After a week of being all by my lonesome, I am being social again!

I've been going, going, going recently! I was exhausted all week and finally felt like I'd caught up on sleep by Friday. I didn't get together with any friends after work any of the days until Friday! It was a Charlotte week. It was nice. I came home from work every day, turned into a youtube video watching zombie, wrote ideas for potential performance art ideas in my notebook, and went to bed. I'd like to get to a point where I'm much more balanced than I am and can actually do things after work, but it takes so much more alone time to get past the decompressing time and into the creative, active time that I tend to just keep the social momentum going. I'm not sure that made sense how I expressed it, but I can go more into the way I operate another time. It doesn't feel important right now. 

On Friday, I met up with friends to go to a soccer, sorry, football game. For many years I thought I was decidedly Not Into Sports but, as it turns out, I just hadn't been to enough games in person. I don't have a desire to watch any sports on the tv but if there's a crowd of people in color coordinated outfits, slightly drunk, singing and chanting together, I'm basically guaranteed to have a good time. In recent years, I've realized I love sports games! Do I feel a desire to go to them frequently? No. Regularly? No. Sporadically, infrequently, when my friends want to? Yes!!! I had a blast. I ate my stadium food, I drank my stadium beer, I smoked my stadium cigarette. And then we went to a bar afterward to keep the fun energy going. A lovely night!

Yesterday, I wasn't entirely sure if I wanted to get together with my friends or not because I was sort of feeling just going to a park to sit by myself and draw, but in the end I did get together with friends. And I'm glad I did! We went to this big protest/party (a common combination in Berlin, as it turns out) put on every year by all of Berlin's remaining squats. There were a bunch of squats that came about in the late '60s/early '70s and most of them have been torn down and turned into condos by now, but a few remain and are trying to hold their ground against developers. They protest all the time, as you'd imagine anarchist punks living in squats would, but this particular one is special. Every squat builds out a cart, some just shopping carts with things attached to them and some as elaborate as multiple rickety old bikes welded together with a proper cart on top that can hold five people, and they each get a certain number of balls of one color and then, during the march part of the protest, they're playing a capture the flag type game where they try to steal or barter for as many of the other squats' balls as possible. At the end, they count who got the most balls from the largest variety of squats. 

Also at the end there is a race, which is just people running and pushing the carts. They do not move on their own. It was such a blast! I got rammed into one of the carts at one point (the game part gets a little aggressive, but in a mosh pit sort of way where people sort of throw one another to the ground and then help one another back up) and now have a bruise on my arm and I'm thinking of it as a battle scar. Afterward, we went to one of the squats (which, of course, the city is currently trying to tear down to build condos) where there was a big fundraiser party with live music and food and drinks. We didn't stay too long, though, because we decided to go get dinner at a place where we could sit down and eat. It was one of our friends' first times eating Ethiopian food. 

Today I went to a garden store with two friends and then we dropped off one of them with her new plants and the other one and I bumbled around town for the rest of the day, drinking beer out in the sun, buying old photos at flea markets, seeing magicians and other street performers, and eating so much food. I got a light sunburn on my shoulders. I am so full of tacos and beer right now! 

I have a date on Tuesday. We shall see how it goes. I deleted instagram and twitter from my phone and have been almost entirely off of them both for the past week, but I downloaded bumble (I'm on bumble bff even though I don't actively need more new friends) and have been on hinge more, so I feel like I've just replaced one phone addiction app with another. Maybe I should delete those as well. I'll decide later. 

The mother of one of my best friends passed the other day and I am grappling with the reality of living on another continent than where most of the people I love live. If I were in the US right now, I would be flying out to help them with the aftermath of her death, but instead I am here, day drinking and seeing magicians and going to parties while it hangs over me that there's nothing I can do to support them other than remind them that I'm awake when all our other friends are asleep so they can call me in the middle of the night when they need somebody to talk to. And call and check in on them. But really, the best way I know of supporting people is to feed them and I cannot feed them right now. As adulthood goes on, I know that there will only be more of these major life events (tragedies and joyous events) that I will not be present for if I continue to live far away from everybody I've ever known. Is this just what my life will be like now? Will I always feel like I'm not able to be there for the people I love when they need it most because I am just too physically far? I have always valued having a strong sense of community and such a large part of community, for me, is being there through the good, the bad, the mundane, the tragic, all of it. And how can I do that when I am not there at all? This definitely will play a role in the future in how I make my decisions about where I am living and how I want my life to go. I am trying my best to figure out how to navigate the current situation and I think I will be better prepared the next time something big happens, but I still will always be learning. If you have any insights to share, please do. 

