sitting at my desk for a few hours actually made me freeze a little), before I'll break out the sewing machine for the last time in HH.

Good day. Really good day.

UPDATE at 9 pm:

Here's the result of my sewing session.

A new purse-organizing interior bag for me, which I can pull tight at the top:

And a Macbook-Accessory-Pouch for the brother, to be sealed shut with velcro. It also goes with the pouch for the notebook itself which I had already sewn a couple of weeks ago and of which the brother is already in possession.