Herroooo! And happy last day of 2023! Honestly, despite a couple of major highlights, this year was a bit meh and I will not be sorry to see it go.
Is it sad that I just don’t feel like going out tonight? It’s snuggle weather and I’ve been having some stomach rebellion in the last day or two, and I kind of want to watch Gilded Age and make pasta.
But the problem with this plan is that New Year’s Eve in Berlin, for those who have never experienced it, is not what one would call peaceful. There are absolutely no regulations about who is allowed to set off fireworks and where, which means that people set them off quite literally everywhere. Everywhere everywhere.
Guys, it’s loud. Like really, unbelievably loud. It is a rather literal riot of explosions and smoke and traumatized dogs, and it starts before midnight and goes on for hours. The anarchy of it all is rather thrilling when you’re in the right mood, but it’s also terrifying because a lot of the people setting off fireworks on every street in the city are drunk and a fair number of them are also teenagers.
So being home alone is basically a recipe for irritation and FOMO, where the FOMO kind of adds to the irritation if you don’t actually want to be doing anything. A real dilemma, this is. I’ll probably just wander to my friend Claire’s house at 10pm to watch the chaos from her balcony, and then try not to die on the way home.
ANYWAY
I wrote a fair amount of this post in my notebook while sitting at the French-inflected, farm-to-table, incredibly bougie cafe down the street from my old flat on Helmholtplatz, which is my go-to spot when I want to treat myself to an overpriced lunch while reading back issues of the New Yorker. I used to do this pretty regularly but not so much of late, because I live further away but also because The Brokeness makes me less inclined to spend a silly amount of money on veal tartar.
I was there a good fifteen minutes before I clocked this fascinating objet d’art just hanging out on the bar in front of me:
Anyway, deux
I have decided that 2024 is going to be the year of the Great Career Rethink. It is time, because I am bored and dissatisfied both professionally and creatively, and have been for a few years now. I kept putting off dealing with it, in part because I was making just enough money that I could kind of groove on autopilot rather than ask myself hard questions about what I want. But 2023 was the year of freelancing being shit, so yeah, can’t even hide behind that excuse anymore.
There’s the immediate need to triage my bank account so I can travel again and eat more tartar, which I can probably do by hustling up more work of the type I’ve been doing for years. But the Great Career Rethink is entangled with a broader where and how do I want to live? reckoning that’s also been nagging at me for a while. And the honest answers involve putting myself in a different income bracket, without taking a job that will make me want to kill myself six months in. This is by no means impossible, but it will involve some doing.
However! Pluto, the planet of death and rebirth, will be moving definitively from my 12th House of All That Shit You’re Avoiding (technically it’s the House of the Unconscious) to my 1st House of the Self later this year, after doing this whole retrograde wiggle thing between Capricorn and Aquarius. Pluto is a shit-stirrer, and like 80% of my chart is split between Capricorn and Aquarius. Just Saturn and yet more Saturn lording over my chart, bossing shit. My particular Saturn does its lording from Scorpio, so WOOF. Sex death and power, baby! Plutonic energies everywhere! The universe is challenging me to dig deep and come into my own!
Anyway, III
So in short, it’s time to give serious thought to what the fuck I actually want and how to get it. I’m even reading a book. (This book is great by the way, more on this in the future.)
Despite the absolute meltdown I had last week about the weather, I am not going to jump ship from Berlin any time soon. But barring the unforeseen, I kind of doubt I’ll want to be here more than another year or two - though also barring the unforeseen, I probably won’t leave until there’s some sort of solid career plan in place. I never actually bar the unforeseen, because life is mostly unforeseen, but I have friends and an apartment and life-stuff, and I don’t want to uproot it all until I feel good about what I’m doing it for.
This is somewhat different than how I used to do things a decade ago. But I have different needs and priorities now - I want things that are stable and sustainable and fulfilling.
I have matured, apparently. God help me.
Anyway, the last
I don’t actually intend for this to be an ongoing diary of my existential angst. But right now, with my birthday and the New Year and all, the big questions are on the forefront of my mind. Also, there’s laziness - when I haven’t been planning ahead, diary mode is the easiest way to bang out 1000 words.
But I intend to experiment with more creative stuff, because 2024 is also going to be the year where I wrestle some creativity back into my life after it went AWOL during the pandemic. I’ve been jotting down a lot of random notes on things (music, books, places, photography, memories, and so on) in the last few weeks, which means that this newsletter is already achieving its stated purpose - which is to get me “thinking like a writer” on a day-to-day basis again, which I honestly haven’t in like 3 years.
2024!
I leave you with my favorite Monty Python sketch, because I was talking about it with someone earlier and it is one of the few things on this earth that has literally never failed to make me LOL
Happy New Year, kids. May it be a woody one.
Fireworks. Not intending to distract from your other burning issues, this is a footnote. My 6 months in Berlin comprised two 3-month summer stays & I never knew of the New Year chaos you report. There is a WEEK of chaotic home grown fireworks in Valencia, Spain that I did suffer through once a couple of years ante-COVID. La Fallas. There must be many who love it and certainly there are many who come to town (like my spouse) to re-connect with it. Big tourist draw. Just as there are many residents who arrange to leave town for a week to escape.
The tradition has pre-Christian roots. Neighborhood communities spend a year preparing wood and paper mache sculptures, often satirical, that will be burned in Las Fallas. Surrounding communities send bus loads of elaborately costumed children and adults for the parades. The festival ends with highly elaborate professional pyrotechnical displays, an art form highly developed and appreciated in Spain.