music

Sigur Ros has a new album out.

Because of the preponderance – and excellence – of Scandinavian electronica, my conception of the place looks something like: walking cobblestoned streets on bright, sunny, windy winter days, Royksopp or El Perro del Mar constantly in the background. Probably through a neo-Socialist brain implant. Everyone drinks milk and looks like my family.

Krankenheit.

I went to bed on Sunday feeling great.

We’d gone out and watched the game against Spain that afternoon, and, despite the loss, ended the night (which, really, began Saturday morning; this was the second of a series) in and next to a Soviet-Era-barge-turned-club-cum-swimming-pool, floating in the Spree. It was a warm night, we were pleasantly besoffen, swimming made us invigorated, powerful, and all was right with the world.

I woke up on Monday feeling that, perhaps, I’d woken up in Hell. The famed German (Russian? Greek?) Strep-Fever had come with swift and terrible retribution.

The construction workers chopping all the railings off of all the balconies of our apartment building had also come with swift and terrible retribution.

cut to: feeble tea-making, cut to: the delivery of the why-aren’t-you-in-school-excuse; “ich denke ich bin ein bisschen krank – ich soll in die Schule gehen, aber mein Hals schmertz”, cut to: unable to stand it, or perhaps to think clearly, our luckless heroine boards the S-Bahn and goes to Starbucks, for internet, quiet, anything. drinks none of her coffee, is less talkative with a friend that she would have liked to have been, cut to: returning home, she sleeps until the next morning, dreams of quadratic prisms and rules for orientation in black and white, hours of this reveal that these prisms and lines are building themselves, inexorably, into a great cathedral.

It is now that the Gästfamilie descends with a swift and terrible anxiety (Monday, I guess they thought… what? I was just hung over?).

And it is now that I must acknowledge my eternal gratitude to Nick Ostrau, German II teacher at UNC-Chapel Hill, for teaching me, as well as the rest of the class, the Gesundheit und Fitness chapter of Deutsch: Na Klar! All of us standing round the room, repeating, in the most pathetic voices we could muster, Ich hab’ KOPFschmerzen! Ich hab’ BAUCHschmerzen! Ich hab’ HALSschmerzen! Ich hab’ POPOschmerzen! (naturally, the anatomy lesson was included in this unit, and the word they teach you surely isn’t going to be Arsch).

So, because of this, I was able to say exactly what was wrong with me. Whereupon they descended with Aspirin, a plate of fruit (beautifully arranged, as ever), tea with honey, a thermometer, lozenges with lidocaine, and the German variant of Air-Borne (labeled, humorously, “Anti-Stress Drink”).

Things improved rapidly. Wednesday, I sat in the garden all day with my guest sister and drank tea, talked about Marx, read for class.

So, because Apollo-who-strikes-from-afar has come to my medical aid, I must resolve: less drinking, less kissing, more sleeping, less swimming in old commie hulks.

Sorry for partying? Not yet.

such a close call!

I almost got bangs – silly me.

dear stuffwhitepeoplelike, thank you for analyzing my kind and i with such piercing, diamond satire.

wechseln

this article makes me want to be a public policy major again: specifically the section on the 8th or 9th page about making allowances for urban “shrinkage.”

it just fits in so perfectly with my childhood goal of: “when I grow up, and have an inexplicable fortune, I’m going to buy ugly buildings in town, tear them down, and turn them into forest, until, little by little, the whole thing is forest again.”