The Candid Yank

We all want to call it home

2011-06-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

Aw, everything changes all the time. There's not a whole lot you can do about it.

What did your neighborhood look like when you were a kid? If you're from some places in the United States, you've probably now got 15,000% more Starbucks, an additional Wal-Mart, several fewer Mom and Pop shops. The dilapidated old yellow brick library with the funny-smelling water faucets and grey toilet paper you used to play Oregon Trail in for an hour on Thursday evenings after swim team has been replaced by a Total Recall-esque, so futuristic it already looks like it comes from the past, concrete, steel and green glass nightmare that no one plays games in anymore. Even the toilet paper has caught up with the 21st century. Quilted two-ply all the way.

The 7-11 is a drive-thru espresso stand, the bank your godfather opened your first account in is now a Chase. The street is wider and there are seventeen Thai restaurants on the block that used to lead to your middle school, which is now a ten-story artist's vision that looks appropriately phallic for an institution of learning aimed at 11 to 14-year olds. You used to have to go downtown for a latte. Now they're practically delivering them to your house, along with sushi, which, when you were a kid, you thought was just raw fish. You did not have the first idea what nori was and would never have allowed seaweed to pass your lips, even if you'd known it was going to be FUCKING DELICIOUS.

But what about the people? Sure, like the streets, they're also a lane-width broader, bigger, brighter and pretending to believe in progressive issues like that they'd be totally cool with Mexicans if they'd just come over legally (almost universally a lie). But apart from that, they're mostly the same people as before, right?

When I moved to Neukölln five years ago, it was the part of town people were scared to have to transfer the subway in. Only the bravest would dare actually leave the train station in order to pick up some "ethnic" grocery item, and then, only in daylight, while accompanied by a bodyguard and a bulldog.

Shortly after I arrived, we started noticing that hip, young people apparently found it "ironic" to live in a Turkish neighborhood and "authentic" to clutch their computer bags while tiptoeing fearfully past groups of Turkish youth standing around drinking Coke in front of the internet store at 1 o'clock on Saturday night. But then, they found strength and safety in numbers, and now they're not scared of anything anymore.

You'd think this would be a good thing, but if you talk to one of them who took a culture safari here five years ago, they'll tell you how there was "nothing" here before they got here and turned it all into a hipster hellhole. "Nothing" like culture clubs, Turkish man hooka bars and other Turkish-owned businesses. But now there is "something" here. In Hipsterese, "something" means "yet another bar serving cheap beer for expensive prices, exploiting design students' thirst for minimalism by not bothering to go shopping for basics like furniture and forcing you to sit on empty beer crates instead of as if that's more edgy than sitting on actual chairs".

I like bikes and funny haircuts and exposed brick walls, but I also like Turkish boys standing around drinking non-alcoholic beverages on weekend nights and scaring the crap out of suburban white kids. But the former seems determined to run the latter out of the area by swarming the place, acting smug and superior, and being willing to pay twice what the average Turkish family can afford for an apartment full of "negative" space they couldn't possibly fill because as minimalists they don't even own CDs anymore.

Can't we all just get along?

Cocaine and Jimi Hendrix

2011-06-15T10:28:00.000-07:00

I was just commenting last night to some unwilling victims about how the internet has taken over our lives so fully and completely that I can't remember what we did before we had it.

Remember back in the day, way way back in the dinosaur ages, right around 1999 or 2000, when you'd wake up on a day off work, smoke a joint and/or snort a line of coke, make yourself some a bagel and/or listen to Hey Joe or Fell on Black Days ten times, take a shower, grab your smokes and house keys and be out of the door? When I was 19, I used to make it out of the house by 11.30 every single day. Where did I go? What did I do? Back then there was a neighborhood in my hometown that was infamous for being home to gays and junkies, and so naturally I insinuated myself into the scene as much as humanly possible, as I was convinced then, as I am now, that no one knows how to party like a gay or a druggie.

So I'd go up to Capitol Hill--now a lame mecca for hipsters and tourists, sadly--and do... what? I suppose most of the time, I'd do at least one lap up and down Broadway, drop in on some friends and acquaintances (remember that? Before you had a cell phone? When you sometimes didn't even have somebody's home phone number? And would just show up to their place and knock on the door? And they'd actually let you in because they were actually home and they'd give you something to drink and have a conversation with you and there was good and contemporary music playing on an enormous thing called a stereo? And other humans would be there too, and one of them might have even been reading a newspaper? Made of actual paper?), then stroll down for about seventeen cups of coffee at Bauhaus and write in my journal. Or, depending on who was in the smoking section, I'd pretend to read one of my many banned books written by political prisoners, communists and conscientious objectors.

And after I was done with all my dropping-inning and coffeeing and chain smoking and trying-to-be-cooling I might go down to Indy Media and pretend to learn something, attend a solidarity rally or an anti-capitalism march, then get back on the bus home. At this point in my life I neither drank alcohol nor had a television. So now I rack my brain to remember what I did at night. I think, I didn't spend a lot of time at home--basically went there to sleep, shower, and host drug parties. No, wait--my roommate and I, when we were both at home, would sit on the sofa and talk.

And well, now, I'm old and fat and married and I have a television and I eat meat and I don't give a shit about politics and I have several paper journals in which I rarely write anything, and I no longer see the point of leaving the house when I have everything I need here. On a day off, I can eat three meals in front of the computer and go to sleep while watching a movie. Take now, for example. It's a beautiful day. Sun is shining, annoying fucking noisy birds are chirping, the temperature is just right, but instead of laying in a park somewhere and trying to impress someone with my newest Chomsky acquisition, I'm using wireless internet while sitting on my patio, hoping none of the tenants in the building across from us can see that I'm not wearing any pants.

Anyway. I've decided that 2011 is my year to finally get back to basics, to kick my internet habit. I mean, I had the internet in 1999 as well, but back then it was too slow to be of any real interest, you could check the weather in Moscow 24 hours a day but you couldn't watch movies and blogs were basically drawn-out status updates from people you knew in person and could ask face-to-face what they bought at the grocery store last night.

Ironically enough, one of my solutions to kicking my internet addiction is to spend a similar amount of time on the computer, but more time offline, like writing these gems for you four people on Word then blindfolding myself and posting it to the internet, without checking to see if Whatshisname has commented on my super witty retort to his status update although I have not seen nor spoken to him in twelve years.

We're all so predictable

2011-06-04T06:09:00.001-07:00

I think it must have been the first, or one of the first episodes of 30 Rock--a show I just now started watching--where Jack can predict everything about a person just by determining which demographic group they fall into. And while he's talking to a woman roughly in my age group he mentions that she picks up knitting every two years, halfway completes a project, then puts it down again. How does he know us so well?

I mean, it's just so hard to know what to do. A couple of things come naturally to me--arguing, for one. Cooking is a no-brainer as everyone has to eat (although evidently there are many different ways of feeding oneself that permit a 30-year-old to make it their entire lives without having the faintest idea of when to put salt in boiling water, how to use sugar to reduce acidity or how you can use butter to emulsify a sauce).

Anyhootles. It occurs to me that only a rare few of us are naturally driven to do creative things, and of those, only an even smaller percentage have got any shred of talent. Anyone can knit, sure, but how many people can create a pattern? Anyone can write a blog, but how many people can write one worth reading? (Believe me, I'm not counting myself among the talented few in this regard... at the moment.) Anyone can pick up a pencil and paper, draw a circle and some squiggly lines and call it a cartoon, which is what I did today.

Boah, nothing illuminates you to your own total lack of talent like trying something new. In my head, the concept was genius, even though I had no idea what any of the characters would look like or how to make eyes. But I was determined to be more proactive in my artistic pursuits, so I sat down and pounded out some of the most inane drivel even I have ever seen and my standards are not that high.

Sigh... I wish I could figure out what I could do that would make me even remotely interesting, but it always seems to come back to my excellent powers of perseverance when it comes to arguing you down to a bloody pulp until you realize you are wrong, wrong, WRONG.

Anyway. It's back to watch ten more episodes of 30 Rock followed by a light marathon of Father Ted for me. Back into the masses of mediocrity I go.

This is not a terrorist manifesto

2011-03-28T08:33:00.000-07:00

There is nothing new about the appalling state of quote-unquote "modern" society. We're too everything. Too materialistic, too self-involved. Too willing to distract ourselves from our actual problems by pretending to care about the problems of others. Too depressed, and subsequently, naturally, necessarily, depressing. We're depressing the shit out of each other on a daily basis. Too predatory, too wiling to play the victim. Too analytical. Too neurotic. Too utterly and completely obsessed with narrowing down just exactly what we "are". Too nervously searching for and frantically promoting our "selves" while attempting to appear casual about the entire thing.

But as you are aware, none of this is new. We now live in a decades- or even centuries-, millenia-long era in which more or less every idea has been thunk. The radical periphery are edging them/ourselves into mainstream ways of thinking. Also not new. Without this exact social phenomenon there would be no social progress, which you may or may not deem a good thing. The main problem now is that we are running out of battles to fight. Everyone worth knowing is aware that most of the -isms are bad. Even historically divided subjects have found socially acceptable moderate paths. Having an abortion is largely considered an unfortunate solution to a grey-area problem that some people choose to make but one which none of us are allowed to judge. Which you'd realize is fine, if you'd be willing to accept that you have no idea what the answer to the universe is. The whole deal of whether or not the shapeless cluster of cells is a Person the second it begins to multiply upon itself appears to be the most divisive issue.

Most of us worth knowing have agreed to agree that one ought not to intentionally discriminate against, harrass, molest, judge, restrict, disallow, legally invalidate, ostracize, or prematurely abort any sentient being, even if is an animal, even if one is not a vegetarian and happily, hypocritically, eats the hairy/hooved/scaly/feathered/beaked bastards on a regular basis. But the question about the fucking zygote, when will mankind ever know?

(However, one might compare a zygote to a malignant tumor, the main similarity being that both multiply upon themselves without end until they have successfully colonized the host; the main difference being that one may eventually grow into a President and cost your society billions of dollars and get you killed abroad whereas the worst the other will do is cost you a few thousand before killing you in the comfort of your own home/hospice.)

Those of us really worth knowing--and notice that I have now significantly reduced the number of people to whom I was previously referring--are aware that without action, most of the being-on-the-same-page-at-all-costsness that is running rampant in modern society is largely a bunch of blah-blah yakkity-yak. We are aware that it is all one big circle jerk invented expressly for the purspose of heightening the effects of drugs and alcohol. ("Oh my god, you're so right, no, let me add to that, no, you're so right. Oh my god, look at the time, it's already tomorrow. Time flies when you're a fucking genius.") You are going to disagree with me. You are going to say, but every person who is dissuaded from gaycism by being forcefully made aware of the fact that Those of Us Who Are Worth Knowing think gays are fine and should not be discriminated against, harrassed, molested, judged, restricted, disallowed, legally invalidated, ostracized or prematurely aborted has now lost his voice in mixed society and can no longer spread the seeds of hate. But I would tell you, Bollocks.

Haters gone hate, I cannot believe no one has ever made that clear to you. Haters gone hate.

So love and take care of yourself and the people you find tolerable. Be as nice as to everyone as they are to you. In no circumstances ought you to bother yourself about what others think of you unless they are paying you. In which case you should suck up as much as possible because I mean that is your daily champagne we are talking about. Let the Scientologists do their thing, and offer to pick up your friend after her abortion and spoon feed her ice cream until the bleeding and unbearable cramping, doubt, guilt, regret, nightmares and suicidal tendencies subside, even if you think she is a murderess, because it's none of your goddamn business why she decided to kill the President.

Live well, and be happy.

There's a time and place for almost everything

2011-03-04T10:24:00.001-08:00

So here in Germany, there is an elaborate system of standing in line at the grocery store. Once you've got it down and have abandoned all concern for your own personal space, it's a breeze. It goes like this:

Put your groceries on the conveyor belt, with the heaviest/sturdiest items toward the front, and the lightest/most delicate items toward the back. Leave as little room between items as possible, stacking like products when necessary. This facilitates the next customer's being able to place his items down after you.
Place the divider, if one is available, as close to your goods as possible. Take two steps away from the conveyor belt and two steps nearer the person in front of you. Stand as close to their actual anus as you can without making physical contact. You will stand like this until it is your turn to pay, breathing down their neck as they pull out their method of payment. The person behind you in line will do the same to you. This takes some getting used to, but you will manage it eventually.
As the checker scans your items, take each one and place it in a cloth or plastic bag or back into the shopping cart. Here is where your original method of heaviest-first comes in handy, because the checker will scan so quickly that your stuff will literally fall off the counter if you are not fast enough. Pay as close to the penny as possible without making the other customers wait so long their teeth fall out. Walk away.

Now, I was in the very beginning of step one when a disgracefully drunken man in his early 40s pushes past the person standing behind me in line and asks to place his beer bottles down on the ledge in front of the conveyor belt. Normally, this is perfectly acceptable, if:

1. The person in front of you has finished placing their items on the belt, and

2. You are actually the next person in line.

Neither of these conditions had been satisfied, so I told him simply, "no." Carefully but quickly I continued placing my items heaviest to lightest on the belt. Ordnung muss sein.

Well, he didn't like that too much, and said dass es ihm egal war--that he didn't care. And began shoving his bottles down on the belt, standing on top of me to do so and completely obstructing my attempts to finish placing down my groceries.

Now, dear Reader, you know me fairly well by now, so it won't come as too much of a shock to you when I tell you that at 9am after a late night out and with some drunken fool blowing his foul, hot, nasty breath in my face and violating even the reduced European standard of personal space that I reacted with my reptile brain and simply placed my right arm from the hand to the elbow along his chest, stepped in with my right foot and shoved him about five feet back to wherever the fuck it is he came from. His girlfriend--a 6'1" (184 cm) tall black lady--goes, "whoa, whoa, whoa!" I give her a look that says,

You want some too?

She looks away.

Now, reader, you're going to wonder why I was so easily provoked this morning, but, as I say, I'd had a late night, was barely awake, was bleeding from my vagina like a halal cow and had had neither food nor water nor coffee nor cigarette since awakening. And here is some pathetic fool burning the hairs out of my nostrils with his disgusting vodka breath at 9 in the morning, not following the super-important rules. Fuck him, and fuck her too.

As we're standing in line, with one customer between us, he complains loudly to his girlfriend about how "unfriendly" I am and how a bit of common courtesy is in order. My heart starts racing, my hands shake. I tell him, "Look, it's not my fault you're drunk as a skunk at 9 in the morning. You can wait the two seconds until it's your turn."

The woman keeps opening her big yap to broadcast her personal philosophies, maintaining that it doesn't matter when one consumes alcohol, whether it's even 6 or 7 in the morning, the point is to live and let live. The two of them continue drunkenly babbling at each other about what a useless cunt I am, how unfriendly and unbelievable my behavior is. Neither of them will address me directly. And so I'm left with only two options--continue arguing with them, or do my best to ignore them. I chose the latter, inching forward in line and using all the restraint I can muster in order to keep my cool.

I pack my shit and step out of line, set down my bag, sit on the window ledge, cross my legs, and wait for the couple to complete their transaction. Mind you, for the entire duration of the several minutes we'd stood in line, they were unrelenting in their commentary on my behavior. I have now been listening to them for as long as I can remember; I cannot recall a time ever in my life when I could not hear their voices. And I am beyond livid at this point.

Finally they wander out of line and I stand back up, stepping forward until I am two inches from the drunk man's nose. I square myself, and ask him:

Do you have anything else you want to say to me?

He replies, at the top of his lungs and so patronizing you could spit:

No! I hope you have a wonderful day!

I turn on my heel and walk out of the store. As I pass through the front doors I can hear the two of them laughing with one another, but now I cannot make out any words. Face burning, I make my way home, wondering what had really just happened back there.

May you live in interesting times

2011-03-02T16:23:00.000-08:00

Things are interesting at the moment.

More so at this particular moment, because I'm drunk. Something I don't do too often these days.

Alert readers will recall my diatribes about my reasons for not drinking. Why I've opted to go in for the dum-dum juice as of late is as much of a mystery to you as it is to me.

Of course, I've drunk since that one time I told you I'd sworn off it forever and was joining AA. But I've always gone back off of it. So that's where I'm at now. Drinking every couple of months for a few weeks, then swearing off of it again.

No, that's wrong. Actually, where I'm at right now--at this exact moment in time--is downloading old hip-hop albums from the 90s. Tonight was R. Kelly and Notorious B.I.G.

Am I supposed to care that R. Kelly is a child molester? Damn Gina, where are my scruples? Nowhere to be found. I also didn't give entirely too much of a shit when Michael Jackson was supposed to be raping little kids. I mean hello? Rock With You? I'm supposed to just forget about that or what? Come on. Get real. People drive Range Rovers without caring about polar bears, I shouldn't have to be villainized for listening to a bit of Jackson Five without guilt. Fuggedaboudit.

Anyhow.

Life is exciting.

Going to Seattle in a few weeks.

Moving house in a few weeks.

Listening to the Sex Me remix by the R.

Drankin a bit of ole Jim Beam.

Life could not be better than it is at this particular moment in time.

I should really write to you more often. The 'Stoph's guidance counselor advised him to drink three glasses of red wine, then sit down to write his Bachelorarbeit, then go back the next day and correct all the follies of alcohol consumption. The point is to prime the pump. Although the 'Stoph does not drink red wine. Forget it. He'll get there one way or the other.

I could be a famous drunk asshole. At least we'd be sure I'd get something written. Even if it was a bit crap and I was too proud to correct it the next day. (I did that with a book I wrote once. Two hundred and forty pages in, I'd get drunk, write twenty pages, go back the next day and have to delete them all. Drunken writing is fun but not quality.)

Hi, Mel.

Purple Haze

2011-02-22T10:24:00.001-08:00

So for the last six days I have been unwholesomely sick. Like the kind of unwell you can imagine cutting down hundreds of thousands of medieval Europeans. Even today, as I went back to work, I noticed: I'm still not really right.

Saturday I tried to work, and just sort of wandered around the place like a zombie for a few hours before the rest of the staff literally forcibly sent me home. I came back and fell into the bed and did not emerge from it except to urinate for nearly three days. I was dizzy, nauseous, delirious, freezing, sweaty.

How? How can I have been deathly ill now four times since September? It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Or does it? Does it make sense that in what might be the filthiest city in the general, overall filthiness of Europe that a young American might fall prey to whatever comes around? I feel like a Native American, my populations being decimated by the numerous communicable diseases the Europeans have been infecting each other with for millennia.

Hopefully now that I've survived the plague, dropsy, typhoid, dyssentary, whooping cough, smallpox and tuberculosis I can focus my eyeballs long enough to keep blogging.

It's a Jungle in Here

2011-02-13T14:13:00.000-08:00

Now as a rule I don't follow politics of any kind. Have had a boycott for several years now.

But as I was waiting on a friend who never showed up (left her phone at the flat), I sat down with my super expensive (you don't want to know how expensive) electronic dictionary and settled down to read some German news. Among the tedious details of Madonna's landing in the city and heading straight for an exclusive private club (Soho House, for those in the know) and how many ways pork fat can't kill you was an actually interesting article about the Green Party Minister, who is a dirty Turk that wants to save the whales and the polar ice caps and all sorts of things people from the second-and-a-half world aren't supposed to care about.

The interviewers had the nerve to ask this guy if he would send his own child to a school full of dirty Turks, which is something the average German attempts to avoid. The claim is that a good German child learns less among dirty Turks, because the Turkish children speak German only as a second language and drag down the pace of the class. Whether there is any merit to this claim is up to the people who know how to use Google to find out. Those of us who don't just form our opinions based on prejudices, like everyone else.

Anyhow. So this Turkish Green Party dude said, yes, of course. My little girl will be entering a Kreuzberg public school in the fall. Kreuzberg public schools are the nightmares of every German parent who wants their kid to grow up and do something other than auto mechanics. The idea is that your precious snowflake will never make it to university if it has to share finger paints with the children of immigrants.

Besides the fact that it would not fit with his politics not to do so, this guy really couldn't go around not sending his kid to a school full of Turkish kids, so, while the headline was all big and obnoxious, like, "KNOWN TURK SENDS HALF-TURKISH CHILD TO TURKISH SCHOOL. SCANDAL?" I was like, "um, of course."

It reminded me, however, of the public school teachers we had who sent their kids to private school. Like, it's good enough for you to come here and earn your paycheck, but not good enough to send your own kids to? I never understood how these teachers could think that they were tough enough to brave the jungle that is public school but that their kids could not hack it.

What kind of message does that send to their own students? To their co-workers who were educated and educate their own children in the public school system?

I have yet to meet a private school kid who was significantly smarter than a public school kid anyway, or one that used his extracurricular time better. Without school-sponsored team sports all a private school kid has to do is steal his parents car and use to do drugs during school hours (like a good friend of mine did whose mother taught at our school).

Usually I attempt to lend a moral to the story but there is none today. Sending your kids to public school will not only not kill them but it is also not news. I wonder if it's too late to get my 75 cents back for the paper.

Today I did something weird

2011-02-12T14:46:00.000-08:00

You're not going to believe me, but yesterday, I completely forgot to use the internet.

I'm serious. Well, partially. At first, it was kind of intentional. I'm starting to realize that I spend far, far too much time on the interwebs, and so I've been trying to cut back from the top down. Like a smoker who waits until after lunch for his first cigarette, I'm trying to just get through breakfast without turning on the computer.

So it went quite well yesterday, pushing through breakfast while reading an actual book written on actual paper and staring at my husband out of the corner of my eye.

Then, as it was my Sunday, I took a wee nap, had a cup of coffee, contemplated laundry, decided against it, and read some more in my book.

But wait. Halfway through my day off, and something is missing. Should I go for a walk? Should I do some laundry? The answer to both questions is yes but I did neither. Instead I went out to eat some lunch.

Came back, farted around some more, still didn't know exactly what was missing. There are plenty of days when I don't do much but fart around and go out to lunch and not do laundry but they all feel like RED LETTER DAYS because of the FUCKING EXCITEMENT the internet provides me.

But I forgot.

I almost forgot today, but my book started to freak me out and I didn't feel like watching TV.

Let's see if I don't forget the internet tomorrow.

I want YOU to stop being such a dick

2011-02-10T14:23:00.001-08:00

When I see really, truly nosy people, I'm always surprised when they don't come from one of those places where everybody is nosy, like China or Turkey or the Amazon or something, when they're not ex-villagers or tribesmen accustomed to seeing everybody naked, knowing what everybody's shit smells like and when every woman has her period and commenting openly on the minutest details of other people's lives then giving them unsolicited advice. Or are older than the age of 10. No one is bothered by a staring child or a meddling Vietnamese neighbor, but in good Protestant nations it is the norm to only stick your nose in a stranger's business until you've been caught, at which time you whistle innocently and slyly wait for your next opportunity to look over their shoulder without being observed doing so.

I'm also surprised every time an asshole tells me I should not allow myself to be bothered by his assholiness. Like, really dude? That's all ya got? Yeah you're a dick but I'm the one with the problem? I guess in a way they're right: they're an asshole and they're cool with it, but also, they're an asshole and I'm not cool with it. Who's got the actual problem?

I'd love nothing more than to go on some hippie tangent about shaping your own reality and being at harmony with the world and that but honestly, more than anything in the world, more than a pony or the reversal of global warming, I wish for a day when people would just quit being dicks to the people around them. Just... stop.

How hard can it be? To take two seconds to NOT be a dick. I mean, really, it takes more effort to BE a dick than it does to not be one. At least in the provocative sense. It's easy to react like an asshole, but to be one out of the blue requires dedication. Premeditation, plan Bs. The careful construction of a social interaction, in which you turn out to be the dick. And this is your goal.

So I'm sitting here in one of my favorite Berlin bars and tapping away at the computer screen. Writing. Clearly engrossed. Could be writing anything from an email consoling someone on the untimely loss of a spouse or a terminal diagnosis (not the case) to updating my CV or writing my super vitally important thesis (also not the case) to an argument on an internet forum (the case). All of a sudden the bored dick sitting next to me decides it would be a good idea to stare unabashedly at my screen. I look at him. He looks at me and laughs. I wait for him to stop. He keeps staring, entertaining himself to no end. I partially block his vision with my right hand.

Unprompted, he advises, "You know, you really shouldn't get so excited about people reading your stuff."

(excuse me bitte schön but did I say a word to you?)

"It's my natural right sitting here to look at whatever I please in this place."

"And it's also your right to be impolite?" (that is the closest Germans have to rude. Another word they don't have which I would have loved to use is the word "nosy". Just doesn't exist. Because Germans are rude and nosy. There are no special words for it, it's just how people are. And if we believe what the linguists say about language shaping the norms of a society then we can reasonably assume that the reason so many Germans are both rude and nosy is because they have not created a word for either trait which describes it in a disparaging sense.)

"Let me give you a tip. If you sit--"

"Excuse me, YOU'RE going to give ME a tip? Haha ok bitteschön"

"Yes and here's the tip Schatz. Don't get so bent out of shape about people reading over your shoulder. You're the one with the problem. People are going to do whatever they want."

"That's the tip, is it?"

"That's the tip. I will read whatever I like and there's nothing you can do about it."

(silence. I literally have nothing to say, in either language, to this buffoon. I nod at him with a look on my face that says "you're a madman and I clearly have no constructive response to your madness you mad person you.")

The guy stares some more, and after having been startled by his intrusive, painfully conspicuous social retardation I'm no longer looking annoyed or surprised, just sitting there with my hands away from the keyboard, unwilling to type a single stroke more until he's quite finished. Finally the game gets boring even for him and he goes, "not that I even feel like reading right now anyway. I'd read it if I felt like it but it doesn't even interest me." Huff.

