Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

I've been slowly becoming aware of needing to get a new phone, if only because my Pixel 5 was 3 years old and google was going to stop supporting security updates for it sometime this year. And I keep getting emails about the new phones on offer and all this shit.

But my Pixel 5 worked just fine until suddenly it didn't. The power button got stuck, somehow, and it decided that the slightest nudge was a long press, so it started the emergency SOS protocol a bunch of times before I was able to go change the setting (so long press was "assistant" instead). Then it would get stuck in a boot loop because it thought the power button was being held down. That was pretty alarming. So I managed to get it to power off and STAY off, and I left it for like 20 minutes before turning it back on, and the power button was no longer possessed. Hallelujah. But something got messed up with the button press to take a screen shot, which was also not ideal.

So I used the 15% discount from my emails to get a new Pixel 8, and if they give me the full trade-in value of my Pixel 5, I'll have gotten it for about a third off.

But I probably need to get new bike tires, because I completely failed to inflate them the other day. I'm going to try my roommate's standing pump, because it will undoubtedly work better than the little hand pump I have, but if that doesn't work out, it's off to the bike shop (where I'll spend more money).

I was in Dresden for 24 hours last weekend; the first 6 were spent at roller derby, then I slept (and had my phone misadventure), and in the morning I meandered a bit through the old city. There were supposed to be a bunch of protests (mostly counter-protests to a planned fascist march), but fortunately nothing started until after I was gone. I was worried, because the old city was one of the meeting areas (near the main station), and one of the counterprotests was meeting at the Neustadt station, which is where I got my train from). But I didn't encounter any fascists or counterprotesters, though I saw 2 guys get out of a pick-up truck with some stickers that looked kinda fash in the train station parking lot.

Dresden is my second-favorite German city. It's got a very different vibe from Berlin, and I like it. I would probably rather live in Hamburg than Dresden because of the politics in Saxony (that's where the PEGIDA assholes come from. The Wikipedia page gives "of the West" as the translation of "des Abendlandes", but Occident is more accurate for the shitty racist connotations.)

9 months left on my current residence permit. I hope I can a) get an appointment at the immigration office in a timely fashion (hahahahhahaahaahhah lol) and b) stay here. I'm not eligible for permanent residency because I'm here freelance, and that has a longer requirement -- 5 years instead of 3 if you have a real job. But you can bet I'm going to apply for PR as soon as I'm eligible (January 2027) so I can apply for citizenship. (Permanent residency is one of the requirements for eligibility. There are a couple others that I don't qualify for, like a blue card from an EU member state, or a citizen spouse.)

They changed the citizenship law, but it doesn't go into effect for another couple months, so what's currently on the website is the current law. It's supposed to make it easier, but in all the reporting I've read, there haven't been any specifics. Some people are supposed to be eligible after 3 years if they have "good integration measures," but there is no information anywhere on whether that applies to freelancers or only people with real jobs or only EU blue card holders or what. But I have plenty of time to figure it out. As long as they let me keep staying here, because I can't afford to live in the US.

I wouldn't have health insurance (though I would probably qualify for Medicaid again in Maryland); I would have to buy and insure a car and pay for gas. Yeah, I could just get a job at fucking Target idk but like. I'm able to have real health insurance here and I don't need a car; the new copyediting gig basically covers my fixed monthly expenses (rent, insurance, roller derby dues, bus pass, storage unit), so I'm only digging into my savings for groceries and incidentals.

So anyway, expect more panic starting in September or so.

Since I moved here, I've been half-heartedly trying to join practices with Bear City Roller Derby (partly because dues are expensive, because you also have to join the club they're part of, SV Lurich 02, which has its own dues structure, partly because I'm terrified of strangers). But they opened a newbie course at the end of March, and that felt like a safer way to join.

Obviously I already know how to skate and have experience, so I don't need the newbie class, but there's never any harm in brushing up on the basics, especially when you've been off skates for 2 years because of the panini. Plus I'd be one among many new skaters, so it's less terrifying. But at the end of the first day, the trainers invited me to join regular league practices, because I was skilled enough.

So 2 days later, I went to the league training all by myself and did some of the contact drills but bowed out of the ones that were more scrimmage-like and returned to my natural habitat: the referee lane. I went to both league training and newbie class for all of April, because I like the other newbies. Then the school where we practice closed our room to replace the floor, so we've been outside the last few weeks. They had to restructure a bit and semi-cancelled the newbie class, because the rental gear is stored in the sport hall, and a lot of newbies don't have their own gear yet. (It's expensive!) The newbies can come to league training Tuesdays and scrimmage on Saturdays, where they have their own stuff to work on. I float between the groups, wherever I'm more useful. Saturdays I do more ref stuff, Tuesdays I help the newbies out.

