Dear reader(s),In case you are in the midst of sending over self help books and Zoloft, I wanted to reassure you that things have gotten much better. I found a job–the sort of job that adults have and are proud to tell other adults about–and the coupling of this job with a new winter jacket, and a lovely shared apartment with very supportive roommates, has enabled me to begin to feel hopeful about the future.Berlin looks very different when you have a month subway pass and don’t have to spend each ride scanning the car you’re on for a potential ticket controller. It also looks different because the snow has melted revealing tons of thawed dog shit, but that’s another story.I guess the struggle I have to overcome now is controlling my anxiety about losing it all. I thought about my 2011 new year’s resolutions and the truth is that besides wanting to go to the gym and master contact lenses, my new year’s wish is to be settled–even boring would be ok. I spent so much of the past decade starting over and changing that I would really like for things to stay still for awhile.If you’re wondering about the image, it’s from the show Out of this World, which was on in the 80’s and revolved around a girl named Evie who had an alien father who passed on extra-terrestrial powers to her. The most useful power was the ability to stop time by connecting both index fingers to each other. I am dying for this power right now!
This week I was passed over for a job I’ve been waiting a month to hear back from, fired from a cake-walk Preschool job, slapped on the arm by a maniac chef, and paid less than I was worth. It was a particularly brutal week, coming at the end of a particularly brutal month, in the shadow of a recent break up. But, what strikes me about this week is how much we, as adults, believe that there should be some sense of mastery to our lives and how in reality, we are simply unable to control most of what happens to us. My circumstances made it necessary for me to take the Preschool job. I would never call myself a “kid” person but I was in need of regular employment and in Berlin, if you’re German isn’t fluent, you are either eligible to be an English teacher or a babysitter. This job was a combination of both and though it was full time, soul crushing and began at 7 am, I took it gratefully.Apart from punching a kid in the face, I’m not sure how you fuck a job like this up, but according to the woman that fired me two days later, I was let go because I was too enthusiasitc…if only she’d known how I felt on the inside, she’d probably have fired me for being so glib.So, once again, I went through the vicious cycle of fantasizing about stable income, realizing the things I’d have to give up to make that possible, and then having the rug swept out from under me. As each day blew in colder, darker and snowier than the next, I began looking out my window for a neon sign declaring, “Berlin Says Go the Fuck Home,” and funnily enough, a Berliner friend of mine asked this exact question of me. “Why don’t you go home?” It was hard to answer at first but finally I realized that it’s not that I don’t want to go home, I’m just not sure where home is. I am somewhere in between Berlin and the States all the time and I’m never really in either of them. But Berlin, for all its cruel mistress antics, feels totally different now that I am single. I feel like I just got here and what’s more, I feel like I have to learn how to survive on my won here. None of these reasons are good ones, just like none of the jobs I’m being offered are particularly good.I unloaded my sorrows to Stuart Pigott, the wine journalist and my unofficial mentor, and he said…”Well, I realized a long time ago that no one was going to hire me for any real sort of job, so I made the decision never to have one. There have been a lot of ups and downs but I’ve never regretted it.” It may not seem like solid advice, but it made me feel better somehow. He’s lived a life that I would call successful, published books, travelled around the world, followed his passions and broken new ground in his field. He seems confident, which is my new go to answer when people ask what I want to be when I grow up.Dreaming of confidence, I flashed back to the day I’d had helping cater a friend’s wedding and the humiliating feeling that I was simultaneously under and overqualified for the work. There I was, washing spoons and serving food precariously on a little tray, trying to get along only speaking and hearing German, and of course, messing up because I didn’t actually understand what I was expected to. It was during a moment of trite misunderstanding, one in which my head was swimming in a gray snow-globe of German and humiliation that I miscounted the number of soups that needed to be plated and found my arm stinging seconds later. “Konzentrieren!” the chef barked. It was a stunning moment, the sort that makes you do anything but concentrate, and it turns out, that I was also too stunned to knee him in the balls, too stunned or too scared of the consequences.The German term “der Pfeifer” translates literally to the whistler, but it refers to someone that gets lost in the simplest tasks. In this city I am always der Pfeiferin….hoping desperately for competence and finding it only in my writing. This is truly the only arena that I can come across as someone who fully understood, understands, and can even extrapolate deeper meaning from the events that take place in my life.Recently, my friend Jessa gave me a tarot reading and it was eerily accurate. The cards that came up represented renewal, starting over, freeing myself from my constant analytical self-judgement, writing more, worrying less about boys and following that which is pleasurable to me because, apparently, it is only by doing what I like to do that real opportunities will crop up. I don’t know where Berlin fits into this puzzle but I am hesitant to believe that leaving would make my journey toward adulthood easier.