The main reason I get annoyed by people reading over my shoulder is because I'm nearly always reading or writing in English and people here think that they can be "impolite" and "curious" (that's the closest you get to "nosy") to you because you are just a dumb tourist and what are you going to do about it anyway? There're also a lot of people who assume that just because you're reading or writing in English that you don't speak German and this makes their game even more fun because what could be better than needling a stupid foreigner who couldn't even be bothered to learn the language of the land? They don't like it? They can go back to wherever they came from.

I don't have a detailed description of how I react to such behavior in the States because it very rarely happens with anybody other than 10-year-old Chinese children with Down's Syndrome and autism at the same time. Everybody else knows better.

But the truly baffling part came next. When he was finished harassing me, the guy turned to his buddy and continued the conversation he'd been having before. I had quite naturally assumed that because I'm sitting at the bar of a cheap, smoky communist dive and being bothered by a stranger that he was drunk and alone and therefore not responding very gracefully to being rebuffed at what could have been a simple attempt to make contact with another human being and really, what can you expect when you sit at the bar of any bar but to be chatted up by other people on their own; it's a given, to be anticipated and if you don't like it you should have sat in a dark corner by yourself somewhere, with your jacket and bag on the empty chair and all your books and newspapers and pencils and shit spread across the table so as to eliminate the possibility of any unwelcome intruders placing down a second drink. But no. He actually interrupted his own conversation to make me feel uncomfortable and give me a "tip". And to call me "Schatz" (literally translated, "treasure", when spoken by a man to a strange woman takes on the equivalent of a bitchy, queeny gay man condescendingly calling you "sweetie" or "honey". Which was surprising because while the guy himself could have been gay I would never have pegged his companion as so and I didn't get the memo that straight guys were hanging solo with gay guys in dirty smoky communist bars these days. Maybe they were brothers. Adopted.)

So now, this guy has so little sense in his stupid pointy head, that half an hour later, he decides to try his game again. This time, I'm reading and not writing, so I just let him point his stupid face at my screen and read away to his heart's content, knowing that the reason he is being such a stupid cunt about it all is because he can't read a word of it anyway. He tries to get a reaction out of me, stretching out his stupid neck and looking at me and laughing, then trying the whole sad action again, and failing to get a reaction.

Seems if he'd really expected me to take his valuable tip to heart he'd have not bothered trying to get his jollies from attempting to rile me up. I mean Lord only knows that it makes all logical sense, accosting people minding their own business at the bar and then accusing them of reacting poorly and THEN having the nerve to give them tips on how to deal with bastards like yourself.

One of my favorite things to say to nosy people is, "I'm here minding my own business, just like you ought to be doing." Didn't have the words for that in German. Must apply myself to finding a suitable translation. Not that it would probably do any good, nosy bastards, the lot of 'em.

Douche. Bag! Get a life, loser, and seriously, why you gotta be such a dick? Life could be so much easier for all of us.

A series of interesting nights part three

2011-02-09T13:54:00.000-08:00

A couple of nights later, I went to see a man about a dog. While the dog was being made ready to come with me, the man received a very interesting visitor. She needed to see him in order to get some very important vitamins that help her in her job.

I asked her what she did for a living, and she used a very vague German term with which I was not familiar which, literally translated came out to "turning on". Not as in, making someone hot, but like, turning on a light switch. I looked confused and she became exasperated, finally exploding, "Fucking! You know fucking? I fuck for a living." Oh.

She turned out to be a most fascinating person, and I stayed there for a few hours longer than I really needed to, first listening to her telling the only too predictable story of her loveless childhood, her father who never had any time for her, and the abusive boyfriend who took her virginity at a young age while her parents were not around to protect her.

I hoped and prayed that she wouldn't leave, because the only other person in the room besides the man himself was a most boring personality but it was not to be avoided, the fascinating one had to get to work and the boring one had to get to boring_the_face_off of me. One of those people who meets you for the first time and ten minutes later is trying to add you on Facebook and inviting you to Latvia in the spring. She did both.

Finally I extracted myself from the den of darkness and went to pick up my friend so we could go to a very famous club here in Berlin. We (ok I) got a bit messy before leaving the house and wound up at the place around 4.30 Sunday morning, right when the party was just getting underway.

Techno is not really my thing even on the best of days, but in certain altered states it can be fun enough, so, bearing that and that we'd be on the guest list in mind, we tromped in among the fashionable, the very gay, and the very wasted. Naturally as time went by the people got more and more wasted. But not in a way you would expect, even from a club like that. You might expect people to get drunk, to do some coke, to pop a couple of pills. But at a certain time of the night/morning, the crowd became so sickeningly inebriated that I felt actually ill when looking at them. It says something, when you can walk into a unisex bathroom with three inches of standing water on the ground and seatless steel toilets literally heaped with shit-smeared toilet paper and twelve-hour-old piss and vomit and whatever else, and be more put off by the people waiting to use them. I don't know what they were on. But they should never do it again.

Around 9.30 the 'Stoph calls to ask if I will be attending lunch at his parents' house, which I stupidly agreed to. Besides the normal cringe-inducing moments at the in-laws, we had to endure having the talk about what would happen when his mother was no longer able to take care of us, with the implicit suggestion made that we would all live together. The woman is 59 and I'm still trying to get the world in focus after 34 hours awake and thirteen hours of partying.

Now is not the time.

But I survived, and now I am finished writing about the sordid details of my trashy nightlife... for now.

A string of interesting nights part two

2011-02-08T11:01:00.001-08:00

Strangely enough I find myself drawn to so-called "meat-market" bars before I am told that they market themselves as such. Some of the coolest clubs and bars I've ever been to have been renowned for being hotbeds of smooth lines, hard drinks, and non-lethal venereal disease.

Wow that was SUPER corny I should write romance novels.

Moving on.

Somehow in passing I'd gleaned the information that Kaffee Burger is where sleazeballs go to pick up but I really never thought any of that would apply to me. I mean, I'm the girl who shows up in a tank top and combat boots, with a mini-skirt and a shaved head. I don't look like the kind you pick up in a bar, I look like a borderline homosexual who will kick your ass if you get too near. So I never really worry about dirtballs trying to get me in bed, although they do, time and again.

The music at the Burger wasn't what I thought it would be, so I went into the Kaffee Bar to smoke as cigarettes are not allowed on the dance floor. No sooner do I sit down than am I joined by five young men who promptly begin discussing fancy student topics like political identity and the sustainability of the situation in the Balkans and so on. The rest of the bar has plenty of seating so I'm not sure why these guys have decided to sit with me. If they had been slick, clubbed-up frat-boy types I might have figured it out, but they were just normal, nerdy-looking, smart-sounding mid-twenties types. Eventually we are all in conversation and they invite me to hang with them that night.

I mean, how sweet can that be? Nothing like that has ever happened to me in Berlin. Back home, sure, you go out by yourself and unless you are some sort of social retard you are guaranteed to meet people. (By social retard I mean hopeless introvert, my apologies, hopeless introverts.)

So it's going cool, we're talking, then we're dancing, then we're sitting in the bar and smoking, then we're dancing, and talking. But it begins to become clear that one of the boys is starting to break away from the group to follow me around and eventually the rest of them ignore me completely.

So I ask the one, "Hey, why did he just walk right by? He completely ignored us."

The one says, "Maybe he wanted to give us some time to be alone."

See, reader, you would have gotten that right away. You wouldn't have waited to have to tell him for the fourth time that you are married or for him to tell you how much he likes your face, everything about it, even your nose, you wouldn't have waited for him to ask you how you feel about him although you only met him an hour ago, or for him to offer to take you home, or to almost cry about how all the girls he ever likes are involved with someone else. You would have gotten up right away and gone somewhere else, but I am naive and thought, these are nice smart boys who care about important things like political identity and the Balkans whatever that is. They are not the kind of boys who would strategically treat an intelligent woman like myself like a random piece of pussy, eliminating one possibility after the other so as to maximize the probability of one of them getting to stick it in. They wouldn't. I don't believe you.

After it became clear that I was not going to fuck any of them (the smartest of them came right out and asked), they all ignored me as if I did not and had never existed.

And the music still sucked, and someone on the dance floor stank.

And so I went home.

A string of interesting nights part one

2011-02-07T05:48:00.000-08:00

In case you don't know what an expat is, it is a Latin mishmash Anglicized abbreviation for someone who leaves their home country which is as rich as, richer, or almost as rich as the country they move to, and either intends to go back in the foreseeable future, or dislikes referring to themselves as immigrants, although that is indeed what they are.

I don't really fit into either category, but as I come from the United States, I'm too bourgeouise--in a worldwide political sense, mind--to be called an immigrant, and Germans want nothing to do with me. So I hang out with other "expats" on a regular basis.

The other night, I even went to an event arranged by and catering to such people. It was my second time attending, and I'd forgotten why it had taken such a long time between the first and second visits. The second I walked through the door, I remembered. It was because the first time I went, I had sworn to myself that it would also be the last.

You know how you go to a party where you don't know anybody, but you're friends with someone who knows someone? So now you're someone who knows someone who knows someone, and as you all live in the same town, the likelihood that you will meet someone who knows someone who knows someone you know can be pretty high. You're all around the same age group and as you've all been invited by someone who knows someone, or by Someone Him-or-Herself, you're likely to have Something in Common.

Something in Common can cover a broad range of topics, from activities to opinions to preferences. You see, I can walk into any party anywhere in the world and enjoy myself, as long as the one thing that the majority--come on, even half--of the attendees have in common is Not Being a Total Douchebag.

No such luck at the expat event. The last time I had such awkward, boring time must have been some time at my in-laws place. You will think I'm exaggerating when I say I was painfully bored, but I'm not lying. It literally hurt my feelings to be that bored. I stayed for an hour--an hour!!--waiting to see if any of the hundred or so attendees of this thing would be worth staying longer for. I scanned the room hopefully, looking for signs of an interesting conversation to butt in on.

But alas, all I saw were other boring people, not seeming to mind being bored by one another. No eruptions of laughter. No intense, involved conversations. Just a bunch of people from all age ranges, from every corner of the earth, boring the socks off of one another, the only Thing in Common that they had being that they all spoke some degree of English.

As soon as I was able to extract myself from what was, admittedly, an engaging conversation from a complete lunatic (sorry Niall) I saved myself by going dancing at the skanky club down the street, which had promised to be fun that night.

To be continued...

I shoulda written it down

2011-02-03T05:12:00.000-08:00

Well and since I entered into the blog-a-day pact with Crafty Chick I've been struggling to remember all my blog ideas. You know how insanity (or stupidity, depending on how you look at it) is supposed to be defined by doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? I'm sort of like that, a lot. Eating that second piece of PBJ bread, or chocolate after dinner. Going to sit in a bar instead of going to the gym. Making that joke in front of those people. You know you're just going to feel like a piece of shit afterwards, but you keep making the same mistake over and over again. Or well I do. On account of the stupidity, mind.

So I don't want one of those Moleskine notebooks that assholes carry around to jot down their super important thoughts because, obviously, I don't want to look like an asshole who thinks his thoughts are so important that they deserve to live in a little notebook that costs as much as the gym membership I never use. Instead of buying this fucking little notebook I should be out pumping iron and sweating like good salt of the earth people. But shit on those Moleskine assholes as I may, they're certainly remembering their thoughts.

Not like me. Yesterday I had two, yes, count em two (!!!) decent ideas for blogs that didn't involve cop-out concepts like chicken in the fussbahn and whatever I was going on about midgets yesterday. Two decent ideas, and did I do anything with em? Did I write em down? On anything? Piece of toilet paper and eyeliner? Scratched out on a receipt made from thermal paper? I even carry around a journal and several pens, pencils, erasers and sharpeners, EVERYWHERE I GO. No, listen to me, I'm serious. EVERY SINGLE DAY OF MY LIFE I carry around a journal, several pens, pencils, erasers and sharpeners. I transfer them from one bag to the other. I literally never leave home without those items. Did I write down the ideas? No. You know what I thought? And it's so stupid and predictable but yet so mind-blowing. I thought: who could forget two great ideas like those? I mean, obviously, you've got this, which if you forget, you can just remember that, and then the connection will be clear. Well I forgot this AND that. Like my last seventy-five blog ideas. Poof. Gone.

So now I think, during my adventures today, I will need to pick up a self-important-asshole notebook, because I realize that I don't have somewhere just for ideas. I carry around a journal and that is for journaling, not for scribbling down incoherent half-thoughts in Greek shorthand, scrawls that I will never be able to decipher later. My journal is for full sentences with commas and semi-colons and shit. Plus it is too big. I need one of those miniscule ones bound with leather and costing lots of money. Nothing says "write in me" more than a leather-bound, palm-sized notebook. It's like you're just sitting there dreaming stuff up expressly to have an excuse to open up your little teensy pile of money and jot down something so revolutionary that only you, in this place and in this time, could ever have thought of it.

If tomorrow's blog closely resembles this one or the two that preceded it, you will know that I kept up the good fight against the Moleskine tiny expensive idea book.

It could scarcely be worse

2011-02-02T10:33:00.001-08:00

OK, and only because I saw two of them today within about five minutes of each other, but I wonder what it's like to be a little person.

I mean, you take people like me, who bitch and complain about being stared at, for whatever reason. I've got different reasons in different places. For example, if I go into a gay bar, I get stared at because I'm tall and I'm a woman, and you've got to look twice to determine whether I was born with fallopian tubes. If I go into a hipster bar, I get stared at because I'm about fifteen points above the average hipster BMI, not wearing ironic glasses or a terrorist scarf.

When I'm in Seattle, I get stared at because I'm tall and usually doing something striking with my skull, like shaving the hair completely off of it, or dying it a strange color, or sticking metal through various bits of skin. When I'm in Germany, I get stared at because I'm tall and black. When I'm in Eastern Europe I get stared at because gypsies are not supposed to wear pants and what the hell is that for a flip flop?

When I'm on the train I get stared at because I stand a foot higher than the rest of the people on the coach and I'm usually twitching around with inhibition to whatever I'm listening to on my iPod, but when a little person gets stared at, they are stared at for being little and nothing else.

You get stared at walking down the street and standing on the train and sitting on the bus swinging your little person feet over the edge of the seat, and you get stared at while jumping at bananas and apples in the grocery store that you can't quite reach, and you get stared at while looking longingly at the ATM and you get stared at while eating Chinese food with chopsticks and while walking your dog at 2 in the morning or 4 in the afternoon. You get stared at while smoking and while drinking water and while picking out CDs or talking to a friend on the street or looking like you're going anywhere other than to a movie set to perform your role as an extra in a film concerning a circus, or maybe a comedy about Tall people doing things with Smaller people.

And it's not like you get stared at like a celebrity, or that you can pretend in your mind that bitches are staring at you because they wanna be you and that haters gone hate. You know for a fact, one hundred percent, that you are being stared at because of your unnaturally small size. Because of your strange proportions. You know they're wondering what kind of job you could possibly do and what your house looks like. They're wondering if you've ever driven a car or made love to a person of average height and proportions.

Now, the last thing Little People need is any more sympathy, so I'm going to do one a favor next time I see him. Instead of averting my eyes and pretending not to notice that there is a fully grown adult who couldn't see over my kneecaps waddling about in the Fußbahn, I'm going to walk straight up to him, raise my hand way over my head, and go, "High Five!"

And hopefully he has a sense of humor, because that is either the funniest joke ever, or the most insensitive thing you could ever do to a stranger who will probably go home and hang himself now but not until he's kicked you in the shins first.

Chicken on the Fußbahn

2011-02-01T10:34:00.001-08:00

Of course, Fußbahn is a word I just made up to replace Autobahn, which means, literally, "way that the cars drive". Yer foot is also dein Fuss.

I like to play Chicken on the Fußbahn because it's too much fun. Sometimes I make the mistake of playing a little too early in the morning before coffee and first words exchanged with people who live outside my home that consist of more than "mmphbrrblpoo" and "mmhmlvyoutoobye". So when I play too early in the day, the first words composed in my head are "idiot" "bozo" and "jackass". Not a good start to the day, even if you don't say em out loud. They're still out there in the universe.

Chicken in the Fußbahn is a good way to pass the time if you're a person of considerable stature, like I am, but I shudder to think what would happen were you only 5'6", or weighed under 180 pounds. Careful out there, I don't want anybody getting hurt. Well some of you. But never mind.

I also don't recommend Fußbahn chicken if you're prone to chickening out, because after you've made a commitment, you have to stick to it. Once you lose your nerve, it could take months before you're back out in the field. No, it's your side of the sidewalk, goddammit, and if they don't want to get out of your way, you're going to bowl em over. No ifs ands or buts about it. Of course, you're probably not really going to bash into them, unless you're having a really bad start to your day. Like, missing two out of the Three S's, for example.

Now, this is the important part. It's all about posture. You've got to straighten yourself up to half an inch above your full height. This is an ancient swami trick called Floating Lotus and it involves an infinitesimal amount of hovering above the ground, but you'll get it in time. Then, you square your shoulders and look your opponent straight in the eye. You're going to think that this all sounds a bit aggressive, but I assure you, if they hadn't been walking toward you on your side of the sidewalk, the game would not have been necessary in the first place. (I do not recommend playing Fußbahn Chicken on the left side of the sidewalk in continental Europe or North America. Playing on the right side in England is an equally bad idea, especially in South London.)

Note! Important! Without the Floating Lotus Square Shoulders To The Sky and Accompanying Thousand-Mile-Stare, you are lost. You will find yourself floundering about on the shoulder of the Fußbahn. This takes practice. But eventually, you will get it.

Give it a try one morning when you're feeling particularly ineffective about your life, when you've just been overlooked for a raise or lost a fight with your partner about how many bananas out of the bunch each is entitled to. You'll feel the power rushing right back into your life. Good luck.

An Open Letter to the Hip

2011-01-22T09:47:00.000-08:00

I wish I weren't so afraid of drawing attention to the fact that most of you all look like complete and utter freaks, because I'd really like to take your picture. I want to take a picture of your stupid big gramma glasses and your tight gray jeans and your stupid acrylic stripey sweater that looks like something even Value Village would rather throw away than sell, and your stupid man-bag purse thing made out of real vintage 80s denim (also in shit condition) and your stupid fixie bike and your stuuuuuuupid fucking haircut, WHY did you do it like that? You are a hair farmer, that's what you are, farming like ten different trends on the same plot of head. Unbefuckinglievable.

But the thing is, as stupid as you clearly look to me, I would never wish you to know it. It looks like far too much fun, running around in the nerdiest and most beat-up things you could find, with a smug and self-satisfied smirk on your face, reading books written by people you've never heard of so you can impress people you've never met. I too was young once, although we did it a little differently. I shaved my head and wore army shirts and wrap skirts to war protests, but never mind that, it was a different era.

I want to take your picture, because I can't imagine that anyone I told about you, without having seen you, wouldn't just assume I was exaggerating about just how stupid you look. But they can't know, unless they've been to Berlin in the last year, what absolute crap you guys are passing off as fashion. I mean it's one thing to look like shit but quite another to smirk at people who actually want to look as if they're putting themselves together in the morning.

But I think the main reason I want to take your picture is so I can compare it to a yearbook from 1979 and see if you don't look exactly as shit as nerds did then, and then I want to psychoanalyze you from afar, I want to watch and observe you, in order to assess the pathology that goes into openly embracing a look that was sported by the fringe, the oppressed, the forgotten periphery. I want to figure out why some of you who are clearly not nerds, work very hard to look like nerds. Does it have to do with solidarity? Is it like a white person dressing like a slave, in order to show comradeship with his disenfranchised fellow man? Do you not feel like a phony, for not even being a proper nerd? Can you even operate a computer? Can you hear me? Hello?

Well, fake nerds, next time you see me out with my camera, you'd better pose, because I am going to exploit your nonsense to the rest of the world. One pair of gramma glasses at a time.

If it weren't for us you'd all be speaking Catalán

2011-01-16T09:09:00.000-08:00

So, speaking of muhfuckaz that don't know how to tip, there is not a waitress alive who sees a table full of The Wrong Continental types coming and doesn't roll their eyes. Here comes a hundred espressi, pain in the ass requests like a slice of radish soaked in lemon juice on the side, and NO TIP. Probably even in the Wrong Continental Countries (Spain, Portuagal, Italy, France) they are not glad to see them coming. That is why everything takes so much longer there. No one is out fighting for the almighty buck.

But, evidently, Berlin is known for poor service, even among the swarthy Mediterranean set. As I finished bringing the twelve espressi, sixteen slices of lemon-soaked radish and one hollowed-out pomegranate to the group and presented them the bill, I asked, before thinking better of it, if they'd like to pay separately or together.

Now you know as well as I do that Spaniards, like the Chinese, do not travel in any group smaller than thirty, but I was in luck this time, as the mere six of them wished to pay separately. It's a tough move to make in the service industry, the offer-and-switch, but some times it's worth a try.

"Erm, actually, there is a ton going on right now, it might actually be really nice of you if you could all just throw your money together on one bill."

No, they said, they'd prefer to pay separately, if that's not a problem.

"Well, uh heh heh, the problem is that I just don't have a whole lot of small change, and everyone will want to pay his bill and need to get change back..."

No, they said, they'd prefer to pay separately, as the problem is not theirs.

The thing is, a table full of The Right Europeans (actually, mostly just Germans, as the rest of Europe doesn't think they have to tip in Germany) are a pleasure to cash out separately because that means six separate tips. Six people all rounding up to the euro after the next, which also means a minimum expenditure of small change. But I knew, as well as I knew my own name, that this would mean six times handing back the exact change.

The leader of the group, a middle-aged, pony-tailed salt-and-pepper ~~stallion~~ horse that should have been put out to pasture long ago, who had the best German out of the lot (read: not enough to communicate with a relatively intelligent four-year-old) wanted to hand me money while his friend was counting out the last thirty cents of her check in pennies, to which I replied, "yeah, one moment please" in a slightly harried tone.

He commented to his friends, "Welcome to Berlin."

Well, now, my friends, you know I couldn't let that one slide just as it was, so I pretended that I had missed something he'd wanted to say to me, and asked him sweetly to repeat it, even putting my ear close to his lips. He returned, "I told them, welcome to Berlin. The infamous Berliner service."

"Well isn't that just funny, because I'm not even a Berliner!" I beamed. Ultra-face-breaking-fake-niceness mode activated.

"Oh yeah? Where are you from?"

"I'm the from the USA, where we are all nice to everybody!" Winningest smile.

"Well, you've learned well here in Berlin."

Can you imagine that, friends and comrades? Insulted by the likes of a non-tipping, pony-tailed, Wrong Kind of European dirtbag? I continued smiling and collecting the pennies, dog-food coupons and pocket lint from his friends (one of which had the decency to tip like a respectable Protestant, although she probably had eight names, two of them Maria).

On their way out, the man had the nerve to comment snidely to me, "Thanks SO MUCH for the great service."

To which I replied, "Oh, you're SO welcome! Come again!" Winningest smile!

How satisfying was that, to pull the offer-and-switch, then the sorry-what-did-you-say, then the Ultra-Winningest-Smile-To-Haunt-You-In-Your-Dreams, while he stood outside, gesticulating wildly, probably swearing in a mixture of poorly-spoken languages never to set foot in the place again.

Berlin expat - 1

Wrong Kind of Continental Europeans - Zero!!

Menschen in the Middle

2011-01-15T12:08:00.000-08:00

I wonder, what makes the difference between being a cool and kooky middle-aged person and an eccentric pain in the ass? It is certainly easy to see the difference between the end results: the former is usually a mish-mash of contradictions; laughing easily yet being a bit jaded, being a bit jaded yet not being bitter, giving everyone a hard time, yet giving them the benefit of the doubt, and in general, having an "it is what it is" view of the world. The latter seem to be putting on a show, wishing they could smile easily but being unable, and therefore overcompensating by putting on their best fake smiles, covering up their social awkwardness by pretending to have outlandish preferences, and being in general still absolutely shocked by the world when it does not produce the results they would have liked.

Obviously, there are more than two kinds of middle-aged people, but as a, ahem, Service Professional, those are the two that I notice the most. The ass-kickers and the fake-funkers.

How cool is it to still be kicking ass in your fifties? And how super lame is it to still be fake-funking at the same age? Suuuuuuper lame.

Your middle age must be a funny time of life, even funnier than your late 20s, which, by funny, I mean, not fucking funny at all, oh my god, did you realize my life is OVER? Anyhow. I imagine that being in your fifties is like being in a state of transition, like being in your late 20s is, with the 40s that preceded it being sort of like the stasis that your late teens and most of your 20s are. In these stasis periods, you're not meant to make any drastic growth or undergo any massive changes or make any momentous decisions. You just go on about your life, reaping the benefits and suffering the consequences of whatever you did in the previous ten years, living with yourself as you have molded yourself.

But in your middle age, you've got a couple of things on your personal growth plate: digesting what you've just seen in the last 50 years. What have you learned? How does it make you feel? And now that you've gone through about two-thirds of all you're going to get, how will you use the rest of it? It's sort of like what I'm going through now, except in the last question we replace two-thirds with one-third. Maybe that's why cool and kooky middle-aged people LOVE me as much as I love them (a lot!) and why the bitter old sacks who still find the time to have a good bitch and moan sixty-five times a day about things they cannot change and do not have the wisdom to know the difference about are usually as annoyed by me as I am by them (a lot).

