14.3.18

(These pictures of my after-winter garden basically show what is called an "Idylln" around here, in a very ironic but loving way.)
(I took the pictures of those golden ear rings to be with fancy stones in the workshop in early fall and they still aren´t finished - by posting these I hope to put a bit of pressure on us to do so.)
(This NIGHTSTAND made me want to give Anita Brookner an other try - I found her HOTEL DU LAC so cruel, but I am so glad I gave it another shot, because this one is just so, so good. Here is my favorite passage: "He would, he had long ago decided, be deliberately euphoric. It was a technique which he could practise and perfect, although sometimes it nearly eluded him. Thus, from his earliest days, he remembered scenes that might have been deviced by Proust." To be deliberately euphoric - what a way to lead ones life (despite the fact that he has been trough a lot of hardships), this seems hugely inspiring to me. I also love the fancy vintage cover and I am planing on collecting many of those. Oh, and that would be my own CRESCENT BRACELET, in case you were wondering!)


My Sundays are busy in a weird way. I do my laundry because I still have my Grandmother´s ancient electricity contract, where they don´t charge as much for electricity used during the night and on Sundays. It looks like I use as much electricity during the week as on washing and tumble drying days. Also I need to flip my mattress once a week, because I got tricked into spending a lot of money on it years ago and it turned out it is complete garbage and really sucks. After a week of sleeping on it, it feels like I have to crawl out of a valley each morning. So Sunday is when I flip the damn thing. My sister says I can´t call it being tricked, I was just being plain stupid instead, since it was one of those shops calling themselves a specialized mattress dealer in bold red and yellow letters, while  simultaneously announcing an eternal sale. The tumbler also doesn´t really work that good anymore, so I spend the day with a kitchen filled with chairs covered in clothes in the final drying stages.

I find a padded fancy leather jacket at my friend´s and stockist´s SHOP, when she is having a sale. I also fall in love with a black cashmere sweater with flowers on it. In the end I swap them for the most elaborate of our SILVER RECYCLING NECKLACES, which means I got a really, really good deal on them. They both smell like the also very fancy perfume she sells, which unfortunately gives me a  bit of a headache, so I have to air them out for a while. Which basically means wearing both a lot. I look almost sharp in that jacket, a quite disturbing sight.

I break the cup that wet with my tiny tea POT, all because when doing the dishes that morning I marveled at the fact that I had not yet broken it, even though I use it every morning since my sister gave it to me for my birthday a few years ago. Trying to put it away while simultaneously eating a shitty peanut-butter-seeds-and-chocolate-slice, I drop it a few hours later. My magical thinking is powerful and by now the facts are on my side. I had a premonition of dropping my phone in the toilet (only for the first time it happened to me, the second time it was a surprise) and even of my grandmother´s deadly stroke, I get a feeling about the tiniest and greatest losses - so don´t try to tell me otherwise. I can´t accept broken or lost things, so that damn cup was glued together again right away - you can´t drink from it anymore, of course, but at least it is not that broken anymore. However I also think when something minor happens, it means something major isn´t happening instead. So all of these plates breaking and there are a lot of plates breaking these days - sometimes they just sit broken in their drawer, broken by ghosts´ hands probably - keep the really bad stuff from happening. And I am very thankful for that. I even told my mother about this when she was mourning a broken antique jug and made her feel very good about it instead. 

A friend tells me she is pregnant while the dog she is currently watching starts to throw up violently. The poor beast heaves and shakes and I pity her a lot. She is a vegan dog, so the throw up is bright yellow. When I am riding home on my bike, I am wondering how a dog in the wild might come to the conclusion to lead a vegan life and I figure it probably goes like this: "Glaubst as, des Hoosn jogn bockt mi nimma - i friss etz Ruam!" This is absolutely untranslatable since that specific vegan dog lived in the Upper Palatinate, being a teenager around 2010, talking this era´s local youth slang. I ask my sister if it is weird to think my own joke that funny - she doesn´t have a conclusive answer.

I don´t know what is wrong with my Photoshop, the transformation frames leave traces all over the desktop and I have no idea where I am at at any point - it feels like going mad. Then I find some short cuts to press while rebooting the whole thing and it goes away. 

I am so pissed these days, carrying around some kind of anger, pared with so much tiredness and a feeling like I might come down with something any minute now. I had wanted to go to a screening by a quite successful DIRECTOR growing up in our town, visiting even the same school as I did, but I had written the date wrong and noticed it too late - made me scream. I also wanted to go to Munich and take a look at all those JEWELLERY EXHIBITIONS, but the day before I was so still so tired I had to lie down after riding the fold up bike I wanted take with me around the block. I will do so some other time, but it feels like I have failed. On the other hand, going to a bigger city always makes me feel depressed about the one I am living in. Of course I could just go visiting a lot, but I am just so immobile. Instead I feel like my life is wasting away, living at the lifeless outskirt of a narrow medieval town, with not that much to see. It is cute alright here, but I feel like I miss out on so much, the really beautiful things. But right now this is the only life I can afford and I am grateful for its advantages, but these days this irks me a great deal. I yell-tell all of this my sisters, they understand. They are not enough dates between meals to calm my mood and never any sweets in the house. My sister´s co-worker suggests I might switch to alcohol, everybody knows about my faul temper by now. Then I get an update on Facebook that one of the events I had dreamed of going to, a poetry reading at the Haus der Kunst, was cancelled due to sickness.