Hmmmm life can be funny, can't it?

Today, a letter I wrote to the ex girlfriend of a former flame of mine was returned to me, undeliverable. There's something sort of poetic about that, isn't there?

I recently had a phone call with a former Big Crush that was two or three hours long. Similar vein. 

(The ex girlfriend of the former flame and I are sort of loosely online friends, I've sent postcards to her before... realized that without context it sounded a bit weird.)

Maybe life is just about things that are silly and fun!!!

If your art is experimental, does that make me your test subject?

I went to a multi-disciplinary experimental performance art thing last night with two relatively new friends of mine (though I suppose all my friends here are relatively new). I've had good luck so far with things I've gone to here being pretty good and so I forgot that "experimental" can really just mean "trying things out" and that "trying things out" can really just mean "throwing shit at a wall and seeing if it sticks" and, well, that's what I felt it was last night. 

There were five pieces of this show last night. The first was a live music thing I couldn't tell you the genre of, then two films, then an ambient music and live painting thing, then an electronic-ish music thing with poetry readings, then an improvisational clarinet piece. 

The first piece made me think "just because you're weird and European doesn't make you Björk." Two people on stage, black and white video being projected onto them, kind of ambient-ish music and singing in a language I didn't recognize. Definitely not exciting enough to be Björk.

The second piece (first film) wasn't bad, but I was a bit confused and it felt kind of unoriginal. Two beautiful, toned, naked women being weird on a stage while they, dressed in a prudish manner, watched themselves on the stage. At one point they became aware of the cameraperson and went crazy. 

The third piece (second film) was also not bad but it wasn't something I would say took much artistic talent or thought. It was just a montage of old home videos of a family from the 1950s with ambient music playing in the background. We kept waiting for something to happen. 

The fourth piece was a woman making ambient music while also doing a live painting, which seems like it could be interesting but wasn't. Neither the music nor the painting was very good and because she was going so slowly, it wasn't even impressive that she was doing both at once. The painting was one of those fluid paintings where they just pour paint onto the canvas and let it dribble around. 

The fifth piece was recordings of poetry readings which the guy then performed music with/over. He seems like he'd be a talented musician in the regular way (his trumpet playing was very good, I could imagine him in a big band) but it felt like midlife crisis art. The sound didn't match the poems well and was dissonant, not in a particularly interesting way. 

The sixth piece was another sort of ambient music piece, an improvised clarinet piece the guy played and put through a looper and other things (I don't know much about these sorts of things, but he was using some sort of electronics). I thought this was actually the best piece of the night but, unfortunately, I was so tired by then and kind of ready to go home and sort of started dozing off during it. 

All this is not to say I didn't enjoy myself because I did. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. My friends and I critiqued each piece thoughtfully but, you know, critically. I'd more often like to sit with friends and pick things apart like we did last night. It was lovely! And it made me think a lot about what I think makes art "good" and "worthwhile" and I'll surely write about that at some point in the future. I'll also write about all the ideas we came up with for performance art pieces. 

Come, watch some YouTube videos with me.

I don't know what this is from but I like it. 

A classic. I've made so many people watch this upon finding out they don't know about Jan Svankmajer. I don't know why I care. 

I think if I met Johnny Flynn in real life it would break my heart because I would surely fall in love with him, but he is happily married to his longtime sweetheart. This isn't even my favorite performance video of his, it's just the one I have open in a tab on my laptop right now. 

It feels sort of self explanatory that I'd include an Ethel Cain video. 

I love old people...

I just think it's sweet. Hehe.

Have you seen this before? Surely, you have...

I'm a banjo fan, what can I say.

I started this last night and then didn't finish it but I suspect I'll do another some other time. I hope you enjoy. 

