Taxi from airport blaring Steve Winwood while sun sets behind las palmas. Never too much wasabi at I Love Sushi. (Me: What is your favorite thing to have here? Sushi chef: women).
Driving Meditation
Before starting the car, I know where I am going. The car and I are one. If the car goes fast, I go fast.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
I’m not kidding.
A walk with my father through the Pennsylvania wilderness:
intrepid explorer skeptical assistant
The nature:
Okay, not so bad.
As I get ready to return to the O.C. to work on an El Segundo redevelopment plan with Planning Studio cohort, I find that El Segundo news is flying around the blogosphere. After reading Maya’s forward about the impending Jack London debacle a couple weeks ago, Radio Free Mike blogged about it from Berlin yesterday, and waterbones relates similar story from the East Bay.
In SuperCycler Awards news: Magi and Rey in Santa Cruz keep the progressive spirit alive, and pass it on to their children. Jordan Kai gets his due for his obsessive compulsive love of recycling from tadpole age of 18 months and receives award from City Council. This sweet camote will grow up to break hearts and save the world, I’m sure. Check out his pic and interview here. He’s the ono-ono keiki in the recycling container Halloween costume. This family constantly impresses me and inspires me to have children. They do it right. But if I ever get my hands on the interviewer I will seriously smack her for disappointing Auntie Desyl’s favorite four-year old:
It had never happened before. I went to interview a nominee for SuperCycler and two minutes into our conversation, he fled the room sobbing. I felt like a heel, I had casually told the nominee, Jordan, some pretty distressing news. “Your favorite recycling driver has moved to another route.” I hadn’t calculated the toll that this news would have and didn’t understand how important and upsetting this information could be.
Bitch. I will seriously smack you.
Meanwhile, spending time ripping cds from the Chester County library, not because they are particularly any good, but mostly to passive-aggressively needle emotionally-unavailable digital copyright attorney a little bit from afar. Oh, forgot, not bitter about that anymore.
Breakfast with the chef this morning. He called me on my shit within 10 minutes of contact and then proceeded to stick his thumb in my back pocket and talk to me about building lawn furniture out of pallets and sustainability networks and mixing sandalwood with oil and that’s why his hair smells so good. So what’s my problem?
dorking around
PS: The moths. The explanation is that he caught a female in heat first and that’s why there is a cluster around her that decreases linearly (as opposed to exponentially) as distance increases from said moth. Note to self: find hobby after retirement that does not involve lepidopterae, please.
eeeww.
Currently listening to: Ute Lemper, You were meant for me. Creepy.
Spent last day poking around apartment trying to pack and entertain visitors and giving waterheater repairman eyeful in nightie until three in the afternoon. Got to say my goodbyes to tall very cuteness whose long arms and longer legs wrapped around me sweetly one last time. In the evening Lederhosen Special and I played house and host to friends including the fabulously red-lip lacquered Frau May and Berling blogger doughnutboy Andy (just as delightful and sweet and thoroughly edible as his blog is relevent and interesting) and a quiet boy from Belfast.
Air France lost my luggage again. Parents are weird as usual (they’ve started a collection of dead moths on top of the refrigerator, don’t ask). Already itching to go “home” where ever that is- someone’s couch behind the Orange Curtain, I assume. Bestest friendus not well, and I want to be the one to drive her around and make her scrambled eggwhites and force her to take the whole Vicadin instead of just the half, please. No calls from Santa Barbara yet, but eagerly waiting to hear that low smooth completely inappropriate german-inflected voice of his. Tired.
Already chickening out of calling the chef. Yet collecting all the Metropolis magazines I’ve neglected so we can hunker down in coffeeshop to scour through for ideas and arguments. I’ll call today. Just need some time. I’ve made up my mind, if he’ll have me. Oops, was that out loud? How scary.
I got my phone call
Last night: hassenpfeffer, spaetzle, rotkohl, moet chandon, cafe. Roommate off to London. Lederhosen Special asleep on the futon wearing my Ginza Tokyo t-shirt and little else. I have no desire to slide in next to him. Completely useless. Wishing it were someone else.
Anxiously awaiting phone call from Santa Barbara this morning. I have the worst stomach ache over it and I popped out of bed this morning at 7:30 in gut-wrenching anticipation. Its already 9:19, and almost twenty minutes late. Where is this phone call? He’s been calling at the most inopportune times, when I could not speak freely, or when there was a gaggle of boys in my kitchen, like last night. Things need to be said. Completely inappropriate things need to be said. He’s still on Berlin time so this should not be an issue. Maybe his children are an issue. Fuck.
feeling: vulnerable
Last night: a collection of three of the more interesting men I know, in one room, various rooms, the Straßenbahn, the altbayerish restaurant one block from my house. Lederhosen Special had no money of course and was uncharacteristically quiet, Exberliner konked out on the futon after trying to come up with clever scheme to extract beer from roommate’s balcony, and tall cuteness was, well, you know. Okay, charming and erudite and self-depricating without being annoying and just, you know.
I was worried that there would be vast imbalance of male energy, but kein Problem, I kept my mouth shut and listened and learned. Watched every moment and enjoyed.
A high-falutin’ introduction to petit bougeois proposition, from my current readings: Sharpe, (in the preface of [GUST] post/ex/sub/dis) distinguishes between the unproductive longing for a unity or a harmony that never was (the post-modern condition, a canny nostalgia) and an uncanny, tension-ridden dialog with the past.
For him, the key to collective social capital is to redefine the role of memory to revitalize the ideal of community (instead of spiralling into a nostalgia that prompts us to withdraw into our homes, our gated communities, our belle epoch rented beds in East Berlin). I know I like to wallow in and romanticize the past, but here is a real opportunity to build social capital with our shared memories and experiences of this place.
So, Berlin bloggers, readers, expats and friends, I have a proposition. I am leaving for the States on Friday morning. Thurday night as my apartment deconstructs I invite you to join me here and meet each other, while I say goodbye to this city and to my friends. Prenzlauerberg is not so far away from Kreuzberg and Mitte, and I know a few of you have been talking of meeting to discuss past histories and current interests and this might be the impetus to build real-time relationships.
It’s time to get out, the weather says NOW. Let me know…