Pros:
- Woke up to pancakes and coffee
- Had a relaxing morning (meaning I watched TV on the Internet: today it was an enjoyably mindless episode of Modern Family)
- Finally made it to Brillenwerkstatt to get my glasses fitted to my face. (Why do glasses get so bent out of shape? Is my face so demanding of the plastic? I put them on and take them off. It’s not as if I’m wearing them in combat.)
- Received nice messages from friends and am being taken out to both lunch and dinner.
- Feel cute. Moisturized. Still able to draw stares from the occasional man on the street.
Cons:
- Could not find anything to wear today. (A birthday outfit should set the tone, don’t you think, for the rest of the year and it appears that I am telling the world that I am a fem-bot. I tried to find items that were fairly new, not ripped or missing any buttons, and not wacky in a retro-experimental way. I also had to find something that was suitable for a fresh Fall day. I ended up wearing: a wrinkled fuchsia mini shirt-dress. a pair of scuffed but presentable brown leather boots that my mother bought me on my 25th birthday, and my Woody Allen Trench coat which is missing all but one button, stained (stained on-top of stains, actually) and slightly rank in the armpits.)
- Tried to upload photos from my new camera (thanks Brendan!) and can not actually open it. After much frustrating examination, and the sneaking suspicion that I am missing a cord of some sort, I resign myself to waiting for expert help (thanks Brendan). When that happens, I will post some photos of me, my outfit, and the many celebratory endeavors that occur over this weekend.
The other day, my friend Pippa, Brendan, and I were talking about this amazing business model we want to implement. You know those bedazzled shirts that say Slutty-Princess, Juicy, or Daddy’s Sexy Girl…well, they exist. So our idea was to take those Snuggies that they advertise everywhere and bedazzle them with fitting slogans. Our sleeved-blankets would sport messages like–Depressed and Sexy, Alone Again on Valentine’s Day, Juicy Shut-In, Bloated Princess…you get the idea.
These garments would be the perfect thing to wear in conjunction with my second NPR story. It’s about staying in on Sunday in Berlin and which recipes work when you’re feeling that all-day Snuggie glow.
You can find the story here.
I must admit, it’s sort of nice and weird to listen to NPR all day and think that I, in some small and mostly insignificant way, am related to all that.
There’s this thing that I do when I find myself in a new place–new meaning everything from a different country to a section of my own neighborhood I’ve never familiarized myself with. I find a building that catches my eye and imagine living there. I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. On the long car rides to visit my grandma in Palm Springs, I would imagine our family living in one of the farm houses we’d pass near Hadley’s Date Orchard.
Suddenly I could see myself as a different girl: threadbare, sun-beaten dress, pigtails, a couple of dogs at my feet. Merely through glimpsing that, I’d register this lovely sensation that my existence was malleable and possibly even, multi-dimensional. It made me feel light and untethered to my actual reality. I’d think, if only I lived in another house, I could be a different person.
Living in Berlin, where my existence is by definition a little fuzzy and disconnected from the German majority, I find that sense of liminality overtakes me more often than it did when I was a child. Only now, I fantasize about permanence and carving out identity.
I fall in love with an old factory building in some remote part of Templehof, and I can almost see myself inside, sitting on the bench of a massive wooden dining room table, laden with pasta and salad and wine glasses. I can hear the mix of conversation and background music that signifies dinner party.
It’s like having a magazine in your mind. I use the buildings around me as backdrops and then, in this frenzy of mental interior-decorating and career identity, I fill in the details. A Pre-war apartment in the small city of Passau, which borders Austria, would entail thick plank hardwood floors, lots of brass deco lamps,a daughter named Winnie, and a career as a bookshop/ cafe owner.
A stone-house on the sloping hills around Franken would mean lots of red-plaid (ala Vivienne Westwood), sheepskins stretched across the wall of our bedroom as a makeshift headboard, twin sons named Elmore and Irving, and a career writing young-adult fiction.
In all of these imaginings, the place is more limited in its scope and the focus is on domestic life. I basically eliminate the onslaught of choices available to me in Berlin and opt for somewhere quiet and unconcerned with gallery openings, 24 hour party scenes, or any festivals that do not explicitly deal with animal husbandry.