The seasons are changing again, my cat wants to be let out in the middle of the night, for a stroll in the dark. On her return she rattles at my door and covers my white bed sheets with earthy foot prints. The next day it feels like the first day of spring, she stays outside all day and comes home pumped, trying to pick play fights with me. It seemed like she had gotten old during the winter, but the warmth has turned her into a kitten again. It does sound odd, but I have really liked that winter, I am in no hurry for Spring either. I feel in tune with the seasons now.







7.3.18

It is BOOK CLUB time again - we are meeting on the 28th of March and you are very welcome to join us! Just send a message to mail@wsake.com and I´ll set you up with the details!


We will be talking about MIDDLESEX by JEFFERY EUGENIDES, a novel having celebrated its 15th birthday last year. Being very late to a lot of things, I just discovered it over a year ago and I was so blown away, the inferno of Smyrna is still haunting me - one of the events in recent history I had no idea about, but then I am not very fluent in Greek/Turkish history, or a lot of the other themes in this wonderful (Homeric) book. 







3.3.18

(Thank you so much, BRIGITTE, for featuring our SILVER RECYCLING NECKLACES amongst other sustainable fashion ideas - we have some BRACELETS now, too!)
(March is apparently endometriosis awareness month so I joined #1in10 - there needs to be better education and more research, the lack of knowledge even shown by medical professionals is shocking and harmful, physically and mentally. Endometriosis is an invisible disease, no ultra sound or MRI scan is able to show it - but my hot-water-bottle-induced skin damage might give you a clue.)



The temperature drops below zero and a piercing icy wind from the North-East picks up. It hits quite close to the ground, behind the knees, sometimes it drifts higher, ripping the hood already drawn close from the head. Biking in this kind of weather is an ordeal. The colder it gets, the more I slow down. My movements become leaden. The grease in my joints becoming goey. I take a walk by the river in the sunshine to the discounter who offers by far the best deal on fair trade, WWF-approved, organic bananas. I fill my backpack and trod home again. The bananas start to rot before ever getting ripe.

I meet a jogger, she is so beautiful and when she comes up to me, her smile is full on.

And then the temperatures drop even further. I stare at a lot of weather reports, but the digits just won´t change. I am scared to go out and put on a third pair of underpants, which have belonged to my grandmother, the nude coloured woollen knee length kind.

For their book project I charge my sister and her boyfriend the exact amount of money I need to buy these SHOES.

I haven´t seen my friend in more than half a year since she has moved her family to the countryside. We finally meet up in our town´s French restaurant. I order some "Good luck" tea from the very cute French waitress (I have a thing for the French currently) and a few sips in, we reach territory we never had - we talk about our mothers. We go deep. Down to the roots of our greatest fears that made us what we are now. The tiny seemingly insignificant events that shaped us so irreversibly. I don´t manage to finish my galette with ricotta and spinach and hand it over to her. When I get up from a chair later that day, my right leg has gotten slightly numb and I can´t shake it off. My back has started to act out again. There is no connection, but I had missed my FRIEND a lot.

My workshop and garden helper tells me he feels depressed, so I agree to go out with him at Fasching. It turns out no one is around and when he tells me about his troubles, I have three instructions for him: stop smoking weed, eat a lot instead and staying clear of his father. A week later, he lets me know his life has already improved greatly by following those simple rules. I share my white chocolate bar with ground espresso bits in it with him, I am not supposed to eat it anyway - there is milk powder in it.

Last winter I got a pair of woollen pants on sale and wore them only once. I had already considered them a waste of money but now I put them on every day, they have an elastic waist, some kind of harem style and enough room for Heattech underneath. They need to be dry cleaned though, which is the only downside, so I will try putting that off until the end of winter. I am not a dry cleaning person, the last time I had something cleaned was when a mouse lived between two of my woollen scarfs for a few days. A dark red and a light blue one, the droppings I found were also coloured that way. I have some other good mouse stories up my sleeves, but I am keeping them up there for an other time.

The first time I taste miso is in an edamame salad I pick up at REWE to go before my train ride home from LEIPZIG. I also have two Dunking Donuts. And it is also the first time I have edamame, which I still haven´t found for sale anywhere, so I still like to get this salad sometimes. Can´t wait to make WALNUT OLIVE MISO SAUCE, even though soy products are considered very un-clean. I have never had a PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY SANDWICH, too, but I have been dreaming about that combination for so long.

I long for my sisters, someone to eat dinner with, to talk to at night. I am pondering getting a little poodle. 

I call E and tell her to coarsely grate two huge salad potatoes and roast them in a non-stick frying pan in olive oil with caraway and salt. They stick to the pan a lot so she needs to make heavy use of her wooden spatula. Almost at the end she has to add some sauerkraut - it is a divine meal, she agrees. I have mine with lots of our local mustard.