(This one has been in the works for such a long time now, which probably didn´t make it any better - so, I just press publish and be done with it... enjoy the ride!)

Two reactions to my ALL OUT blog post - both from the same friend:

1. I should finally join Tinder using that first picture I posted, it would get me a lot of matches.

2. Writing about going mad on social media is probably not going to affect my upcoming dating business, but I really need to go easy on the cat picture posting - this does actually make me look crazy.

I´m not regretting anything, neither writing about it - THE PUZZLING WAY THAT WRITING HEALS THE BODY. So, in tune with said post: You know you got it if it makes you feel good, oh, yes indeed!

A lot of things happening here on this blog (and in real life) are partially my sisters "fault", she keeps encouraging me to always go a step further in the wild direction, so here we go, on and on: her plan for a very long time now has been to find me a date and since it hasn´t happened "naturally" so far, we signed me up for a dating service and app while she stayed over for a while, working on her thesis and being in need of some real deal procrastination. Not a fan of the web thing, but I have been swiping now for a few days and it has been a blast so far (I actually did use the picture my friend suggested)! By now we are full on "Pro Tinder" - which is also the title of her little performance art piece shown above, where she swipes a passport photograph of her boyfriend to the right all the time and I get to do whatever I want to on my little device.

Somehow most of the profiles are disturbingly alike - apparently all a woman wants is a man who likes his beer, rides a bike in full gear and is very into skiing down a mountain, maybe throw a beach in there too, or (an uncomfortable looking selfie in) a car - or better yet: employment at Audi (must be a regional thing, unless working there actually requires having a Tinder account). Also the amount of people skydiving is quite stunning, the sky must be riddled with falling people! And so many men on horses - who knew! It also took me a while to find out what an ONS is, the height thing I still haven´t figured out, but then again - I´m really new to the whole dating situation.

Inspired by all this I included the following in my profile pictures to help things along a bit:
- my collection of tiny beer mugs
- an assortment of bikes stored away in my shed
- me skiing (this won´t ever happen, so I had to draw it for you)
- I also had no recent picture of me on a beach, but I bet I´d look that stunning
- since I don´t even have a drivers license I had to make up the car picture too, plus the one of me wearing a dirndl, holding a Mass

And for almost full disclosure, here are some other things you might want to know about me:

Blessed with anxieties about enclosed spaces and travel.

Afraid of heights.

I have a damaged spine and some other ailments - most of the time no one notices and I don´t really care, but sometimes I´m having a hard time dealing with being failed by my body. This also keeps me from doing adventure sports (and running) (and camping).

Reproductively challenged - we might have to be happy with just each other or buy a baby on Ebay.

Haven´t been in a relationship for an embarrassingly long time.
I am not a minimalist, I´m not even pretending to be one.
Feminist.
Tasteful - my sister says so, I´d add "in a slightly off way".
She also thinks I should mention that I don´t pay rent, as this might make me very desirable (she´s still a student on her way to become an artist/dancer, maybe that´s why).

Collector of odd things (see tiny beer mugs - I don´t even drink beer by the way).

Frighteningly honest about myself (see this blog).

Got clinically diagnosed with a severe desire for freedom.

Completely fine with not sharing every hobby - you´re not expected to prune my Sweet Juliet roses with me (the William Morris is sadly not doing so fine this year), also I will not accompany you on your crossing-the-alps-rafting-trip-thing (or running) or play video games with you.

Love my work (well, I think I´m currently transitioning to something else, but still) AND every distraction I can get from it.

Overall peaceful person, but some things are unnegotiable - sorry.

Laugh a lot and am easily made to do so.

I love people, they are my number one remedy for a lot of things.

Really like do go out and do stuff - often on my own, but that´s actually very negotiable in case someone wants to tag along. I´d like that a lot. 

You´d get access to over a hundred cook books and so many more others (and a vast collection of vintage tableware - you could become a food stylist if you´d want to).

I´m not scary crazy in real life, I save that exclusively for this blog.

What I want? I think I know. 

Don´t get me wrong, I´m not a fool (maybe foolish, I´m fine with that) - I don´t expect any miracles, but so far I have found a lot of beautiful things over the life span of this blog, so why not see if it can help me find the real deal. Also this is not a prank nor a project or 40 DAYS OF DATING, this is just me. Maybe it´s just proof of a new mindset, a start, a hello, another all out.

So, in case you´re not one of my ex-boyfriends who are probably the only male persons reading this blog + the guy from my neighborhood who´s getting married in the next couple of weeks (congratulations by the way!) - I took the first step, let the games begin! 







