Today I learned that doing my hair in Berlin is dumb, because it will get destroyed.  It was also fifty-three degrees American, and glorious, and isn’t my man glorious as well?  It is sometimes hard for me to contain my joy at him.  To continue, today, I curled my hair, and I promise promise it looked really pretty when we went out, but by the last stop it was this humidified mess, and that’s okay too because it is lovely here and I don’t really mind the rain at all.  I am also always really surprised at how big my purses look in photographs, because when I buy them I try to be conscious of that very body-dwarfing quality and yet whenever I see photos of myself and purses I see I am as-always dwarfed by them.  It would help to be bigger, and I think also to have bigger hair, which is a goal toward which I am continually working, but also a goal that my likewise continual aging will probably thwart at some point, either distant or not.   

These are pictures from our neighborhood in Berlin.  It is, I think, so pretty because everything is pastel.   Last night we walked around and wanted deeply to go into every little bar and it was quiet from the snow and not even that cold (relative).  

I finally finally got to Berlin after driving seven hours and selling my car and taking five planes and freezing my ass off in sub-zero NYC while drinking $2 margaritas five minutes from my sister’s office in Manhattan and then walking another seven minutes back to her sweet new pad in Manhattan where I had to wear ear-plugs to sleep but then discovered many of my sleeping troubles might be sound-related, note-to-self, and then I went to Berlin, where my boyfriend met me at the airport with yellow flowers and took me back to our lovely apartment with a graffitied door, and where it was sunny for two days straight, and where it is snowing today, and where there are delicious fancy cheeses for 89 cents and also maybe my very favorite thing about Europe, which is the pear purée juice everywhere, OMG, I want to drink it every day, hot and cold, morning and night, undiluted and diluted with both water and alcohol.  And our apartment is five stories up and facing away from the street so it is peaceful and quiet, and I have never lived so high up, or so far away from home, and so far it is nice, and very different, and very exciting.

Some NYC PICKTURES.

These are some pictures John took last week in Chicago, when the camera fogged up when we entered the greenhouse.  I think they are really lovely.

Today I am beginning my journey to Germany. I got up early, bid a tearful goodbye to all my coats except one, and made crushing shoe selections — no heels, two boots, two flats, and I watered the plants that are not mine but that I have been barely keeping alive because apparently I am not very good at taking care of plants but my boyfriend is.  Today I drive to Indiana, tomorrow to NYC, and then Wednesday to Germany via the Reykjavik and Copenhagen airports (my first time to Iceland, even if it is only the airport).  Spent yesterday imagining all the places we will go in Europe.  So lucky and excited and nervous and happy la la la la la fa fa fa. 

Chicago, outerwear, cold, ice scraping.

At the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago.  I went with my lover to see the flowers in the winter and we noticed that only lovers were there.

"Language, after all, isn’t a spontaneous effusion of the self like vomit or urine. Language is social; it’s a form of communication. Descartes can insist, “Cogito, ergo sum,” but before that “Cogito,” there was some other person who taught little Descartes his Latin. Rather than “I think therefore I am,” it would be more accurate to say, “Somebody else speaks, therefore I am,” or, better, “Somebody else spoke first, therefore I can speak as well."

My to-do list before I move to Berlin has many terrifying things on it, like “re-title car” and “new brake-pads” and “pay bills” and “recycle empty wine bottles” and “take dog back to Minnesota.”  And then because of a death in John’s family, all of everything has to be sped up by a week because he is flying back to the U.S. and we are going to Indiana to be with his relatives.  This morning we discovered that also my vehicle registration has expired so really I shouldn’t be driving anywhere anyway, when right now I have to drive all over creation to get everything done I need to get done, so I have rent a car, but I have no credit card in my own name, ack, terror, as I have wished not for my real name to be etched in plastic but that is because I am conspiracy theorist probably but also because I resist real life at every turn maybe, I don’t know.  

But then I went out into the world to start getting shit done, and now I re-titled my car, and got plates, and have an appointment to get new brake-pads and am getting an oil change as I write this, and tonight I will see about the car rental, and though this terrible bureaucratic chicanery is one of my worst nightmares and I feel alone sometimes because I think I am the only person in the world who isn’t into Downtown Abby anymore, and I am leaving America and I love America, I know I can say it will all be all right, because even though I cannot see at this moment that everything will get done, I know it will, because it has to, and I know that it is possible to do all this and more and even more after that.