Tuesday, November 29

I Hate English

Do you like rocks?

Would you like some rocks?

Would you like some rock?

Would you sum rocks?

Do you like a rock?

Would you like a rock?

Do rocks like you?

Would rocks like you?

Do you like wood rocks?

Do you rock wood?

You do like rocks?

You do like rock?

You do like some rocks?

You do like sums?

Like, do you rock?

Would you do a rock?

Do rocks like?

Rocks do like. You?

You rock, do you?

Like rocks, do you?

Like rock, do you?

Do the rock, do you?

Like some dew, would you?

     

Sunday, November 27

:sniff:

Questions for the readership (two, last I counted, plus a few people who somehow found the site using searches like "grandmom fucking" and "dcon teenager eating", neither of whom I think I can help, and both of whom I pity immensely, if for different reasons):

If alcohol is a disinfectant, does that mean that drinking during a cold is good for you?

If so, which alcohols have you used to disinfect yourself? Shots? Wine? Do you mix the alcohol with tea or chicken soup or Theraflu, or do you just toddle off to bed with a bottle of Stoli Vanilla and a cold compress?

If not, why is it that, even though I have been lying prostrate in bed all day long, sick enough that even the bathroom seems SO IMPOSSIBLY far away that I would rather blog about wanting to visit it than actually try and walk that far, I want a beer so badly right now?

Is this magical health science or raging alcoholism? And whatever the case, how am I going to get a beer back to my room if I can't even make it down the hallway to pee?

What I need is a night nurse. Mm, night nurses.

     

Saturday, November 26

My Life Is More Pretentious Than Yours

On Wednesday I screamed into my bass clarinet for ten minutes while a man with a magazine cutout covering his face drew elaborate makeup-swirls over the face and neck and arms of a thin woman wrapped in duct tape. He wrapped her face in bandages. She read poems into a microphone. She kept waving to her friends in the audience. The beautiful soprano next to me made farting noises into her hands. A man drilled into a doorframe while a girl read prose about groceries. Nearby a man was stamping rows of little black cars onto a wall covered in newspaper. A guitarist and a fiddler played Louisiana two-step and everybody danced.

On Thursday I stood behind a shadow-screen at a club in Friedrichshain and pretended to shove a plate and a clarinet up my friend Eric's ass. The song was "Blue Moon." He was the girl. I was the man in the moon. The plate was the moon. The clarinet was just a clarinet. A blond drag queen in cowboy boots with a guitar and a rubber chicken threaded through her belt and an enormous redheaded queen in a muumuu sang Erykah Badu songs as folk duets. A small person of indeterminate sex dressed in a pig costume danced to techno. We all ate Thanksgiving dinner together at the bar.

At least I'm not temping anymore.

     

Tuesday, November 22

To the Hot Girl on the Subway

I'm sorry I licked my lips as I looked over at you, causing you to stare at me with a combination of confusion and fear for the duration of our three agonizingly long U-Bahn stops together. You were super-hot in that butch intellectual hipster way that I like especially well, but I was just licking my lips because they were dry. I hope the way that I shifted uncomfortably and looked away for the next five minutes conveyed this.

Sincerely,

Jaime.

     

Saturday, November 19

No Escape

Last night, outside of a bar in Mitte:

Girl: "Hey, you guys speak English.. do you know where the nearest ATM is?"

Me: "Over there to the left."

Girl: "Thanks! Hey, where are you from? Are you American?"

Me: "Yeah, I'm from Nebraska."

Girl: "Oh, that's cool. I grew up in Omaha."

Me: "Really? Wait, wow, me too. Um, what high school did you go to?"

(She tells me.)

Me: "Fuck. Me too. What year did you graduate?"

Girl: "'99."

Me: "..I was '98."

Girl: "Wait, what's your name?"

(I tell her.)

Girl's Brother: "Dude. I had so many classes with your little sister."

Me: "This is the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me, ever. Do you guys want to come inside and sing karaoke?"

(They do.)

     

Tuesday, November 15

Attention Teachers

The thing, that you do, where you stand up in front of a class and you teach people things and they learn them because you are teaching them:

It is hard to do.