Ah, but soon, I will be thirty, and will find out what that total mystery is about. No one knows anything about thirtysomethings. They are all in a very exclusive club, not unlike Freemasons or Knights of the Scottish Rite or whatever. Their logo and mission statement shifts drastically every four or five years so as to maintain the utmost secrecy as those who leave the club for their forties re-enter the world outside the Twighlight Zone spiral stasis limbo that is one's 30s.

Welllp, I've got some ~~self-loathing~~ self-appraisal to do before I enter the Menudo of ages... see you on the other side of the tunnel.

Rick James Says...

2011-01-14T08:37:00.000-08:00

The internet is a hell of a drug.

A while back, I remember reading someone protesting about how unbalanced online IQ tests are, that most people seem to test quite highly. The solution to that mystery was that the average computer user was likely to be of above average intelligence. Makes sense, in a cartoonish, caricature-style, largely outdated sort of stereotyped way, if you imagine the average computer user to be a glasses-wearing programmer egghead who speaks in binary code.

Unfortunately, as social networking and photo sharing sites show us, nothing could be less true.

Idiots are swarming in the millions to take part in the great Internet Collage, and I have become one of them.

When the internet first came out for public use, I was allergic to it. Hives, rashes, persistent cough, fever, soft stools, the works. I must have been about 14 years old when our school library first introduced online terminals. You had to take home a piece of paper absolving the school of any blame for whatever filth you might find in the internet to your parents and get their signatures before you could use them. The kids whose parents signed the waiver would just be clickety-clack, clickety-clacking away on their little internets, while those whose parents were Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses or nudists or vegetarians or whatever, and therefore were not allowed to do anything any of the other reindeer were allowed to do, flipped through library catalogue cards and slogged through the massive paper labrynth in order to complete their projects. I, having neither bothered to take home the waiver, as I had less than no interest in the internet, nor having any particular fancy toward library catalogue systems (still not really sure how they work/ed), would sit reading a comic book or writing a story, wondering how on earth those kids could do homework during class time. Everyone knows that the only time to get homework done is three hours before the assignment is due, regardless of how many weeks you have been given to complete the project.

So at first, the internet just seemed like a sneaky way of tricking unsuspecting doofuses into doing work when they should have been reading comic books, and I forgot about it for another five or six years.

In the late 90s I became addicted to yahoo chat for about three months, and then my computer stopped working. So I quit.

In the mid 2000s I had access to a friend's computer in which time I re-addicted myself to

yahoo chat, for another two months.

In the late mid 2000s I lived in Canada and was forced by this same friend to open a MySpace account in order to keep in contact with my friends back in Seattle. While I only had limited access to any computer, I was fully addicted to the MySpace.

In the late-mid/early-late 2000s I moved to Germany and was able to dedicate myself full-time to an internet addiction and have been here ever since.

But I wish I were addicted to something edifying, or even porn. You know? You meet these other internet nerds and they're all smart with their little world news and politics and who the fuck is Ann Coulter? I still don't know who Nancy Pelosi is. I have heard that a man named Barack Obama is the president of the United States and that he is in the party I regularly voted for back home, but I do not know him on a first-name basis as many of my countrymen feel they do.

Some people use the internet to further their hobbies, or develop their interests. My partner uses the internet to learn about martial art, for example. You can look up stuff about planes or carpentry or anything you want.

But me? I'm like Jerry Seinfeld's fake tv dad, the one who calls the expensive electronic organizer Jerry gives him, a "tip calculator". Jerry keeps insisting that there are a multitude of things that can be done with the organizer but Pops just keeps referring to it as the tip calculator, because that's all he knows how or cares to do with it.

Me? I use the internet to obsessively look up the latest guess the weather guessers are guessing about the weather, read personal blogs written by people I do not know and have never met, maintain contact with friends, see what celebrities used to look like before €400,000,000 worth of plastic surgery and of course keep up my end of my internet arguments--and it's making me stupider by the minute. I can hardly finish a thought without using an emoticon or an abbreviation, I'm annoyed that I have to speak in full sentences.

The scary thing about internet addiction is you don't realize you're doing anything but having a good time, you don't recognize the signs of compulsion and excess, until you're already too deep in to pull yourself out of the Information Superquagmire.

I don't really have a solution to my problem, as I can't imagine giving up the internet cold turkey, but I can do something about my stupidity problem, and that is by remembering to freshen up the old blog every once in a while, because, here, of all places, I wouldn't want to be caught dead not communicating with full sentences.

right im out k peace bye

;)

Greener Pastures

2010-09-16T11:23:00.001-07:00

It seems like every other time I post something, I'm talking about either starting or quitting a job.

As I may or may not have mentioned, I worked for the last year for a pair of utter psychos. The woman is overbearing, rude, condescending and schizophrenic. The man is similar, with a smidgen of violent tendencies and severe substance abuse thrown in for good measure. That, added to the so-so pay, absolute lack of benefits, and crappy clientele, led me to have to quit.

The excuse I gave to my boss was that I needed a job with benefits in order to avoid trouble with the tax office, but she, and the other guy who's worked there since before dirt, and is also on welfare, told me that it would be near impossible to find a job in Berlin's job market. As if I'm going to take advice from two people who haven't looked for jobs in over ten years, especially not the dick collecting welfare and working under the table at the same time, fuck. right. off.

Sunday I will have what I hope is my first shift at Barcomi's, a very famous and successful coffee roasting company and independent bakery. If I do well on Sunday, I will make substantially more per hour than I made at the old place, get proper hours and my insurance paid, not to mention healthy tips.

Almost more than for the sake of having the job itself, I want to do well so I can go back to the Assholes of the World and tell them that I'm doing just fine without them, thanks. Unbelievable how many people work there because they truly believe they can't do better. Sad business.

Wow, sorry for the unbelievably boring post. Not that anyone reads this thing anyway. Ha.

Like School in the Summertime, We Gots no Class

2010-09-14T07:34:00.001-07:00

On St. Paddy's day of this year, we went with our Irish friends to an Irish pub at around noon. I guess the Irish set aside the time to celebrate the life of St. Patrick from dawn til midnight, but for those of us who aren't accustomed to showing up to bars in the daylight hours and sucking down Guinness for the next twelve hours, it can get a bit.... samey. Therefore we brought a game of Uno to the bar. This was met with unappreciative glares from everyone who wasn't cool enough to have been invited to play. Attempting to mollify our new un-fans, we offered to deal them in, but they weren't having any of it. Evidently it's incredibly lame to play Uno in a bar, even if the bar is as shitty and expensive and smelling of piss and touristy and did I mention shitty as the Oscar Wilde in Berlin. One friend even went so far as to ask us if we'd planned on being bored since even before we got there. Slightly embarrassed, we put the cards away and assured our friends we weren't bored, we just like playing cards.

Troof. So whenever we can sneak out of the house without attracting the notice of any of our hipper friends, we drag along a card game or dominoes, order up a round of drinks, and have ourselves a good old time. Last night was one of those nights.

Baiz thinks it's a communist bar or something, but in troof, they just don't know how to turn away people who like to leave subversive flyers laying around. And they apparently hate IKEA as much as I do. Some might suggest you get new tables, but I'm totally into the splinters in your fingernail beds thing.

We are so hip we take pictures of the Uno. To be fair though, the lady on the left is Cookie's friend Eleanor, all the way from Australia via Canada so it's a bit of an adventure to be sat in a smoky dungeon playing Uno, especially when you've just come from a place where smoking isn't allowed and you're only allowed to sit for an hour while consuming super expensive food and drink.

Graham's beard always goes all blurry in indoor pics. Check out the Mercedes hood ornament chandalier in the background.

Plotting their next +4 wild cards. No one is more competitive at the Uno than we.

Fat ass mineral water. €,50 for half a liter of it. With a nice chunky slice of lemon. You're paying upwards of €3,50 in most places in that neighborhood for a simple glass of bubbles. Maybe they really are commies.
You ain't got no blues.

After slumming around at Baiz for a bit we decided to go to "Punk Rock Pizza" (not their real name, I believe they call themselves "Duo Forni" or some such). Never again.

First of all, the place looks like this
except bigger, this pic does no justice to just how cavernous the place is.
The douchebag with the ponytail was our "waiter". Couldn't stop blathering at us in Italian. Hello friend I am not here to learn fucking Italian, don't need a ten-minute explanation about the virtues of smoked horse meat. Bring us some beer and a salad and for christ's sake enough with the yelling. When he saw we weren't into his schtick he started just slamming shit around and hamming it up conspicuously with the other customers who apparently find a waiter who doesn't bathe and screams and dances around "charming and authentic". The place was full of assclowns making a spectacle of dinner. When in fact we just wanted the dinner and not the spectacle.
Pizza was amazing though. Cookie's got the prosciutto, arugula, mushrooms and shaved parmesan. I'd post the rest of them except they were all in a state of half-eatenness by the time I pulled out the camera and no one wants to look at pics of half-eaten food.

They brought me a "salad", which was in fact a bowl of lettuce on a plate with an enormous chunk of fennel, strips of cucumber and 5-inch-long carrot sticks, one uncut radish and an entire tomato. There was oil and vinegar on the table, dressing sorted.

Will never return there though as the servers were even unclassier than we are and that is a hard thing to do.

I was gonna blog today

2010-09-14T05:39:00.001-07:00

but technology has failed me. Fuck you, blogger.

Not Judging a Book by its Tattoos

2010-09-13T05:52:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how much time I spend in bars, although I don't drink. Wow, it's weird to put that in print.

I don't drink.

Or, at least, I haven't done since late January of this year. Although I often question whether or not I was really as much of a hopeless alcoholic as I'd originally suspected (as I keep alcohol in my home--for cooking, mostly, and just cos you can't throw away Sierra Tequila, even if you never plan on drinking it--and as I hang around in bars with drunk people three or four nights out of seven), I rarely question my motives, and never look back.

Sobriety is a beautiful thing, but it can make hanging around with complete tools quite the chore.

We went last night to the lovely Fire Bar in Krausnickstraße, and although it's difficult to fuck up a night at one my favorite smoky dungeons, one Kiwi expat did his darndest.

You know how someone's banging on and on and you'd love nothing more than to zone out but you realize that if you fail to make eye contact and nod it will force that person to work even harder to re-gain your attention? Caught between a rock and a hard place. It's bad enough when the person's just boring, but worse when they believe they're experts on subject they have not the first clue about.

Among "Johnnie"'s topics of ~~conversation~~ monologue:

Factory employees working the lines at such firms as Siemens, BMW and Volkswagen, though making upwards of €20 an hour, are working dead-end jobs and when they hit 35 will no longer be able to drag their decrepit carcasses into work. Nor do they possess the intelligence to pursue careers in administration or middle management, because everyone knows you have to be a fucking genius to be a middle-manager.
Native Americans on reservations drive Porsches while the rest of us poor suckers throw our money down the drains of their fancy casinos. Their education systems are among some of the best in the world.
Tattoo artists like himself make several hundred thousands of dollars per year. However, he did not know what it meant to be charged for the workspace in a tattoo parlour.
The Hell's Angels of Germany do not stoop to such menial tasks as the distribution of illegal substances. Their minions on the bottom of the "pyramid" take care of that for them. (as a matter of fact drug-dealing is about the only activity German gangsters pursue with anything approaching diligence)
Everyone ought to get fake tits, because there is no such thing as a tit too big (he obviously didn't get the irony in that one)

His accent was a weird mish-mash of Kiwi, American and Cockney. He bragged about doing "thousands of dollars of cocaine and speed--Christmas Lines, you know?" at a hotel party. I think he was invited by Pablo Escobar himself.

It's funny when you're sat across from a 33-year-old man who seems to have learned everything he knows about life from a Tarantino flick. I'll bet he's got posters of the Godfather up on his bedroom wall, right above his stash of Playboys and Tattooing Bi-Monthly.

Regarding the activity of German gangsters, I asked him how he had acquired his information. His response was to ask me how I could be so sure he didn't know what he was talking about. Ohhhhhkay.

Finally, a half-naked man covered in tattoos that appeared to recognize our hero came over and saved the night, distracting him long enough for us to abscond to the next bar. One mineral water and lemon later I was on my way home.

Thank god I made it home before daylight or I would have felt just as filthy as I would have, had I been drinking all night.

Put yer eyeballs back in your head

2010-09-11T04:47:00.000-07:00

It doesn't really matter where you are. On the bus, on the tram, on the train. In the grocery store, at the pharmacy, waiting at the crosswalk. On your bike, in a car, I do not care, Sam I am, yer getting stared at and for no apparent reason.

Why? This was the question that perplexed me for what seemed an eternity. What is it about my stupid mug that you find so fascinating you'd stare for ages, not in any way that belied admiration or even curiosity but with what looked to be a sneer on your face, or worse, a complete blank. A poker face. Driving me to insanity with your stupid staring, that's why God gave you ocular muscles, so you can look in any direction you please. Why in mine?

For eons, as I say, the matter disturbed me deeply. I read articles, I argued in forums, I collected testimony from red-blooded Germans. Why do they stare? I'd ask. A litany of unsatisfactory explanations would be the reply:

They're not staring. It is all in your head.

You wouldn't know they were staring if you hadn't been looking at them in the first place. It is a return stare. (bullshit, I only looked cos I could feel their stupid eyes boring a hole into that place where my unibrow used to be.)

They think you're interesting looking. (wtf, I'm not in a zoo, and weren't they ever taught that staring at the clinically "interesting" is rude?)

They think you're pretty. (then why the scowl?)

You're a big black woman in a small German place. (bordering on satisfactory, only heard from one German woman, who now lives in Canada and thus, having escaped the insanity, can look at it from a realistic perspective. Still doesn't explain the lack of manners.)

They don't realize they're staring. (donkey crap, how can you not realize you're staring when you're blinking and scowling at someone who is looking you in your stupid eyeballs)

I've never been stared at, and I'm a super model. That means therefore that no one would bother staring at you if they wouldn't stare at fabulous me. It is all in your head. (fuck. off.)

Who gives a crap if they stare or not? (oh... right.)

The least obvious answer, although I believe it to be the most concrete and provable, came to me when my American friend Allison came for a visit. Lovely as she is, she is hardly remarkable in the sense that one must take a second, third and fourth look, risk being run over in traffic and miss their mouths with their forks when she walks past. Nevertheless, during her entire ten-day stay here in the the Aggro City, she was constantly ogled. For the first time, it became clear why:

She was dripping foreignness.

And not just that simple, sometimes endearing (to the great unwashed hippie German populace) way that the Spaniards have, of seeming to not notice whether the sky is green or caring if a meteor was on a collision-course with the Earth. Also not in the (often despised) lost-in-the-white-man's-world way of African immigrants. But in the fully-awake, casually alert, self-confident way of an American woman, who is used to getting what she wants when she wants it, who believes the sky is the limit and who won't settle for less.

We hardly realize this is how we look to Europeans, who naturally, being beaten down, squashed in and generally resigned to being a short poppy for the rest of their lives, interpret such outward appearance to be merely arrogance. It is impossible for them to know that in other parts of the world, people actually believe they can be as great as they want to be, and deserve respect from their peers until they have un-earned it.

Four years on, I have, more or less, lost this outward appearance entirely. Through a wholly subconscious instinct of survival, I have learned to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. A couple of weeks ago I realized how crappy my posture had become: an inadvertent response to being stared at for walking tall and looking forward. It's strange to the natives to see someone doing this: you must be looking for someone in a crowd, or scanning the buildings for an address. There can be no other possible explanation for looking anywhere other than your shoes whilst walking and bashing into other people like moles in the daylight. (actually I think moles have better navigational capabilities than your average German, whose primary function in life is to obstruct the free movement of other humans in his environment, who, unless are walking like a tall popppy, he does not realize even exist.)

Well, but all of this is irrelevant. When I realize now that someone is staring, I take a simple and satisfying course of action: I don't stare back. I put it out of my mind, and forget about it. A strange method of coping, but it seems to work. And because I don't put out those nasty combative vibes, I receive fewer stares.

Or maybe I'm just getting too old and wrinkly for anyone to bother staring at.

Life is different but kind of the same

2010-09-11T04:35:00.001-07:00

I wonder why we feel the need to explain ourselves to our journals, to our blogs, to our mothers, why we haven't been keeping up contact. Stuff happens. You get it.

After having taught my English course for three weeks, I realized that I had been living in an insane upside-down world for nearly the last year, and decided to quit my day job. Thass right: I did the unthinkable: not out of belief that my (obviously) unlimited powers of English instruction were so unparalleled that I could quit and become Germany's Next English-Teaching Model, but because I had had. Enough.

I've never just up and quit a job like that. I either have something else already lined up, or am leaving the country, or get fired. (cue mirthless laughter) Ha. Ha. But this time was different. This time it was like leaving an abusive lover, one who, while lying and scheming and cheating and beating would pepper his socially unacceptable behavior with more conventional niceties, like lying politely, scheming conspiratorally with you (so that you wouldn't believe he was scheming against you) and claiming to cheat in your best interest.

I found myself working illegally for no good reason, as I am married to a German citizen and have no need to lie to the tax office.

I found myself being literally assualted by my boss, and not because I couldn't find anything better and feared being thrown back on the apple cart I'd been smuggled in on.

I found myself busting my ass and not even getting the respect of a full time employee, and I don't have any masochistic tendencies (that I know of).

So now I am footloose and fancy-free (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean) with a wad of cash burning a hole in my bank account. The jobless panic hasn't settled in yet.

So, diary/blog/mom, sorry I haven't been around. I've had other fish frying my brain for the past year though.

I'll try to call before your next birthday.

Foxes and shooting stars

2010-03-22T02:53:00.000-07:00

I have the best patio ever.

Sure, it's loaded with all sorts of grit, filth and crap, but it's classy crap, mind you. Bourgeois things like potting soil and empty flower troughs and plant experiments and liquor bottles and ashtrays and overflowing shopping bags full of patio garbage, plus three mismatched chairs and a rickety card table. Our apartment is on the ground floor, so the view from there is spectacular. For example, I can watch my neighbors' torsos as they cook--or erm, cut--or erm, do something in the kitchen, and I know when they go for a shower or a shit, and I know how long their children stay awake.

Since the arctic permafrost settled in some six months ago, I haven't been using the patio for anything much really, much less spying on my boring neighbors. It was too cold to smoke, too cold to sit, too cold to stand. The only thing it's been good for since October is keeping beverages cold (hence the liquor bottles). But in the last few days, the temperature has been so humane that we've been sitting out there of an evening and enjoying a non-alcoholic beverage or three.

Night before last, the 'Stoph and I were sitting out there, solving the problems of religion, politics, ethics and the world and gazing into the heavens when the longest, shiniest, sparkliest shooting star you've ever seen bisected the sky. It was so long that we had to actually move our necks as if we were watching a tennis ball being volleyed across a court. There was something magical about sharing that moment, since all the shooting stars I've ever seen have been too short for anyone else to have seen them, unless they'd been looking at the exact same place at the exact same time I was, which has never happened.

Of course, in reality, all we watched was a particularly large and stubborn space-turd entering the Earth's atmosphere at the wrong angle (idiot!) but it did seem to be special at the time.

Last night, I was out there with a book and a Club Maté and a cigarette when out of the corner of my eye I spotted something larger than a cat and smaller than a dog with a longish tail clumsily creeping around on the other side of the lawn. After having seen several of them and even gotten close enough to touch one, I'm not sure why I'm always so surprised to see foxes in our courtyard, but it never fails to catch me off-guard. A mix of fascination and fear compels me to first whistle and click at the fox, then prepare myself for flight in case he decides to charge. Naturally, this has never been the case, as, for whatever reason, foxes do not seem to be aggressive toward humans, at least not in the city.

So the fox and I had a pleasant little stare-down, me clicking and whistling, and he pausing every few seconds to see who the hell was making stupid noises in his courtyard, and me wondering how high he could jump (some of them can even jump over the moon) and whether or not I could slip indoors before he came to chew my scalp off. Then he got down on his belly, out of the floodlight that illuminates the pedestrian path, and slunk off into the moonlit night.

I should really savor and appreciate these sightings while they last, as, in a few months, the most interesting things I'll be seeing in the courtyard are drunkards pissing on our bushes and teenagers fucking, without condoms, in the trees.

Why do you have to make this weird?

2010-03-20T03:23:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been in love with a friend, or had a friend be in love with you? Maybe (hopefully) you were in 10th grade, and although your friend had a boy- or girlfriend, you still hoped beyond hope that one day they would see that their significant other was not really quite as well suited to them as you were. And you fantasized about the day it would happen, the day they would look deep into your eyes and tell you that really, they did know all the time, but they were so terrified of the intimacy that would follow if they acted upon their true feelings, because they've never opened up to anyone the way they've opened up to you, and although you are overweight and not very attractive and have not so many friends and do not drive a car and must be picked up after band practice in your father's 78 Chevy with the red door and the puke green body and there is usually a strange and pungent aroma wafting up from your shoes they find you the most beautiful thing they've ever seen. And then they lean in, and you lean in, and at first you just brush lips, and then your bodies melt into one another's and blah blah blah happily ever after the end Amen.

Hopefully, though, unless you happen to be 14 at the moment, you have moved past such silliness. The friend NEVER leaves his/her girlfriend/boyfriend for you. In fact, it is likely that the friend will go through several relationships during the course of your infatuation and never even once think to look in your general direction for physical intimacy. S/he never thinks you are all that beautiful, and although s/he enjoys your company, s/he really does notice the smell coming from your shoes. For these, and multiple other reasons--the most important being that you two are friends and nothing more--you will never get with the friend.

Friend zone is a very stable place. Unless the two people involved are both wildly, madly in love or hate with one another, friend zone is so constant that any changes undergone are too subtle to be noticed at once. For example, you may grow closer and closer to a friend and find that they are now one of your best friends, while not long ago they were a mere acquaintance. What is not likely to happen is that one day, you turn around and find that you are head-over-heels in love with your friend.

As I say, friend zone is a stable place, so it's only the dreamers, hippies, and other unwashed creative types who believe they can drastically alter its borders or rules.

But what about a good friend, who loves you, and thinks you may cheat, and nudges you and attempts to tempt you into cheating, although you are married? And have been in the same relationship for going on five years?

Is that actually a friend... at all?

I'm starting to wonder if there is a false friend here with me in friend zone.

Like a fish out of um... whiskey

2010-02-10T11:41:00.001-08:00

I "quit" drinking two weeks ago for the following reasons:
I'm not getting any younger,
thinner,
smarter,
more creative,
or more productive
It'll be a bit of a laugh (actually it will quash all laughter from my life from here until the end but don't let's be pedantic about the matter)
Was bored and have tried all the other drugs, thought I might give sobriety a whirl
Forgot what it felt like not to be craving either alcohol, greasy food, sleep and/or ibuprofen at any and all times
Makes me more stupid than I am naturally, contributing to many a face-palmed morning
Stopped actually getting drunk, regardless of amount consumed

The last time I went this long without alcohol, I was doing just fine, until my *clenched teeth* mother-in-law broke out the champagne to celebrate the month-old news of our marriage. I felt somehow sabotaged, but it's not as if she could have known I was attempting to give up the sauce and that turning down a toast in honor of the marriage of her first son would be a faux-pas even someone as gauche and heartless as I could not bring myself to do... could she?

Of course, the second I got a couple sips of bubbly down my throat, all I wanted was just a splash more, and then just a glass more, and then oh fuck it let's just get out a few bottles of the cheaper Chardonnay, shall we? Then the MIL and I had a private, in-the-next-room and half-whispered, inebriated heart-to-heart and I was like, "Oh god, thank you for alcohol, thank you for making this conversation not only bearable but almost even enjoyable. I will want to stab myself through the eyeballs in the morning, but for now I am content."

Not Drinking isn't as hard as I thought it would be, except when stuff like my *new-and-improved!* crazy-pants boss calls me at my house to tell me I've nearly thawed down his establishment (that's a story for another day) or when I've talked to so many customers in the dreaded Krautian tongue and put on so many fake smiles that I fear my brains will bleed out my eardrums and all I want to do is drink away the memories of the day, pass out into blissful oblivion in front of the television, wake up, eat a cold cheeseburger, then pass out for some restless, uncomfortable slumber and wake up puckered with dehydration and craving biscuits and gravy. But other than the self-medicating kind of Drinking, I don't really miss Social Drinking (which, as we know is for Grammas anyway).

Since I've not been drinking, I've been to the library, begun to teach myself how to knit (OK so I ordered a book off Amazon and have been flipping through it the last couple of days--no I don't have any yarn yet, no you fuck off!) and started listening to classical music and bossa nova (two kinds of music known to be enjoyed by cultured and intellectual, non-stupid people the world over). I'm having thoughts and ideas and look, I even wrote a fantastically self-involved blog all about me, me, pathetically struggling to not drink, me which no one will read but that is ok because it is a sign, a sign!--that my brain cells are coming home from the pasture, are waking up from their 40 winks, back with the pack of fags, that they haven't really Gone Away Forever but are going to serve me again in the future. I couldn't be more thrilled.

People look at you funny when you order a fake beer or a mocktail, and if you have the privilege of the company of Irishpeople, you will suffer no shortage of cute comments about your lack of alcohol consumption ya fookin girl, fook me, I taught we was at a poob notter grade school cafeteria, but all in all, it's not been so difficult. I spend the same amount of money in bars and still smell like an ashtray at the bottom of a urinal in a truckstop bathroom after a night out, but I wake up feeling as if I can mingle with humanity without having to wear dark sunglasses or wincing every time someone with an annoying laugh comes too close to my central nervous system.

Now, if I can just give up smoking, swearing, caffeine, and dinner after 8pm, I will be golden.

Aw, How Sweet

2009-12-14T07:30:00.000-08:00

Stupid, stupid Christmas. I now remember why this holiday annoys me so much every year.

