november, 2001

Donnerstag, 1. November, zweitausendeins, 20:29 (GMT +0100)

i just figured out the hard way what Essig is. look at the word. looks kind of etymologically related to essen, to eat, right? i don't think austria wants me to cook, i really don't. chris is doing well, cooking up a fucking storm with wayne in his apartment in new jersey. he may not have 50-schilling opera twelve minutes by foot away, but he does have a real kitchen ... here at the institute there's a little hole in the wall with about two forks, no knives that actually cut, which is probably a good thing since there are no cutting boards. there's a nasty little fridge, but things in it seem to ... well, keep, i suppose, but they take on a nasty smell, and it doesn't feel really cold in there. there are no measurements -- we use empty half-liter coke bottles to decide how much water to put in our pasta and soup packages -- and only one burner wants to actually cook the water (i mean boil -- kochen, cook, whatever) once it's measured. at frau bernthaler's, things are a little more equipped, because she actually does use it daily. well, not her per se (she and gabor had an argument over dinner the other night about wienerschnitzel -- do you put milk in the batter or not? (9 sources out of 10 have now confirmed that you don't, as she said you did) -- and gabor shot back, seit wann hast Du gekocht?! which was a valid accusation, since i bet she couldn't make an omelet to save her life) -- but the hungarian maid eva ("eva ist immer kochen," said she yesterday in her broken deutsch) or traude. and i don't know how they produce what they do from the kitchen they have to work in! it's bigger, at least, than the one at the institut, and while she has all kinds of pots and pans, none seem to be clean, or useful. there is one liquid measurement i can find and it's holding cooking utensils. it's really not awful -- but we can't stock it like i did the lodge kitchen, which, while a nasty, rat-infested hole in the wall, turned out some wonders because we linoleumed it, kept it beautiful and clean, had utensils and implements, and actually kept it stocked. so i'm reduced to eating out of packages that don't require much more than an egg or a little butter -- things i can find and don't have to really stock.

and i would love to stock a kitchen here! the naschmarkt is but a few blocks away, and there they have everything -- they have sharp paprika for dirt cheap -- 100g for a dollar or something? spices all over the place, huge stands of olives and schafskäse, white asparagus, pink artichokes ("why?" asks chris), mangoes, fresh fish and meat and such (not that i eat it, but if i did, i imagine this would be some kind of paradise), et cetera. it's two blocks long and one block wide, crammed full. i would love to go buy fresh tofu and turkish delight and baqlawa and bok choy every day!

tonight was an eating-out-of-a-package night. it's all saints' day, which in this country means that everything and its mother is geschlossen, and i had to buy groceries yesterday if i wanted to eat today. (okay, i'm exaggerating -- billa and most restaurants were indeed closed, but i got pasta at segafredo's for lunch, where a persian guy tried to pick me up, and when i went to the westbahnhof to buy my ticket to munich (turns out i'm actually going there tomorrow, instead of the other way around), even the bipa there was open and all the stores were bustling. but if you needed baby food or something special, you had to stock up the day before.) i went to oliver's father's grocery, ding haw, and got some chinese noodles and a package of peanut sauce. all i had to do was add

• 110ml Wasser,
• 1 Esslöffel Zucker, and
• 3 Esslöffel Öl.

now really, how hard could that be? i asked eva the hungarian maid (i differentiate from frau eva pürrer, our wonderful guide through salzburg last week, who wrote the recipe for glühwein in my recipebook) for some öl, please. she showed me the olivenöl. i really wanted not olive oil, but cooking oil. wesson. you know the stuff -- yellowish in color, but not something to make a cake taste funny. (i put sesame oil in carrot cake last semester sometime, i remember, when i had run out of cooking- and olive oil -- it tasted damn funny. palatable, but not after you knew what the inadvertent secret ingredient was.) so i saw a bottle of what looked like cooking oil, and i asked eva if that was it. she said, it's for salad. you put oil on salad, right? like part of a dressing. so i said, i don't want to use olive oil, i'll use that.

i noticed as i poured it in that it wasn't really coating the spoon like oil does -- any type of oil. after the third löffel-ful was already in the mix, i thought to smell the Essig ("eating-oil," right?) -- very pungent, very distinct, very much not öl.

vinegar.

yeah, so next time i smell the stuff first -- and now i'll never forget what Essig is! i told eva when i figured it out, and she laughed at me. i deserved that. the sauce turned out to be not bad. after all, i do put a tablespoon or so of vinegar in my gado-gado awesome peanut sauce, when i have a kitchen and when i'm actually cooking ... not three, but hell, it was edible. good, even. i'll get the mix again and try it with actual öl.