Roller derby outside is not exactly ideal, as you may imagine! Tuesdays we skate on a basketball court, and Saturdays we go to Tempelhof park, where there's a spot of smooth-enough asphalt. It's much grippier than polished wood, gym floor, or the usual skating surfaces. It's about the same as a particularly grippy vinyl floor, but it's rough. It's *asphalt.* There are periodically rocks or other bits of debris. So it's difficult to do a lot of things that are easy on normal floors. Also, it can tear up your wheels and your toe stops, and lord help your knee pads and laces if you fall. (Which reminds me that I really need to order new laces to replace the one I mangled in October when I decided to skate the entire perimeter of Tempelhof, which is something like 3 miles.)

Tempelhof used to be an airport, but they closed it after reunification, because there were 3 airports. (Now there's only 1, and it's a nightmare.) Those of you who are familiar with Cold War history might recognize the name from the Berlin airlift in 1948-49, when the American army organized an airlift of food and other supplies after the Soviet army closed off the land routes to the city from the west. Planes landed at Tempelhof every 3 minutes for nearly a year.

You might know, on an intellectual level, that airports are big. Even if the terminal isn't absurd, like O'Hare or Atlanta, runways and taxiways take a lot of space. You don't really get a gut-level feeling for it until you take a runway on foot.

Anyway, roller derby is back, and I'm stoked.

I sent my thesis off to my committee this morning. Now I wait for them to respond with whether any of the times I suggested for my defense work for them. Two of them are on a lot of committees, but I'm not sure how many are defending anything right now.

I have also transferred a third of the money required for the co-op shares, so that's happening, too. I'm planning on moving to Berlin in August 2020. I'll have to find a WG for a year or so, until the co-op is built, which could be tricky (because housing in Berlin is pretty ridiculous). So I'm counting on having to go back over next May/June to tour WGs and sign a lease, with any luck.

As a way to try to earn more money, I've started a Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/sflinguistics I'm working on my first column at the moment. I plan on writing about portrayals of linguistics in SFF, language use in SFF, and if I get enough subscribers, add an academic end of things (article reviews/summaries) about fandom and language. I haven't done much in the way of promotion yet, but it's on my list.

Uh, hi, I guess I didn't update my journal very often. I kept a paper one, though! Because I needed to keep track of stuff so I can turn in a paper for the people who gave me a grant.

Hamburg was nice; I met with a professor whose research interests me, and he gave me some advice on things to look at (including some translation theory, even) and wanted to hear more about my research in the future, because it's an interesting topic. (So I know one place I'm going to send my exposé once it exists, even if the prospect of living in Hamburg doesn't fill me with glee.)

Dresden was AMAZING. I really liked it there, and the Altstadt was beautiful, even if half of everything was under construction. I took day trips to Leipzig, Bautzen, and Pirna, and Ben and I went to Saxon Switzerland, which is a place I could definitely go back and spend a week in a cute vacation rental or hotel and go hiking and work on a novel. But there isn't a university for me there, because the TU doesn't have anything that matches my research interests.

Berlin was, as usual, great. I got to see kriski and dirtyzucchini and kriski gave me a copy of her poetry collection, which I am excited to read. I flipped through and the one about the woman at the knitting group punched me in the stomach. Good job! I can't wait to share these with my classmates.

I also got to see some parts of Berlin I'd never made it to before, because I didn't have to go to the obligatory tourist sites. I didn't even set foot on the Museum Island!

I have all my photos up on GPhotos; let me know if you want the link (or if you have a GPhotos/gmail you want me to share it with). They are sorted by city but otherwise unlabeled. That's a huge project...

I learned that you don't have to live in the same city you are doing a PhD in, if you are doing a solo promotion and don't have to meet f2f with your advisor very often, which means that theoretically I could live in Berlin while promovieren in Hamburg and go there every other week or whatever. And that your student ID is valid at all the libraries in all the universities :O

I just don't know which city Ben would have better luck finding a job in. Both have a lot of tech/software stuff, but they're both also full of young jobseekers who are more the type (ie cheap labor) startups want. So idk. But any decision is at least 2 years off, because I won't finish here until May 2019 (that's the target) and I doubt I'll finish my thesis and immediately want to write the exposé for winter admission (October). Summer admission (March/April) might be better, even though I'll probably have to turn it in around October anyway.