Thing is, if I can get out of having to give or receive presents, everything is fine. If all we do on Christmas is get together, cook an enormous meal, drink copious amounts of domestic beer and watch basketball, then all is right with the world. Or we can go to a movie or a diner or have a snowball fight. All of these things make me a happy camper all year long.

What doesn't make me a happy camper is giving gifts. Even receiving gifts can be a pain in the ass. You might be thinking that I mean, when someone gives you a gift that proves they have no idea who you are, or gives you something you already own ten of, that pretending to be blown away by said gift can be annoying. Oh no. This time I mean something much worse.

I mentioned to the 'Stoph that I'd like to have a food processor sometime in the next few years. Ever instinctually inclined toward self-preservation, he carefully asked if a kitchen gadget wasn't the kind of gift that gets husbands the silent treatment until the following Christmas, and I assured him that as cooking is sort of a hobby of mine that I would love to have it any time of the year, even at Christmas.

Then he asks me what kind I'd like. I tell him, the most important thing it should do is puree. Aside from that a bit of fine chopping would be nice but its primary purpose would be to liquify vegetables, squashes and legumes for soups. So then he asks if I want a hand-held one or a stationary one and how big the capacity should be. Tiring a bit of basically picking out my own gift, I wearily tell him what I'd prefer.

But is it over yet? No, it is not over. During the course of the last month, I shit you not, this guy has asked me no fewer than ten times what again it is I want the machine to do. We have now had no fewer than ten several minutes-long conversations about this one stupid machine that is supposed to serve one stupid purpose. Finally he got tired of having to remember the two words, "Pu" and "ree" and asked me to come to the store with him to pick it out.

!!!!!!!

Is that really the way things are done in the normal-people world? Not only do I know exactly what kind of thing I'm getting, but I don't even get to be surprised at all, knowing exactly which model it is? I was blown. away. But, ever the good woman to the depressingly uninspired man, I agreed to go with him to show him the KIND of mixer I'm talking about. So on Saturday afternoon, we planned on going, but wound up sitting around the apartment all afternoon until I had to leave to meet some friends. As I'm getting ready to leave the house, he goes, "So are we going to the store?"

"No, I don't have time now."

(dripping with sarcasm) "Thanks."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No. He. Di'int.

I go, "Sorry, did you just say 'thanks'?"

(groaning cos he knows he's in trouble) "Ayep." (sigh)

Cue neck-gyrating, finger-waving, hands-on-hips, oh-hell-no mini-lecture about how it's bad enough that he can't remember the words "pu" and "ree" but now I get attitude about ruining his whole fucking day because what, it's the end of the world if you don't go today? He has the nerve to respond,

"Well, I just want to get it over with."

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Because you're the only person in the world? If I want my gift I better jump when you say jump? We both sat around the house the same as the other and you KNEW what time I had to leave, oh hell no, you know what? I am so sick and fucking tired of talking about this thing, if I'd have known it would ruin your life to get the damned thing I'd have never mentioned it in the first place. Forget about it. I am so fucking over it. You're on your own. Don't buy it if you don't want to but the dialogue about the fucking thing is OVER.

I can't see the point of raping all the magic away from Christmas by forcing your loved one to do all the work for you. What is the point of buying someone a gift if there is zero element of surprise? If we did things the way he wanted to do them, I'd honestly rather buy the damn thing myself, on my own time, without pressure or whingeing from a grown-ass man. If it's the thought that counts, then he deserves a punch on the nose right about now.

But that's what Christmas does to the unwilling. If it doesn't give you any joy to give gifts, why not just opt out of it? I know I say this every year, but I swear--this is the last year I'm exchanging gifts with ANYONE. I hate it. Hate buying them, and now I even hate receiving them.

After I was done telling the 'Stoph where to shove it, I went out with people who I will hopefully never exchange presents with, and had a jolly good time. The end.

No, Your Mom Is

2009-12-13T02:37:00.000-08:00

I am the picture of Christmas cheer, goddamit.

Last night, a few fellow Americans and I went down to the Christmas market at the Rotes Rathaus (incidentally, the place where JFK made his famously ill-pronounced proclamation of solidarity with the survivors of the war now living in West Berlin, "Ish bean ine Bahleener").

It must be said that they sold absolute tosh, bollocks, rubbish and perhaps a tray of biscuits with a spot of tea, oops sorry back to American English now, anyhow the stuff was crap. Usually there are at least a couple of jewelry stands from whom I'm almost tipsy enough to buy something I don't need, but even completely trashed on the white wine in the plastic cup pictured above and with cold hard cash burning a hole in my pocket, I couldn't be bothered to waste my money there.

Plied wares included: hideous "hand-painted" ornaments, usually centered around a theme of Christmas nightmare, horrid, ugly, frightening things to make you afraid to go to sleep at night: Nutcrackers and goblins (I think they were supposed to be kings or something), animals from the Netherworld, etcetera, all fashioned with a smallish sort of rope thing so as to be attachable to a Christmas tree. Silk scarves in boring patterns and dull colors. Titanium, glass, and rock jewelry. Not a chunky silver ring in sight. "Handmade" slippers, socks and moccasins with the "Made in China" stickers still on them. And lots and lots of overpriced food.

The evening was going well, we were frozen but in good spirits, when apparently I provoked the ire of one middle-aged fatherly looking gentleman by loudly speaking in English, generally obstructing foot traffic and having a huge ass, and he called out, "What a horse!" I turned around to see if someone had been talking to or about me, and there was this guy in his cheap suit, looking back as he walked in the opposite direction, clearly disgusted by my existence on the planet. I looked at him questioningly and he repeated, "Horse!" Lacking the wit or vocabulary with which to form a decent comeback, I cleverly retorted, "SIE sind ein Pferd!" No, you're a horse!

Other than that the night went swimmingly and we stuck with the animal theme a bit, calling each other rhinos, sheep, hippopotamuses and other assorted not-quite-offensive animals.

Then we went to a friend's bar and I got so drunk that I fell asleep on the train, missed my connection and rode all the way to the end of a foreign line, paid €17 for a five-minute taxi ride, babbled incoherently to the 'Stoph and passed out with a cheeseburger in my hand. The end.

What Rhymes With Hiatus?

2009-12-07T11:16:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about you. No, I'm serious. I've missed you, and I think about you all the time, it's just... sometimes you need time for you, you know? I knew you'd understand.

With all the me-time I've been getting lately, I've got enough saved up to be in your face every day for the rest of your life. Don't start celebrating all at once.

Have you ever become so addicted to something that you didn't even realize you were hooked until it was too late and you forgot what you used to do before you discovered it? Like drinking coffee, or smoking cigarettes for example. What did you used to drink when you woke up and wished you could stay in the bed? What did you used to do to distract yourself from the utterly unchallenging repetitiveness that is life in the First World and look cool at the same time? If you're like me, the last time you weren't a coffee addict you were still a child, ditto on smoking, oh God I have spent 11 years of my life chain-smoking and avoiding museums, libraries and hospitals as they tend to not cater to my habit; someone shoot me now--oops, never mind, killing myself anyway.

I knew I liked to argue, but I never imagined that it would take over my life. For the last four months or so, I have been spending every waking moment not filled with eating or sleeping or drinking cheap vodka in shithole bars arguing on an expat site for English speakers in Germany. At first it was merely interesting, a site I checked out to see what else I was missing out on in life. Then I made the mistake of creating a profile, commenting, and etching out an online persona for myself. Then they made the mistake of empowering people to hand out reputation points, for which I shake hands, roll over and dance for like a dog, albeit a feisty, don't-take-no-shit-off-your-white-collar-ass kind of way. Now it has taken over my life. I find I'm finished with my arguments for the day, then have nothing to do--can't even remember what I used to do on the internet, much less what I used to do before I became addicted to it. I stare dumbly at my computer screen, wondering what other buttons I can mash to make something stimulating come up and entertain me for the next 43.7 seconds. While waiting for responses to my absolutely senseless and inane comments, I refresh my Facebook page over and over again until my eyeballs fall out. I blame winter.

I have also been: wondering what it all means, trying to keep my house clean, wondering what it all means, failing at keeping my house clean, wondering what it all means, looking for a job, wondering what it all means, starting a new job, wondering what it all means, keeping up with friends in town and overseas, wondering what it all means, and teaching myself how to make crêpes.

What have you been up to?

If They hate you, and You hate you, then everybody hates you and it's your own fault.

2009-08-29T06:05:00.000-07:00

The gall of some people just chaps my hide. (Oh God, I really am turning into my mother.) Below is a conversation between a 40-year-old professional and a 28-year-old bum about identity, the social relevance of self-esteem, and the limits of the usefulness of self-deprecation, although only one of us is aware of it.

fromNYC, on 29.Aug.2009, 12:52pm, said:

When we were discussing the various perceptions we all had of each other or stereotypes we were familiar with, when it came up that Americans were generally perceived as shallow and overly friendly, there was a general nodding of heads and agreement across nationalities. ...Sad but true, that seems to be the perception not only here in Germany but around the world - that we're always trying to sell ourselves to everyone. And the sad thing is, I can't even say that's an incorrect assessment.

dessa_dangerous, on 29.Aug.2009, 2:26pm, said:

I really don't know what to make of this. You sat in a room full of people who negatively generalized your people--if you're an American, Americans are your people, whether you like it or not--as being shallow and if I may paraphrase, fake, and your reaction was to nod and think passively, "yes, you're right."

The problem with situations like these is that people like you--not that I know you from Adam, but people who say out loud the sort of thing you've just written down--is that they think they are somehow different, somehow exempt. That when the gross generalizations are made that they're about someone else.

No one is done justice when we, rather than disproving stereotypes through action, sit around wringing our hands and feeling superior.

Furthermore, the assessment is inaccurate. America, like any other country, is full of all sorts of kinds of people--good, bad, smart, dumb, shallow, prophetic, etcetera etcetera etcetera. America, unlike some countries, has been the birthplace of some of the greatest works of art, literature, science and medicine introduced in the last 150 years. Of music and ideas and movements. Americans are shallow, my ass. Maybe the people you know are shallow and lead pointless, useless lives. That doesn't mean everyone is or does.

As for whether Americans are overly polite--I'll take overly polite over overly hostile any old day.

No One Cares About Your Birthday

2009-08-16T07:29:00.001-07:00

My 28th birthday is coming up, and I couldn't be any more underwhelmed.

I mean, seriously, who even cares about their birthday at this age? What do you really want? A pile of elaborately wrapped gifts, a sombrero on your head and ten Viva Mexico employees singing Happy Birthday all out of tune at you, and a cake? I mean, who even eats cake anymore?

I think the last year I really gave a shit about my birthday was the year I turned 23. I made flyers and told everyone to show up to a club where DJ Riz was performing, waltzed in completely hammered 1.5 hours late, got wasted on free liquor and (I think) did a bunch of drugs. My skirt fell off while I was dancing and I scampered off the dance floor, a weaving, carmel-colored streak of thundering cellulite and pure embarrassment, to go figure out pinning it back up. Got in a cab and went to go snort some more illicit substances. The end.

Working on your birthday is the best, especially if you work retail or customer service, and even better if you work somewhere familial like the Pike Place Market. Go to work, tell everyone it's your birthday and get free shit all day long. I think I ate about 24 free meals on my 25th and went to the bar with a dollar, with which I stumbled home, shitfaced from free drinks. Wonderful.

My cousin, on her 25th birthday, which was exactly 25 days before mine, decided to throw a "Silver Anniversary" party, where she wore, and requested that her guests wear, silver outfits. I think I wore a blue t-shirt with a pocket on the breast and a patterned skirt. She threw the party at the same place I would have my party a few weeks later, the Noc Noc on 2nd Avenue. Unlike me on my birthday, she decided to get mouthy with the bartenders when they were tired of her pops playing shitty 80s and 90s chart music and told her politely that they wanted to put on their resident DJ so they could actually make some money that evening. The result of her temper tantrum was that she was 86ed for life out of the place until she apologized. The reason for the conniption fit? It was her birthday, and anyone who didn't agree that the world should come screeching to a complete halt on her special day was deserving of any abuse she decided to heap upon them.

Needless to say, I held my party in the same place with no troubles, no mention of cousin, and zero guilt that she assed herself out of being able to attend.

This year, she went again to great lengths to secure a spot for her party and was ejected from it before the night was over. Evidently this time around it was about her guests' poor behavior, but I still find it mind-blowingly lame to get kicked out of your own party at the age of 28. We's not chillens anymore. Get it together.

The 'Stoph found that he had to work the closing shift on my birthday this year and told me that he would do his best to switch days with someone else. I told him in all earnestness that that would not be necessary. He told me that he was not stupid enough to believe the words that had just come out of my mouth and have effectively fucked himself over with no one else to blame when my incredulity-turned-inconsolable-wrath was visited upon him. I didn't know I was perceived as such a diva.

On Thursday evening I plan on having a nice, quiet citronella-candlelight picnic with a couple of friends, going to sleep, and trying not to wake up in tears that I am finally, fully, firmly in my late 20s. I will wear my regular nun attire and do my best not to run out and purchase any knee-high boots or hot-pink mini skirts or put streaks in my hair or show up to any all-ages clubs or anything. I will have one foot closer to the grave and that is the end of it.

But on second thought, some cake might be nice.

Draaaaaaaama

2009-08-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

Fun!

Tried to get online today and found that I couldn't. Tightened all my connections, then tried again, to no avail. Skimmed the German help page in the computer and got told to make sure no one else in the house was on the phone. That brought a small, irritated, non-existent giggle because I live in a shoe box and have only one phone. Out of curiosity, I picked up the phone, which had no dial tone. This is the second time in a month that our phone/internet service has conked out and I am tiiiiiired of it. To call our phone company costs like 55 cents a minute which is tres uncool, mannnn I would really love to quit this piece of shit company. Can you believe that when we signed up for the service, they told us it would take up to nine weeks before it was installed? I laughed, like, "they always give you some silly amount of time to wait before your service is hooked up so you don't clog up their phone lines twice a day wondering where you internet is. Betcha it's here in 48 hours." Nope, we had to wait the entire 9 weeks. Fucking Berlin.

OK but that's not the drama. Drama is, on Friday morning, the 'Stoph and I and his dad are taking off for the Rhine. This has been the plan since Christmas. What was unclear was where we were going to stay. At the moment we are broke and thought that camping might be nice.

A couple of weeks ago at Sunday lunch, the subject of where we were going to sleep came up. Everyone else attending this event (the entire family paying a last visit to a relative who has been dying for like 10 years) is staying in the same hotel. The 'Stoph's mom offered ages ago to put us up in a hotel, but like I said, we were thinking of camping anyway, for example, somewhere near a canoe rental, and canoeing around a bit.

But it had been raining all summer, and the hotel everyone was staying at looked nice, so I told the 'Stoph that I thought we should take up his mom on her offer to book us a hotel room.

All of this negotiation was going on in German, and then finally, the 'Stoph turns to me and asks how I'd like to camp in his cousin's yard. There are several problems with this:

I don't know his cousin from Adam, and for that matter, neither does he. But at least he's met him. I don't like staying in the homes of people I don't know, or in their yards, or whatever. It's weird. I feel like a conspicuous elephant; you're forced to be über fakey polite. Gross.
Camping is great and all but it is a dirty act. You're filthy and sweaty, everything smells like grass; even after you get out of the shower/river there are things stuck to you. This is fine in the middle of nowhere, but I don't really fancy the idea of walking into someone's nice home to take a dump or make a cup of tea and there they are all clean and normal and there I am looking homeless. Makes me feel like a field-slave running an errand in the plantation house, no thanks.
Pitching a tent in someone's yard? I haven't pitched a tent in a yard since I was 10, and then, the yard was my own, and the tent was actually an old sheet hung over the laundry line and held in a triangle shape with stones, and I didn't sleep in it. My neighbors didn't think I was weird because I was a kid playing in my yard, but we are nearing thirty and it's pathetic to be itinerant in the city.
So what is his cousin trying to say? Sure, you can chill in my yard but I'm not letting you sleep in here. What are we, dogs? Are you telling me that you don't have a couple square feet in your living room where we can lay out some sleeping bags? It's fine if you don't want guests sleeping in your place but I don't want to be cast out into the yard like a stray; what if I have to use the toilet in the middle of night? Are you going to leave the door unlocked or do we have to crawl in through the pet door?

So I turned and said to him, in English (which shows how annoyed I was, because I usually speak German in their house as a sign of respect): "I told you already what I wanted to do."

Crickets. Evidently this answer was not satisfactory. Another cousin present at the meal, Jul, said, "No answer?" Yes motherfucker that was my answer, although it wasn't all of it. I omitted the bit about how I was perfectly OK to stay in Berlin and finish up some work before my seminar and hang out with people I actually know who are actually not dying, but I left that bit out. Mom could tell I didn't want to stay in any fucking tent in some stranger's yard, so she said she would arrange something for us in the hotel. Relief.

Short-lived though it was. Papa slammed down his fist and yells that she won't be arranging anything. Forget that he hasn't worked in 12 years and has no say over what the woman does with her own money. Mom says nothing. I am appalled.

Later on, I tell the 'Stoph that it's not a big deal, he can go alone and I won't be mad. But under no circumstances am I sleeping in someone's yard. He says, don't worry, we will figure everything out. Love.

Even later, Jul drags me into an adjoining room and tells me that he and Mom will arrange for us to stay in a hotel, but not to tell Papa or the 'Stoph. OMG. How old are we? Mom, day-drunk off white wine, whispers loudly in my ear several times that she is going to take care of everything and not to tell Papa. Yeah, he can probably hear you himself.

Next day, Mom calls us up and says everything's arranged but that we have to keep it a secret. If Papa asks who paid for the hotel room, we're to say that I paid for it. Hello? I have like five cents to my name and he knows that. He wasn't born yesterday, were you?

Keep in mind that the youngest person involved in any of this is me, aged 28. Mom is fifty-fucking-seven and Papa is sixty-fucking-two. Unbelievable.

Safe to say, the ten-hour drive across Germany with the 'Stoph's father is going to be an interesting side-show. I think I will feign a complete lack of comprehending the Teutonic language.

For the sake of brevity I will abruptly end here.

Wow, I'm (still) a Commie

2009-08-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

Way, way, back in the day, I used to actually attend Socialist meetings. I used to argue for revolution, for taking power out of the hands of the rich and putting it into the average Worker. I also didn't used to believe that age makes you more conservative.

Now I believe that not age, but experience, makes you more conservative.

I participated in a worldwide political opinion poll and was able to compare my results to people in any demographic. It was AMAZING. Over the years, my views have softened considerably. How's that saying go? Have an open mind, but not so open that any old thing can fly into it? Something like that. Seattle is full of "hand-wringing liberals" and I ain't one of those.

What's true is:

I don't believe abortion should be illegal, or that any restrictions against it should have anything to do with anything except the development of the fetus. For example, I am against third trimester aborting, unless it jeopardizes the health of the mother and the child.

I don't give two shits of pot gets legalized or not. Pot is absolutely not essential to the average person's life. If you really like it so much, then grow some if it becomes illegal. It is simply not possible to eradicate the United States of marijuana, nor do I think it necessary, nor do I think it would be the end of the world. It would just be. The potheads would have to take up another hobby; the video game and frozen burrito industries would collapse. Boohoo.

I believe in the freedom of speech. This means that I don't think it's the government's job to regulate what we see on television, hear on the radio or read in books. It also means I don't think it should be illegal to use racial slurs. Slurs don't make the racist, racists make the slurs. I don't think suppression is the key to progress.

I believe in the right of responsible Americans to own guns. I used to be extremely anti-gun until I picked up a history book. Taking away people's arms makes them absolutely at the mercy of the government. If the majority of the people want to revolt they will need weapons. Yes, life is pretty good in the United States, but if the neo-cons were to get their way, in a few decades we would either face a totalitarian state or be forced to revolt. No one likes to think of that because most of us haven't lived through a war, but sometimes it is necessary to defend oneself against one's own government. Truth.

Access to health care should be a benefit of living in an industrial nation, but I won't say that it is a right. I think it is incredibly arrogant to claim that it is an inalienable right; in most of the world, western medicine is a luxury. I believe people spend waaaayyyy too much time at the doctor's office and not enough time exercising, eating well, drinking water and meditating. Too much time working and watching television, too little time engaging themselves in activities that interest them. Of course you have high blood pressure and a bad back, of course you're fat, of course you're a walking health disaster, look at your life.

Don't drive cars if you don't have to, don't start wars over anything--ANYTHING, give the world a coke, etc.

I thought I was becoming a serious neo-con in my old age, especially concerning illegal immigration and gun rights. But in every demographic group I checked, from 70-year-old white Alabamans (who by the way are much more liberal than the mainstream media would have you believe) to 25-year-old San Franciscans, I am several points more commie pinko in comparison. I mean, who doesn't agree with everything I wrote above? I'd say communist bastards but apparently even they think violence in video games should be regulated by the government.

Sigh... there is no hope for me. I think I will go buy some red shirts and combat boots now.

2009-08-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

(Right: Someone is a [bilingual] master of irony. "Gehwegschäden" means "the sidewalk is all fuckered up", an extremely predictable state of affairs in a town like Berlin which to this day bears the scars from its lunchroom foodfight with the Russians in WWII.)

Mauerpark is a horrible little place--dusty, meagerly sprinkled with sparse grass and liberally coated with drunken degenerates. But on Sundays, it hosts the city's most popular flea market.

Me following two random strangers around the park.

Laura loves Astra, even when it's the pussy 5% one. I know €1,50 for 12 ounces of beer doesn't sound like much money for a beer to y'all living stateside, but you can get a half-liter bottle for €0,35 at the grocery store that'll blow your MGD to hell. People in the first world wouldn't dream of patronising a graffiti-covered dollhouse but here it's all about street cred. That filthy little box is laughing all the way to the SpardaBank.

After trying, and failing, to find a suitably cheap and tacky birthday gift for Brigid "Dessie's Got to Do the Rage" Lynch I gave up and just wandered around trying to make sense of all the useless shite in boxes. Anyone have the first clue what this ceramic pooch could be used for? Don't get me wrong, it's ugly enough to be a home embellishment, but it was clearly manufactured with a purpose in mind.

You know when you start getting trophies like this it's time to get a day-job.

Who. On. Earth! would buy this creepy little busted-ass Chucky doll for their kid? Not even the gypsies wanted it (that's why they donated it).

Chucky and me awake...
Chucky and me asleep.

Nice.
But not nicer than the unflappable tooth. Fuck I love this guy.

Different day, obviously. Cookie reckoned you'd have to stand on another person's shoulders in order to sling a bike up there like that, but I reckoned you'd just have to be taller than 5'2" and have the testosterone of five bulls coursing through your 15-year-old veins.

The normies playing foosball. Just to be stuck on myself? My team won every game except one. Then I decided to take on Cookie and Graham on one side, me on the other side, and WON SINGLEHANDEDLY, end score 4-10. That's because I'm the Juggernaut, bitch.

Can you believe that enormous blonde dude had never played foosball before? I guess they focus more on wrangling crocodiles in Australia than manipulating bits of plastic back and forth over a mini-soccer field, the fresh air-loving communists. He's a computer game nerd though and turned out not to be half bad.

Well, four hours later and my awesome video didn't upload. I hate you, internet.

A Cop Gave Me Food Poisoning

2009-07-31T02:34:00.000-07:00

(Right: the grass looks that nice precisely because you're not allowed to grill there.)

Well, at least we didn't get a ticket.

What I did get was: two first degree burns, two long slashes of stinging nettle (which for some reason appear to have left a scar), an ambiguous bug bite, and food poisoning.

To my own credit I must say that I knew--I knew! that we were probably not supposed to grill in Treptower Park. As we sat there, grilling away, I imagined that everyone else in the park was watching us, clucking their tongues, dialling the Ordnungsamt or worse, the police. I couldn't remember ever once being at a barbecue in this park, and a quick survey of the grass revealed very few burn marks. There was nowhere to put out coals.

But we figured, how often do the cops make their way down here? Never, eh? Where are they even going to come from?

And I suppose the chicken had been out for a while even before Officer Friendly showed up. As a matter of fact, if Cookie had gotten her way, it would have sat out even longer. On a beautiful day like this
temperature around 78°, yr chicken probably needs to be refrigerated. Mine was out for at least two hours before it got slapped on the grill, and the rest of it went on considerably later.

I was just putting the garnishes on my second poison burger when the cop car pulled up. Here you can see the little road, which I would never have believed wide enough for an entire police vehicle:
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the silver and green vehicle and continued slathering curry ketchup and salad onto my burger.

"Are we in trouble?" I asked Cookie, neither looking up from my burger nor turning around.

"Yeeeaaaah, it looks like it," she said, just as nonchalantly.

The cop gets out and introduces himself, then tells us that we are grilling in a protected area and that he won't give us a ticket this time but to beat it. There is another grillplatz near Bulgarische Straße if we'd like to go up there. We say thanks, he says have a nice day. Graham and I are trying to figure out what to do with the grill and its freshly lit coals. For a minute it looked as if we were going to just extinguish it with water and start anew, but I piped up and said I knew where Bulgarische Straße was and that I bet we could just carry the grill to the new place.

Bulgarische Straße turned out to be further than I had remembered and when we got there we still couldn't find the grillplatz and kept walking. By this time, the grill was spitting embers and I had one burn on my right hand. As the sidewalk narrowed, Graham had to push into me a bit to avoid knocking the cyclists off their bikes and inadvertently wound up pushing the fiery hot grill into my forearm, giving me another two-inch long burn. As I flinched from that, I unfortunately dug my left arm into a thicket of nettle, which left two long slashes across my tricep.

