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

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.

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 -

Partir Ou Mourir

Today is the last day of the year.  I am making more postcards.  I am meeting new people.  I will have a resolution by midnight tonight, Berlin time.  Writing for my next project has begun, small progress as it might be.  Tonight my brother and his friends are going to take me out, though I don’t know where (please God, let there be electro, and cute French boys to watch).  We start off drinking some glühwein here at Erik’s apartment.  Then I don’t know where exactly.

Last year my new year’s resolution was to find my brother, and here I am in Berlin.  I did my work.  In case you forgot, or didn’t know, last new year’s was spent at a New York City hipster house party where yours truly shared a giant pink mess of jeger and champagne all over the walls and some coats.  My resolution then was also to forget about Viriginia and that entire mess, or at least write about it and then get over it.  Now I have to come up with something to pacify my nightmares.  When I graduate, when I publish Everything That Never Happened To Me, when I live in Portland and come back with memories from Berlin, then what?

I have a few ideas, specifically from strange dreams I’ve been having.  I have this one dream where I keep cutting my own hair and braiding it, and giving the strands to a blonde boy whose face I cannot see.  He has long blonde hair and birds are always stealing strands of it to build a nest in a nearby apple tree.  The first line that keeps appearing is, When I die – . The setting for my work might be something a bit from a dark fantasy of one’s futue.

Meanwhile, I’ve set up my reservation at Alcatraz near Senefelderplätz, in the general area where my brother lives.  When I went to put in my deposit I met these two nice French boys, one of which immediatley started talking to me about the Silvestern (the new years).  I felt embarassed talking to a French person and letting them know I’m American.  You always think of the French as the latest in fashion and food, maybe a bit stuck up, but face to face you are just struck by how simply a conversation can go.

I leave you with a German song by Stereo Total, “Ich bin der Stricherjunge.”

Speak to you soon, my merry canner friends.  A thousand friendly kisses.

Berlin

More about this when I wake up, but I spent the night going to bars and clubs with my brother and his friend Erik (who I am staying with). I have been awake for nearly 40 or so hours with traveling and then spending the whole day and then the whole first night here in Berlin up.  But that’s not really awake all those hours, since I passed out on the plane when I just stopped being able to hold my uncomfortable little body up.  It’s now 8 AM and the sky is lightening up.

View from my room.

I’ll wake up and write I’m certain of it.

This Adventure Merits a Photograph of My Current Location

I am at a Sports Bar in the JFK airport.

I ordered a bloody mary and some chicken strips with a side of fries.  I paid a very stupid 5.00 to get on the internet.  An old French guy (okay – not so old – like maybe 35?) asked me if I was French in French.  I responded in Spanish that I was from Argentina.  There’s lots of people with really thick Boston accents that work as waiters (or am I hearing things?).  Also, I left my cellphone at the PDX airport, so I don’t know when I’ll see that again.  Because of this I couldn’t get in contact with a friend I was supposed to eat lunch with in NYC.  Instead I have been forced to surf the internet.

Let this be a warning to you.  Bad ideas can only lead to losing yourself in enormous interntional airports and being cold and bummy as hell in a foreign country.  In short, if you have a crazy idea, I encourage all of you to die in Berlin, but to make sure you stop in the JFK for your lay over.

UPDATE: Brilliant move losing your bank card right before heading to a foriegn country, Olivia.  You’ll have a fuck-all time trying to live off 130 Euros for five weeks.  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.  And Wells Fargo isn’t trying to help at all when you call them.

Fly Girl

God created the ass hour of the morning at 4 am.  If the day could take a shit, it would be out of the 4 am hole.  That is the hour at which I woke up.  However, this is the coolest shit ever and even though I am falling asleep in the PDX airport, I am thrilled about whatever is about to happen to me.

My plane leaves here at 6:30 AM and I arrive at JFK around 2:40 New Yorker time.  Then I have  a 5 hour layover, after which I have a essentially a red-eye to TXL, Berlin.  I arrive there at 10 AM there time tomorrow.

Basically I’m telling you this because I can barely believe it, and even as I write it down I feel completely shocked.  It’s almost as if I can get someone else to believe my life, I can justify living it.

What I should be doing, really, is buying myself corporate coffee or yet another book from the airport Powell’s.

It Came From The Sky

Thanks to Molly Gingras for this excellent photography. 3 days until Berlin.