Photos by Mia

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Although this blog might sound teenage-angsty at times, I usually try to avoid writing about how I feel. It’d just seem wrong to go too deep & I’m not sure if anyone would actually care so much. It’s a lot easier to write about parties and music, films, art, and travels. Just like it’s a lot easier to just stop thinking for a night or two and just don’t care, tell myself that everything will be alright, until I actually belive it. And then keep going and going until everything is crashing down. And then start all over again. I think it’s human to always choose the easiest way, it’s even a subconscious process I guess – we block out everything else and focus on the option that looks the easiest, even if it’s the most destructive of them all. Right now I’m surrounded by a mess. So many things are falling apart and I’m somewhere in between which would be a lot easier to handle if at least I knew where I was going.

But I don’t. I’m leading what looks like a double life and I can’t bear it anymore. I can’t be bothered with all the prententiousness anymore, the desperation of the city, the hopelessness that waits around every corner and the constant need for entertainment & the fake happiness that surrounds you every day. This feeling isn’t new to me & probably not to anyone else who’s ever lived in a city that sucks you up like that. The weird thing is, I wouldn’t even know what to do otherwise, I’m just sitting there and waiting for everything to eat me up from the inside, just because I know that I wouldn’t feel different anywhere else, no matter what I did or where I went. Actually, I enjoy it here. I’m glad I went here & it mainly brought good things into my life.

Still I’m walking around the flat like a zombie these days, trying to get by somehow, putting a smiley face on for work & leaving it in the cloakroom as soon as I leave the shop. I feel like I need to get out of here, just run, go somewhere else, get away but I know that what I truly want is to run away from myself. I’ve done it before, lots of times and eventually ended up here. And did it help me? Probably not. I could be everywhere in the world right now and would still be facing this. And it’s my fault, clearly, at least it’s all coming from me and I can’t blame it on anyone else. It’s me who has no interest in people anymore. It’s me who has no interest in socializing, no interest in daily life. It’s Monday, I’m in a post-weekend-clear state of mind and I’m starting to realise what’s happening: all the excitement from the past is gone and I again have successfully failed to run away from myself.

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Chilling in the kitchen with a facemask on, after a great self-made Chinese dinner. I love our flat. Tonight we’re going to have our official housewarming party – it’s gonna be dirty, it’s gonna be messy, but I’m looking forward to the party & also showing our friends how we live and how nice and cosy the flat is. We will make some nice fruit punch later & I will make and effort to get out of my autumn depression by tonight. Fingers crossed.

In other news, yesterday I finally booked a tattoo appointment. I’ve been meaning to do it for such a long time now but I never thought it’d actually happen one day. But it just felt right last night so I walked in, spoke to the guy (a heavily tattooed and pierced dude with a rough Berlin accent, obviously) and made an appointment for Wednesday. I’m quite nervous on the one hand because it’s such a permanent thing, although I’m sure about what I want and everything, but on the other hand I’ve realised my body is merely a shell, it won’t stay here forever anyway and it all doesn’t actually matter that much. I mean come on, it’s a body. So yes, I will be getting my first tattoo (above the crook of my arm, that’s as much as I can reveal) in four days and I’m excited!

Today as we were sitting in the café with hot chocolate & our laptops, we heard someone banging on the window behind us & it turned out to be Edvina who has just arrived back from Sweden & England. So this afternoon we finally reunited and completed our lovely Neukölln flat. Here we go, meet Edvina from Stockholm, Cassie Ainsworth’s lost twin, a brilliant survivor in the jungle that is (East-)Berlin & everyone’s favourite party company.

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I think autumn definitely is my favourite season. I always try to deny it but the weather does have a huge impact on how I feel. The autumn weather makes me calm yet productive, melancholic yet happy. I’m sitting downstairs in our local café, drinking really good cappuchino, wearing oversized clothes with Doc Martens, trying to get things done & changing my blog layout. Having no internet sucks most of the time but it really helps you to focus on the really important things, forces you to leave the house more often & also makes you realise which of the things you waste your time on are important and which simply aren’t.

Saturday we went to a party in an old brewery space with weird performance art and people hanging from the ceiling playing drums where everyone was stoned or on psychedelic drugs. Like, one of these places people make up for movies but which you never thought existed, one of these artificial weekend worlds people over here love because it distracts them from their miserable existence. We left pretty after a while and went to a hipster party where everyone was drunk & dancing to techno music. Oh well. I spent Sunday in bed, then had the best bubble bath of my life & eventually got ready for a nice all-you-can-eat Indian buffet just ten minutes away from our place in Neukölln. It’s been ages since I last went to a proper restaurant for a proper dinner.

