An alternative life

His room a refuge. An intellectual dream capsule that represents him in many ways.

Perlmuttfarbenes Meer und rostrote Felsen und eine Stadt dazwischen.

Noticing contrasts. Old - New. Liberal - Traditional 

Taste and longing. You can't have everything.

Barely isolated windows and lonely books looking for new stories.

This calm regarding arousing events. Let the world flow by for a minute. 

The joy of doing nothing with a coffee in your hands.

When the sun comes back and you realized how you missed her.

Zines, illustrations, appreciation for art and for being different.

Diving into a world of caring kind people who turn saved food into soup and do jam sessions in green houses.

Being funky. Seeing light things.

Lastly, people who you want to see smile, smile at you. 

Getting back on track takes a bit more but we'll make it.

Thanks, Edinburgh. 

December 2016

Be my friend, stranger

On: New friends.

New friends. You don't know if you'll keep them. You don't know who they really are. You like them for the version of theirselves that they represent right now. More especially for the version they decide to show you.

Who were they last year? Who were they in desperate teenage years? 
Are they consistent? Are they opportunists? Are they psychopaths? Are they loyal? Are they going to stick around or are they going to vanish?

One of the dearest friends I have, wrote me once that up to this point, friends had always been variables in his life. But some just should not be. Apart from being one of the nicest things someone has ever said to me, this quote is meaningful in general, too.

It's true: We change constantly and with our personality changes, friends come and go. We move, we start a new job, we change subjects in University, we go to a different gym or try a new hobby - BAM! So many new friends! 

As new people with interesting thoughts and conversations, with great humour or the same taste in shitty 90s music come in our lives, they take up our time and space in our minds. Their problems become important, their worries, their enchantments, their love lives, their everythings. I don't know about you, but I feel like I'm always taking part in people's lives and I do it really fast. I get invested. 

For example last night, in the hallway of our neighbour's house I talked to a new friend. His love interest rejected him recently, because "her head is not in the right place" and despite all my (already existing) loyalty, I get it. Nobody is to blame - it's just this unrequited love thing that happens way too often, but does not actually when you look at propabilities. 

She is confused, she likes him as a person, she misses to be around him, she's afraid that his friends and house mates don't like her anymore (I get it). So she texts him. And instead of keeping his distance and trying to get over this shit, he comes running to her. He knows that it's shit. We know it's shit. So as a friend (even as a recent one) I felt the urge of keeping him from doing that. From hurting himself even more by not letting go of someone that doesn't like you as much as they do. While doingt that, I realized that I already cared. 

I cared so much for a person that I've barely known for a month. I couldn't stand his sadness and his disappointment and his eyes as he told me he can't help but doing it although he knows it's not good to do it.

Participation, sharing and being invested in someone's life are precious features of a friendship. Although they can weigh you down. As your friend shares a problem or a worry, a sad story with you, you can't ignore it, it affects you, makes you a witness, a confidant. Not that every worry they share with you is how to bury a body, but some things are not easy to process for you. Friendships sometimes get mistaken for therapy, people might tell you things that aren't harmless - there has to be a line.

Another problem is that some people mistake you not only for therapists or problem-solvers but also for a rubbish tip where they can dump all their shit so that they don't need to process it themselves. If you feel like you're becoming this kind of pain relief for them that is unhealthy for both of you, try to make it stop.
Some friends are just slowly pushed off screen by others, because you have only limited time and capacities to keep in touch with everyone. 

And all my friends have gone to find another place to let their hearts collide. Just promise me you'll never leave again. - Ed Sheeran

Others, like the ones that use you as a dumping place for anything, you should actively push off screen yourself. In the movie that is your life, in which you are the protagonist, there shouldn't be people treating you like that. Remember that! (getting all self-help-book-life-advice-ish over here)

Some people may say I care too much, I get too invested - but what would life and friendships be without that? If everyone only cares about themselves (we all are narcissist assholes in a way) where do we get? We already live in a world that is cruel and egoistic, where human nature is too often seen in a pessimist way: "it's a dog eat dog life". (Learned that saying from a not so good movie I saw recently). 
We don't need friendships to just mirror ourselves and confirm how good we are, to support our egos and sometimes dump or worries-

