Hello, friends and family and the handful of strangers who somehow stumbled on this newsletter and decided to subscribe (I’m a bit baffled by this audience segment but also very appreciative)!
I’d intended to try something “creative” for this one but the last couple of weeks got busier and more distracting than expected. So here I am, trying not to completely fuck up my posting schedule less than two months into this whole “discipline and accountability” project I assigned myself when I was feeling optimistic about my capacities. I really meant it with that whole “write literally anything, even when I feel like I have nothing to say” directive, huh? Aren’t you guys lucky.
Anyway
I have indeed been busy! Mostly trying to make more money so that I can hand literally any surplus directly to the German government to pay off my taxes, so that I don’t have to pull the money out of my IRA. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, do not spend anything at all on plane tickets to any sort of island, or replenishing my aging winter boot collection. (This is the first time in my decade+ of freelancing I’ve gotten behind on my taxes, btw. 2023 can bite me.)
But I have also been occupied by more pleasant things - because despite the fact that I was in a full-blown freakout about the prospect of endless winter a few weeks ago, I am actually finding this winter rather…. pleasant? And cozy? I have been slowly and cheaply decorating my flat! I have been rereading the works of Jane Austen! I have been batch cooking my way through the New York Times cooking app on weekends like a properly bougie millennial! I have been having cozy dinners with friends and sometimes snuggling their cats!
I have also been doing truly dumb shit like trekking out to IKEA with a bag of returns right before a snowstorm was supposed to hit, on a completely empty stomach, because I thought I’d be in and out in 45 minutes. You know, because I had made a list ahead of time and a girl on a cooking kick needs a proper stew pot and also a sheet pan.
Anyway, I spent about an hour wandering through the lighting section in a blood-sugarless haze, contemplating the Edison bulbs before realizing that the only lamp I actually liked enough to lug home in the snow was the only lamp they didn’t have in stock. I had neither lamps nor Edison bulbs on my list, of course. Classic IKEA bullshit. Then I somehow got on the wrong tram back from Lichtenberg and ended up pretty far out of my way still in a snowstorm and with even lower blood sugar and yeah that was a great little adventure that resulted in me being too wiped out to do any of the cooking that I’d planned on that evening. I have big plans for the sheet pan on Saturday though.
On another note, do you know how hard it is to find ground turkey in Berlin? Hard enough that I had to send Claire a picture when this magically appeared at my local Rewe after two weeks of searching:
Some unrelated shit
I made a whole bunch of weird notes the other day about Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of Great Expectations, and how Natalie and I got obsessed with it at some point in high school because when you’re a teenager this is a very swoonworthy movie, and how it was also a formative early encounter with the whole lickable cinema concept and also with the music of a certain ‘90s Brit-pop frontman whose actual, real given name is Jarvis Cocker.
Anyway, I did not have time to form these notes into something coherent, but I will say that this is a very lush, green movie to watch during snowy season. And that my life was forever changed by knowing there was a person out there whose actual, real given name was Jarvis Cocker, and that he grew up to be a rockstar. Everybody has a destiny, you guys. Jarvis’s was to write what is still my favorite unrequited love song of all time (and a bunch of other songs I truly adore), and mine is to foist it on you on a random Thursday evening because I’m out of things to say.
This music video is weird as fuck, by the way. Goodnight.