For Zach: when he said cathedrals everywhere, he really meant EVERYWHERE.

In chronological order. 

A beautiful sunset. 

Funny hen-basket decorations at a restaurant. 

Not my flowers, not my beer. (Just kidding, it was my beer.) I was seated outside at the only available table while my friends ordered food inside. 

A swan at the lake where my friends and I went for a swim. It was cold and I am afraid of swans. It was a lovely day. 

I went to a kind of experimental-ish theater piece in this space that's absolutely meant to be a grocery store or something like that. Have you ever seen a play where you have windows to outside? I hadn't ever before, but now I can say I have. The lead actor even went outside to yell into the street for a minute or two. 

Breakfast before work with a coworker. 

Dinner before a different experimental theater (live film, in this case) piece with a friend. 

The theater, looking quite grand. The yellow banner up top used to say "NONBINARY" for a while. We spent a very long time trying to translate the sign language (my friend's wife is deaf so she knows a little bit of German sign language). It says "tohuwabohu" in case you were wondering. 

My bus, taunting me. I've missed it three times this week in exactly this fashion, and I've only taken it three times this week. 

Fountain near my apartment, first time I've seen water in it. 

Shadows on my bedroom wall. I left the curtains open one night. 

Notes I took during a call at work so I could draw a detail for the mounting of a pendant luminaire in a slanted plaster ceiling.

Spring has sprung in Berlin!

I went to a modular synthesizer workshop today. I don't know anything about them and am not a musician and do not intend to get into them, but it was free and a friend of mine was going. I think this will now be one of the things I take every friend to when they come to visit me in Berlin. It was very cool. 

It can be difficult to manage it all.

One of the universal struggles we all face is that of time management. I think about love and romance all day every day, as I'm sure you can tell by now, but I think I think about time management even more. Isn't that so lame and embarrassing? But it's true. So here I am. 

I want to be able to do every single thing that interests me all the time and, unfortunately, so many things interest me. Recently, I've been going to the theater more. Shows are in the evenings. What else is in the evenings? Dancing. I need to coordinate between the shows I want to go to and the social dance events I want to go to. What else is in the evenings? Basically everything. I hate the 8 hour workday, I hate the 5 day work week. Ugh. It's just impossible! I wish I could take art classes and go for bike rides or yoga classes or what have you in the morning, then work for 5 hours, then go to a show or out to dinner with friends or out dancing or watch a movie at home. I never really watch movies. I never can spare the time to! And yet I spend so much time doing basically nothing. I want to go to museums and write stories and try every new hobby. 

This coming Thursday, I'm going to an introduction to synthesizers workshop with a friend of mine. I had to google what synthesizers look like. I have no previous interest or experience with them, but I love to learn new things and so I am going. Wouldn't it be so cool to make music?

There simply is not enough time to do all these things and run errands and do chores and lounge around in the park, chatting and hanging out. When am I supposed to find the time to file my taxes? (Don't worry, everything's already finished and sent in.) When am I supposed to get the haircut I so desperately need? I need to buy a new basic, everyday, nude bra! I've needed to for months! And yet I haven't! I've just been wearing the ill-fitting one I already have that is absolutely the wrong size now because I've recently lost weight. I barely cook! I wish I had more time and energy to cook. 

I am stuck between not knowing how to make time for all the friends I already have and wanting to make more friends and know everybody in the whole city, the whole world. I need to call my friends from back home and catch up with them. I need to call my friends from back home and plan their visits to come see me in Berlin. 

Although I am on hinge, I have no real interest at the moment in meeting people from there because I'd rather be making friends right now than going on first dates. Maybe that's also due to my current desire to meet a partner organically and have a romance that develops from a friendship. 

I need to learn more about bike maintenance! Can you believe I've never fixed a flat tire? I've changed a car tire but I know less about bike maintenance than car maintenance. Embarrassing! 

A friend of mine and I are starting a dnd campaign. Well, it's more that he's starting it and I'm participating in it. Our first meeting is in two and a half hours. I'd like to get into a rhythm of having certain things I do at certain times on certain days, but I'd also like to have a completely open and free schedule so that I can go wherever the wind takes me. But I have a full time job! How am I supposed deal with all of this? I don't know! 