... yeah, I kind of fell into a really cool dissertation idea, so...

I'm going back to Georgia on the 2nd, so I have another week here. I'll start packing up at the end of this week or the weekend. Mostly I just have to put my clothes into suitcases and streamline a lot of loose crap floating around.

Oh, and I'm going to a roller derby boot camp, so I might join a roller derby team. (My academic schedule may prevent me from participating much this semester, but we shall see.)

Been home a few days now, but there's been football and unpacking and homework and this fucking cold. I never really posted much after the first couple days in Berlin, so I'll give a précis for the rest of it. The weather was variably terrible and bad, with a brief foray into pleasant followed by an immediate return of terrible.

( June 20 )

( June 21 )

( June 22 )

( June 23 )

( June 24 )

( June 25 )

( June 26 )

( June 27 )

( June 28 )

I dumped my pictures into dropbox. This link might work; I can't tell because I'm logged in.

Ben posted a bunch of photos on tumblr, and he collected them here. He had a photo pass for Sanssouci, so he got inside pictures, whereas I just got outside ones.

I feel really comfortable in Berlin. I can't get Ben to do much more than say "yeah, it could be fun" when I discuss moving. But that's an entirely different blog post, and this one's taken me an hour to write already.

I was eating a caramel apple cake? cobbler? of some sort at Cup A Joe (Hsbo) this morning and drinking a decaf cassia mocha, when I thought, "Hey, if I had any sort of business skills and wanted to deal with the visas and paperwork and shit, I could open an American bakery in Berlin. I'd sell authentic American baked goods, like chocolate chip cookies and crumbles, crisps, brown bettys, and cobblers, as opposed to bizarre* German interpretations of such. But damn that'd be a lot of work. And who knows if it would even be successful! Germans tend to find American baked goods too sweet."

But I have a ton of great recipes for things like that. Also, it's fall, so I'm all BAKED APPLES AND CINNAMON AND BAKED PEARS AND CARAMEL AND YUM, and there's nothing nicer than a hot apple crisp with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on it. (Except maybe hot spiced apple cider.)

Though some of the baked fruit desserts remind me of German desserts like apple cake or plum cake.

Ooh, and around Thanksgiving, there would be pumpkin pie & pecan pie & chocolate pecan pie.

Clearly, what I need is a German friend with a) money and b) restaurant-running skills so I can be the ideas & recipes person.

*When I was in Marburg in college, I walked past a bakery on my way somewhere else, and they had this display of ... muffins? with little American flag toothpicks sticking out of them. I was curious, so I bought one. It was a white not-quite-cake, not-quite-muffin with a big glob of chocolate pudding inside. I can't say I've ever had that sort of thing here.

Though that wasn't as horribly disappointing as the "hush puppies" they served in the hospital cafeteria in Oregon during my residency. Oh god those were disgusting. Dry and flavorless and yuck. If you want southern food, you need to run it by a southerner.

sehnen: to desire, to yearn.

Sucht: addiction.

Sehnsucht: desire, longing, yearning.

Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiß, was ich leide!

It's a good question, and an important one, and one I haven't really addressed in detail. It's hard, because all I have is this vague longing to be there, as opposed to a nice list of reasons, like a job or something.

I've been to Berlin 3 times now. Once for 3 days during my year in Germany (1997), when the city was still scarred from the division and you could literally see when you crossed on the S-bahn from former West to former East. I thought then that Berlin was the sort of city I could live in. It didn't feel too crowded, like New York does, though wikipedia tells me they have similar densities.

The second time was for a week at Christmas (2007), which was cold (approximately freezing the whole time) and dark (sunrise: 8 am; sunset: 4 pm) and rainy, the sort of foggy mist you get on a cloudy winter day. The clouds broke regularly, but the fog rolled back in at 2 pm every day that week. It was miserable weather to be a tourist in, but that's what you get for traveling at Christmas, really, unless you're going to the Caribbean or Mediterranean or something. That's when I had my first notion of moving to Germany and being a tour guide. I said it to Ben after we finished our guided walking tour, though I doubt he remembers.

The third time was almost a year ago now, May 2010, for a course at the Goethe Institut. There were two ways that could have gone. I could have gotten it out of my system, or I could have confirmed that I didn't want to leave. Considering that it was with a heavy heart that I got on the overnight train to Vienna, it seems to have gone the latter way. (I did look forward to seeing Ben again, once he got to Vienna, so leaving wasn't quite as melodramatic as it could have been.)

