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

(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.

A Fully Qualified Layabout

Being unemployed is ass, but the upside of it is that everyone and his dog is out of work at the moment (misery loves company)--even if the dog has a double degree in something smart, like architecture, and not something stupid, like Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

Berlin also happens to be one of the worst places a retail-slave-turned-pretend-intellectual-with-a-very-limited-visa could be while on the job-hunt. There are a crapton of English teaching jobs, but just like salmon or airline tickets, you have to snatch them up at precisely the right moment, or else both the quality and quantity are either faltering or outright lacking. But even salmon season lasts longer than a couple of weeks. In Berlin, because everyone is certified to teach English (and usually with much better/smarter-sounding certifications than mine), you have to be bam! front and center, some time between July 29th and August 1st, in order to be not too early and not too late to sign contracts, get basic training, and a full class schedule. Otherwise you're up shit creek in early March, applying to companies whose total vacancies comprise of three classes twice a month but if you'd like to sign a contract binding you to them until July, and don't need to eat or pay bills until the next school year, maybe they'd have a few more classes for you in September?

No thanks.

Since September I have been "retired" from the Berlin English-teaching scene. Too many fishermen, and just not enough fish. I've done a seminar, and worked in a kitchen, but for the most part I've just been... gainfully unemployed.

Fast-forward to March 2, 2009. I am no longer gainfully unemployed. I am now gainlessly unemployed. So when I'm woken up by some yahoo in a vertically-striped shirt, blue jeans and brown loafers on the other side of my phone, asking me to interview for a €400 job washing dishes part time, I practically oozed with enthusiasm.

Went there today, didn't get the job, cos I'm illegal. That's life.

When I got home today from not-working, I thought to myself, "I ought to just go up and stand in front of the shopping center and stand around drinking cheap beers and smoking rollies. But because I'm not German, I, as an able-bodied, childless person, cannot apply for welfare and stand around all day getting drunk and eating pommes with tiny plastic forks."

But--as I so often do--I digress.

The job listings here are something akin to madness. There are--literally--thousands of jobs available in the fields of which I have pooled most of my expertise (haha). Retail, waitressing, bartending, barista...ing. I can do all of that.

The catch? To do any of those things here, most employers wanna see a certificate of completion. Not like, a mixology diploma, but like, a piece of paper that says you worked for three years at half-pay "learning" how to make a fucking latte. That attests and affirms that you are now a professional and therefore worthy of being hired on at €5 an hour and no tips in their establishment.

Wow. And I could have sworn I learned how to make everything on a coffee-shop menu in under eight short hours.

I could have sworn I learned how to use a cash register in five minutes, and had perfected it in a week.

I could have sworn that even a monkey can stock a shelf, and a polar bear can count change.

Three years? Three years of your fucking life, gone, to prove that you are now a professional juice-presser? Apprenticeships are either for jobs with no official regulation (like tattooing, body piercing, and shamanism) or which just really require a lot of hands-on experience in order to get right on the first try (like plumbing, carpentry or electric work). I may also say that I feel that jobs which genuinely require apprenticing are usually good, honest, humble careers--note that word, career. Bussing tables is not a career. Working the cash register at the grocery store is not a career. I mean, even a bank-teller is not a proper career. You are just doing a job that any monkey can do. Or polar bear.

I don't mind my job requiring only slightly more skill than can be offered by zoo animals, nor do I mind commanding half the respect afforded to said beasts. It doesn't matter to me if I scrub toilets or flip burgers. I'm not too proud for that. But I'm also not planning on doing any apprenticeships to prove I can do it. Not any time soon.

A friend of mine recently applied to a small hotel for a position as a chaimbermaid. The owner of the modest inn was doubtful that the girl would like working there very much, because the pay was only €800 before taxes, and with only €620 take-home, most people would rather just collect unemployment. My friend, being German-born but Canadian-raised, found the idea of staying home doing nothing for doing-nothing's sake distasteful and told the lady so, but the lady wasn't buying it. She'd confessed that she'd actually rather find a Polish or Czech immigrant to work for her--someone not so well provided-for by the social system.

Everyone likes to shit on America and our social services system ("Did you know a baby dies of AIDS every three seconds in the States? It's true. It's the highest cause of infant mortality in America, right after high cholesterol and gunshot wounds"), but at least when healthy, childless Americans are out of work, they, like... look for a job. No 18-year-old with "too much of a conscience to work at McDonald's" is going to fund his kind bud and used-bookstore habits from his welfare check.

And after all this complaining... I still don't have a job.

Time to head up to the shopping center and knock back a few lukewarm ones.