What good problems to have. But problems nonetheless. 

Temperatures are rising and I am out of doors

Please never apologize for rambling. That's what I'm here for and I've most definitely rambled at you more than you've rambled at me. I think you absolutely should plant some bleeding hearts. And I think you'll be very successful with your gardening endeavors, it feels like a year for that somehow. Something in the air, I'm not sure. 

I went for a bike ride today! I had originally been considering biking to this little town that's almost 90km away from here and spending the night out there and going for a hike tomorrow before coming back on the train, but my weekend has somehow filled up quite a bit and so staying overnight isn't happening. For the better, probably. I haven't taken this new craigslist bike out for any longer rides yet and don't have any tools for fixing it if something does go wrong. Luckily, I'm in Germany and not the US so I would be able to just take the train if need be. But still. 

The new plan was to bike to a closer town and then take the train back from there and then talk with one of my best friends on the phone about their plans to come visit this summer. That would've been a 50km ride instead of 90km. Of course, I kept stopping to eat the chocolate I'd brought along and to take photos of flowers and of houses the camels at the circus I stumbled upon and at one point I stopped and ordered myself a piece of cake at a bakery and sat around and ate that. Because of all the stopping, it eventually started to rain on me and I realized it was getting to be time for me to head back so I could talk to my friend so I stopped early, probably after about 35 or 40km. Conveniently, this was right by the last stop of the S-Bahn line, which runs every 20 minutes so it was super easy to get back. I think another weekend I'd like to do my plan to bike to the other town, but I may start by taking the S-Bahn to the end of the line because a lot of my ride was just city/suburban riding and it seemed like it was going to start feeling more rural if I'd continued and, well, that's sort of my goal in getting out of the city. To feel like I'm really out of the city. But it was fun to ride out of Berlin today and experience that part of it for myself! 

The camel.

Tomorrow it's supposed to get up into the low 70s so I'm going swimming with two friends (the meek guy from the maybe-date and the best friend of a twitter mutual of mine) and then on to a "community networking night" at this events/sustainability space I volunteered at last weekend, which is basically a big dinner party with vegan food and a guided meditation after. I haven't attended one before, but they're once a month so I think if I like it I'll try to make out again soon. Last weekend when I went it was to help build this vertical garden/green wall thing in the front area of the space. 

Not the world's best photo, but this is the front area of the space. You can see two of the five panels of the green wall. These will be mounted to the white wall above them and have wool pouches with the plants attached to them. Very excited to keep working on it and see how it works out in the end! 

What else is there to share? Not all too much. I'm relaxing for the rest of the day. Might watch a movie. Might not. 

For Ciera: Music!

Not that I really need to give a disclaimer, but I will say I've been very especially into folk and country as of late. It isn't a new thing, as you know, but it has been almost exclusively what I've been listening to. 

March 22nd, 2024. A great day for music. Four albums by four women. I haven't even had the time to listen to them all yet. 

Trail of Flowers by Sierra Ferrell, of course.  I've been waiting and waiting and waiting for this album for a number of reasons, one of which is that she played Why Haven't You Loved Me Yet at her show last spring in Vancouver and it's been stuck in my head ever since (and she didn't even release it as a single!!). I think if I'd looked for it, I probably could've found it on youtube but for whatever reason, I didn't. 

Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee. I've only started listening to her recently, but I've become obsessed. I can't stop. Her older stuff is so good, too!!

Bright Future by Adrianne Lenker, of Big Thief. I don't know if you listen to her or not but even if you think you haven't heard her before, you have. I really love this cover of her song Anything. 

Bite Down by Rosali. I'm only listening to this one for the first time right now as I write this, but I'm blown away. A voice like a warm hug. 

Stupid Horse but this time it's on the banjo. If you don't know the song yet, click the first link first to get an idea of what it sounds like.

I know I already sent you an Emily Nenni song earlier, but I really think you'd like her and I hope you give her a listen. Her song Never One to Stay was my introduction to her. 

There are too many incredible artists!!!