All the while, Cookie, Jarral and Jason are still at the park. Graham and I are carrying the grill while Michael pushes my bicycle. Once Gra and I found a place in the woods to put down the grill--a dark, unfriendly place with no grass on which to lay out a blanket, no sunshine, just woods--I cycled back as quickly as possible to the rest of the party. On my way, I noticed that we'd passed the intended grillplatz, which did indeed have grass and sunshine and ponies and shit. So I got the rest of the gang, led them to the new spot, the cycled back to Michael and Graham and told them where the new spot was, then cycled back to the new spot and ate a ton of poisoned chicken, from which Graham and I both suffered abdominal cramping and diarrhea all the next day. Total cycling and lugging time was somewhere around 2.5 hours--the cop first came around four and we settled down in the new spot around six thirty. Then we went to a bar. The end.

Good Neighbor or Meddling Busybody?

2009-07-28T05:48:00.000-07:00

I'm laying in bed, no idea what time it is. The tail end of yet another disturbing dream is still in the foreground of my mind; I can still see traces of it when I open my eyes. But piercing through the gossamer fantasy, rousing me to consciousness, is a brutal yet unshocking dose of reality.

The neighbor is bashing his lady again.

No, let me not lie. I'm not sure if he's actually bashing her. The screaming usually starts in the mornings, before he goes to work. While I can hear every word he says, I can't actually understand it. At my request the 'Stoph once listened closely enough to make out that the neighbor--we'll call him Gunder since that's his name--seemed to be upset that the woman has no job and does nothing all day. Sits around the house, makes excuses for why she can't employ herself, blah blah blah.

The woman responds in the most horribly high pitched whine ever. It's the same high-pitched whine she uses when they're engaging in one of their two-hour-long fucking sessions. Her voice would be enough to drive any man insane, but that's no reason to scream at the lady. Just tell her to get out.

Which is exactly what he does. Once, after a particularly heated eviction (Gunder kept telling her to get out, to just get out, to get the fuck out now, what the fuck are you still doing here? I told you to get the fuck out) I saw her moving girly-type furniture out of the house--a vanity mirror, the type of upholstered armchair no self-respecting potbellied biker dude in his 40s would dare have in his home, an unidentifiable object made of wicker. Soon after that I was subject to the familar yet nauseating sound of them having sex, and not long after that I saw them walking peacefully together like a happy couple.

Usually when he starts screaming, the first thing you think is, "Wow, that dude is really pissed about something. I wonder what it is?"

Then you think, "Man that chick's voice is annoying."

Then the screaming escalates, with the man getting louder and the woman maintaining her volume, but obviously protesting and you wonder, "What the hell did she do to piss him off so badly?"

Then you can hear the screamer moving about the apartment, repeating himself, refusing to allow anything the woman says to mollify him. And you begin to think, "This guy has an anger issue."

Then you realize it is only the eleventy-seventieth time you've been subjected to this nonsense and you wonder, "Why don't they just end it? We are in our 20s and we've never screamed at each other like this, even once, and we live in a tiny shoebox of a flat, while theirs is literally four times the sizs of ours. Can't they find some way to get along? Why would either of them stay in a situation that is so obviously not working out? What a couple of douchebags... grown ass people who can't figure out how to manage their lives. They deserve each other."

Then you hear the first crash and you think, "....."

And you shut off your stupid judgmental brain and listen very carefully.

The screaming continues after the first crash, but the man's voice takes on a higher pitch. He has worked himself up in a frenzy. Crash, boom, shatter. The woman's voice is not to be heard.

And you wonder, "Maybe I should call the police."

Today, after he was finished verbally and perhaps physically bashing his lady, he slammed the door on the way out of the house and I could hear her through the wall, crying to herself, pathetically, self-pityingly. Part of me can't understand why she would stay--they have no children together and as far as I know haven't been a pair for longer than a year or so. Why wouldn't she cut her losses and just get out?

The other part of me understands that sometimes weak people can't help themselves out of harmful situations. I don't understand it deeply or well, but I understand that other people understand it, and I can respect it despite its incomprehensibility.

I know that there are people who read this blog although they don't comment. If you've made it this far, can you do me a favor and give me your unbiased opinion? I am considering taking some sort of action. A good friend thinks that if I write a letter telling the man that we can all hear him and that if the fighting continues the cops may have to be called, Gunder will perceive it as a threat and take it out on his woman. She also thinks that the man will just shrug and think I should mind my own business. I thought of including as an addendum in the note that it is his business if he wants to scream his head off all day during daylight hours and that I understand we all have complications in our relationships sometimes, but that if he is indeed hitting his woman then I am obliged to intervene, regardless of the fact that I don't know either of them from Adam. The note would be anonymous.

Even if this will be your first and last comment I'd be really grateful for your opinion.

P.S. I went to the party last night and didn't drink a drop.

You Can Eat All the Dust You Like

2009-07-27T06:07:00.000-07:00

(The title is a Little Britain reference; if you've never seen the show you need to make a date with YouTube, pronto.)

It's weird the stuff that's considered "healthy" just because it's not "bad for you". Everyone agrees that anything deep-fried or with a ton of sugar in it is "bad for you" although that's complete bollocks. As someone who's struggled with her weight for all of her adult life and has lost 50 pounds in the last two years can tell you, the key to changing your eating habits and thus changing your life is to enjoy everything in moderation.

There are some things that people enjoy in moderation that they really shouldn't--such as cocaine, cigarettes, reality TV, and extramarital affairs--but no single food is going to ruin your figure. As anyone with half a brain knows, the key is to eat well.

A friend of mine constantly refers to everything I do as "healthy"--working out, drinking water, eating salad. Only one out of three of those things is healthy. I drink just enough water not to die, OK, well, I drink enough water that I don't wish I would die (somewhere around 5 liters a day), and eating salad is, well, eating salad. Everyone knows that it's all about what you put on the salad, but at the end of the day, a few kernels of corn, some feta cheese, a couple shreds of carrot, a bit of tomato and four tablespoons of oil and vinegar are not significantly contributing to your overall health. Lettuce is nothing. Salad is... nothing.

You also cannot eat a salad to "cancel out" "bad" foods. Recently, at an Italian restaurant, this friend placed her order: Pizza Delo Chef, an order of cheese bread (the exact same size as a pizza, except without tomato sauce or toppings) and a half liter of house red. I placed my order next: Salami and mushroom calzone, tomato salad, and half a liter of house white. Friend's jaw dropped as if I'd just figured out the last digit of pi--"Salad! So healthy, aren't you good? Shit, I should have gotten a salad too!" She then waits until the server is finished taking down orders and changes her own. I was impressed with her spontaneous display of willpower until she opened her mouth and ordered the salad as well as cheese bread and pizza. I looked at her and made some sort of joke about how now she's got bad plus bad plus neutral and she looked back and replied in all earnestness that the salad was going to cancel out the cheese bread.

(This is the same person who drank like a fucking fish until I told her that a bottle of wine contains as many calories as a medium-sized meal. She literally had no idea that there were calories in alcohol. She still drinks like a fish, but has taken to eating more salad in hopes of combatting her budding obesity.)

I can't remember now what my point was, other than "hahahaha!! Point and laugh at those who I am better than" but I guess that's what happens when you try to blog everyday... they can't all be gems.

OK I will invent an artifical point. I'm not even that much of an internet nerd and even I use the internet to my advantage when it comes to educating myself about nutrition and fitness. I find it incredible how many people share the mindset that if you do a couple of things right, everything else will be cancelled out. In short, if you want to stay healthy and active, you're going to have to do a whole hell of a lot more than watch Billy Blanks every blue moon and eat one salad per six cheeseburgers with fries and Coke.

2009-07-26T04:51:00.000-07:00

Ack! Today is the birthday of two people close to me--the cousin mentioned in a previous blog, and an Irish girl I met here a couple years ago. Tomorrow Brigid "Dessie's Got to do the Rage" Lynch is having her birthday drinks at a bar in a neighborhood I adore and it will be a huge challenge to stay sober.

Not that I've exactly made a Herculean effort--a couple days ago I gave drinking for 12 hours my all, and succeded wildly. Made it from 2pm to 3am without a break and without passing out, although there were a couple of cups of coffee, a few liters of water, and two heavy meals thrown in there for good measure.

So far, from what I've seen of the Irish in Berlin, stereotypes about Celtic drinking habits are not that unfounded. After one of their favorite bars closed its doors forever, the former employees are now scrambling for work in other Irish bars staffed entirely by their friends, and one is even going home. After eight years of living in Berlin and having a child with a German woman, he is packing it up--life is simply not worth living if he can't go down to Murray's and have a bit of a craic with his mates.

Tomorrow night will be a true test of my dedication to pretending not to drink. I will be around people who are piss-drunk, people I don't know all that well, which never helps. Also, truth be told, I might just have a better time with a few drinkies.

The problem with that is that all I'd be having is a fake good time.

I can still remember, way, way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, before television or electric toasters or democracy or the internet and before I was a career alcoholic--so about 1999 or so, that I was perfectly able to engage in great conversations, to dance, sing, laugh and embark on adventures stone sober. After having gone through my pot phase, my cocaine phase and my current alcoholic phase however, it's become nearly impossible to imagine doing all the things I used to do without a bit of help. After the cocaine phase ended, I literally could not sit in a room with anyone--even people with whom I'd been well-acquainted for years--without drinking something. I also could not smoke pot. Something had changed in my brain, I felt that I was actually differently wired than I was before.

Re-wiring my brain to go back to its default settings will take some time and effort, and I won't get any further by going tomorrow night and drinking myself into a good time.

I suppose we'll all find out in Tuesday's blog how it went tomorrow night.

2009-07-25T07:47:00.000-07:00

I love going to the gym. No, scratch that, I love working out at the gym. Cycling there in the rain is not my favorite part of it.

Tons of people smarter, more active, and more creative than my good self despise going to the gym. They say it's boring, repetitive, rote. They'd rather jog outdoors, play tennis, swim, rock climb or hike.

I love all of those things too (with the exception of jogging--bleh) but they're not suitable as regular, 3-5x a week workouts for a Neurotic Nelly like me. The reason both the 'Stoph and I like gymming it up is exactly because it is so repetitive and predictable.

It's never raining in the gym. No one (usually) is staring at you in the gym. Everyone else is sweating and grunting; no one is picnicking or playing acoustic guitar or sunbathing. You don't have to be rich or buy a nice outfit or be fearless when it comes to heights or buy any special equipment. You don't have to wax your bikini line or smell like chlorine for the next two days. You never have to wonder if you got a good enough workout, if you burned enough calories, whether your ratio of aerobic to anaerobic was correct. Working out in the gym is methodic and efficient for people with specific goals and a fear of embarrassing themselves in public.

Besides the convenience and comfort of working out in the gym, there are also a ton of steroid-inflated, full-body waxed, orange-tanned men to stare at and you hardly see any of those while rock climbing or mountain biking.

Eventually, I want to get to the point where I am working out occasionally in the gym and getting most of my exercise by doing some cool outdoorsy type sport... but not until I look good in a leotard. Looks like I'll be regularly hitting the gym until, oh, 2016. Sigh.

Lots and Lots of Paint on Everything

2009-07-24T05:01:00.000-07:00

Oh God. Yesterday I met up with Laura at 2pm and started drinking immediately, urgently. In a sense, it's her fault, because she was a living, breathing human being who happened to be there, and although she didn't consume any alcohol until much later, her presence served to justify my behavior, as I wouldn't have drunk on my own. Thanks a lot bitch. We took a walk, sat in a park, ate lunch, and sat in another park, where, thinking some lovely green leaves were either strawberries or mint, put them up to my nose to smell them and immediately realized that they were stinging nettle. The tip of my nose burned and tingled for the next six hours. Then I invited another friend of ours (Brigid "Dessie's Got to Do the Rage" Lynch) to meet us at my house, where we ate, drank, and chain-smoked until 3am. Fun. Laura stayed over for the night, then woke up at an ungodly hour and dragged her alcohol-soaked carcass into work. I slept for three more hours then took a walk around the neighborhood. This is what I saw:

At first I thought it was some sort of rescue ladder until I realized it's extending from a moving truck, not a fire engine. Apparently I'm not the only one who has little trouble moving furniture into an apartment, to later be baffled by my inability to get it back out. You just heave it over the balcony instead of taking an ax to it. Good thing to remember for next time.

Germans are so. weird. with their little stuffed animal obsessions. First all over the backpacks of 50-year-old women, now on their own lattice frame on the patio.
My name is Odessa, and I approved this message.

This is on my street! I feel so... urban. Also, in black, it says, "Nazis aufs Maul," which, literally translated, means "Nazis on the mouth". I have to find out what the hell that means.

Weigandufer.
I can't tell if this is graffiti, or if the building used to a midget-in-a-teacup factory.
OK, this was creepy. Santa here is hanging from the rearview mirror of one of those psycho trucks. You know the ones I mean, the ones that are literally crammed to the ceiling with clothing, odds and ends, and plain old garbage. Like the home of a packrat, except one who lives in his car. The air freshner was "New Car Smell" and I somehow couldn't get over the irony of someone trying to pass off New Car Smell in a 30-year-old landfill on wheels.
A playground next to a school.
I know what you're thinking, that it's some sort of circus school, but it's not. Evidently it's just a really, really bad school where no one attends so you have to sort of trick them into thinking school is somehow fun.
Yeah. Um.
Someone likes blue. I do have to say that this bike is looking a little fresh and so clean-clean with its allover blue paint job (even the basket) but then again I have to wonder if these were the only colors the bike thief had in his garage.
Another cake building... sigh... I'd love to live in one if the cellars didn't look like dungeons and they weren't all haunted.
Pretty patios. Unconventional but pretty.
A former beer barden.
I think cobblestones look soooooooo pretty in the rain... best is in the rain at night.

The handiwork of yet another blue-obsessed person.
I put this one in here just to freak your eyeballs out. The other angles were so bad even I couldn't deal with it.
House.
Hermannstraße. This last one I took right after exiting Hasenheide, one of (in my opinion) Berlin's most beautiful parks. Unfortunately for me and everyone who loves it, it is full of African drug dealers. In general I don't mind drug dealers, especially when they're just selling weed, but these guys are aggressive, they follow you, ask your name, etc. Everywhere I went they were there; I haven't seen so many black folks in one place since the time I got drunk at the hair shop.

Then it started pissing down rain and a lightning bolt cracked so close to my house that the apartment was full of a bright white nuclear flash and I stood stock still, terrified. I was cooking a meal and not sure if you're supposed to touch anything metal while there's an electrical storm going on so I just kind of kept standing there, undecided. Sounds like a good diet; I should move to somewhere that has a lot of thunderstorms.

More like P-Üno

2009-07-23T01:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not much a reviewer, because I don't consume the kinds of things people like to read reviews about--I don't buy CDs or DVDs, I don't drink in expensive scene bars or eat at upscale restaurants with star chefs, and I don't go to the cinema unless there is a movie I really, really want to see.

I'm not sure why I wanted to see Brüno so badly--probably because I am in love with Sacha Baron Cohen and want him to be the father of my children. I didn't see Borat the film, but I adored him on the Ali G show. Also there is a Brüno promo poster plastered all over Berlin which mesemerizes me; I stare at it everywhere and think, "If only."

The theater was packed. We had high hopes in the beginning of the film. The first twenty minutes or so are good--really funny stuff. Cohen messes with people who are in ridiculous positions--patronizing models and talent agents and the like. Later on, he interviews an actual terrorist, which I found to be the highlight of the film. Good, solid Ali G style piss-taking.

But then he moves on to people like Ron Paul and Paula Abdul, people who, while I don't have much time for their politics or drug-addled reality show performances, are Real People with agendas in the Real World. I liked the bit with the gay converter, but for the most part, all Cohen did was force other people to feel very, very uncomfortable, which made me feel very, very uncomfortable.

Some people deserve to be made fun of. Models, terrorists, rednecks, swingers and the parents of child actors and models. But I think he took it too far with some of his victims, beyond the boundaries of good taste or entertainment. It's not often that I am stunned by the crudity of another person, but there were times when my mouth hung open and I covered half my face with my hands. Several times, I wished I'd had the nerve to just cover my eyes, but I figured that as I'd paid to watch the thing, I might as well get my money's worth. I left the film feeling drained and uneasy and relieved that I'd only spent €5 on the show.

So that's my review. Go see Brüno if you have a really strong stomach, oh, and if you don't mind a talking penis and several comedic but explicit sex scenes.

Postbank is (not) for Lovers

2009-07-22T07:12:00.000-07:00

Before I moved to Berlin, I hadn't had a bank account in years. The explanation for that is simple enough: as a teenager I'd fucked up my Washington Mutual account, owed them a hundred bucks or so, and decided to cash my paychecks at my employers' banks for the following seven years, until the debt was erased. I wasn't the world's most responsible 17-year-old, that's for sure.

But when I got to Germany, I quickly learned that no one believes in paychecks. There is no such thing as "automatic deposit", it's called "getting paid." Almost without exception, employees are paid on the first of the month, which of course always reminds me of my free lunch-, medical coupon- and foodstamp-assisted childhood. Back home, the first week of the month is when all the blacks, Mexicans and toothless, illiterate white people descend upon Macy's, McDonald's and the liquor store. The last week of the month is the busiest then for hock shops and the return counter at Target. But in German hip-hop there are no lyrics about the "first of the month". More like, the "line-up at the Arbeitsamt".

(If you don't like my race "jokes", you don't have to read. Just to put that out there.)

The 'Stoph dragged me kicking and screaming to the Postbank, which is a combination of the national postal service and the world's worst savings bank. Because I was 25 when I arrived, I was supposed to get a service-charge free "youth" bank account. For reasons best known to themselves, Postbank started charging me immediately for their services, which include:

holding my money
transfering my money
not crediting me any interest on my money
avoiding talking to me about my money
frowning and clucking when I ask to talk about my money
telling me that my problem is not their problem
being absolutely useless, condescending dicks

My bank card doesn't work. It's brand new, was sent to me because my last bank card mysteriously stopped working. I haven't told them about it because I am terrified of having to go inside and talk to someone about it, someone who will roll their eyes and make me feel about one inch tall for having ruined their day with my petty inconveniences. The card only doesn't work at Postbank, my very own bank. But luckily for me, Postbank is part of a large network of banks and I can take money out of any of them without charge. However, if I need any services, I have to go inside my bank and deal with all of the dragons that work there.

I have never had a nice experience at Postbank. You want to know why I stay there? Because I am too afraid of dealing with the hassle of closing my account. No bullshit. I am staying at my bank because staying with it is less painful than dealing with a human being in order for me to leave it. Pathetic.

Last month I transferred some money to a translator for work she through the mail. A few days ago she emailed me to check if I had indeed transferred the money. I scanned my bank statement with her name on it and sent it to her. Too late, I realized that the sorting code was wrong.

Craaaaaaaap.

I put it off for a few days, then mustered up all my courage and tiptoed into my bank. The conversation went like this:

Odessa: (prepared with bank statement, correct numbers, and cheerful voice) Hello! I made a transfer last month that didn't go through because the sorting code was entered wrong. [I omitted the bit about how I never do anything with numbers without triple, quadruple checking it. There is literally no way in the world that the fault was mine.] I'd like to know if the money has been sent back to my account, or if I will need to transfer it again.

Useless Postbank Assmonkey: (gruff) This is from last month.

O: Yes

UPA: You need to call this number on the bottom here. I don't have time to deal with this.

O: (cheerfulness gone, pointing to computer) You can't look it up and tell me?

UPA: This is from last month. Why did you wait so long to deal with it? Not my problem anymore. Call this number.

O: I didn't know there was a problem until last week, when the woman who was supposed to receive the money emailed me and told me she hadn't.

UPA: Well, it's from last month. Don't you have online banking [a service you have to sign up for, one more pain in the ass]? I can't help you.

O: (not understanding his preoccupation with the fact that it happened last month, other than that he was making a moral judgment about my lack of personal fastidiousness) Are you sure?

UPA: Yes.

O: (with a light tone of anger in voice) I find it absolutely unbelievable [pause for effect] that I can walk into my own bank [pause] and ask a question about my account [pause] and be told that you cannot answer that question. I don't believe you.

UPA: ... (takes my information, walks ten feet away, makes a couple of phone calls, digs up some paperwork, tells me to sign here and have a nice day.)

I won! I won! I can't believe I won! Or that I'm right about them being deliberately unhelpful. Hmm. Maybe it is time to switch banks. Now that I know I can dooo eeet.

Cross-Dressing in Other People's Clothing

2009-07-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

The last time I wore high heels was in 1997. The theme of the dance was One Sweet Day; I think it was a "Tolo", whatever that means.

As usual, I had no date. Bopping around the school cafeteria were me and my chunky heels and my crush with a freshman girl called Melissa and 60 spindly high school boys, none of whom looked to the 6-foot-tall-without-heels, 300 pound girl for a dance. I wore a dress bought for me by my mother, in which I had recently accepted a literary award, and never wore after that night. I don't remember what it looked like, probably because it wasn't important--the shoes are what I remember best about that evening.

I danced and danced, then took a drink of water and kept dancing. I did not sit out even one song. At the end of the night I called my mother and she picked me up in her '79 Volare, a former police car with dirty adhesive in the form of a governmental serial code along the side. Scraped out of the adhesive were the names of various neighborhood kids who made their mark with housekeys and the edges of bottle caps and dirty fingernails. I rode home in my mother's car, in my chunky heels, while the other girls--Melissa included--rode to the beach, or to their date's house, in late-model Camaros and Ford pickup trucks with flawless paint jobs.

My prom came and went. Lara, my best friend at the time, and I, went to a Blood Brothers concert instead. Not that anyone had asked me anyway. The shoes sat, undisturbed since Tolo, in my closet next to the cat box, sprinkled with kitty litter and collecting dust.

Twelve years later, I don't own a single pair of girly shoes. Not even a pair of canvas Chinatown flats with plastic flowers. I own two pairs of flip flops, two pairs of athletic shoes, one pair of leather penny loafers sent to me by my Gramma who has no clue how unfashionable they are, and a pair of green knock-off Crocs with a hole in the ball of the right foot.

I own five or six dresses, all of them light, summery things, nothing one could wear to a wedding or funeral or even a job interview.

The vast majority of my considerably un-vast wardrobe consists of men's pants and shirts and women's pants and shirts in a masculine cut. One time I asked the 'Stoph if he cared that I didn't girly up for him, and he said, "Nah. I think women in men's clothes are hot. It emphasizes their femininity." I know, right? Did you ever hear such a crock of shit?

That's what I thought til I tried on Michael's sport jacket the other day. I loved the cut, the feel of the fabric, the pinstripes. Incredibly, I actually did feel sexier than I did while I was sitting around drinking beer out of a backpack and trying not to freeze my calves off in my capri pants. I experienced a sudden urge to grab the nearest microphone and start drawling something about never going back to my baby in a convertible at sunset or something.

Am I an undercover lesbian, or do I just really enjoy men's clothing? I have fantasized about buying men's chonies, because they look comfortable, like you'd never have to pull them out of your asscrack. I like men's pants because they usually have a straight-leg cut, which is good for a body type like mine, and I like men's button-down shirts, because I prefer the buttons on the other side.

If I ever showed the above photo to my mom I'm sure she'd join a Loved Ones of the LGBTQ group and start calling me KD. Very funny, mom. You can stop sending me knee-high pantyhose and ankle-length Mormon granny skirts now... I think I'll wear a suit and tie to my next funeral.

Doodooing into Cyber Space

2009-07-20T01:18:00.000-07:00

I think I need to blog more. There are a few blogs that I read religiously, that are utter crap, but I just can't not read them. In the interest of discretion and tact, I'll omit the names of the bloggers. One of them is a popular relationship blogger whose posts have as much depth as a Dear Abby column. Another is a self-absorbed alcoholic woman-child who has definitely something worthwhile to say, but is too busy taking 28379371 shots of herself in front of a dirty mirror to bother writing any of it down.

Then there are a couple of blogs I really, really, like. Sn0tty.com (that's a zero, not an O) is home to one of the most talented bloggers I've ever read, but like me, she only posts once every blue moon. When she does post, it's worth reading, but you can tell that it takes some self-motivation to give birth to the blog, then set it free in cyberspace.

Maybe she has the same problem I do, though. I don't want to sit down every day and bang out something, anything. I want to sit down and carefully shape and mold thought-provoking posts with which the reader can identify and perhaps in which he can find hope and inspiration and blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda yawn zzzzzzzz. Here's an idea: just write something. Successful bloggers everywhere will tell you that the key action taken by widely-read authors is posting regularly. But readers will tell you that posting too much waters down content. No one has something thought-provoking to say every single day. I mean, I do, but I'm special. I can bang em out every day, sometimes several times in a day. I usually provoke my boyfriend to thought by gracing his otherwise lackluster existence with such wisdoms as:

"Oh God... I fucking hate birds. SHUT. UP."

"I think our neighbor is kicking his girlfriend out again. Quick! If you put your ear here, you can hear everything."

"Did you know Ava Braun died of renal failure and not suicide? It's true. No, really. I read it on Wikipedia."

"Ew, gypsies. They better not come into this yard. I told a tiny begging one to fuck off yesterday and I think it put a curse on me. My feet are cold."

"You should scrape off the black shit from your toast cos it causes cancer. No, really. I read it on Wikipedia. Eh? How should I know 'what kind of cancer'? Cancer cancer. The type that kills you. Duh."