Wait for the Tinder date bit: THEY USE MY BODY AS THE SHAPE AND MY FACE FOR THE INSPIRATION.

Ich kann nicht mehr schlafen. I lost sleep. Not all of it, but the most important part - falling asleep. It was such an easy thing to do and now it´s gone. Warum? Das Leben, deswegen. And then it all came back and it was bliss.

Ich träume auch nicht mehr. Und dann doch: Wir wollen in zwanzig Minuten nach London fahren. Aber allen tut was weh und keiner hat Tabletten. Also verschieben wir es auf eine Stunde später und holen welche von zu Hause, einer kauft glaub ich auch noch Kondome in der Apotheke. Seine Jacke ist blau, Gore-Tex-blau. Ich weiß, wer er ist, aber warum ist er so klein?

A few nights later condom guy has created a really exciting treasure hunt for me (apparently it´s my dream birthday), the clue cards are yellow, he even spelled his name wrong. I take all of my friends along, everyone seems to really like me - there are tears of joy. We never get to finish it though, the dream takes a turn somewhere. 

This summer needs to slow down. Every summer before that went by too fast, this one is just the same. No more linden tree scented bike rides, meadows already parched by the sun, lavender and oregano in full bloom and there are already quite threatening buds on the Michaelmas diasies - no no no no! I hate those - and phlox, oceans of phlox! And why are there so many hipster sedum plants in my garden, about to burst into those ombre flowers everyone is so crazy about despite the fact that all they do is announcing f... fall?!  I´m this close to do a bit of brutal weeding, but tearing out these signs of pre-fall just won´t keep the seasons from changing.

So soaking it up it is! That´s how I do it: trying to avoid bladder and yeast infections at the swimming pool - might even go for those greasy fries next time, they go so well with chlorinated water. Maybe I could also find out if that circling of crows over the pool is a reoccurring thing as soon as the divers line up - are they really hoping for calamities? Forcing my friends to visit the most bustling places of our city at night, so I can watch people queue for ice cream and be so young - so young! Deepening that Birkenstock Arizona shaped tan on my feet and acquiring more freckles now that I finally don´t mistake the one on my lip for a chocolate stain anymore trying to rub it off. And how come I´m still waiting for the first mosquito bite of the season? I really have to use my rose scented geranium leaves to finally make this very fragrant POUND CAKE again. This is not a particularly summery thing but I do like my way of calculating and since these new pieces are getting more elaborated every single day it certainly keeps adding up a lot - it´s gold-plating now, who knew? And then of course there´s W singing his signature Marilyn Monroe song at the Jazz festival - they had a prime spot at a prime time this year and a great crowd who loved them:

Running wild, lost control.
Running wild, mighty bold.
Feeling gay, reckless too,
carefree mind all the time, never blue.
Always going, don't know where,
always showing... I don't care!
Don't love nobody, it's not worthwhile.
All alone and running wild!


My friend says he knows when I´m not writing the truth. He knows it´s never enough. It´s hard to appreciate the little things when what you really want is huge. 

Und dann sagt der Freund: "Darf ich was Romantisches sagen? Dir fehlt die Liebe." Und ich sage: "I know." And this time I mean it.




The bloody amazing CHARM BRACELET PRINT is by the wonderful FAYE MOOREHOUSE.
The BUTT BARRETTE is by us and it doesn´t get old ever.


Always, always, always NAYYIRAH WAHEED.

our BOOKCLUB will be meeting again on 26.7., 19.30
and we will be discussing TSCHICK by WOLFGANG HERRNDORF
this means friendship, the hell that is puberty and first love, 
a hot summer school holiday and of course a stolen Lada

in case you want to join, let me know (mail(at)wsake.com) and i´ll set you up with the details
PLEASE NOTE: these meetings are fun, not work!

FAMILY SCORES

Elsa Artmann und Samuel Duvoisin

Buch + Performance
Mittwoch, 12.7.2017, 14.45
Studiotheater Zentrum für Zeitgenössischen Tanz Köln

Ich kann mich nicht erinnern, wann ich begann, mit meiner Schwester Anna Englisch zu sprechen. Es mag in Leipzig leichter gewesen sein, als ich mich bemühte, meinen bayerischen Dialekt abzulegen und es mich anstrengte, beim Telefonieren darin zurückzufallen. Unser Englisch ist angelehnt an die Serien und Late-Night Shows, die wir schauen und ziemlich unvollkommen. Wir sprechen mit deutlichem deutschen Akzent und fügen deutsche Wörter ein, wann immer uns die englischen fehlen.