Lael Neale is somebody I started getting into right around the time I visited you last February and I'm not sure I ever actually showed you her music? I might have been too fixated on making you listen to Skrillex (which I stand by, btw). Particular standout songs for me are I Am The River and Every Star Shivers in the Dark. 

At the tail end of last year and the beginning of this year when I was infatuated by a guy I'm friends with, I got really into the song We Can't Be Friends by Lorene Scafaria, for pretty obvious reason. 

Erin Rae is impossible to choose favorites from. I wish I could listen to her music for the first time over again. I think that Love Like Before may be a perfect song. I used to occasionally send Can't See Stars to a guy I slept with two summers ago and now I think of him every time I listen to it. I think he was infatuated by me. 

I can't imagine you haven't heard Alice Phoebe Lou before, but I'm including people here not because I think you haven't heard them but because I want to emphasize my love for them. Her live versions of her songs take the cake for me, though I listen to her endlessly on spotify as well. My favorites are this version of Something Holy and this version of Only When I. I used to lie down on the floor in my apartment in Seattle and listen to her on repeat for hours, just letting the music wash over me. 

Same goes for Johnny Flynn. Such a unique voice, so much better in live versions. I don't think I've found a single video of him on youtube that I didn't think was lovely. Here's him singing The Water and Amazon Love. 

I sent messages in our group chat a little while ago about Labi Siffre, but I do feel like I want to underscore that one. He's incredible. Another song I listened to a lot during my infatuation was Bless the Telephone. 

There's absolutely no way you haven't heard of  the The California Honeydrops before because I know I've made you listen to them. I am eternally obsessed and have probably seen them live more times than any other band. I've also hung out with them and danced a very very very long salsa with Lech, the lead singer. It's hard to know when to finish dancing when people are just jamming rather than playing songs. When It Was Wrong was the first song of theirs I ever became obsessed with. Were they at Salmonfest the year you were there?

A very recent discovery of mine is Laurie Anderson! O Superman! There's no way she isn't friends with David Byrne. Speaking of, if you haven't listened to much Talking Heads before, there is no time to start like the present. I've loved them all my life because my mom is a big fan and, well, she has probably influenced my taste in music more than anybody else. 

I've also been really into watching videos of Frank Zappa's live performances recently. Here is a brief example. My introduction to him was at this guy's house after we'd been swing dancing. We put on Frank Zappa and I made him watch Jan Svankmajer films, silently, to accompany the music. 

I will make another post if/when I come up with more to share. There's so much music out there and I want to listen to it all. 

For Zach: cathedrals everywhere, for my eyes to see

A gondola. I didn't know we had one in Berlin until I saw it.

Stylish footwear in a painting. 

A photo I took by accident when putting my phone into my pocket, I think. 

A beautifully blocked and beautifully lit flamenco dance.

A worm on a walk. I was on a walk. The worm was moving in the usual way worms do, without legs. 

A building with a blue sky painted onto it, against a gray sky. A funny contrast. 

I hear her voice in the morning hour, she calls me

The radio reminds me of my home far away...

Take Me Home, Country Roads has been following me for two weeks. Three weeks? Something like that. It's kind of a perfect song. And there are so many beautiful versions of it. 

I've got three road trip playlists, all made by my mother. She's got excellent taste in music and I trust her pretty much blindly and when I was going on a road trip with my ex boyfriend ages ago, I asked her for a road trip playlist. I'm not entirely sure she understood, at that point, that you could just keep adding to a playlist you'd already begun in Spotify and so, when I told her we'd listened all the way through the playlist, another came our way. And then another. There's some John Denver on those. 

There's a specific version of Take Me Home, Country Roads that I distinctly remember hearing but haven't been able to find again. I don't remember whose version it was. 

Here's a nice banjo cover. 

Anyway, the song's been making me a bit nostalgic for the US and the wide open road. There's just something about driving for hours on end through an unchanging landscape. The longest day of driving I've ever had was thirteen hours from Durango to Oklahoma City. There was a snowstorm through most of my way through New Mexico and it added a couple hours onto the driving time. That's also the only time I've ever been in Texas and, wow, what an unchanging landscape. 

I love traveling by train here but there really is something to be said for driving. Sorry, Mother Earth.