The weather that whole month was variable, frustrating, cloudy, rainy, and cold (40s-50s F), with periodic breaks of sun and warmth. I'm told that it was the rainiest, coldest May they'd had in quite some time. I blame the Iceland volcano.

But I found more in Berlin than I'd known was there, and now all I can think about is being there, which I can't afford at all right now, with this not having worked in a year thing. And we can't uproot soon, because of Ben's job and our many cats. Finding an apartment that is big enough for 5 cats, let alone allows you to have that many pets, is just not happening. Aside from that, Señora Crankypants has diabeetus and is allergic to grain, so she needs insulin and a special diet, and traveling with her on a trans-Atlantic flight...no. Claire has PKD, hyperthyroidism, and an anxiety disorder, and continuing to medicate her properly (and get her special food, too) is daunting.

What do I love about Berlin? If I had to quantify this nebulous emotion, I'd start with the fact that it's never the same city. It's always changing. One of the most famous quotations about the city is "Berlin ist eine Stadt, verdammt dazu, ewig zu werden, niemals zu sein" (Berlin is a city damned to always be becoming, never to be). Another, not on the wiki page, is from Frenchman Jack Lang: "Paris is always Paris, and Berlin is never Berlin." I love things that are in-between, that are both and neither, that walk the line of belonging and not-belonging. Berlin very much is.

There's so much history there, and as someone for whom the Cold War and its end is a source of great interest, how can I not be drawn there? The scars are still there, as well as the scars from WW2, in bullet holes remaining in façades. Berlin is a city concerned with its past, as much as it tears down the old and builds the new.

But Berlin has a reputation for being unwelcoming, dirty, and awful. It's not undeserved, but I'm with Ms Boedecker on this one.

Die Berliner sind unfreundlich und rücksichtslos, ruppig und rechthaberisch, Berlin ist abstoßend, laut, dreckig und grau, Baustellen und verstopfte Straßen, wo man geht und steht – aber mir tun alle Menschen leid, die nicht hier leben können!

Berliner are unfriendly and inconsiderate, abrasive and opinionated; Berlin is unsavory, loud, dirty, and grey, construction sites and stopped-up streets, where you stop and go - but I feel sorry for everyone who can't live here!

It's a city you love for what it is as much as despite what it is. It's a city that gets under your skin and hooks you with its claws and doesn't let you go. It's a horrible, beautiful place.

I live on a quarter acre, half wooded, in suburban Raleigh-Durham. Winter is mild and short, summers are appallingly hot and long. I have a nice garden outside my rather large house which I've invested a good bit of time and effort into. (The lawn is a different matter entirely.) I've got the American Dream! Why would I want to give that up and move into an apartment in the middle of a city in Europe? (I'd want to live in Prenzl'er Berg, Kreuzberg/F'hain, or Mitte, possibly Wedding if prices are OK, maybe Pankow depending on transit options. Not Charlottenburg; too bourgeois for me.) That's an even harder question than the one I opened this post with!

I'd miss my herb garden and my gardenias (grown from cuttings from a 100-year-old bush that was being torn up when the house was sold to become beach condos) and my Yoshino cherry. I wouldn't miss the lawn and nastygrams from our HOA telling us to fix it up, and I know Ben wouldn't miss mowing it. Depending on the apartment, I could still grow herbs in pots on the balcony or in a hanging pot over the balcony rail (a very popular technique in Germany!) I wouldn't have my gardenias or the tree, obviously. Where can you plant an ornamental cherry in a city? I don't know if Yoshinos can even survive up there, though I guess they have them in Hokkaido? While I could possibly take a cutting of my gardenia and put it in a huge pot, I don't think I want to deal with the agricultural end of customs. It seems unpleasant and annoying.

I wouldn't miss having to drive everywhere. If we lived in Berlin, we might not even have cars! I'd keep my drivers license/get a German one, in case we need to drive anywhere in a rental car or something, but there's not much point in having a car (and paying for a parking space, insurance, $6+/gallon gas, upkeep, etc) in a city with 24-hour public transit and a country with extensive train service, even if they strike occasionally or there are maintenance or service issues. When I see Germans complaining about DB or the like (which are still valid complaints, don't get me wrong), I wish Amtrak were half as good as DB.

I guess I've realized that the part of the Standard American Dream where you have a 2000-sqft house in the suburbs is among the things I don't want in the Standard Life Script, much like the 2.5 kids part. I like the college education and marriage part (even if we have a non-standard marriage), but the rest of it I want to shake off.

