Lucky Numbers

My birthday started with pancakes at midnight at a friends house, and continued this morning with a selection of blueberry and strawberry tortes my boss surprised me with this morning. At lunch we ordered in dim sum from Good Friends, a excellent Chinese restaurant in Kreuzberg. Tonight there will be drinks at Que Pasa at Gorlitzer. This weekend will be a party at my flat.

This is the year I turn the age of my birthday. Doubles have always been my good luck. Two two’s are a sign things will go well for me.

And what do I have to show for myself?
My mother sent me this jumper, and I am happy:

Music of the day:
Cry For Help – Flying Lotus

Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr – Andre Bukhonsky

Collapsing at Your Doorstep – Air France

Sabali – Amadou & Mariam

It is a good day in Oliviaville.

Memories of Jetlag

Reading back through my old posts from this winter I’m overwhelmed by how vividly I feel the jetlag I had when I first arrived. The lack of sufficient daylight lead to me never getting over my jetlag the entire month I was here. I would wander up for breakfast at 7:30 at night, or 10:30, and find a pretzel at a pub, or make myself one of Erik’s frozen’s pizza. My diet was similar to his diet then. Lots of fresh bread rolls, thinly sliced meats, and salted butter for mid-day meals, frozen pizzas for dinner, and abundant clementines at breakfast, with yogurt and banana-flavoured soy milk. Lots of vodka-pudding whenever Erik left it over. Other things are remembered. The mushroomy smell of people’s boots right outside their doors, moist from the snow and sweaty from too many socks. The cold inside my cheeks that never went away, that followed me home, that turned into pneumonia. Even when I was cured and I woke up early to go online and catch a skype conversation with Johannes, I would listen to music from the winter and my cheeks would swell with the Berlin cold.

Berlin, January 1st 2009

My meals since I’ve moved here are very different. I eat lots of hummus and hallomi. I boil potatoes and save them to put my spreads on top of. In the morning I will pull a boiled red potato out from my fridge, heat it for a few minutes in the oven, and cover it in tomato basil spread, or in quark. Meat is disappearing from diet. I eat blueberry tortes at the local bakery with my fake family, with my fake kids. Johannes and I eat lots of Falafel döners together from Turkish imbisses we pass by. We split our baked potatoes wedges at a vegetarian bar over tofu and wheat burgers. We go to bed late drinking Polish beers in his loft bed, watching a film on his large computer monitor below. We wake up late and practice piano separately on his electronic and acoustic pianos.

In winter my anxiety made me crave salt. Now my homesickness urges me towards tropical fruits and food colouring. I miss mac-and-cheese from the box. I miss avocados slathered in lime and doused in salt and chased by a Corona. I miss single bottles of apricot beer drunken quietly under the extra blankets I kept on the couch. I miss my view of the Berry Good fruit stand, especially during the summer when dogs and bicycles sat unlocked in the makeshift parking lot.

My summer here is ending and the smells of winter are coming on, the cold feeling in my cheeks I now recognize as love, and the world I’ve been building for myself is slowly materializing. The Expatriate parlor/bookstore I’ve discovered may lead to more work, possibly an internship at the ExBerliner. The owner of the small bioladen where I buy my groceries gave me a bouquet of the summer’s last blumes on Monday. These mundane details are my privilege, my memories of midnight meat in December a pinch at my cold cheeks. Johannes and I: our meals now being the largest physical gap between us aside from the table we eat across, we grope beneath our tablecloth for each others’ hands in the dim kitchen. And here in the middle of the table, where our cold hands meet, I am at the middle of the blue-bridge again, where we met half-way to eat lunch, me from the east and him from the west. That is love the only way I know it, the half-way point underneath the table, over a bridge, between two languages, the summer in between our two winters and any more that come.

They Will Never Learn

Harry Patch (In Memory Of) – Radiohead, free download

Another song, and hopefully more later.

i am the only one that got through
the others died where ever they fell
it was an ambush
they came up from all sides
give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
i’ve seen devils coming up from the ground

In other news, last night I had a dream three girls at Reed tried to welcome me back from a winter in Berlin, and I pushed the fattest one out the window.  When she hit the cement, she burst into a million coins, after she yelled out that my dog is infinitely worse than her dog.  The other girls went running towards my fridge to steal some apricot beer and rip my drawings from the kitchen hallway walls.  The girl with bad hair went and stole all my Radiohead CDs, and the whitest girl tried to console me while stretching one hand out the window to pick up the coins from the cement (it was a very long, rubbery hand).

i’ve seen hell upon this earth
the next will be chemical but they will never learn

Words Don’t Count

New story underway.  I’m still negotiating how much I can steal from real life, and what I want characters to reveal about themselves.  Maybe describing a story isn’t as helpful as sharing the music that goes into it.  Life now is like a shallow tide swept away all my castles.  My past four years were supposed to be mine forever, but now they’re stoney markers of life long past, headstones of other people’s decisions, but not my own.  The people I love aren’t people, the lessons I learned impractical, the friends I made mostly a scattering of lonely socialites looking for ladders to climb and someone to tell their unfortunate secrets to.

I don’t have many secrets because I don’t have much of a sense of privacy.  I have statements that I abide by, or mantras, and they change.  Here are some.  You can’t hide from the truth, because the truth is all there is.  Words don’t count.  People do.  And the people are gone.  My life is starting over in land-locked Berlin.  When I’m lucky, and ready, I’ll turn around and send the right words to the right people.  I don’t have friends, I only have very good readers.  Dignity can’t be held hostage for the price of a plane ticket.  Berlin doesn’t extrodite most American criminals.  You don’t have to erase everything and everyone that hurt you, but you have little control over anyone else’s lives with the exception of your presence in those lives.  If you withhold your life from others they’ll often resent you.  Disappearing isn’t as complicated as you expect, and it’s often easier than dealing with transitions, or watching people forget and replace you.  However, once you’re gone it’s really hard to reappear, and you will regret it when your past is an empty path with very few people left to account for it.  The benefits of having a relatively empty past are the ability to focus relentlessly on the present.  That’s how writing can really help you, to record the past that otherwise might not exist.  And the few people that do remain, after you pulled a pretty swift disappearing act, those are people who you could switch lives with.  Those are your people.  They know your past.

