Strange Day

Today has been a strange day.
It is 9 pm Saturday and I am enjoying a snack of gummi bears and beer at my computer. Last night I (again, somehow) came home at 4 in the morning and set an alarm for 9 am in some kind of subconscious effort to give myself the longest, strangest possible Saturday.

Maußi just bit me and has been banished to the hallway. Bad cat. Bad, bad cat.

Here is a sort of mangled description of the first 8 hours or so of my day: I ate an apple with my morning coffee and didn’t really eat again until my 8 pm meat sandwich n’ raw carrot spectacular. Wasn’t hungry or especially tired all day—just drifting like a cursed pirate, food turned to ashes in my mouth, forgot the taste of bread, etc. First managed a nap at 6 pm, woke up 45 minutes later with both arms completely numb from elbow to fingertips (sitting up was difficult and took 3 tries). Read some German history and Marx while sitting on my bed with my back flat against the wall and my legs straight out in front of me in what proved to be a really agonizing but very worth it stretch of my unbelievably sore, cramped hamstrings and calves. Wrote some postcards to the folks that I have had to needle and hammer and put the screws to in order to get their addresses.

Cartoon pigs who long for the honor of being consumed by Hamburg fairgoers.
left pig: "I am still too small!", middle pig: "They are waiting for us!", right pig "We are almost there!", sign: To Pig-Grill

But hey, this isn’t a complaints blog—it is a celebration blog! Let’s think positive! What did I do today besides type and then delete sentences, refresh websites that never changed, and consider eating and decide against it?

1. I went for a long run in a new direction and found two new fountains and an overland route to a region I had heretofore traveled to only via U-Bahn (subway). I really like it when that happens. There is nothing like uncovering a connection between disparate regions of a city to give one a sense of continuity and progress and hope. It is like I have unlocked a new region of the world in a video game.
2. I went with Johanna to a used clothing store that sold neither the Sandalen (sandals, for to protect my soles from the floor-stew ecosystem down at the Stadtbad [city pool]) nor the T-Shirts (t-shirts, because I have about 4) that I wanted. That was frustrating but I still count this one as a win because (A) I actually interacted with another human being, and (B) I didn’t buy anything I didn’t need, i.e. I didn’t buy anything. Johanna got a belt she didn’t need, but it was cheap and had a cool clasp mechanism.

After that we went for a walk, because the weather was lovely and putting one foot in front of the other seemed like as good of a plan as any. We had a good conversation and saw a lot of new and interesting things, and old things made new and interesting by sunshine and spring growth and up-and-running fountains and big piles of happy Germans flopping around in the perfect grass.

But none of this silver-lining crap really matters, because I FORGOT MY CAMERA, and if I didn’t take a picture of it it didn’t really happen. Here is a brief list of the things that I would have photographed:

A. A massive fountain throwing up a 50-foot column of water in the middle of a busy roundabout. There was a pretty stiff wind that kept blowing these big sheets of mist over the street, which looked awesome but hard to drive through. When people in cars ask me for directions and I tell them to get a bicycle.

B. Another fountain with a huge boulder from each continent. The American rock weighed 20,000 kilograms and was my favorite.

C. Two tiny lime green hatchbacks—one Opel, one Nissan—parked right next to each other.

D. This awesome statue called Der Ratgeber (The Advisor) in front of the Mitte Rathaus (town hall). He looks like the friendliest possible mayor of a thriving cartoon village, and his cloak is a glass tile mosaic.

E. The Volkspark (public park, literally People’s Park) in general. I arrived in Berlin at an aesthetic low point—bare trees, dormant brown grass, empty reflecting pools and dry fountains, gravel and filth all over everything—and it was still fairly beautiful, but on this walk I got my first taste of what a massive parks and rec budget and a cultural obsession with the outdoors is really capable of in terms of raw (i.e. meticulously cultivated) natural (i.e. carefully engineered) beauty. Little kids throwing sticks in streams, lovers and bums sleeping in the grass, dogs so excited about all the people and new smells that they just sort of spun in place. Flowering trees suddenly covered in blossoms.

F. A thousand other things that I DON’T REMEMBER because I DIDN’T HAVE MY CAMERA.

this banana is feeling it

3. I guess I did some homework. It wasn’t very funny. I have learned how to count to 20 in French. All together now:
Un
Deux
Trios
Quatre
Cinq
Six
Sept
Huit
Neuf
Dix
Onze
Douze
Treize
Quatorze
Quinze
Seize
Dix-sept
Dix-huit
Dix-neuf
Vingt

Actually, while I can write these words, I am approximately 100% certain I am pronouncing them all very wrong, and thus I can’t really “count” to 20.
I feel like my legs could cramp up at any moment. First my calves, then my hamstrings. I would double up a little bit from the pain and squish the cat in the process, prompting her to flay my thighs as she squirmed to escape. Any minute now…

It is now Sunday, and Sunday is making more sense than Saturday. This post doesn’t have the usual pile of pictures (see 2.F., above) to anchor it down, but I guess it is still a sort of a journal of what I did with my day, so I’ll post it with some choice photographs that I am pretty sure have not appeared on this blog before.

Here, processed chicken icon Colonel Sanders is likened to brutal dictator Mao Tse-Tung. Doesn't this make you want to consume processed chicken?

Speaking of photographs, pt 1: I put up a new facebook album of my favorite photos. Diana insisted I do this, probably because she is conceited.

Speaking of photographs, pt 2: I am going to take a run along a route similar to yesterday’s, and in a daring experiment I will bring my camera along and take some photos. I will try not to get it sweaty and definitely not drop it. All of those moments from yesterday are of course gone forever—memories don’t count, I want photographic evidence—but the sun is shining again, and with the probable exception of the consecutive lime green hatchbacks, everything I wanted to photograph yesterday is still there.

Then, hopefully a bicycle adventure, but maybe homework if I am feeling anxious or the weather turns nasty. Send me things! Take care of yourselves! Happy spring!