I’m sure this means that I am overwhelmed by the choices available to me now. My fantasies are about simplicity, reduction, and creating an identity that seems sustainable enough to usher me into middle age. They never take into consideration the boredom associated with conservative, rural life or the fact that no one would ever visit us, and that the people who were around would most likely not be the kinds of people that we could talk about Objectum sexuality or Jonathan Lethem with.
Despite all this, I still seek haven in this pastime and maybe even believe that my life will come to resemble my fantasy enough to warrant an end to all this “what if-ing”.
A little shameless self-promotion for you on this cold and rainy August day. I recently began working for the NPR station here in Berlin as a food-blogger. About twice a month, you can look forward to my insights on food and drink life in Berlin.
I began with a short piece (very short, in fact my bio is about as long as the review) about a restaurant in Neukölln where Brendan and I had a 13 course meal! Next time I promise more in-depth coverage.
On a similar note, I am writing posts about wine and wine related stuff on our dear friend Stuart Pigott’s website. The posts are in English and fall under the heading “Pass the Bottle”. I have been given very free-reign at Stuart’s Planet Wine, and my style is perhaps a little snarkier than usual.
From the New York Times article; What is it About 20-Somethings?
“The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation. ”
New residency every year, check! Moved back with the rents at least once, check! Ditto for the multiple jobs, romantic partners and unmarried status at 29. I have to say that for all my years proudly proclaiming myself as different, unique and complicated, I am finally very comforted to learn that I am just like the rest of my peers.
As I reach the end of my 20’s (I’ll be 30 in October) with the feeling I’ve got little to show for myself, I recall all the moments of suffering and struggle when I thought…this seems so much harder than it did for my parents! I mean, I know that my mother’s generation was burning bras and juggling careers and kids in a way that was previously unheard of, but at least they had jobs when they got out of college if they wanted one!
I was talking to my 22-year-old sister who is itching to be done with her undergraduate studies so she can begin life in the real world and I just want to shout…Don’t Leave! It’s a fucking mess out there.
Here in Germany, many people my age are just completing their first degree and work life doesn’t begin until their mid 30’s. I wish this fact comforted me. I feel much more like an American when it comes to my sense of where I should be at this stage in my life. And even though I feel totally fine about turning 30 and don’t have this complex that it means I’m losing my youthful energy, looks, etc…I do feel annoyed that I’m not further along. I know that therapists love to throw out comforting lines about all of us developing at different paces but I doubt anyone my age feels good about asking their folks for money, deferring important purchases, or reading about classmates in blockbuster films! I’m talking to you Chris Pine!
For the rest of us, here’s to baby-steps and the hope that the next decade will bring at least a little success and clarity.
I have wanted to visit Sweden since I was a kid and I finally made it on the coat-tails of a program called Paideia: Project Incubator. The program invites applicants from all over Europe to take their Jewish centered projects and bring them closer to fruition through the help of tutors and foundational support. My project was a Modern Jewish cookbook for a German audience. I learned a lot about how to move from a grand idea to a series of concrete steps. It’s sobering stuff, actually, to realize that no one is going to hand you a fat check and let you loose. I am now hoping to be able to find funding just to produce a well-researched sample chapter to bring to potential publishers. It’s a much more modest goal and I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that no one loved me and my borscht and offered me 20,000€.
And…in the midst of fighting off my fantasies of success in favor of realistic goals, I didn’t manage to see much of Sweden at all! I spent all day in a series of cramped airless classrooms learning about presentation skills and the finer points of Swedish Kosher cuisine. Occasionally I made it out of the heavily secured building to the Salu Hall, a marvellous 19th century indoor market with gorgeous heaps of meat, fish, fruit and vegetables.
It was maddening to be around so much traif (non-kosher) food and know that I was forced to pass it up because of time limits and price. The one night I made it out with friends, I ate heaps of shrimp at an outstanding Vietnamese restaurant. And there was also this incident where I was dying for breakfast on a Sunday when everything is closed in Stockholm. I ended up getting a sausage McMuffin at McDonald’s and then wrapping it in three plastic bags so that the smell of piggy-patties wouldn’t waft into the room before I had a chance to scarf it down. It was a very Roth-ian moment, to say the least and I realized that I’d have to learn a lot more about kosher eating if I want to write this cookbook.