Über Intimes auf Englisch zu sprechen, macht es für mich weniger wirklich, mehr zu einer Inszenierung. Ich höre mir dann zu wie einer Figur aus einer Sitcom. Alles wird zu einer Anekdote, fast alles wird mit einer Redewendung beantwortbar, aber alles wird auch möglicherweise bedeutend, möglicherweise ein Wendepunkt. Auch die Konversationen mit mir selbst, die ich fahrradfahrend auf dem Weg von der Uni nach Hause führe, sind oft auf Englisch.

Oft träume ich hier davon, dass jemand mich interviewt. Weil ich in irgendetwas sehr erfolgreich geworden bin, sitze ich mit jemandem auf einer Couch und werde um Auskunft gefragt, meistens über mich selbst. Eine dieser Fragen, die mir ein etwas ignoranter, aber höflicher Host in meinem Kopf stellt, lautet: Würden Sie sagen, dass der Erfolg Sie verändert hat? Oder sind Sie für die Freunde von früher immer noch dieselbe? Und ich würde antworten: If you ask me whether success has changed me or whether I am still the same – my answer would be that of course success changed me since it was the very purpose of my being successful to change me – and no, I am not the same to the friends of old days – the very purpose of my being successful was leaving my old friends behind. Success is about being able to choose your environment, and what I could decide was whether I wanted to belong or to be successful.

Dancing enables me to create a body which has less and less in common with the bodies I visibly share genes with. We lose resemblance, and I win resemblance to bodies of my choice. I aim to wrap my pelvis like my teacher Kojiro Imada does, and in my daily repetition I am going to succeed. All the training makes it possible for me to physically exist outside my family - to be more familiar with others than with my family. My body is shaped by practices so substantially different that even ageing, even my choice of a partner, even my social class cannot smooth over the difference between me and them.

Still, something keeps me from identifying fully with my dancerly work. My practice always has been a fragmented one. I am always in one place negotiating my absence from other places. Looking into the mirror in my ballet tights I ask – Am I a dancer, though? Can I, as the National Dance Company Wales puts it in their call for new dancers, join the family?

Or is there too much in this aiming and trying body that wants to belong to an environment less fruitful, less fluent, less ambitious, less interested in the world?

According to Hannah Ahrendt, privacy is necessary for the publicly irrelevant to survive. So if you want to keep a person in her home, make her case so specific, so individual, so unrelatable there will be no other place for her to survive – but inside.

I refuse to be associated with any domestic work. I refused to learn about gardening or cooking as a child, and I still proof no talent in making a room cosy or welcoming. Whenever it is my turn to cook and I find myself waiting for my boyfriend with the dinner ready, I suddenly feel the depression of a housewife of 30 years on my shoulders. I choose to lie to strangers about my everyday life to not make them assume I could enjoy cooking a soup or arranging flowers or going shopping. I take it as part of my fight for my artistic work to be taken seriously. I keep my distance to the beautiful and carefully arranged work of female bloggers I know, their writings and photographs about food, fashion, gardening, children, health. And still, at the age of 27, I visit the house of my parents to find the inside of these walls is still the proudest presenter of my work, and thus, simply by not excelling in art business, I have become a woman in her place. My art is being domestic.

But also, my art is being domestic in my place, and I am represented my many paintings in the spaces I myself very rarely visit. In the last months I changed the pictures I sent or brought home to drawings of family-themed scores.

Ich nehme einen Körper ein und verlasse die Zeichnung!

Ich bin ein ausgedehnter Pudding mit gespannter Oberfläche geworden und vibriere durch die Bewegungen der anderen, ich kann gedrückt und geschoben werden. Ich verlasse meinen Körper nicht mehr.

Umso intensiver meine Körperverfassung, desto mehr muss ich mich selber auffordern, in Relation zu bleiben.

Wie verfahre ich, wenn ich eine eingenommene Körperlichkeit wandeln möchte, ohne sie zu verlassen?

Wenn ich mich mit dem Rücken zu den anderen befinde, wie erfahre ich dann über meine räumliche Ausbreitung etwas über meine Reaktionen? Ich teile mir ein Organ mit jemand anderem.Was ist die Funktion des Organs, das du wirst?

Ein Organ zu sein, hilft, um die Pose, die eine gezeichnete, abgeschlossene Figur vorgibt, in Bewegung zu bringen. Ein Organ wabbelt, bläst sich auf, schmiert. Ist tendenziell weich und leicht, kann aber auch zittern? Andere Körper können durch ihre Bewegung den eigenen Körper eindrücken, verschieben. Wenn du fällst, fall ich auch, weil sich dein Körper ungesehen in meinen Raum schiebt.