This is a thing which I have just learned. I learned it because I tried to teach two people English for the first time today. I am almost certain that when I was through teaching them English, they knew less English than they had known at the beginning of the class. It was a sad, sad day for everyone involved. The sun and the moon and baby Jesus all cried for me and my bad teaching.

If you can do this thing, the teaching thing, good job. Get down with your bad selves. You are some smart folks.

That is all.

     

Monday, November 14

They Tell Me Schadenfreude Only Works On Other People

Clearly I'm going to have to start this.. second, third?.. round of blogging on a better foot. Somehow. Writer's block after only one post, it does not bode well for you, little Essay House. I'm used to writing here as an outlet for my rage over the inconsequential details of my (Philadelphia) life, and everything in Berlin is basically really neato so far, and Somebody Else Having A Pretty Nice Time doth not a blog make.

Damn you, Berlin! Why are your streets clean? Why are your people friendly and polite? Why is there so much fresh-baked bread and marzipan everywhere here? You are stifling my spirit with your sunlight-dappled cobblestone streets and your vibrant artistic community and your smiling blond children carrying puppies. I must suffer if I am to create! Yarrrr! GRRRR!

...Maybe I'll go read some CNN, that always greases the ol' misanthropy wheels. Be back later.

     

Friday, November 11

No Really, I Still Have A Blog

I GUESS I could tell you all this whole huge story about how I finally finished my worthless, worthless master's degree in clarinet performance, and then spent two months doing temp work around Philly, during which time I ended up squatting in a house in South Philly from whence my 90-year-old landlord had recently evicted the family (grandparents and grandchildren) who lived there (resulting from said family's nonpayment of rent for nigh on a year and a half), such that the walls were covered in Magic-Markered notes like "THIS ROOM is to be kept CLEAN! love Grandmom and Pop-Pop" and the rooms were filled with adorable grandmotherly knicknacks, and also mice;

I COULD bore you with tales of Temp Worker Magic Fun Time, of twelve-hour shifts beginning at six AM doing menial customer service work for an educational computing conference, of the highly-irrational girly disappointment I felt when one of my co-workers told me I looked like Elyse from America's Next Top Model and I went home and looked up the show online because I don't have a television and found out that this Elyse weighs nigh on thirty pounds less than I do, of the time my coffee at the Dunkin' Donuts outside the Convention Center was delayed several minutes because the woman in front of me was ABSOLUTELY STONED OUT OF HER FUCKING MIND and totally could not remember whether she wanted one donut or two;

I COULD ramble a bit about the month I spent in a village in Italy playing in an opera festival which could easily be described as the least organized thing that has ever happened to me, about my fabulous hotel-restaurant jazz debut (along with a cellist, another clarinetist, and a percussionist) on bass clarinet and my subsequent failed attempts to become Eric Dolphy, about the women in Italy who are absolutely terrifyingly well-kept such that you think maybe you are admiring the sweet sweet ass of some 23-year-old vixen and then you realize that those people walking next to her are her teenaged children, about sleeping barracks-style in a convent full of male singers who would wake up in the middle of the night mumbling about bats and Ligeti, about the enormous Ren-Fair that was going on the entire time we were in this village and the proportional increase of Tripe and Roast Whole Pig consumption experienced by all members of the opera festival cast and crew therefrom, about a conversation which ended "So we're playing tomorrow, outside, at night, on a hill, in front of an Alzheimer's home, in a different city than the one you originally said we would, and as far as you know we have no lights, no sound, no stage, no audience, no transportation, no sturdy music stands, no clothespins to hold the music on in case the wind blows, and Italian National Television is coming to record us?" "We can definitely get clothespins" ;

I COULD also talk about returning to Philly for two weeks, selling, throwing away, or losing 95 percent of my worldly possessions (including the books, which were stuffed into boxes and put on a truck driven by a nice man named "Larry"), stuffing the rest into two suitcases plus a backpack and a bass clarinet case, hauling the whole lot with me to the W Hotel in New York City to play a concerto for Turntable and Orchestra (!) with DJ Radar at Carnegie Hall, and flying directly to Berlin to start my new happy happy happy life as a starving musician, English teacher and general miscreant.

But really, blogs are supposed to be about the present. So instead:

Hi from Berlin! I have an Internet connection of my VERY OWN again.

Hilarity ensues.