I did realize that soy is very kosher and that fake-chicken is quickly becoming the staple of the Swedish-Kosher diet. You can bet there won’t be any of that in my cookbook. On the one night that I cooked for the group (with plenty of help from the international students in my program) we cobbled together a respectable meal of vegetarian Borscht, Pisaladiere (a French anchovy and caramelized onion flat-bread), an incredible very lemon-y tabbouleh and strawberry cheesecake. I gave a little (alcohol fuelled) speech before we ate. I think I said something about making messes and cleaning up later…It seemed meaningful at the time.
On the last day, I took a picture with everyone in the program from Central Europe. I really liked everyone in the program and especially the people in this photo. I guess I feel like I belong in the Central European crew…. It’s funny how subtly the sense of yourself as an outsider can expand and shrink depending on the context. I had no qualms about getting in this picture but now that I look at it, I wonder….It’s not like it’d be easy to play spot the American. Only you and I know which one in the group grew up on junk-food and TV.
I did make it to the synagogue for Friday night services no less! And it was eye-opening to be in this incredible and very significant building surrounded by religious Swedes who showed up in everything from 3-piece pin-striped suits, to sweat-stained gym outfits. Long live pluralism!
I was happy to get back to Berlin, but I think I will always have a soft spot for this narrow street where the program was located and what it meant to be a European Jew, even if it was only for two weeks.
So Spain won the World Cup. Spain, the country with no lyrics to their national anthem….how weak is that? What do the Spanish do when their country is war torn and they need to boost morale? Hum to each other.
Sorry if I seem a little cranky. It’s probably because it’s 113 degrees and I could fill a jug with the sweat under my boobs. There is no air conditioning in this country, not much anyway, and I don’t feel bitter about that. I mean, it’s only this hot four days out the year and the rest of the time, it’s like a dark, slightly moist basement.
And, like all extreme weather, it feels sort of pride inducing to get through it as a city. The people of Berlin are doing the only thing they can do. They are going to the lake, the pool, draping wet towels across their necks and sticking frozen water bottles in their crotches.
The heatwave was actually pretty well timed in my opinion. Coinciding with the World Cup meant that I wanted to be out of the apartment drinking beer anyway. Discovering that the little Italian café/grocery across the street from us, Maritnellos, sells huge Moretti Lagers for just 2 Euros, helped sweeten the deal. When you are as hot as I’ve been for the past few days–the kind of hot where you can only eat things that are frozen, a super cold beer is like mana. I drank 66 cl down like it was barley pop.
I also discovered birch juice at a nearby Russian speciality shop. If you’ve never tried birch juice before, it’s very light and refreshing. It tastes slightly sour and has a little bit of that woody flavor you get when you eat fresh sugar cane (such an amazing treat if you can ever get some).
I’m not sure how they drink this in Russia. I tried drinking it with and without sparkling mineral water and I liked it both ways.
Recently I did an interview with my friend, the wine critic Stuart Pigott about summer wines and his recommendations for cheap bottles. This is the fourth article I’ve written for EXBERLINER and I was really annoyed to find that the article was printed without a byline. Not only was my name no where to be found, the piece was edited down to sashimi thin slices of flat copy. Needless to say, I won’t be writing for them any more, which is a shame because they were the only English language print magazine in Berlin and I had only begun to scratch the surface of what I wanted to write about.
For those of you who are interested in reading the full article, I am printing it here, enjoy!
Sabrina Small: I found this amazing white wine, it’s really good on ice. It’s called Liebfraumilch. Ever heard of it?
Stuart Pigott: Yeah of course. Liebfraumilch and I go back 40 years, at least. But if you like it, and you like it on ice, then I won’t try to dissuade you.
SS: really?
SP: It’s not my job to tell people what they should enjoy.
SS: But how could the world be snowed by something like Liebfraumilch for so long without learning about the truly good wines that are available in Germany?
SP: Well people did discover other wines and Liebfraumilch collapsed in every market beginning in US in the 80’s. But most of the time, the new wines they discovered came from places other than Germany. That was sad. But it was because Germany had identified itself so much with Liebfraumilch, just as it had simultaneously with BMW and Mercedes. That continued to work, up until now.
SS: Do you think Liebfraumilch could come out with an amazing wine today?
SP: I see no reason at all why the basic idea of Liebfraumilch, that you blend together different grape varieties to make a wine with a bit of sweetness that’s not too heavy…this seems a great idea to me. But, you know, if you start with shit grapes you’ll end up with a shit wine, and this was the problem.