There are cities in America where I could live more like the way I want to - New York, DC (sort of), Raleigh (kind of), SFO - but those aren't places I want to live. I like DC; I grew up near there. I can't afford DC. I'd be closer to my family, which is both good and bad. DC is kind of like Berlin, in that it's a capital city with a lot of varied cultural things, but it's definitely not the same. Maybe Berlin's a hybrid of NYC and DC. I don't know; I haven't spent significant time in NYC, and my main experiences in DC are the Smithsonians.

This is already quite a book, and I have to go to a meeting this afternoon, so I'll end this here. But feel free to comment or ask questions in comments. I haven't had a chance to address missing my local breweries, farmers, restaurants, Mexican food, etc, not to mention my friends.

A while back, acari (I think) posted a couple youtube clips of German political humor-cabaret (Kabarett), including Brandenburg (though a different video) (lyrics).

This video came across my facebook feed today, and the ca 10 second clip of music at the end sounded very familiar. I'd probably never have recognized it if it weren't for those clips in acari's journal.

I read a really interesting article on the history of football in the DDR/GDR. I mean, how is that not relevant to my interests? Football, the Cold War, divided Germany... yeah. Ping.

So the excitable part of my brain went down this path of "Oh, hey, there are universities in Berlin, and you could go study history there, and maybe be able to focus on that, but you couldn't apply straight to a master's, because your BS is in chemistry & German, so you'd have 6 semesters of full time classes, and that's a lot of work, and damn, but international applications are complicated, and history is a limited enrollment subject" then said "meh. You can find books to read on your particular subject."

Then I wondered if the Volkshochschulen (sort of equivalent to community colleges) offer history programs, and I ended up on the Berliner VHS page, and, while I couldn't find any history courses, at least not from the broad categories listed, they have a health & fitness section, so I poked in there a bit, and they have things like qi gong and yoga. Since one of my plans for the next 10 years is to become a teacher in my tai chi school, I wondered how one applies to teach a course at a VHS. That question itself wasn't answered, but it looks like you have to do some sort of continuing-education program to ensure quality, if I'm understanding this Bürokrat-Buzzword German properly.

Oh, hey, I could click on the FAQ (HGF? Not pronounceable at all...) and find this. Silly me, I was looking in the "about us" section :P It seems I just need proof of qualification and experience at teaching the course I'd like to teach (to *each* VHS, if I wanted to teach at more than one). And, hopefully, after 10 years, I'll be able to do that.

(You can also take German as a foreign language courses there, for FAR cheaper than at Goethe, though without the fun cultural programs and the like. And get certifications for various jobs, like IT and whatnot.)

More later on pros, cons, terrors, stresses, and that sort of thing in regard to the idea of moving holy shit to Berlin. Because moving 6 time zones and an 8.5-hour flight to a different country isn't all sunshine and rainbows. Especially when the city you want to move to only has 60 hours of sunlight a month between October and March (but 220 hours of sunlight in July! Yeah, Berlin's at 52.30N. I live at 36.09N now.)

So my author bio in the back of my books can read "When Hertha is playing, you can find her in the Olympic Stadium." (Or, if I get published in Germany, "Wann Hertha spielt, findet man sie in der Ostkurve.") Because you know that's what I'd be doing on match days if I lived in Berlin, wearing blue and white.

I wonder if I'd need a work visa if I work as a writer for myself. Looking into it now would be rather premature.

I do have a horror that we sell the house, the cars, and a lot of furniture, ship the rest to Germany, and fail to thrive there, and have to come back, without a place to return to or any stuff (like cars and jobs). That doesn't mean I shouldn't try, you know? A trial period, a few months to see if I can find paying work, say, before selling the house and bringing Ben over, would help out. (I also have a horror of renting an apartment or finding a WG sight unseen. Maybe by then Chiara, the Italian gal in my Goethe class, will have moved there & I could borrow part of her floor while looking for a place to stay.)

Pity the Embassy probably doesn't need a pharmacist on site. I wouldn't even have to do anything for my licensure, since federal facilities only require licensure in a US state. (I could work in any VA or military base in the country on my NC license.)

That time in which I watch a Scorpions video on youtube and attempt to wax philosophic about an event that happened 6 time zones away when I was 13.

Somehow, 9 November snuck up on me this year. I was writing checks this morning, and I realized today's the 9th. Man.

The video I linked last year was removed by the user, sadly.