Today is what I call my productive day. I just booked my flight to Cologne for Christmas. I haven’t been there since I moved here in February so I’m looking forward to being back to my kind-of-hometown & spending time with my parents & brother (who I haven’t seen since August either) & my grandma & grandpa (who are the only other people I consider as “family” & who I haven’t seen since last Christmas I think). It will also be funny to be back in the city I grew up in, maybe go to church on Christmas Eve and see people I went to school with, because I feel like I moved on so much – I’m, still the person I used to be, I feel like inside I haven’t really changed a lot – but I lead such a different life now. And I hope that this year I will be able to fully enjoy Christmas & the very special mood and atmosphere that surrounds it.

But at the moment it’s still autumn, a much happier & calmer autumn than last year. A more active & productive autumn, a more social autumn and a sunnier one as well, I think.

Living with people is fun, especially if you get along well & if they are cool, laid-back and inspiring. I’m lucky to live with two amazing girls (well, one hasn’t moved in yet, but we’ve been friends for a while) who I am going to introduce to you over the next few weeks. So meet Mia from Stockholm, an amazing photographer who is currently working on a project about life in Berlin. You can check out her portfolio here & here.

Some impressions of moving in and all the stuff we did in our new flat. It was a hell lot of work but it was totally worth it, the flat looks amazing now. It’s been a week now since I moved into this flatshare and I really enjoy it, it’s nice to have people around you, find your friends in the kitchen when you get home from work and having someone to talk to. I might become a flatshare person.

Photos by Mia / Mia’s camera

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❤ MOVING! I am so looking forward to moving into our new flat on Monday! ❤ ordering Pizza online & paying with PayPal – I felt so 21st century ❤ How to Suck at Facebook ❤ autumn – I love the falling leaves, the last sunbeams & rainy afternoons ❤ being a hard-working girl – I currently work 30 hours a week at LUSH, it keeps me busy, I make money & it’s fun, I really like our team ❤ making plans for my new life in a flatshare & just generally after moving – it’s such a great opportunity (again) to change things ❤ my new favourite shoes – I love them, despite their shitty quality ❤ What The Fuck Should I Make For Dinner – best thing ever ❤ 1001 rules for my unborn son ❤ The truth is rarely pure and never simple. – Oscar Wilde ❤ this ❤ biking through Berlin – I love my new bike & I love riding it through the city at all times of the day. It’s a completely new way to discover your city, you see so many new things & even get to see the touristy stuff you’d usually never ever come across ❤ Hologram City ❤ “Tut-tut, hier kommt der Waynetrain und der fährt mit deiner Story zum Whateverrest.” ❤ this outfit ❤ not giving a fuck – I stopped caring & worrying about so many things recently & it feels so good ❤

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I spent the last two hours browsing through “Spice World” screencaps and drooling over their stylishness while waiting for Janna to come over and bring me junk food. I’m moving this weekend and I feel less prepared than ever, although I have the flat keys in my pocket & already packed all my belongings into boxes. Right now I’m in a state between complete emotional numbness and utter excitement – we’ll see.

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In February 2010 I moved to Berlin for a change and in order to write my Bachelor thesis for university. In September 2010 I have been living here for 7 months now and I have barely started. Whenever people ask me how the thesis is coming on I start stuttering and all these thoughts come flashing through my mind. Finally. Put. Some. Proper. Effort. Into. It.

When I was in school, or even in university, I never had to work and study hard. It’s not like I’m a natural talent but it was enough to pay attention in class and read it again a day before to keep it in my short-term memory. I didn’t feel like I had to remember it forever. I’ve always been incredibly lazy and never did more than I had to, unless I was interested in it. I became good at selecting (I still believe learning to select what’s important and what isn’t is one of the most important skills you need to learn in school) and also at pretending I know about things I actually never had a clue about.

It’s been a pretty easy and comfortable life most of the time – laziness isn’t particularly cool but it makes life a lot more enjoyable. The only problem about it, which people have already predicted in the past, is that I never learned how to study. I never learned what it means to lock yourself up in a room for days and days and just work. I’m simply unable to do it. Not only do I have no idea how to start, my lack of motivation and short attention span makes it impossible for me to focus and before I even get down to it… oh, a squirrel! Facebook! Twitter! Afternoon telly! And trust me, if you have subscribed to at least ten dozen feeds, Google Reader will always come up with something new. Always. Even if you refresh every two minutes. It’s still a mystery to me how I managed to write all these papers (well, the four or five) for uni, do big home office jobs under extreme deadline pressure or just generally sort my life out over and over again.