So now you can see what you'd have to look forward to if I blogged every day. Still, it might be an interesting experiment. Maybe it's not as hard as it seems. Putting too much thought into the posts is what murders my desire to blog. I want to write something funny and smart, but if I just settle for something that makes it through spell check I should be satisfied with that.

Oh, right. I don't use spell chekc. OK. Well, something with a minimal number of split infinitives and dangling prepositions then. Ha ha, uh, is a "dangling preposition" even a thing?

OK. I'm finished taking a dump into cyberspace for now. See you tomorrow with another gripping, riveting post. Maybe I should take some pictures of my ass in tight pants or of my pedicure or something, to prepare.

Finally Cut Off

2009-07-09T03:50:00.000-07:00

I hate that I had to cut my cousin, once the person closest to me in the world, off my friends' lists.

But how pathetic is that?

True, I live on the other side of the world from her, but it still seems so petty, so passive-aggressive, to show someone your displeasure by cutting them off a fake fucking networking website. It's ridiculous. I feel ridiculous.

I can't be alone in this experience. There must be someone else in the universe who has tried and tried to reach out to someone, to keep a relationship going, to realize they are never going to be met halfway. Even a quarter of the way would suffice.

I think now I will tell you a bit about my cousin. As briefly as possible.

She is 25 days older than me, which means she is going to be 28 in a few weeks. She is not only unemployed, but refuses to get a job, because it interferes with her "kickin it time". She sleeps on the couch of any minor acquaintance with food in the fridge, but the bed of a guy who's careless with cash is preferred. Rather than spend any appreciable amount of time attempting to improve her situation, she lives off handouts and a meager amount of tips earned by dancing burlesque once a week. A mutual friend of ours is running out of patience after having spent endless amounts of blood, sweat and tears trying to help the girl. Now she is about to be ejected off said friend's couch.

I would call my cousin at what for her was about noon--nine pm my time. She'd be sleeping. I'd almost beg, "can't you talk just for a little bit?" and she would mumble, "call me in a few hours."

"But in a few hours I have to go to sleep. I have to get up early for work."

"Well, try another time." Click.

As I write this down, I realize how sad and pathetic all us suckers in her life are. The people she makes time for are the scenesters, the ones with money, the ones with drugs, the ones with liquor cabinets and hot tubs in their condos. If she knew anyone in the "business" she would be the world's most notorious Industry Ho. She latches onto people who can get her ahead in the fields of getting wasted and buying clothes.

The rest of us fall by the wayside.

Like a junkie, who would steal from his own grandmother, who doesn't even recognize his oldest friend as he begs from him on the street, my cousin has turned into someone beyond help, someone who must either hit rock bottom and rebuild, or fall into that pit and perish.

The cocaine, the booze, the reefer, the parties, I introduced her to all of that, and now I can't help but feel a pang of regret when I look back on those early days of our adulthood, when her biggest vice was opening her legs for whoever asked. I should have known then, that she would grasp for anything that felt good, anything to distract her from the inner turmoil she so faithfully drags along.

Her life knows no stages. When I left the United States, we were 23 years old. At the time, I reasoned that while six years is a long time to be out of a job, 23 is also young enough, resilient enough. A 23-year-old can explain away a six-year gap on a resume by claiming any number of things, but a 28-year-old will be harder pressed to explain what she's done with the last ten years of her adult life.

What have you done in the last ten years, cousin?

Stayed in Seattle and as good as refused to learn about anything else
Drank yourself half to death
Snorted yourself stupid
Got fired from every job you held for two months at a time, for poor attendance and atrocious work ethic, then complained aloud about unfair treatment
Made no effort to either gainfully employ or educate yourself
Burned so many bridges you deserve an award for outstanding achievement
Alienated everyone who loves you

I was the one who always understood, who always forgave, who always excused. I pointed out your thoughtful and philosphical sides to the ones who claimed you were nothing but a brainless, ignorant, gold-digging whore from the ghetto.

That is over now.

Get your shit together... you disgust me.

Goodbye.

Retraction: Social drinking is for grammas, and for me too. bleh.

2009-06-20T04:33:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, I wrote about how the concept of social drinking is a joke, and that the only point of drinking alcohol was to get drunk.

Now that my little "experiment"--going 45 days without drinking--has come to an end, I must say my opinions have changed a bit. Especially now that I am officially a gramma.

Last night I met with some friends and had a few glasses of wine. By "glasses" I mean "plastic cups" and by "met with some friends" I mean "sat on the steps of a government building and drank cheap wine out of plastic cups like common hoboes". We were having a whale of a time but it got a bit chilly so we wobbily retreated to my little hovel here.

One of the major reasons I wanted to quit drinking for a while was that I could not control anything that went into my mouth while intoxicated. I could not fathom putting down a drink unless I was nearing the vomiting point (ironically enough, while I could not control what I put in my mouth, I have always been good at controlling what comes out of it--besides words that is), therefore I would drink until I came close to being ill, then fix myself up with some starchy, fatty food and a liter of water. Lather, rinse, repeat. Finally I realized I would never lose any weight while continuing to drink the way I did (untrue actually, I did manage to lose 30 pounds, but that's over the course of two years--not exactly melting the pounds away).

Back to last night. In 45 days, I have broken my resolution and consumed alcohol on four separate occasions. On each occasion, I felt queasy and unsure about two drinks in, but kept going because, duh, what else are you doing to do? Stop and sober up? But last night, after about 3/4 of a bottle of wine, I quietly took my bottle and glass into the kitchen and poured the rest of my glass into the bottle, and put the bottle on the shelf, and poured myself some water, and sat back down as if nothing ground-breaking had just occured.

I usually drink about two bottles of wine per session, excluding any beers or shots that might be picked up in the course of the evening. So yes, something ground-breaking had indeed just occured.

At the moment I have fake beer in my refrigerator. Yes, fake beer, and not Jever fucking fun either. I drink it because it tastes AWESOME and doesn't make me feel bloated, drunk, hungry, horny or guilty.

Since all of my attempts to get drunk for amusement in the last 49 days have failed miserably I have concluded that yes, it's OK to drink a glass or two of wine or a fake beer while chillin with the homies, just for the social aspect of consuming something together, and to relax a bit and enjoy the taste of a nice beverage. Wow. I am officially 62 years old.

I can't wait to tell my mom... finally she can quit recommending AA to me every second time I talk to her.

Do Your Own Effin Laundry

2009-06-18T01:49:00.000-07:00

Today is one of those days when I'm glad no one knows where this blog is.

The 'Stoph, with his injured little self, is starting to milk it. For the last few days I've been running around like a house Negro, picking up this, fetching that, preparing this, filling that, lifting, arranging and double-checking. He has a torn ligament and I know that can't feel nice; besides, I have had a sprained knee before and that was bad enough.

Men whine. Oh Christ do they whine. I've always heard that men are wimps when it comes to pain, but I've never had to deal with it first hand. My father was a Catholic comedian, in that whenever he'd get a scratch he'd clutch the mauled extremity and howl to the ceiling, "Offer it up! Offer it up!" That was fine and good for him but sometimes as a kid I'd hurt myself and my pops would be like "Offer it up, Shorty! Offer it up to the Lord!" and he wasn't kidding. Uh.

Anyhow, a couple of days ago the 'Stoph had exploratory surgery and afterward had to walk around with a straw inserted about five inches into his knee and a Nalgene bottle filled with his own plasma, blood and stringy gunk attached to the straw. Instead of taking my advice and popping the pain pills the doctor gave him as soon as he got home, he decided to ride out the effects of the hospital-administered anaesthesia. Five hours later he's moaning and grunting and nearly crying... I told you so. After it got a bit melodramatic I asked him if he weren't whining a bit harder than was absolutely necessary and he replied that he supposed he wasn't in mortal pain but that getting comfortable was kind of difficult. I arranged him on the bed and he finally shut up. Now he's got the tube out and is mobile again, with a lot less pain.

Today I am having my "woman" pain. For the uninitiated, that means I am bleeding like a halal cow. Sorry to upchuck your lunch for you. I got up bright and early this morning to take a 40-minute walk around the neighborhood, schedule a laundry time for the 'Stoph as requested, then came home to waste time on various websites (Ian knows which ones I'm talking about). As I was enjoying a particularly catty internet fight, the 'Stoph asks me if I'm working. No, I say, I'm just fucking around, what do you want? And he asks me to do his laundry.

I. hate. laundry.

I invent all sorts of excuses and priorities and previous engagements in order to put off doing laundry. I will spray a musty sweater with perfume and take a wet towel to a stained pair of pants before doing laundry. I will wash my socks and underwear by hand before gathering up everything and taking it to the laundry room. I don't know what it is, but something about the whole ritual of spending a couple of hours attending to the various stages of cleaning a batch of clothing, then fighting it into some sort of orderly shape a.k.a. "folding" repulses me. I don't like anything that needs three hours of my undivided attention. This is why I don't have children.

I looked at him in disbelief. "Why did you schedule a laundry time--that is, have me schedule you a laundry time, if you don't have time to do the laundry?

"Um." drools

"The reason my face looks like this is because I hate doing my own laundry. What makes you think I want to do yours?"

In a childish wheedling whine: "Well, but I have to do blah and blah and then so-and-so wants this-and-that bleh bleh bleh."

"You knew all that from the start. If you don't have time to do laundry then it has to wait."

"Please?"

Oh, GODDDDDDDDDDD. More out of a WWJD sort of feeling than any kind of sympathy or consideration I agreed to do his fucking laundry. Jesus would have agreed to wash his dirty drawers without a complaint, then separated the whites from the colors before being tacked up to the cross. As I walked along the stone path, nearly doubled over in abdominal pain, I resolved to myself to "offer it up".

Thanks, dad.

There Goes the Neighborhood

2009-06-16T00:26:00.000-07:00

On my other blog I wrote yesterday about prejudices against Islam. I wrote it there instead of here because this blog has about 3.5 smarty-pants readers, whereas the other has hundreds, many of whom could stand a breath of fresh air or two. Another reason I posted it there is because I think there are a lot of people in the United States who need a reality check about their attitudes. Not that my attitudes are all that great. But to be sure, living abroad teaches you a bit about the world, and a lot about yourself.

I digress. <--are we ever going to come up with a less cliché way to say "I am babbling on and now want to change the subject?" Something a little more refined than "anyhoo"? Ahh, fuck it. Anyhoo. So the other night the 'Stoph and I are dead to the world asleep when someone urgently, obnoxiously leans on the doorbell. And we don't have a nice pleasant "ding dong" leave-it-to-Beaver-keeping-up-with-the-Jonses type modest and melodious doorbell, either. Ours is more of a prison yard siren, or public school recess kind of screaming metal alarm. Danger. It does not occur to me that a friend in need is standing on our doorstep, because no one who knows me would dare to show up without calling if even they were mortally injured. Whoever is at our door can be up to no good. Heart thumping wildly, I shake the 'Stoph.

"Did you hear that?" <--the President of Japan heard it "Mfmblxzzrrphrm." <--affirmative. But he's injured at the moment, so it was up to me to go tiptoe quietly to the door. I peek out the peephole and see no one. Curious. So I go window on the other side of the apartment and sure as apples is apples, there are three young men standing across the courtyard, smoking cigarettes and gesturing toward our building. "Luckily" they did not seem particularly interested in our apartment, but I noticed that they seemed to be conferring only about ground-floor homes. If you've followed my other blog you've likely read about the last time someone attempted to break into our apartment. That guy got away, but I was determined these dicks would not. "Call the police. NOW." The 'Stoph called the cops and the useless bastages showed up about half an hour later, unenthusiastically asked a couple of bland questions, then reluctantly bumbled around the courtyard a bit with flashlights, and left. I stood watch from the balcony until half an hour after daybreak and then went to bed. Relaying the skeleton of this story to a couple of friends, I heard, "I reckon if you moved out of Neukölln you wouldn't get hassled so much."

This is insulting.

The reason we get "hassled" so much is not because of our geographical location, but our physical one. We live on the ground floor in an apartment complex without a security gate. Unlike most residential buildings in the city, any old fool can waltz into our courtyards whenever he likes and case the joint at his leisure.

What my friend's comment meant was, "get out of the poor brown part of town and everything will peaches and cream with sprinkles on top."

I am sick to death of the Turk hate here. I don't want to say that this person hates Turks in the same way a lot of Germans hate Turks, but she, like most white people in this city, view them as undesirable thugs. I have heard of "nice areas" being turned into cesspools of... what, exactly? as soon as a döner shop moves onto the block. What you meant were there were a bunch of extravagant brown people standing around on an otherwise unremarkable street in large groups talking and laughing loudly, listening to "ethnic" music and reminding you of your own plain, stale, dull, uptightness. Hmm, where have I heard this story before?

This town is full, and I mean FULL of petty crime. Anywhere you go, there are bars on windows, graffiti on everything, and bicycles ripped to shreds for parts. Nowhere in this city is safe from vandalism or theft, even in the nicest and hippest parts of town.

What I like about my neighborhood is that there is very little pretense. No one here can pretend the Turks, Syrians, Lebanese, Sudanese, Gambians, Eritreans, Poles and Bulgarians do not exist, or that they do not work, or that they do not speak German. I love my neighborhood and I feel comfortable here.

In 2006, I stayed at my mother's house for a few weeks prior to coming to Germany. It was the first time in my life I had ever lived in a predominantly white neighborhood. I was not comfortable there. I'm not saying I don't like white people, but it was clear that they didn't much care for me. Daily I commuted on a crowded bus with standing room only and not even half-dead, arthritic old ladies would sit down on the vacant seat next to me. That was a shocking dose of reality.

I like my neighborhood because even though sometimes Turkish kids try to break into my home, they will never hesitate to sit in my lap on the train. It's a small sacrifice, really.

Tourist Season.

2009-06-15T03:47:00.000-07:00

(Right: a shot of my breakfast, just to make you jealous. L-R: Yogurt with honey, müsli, bananas and mixed berries; mehrkorn brötchen with soft-boiled egg, cucumber, tomato and cheese; brötchen with cheese and paprika wurst, and black gourmet coffee.)

It's tourist season in Berlin. Everywhere you go, the tops of stairs, narrow sidewalks, doorways and train stations are occupied by enormous groups of camera-toting travellers, mobbing around like Chinese people and trying to get as many photos in front of as many historical landmarks as possible before jumping back on the tour bus and heading off to Dresden for dinner and drinks. Annoying.

I do and don't get why people decide to do Europe in ten days. On one hand, if you're from any part of the world besides Europe, traveling here is expensive. If you're from the U.S. or Japan chances are that no matter how good your job is, you can't take off more than a couple weeks off of work. But on the other hand, if all you're going to do is stand in front of the Brandenburger Tor and eat a curry-wurst then you could have saved €2000 by just staying home, Photoshopping yourself onto a postcard and boiling some sausages from Albertson's and eating them with ketchup. I want to take an Al Bundy vacation too.

The crappy thing about hating on tourists is that I am one. I mean, OK, I've lived here for nearly three years but I haven't seen everything and I do still go around to the touristy bits of town and take photos of shit. I justify it to myself by claiming that I get there on my bike, pack a lunch I prepared in my home, and don't pose in front of anything. Yadda yadda here are some pictures.

I was totally annoyed that these tourists wounldn't get the eff outta my photo. They ruined my shot at least five times by standing directly in front of my camera, hands in front of them like mummies. I think they were Italian.

The gods live in unlikely places.

Space ships in the subway station.

After this photo shoot I wound up at a gallery opening with some friends and after the opening they looked at my pics and chose this one as sufficiently arty enough to have made it into a pretentious, shallow art show. They even recognized that the beer bottle was the star of the photo. I am so profound.

Nothing beats Berlin graffiti. This is an ultra-swank neighborhood and I love that no one makes any attempt to cover up or remove the graff. I like the guy with one closed and one happy eye.

I'm wet.

This was a cool little secret garden that I discovered behind some other swanky-looking shite.

At Baiz. It's called a communist bar for some reason. The first time I went there I was like "So I can pay for my beer by washing dishes or handing out pamphlets or preaching about Mao or what" and they were like "Zwei euro bitte." Fucking fascists.

The TV tower behind some buildings. You do not even want to know how many times I took this shot.

Taxis actually wait here. There must be five entire taxi stands in the whole city. Who leaves a restaurant and goes, "well I could walk three blocks to the train station or four miles to a taxi stand"?

Cookie and Graham and I at Baiz. Sorry these are a bit out of order. The beer in the foreground is Erdinger Alkoholfrei and it rocks your world if you're trying to stay off the sauce. I took one sip of it and asked the bartender if it was indeed alcohol-free. He smiled and showed me the bottle and I was appropriately pleased and surprised. Cookie told me later that that is EXACTLY how the TV commercial goes. Ha.

I couldn't stop talking about that gotdang beer and bought six bottles of it at the store two days later.

And that is all.

June 6, 2009 3:37 AM WAT THE HELL... HE WERES MAKEUP... YEA HES GAY

2009-06-07T03:27:00.000-07:00

(Above: Tokio Hotel fights AIDS and makes a shitload of cash advertising for H & M at the same time.)

Last year during my English seminar I asked the students--aged 19-26--to describe to a partner their favorite and least favorite bands and to collect reasons for each. When the answers were presented the unanimous unfavorite was Tokio Hotel.

I'm pretty sure that as a little girl I was drawn to anything that was flashy and pretty and I do remember writing at least one "What kind of shampoo do you use" fan letter to Will Estes when I was about 13, but back in '94 we didn't have MySpace or even know anyone with a computer in their house so it was a bit harder to stalk your favorite heartthrobs.

My closest--and most psycho--girlfriend in middle school had crushes on all the cute boy actors of the day. Jonathan Brandis, Eddie Furlong and Leonardo DiCaprio could all be seen striking seductive and grossly age-inappropriate poses on her walls, but JTT (Jonathan Taylor Thomas, of Home Improvement fame) was her undying obsession.

She used to write him 20-page long letters, all delusional scribbling about how she knew that if you really hoped hard enough for something to happen that it would happen, that neither of them could escape their fate forever, that eventually they would be together and live the fantasy life they always wished upon a star for but never realized was actually possible. In other words, Terri--then about 5'6" and 190 pounds and smelling of cat piss and unwashed hair, now about 5'6" and 300 pounds and smelling of cat piss and unwashed hair--would lead him to the paradise that awaited them both if they would just heed destiny's call.

Even at that age, I knew she was a fucking nutcase. It was the 90s and the height of emo grunge rock so I had heard of lots of people who thought that Eddie Vedder was singing through the radiowaves at them personally, who believed that Kim Thayil really was psychic and therefore purposely played his show on their birthday, that Kurt Cobain was calling them to join him in a suicide pact.

But I'd thought today's modern media-savvy teenagers were way too sophisticated to get duped by such hype. The lead singer of Tokio Hotel is the dude with the stupid hair and black French manicure. The dude with the dreads is his twin. I know, right?

Christoph didn't believe me when I said Tokio Hotel was in an H & M ad so I took a photo of it to prove it to him. So this morning he asked what kind of music they played and I pulled up their MySpace page and played him a couple minutes of horrible horrible pop emo bullshit. They basically sing the same lyrics as 'NSync or Britney Spears, just with guitars. After we listened to that claptrap I skimmed through the photos. This Bill dude gets thousands of comments per photo, but it's funny to see how different some of them can be:

(¯°::яäwя::°¯)Glenda Kaulitz	June 6, 2009 3:40 AM I honestly L O V E you Bill Kaulitz with all my heart! I would be nothing with out you! u mean so much to me! you honestly have my full && complete ♥ it hurts sometimes that my love for you is so powerful, and just knowing that you don't feel the same back, [[yet]] kills! im so determined to be with you! I hope to God, i wish on 11:11, and have full faith that we will be together! i know people may think what i feel for you is over the TOP, but in my option, YOUR WORTH IT! if i had to i would tell the WORLD how i truly feel about you! what i feel for you is 100% real && true! it's more than a crush! Here's my true feeling wen i see you with another chick! im jealous of every girl who hugged Bill ♥ Kaulitz because for one moment they had my whole world in their arms!♥ <3glenda>
(¯°::яäwя::°¯)Glenda Kaulitz	Comment Back - Send Message - Block User - Delete
	AWWW HE FINALLY TALKED …Quanisha Williams June 6, 2009 3:37 AM WAT THE HELL... HE WERES MAKEUP... YEA HES GAY Aaaahahahahahaha! But shit dude, who knew kids today were so damn illiterate? "In my option"? Uhhhhhh.

I didn't buy a camera for nothing, part four: Not Strong Enough For Abstinence

2009-06-01T11:28:00.000-07:00

(Left: Laura epitomising the vibe of the weekend. Unter den Linden, Berlin.)

Like most people with an ounce of willpower, I sometimes feel the need to shake up my routine a bit to see if I can go without something upon which I feel dependent. Usually this includes cigarettes, television, eating late at night, and certain annoying people. What it does not usually include are sex and alcohol. Cos I mean, who in their right mind would willfully deprive themselves of either?

Whether or not I'm in my "right mind" remains to be seen, but 31 days ago I decided to go 45 days without drinking. The reasons seemed so clear in the beginning. I wanted to lose weight, which was proving difficult given the empty calories in alcohol and compounded by the late-night junk food I was in the habit of consuming after drinking my weight in beer. I wanted to see what sort of things I would do with my free time, what I would do for fun, how I would cope in social situations. I wanted to know what my brain felt like after a month and a half of leaving away the dum-dum sauce. I wanted to see if I made any more art, or was more productive, or dreamt up any new and fantastic ideas.

The arbitrary 45 days came from some stoopid article I read on Yahoo health about breaking habits. I can't remember what the fake patient in the article was giving up, nor does it matter. This is why the internet is bad for your brain, folks. All I saw was "45 days and you're cured forever of whatever it is you can't seem to give up! On the other side of that wall is permanent and everlasting salvation!" This is the same part of my brain that files cancer-fighting foods ("eat broccoli twice a week and you'll pretty much never die of anything, ever!"), weight-loss tactics ("eat equal parts celery and vegemite three hours before bed and watch the pounds melt away!") and job-interview tips ("always use positive wording, even if it makes you sound like a candy-coated dimwit!").

When I gave up smoking a couple of years ago, I made a paper-link chain like the one pictured above out of of construction paper, and, like the one above, I wrote a nice little "inspirational" psalm each day to motivate myself to keep at it for another day (obviously the direct result of having two 12-stepper parents). The chain pictured is my drankin' chain. Of course on the link in the foreground is written "I drank this wknd."

So, I made it 28 days without drinking. The reasons for abstaining had started to seem so distant and unimportant, and I caught myself on several occasions daydreaming about all the incredible and super-fun stuff I was gonna do after my 45 days were up. Unfortunately, the fantasies you create about a thing of which you've been deprived are always 10 000x more exhilirating and exciting than they ever were in real life. Maybe that's the reason no one gives up alcohol or sex--the reality of it once you get back on them is just too disappointing.

After three beers, I'm starting to have a little bit of fun. Yes it is broad daylight. You can ask me later why I decided after a month-long hiatus to defile my poor stomach with beer instead of something pleasant like champagne or cider. It tasted like shit.

It's rare that I look anywhere near fancy enough to sneak into opera houses and use the toilet while posing as a paying customer.

After drinking some beers we decided to meet up with Cookie and Graham and go see our friend Brigid "Dessie's Got To Do the Rage" Lynch at her new job, Silberfisch. Silberfisch is a horrible horrible tourist bar, waaayyyyy too expensive for sensible people and directly on the Ho-Stro'. All the people in the background are on an organised pub-crawl, and I do mean all. Every night, several groups of 100 people come into this bar and pay €6 for a beer. That's like eighty bucks U.S.D.

Smooches.

See, I kept trying to get drunk and love everything, but it wasn't working. All I could do was my same chin-up pursed-lip thing that pisses off homophobic people so badly.

The pub-crawlers are getting a bit worked up now, probably high off the sugar from the "complimentary shots" the bar provides them day in and day out.

Here's our polite picture

Here's what we really look/act like

This god guy is guarding the DJ booth.

Laura is hardcore and stole two beers off a table freshly evacuated by the pub-crawlers. I guess you do sixteen bars in a night and you're bound to forget something somewhere.

We were supposed to go to some gay ladies' bar and get our homo freak on, but after five beers I was so disgusted, grossed out and even hungry that I had to ass out and go home. Not once during the entire night did I get wasted with wild abandon, forget my name, dance with a stranger, or do anything I regretted. I totally could have had just as good a time, and even better, stone sober. OK. I have concluded my experiment and am going to finish off the remainder of my 45 days sober as a judge.

Fast forward to Saturday night. I got on the wrong train and wound up in the middle of nowhere. I was so pissed off at myself that I almost wound up going home, but I was persuaded to stay out.

700mL of vodka and six hours later I am back at my house after the evening's festivities, taking about 48299318703 pictures of myself in front of the entrance to my house. You see what I'm pointing at? Me neither. I forgot that I'd taken these until the next afternoon.

Deep in thought about uh... what the neighbors are thinking

I know. It's bad. Really bad.

I'm sure only the most profound statements were going through my mind. For some reason it was of the utmost importance to capture the morning light filtering through the uh, smog.

This one makes me LOL because I look so saaaaad. And wasted.

The best part of the night however occured at about 4 in the morning at Hackescher Markt, where we comandeered a couple of chairs and a table from a bar that had been closed for hours and "interviewed" strangers with my camera. I took about ten videos but this is the only one that made the cut, guess why? Turns out shit is way funnier when you're off your ass on vodka.

I'm now of the opinion that I absolutely never need to drink again in my life, but the first thing I've got to do is just get through the remaining 15 days or so. One day at a time. Easy Does It. Keep coming back, it works. Blah blah 12-Step cliché blah.

