Food and Footage

On my second morning back in Berlin, I woke happy to see that the sun was shining (the day before had been snowy and monumentally gray).

Settling in for breakfast and listening to RBB on a charmingly shitty wireless radio, I was pleased to be back in the main room of my Kreuzberg flat, back amongst the Lilliputian coffee cups, and back in Danny Devito’s bathrobe (long story).

It was easy to imagine that well, everything would be easy from this point on. I should have known better. About 10 minutes into breakfast, I was confronted by the lack of job prospects I have here.

I had previously found spotty employment as a cook in Berlin, joining in the long-standing immigrant tradition of taking low-paying, strenuous, cash under the table work. But this time I wanted things to be different. With my last year as a twenty-something well underway, I wanted to find meaningful employment.

As a cook, I felt I was reduced to frittering my talent away in hopeless little bistros. I realized that better restaurants did not necessarily mean better pay, or for that matter, better ingredient quality. I slowly fell out of love with idea of owning and running an operation that entailed a lifetime of terrible scheduling, food going rancid and, (if god forbid business was good), certain dehydration, exhaustion and no social life. My plummeting faith in my abilities as a professional cook, lead me to seek work as a writer instead.

Doesn’t that decision strike you as wise and forward thinking? I thought so. I slugged my coffee back, pocketed my ham and cheese sandwich, and was just about to hop the bus to the Writer’s Employment Emporium when I realized that:

it didn’t exist,

I was poor (again),

insurance-less (should be an adjective if it isn’t),

and living in a country where a gift for writing English prose and a bag of chips will get you absolutely nothing.

Pair the English language gift with German fluency and then you’ve got something; translating work, writing synopsis essays for corporations, and a variety of bilingual admin jobs would all be possibilities. Without fluent German my prospects were slim, even babysitting jobs are being advertised with German fluency as a requirement.

I tried to comfort myself by indexing my skills. At best, I realized I could function as a fluency editor; someone who smoothes out the grammar and syntax for a German person writing in English. I have worked in this capacity and was handsomely paid in wine.  But the demand for fluency editing alone, is not very high, and my capacity to find clients without having the ability to understand and talk to people is virtually impossible.

Not only does NOT having job prospects engender financial disaster, it also makes my prospects for getting a visa awfully shaky.

ENTER ANXIETY: STAGE LEFT

I was determined, after a half-hour of staring out the window and tuning out the world (while my brain exploded into fireworks of self pity, fear, and doubt) to forgo the search for a job. It was only my second day back in Berlin, I reasoned, I should cut myself some slack.

I still wanted to write. I had so many ideas for articles. I wanted to write about a new singer-songwriter I discovered. I wanted to write, finally, about my high school love affair with Star Trek celebrity Chris Pine. I wanted to interview one of my favorite bloggers, Holly Becker of hausmaus, and discuss the pleasures and struggles of living abroad in Germany. I wanted to get back to my novel. I wanted to begin some short stories I’d toyed with during the week I spent writing for ex-code in London. In short, I felt full of potential words and optimistic about putting them down.

I set off, this time more realistically to a cafe, to settle in and start writing. But…the internet loomed it’s barred triangular head above my Word screen, and I found myself frantically checking craigslist Berlin to see if any new jobs had been posted. Craigslist, as usual, greeted me with its plethora of fake jobs. Then I started scanning the pages of the Berlin US Embassy website, looking for links to employment opportunities and information about the various visa’s available to US citizens. The websites were red, white, and eeww! I felt simultaneously nauseous and deeply in need of junk food. I tried to calm myself down with candy and a trip to one of my favorite thrift stores near Checkpoint Charlie.

As I stared at the chaotic collection of dishware, clothing, and bric-a-brac, I did feel comforted. I was comforted by the honesty of the display, which seemed like a metaphor for my life.  It was impossible to take it all in at once. To the untrained eye it would appear as nothing more than clutter. But, as I started to relax, I was able to see the treasures buried amongst all the junk. Some color would catch my eye and I would allow myself to be overtaken by it. If I could just relax enough, I knew the clutter would become endurable and I would be able to make sense of things and press forward.