We need friendships to develop our identities, to share our thoughts, our feelings, our lives with others, making small moments and achievements and feelings meaningful.
I get the unsettling feeling of not being able to keep all the people around that I really like to have around. Not only in the obvious literal way, me being in Wales at the moment and them all over the place (Freiburg, Paris, Tessaloniki, Hamburg, Halle, Tübingen, Potsdam, Heidelberg, Erlangen, Edinburgh, Konstanz...), but also in a sense that I might lose them because other things become more important and we're slowly drifting apart, even virtually. 

What still makes me hopeful for the future is on the one hand, the endless possibilities of meeting best friends that I haven't met yet. On the other hand, what my aunt said on her 50th birthday last year when she explained how she knew all the people that were there at the party - It was like a puzzle, a mosaic of people that were once or still are important in her life, she told us about how she got to know them and how she lost and found them again.

Someone recently said to me that he does not believe in randomness, he rather believes in patterns. So if this one pattern makes me meet a person, maybe it makes me find them again when we lost each other? I put the question mark there because I don't know if this is possible. I lost friends, that's true - But by now I never managed to become friends with them again. 

Making new friends can be tough (I'm trying really hard at the moment, you know), but at the same time, like I said in the beginning, it can also be very easy. You can define yourself differently, be a different version of yourself and they'll still like you for who you are or show them to be. But I think if you're always choosing new friends over old friends because you're changing that might not be the best idea. The friends that have stuck around for a longer time, they really know who you were, where you have gone wrong, how you changed, and maybe even who you want to be later. Do not dispense of these people. You need them. As a mirror. Not a mirror that always reflects how cool you are, but a mirror to show you the real you, that is not always funny and beautiful and stunning and creative. It's sometimes mean, ugly, desperately sad, hopeless, an asshole, an arrogant prick, a stupid irrational depressive person. They see who you really are. They know you - and they decided to stay. You know them. You both committed. That is something special and the trust and work you put into this relationship pays off. You sometimes have to let your friends go, but don't let them go easily.



So what about me? I let my new friends feed me with cheese cake and try not to put their faces on the internet (too much) without their knowledge. All the pictures you saw are potential new friends. Will they stay around? God knows.

PS: The hat is back.

Life Goes On

On: A trip to the past, Film-making, & Diary Headlines

I'm standing there. On a bridge across the Seine again, after all these months. It feels like last year, it smells like last year - but it is now. And my time in Paris is over and gone. Regardless of whether I'm there again or not. 

Everything is like it was, or so similar you hardly find the changes. But still: It's over.

This trip to Paris, these 8 days were not only a rollercoaster of emotions: happy, joyful, disappointed, sad, lonely, hopeful, empty, cozy, excited. 

They were a trip to the past. I accept this, but I still enjoyed every second of it. 

My favourite one. Promenade Plantée, Paris, March 2015

Finally, I've been to Pintes & Frites AGAIN (been there at least 4 times), the newly renovated Picasso Museum (soooo good, honestly), discovered a new bar, celebrated the birthday of my colleague in Kindergarten last year (who was in Paris, too, by chance), rested on the Promenade Plantée, danced into the night in one of my favourite night clubs (SHOWCASE!) under a bridge, met someone new, got excited to see 'The Subways' playing live at Le Trabendo, saw all my lovely girls from the picture of my bedside table again, stayed with my host family and played babysitter again (how I missed it... -.-), bought new books at Shakespeare & Co. (#NEED), ate a lot of cheese, went out eating in a fancy restaurant (with a creepy waiter, though), sat on the borders of the Seine and played Cards Against Humanity.

Doesn't that sound like hell of a trip? (To say it The Subways-like:) Oh Yeah! 

Side note: I'm gonna spread some of the mobile pictures I took randomly in this post, so don't get too distracted. [and: enjoy! ;) ]

Obla Di Obla Da - Life goes on, bra. La-la how life goes on - The Beatles

Life goes on. Here, back in Freiburg, my film project was waiting for me impatiently. Today, on the third day of turning the film, I'm excited about the nice pictures we took and how everything will turn out when we start cutting and montaging on monday! 