I didn't buy a camera for nothing, part three--decorating special

2009-05-27T06:02:00.000-07:00

(Left: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the vainest of them all? A mirror fit for a very flamboyant queen)

Today has been an interesting day. Of all the photos posted here, there are none of the most important place I visited; namely, the U.S. consulate. With all the cameras and police and security and Marines, one gets the feeling that taking pictures is not so welcome. We've all heard of the would-be terrorist whose ruthless, murderous plot was aborted because some ~~fucking nosy meddling busybody~~ responsible citizen alerted the FBI that an "Aaaa-rab looking gennilman" was taking pictures at Disneyland or of interesting architecture at Citibank or something.

I noticed that the two security officers working the front booth were both black--not African-American, just African. I couldn't help but wonder if they were put there because no one else would take the job, or because the powers-that-be didn't want to risk wasting perfectly good white lives in the case of a bombing or shooting. Of course the diplomat in me has a slightly less race-card pulling theory, that maybe black guys are just the biggest, baddest, scariest motherfuckers in the world and that any terrorist wanting to start trouble would take one look at these guys and beat a hasty retreat back to Syria. Either way you (I) look at it, putting your only two black employees in the way of danger you yourself are not willing to face smacks of Vietnam-era recruiting and age-old mercenary tactics. Put some Russian dudes in there, they already know how to use automatic weapons, you only have to pay them in vodka and they don't live past 55 anyway.

But to be sure, middle-eastern people are nuts. Just check out the kind of pointless shit they put in their houses. What is the purpose of this thing? I mean it's pretty, but no one is fooled into believing it's wrought of pure gold and adorned with precious stones. You think it's a store that sells decorations for restaurants but you're wrong. This is the kind of mess that Ahmed Q. Muhammed has in his house. Right next to the eyebrow wax and goat cheese.

Someone really has to tell these people that the days of Byzantium are gone, gone gone. Now the only people who over-decorate are those who are overcompensating for a lack of actual wealth i.e. residents of trailer parks, prostitutes, working-to-middle class black people, etc.

The Arabic writing means something like "Super Imperial Royal Gilted Home Decor For Those of Discriminating Taste."

You think you're just on a train to another broken-down part of the city, but you're wrong.

You are actually on your way to ancient Rome. Or wherever those kind of columns hail from. Evidently it's not just Turks and blacks who overdecorate. Columns in the subway station?

Super 70s. Love this train line all the way to Rathaus Spandau and one day (hopefully soon) will make a photo special out of all the crazy 70s-style stations.

Even the graff kids have love for Bäääääärlin (Berlin's mascot is a bear)

Gluing that stuff takes dedication and effort. This is what I call good vandalism.

Random pointless shot. Jannowitzbrücke.

Aaahh, Görlitzer Park. It looks so innocent and green here, but this is the very same park I wrote about in a different blog. Just because they reseeded the grass doesn't mean that about twenty feet to the right of this frame there aren't about sixteen dudes waiting to sell drugs to little kids. True story.

He's so sweet and clearly loves his photo being taken.

That's a bit better, you just have to catch him off his guard.

I was like "get yr dirty fawkin feet off me" and he was like "my feet are cleaner than your mouth" and I was like "fuck yo feet nikka!"

His feet evidently think they're funny.

Two things come to my attention. 1) I need a new jacket, because I am wearing this one in pretty much every photo I've been in within the last year. 2) I need to quit smoking because holy shit will you lookit that smoking toof.

Looks nice, doesn't it? A calm and quiet place where residents of our buildings can sit and listen to the birds chirping. Unfortunately people who live in our building can sit on their patios and do the same thing, so the majority of people who sit on our lovely benches are loiterers casing the joint and/or pissing in our bushes. They do however know "who the fuck I am" and when they see me coming they know there is going to be trouble.

Not even my mama calls me out like you do.

2009-05-22T02:18:00.000-07:00

A girl I was thick as thieves with in middle and high school recently contacted me over the Facebook. For the sake of anonymity we'll call her Shawna.

Shawna was one of those friends that girls have before they've "found" themselves. You know the kind. Bossy, domineering, manipulative, tells you what to do and who you can hang out with. Completely runs the show. I don't know why I tolerated/needed this sort of relationship as a girl (in adulthood I am very much more a leader than a follower). Maybe I was just desperate for friends. But I do know that I'm not the only one who had a girl friend who acted like an abusive boyfriend, except without the "let me just put the head in"-type talk.

She dictated where we went, who we went with, and how we got there. She did not approve of any of my other friends, although she was allowed to bring new people into the fold. I was not allowed to disagree with her about anything. She considered different viewpoints dealbreakers and I quickly learned to keep my opinions to myself unless they conformed to hers. I was not allowed to listen to hip-hop in her presence because anything played by KUBE 93 was made for and by idiots. I did learn to like a lot of indie and grunge music, but my heart was never really in it. When I got a couple of new close girlfriends in high school it put a strain on the friendship. One day, she dropped in unexpectedly at my apartment (yes I had an apartment in high school but that's a story for another day) while Lara was over there, and I did my best to keep Shawna out of the room where she was sitting. Shawna, like a suspicious lover, sensed that something was amiss and sought out the interloper. When she saw that I'd been "cheating" on her, she left abruptly, saying, "Oh. I see how it is." She walked out the door, concluding the friendship, five years of almost constant companionship over in an instant.

Fast forward ten years. This girl finds me on the Facebook, and starts claiming that she'd missed me, had wanted me to be in her wedding, had been looking for me, etc. I found it a little weird because she also let it slip that she'd known where I worked for three years, a shop in the very very public Pike Place Market... she could have come and said wassup at any point... but didn't. I digress. So we were chatting and that, catching up, and she starts asking questions:

--So do you listen to rock anymore?

--Not so much... I'm really into [insert hip hop artist here] at the moment.

--That is so sad, I thought I had converted you!

--No, it's not sad, it's fucking awesome, and judging people because of their music preferences is bullshit. I don't have time for that mess.

That put a hitch in her giddyup.

I became a fan of gay marriage on the Facebook, and a couple of days later (completely coincidentally) cut my hair in a dykey fashion and posted pictures of it in an album entitled "Super Gay Haircut", and set my status to "Odessa ______ cut her hair and now just looks g-a-y."

Shawna comes around talking about, "I find it funny that you are a fan of gay marriage, but are using the word gay in a derogatory manner. Old habits die hard, huh?" <-- this, on my wall for everyone to see.

I ripped her a new one for that. You're not going to call me out for being a hypocrite after I haven't seen hide nor hair of you in 10 years and you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. I am more empathetic towards gays than most people are toward themselves but you wouldn't know anything about it because I don't know you anymore. It's really just not going to go down like that.

Time and again I come into contact with people who want to call you out in front of other people for some ole bullshit. Why is that? What are you trying to achieve?
"You're so competitive."
"You always do _______, don't you?"
"Really? I've never seen you do ______" <--because you're with me 24/7, right?
"You really don't like so-and-so, do you?" <-- I am allowed to not believe everyone is a fucking saint. You can fake that funk if you want to.
"Everything for you is black and white."
"You're one of those people who.... [insert brainless generalization here]"
"But you would think that, because you come from America." or "You're really patriotic, aren't you?"
"You don't want any more? It's because you're trying to lose weight, isn't it."

I wish I had the audacity to say every little thing than came into my stupid empty head. Instead, I blog about it ;) but seriously, why is it always people who don't know you very well who think they are experts on You and want to call you out using absolutist terms like "always" and "never"? Who claim that you are "one of those people who"? Who end their accusations with "don't you?" and "aren't you?" as if you're just gonna go, "awww, you got me. I really do kick puppies, you're right." I find it the rudest, most ignorant thing EVAR.

For example, if I'm sitting with someone who is a nervous and neurotic mess, the last thing I'm going to say is "wow, you look really uncomfortable right now." Or if I'm with someone who is overweight and refusing unnecessary food, I'm not going to poke a finger into their belly roll and go "it's because of that, isn't it?" What would give me the right?

I think everyone should pipe down and keep it to himself when it comes to dissecting the motives and agendas of other people, because most of the time you're wrong, and the rest of the time you're just being a presumptuous dick. Next time I get called out I should just be like, "Wow, you're really miserable in your own life, aren't you? You're one of those people who always have to tell other people about themselves in order to direct attention away from the fact that you're a hot ass mess... aren't you?"

More €uros than Sense

2009-05-21T02:24:00.000-07:00

My new boss has issues.

I don't know what they are exactly. I just know that he doesn't have his shit together.

Examples:

°On the day of my initial interview, he couldn't be bothered to be at the office and showed up 45 minutes late, then was a bit of a condescending showoff.

°The boss is always late. No one knows where he is, and you are not allowed to ask.

°Numerous times he has scheduled meetings between me, him and the "head teacher" and had nothing to say. Worse, when I've attempted to contribute, he's allowed the "head teacher" to mire down any real meaningful discourse by evading direct questions and answering with vague plans and generalities. At least three times I have wasted two hours of my life getting absolutely nothing accomplished. It is quite a feat to out-underacheive someone like me, but these guys take the fucking cake.

°I was asked last week if I would do a one-on-one Business English session with a client who only had time for a two-hour consultation. That means that she wants to sit down with a professional and brush up as much as she can by speaking, being corrected, and taking notes. It means that after these two hours she does not want to see you anymore. Basically she wants to rent an English-speaking hooker, she pays by the hour and will not call you in the morning. Period.

Friday rolls around and she and I both show up to the language school, whose doors are locked, at the exact same time. I'm like "unnnnnnnnnbelievable", which was a lie, because I absolutely could believe that these unorganised fools would set an appointment for three o'clock and then not bother to show up. But attempting to salvage some semblance of face for the company I make up excuses and try to hide my frustration and dare I say it? anger. This is a challenge for me because I have a face like a cartoon character and you can read every single thought that has ever passed through my mind in a nanosecond; I have been advised never to play poker. Etcetera. After waiting five minutes or so it appears that no one is going to answer the bell and I have just about given up the charade of pretending to believe someone will let us in when Frau Boss, a tacky, trailer-trash bleach blonde with a bad attitude walks up and opens the door. I tell her, "We had an appointment at three?" She sort of shrugs like "and that's my problem how?" and nonchalantly lets us in. Apparently the entire office had been having a "team building excercise" wherein they ate cake and drank champagne. Having been a party to their "brainstorming excercises" I can only imagine the whirlwind of pointlessness the team building meeting must have been.

Herr Boss shows up and starts trying to convince our client to accept a free introductory hour which will be deducted from the total price of the course. She tells him that she doesn't need a course, she just wants a couple of hours. As if he hasn't heard her, he launches into his spiel about the duration and price of courses. I tell him, she doesn't need or have time for a course. She booked two hours and that's why I'm here now. He tries to persuade her that two hours is not enough and that our super affordable courses can be done daytimes or evenings. She and I look at each other like WTF and she's like, I'm leaving for Stockholm in ten days. I don't have time for a course, I only want two hours. (Keep in mind that Herr Boss himself is the one who told me about this lady and her very specific request only 72 hours before.) Finally he shuts the fuck up and leaves out so we can get on with our lesson. The lady and I get on like gangbusters but that's a subject for another blog.

°Today is Himmelfahrt, or in more recent years, Men's or Father's Day. Briefly explained it's some Christianized pagan holiday that gives men a reason to get drunk all day instead of going to work. It's a bank holiday, which for those of you in the back, makes it like Sunday or Christmas or Thanksgiving or whatever. Nothing's open.

A few days ago while planning lessons, I realize that our Thursday evening class falls on a holiday this week and shoot off an email to Herr Boss and ask him if the school is going to be open that day. I get no response all day. Around five p.m. yesterday I give him a call:

O: Hi Thorsten, did you get my email?
HB: No, haha, I didn't look for one.
O: OK, well I just wanted to know if we're holding class tomorrow? Since it's Himmelfahrt and all.
HB: Oh shit, that's right, it is! Haha, well then, no! We're not going to be open.
O: OK then maybe uh it would be a good idea for someone to call our Thursday night students and let them know not to show up?
HB: Yes, I'll do that, definitely.
O: OK so have a good day off tomorrow.
HB: I will! I'm gonna be drunk all day! Hahahaha.

At the age of 29, this dude owns two restaurants, an adult education center, a language school and probably a couple of rub-n-tugs, but all he really does is tell you about his "visions" and invite you to chain smoke with him. How this language school is ever going to make it when he's yanking around both clients and employees is a mystery to me. I really think he has more money than sense. More stories about him to come.

I didn't buy a camera for nothing, part two.

2009-05-12T03:08:00.000-07:00

(left: the sink in the ladies' at Amrit. There are even two of these masterpieces side by side. Sigh.)

Amrit is a super delicious, super beautiful Indian restaurant on Oranienstraße in Kreuzberg. The decor is like something out of a movie and they are always bumping those Indian jams that make me want to do nothing but watch Bollywood films for the rest of my life.

I've only been there during the lunch specials. For €5, you get a huge portion of Korma/Masala/Jalfrezi/etc etc, rice, salad, fried bread and and soup. We're not talking no rich people's courses neither, but actual solid amounts of everything. If finish your plate and walk out of there feeling like anything smaller than a blue whale you need to enter eating contests, STAT.

The service there is hit or miss, though. While the food is always 100%, sometimes you get a waiter who hates life (or rather, just the people he meets in it who don't spend enough money). I thought this was Europe and no one cared about tips, but evidently I was wrong.

Yesterday this dude earned his three strikes pretty quickly. Strike one was when he told us he wasn't "allowed" to bring us tap water. Lie, and a poorly told one too. I have been there a thousand times and have never had any problems; his, on the other hand, was a face I had not seen before. Strike two was when he brought out one salad for four of us. Now when I go to Amrit with one other person I'm always sad because they bring us the same amount of salad that they bring when I'm alone, but try bringing that one salad for four people and you are going to have problems, pal. He was skeptical that we would finish the one, I guess because fat foreigners are only interested in eating cookie dough and french fries. Best be sure he brought us another salad, and we ate all of it. Easily.

Strike three was absolutely the icing on the cake however. Laura has a pretty light appetite most of the time and finished about half of her monster portion at lunch. When she asked for a box the sycophantic asshole fuckface lskajdflkasjdflaksjdfldaskj ffuck i hate this dude, he told her, "I'm very sorry but there's not enough there. That's only two bites. I can't ask the refrigerator to box up two bites." (He kept saying "kuhlschrank"--"refrigerator"--when referring to the "küche"--kitchen. They sound similar but not so much alike that it doesn't make you a moron for getting the two confused.) Laura was about to tolerate that bullshit when I spoke up, "what the fuck difference does it make whether you've got two bites or an entire plate, you're a customer who wants to take home her leftovers." So she decided to tell him that it was actually kind of senseless because she really did have much much more than two bites and if she wants to take it home who is he to tell her how much she is allowed to take home? and offered to pay him 50 cents for the packing. Oh god just when I think about this fucking retarded assmonkey piece of shit I get mad, then he told her that he would have to ask the refrigerator if it were ok, he'd try his best but not make any promises, because it's such a small amount of food, he might get in trouble. FUUUUUUUUUUUCK. I want to go burn that guy's house down, seriously. We were pissed, but he still made €2 in tips from the table. He told Laura to have a nice day and she mumbled "I hope he doesn't have a nice day" and she's never ever like that so you'll have to believe me when I say he was a fucking dick about EVERYTHING. Consensus was that we marked ourselves from the beginning as ghetto trash because we asked for tap water instead of buying overpriced drinks. We noticed that the table next to us was getting excellent service and extra everything; I guess you have to order enormous foo-foo drinks with umbrellas in them at three in the afternoon to be valued as a customer. (p.s. laura's leftovers literally filled the to-go container he brought her.)

Laura sometime before the packaging incident.

Cookie and Graham as Graham is paying and not looking too pleased about it.

My "sexy" cougar

My feral cougar

Lady Bag. Evidently you shoot the lady first, then slip her in the bag and toss her in the basket provided (instead of flushing her down the toily).

This doll store always creeps me out. There was a dolly in there whose startlingly authentic expression of disappointment, longing and resignation was so life-like that I got a little spooked, cos she's staring straight at you, but it didn't translate to digital photography so instead of showing you that one, I decided to show you a doll that looks like a small, female, porcelain version of Daniel Boone. Seriously wtf is up with those shoulders?

Then we went to Murray's Irish Bar for Lucy's going away party. Murray's is crap and as I'm on (or off, whatever) the wagon I had to get stoned and drink Apfelschorle all night.

Laura looks like she's enjoying the super laaaaaaaame open mic performer. Have you ever lived in a hostel, or belonged to a youth group, or been with a group of six or more white people to a beach or park? Then you will know exactly the type of music this guy was playing. "Baby Hit Me One More Time" acoustic is neither ironic nor clever. Old reliables like Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine acoustic were also popular. Evidently one time I got really wasted and sang all the words to Killing In The Name Of so now every time I get around this particular group of people while armed with guitars one of them screams "Dessie's gotta do Rage! Dessie, do the Rage!" (Only Irish people call me Dessie, pronounced Dezzy. lame) I've not been drunk enough to get in front of a barful of strangers and do acoustic Rage again though.

Brigid and her man Damien are usually the ones screaming for Dessie to do the Rage.

Graham has hated all of us since the beginning of the day. Lame. At least Cookie's into Hotel California or whatever other bullshit-ass campfire song is being sung.

Ach... the one thing denied me the entire night. However... I'm sure my liver will thank me in 20 years.

Square apples are grown in boxes.

2009-05-12T02:02:00.000-07:00

I love crazy people. I don't mean crazy like your aunt who likes the bingo, or your mother-in-law with the OCD, I mean like screaming-at-inanimate-objects-in-the-middle-of-the-street crazy.

I have this theory that most to all of them will act normal if you treat them normally. If during one of their outbursts you sort of metaphorically poke them, they will stop, just like a snorer. Of course, like a snorer, they'll inevitably resume disturbing your peace just as you were beginning to enjoy it. The trick is to force them to realize that other people do exist in their world and can see, hear, smell and touch them. This usually results in a negligible amount of self-consciousness and they move on to terrorize the next batch of daisies down the road.

My fascination with psychos drives my friends nuts. They can't understand why on earth anyone would voluntarily tolerate the presence of a crazy, much less encourage interaction with one. What I say is this: when you're as entertaining as that guy, I will pay you more attention and him less. Until then STFU.

I want to make it clear that I don't talk to crazies and drunks because I think they are funny freaks, or because I need someone to whom I can feel superior, or because they are funny like clowns/funny haha. I talk to them because they are some of the only people who will tell you exactly what is on their minds. They don't have the capacity to give a shit about what you think about them. This is why people believe they're crazy. I, on the other hand, believe they might have gotten it just about right.

Who knows why people scream at themselves? Not me. This dude was super into it. Sorry the video is on its side but it was the only way to get his whole body in the shot:

My friend clearly thought that I thought that this guy was entertaining like a monkey in a zoo, but that's not the case. I thought he was fascinating. You have never heard a more spirited conversation. If politicians had this much heart it would make it much harder to actually pick one to run shit. Too bad the conversation was in German; I would have liked to have understood more of what he was saying.

Unfortunately he decided to get really really upset with himself (or his cigarette, or his reflection, depending on whom you ask) and start flailing about the table. Mind you he was not a paying customer or anything and the proprietors of the cafe we were patronising seemed to have no problem with his snotty, vomit-covered, piss-soaked bulk loitering about their premesis, and they made no move to expel him when he started to lose it. He went into a high-pitched, loud-as-banshees screaming match with himself, banging on and kicking the table and nearly upending Cookie's cup and saucer. Remembering my old "metaphorical poke" trick I said curtly, "Hey!" He kept on. I went, "HEY! HEEEEEY!!!!!" and banged my fist on the table, hard. In a loud, authoritative tone I commanded, "RUHIG UND LEISER, BITTE." ("CALM DOWN AND BE QUIET, PLEASE.") He went silent and I was quite pleased with myself, but this guy was a tough nut and was back at it before a couple minutes had passed.

Finally a dude from the bakery next door finished watching the spectacle (he had appeared amused the entire time) and told the guy to keep it pushing. Half an hour later we saw him only a block away, doing the same thing to another sidewalk cafe.

What a funny town. In Seattle there are precious few places a Crazy can yell at himself with impunity, namely; the bus stop, the waterfront and the park. We have a modicum of decorum and smelly yelling bums are not tolerated anywhere in public. Even the library discriminated against them, banning people from bringing in overlarge duffle bags or sleeping at tables. Now if your duffle bag was North Face and you fell asleep in a Noam Chomsky book chances are you'd be left alone, but don't let it be an army duffle issued to you back in 'Nam and MAD Magazine because they have security officers to deal with scum like you.

If the crazies are always treated as the dregs of society, they will always behave like the dregs of society. End of story. I don't believe that your average mentally-disturbed dude on the street is incapable of rehabilitation, I think he just doesn't give a shit anymore about being "normal", especially not after having seen how cruel and judgmental Normal People can be (hell I don't want to be part of Normal People either but I don't have any mental illnesses to excuse me from having to tolerate their society... yet).

For this reason and others, I don't support pushing the crazies out of the library, away from the sidewalk, or off the beach, at least not until they threaten my coffee, or that of a loved one.

Art Shows are the New Emporer's Clothes, Unless They're Playing Naughty By Nature. Then They're Called "Parties".

2009-05-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine who works at an art gallery which shall remain nameless (as we are not interested in giving them any undue publicity--someone might actually read this blog one day) admonished me the last time I went to a show, for the unspeakable crime of having too good a time. (The DJs had played Jump, so I jumped.) Later I was told that it was a "gallery, not a party", which I found laughable/insulting/humiliating, as the place was covered in graffiti, everyone was drunk, there were two DJs on the decks and not a soul over the age of 35. I've also been coming to their shows religiously for the last two years and I think by now I can tell the different between a formal vernissage and a party. That was a party if ever I saw one.

So I said basically, "Fuck yo gallery's couch nikka" and on Friday night, although the nameless gallery was also having an opening, I opted instead to head out to Kreuzberg's Bethanien, which had DJs and booze and people under 35 and even balloons, although the balloons are supposed to be art.

The show was good, very chill, relaxed vibe. All the freaks in town came out to play; I should have gotten photos of some of the people but I was feeling a bit tactful that day and decided to give the weirdos a break. Most of the art was pretty standard hipster fare and not really worth noting, besides a see-saw bed and a table set for 12 with whatappeared to be white chocolate flatware and food, which was in the process of melting under twelve individual heat lamps.
The space itself was gorgeous, I'm not sure how old the building is, but it looked like some sort of baroque-era secondary school or something; there were little girl's rooms. You know what I mean by Little Girl's Room? The kind with super uncomfortable or even metal toilet seats, paper that takes off your ass skin, puke-colored paint, trough-sink, powdered soap, the distinct aroma of guilt and secrecy? Oh you don't? Me neither...I was just testing.

In attendance were: Sabrina and the 'Stoph

Andrea's hot 29-year-old art teacher boyfriend who looks like Kurt Cobain

Sabrina's totally creepy and perverted-looking ex-boyfriend from high school, named (the Angel) Gabriel

and of course, me!

(Does it reek of desperation that the only pictures I post of me are the ones I took myself? Oh well, I suppose it'll stay between you, me, and the rest of cyberspace.

This was one of the cooler pieces I saw. The blob in the middle is actually a smoky spire which was spiring up into outer space (by that I mean it was like, moving.)

Let's have a peek inside...

Aww, it's a totally cute little model town! I wonder if in addition to the fire and ruined buildings if there are any dead bodies or dog poop along the sidewalks... just like in real-life Berlin! OK, not the dead bodies. But poop. Lots and lots of poop.

All that work for a bit of a shadow against paper. I want to stay home on artist's grants and play around with popsicle sticks all day too. Fuck.

This dog was such a soldier, I started to wonder if the was a piece of art. Turns out he is just the most patient and attentive dog EVAR. S/he was waiting on his/her master to get out of the loo. Also check out the tight pants, Keds and Chucks in the background... yeah, it was that kind of party. Sigh. The hipsters are starting to get along with the rastas and the punks though so there'll be no more Berliner versions of West Side Story in the near future. Should make for interesting parties this summer.

Jumping ahead to Saturday night. My Australian friend Cookie has done the officially tackiest thing I have yet to see at a barbecue slash picnic. We've all heard of people putting ranch on pizza, fries on burgers, tartar on fries (I am guilty of three out of three of the above) but seriously potato chips on a cheese sammich? Ew to the maxx. She was like "don't knock til you've tried it" and I was like "well I've not tried sky diving or deep-fried candy bars but that's because unlike you I have an instinct of self-preservation, you're not getting any younger you know... how's your cholesterol?" then lit my 38th cigarette of the night. Nothing like a little hypocrisy to spice up an alcohol-free Saturday night. Bleh.

Here's the culprit and her husband sharing a bottle of wine out of plastic cups. You can't tell from this picture but Graham is officially the most English person you have ever met. He's dry and proper and isn't into a whole lot of public displays of anything which isn't dry and proper. He is super smart and has a rad sense of humor though and he runs around like a kid when it snows. Good shit.

No matter how long I make art, hang out with artists and art enthusiasts, or attend art events, there are some things I'll never even be able to pretend to understand. The open road? Random shots of people buying stuff at the grocery store? A building standing firmly on its foundation? The sky failing to fall? Why am I wearing headphones when there is no dialogue or music on the video? Sometimes I think I just need my MTV (kidding, kidding). I didn't want to let on that I didn't get it. Art shows are always a bit Emperor's Clothing-y for me.

