October 27, 2015:
There’s a slowing of the wheels in the mind when you’ve been in a place for 2 weeks. I’ve only been here for 12 days and while, to be honest, I’ve been asleep for almost half of them, it feels like a month. My mind has been filled with new trees and new streets and staying in one European city for this long is new. How exciting!
November 5, 2015:
When I was traveling Europe for 2.5 months, I would call my friends, tell them what I was doing, catch up.
November 7, 2015:
I wrote an application for the Peace Corps today.
I wrote about how I want to give back.
I finally learned what half and half is here. It’s called “Kaffeesahne” and when I learned about it I nearly cried.
After I bought some I got so excited that I just kept pouring hot water into the filter.
Then I left the house and went to TK Maxx (it’s with a K here but I don’t know why) and ambled through the aisles like a lost chinchilla looking for its mother.
It seems like every song is in English. In fact, I’m almost certain every one of them was. I noticed that I hardly recognized any of them. What’s more interesting, they would never survive in an American store because we would break the speakers. I think they are like has-been B-list songs from albums we listened to by artists who had one hit wonders and fell off the racetrack. They are like the off-brand recipes that never made it to grocery shelves, but somehow Germany got a hold of them and Saturday night karaoke was forever changed.
I walked in the complete dark, the only light at 6:37pm was dispensed from the street lamps and the reflection on the rainy sidewalk.
I feel like crying for no good reason. It’s PMS season.
There is a pattern to my TK-Maxx/off-brand shopping store experience.
I have never, let me say it again, never made a purchase that was perfect at a TJ/KMaxx, Ross or Marshalls. But every purchase I have made has been one notch down from perfect. But these are rarities in the wardrobe hall of fame. My favorite articles of clothing have been gifted to me by my mother, something I purchased for my sister but then stole because she never wore it, and the rest of them were purchased at H&M from the winter sale of ’09 when I spent $50- in fact, my funeral dress is from that very shopping day. And also my gold-zippered black crop pants. Those were legend among my pants, they were like “oh here she goes again- going for old gold grill capri pants mcgregor again. He’s even pleated from overwear and she doesn’t even so much as swish us on the hanger.
My pants talk, I learn things all the time.
To describe the experience: I almost never see anything perfect. If I do, it jumps out at me right away and I spend the rest of the shopping trip so thrilled that I think I will stay up all night doing cartwheels in the new item.
But that usually doesn’t happen. You know what happens? One of two things: I buy the thing that is almost great, or I wander around for an hour after the I’ve decided that there is nothing and I try to make all of the things work. Then I eventually blow air between my lips for a final time and walk out, feeling dumpy.
Dumpy: I’ll define it for you.
Waking up at a certain time, meandering to a coffee shop 43 minutes walk away, sitting there for 2.5 hours catching up on your sketch journal, taking a bus back amidst the rifraf, come “home,” climb 5 flights to the apartment door, take my boots off at the door because they do that here, and then I sat at the table and wrote a note to the peace corps. And then I looked at my sister’s wedding’s guest list draft on google docs. And I was a bitch about it because I thought some of them were ridiculous and the wedding list is crazy long (because I actually don’t want to see those people- am I a bitch or what?) but she asked me my advice. So I told her that next time I will try to be gentler but I don’t always understand where she his coming from, so when she asks my advice, I don’t know what to say except what I think.
So then I went to TJ Maxx and I left looking dumpier than when I arrived. You know why? Because I felt dumpier.
And now I feel like crying for literally no reason. I am going to think back on this time like I did my trip to Europe and I am going to think “Why didn’t I go to more places? Why didn’t I kiss that guy when I should have? Why did I spend the last 9 years of my life finding myself and being no closer than I was when I started this decade. Just more tired, disillusioned and not depressed. I’m not depressed, that was the middle of this decade. Now I am healthy. Healthy and just as unfettered as I’ll ever be. I sold all my stuff and got rid of my childhood roller skates and any shirts I haven’t worn in a year, except for that pink one but I should probably throw it away when I go home for Christmas.
So. I’ve gotten rid of my stuff except for 8.5 piles of pictures from my youth colorfully displayed in books when I had time to cut up pictures and arrange them.
Oh my God- guess what! I literally found the place where I have absolutely no idea what I am doing at all. I am in Germany, I just discovered coffee creme today, and in TJ Maxx, I realized that I don’t even know how to say “excuse me” in German when I bumped into the person behind me. She said “Perdone,” I thought- “Oh that’s what it is.” And then the store associates at TK Maxx were restocking this TK Maxx with machine-like precision. I was swishing pants on the clothing rack and the clothing associate briskly marched over and had the pants reattached to the hanger that had come unattached just as soon as my fingers left it. It was as if to say “I’ll fix your mistake, ingrate.” I almost started laughing because it was so abrupt and impersonal. I just passed racks with the clothes falling off of them and I was standing next to one that was tidy. It seemed like he was trying to tell me that I was the reason or his pain.
So I left without anything.
But how I felt in that store is how I felt at my old job: the music is in my language, but the vernacular is not.
I clopped around that store, as I am wont to do in this weather and in these seasons of doubt, looking at every iota of merchandise and trying to see myself in each one. Nothing fit, was the right price, met a need or enhanced who I was. As far as I was concerned, everything in that store looked just like everything I just got rid of to move here, and walk through this store looking for new things. Being in that store was like my whole experience so far in Germany: why am I here and what am I looking for? Or am I just here because I like to window shop, but I don’t commit. Meanwhile store clerks are milling about me like the fast-paced scene out of Garden State restocking and straightening like it’s their last task in life, and I am digging for purpose amidst piles of shoes.
Just before I left, I realized that I was wearing my lady-boxer underwear with my cotton leggings, so no wonder I was getting looks all day at my upper thighs. I just thought I was getting attention from climbing 5 flights of stairs to get to my apartment.
Onward in doubt, onward.