However, the funny thing is: one might assume this knowledge about myself would make me feel desperate and give up on myself. But it doesn’t. Whenever something has to be done, I just know that I will do it, simply because it has to be done. By no later than the end of December, and you can quote me on that, I will have finished my thesis, no matter how. It’s just the way things have to go, although it doesn’t necessarily make sense and, quite frankly, I don’t give a shit about this degree anymore.

The most important lesson university has taught me is how little it means: sometimes you just have to do stuff to realise that it means nothing. Sometimes you just have to finish things just to get rid of them, I’ll do this to liberate myself so I can finally one day tell the critics: I’m officially an adult, I make my own living, I have a uni degree so honestly, what the fuck do you want from me?

Photos from nights & mornings in Berlin and my trip to Sweden last month, balcony parties, watching the sunrise at the Spree and from the ferry shortly before arriving in Trelleborg & shopping in the candy store.

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Yes, it’s sorted, I’m moving again in about three weeks. I found a lovely apartment – old building, high ceilings, wooden floors & three separate rooms – in Neukölln and yes, this time it’s going to be a flatshare. It’s weird, I’ve been living on my own for almost three years now & I’m pretty much used being alone and independent. Still I recently felt it was time for a change, I met people I could actually imagine living with and, as trivial as it might sound, I got incredibly bored of my life. Again. As always. I’ve never lived anywhere for much longer than a year since I moved out, I get excited about new things easily but get bored again way too soon.

We still need to paint which is something I’ve never done before but looking forward to for some weird reason. Just as much as I’m looking forward to our massive housewarming party & properly living with other people. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t constantly change my life in some significant way, I’d probably be dead by now or at least at the age of 30 (Just naturally dying at the age of 30 is an idea I’ve had since my early teenage years, maybe because I always thought it’d be too much of a hassle to bear all this for much longer. Or because I was convinced my lifestyle would never be healthy enough to make me survive that long, which was just recently proven wrong by Ozzy Osbourne).

I have mixed feelings about Berlin. I live here, it’s my city at the moment and I certainly like it here. Although Cologne will always have a special place in my heart, I guess I’ve had the best times over here so far. However, I dislike people romanticising Berlin and fooling themselves into thinking that only if you live here you can do whatever you like and be whoever you want to be. And while all this pretentious Berlin romanticism is doing my head in, I really like this Tilt-Shift video of the city by pilpop.

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I‘m writing this from the train to Rostock from where I’ll take the ferry to Sweden in a few hours to go to Way Out West Festival in Göteburg. It’s been a pretty last-minute decision, planned within 2 hours including phonecalls & a taxi (decadence at its best) rushing me to the station. Packed my bag in 3 minutes – new record, definitely – and will spend this night sleeping on the floor of a ferry. It will be worth it, though, I’ve never been to Sweden before, I’m going to see fucking Iggy Pop for free, my friends are gonna be there djing, it’s Jasmin’s birthday celebrations & will finally be travelling again, something that I’ve missed a lot since moving to Berlin in February.

I only have one pair of shoes but four spare films for my camera which I’m planning on finishing, so expect lots of photos. I’m completely high on travelling adrenaline right now and it’s so funny considering I went to work this morning thinking it’d be an average work day followed by a quiet night in with food & evening telly. And now I’m on my way to catch the ferry to Sweden, woop woop!

Last week we went dumpster diving. For those of you who are not familiar with it, you basically find a supermarket, sneak onto their backyard at night, find the big bins where they throw away all sorts of food and well, take it. I know people who do it because they don’t have enough money to actually buy food and there’s people who do it out of a political motivation to protest against the enormous waste of food in the first world countries. Whatever your motivation is, I think it was shocking to see this huge amount of perfectly eatable food in a dumpster. And this is probably the amount of bread they throw away every single day.

Photos by Sara

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❤ Club Mate – favourite drink of all time, not to mention the caffeine ❤ my new haircut – I’m so glad I finally did the sidecut, I love it a lot ❤ looking for a new flat & hopefully moving soon ❤ rainbows in the park ❤ oldschool black-and-white overexposed photobooth photos ❤ “Adventure is not outside man, it is within.” – George Elliot ❤ going to work early in the morning listening to The Knife ❤ trying out new things ❤ massive flat parties (preferably not at mine, though) ❤ scoom – I buy coffe & food there all the time on my way  to work & it’s so tasty ❤ my new silver MTWTFSS Weekday body chain, the most amazing jewellery I’ve bought in ages ❤ free food ❤ Bastian Pastewka’s Kötbullar sketch – PRICELESS. ❤ open air parties ❤ looking for a new flat, although it’s frustrating & so much work ❤ A Lyric A Day – one of my favourite 365 projects ❤ people – I haven’t felt like that in a long time but at the moment I’d say I rather like than hate people in general ❤ Wild Nothing ❤

Photos by Franzi