SS: I’m from California, and the wine bottles coming out of Napa Valley and Santa Barbara always seemed sort of playful to me. They had funny names and wild typography. I feel like the old school German wine labels look like police badges in comparison.
SP: (Laughs Boisterously) I can understand that. The old style is very old indeed. The whole German wine game changed dramatically roughly ten years ago. All the old stuff went out the window and people began from scratch, in a really creative way. If it hadn’t changed, I doubt I’d still be writing about it, but the wine-makers in the Pfalz region, where Liebfraumilch was made, are mostly under 30 and they are blowing my mind with their wines.
SS: Now that we’re in summer gear, what do these wine-makers have to offer that wasn’t there before? Is it still Riesling Riesling Riesling?
SP: Well Riesling is statistically the most important grape in Germany for good reason. It gives the most amazing diversity of white wines, ranging from feather light to heavy metal, from raspingly dry to honey sweet. But the new wines that are being made with Müller Thurgau grapes, Sylvaner, or Weiss Burgunder, are developing a cult following and they are more interesting than they’ve ever been. And recently, I’ve had some psychedelic experiences with Scheurebe (a sweet explosive white).
SS: Beer trumps wine because you can drink a lot of it, cheaply without getting super shit-faced.
SP: (Laughs Boisterously) I’ve seen a lot of people get super shit-faced on beer. And if you’re gonna vomit on beer, a lot more liquid comes up than wine.
SS: So you’re advocating for wine because it’s easier to deal with coming up?
SP: I’m saying that wine is a drug, just like beer is, and it offers a different sort of high. I’ve had absolutely effervescent experiences with wine, and I’ve also had ghastly experiences talking to the big white telephone when I’d reached my limit.
SS: Is that a British euphemism for puking?
SP: One of many.
SS: Well one idea I had to get the most out of wine in summer, was to mix it with mineral water. It would dilute the alcohol and allow you to drink at the same pace as your beer buddies. Is a weinschorle out of the bounds of good taste?
SP: You can do whatever you want. People think that wine is a snooty zone where you have to play by the rules. But this is all complete bullshit! I think mineral water mixed with a very dry Riesling is a damned good idea!
SS: But would that Riesling be really expensive?
SP: You can get a very decent Riesling for €2.50. I wouldn’t buy it in the discounter grocery stores though. The buyers there will take a bottle that’s a cent cheaper than one that would taste 10 times better. Geitzig ist Geil is a real problem in Germany. But penny pinching only ends up pinching their customers in the ass.
SS: So where should I buy wine?
SP: Well, the bio markets are much more picky about the wine they buy. You will have a much higher success rate there than at a regular supermarket for the same price. But, you have to buy the slightly more expensive stuff. €2.99 will taste like shit. €4.99 will taste dramatically better.
SS: Why is there so much cheap crap out there?
SP: Well, there is a serious overproduction of wine, a global surplus. Too many vineyards were planted in places like South America, Australia and South Africa, and now there is a lot of crap sloshing around. It’s a hit or miss thing. If you’re willing to try a bunch of wine, you might find something good, but you have to buy it up because next month, it’ll be some other ridiculously cheap wine from the same label and it might not be half as good.
SS: What about wines for grilling? Would you go red or white?
SP: Well there’s this very old-fashioned idea that’s still in the heads of a lot of cool young people that somehow with red meat, you need red wine. Well this is complete bullshit. This is drivel your parents were sold about wine, and it’s high time your generation act like rock stars and chuck this idea out the window.
SS: But most people think Germany produces terrible red wine.
SP: Well this is also complete bullshit. Even 20 years ago, Germany was producing top-notch red wines, but it came with a steep price-tag. 10 years ago, partly thanks to global warming, and partly because the new wine-makers stopped making the same mistakes with red grape varietals, the price of red wine in Germany has gone way down and the wine is totally pleasant.
SS: I had a real epiphany as a wine drinker when I realized my beloved Pinot Noir was being produced in Germany under the name Spatburgunder.
SP: Oh absolutely, Germany grows the third highest amount of Pinot Noir in the world.
SS: And they’ve been making these wines for a while?
SP: Well, since the 14th century.
SS: That seems like a time-span you can trust as a consumer.
SP: These things happen in waves. I think, for example, French Pinot Noir in the lower price-range is not half as good as what Germany is producing. But 20 years ago, my opinion was the exact opposite.