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.