2009-05-09T01:37:00.000-07:00

(Left: The face of nosy. This guy was staring over my shoulder at what I was doing with my camera for so long that I decided to immortalize him in the act. Nosy muhfucka.)

My friend Nichole is the first and only person I've ever known who admits she has a "staring problem". Sometimes we'd be on the bus or at a bar and I'd go, "why are you staring so hard at that guy... he's going to notice." And she'd be like, "Yeah I know, I have a staring problem." And just keep staring.

Myself, I'm a self-professed nosy muhfucka. That means: I want to be in your business, to the point of cupping my hand against the wall to listen to your conversation, but I don't want you to realize it.

There's nothing wrong with being nosy. In journalistic circles they might even call my preoccupation with jumping in other people's Kool-Aid "inquisitiveness". Which is actually bullshit because it's not like I'm writing a book about their business or anything, like a cop asked me once:

I was downtown, on my way to work, when I saw the cops harrassing an old black dude chillin in the doorway of a closed Rite-Aid. I stopped because I have seen the cops take black people into deserted areas for questionable reasons and I wanted them to know that I'd seen and noted the names of all of the officers present. One of them told me to keep it pushing and I told him that my tax dollars paved this street and paid his salary so I could stand there as long as I wanted, thank you very much. He asked snarkily if I were writing a book or something so I replied "yes" and he goes, "Well pull out your pencil and paper then! What kind of writer are you, with no pencil and paper? Bahahahahaha" so I kind of slunk away in shame, but I gave the old black dude the knowing-eye and retained the names of those shithead cops in my mind.

But if you don't want anyone watching or listening to what you're doing, it's a good idea not to do it in public. It's funny to me when people get mad that you stopped to check out the spectacle. I had a girl once come up to me at work in Pike Place Market, mad that I was laughing to other people about an argument she had had in the middle of the street wherein she overturned a stinky fish tub on a fish guy and cussed him out. She threatened to come to my house, get me fired, call the wrath of Apollo upon me, etc. I was like, "You are making an asshole of yourself in literally in the most public part of the city. Get over it."

Or this guy, who got mad when I took a picture of him pissing in the middle of the sidewalk. He told me that taking pictures of him was verboten, I told him that public urination in the middle of a street festival was verboten, he grabbed me by the shoulder and attempted to drag me off to the police, holy fuck was he drunk.

I listen to my neighbor fighting with his girlfriend, partly because it's too much drama to just let go, partly because they are screaming at the top of their lungs, partly because I want to make sure he's not beating her, and mostly out of revenge for the fact that they have hours-long sex sessions and I don't get a choice about whether I have to hear that. So sometimes I open my door and put my ear out into the hallway where it's easier to listen in.

This guy with the stupid hair made the fatal mistake of being too damn nosy. He should take a lesson from me. You see, while I am helplessly addicted to getting in yo bidness, I make sure to be discreet. I was checking out this guys idiotic hair from behind, but when he kept turning to check me out, I would avert my eyes. At some point it got old because he kept staring and if there's one thing that drives me nuts, it's being stared at. You see all the nice orderly people in the line minding their business, or maybe checking out the person in front of them on the sly, well this dude had to turn around 180° to see what the fuck I was doing. I had decided to take a picture of him from behind when he gave me the perfect opportunity to take his picture from the front; here he is pictured trying to get out of the photo. You see Mr Greenhorn you have much to learn about the art of nosiness. Now you are on the internet. Muahahahahahaha.

So, a word to the wise: pay attention to everything and everyone, because other people's business is usually more interesting/worthy of ridicule/shamelessly debauched than yours, but don't get caught doing it, because God forbid they should actually feel some embarrassment and start making a habit of just picking their noses/scratching their balls/screaming on their cell phones/beating their children/masturbating at home. Good thing Nichole doesn't have a camera.

2009-05-08T11:20:00.000-07:00

Ugh, I'm going to be 28 this year. For most normal people that means little more than finally being respected by your elders and qualifying for jobs which require a bit more responsibility and maturity.

But for someone like me, who is terrified of responsibility and laughs in the face of maturity, it means: in two years, you're going to have to start acting like a grownup.

The other day, I was walking down the street, going about my business, listening to the Bee Gees and bopping along. Singing, dancing, walking to the beat, shaking my shoulders, inventing little choreographies in my head and testing them out, doing the disco finger, etc. Of course I was walking on a non-arterial street, but the point is that if anyone saw me doing this the first thing they might think would be: "Now that is someone who is into her music." Or maybe "I wonder if she's drunk." Perhaps "Aah, to be young and full of life and energy, even if it makes you look like a fool."

But I'm pushing that age where it won't be so cute anymore. As I was going along, enjoying my good time, I thought to myself, "what about in five years? Ten? If I saw a 38-year-old lady doing the disco finger on the street I'd reckon she escaped a loony bin."

The problem is that I am SO silly. I am entertained by any- and everything. I do not have a refined sense of anything, much less humor. Some of my favorite recent jokes are:

"Hey, it's Ole Five Breakfasts!! What's going on, Ole Five Breakfasts?" (boyfriend eats like three different things for breakfast when he's feeling hungry. First cereal, then buns in the oven, then müsli, then a nutella sandwich, etcetera) I laughed my ass off hard, like tears streaming down my face when I thought up that one. Then I noticed he didn't get enough to eat at lunch and started poking around the kitchen. I was like "eh, it's Johnny Five Lunches!! Bwahahahahahahaha!!!" again, seriously, dying from laughter. Next day I was at it again and gently, lovingly, he goes, "seriously dear... 'Ole Five Breakfasts' isn't funny," which just made me crack up all the worse.

I had never heard something referred to as "The bomb dot com" until some hipster Latina girl on YouTube said it yesterday, and it is now my new thing. I love it precisely because it is so stupid. Christoph again was not impressed, and every time he rolls his eyes, it will make the phrase that much sweeter.

WOW MOM will never get old. I was so stoked to see a garbage can with "Wow! Wow!" on it that I had to do my WOW MOM for the camera. The fingers are the Ws or Ms, and my mouth is the O. See? Hilarious.

The worst thing about me is that while I know this shit isn't funny to anyone else, I just. can't. stop. laughing. When you're young and cute people just sort of giggle at you and think you're a bit silly/drunk/stupid, but when you get a bit older? People will just think you're homeless/mentally challenged/schizo.

I think it is TOTES unfair that I have to be a schizo, while grown men and women here walk around with stuffed animal keychains on EVERYTHING. On backpacks, purses, bookbags, beltloops, etc. Sometimes a middle-aged working man will have several on his attaché or lunch pail or whatever the hell it is that middle-aged working men drag around with them on trains. NOT fair. If you were to walk around with dirty, beat up stuffed animals attached in a hundred places on your backpack past the age of 19 in Seattle people would start directing you to the nearest VA hospital.

I also do not and will not dye my hair in raver-colors past the age of, oh wait, I'm already too old for that. Grown women go about their business with purple, orange, blue, fire-engine red hair. I don't know why fire-engine red is so popular. And they don't do it at home with Manic Panic either, we're talking sitting in a respectable salon and asking the hairdresser to please give you a cut and foil and add a bit of Vibrant Violet in there while you're at it.

So, in conclusion, there are different measures of maturity in different parts of the world, and if I have to be schizo in order to enjoy my life, then so be it. I mean, who wants to go through life not feeling the beat?

I didn't buy a camera for nothing, part one.

2009-05-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

Welcome to a little bit of my world.

In the foreground are Christoph and his mom, and in the background are his brother and dad. His mom just turned 57 and it was her idea for us all to go on an exhausting hour-long ride through the dust and rocks and shit to get to a restaurant and eat some schnitzel that I could have made way better out of a package at my house. I suggested that I would cook the celebratory meal, but she declined. The woman is a better cook than all your momses and gramses put together times ten so the two points of cycling an hour to a restaurant were: 1. You are all fat and need exercise. 2. It's my birthday and I'm not cooking for you ingrateful assmonkeys, and I'm not choking down your pathetic attempts at culinary art either.

Just because I think it's cute. He doesn't always look like a kindergartener on his first day of school, I swear it.

Yet another great thing about Berlin... respectable people actually live here, and I'd bet good hard-earned money that there are no immediate plans to replace the broken panels of glass or remove the graffiti. You live on Weserstraße, you will have to put up with boarded-up windows and spraypaint all over everything. Deal with it.

Some more third-world looking shit in the middle of the Second World. Oh wait, this is West Berlin, so it's technically a colony of the First World. My bad. Dang we need to get on that shit stat.I haven't seen Woolworth's since I was like, ten. OK, that's a lie, because I see this one all the time, but Woolworth's here isn't like Woolworth's used to be back home, which smelled like popcorn and 35 cent coffee and back-to-school clothes.

Crossing at the crosswalk literally saves lives on this street. They should do PSA or something.

I felt like such a tourist taking pictures of myself on the street, but simply put it had to be done. Just another day in the life.

There are like ten streets in ten different districts here called Karl-Marx something-or-the-other. Karl-Marx Straße, Karl-Marx Allee, Karl-Marx Platz, etc. Once you get in the East, Rosa-Luxembourg and Frederick Engels Streets are quite common too. Effin commies. The ungrateful West Berliners have only dedicated one street to John Foster Dulles, the man to whom they basically owe their entire continued existence. You'd all be speakin' Russkie and living in mud hovels if it weren't for him.

Now you too can live on Best-Insult-Evar Straße.

Pedophilia and homicide are not too hot here, but bike theft and animal cruelty are super fashionable at the moment. This definitely beats out the drowned-cat-and-duck-tied-together-with-a-bit-of-hemp-twine combo I saw on the canal last summer. People were walking around this atrocity as if it were just another bit of organic waste on the street. Hey, it biodegrades.

"Berlins gröstes Bräunungscenter" translates literally to "Berlin's biggest Tanning Salon". Very helpful in Berlin's biggest Turkish neighborhood. The boys and girls of Neukölln go from golden-brown to burnt sienna, frost their tips and smoke menthols. Like a Muslim version of Lynnwood (sorry for the Seattle reference).

I was feeling a bit tired of life myself, but the pack was empty. :(

A suitcase and a plastic bucket lid. Like an urban version of the happy mask-sad mask deal. How fitting a piece of art for this town. This installation has been chillin on this fence for weeks now. I hope it's not taken down any time soon.

2009-05-06T00:22:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm off the sauce, coffee shops seem to make a lot more sense. I'd forgotten about them a bit during the last ten years. Why would I want to hang out in a coffee shop when I can hang out at a bar? Why would I hang out in a coffee shop when I have coffee at my house?

I used to loooooooove coffee shops as a tween (barf I just actually used that word) and places like the one pictured above were my very favorite kind. This one doesn't just look like it's in someone's house, it's in someone's house. Which is why it looks like it's in someone's house.

Coffee shops are also cool because they're one place where you can hang out for hours and no one seems to mind. Or was that just when I was a kid? Cos now I know for sure that I feel like an asshole if I'm just sitting there after I've finished my coffee and biscuit or whatever, or maybe that's just in restaurants in the United States of America.

Everyone (in America) knows that servers haaaaaaate it when you chill at the table for even a little bit after you've finished consuming whatever you've purchased there. It's why they drop off the bill and ask how you want to pay, or abruptly cut off service and get all brusque about bringing refills of water. They want you out of there so they can turn the table and get the next tipping customers in there. It doesn't matter if you've just dropped $250 on $15 worth of food and drinks and are therefore basically entitled to take the table home with you, they want you gone. Buh-bye.

Cool thing about being here is that people don't tip. True, servers walk away with a lot less cash at the end of the night, but as their hourly wage is higher, they also don't worry about walking away with nothing, as some minimum-wage earning servers do in the States. While the lack of monetary incentive often produces mediocre-to-downright-terrible service, staff really don't give a shit if you hang out there all day. Café culture isn't unique to Europe for no reason.

(I live for my "European" moments, because most of the time, it seems so normal here, and as long as I don't have to interact with any actual human beings, I could pretend I'm in an older, dirtier, flatter version of my hometown. Ha. Ha. <-- dry humorless laugh)

One thing that definitely sets this place apart from my hometown is an indoor table which looks like this Is that wicker??!!??

And I have those communist-ass wood spoons in my house, hand-me-downs from Christoph's communist-ass mom and communist-ass dad. The ashtray is cast iron and could be used as a murder weapon. The glass is a promo, but at least the cups and saucers and sugar dispensers look as if the proprietor stole them fair and square from some other, more successful restaurant. Good on him. Sitting at this cafe was basically like sitting at my own house, except with strangers in it, and dirt everywhere. Ha.

I will definitely be back to this place, because no one knows about it yet, as it's only been open for three weeks and has no sign outside, because it's in someone's frickin' apartment. Therefore when this place becomes the new most happening place to be in Kreuzkölln, I can say me and so-and-so go way back... maybe I should learn his name first though.

Can anyone tell me exactly what they were protesting, anyway?

2009-05-04T02:58:00.000-07:00

(Left: the only sane person I saw all day.)

I still don't know what the hell Mayday is, but evidently it is a big deal in Europe. Walpurgisnacht is the night of April 30th and it's a pagan holiday in which people are supposed to dance in the new spring season (obviously they are not working on a Gregorian calendar). Traditions range from burning effigies of witches to burning actual automobiles.

Why these crazy Krauts and Frenchies lose their minds over the coming of spring is beyond me.

Berlin is a fairly peaceful town--violent crime is relatively uncommon among innocents--i.e. people who are neither engaging in nor soliciting illegal behavior--but a couple of times a year a large percentage of Berliners transform into man-eating werewolves. At least once a year they will lose their shit over some soccer game or another (last year's Turkey vs Germany game in the quarterfinals of the Eurocup was a good example of otherwise perfectly normal people transforming into hideous monsters seemingly overnight), and they are guaranteed, year after year, to lose their shit over this pagan holiday.

This year's Walpurgisnacht wasn't that bad while I was there. The police had blocked off the streets surrounding the concert and demonstration and collected glass bottles and other projectiles before allowing party-goers into the area. They even provided plastic cups for people wishing to pour their beers into receptacles which cannot be used as weapons in the event of a riot. Drinking on the streets here is as illegal as it is anywhere else, but the cops in general have bigger fish to fry. I've never heard of anyone being ticketed for walking down the street with a beer, people drink everywhere, on the train, in McDonald's, at church, etcetera. There is also a drinking age, but do you think the police asked for ID before they handed a 15-year-old a cup to but his Bierchen in? No they did not. The cops made a very big show of their enormous presence, with paddywagons and officers standing at attention rank-and-file style for several blocks around, but IMO they were being super. fucking. cool. about thousands of drunk punk-rockers partying on the street all night, drinking and drugging and cursing the police to their faces. The cops' cool composures went unappreciated, but everything I saw was relatively peaceful.

After I took a picture of some kid's tiny speed-dick while he was pissing (afterward he attempted to get the photo back from me, nice try buddy, all you're going to get from me is a knuckle sammich, I said, DON'T FUCKING TOUCH ME) Laura and I were outro and off to the next event, several blocks away. When we walked back through the area a few hours later all was quiet and peaceful, the police presence greatly diminished.

Next day however we read that there were 30 cops injured and 49 arrests made, presumably after we'd gone to the other party around 10 o'clock.

Because we're geniuses, we decided to go to the Actual Event, MayDay, which took place the next afternoon and evening. It was just a normal street festival, except that it's well, in Berlin, which means lots of people walking around in tacky outfits and dyed hair, drinking beer, smoking reefer, and dancing to electro in broad daylight. As evening started to fall, the cops got into formation, and the good-natured cop-taunting began.

(Adalbertstraße, Berlin, 1 May 2009)

Backstory: In my homeland of Seattle, PNW, I have attended more demonstrations than you have had hot dinners, and I know the routine, and all the variations thereof. In the First World there are best case scenarios and worst-case scenarios. Best case: a group applies through all the legal channels for a permit to demonstrate, all of its attendees proceed peacefully, stay within the bounds marked off for their rally, wave signs and play crappy jam band music, talk all revolutionary-like, and pretend the police are not even there. Worst case: some fucking moron decides that the police, who are just as much there to protect innocent shopkeepers and tax-paying citizens from said moron's collosal stupidity as they are to haul him off when he does something dumb, are the enemy, and starts taunting them. As we all know people are even stupider in large groups, so a gaggle of his fellow geniuses will join him. Then King Intellect will climb up the side of a building and set an American flag on fire, thus providing legal grounds for breaking up the demo, causing the police to push a crowd of thousands through an area which can only accomodate hundreds, fire off rubber bullets and tear gas cannisters and beat up anyone who looks them in the eye. One thing I have learned is: you are not bigger and badder than the police. If you fuck with them you will pay. It is unlikely that you will get away without paying, but consider this; if you do somehow escape retribution there is a 100% chance that someone else will have to pay for your stupidity.

(This guy is a drug-enforcement officer, who, like many of his fellow policemen, was walking around with a video-camera to catch your dumbass in the act.)

In the Second World however, there appears to be only one kind of demo: People getting wasted all day, then rowdy and violent at night. At MayDay itself it was impossible to prevent glass bottles from making it into the festival, and when the sun went down the partiers taunted the police, hurled glass bottles and rocks through the air (not one or two or a couple. We are talking a fucking mob of idiots throwing shit at the mob of police), attempted to bring down a street light, and set fire to a car.

(the red light had a cover just like the green and yellow ones, but this dude broke it off and kept going. A couple minutes later he and two other people attempted to rock the pole out of its foundation.)

Either I am getting too old for this shit, or maybe just less convinced of my invincibility. As I cowered next to a building, praying I would not be hit by a flying bottle or paving stone or the first to inhale the tear gas, I thought to myself, "Why on earth did I wear flip flops today?"

Laura was close to tears, so we waited until a lull in the violence and very carefully, very slowly, picked our way through the mounds of broken glass and past the hordes of crazed protesters back to our bikes and cycled home.

(I dunno why this video is so dark, but the important image is there, the one of the ambulance trying to get through the crowd and people riding the back of it as if it were an ice cream truck.)

Ask Junior if he wants a hit

2009-04-29T01:20:00.000-07:00

Man do I love a summertime barbecue. Back home, barbecues would be in someone's backyard or on their patio. It would start in the afternoon and go on well after the coals had cooled. Potluck style, everyone would bring something to throw on the grill and/or a side dish, plus alcohol or some other mixer-type beverage. One thing not usually brought was children.

But then again, I'm talking about the barbecues of my "youth"--those years between the ages of 16 and 24. Now that people my age are settling down and having kids, it's evidently supposed to be a given that sometimes small people will accompany the guests.

Yesterday I co-hosted a barbecue in Görlitzer Park, arguably the dirtiest, shoddiest, grungiest, crummiest, junkie-est patch of grass in Berlin. It is also reknowned for its after-dark party scene, which adds to its daytime popularity. Gypsies begging and Africans slangin weed are not uncommon sights along the park's expansive corridor. Broken glass, empty drug baggies, shattered beer bottles, spent coals from previous barbecues, and copious amounts of garbage are underfoot. Add sixteen drunken adults into the mix and you have an environment that is anything but suitable for a 2.5 year old child.

But maaaaaan, was that kid cute. Oh man. Seriously. I was ready right then and there to grab the turkey baster and make sure I have one by this time next year. Watching the tow-headed toddler chase the brightly colored ball wherever his father kicked it, his long curls bouncing as he ran, listening to his joyful laughter and simple observations, I was moved. Touched by his exploratory spirit as he spun the wheels on Laura's bike, entreating his father to watch. "Look! Look! It goes faster! Look! It's doing it!" I was fascinated by his fascination, oh MAN what a fucking cute kid.

I remarked to Cookie, "But come on dude... what's he thinking bringing his kid to a barbecue full of drunken grownups, hot coals, baby-snatchers, rapists, Gypsies... not exactly a kid-friendly environment. I mean it's great that the kid gets to run around in the sunshine, but really."

Cookie just sort of nodded and said, "Well, we're getting to that age, aren't we? It'll happen more and more that people will show up with kids."

To which I replied, "Not at my party."

There's this theory that when you get married or have children, that your life changes, and you get different friends from the friends you had when you were single and childless. I personally think that's a load of bull, but there will always be assholes like me who like to hang out with grownups during grownup parties.

To be sure, when my friends started "dropping like flies", I truly did not make an effort to hang around them. We're talking about unmarried women living in small apartments with babies and sometimes baby daddies, the shit is depressing. All the girl's party clothes and paraphrenalia laying alongside toys, onesies and baby wipes. A girl in a woman's body, attempting to raise a child while refusing to leave her carefree youth behind.

I don't, of course, believe that when you have a kid you have to stop having fun. If you can afford it and you have the time, by all means, go seek adult company and entertainment. What I would kind of request though, is that you don't bring the kid with you.

I remember parties when I was all of 18 where there were infants in playpens weaving among the reefer-smoke, seemingly unfazed by the bass-heavy rap rattling the picture frames. Many's the mom I've seen kickin it downtown, pushing a stroller, smoking a blunt, and lining up her next baby daddy. To me, bringing a 2.5 year-old to an outdoor party where grownups are imbibing, smoking and cursing, as they were in the park yesterday, seems unwise. Yes, it is outdoors. No, it's not really a family event.

To the father's credit however, the rest of us at the barbecue might as well have not even existed. While my eyebrow raised upon seeing the child wading amongst the filth, Dad spent 100% of the time he spent there with his son, completely engrossed in kicking the ball for him, listening and talking to him, watching him spin the wheels on Laura's bike, hugging and kissing him, and monitoring him while he ran around a bit exploring the grass and the bushes and the bugs and the trees.

I concluded that it must be an American thing--where we work so hard to shelter our children from the realities of grownup life that they enter adulthood with zero tolerance for, and therefore heightened vulnerability to, its vices and pleasures. My parents were teetotallers and I am DEFINITELY not the better for it.

Damn Europe. So backwards, yet still so right. Sometimes.

Social Drinking is For Grammas

2009-04-18T05:22:00.000-07:00

I caught up with some friends the other day and three out of three of them were already drunk. Besides the fact that I'd sort of promised myself to stay dry that evening, it was basically too late to start. Laura was five beers down, Cookie and Graham were down a litre of cheap 13% wine EACH, it was simply too late. I would never catch up. I sat there sober, then later had to hear that there was a "weird vibe" and that it was "awkward" because of... me. Due to my "extreme" sobriety during which I still managed to crack jokes and fake sumo-wrestle the 'Stoph.

Telling this story to Andrea a couple of days later, she agreed that it's kind of shitty to hold someone responsible for not being wasted at seven o'clock in the afternoon, but she had a solution for next time: just drink two beers, and then go home.

I want to illustrate for you now another scenario. You walk into a bar, sit down. The place is full of regulars, half of them are friends. Now you're not particularly thirsty and you don't really find the burn of vodka down your throat theee most pleasant sensation. Beer doesn't burn but you're not especially hungry, and you know that after you drink one, you'll feel as full as if you had eaten a meal. Wine is nice if it's nice, but as you're in your favorite dive bar, it's probably not that nice. So what do you do? Order a coke? Why on earth would you go to a bar, sit down and order a coke? Go to the store, buy a coke, go sit on the beach and enjoy. The (sober) end.

No, no, no. If you're like me then everything you drink serves a purpose. In the regular course of my life I drink a very limited number of beverages, but all of them have their functions. To get high, jittery and talkative, I drink coffee or large amounts of black tea. To chill out in the evenings I drink green tea. To quench thirst/not die I drink water. To get drunk, giggle a lot and do, with relative impunity, things that I oughtn't, I drink wine/beer/spirits.

I've never really understood the concept of "social" drinking, when used in the context of drinking alcohol to be social, and not to get drunk. Social cooking, social eating, social camping, social canoeing, social shopping, these are all things you were going to do anyway so why not share them with a friend? But "social drinking"? Well no actually I wasn't planning on drinking this beer until the evening because then I am free to get drunk, in the meantime, would you like to drink some social water with me?

I mean, of course, you don't have to get disgustingly, asshole-bent-over-a-public-toilet-and-crying wasted every time you drink. Andrea is a tiny little girl so maybe two beers makes her tipsy. I myself don't really see the point in drinking two beers. For the calories wasted in two large German beers I could eat a portion of french fries or a two slices of pizza. I would WAY rather have some pizza than drink two big bloaty beers and feel a little fuzzy in my brain.

When you're in your twenties, drinking is for adventures! Drink a few and ride the train! Knock back a couple and play pool! Swig a bit then trespass on government property! Sip some sizzurp and talk to strangers! Get a li'l dreezy and play kick the can for miles! Steal shopping carts and push your friends around in them! Tear around a playground! Dance! Wrestle! Argue! Cook! Explore, run, jump, skip! Use it to celebrate, use it to commiserate! The possibilities are endless! Get drunk and do all the shit you usually do, except with poorer judgment (and way more fun)!

"Having a glass of sherry with dinner" is for boring old motherfuckers who get laid once a month. I say, let your inner drunk out. Don't pretend that you like the taste of six-year-old grape juice. I call bullshit. There is a reason you drink the first glass to the bottom, and why you accept the second glass, and the third, and so on. And it has nothing to do with the frooty bookay.

I hope I am drinking and yukking it up way past the age that that kind of behavior looks cute. There's nothing so heartwarming as a tableful of middle-aged biddies drinking and cursing and swaying out of rhythm to the jukebox. I'm not even being sarcastic. Those broads are doing it, not pretending that they're not doing it.

In conclusion: if you use alcohol in order to be social... does that mean maybe that you weren't all that social to begin with? Social is social, drunk is drunk. There is a difference.