really not a bad day in all, so far, and promises to be better before i go to bed. as eva commented today, "allein ist nicht gut." no, it isn't -- olivia's been in cardiff for two days now -- she went this weekend because she thought she was going to be all lonely while i was in munich, and now she leaves me being by myself for two days ... it's good to be in different company now and then, but totally alone has its drawbacks (especially when i can't cook! rar). yesterday was pretty boring. i did some homework, read about klimt in the carl schorske book we're reading (fin-de-siècle vienna, which is interesting at points, and dry as sawdust in others), which was actually cool, walked around the glorious naschmarkt and picked up some of the aforementioned curries-in-packages, and then pretty much bided my time -- doing something productive, i'm sure; i practiced some, read through the milhaud that jack elena's friend gave me -- until the brahms' requiem that night. it promised to be awesome. i didn't get the best stehplatz, because people were already in the middle before the buzzer läuted (dipshits -- people were badmouthing them in loud german, hehe), but i could hear -- the first 1.5 movements, that is, until i started feeling very hot, and then almost fainting. i knew it was time to go when the stage started swirling and i started feeling nauseous. the ushers were very attentive, giving me water and offering me a doctor -- which i accepted and declined, respectively, auf deutsch. but it was clear that i had to go home, so i did, and slept. good thing the concert was again this morning -- i went at 9:30 and waited in the cold (i might have to get some gloves that will go with this jacket -- the bright orange ones might clash just a little with this mango jacket, mom) for an hour or so, reading dürrenmatt that mom had given me -- to my surprise, i'm actually understanding a lot, and i haven't looked up a single word yet (on purpose). finally heard the requiem this morning, performed by some dresden orchestra, i think, with sir andrew davis conducting, the wiener singverein, laura aikin on soprano, and the diminutive but powerfully-voiced thomas quasthoff on baritone. all, with the possible exception of the thin-voiced aikin, were wonderful. great morning.

lunch at segafredo's, i said, where a persian dude told me i had an american accent (thanks) and wanted to practice his english, so i agreed to meet him next week. he said, maybe we could catch a movie, too, and i said, how about we just meet up here and speak english. blah. train ticket to munich without problems, unlike mom's the other day. hurrah for these more frequent and less up-ge-tripping (as mom would say in her germanicized english past participling) german exchanges -- he told me if i had an ausweis it would be billiger; he said if i wanted to leave half an hour earlier i wouldn't have to umsteigein in salzburg, but i said that was too early. have since finished the schorske-klimt, done my german homework, cooked that peanut sauce mit Essig, and after practicing, i have plans to meet up (finally) with oliver's friends florian and attila. some cafe. works for me -- i got no plans until 11:20 tomorrow morning, when my train leaves for munich ...

Sonntag, 4. November, zweitausendeins, 11:01 (GMT +0100)

i'm sitting in munich, 11:00 a.m. plus a few seconds, on a debian machine (flat screen now to replace the old noisy one he had hooked up to four computers simultaneously in august), finally typing with a correct keyboard and in linux (i missed my operating system!). looking at my links to random pages, the weather, people's journals, what is going down on the new york times online, et cetera, and i do not want to go back to vienna. it's not like i have anything to do here, per se, or that i'm implying that munich is much better than vienna, but i want to be anywhere rather than vienna! i look at the weather report for the next few days, linked to my page, and what the hell do i want this that city? there i have precisely one friend (making more -- chilling with florian and attila the other night was fun), i have no fun in my daily routine, my room is the ugliest piece of shit ever and i hate, really hate, depressing living environments ... i really do not want to go back. and i have to tomorrow, and while i may the city leave once or twice before the program ends, it would be to go to prague with anna, or who even knows where. i don't like prague any better, and i have even fewer friends there. (at least the crown's deflated.) what is there for me in vienna?!

i thought i was getting better on this, when i went to salzburg and then to vienna with mom, and then the few days before i came to munich. martin says, and quite rationally, that it's a city of 1.4 million people -- same as munich, roughly -- how can it have nothing to do? even if the nightlife is not anything even close to munich's scene (kunstpark ost again the other night, to natarj temple, to driving games, and to aubergine sandwiches -- i could live on that :), 1.4 million people don't sit on their asses all day. what do they do? what's fun that i could do, to? --i have no idea. i'm at my wits' end! i really don't know, and i'm so frustrated by it. i'm sure a lot of it is the things i already mentioned -- only having one person there ever whom i talk to; living in depressing quarters; having nothing to keep me occupied; not being able to work because i'm not a citizen; &c. but i try not to hate the city! i try to want to go back to it tomorrow! and the train ride east is really the last thing on my list.