Der Raum war für mich so groß, dass ich ihn nicht erfassen konnte. Da ich in einem Körper war, der größer ist als ich, war für mich der Raum größer als der, in dem ich mich befinde. Ich habe mich kaum von meinem Platz bewegt und den Raum mittels Bewegung wenig benutzt. Ich war sehr damit beschäftigt, mich zu meinem Körper und dem Körper, der größer ist als ich, in Beziehung zu setzen, die Form zu füllen. Zum anderen spielt die Relation zwischen mir und den anderen eine Rolle: Wie kann ich mich an sie schmiegen, wenn ich gar nicht weiß, wie groß ihr Körper ist?

Feuerholz

Drei Tänzer_innen stellen sich einander zugewandt auf und strecken die Arme mit erhobenem Zeigefinger seitlich diagonal in die Luft. Sie sind Äste. Die Arme sind Zweige. Etwa gleichzeitig fallen sie aufeinander. Während sie in ihrer Pyramidenanordnung langsam zu Boden rutschen, erzählt eine von ihnen eine Familienanekdote.

Meine Mama fragt immer, wenn ich sie anrufe: Hast du schon gegessen? Obwohl hier zehn Uhr abend ist, fragt sie immer das gleiche. Und ich sage ja, und dann: Ok, dann, was machst du jetzt noch? Und ich sage, ich schlafe jetzt gleich. Dann gute Nacht. Seit vier Jahren sagt sie immer das gleiche Ding, wenn ich sie anrufe.

Mit 42 hat sich meine Mutter die Augenlider liften lassen und auch die Zornesfalte mit Botox auffüllen lassen. Aber sie wollte in keinem Fall, dass ihre Familie etwas davon erfährt, vor allem nicht der Mann ihrer Schwester, deshalb hat sie sich zur gleichen Zeit auch eine neue Brille besorgt, sodass sie immer, wenn sie danach gefragt wurde, sagen konnte: Nee nee, das ist nur die neue Brille.

Meine Schwester hat mich gestern gefragt: Wieviele Bücher am Tag soll ich denn bitte lesen und wozu? Ich sitze auf der Terrasse, und am liebsten würd ich meinen Kopf gegen den Tisch hauen. So sinnlos. In dieser Wohngegend.

Ich habe meinen Großeltern eine Einladung per Email geschickt, zu meiner Bachelorpräsentation. Mein Opa Norbert antwortete: Oma kommt, ich vielleicht. Du weißt ja, manchmal habe ich keine Lust. Liebe Grüße, Opa und Oma.

C. sagt zu ihrem Großvater (er droht ihr, zu sterben): In einem Jahr komme ich zurück nach Hause.

Meine schick angezogene, dünn gewordene Mutter begrüßt mich vorm Auto mit einer zurückhaltenden Umarmung und drückt mir dann ein Desinfektionstuch in die Hand. Wir drei bleiben vor dem Auto stehen und desinfizieren uns die Hände.

Mit 50 hatte mein Vater eine Neuerfindungsphase und er hat sich seinen Großvater auf den Oberarm tätowieren lassen, so richtig als Portrait. Er fand, dass sein Großvater der beste Mann in der Familie ist. Und irgendwann hat er mich gefragt, ob er sich mich auch tätowieren lassen kann. Zum Glück haben wir jetzt lange nicht mehr darüber gesprochen.

These pictures pretty much capture my happy place right now: on sunday my god daughter payed me a visit, being very cute and easy and we delighted in the sweet little grimaces she made. I also very much enjoyed seeing the happy look on my friend´s face, despite the sleepless nights spent with a gassy baby. 

My kitchen was full on that day since my sister and her boyfriend also stopped by very spontaneously this weekend on their way to the Alps which made for a couple of quite "culinary" days - filled with BRATWURSTKIPFERL, DUMPLINGS, endless PASTA SALAD and so much more dishes to try at our street´s potluck summer party. They will be stopping by again in a few days on their way back North - lucky me!

And even though I now own a very fancy antique fruit-drip-bowl, a fact that might make me look quite sophisticated, I really do prefer the messy look of my kitchen table after we devoured Nigel Slater´s CHERRY POLENTA CAKE (I didn´t bother actually pitting the cherries by the way). No one got why I would want to take a picture of that, but this is what I want all my days to look like.