And this is what it looks like. The equipment
we got from University is worth 10k €.
Please don't break it - it's on my insurance!

But I too, once again, realize, how much work this is. And how fun it is! I can really see myself there, practically producing and developing movies. Telling stories for a living. This would be a dream coming true! 
It is hard work, it eats up your time. You have to focus but don't get lost in the details, there's still a schedule to follow and a dead line to meet. But in the end, you have your product, the story, the film. You have your creative effort in thing and you can show it to people, let it act on them. How do they perceive it? Can we communicate and discuss it?

Questions and thoughts like these are so interesting & fascinating to me. I want to change people's minds, I want to touch people's views, I want to give them words or pictures to make them wonder. 

Good news ahead: Next week, when we are cutting (and I'm hopefully desperately finishing my politics paper on the clash of civilizations), my best friend comes to visit me! Yeah 3X (quoting Chris Brown 'n' stuff). I'm really really glad to see him. We manage to stay in touch decently. But still, it's different in real life. Hugging and bitch slaps and that kind of stuff... ;)


He goes to (f*cking) San Francisco in August! I will miss him so much, but I'll better work to visit him there or I'm going to kick my own ass. And I'm taking Spanish courses this semester ! (but this is kind of irrelevant at this point...) 
Anyway, he visits me next week and he's going to meet my boyfriend for the first time and we will get drunk together. Long story short: It will be awesome!

If this is how Picasso liked to kiss, I'm worried about his partners...

Like the memories of Paris, the endless whinings about my romances, the sorrows and troubles and joys of my daily life and my wondering about bigger things - I keep them all in my diary.

#lifegoals: Being as cool as Charlotte
from The Subways

side note: This very best friend mentioned was the only person who was ever allowed to read (selected parts) of my diary. Yeah, THAT level of "best-friend-ship"

Here on my blog, too. But there's still some things that I only say to myself. But what's funny, and what I like to share with you (3 other people who read this and future-Lotta, of course, don't forget ya) are the headlines of my entries. 
I always write the exact time, the headline and the date, seperated by commas in the first line of a page.

Examples (translated to English):

20:38 h / I am a lying bitch / 6.8.14
18:01 h / The end. The beginning. / 8.8.14
0:50 h / Guerilla Art & riding my bike / 30.8.14 
1:31 h / Tinder again, being lonely / 21.9.14
1:05 h / new beginning - AGAIN, Freiburg / 12.10.14
0:03 h / Memories of Paris / 13.10.14
4:20 h / new people, Moritz, cafeteria party / 24.10.14
2:08 h / Just Like The Movies / 31.10.14
23:19 h / Independence + crying / 23.11.14
1:04 h / I already miss you - nobody's got time / 19.12.14
15:36 h / Cologne & a new year / 1.1.15
23:51 h / Spontaneous visit! + film production / 26.2.15

... If you'd take stats, you could figure I'm a night owl. And a ordinary girl who kind of cries a lot. (And speaks too loud, but that's another story). I don't know if you're interested in my diary. It seems you kinda are, since you are here, reading this shit. I really love you for doing this, honestly. I love you for caring about my life. You're not obliged to. I love you.

#Lifegoals: Appartment with balcony in Paris

My love for this place never gets old.

I said "Life goes on". And nowhere you can see this clearer than in Paris. 2 months after the terrorist attacks and assassinations, life flows by like ever before. The curfew of going to the park in Kindergarten has ended, finally. You spot graffitis of "JE SUIS CHARLIE" at every corner. And at République people still light candles when it gets dark and draw pens on the statue. But the city never stops moving. It eats people up, incidents get forgotten. Or at least buried under new ones. People have lives. Lives don't stop moving. People don't stop moving, either. It is our mechanism against fear. Against hopelessness, desperation - loneliness. Moving on, going a step further, leaving stuff behind. Lala - Life goes on. 
Sometimes it's easy.
But sometimes it's hard.

There are still people lighting candles every night.
There are still people who care.