it's cold, too. vienna and munich have gotten much chillier much faster, and one reason for my visit here is to reclaim my winter coat, which i left here (too bulky) in august. my beautiful mango coat can't take 0 degrees celsius, i hate to admit. martin's got the door open to air out the room, and while the view from the balcony is beautifully lit with yet-morning sun on the autumn-colored trees outside of his house (why is vienna not turning colors?? salzburg is. munich is. what's up??), it promises to be a gorgeous but frigid day. maybe weather for more pool-playing -- i could use a chance to reclaim my billiards-honor from yesterday afternoon!

i'm having fun here. it's great to see martin again, in all kinds of capacities. his parents took us out to dinner last night -- which was fun! i like them -- which started out in german (mine's so much better than when i met them last, five months ago almost exactly, when i had a few words and couldn't understand a thing -- the language even sounds worlds different to me from august to november, when then i couldn't understand a word that came out of either his or his brother's mouth, and now i can understand a good half to three-quarters -- i love it), but when the talk turned to a topic i could follow but not contribute to, and one i cared about, it started being half and half. we debated for hours (both during and after dinner, with and without parents) everything from the american tribal mentality to the difference between iterative and recursive functions, and how you can tell one from the other one level up. i love the discourse! god, how does one survive outside of a swarthmore environment for an extended period of time? i mean after you graduate? props to those graduated seniors who aren't experiencing huge breakdowns slightly related to that.

things are chunky-peanut-butter-like, i guess. smooth and great until one hits a bump. seufz -- i hope things work out.

i do not want to go back to vienna. fuck.

Montag, 5. November, zweitausendeins, 15:26 (GMT +0100)

in august we listed to his zweiraumwohnung cd and while i liked the liebe ohne ende track, the one he played over and over said:

zwei von millionen von sternen die sich immer mehr von einander entfernen

i realized that immediately but tried not to think about it too much. fuck.

i think bavaria and the top part of austria were foggy today on the train ride back from munich, but it could just be that my contacts are so salted over that even when i got out into the bright sun on mariahilferstraße back in vienna, things were still cloudy.

Mittwoch, 7. November, zweitausendeins, 24:21 (GMT +0100)

i feel much lighter.

which for the past eight months would have been an awful thing, terrible in the kundera sense.

now, i think perhaps parmenides was right after all ... i can see everything without weight. the lights at the opera house tonight, as i looked up at them from the floor of my stehplatz (salome), where i was reading the dürrenmatt mom gave me, and noticed that there was no sheen over them. i don't mean the salt that coated my eyes from crying all night sunday and monday morning, when i woke up in munich, missed my early train, was given sandwiches (his mother), a kiss on the forehead and twenty marks to go sit in a cafe until the next train left (him), and then clouded my vision the whole train ride home. it is almost physical weight that was gone from these lights, which finally had no metaphysical meaning except as crystal diffusers of light.

am i making sense? true, tuesday morning (as i predicted in the yellow car) i woke up three times during the night, unable to figure out where i was (barcelona? munich? prague? salzburg? madison? swarthmore? vienna? --all recent possibilities), at what point in my life i was, what time of year it was, et cetera. very disturbing. when i finally did realize all this, it took me a little longer to remember the past weekend, and my (cold -- i miss martin's house, heated bathroom floor, full beautiful water pressure, usw.!!) shower was less than happy. but since a couple small crumblings of my surroundings that day (you know when you stop, arrested by a visceral memory, and the world kind of falls off its skin, dalí-like?), my vision has stayed clear, and has maybe even been washed.

this applies to not only my mental state post-weekend -- much more lucid and resilient than i had anticipated by about 71 times -- but to the city of vienna, with which i might be beginning to make peace. finally. it's fleshing out a little. oliver's dudes flo(rian) and attila are the first actual austrians within about two decades of my age with whom i've had any contact, let alone very pleasant contact. the fact that we talk (mostly) auf deutsch makes that somehow more authentic, even if my german's not quite colloquial. genau. whatever. fun to drink socially again, club (u4 last night, which was perhaps not the most enlightened decision i've ever made the night before an 8:30, but dr. l.