1. Unexpected Delight feat. Laura Darlington – Flying Lotus
2. The Truth feat Roisin of Moloko and J-Live – Handsome Boy Modeling School
3. Oh Happy Day – Edwin Hawkins Singers
4. The Recipe – Locust Toybox
5. She Came Along – Sharam feat. Kid Cudi
6. Travelin’ Light – Billie Holiday
7. Testament (ft. Gonja Sufi) – Flying Lotus
8. You’re Everything – Bun B feat. Rick Ross, David Banner, and 8-Ball & MJG
9. Caravan – Blur
10. Das Erste Mal – Stereo Total
11. The Black Ghosts/Full Moon – DJ Trife
12. In This World – Moby

Hope the music does something for you.

And Your Wifey, She Don’t Like Me

Drawings, partners wearing each other’s clothing, open windows in the summer flat.

I’m going to make something about forgetful people soon.  My next project includes sarcasm, bad grunge music, a car trip, and public humiliation.  Hopefully Elephants too.

Jog your memory friends – you’d be surprised what others won’t forget.

Everything You Ever Wanted

Download my thesis, Everything That Never Happened To Me (pdf).

Download the soundtrack, a mix CD I compiled (zip).

Individual tracks:

1. “High School Lover,” Air
2. “1992,” Blur
3. “Fog,” Radiohead
4. “Etched Headplate,” Burial
5. “Day N Nite,” Kid Cudi
6. “I’m Afraid of Japan,” Final Fantasy
7. “Orion,” Rodrigo y Gabriela
8. “Nobody Lost, Nobody Found,” Cut Copy
9. “U Hurt Me,” Burial
10. “Figure 8,” Elliott Smith
11. “Knives Out (feat. Monica Blaire),” Waajeed
12. “Lose Control,” Missy Elliott, feat. Ciara and Fat Man Scoop
13. “Man On The Moon,” Kid Cudi
14. “(Reverse),” Final Fantasy
15. “Waltz in C# Minor, Op. 64. No. 2,” Chopin
16. “Passing Feeling,” Elliott Smith
17. “High & Dry (feat. Bilal),” Pete Kuzma
18. “Sex Born Poison,” Air
19. “Kesson Daslef,” Aphex Twin
20. “You Never Wash Up After Yourself,” Radiohead

Back in Berlin

Here are a bunch of pictures from the host family’s house in Berlin.  The house is located in the Kreuzburg district.

I plan on uploading a pdf version of my thesis here soon.

Implication

A crime has been committed: I stopped writing entirely for nearly three weeks after I returned to Portland.  When I started back up, there were gaps in all my journals and in my thesis.  There was a large period of time in which nothing seemed selfless in telling.  Anyone who would read about me knew about me.  This now also seems a problem with my thesis.  As I often do think to myself, “It’s Time to Lose Your First Person Young Female Narrator Who Is Essentially A  Stand In For Yourself.”  This stopped the journaling and obviously the thesis.  Who am I and who is Oblina?  And more importantly, Who Gives A Shit?

The solution has been pulling away from the self and talking about the people who need to be written about: not me. This has lead to a “we” cropping up.  I have been reading Yiyun Li’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Jean Thompson’s Throws Like A Girl.  The sympathic group, the group implication, the “we did this, but among us, there was one – and let me tell you about him,” story model.

My wikipedia-articles-visited list is a good predictor of what I’ll be writing next.  However, the articles don’t always line up, or only tangentially reveal my state of mind, and don’t accurately help you, the reader, know exactly what bullshittery I am up to next.

In order to get any of you looking forward to what I’ve been writing and how I’ve been editing, please accept the following list of wikipedia articles as a small token – a reminder that I will write here more often and try never to leave again for so long a time.

-Cadaver

-Death

-Hospital

-New York City

-Burn Unit

I also studied all the human hair articles, which are too numerous to post here.

Atlanta

It hasn’t been easy these last 23 hours.  Berlin to Paris to Atlanta, and my next stop will be Portland.  It’s stupid but I just thought of it – convenient, that it’s called Port – land.  Am I ship returning to harbour?  Do I come from somewhere like Portland?  Does that mean I have to come back there no matter what?

I spent the night here while security guards and janitors and late night shop attendants made their rounds, looking for left-behind luggage, mopping up the mobile sidewalks, counting their chicklet gum packets and tampons and sodas before locking their booths.  I converted my last bit of Euros into dollars before everything closed up.  I got in just in time to buy myself some dinner.  Got myself a food court set of california rolls and a pack of oreos with a wordpuzzle magazine to help pass the time. Did three puzzles, ate the sushi, talking online for an hour or so, then fell asleep at my gate.  I woke up and my hand was asleep.  It was 5.50 am, so I wandered to the bathroom and took a fake a shower, just because I felt so gross.

Miss Europe, think I’ve developed some awkward mimetic accent from all the German accents I was around or something.  It’s really strange being able to read everything all of a sudden.

some last pictures -

Short Announcement

I haven’t posted for a while. That’s because I’ve been having a lot of strange thoughts and feelings.  I also haven’t been writing much.  I hope this short video explains things, for now.