One night in the real world

The setting is relevant, I suppose, so here it is: a squat-bar, one of many in this city, but unlike most this one is attached to a specifically queer house. When I walk in (late in the night, stone cold sober, having decided to come here for a drink after finishing a marathon stint of coding), the room is full of writhing queers dancing to Bronski Beat. I order a drink that is served in a giant soup-mug- it's hard to dance with it without splashing gin all over myself, so I put it down. At some point I fancy I cigarette, so I sit down on the bench seat to roll one.

My friend comes up, and warns me that they're "keeping an eye" on the guy I've just sat down next to. He's been a bit of a problem all night.

Fuck it! I'm up like a shot. No patience for drunk macho men in my personal space on a night like this (my first night out in a long, hard week of work-jail). Warning appreciated. I relocate to somewhere else to finish rolling my cigarette, enjoy my beer, chat to my friends.

I've barely lit it before clumsy hands grope me around my ribs. I have fast reflexes, and I'm sober, so I knock him back fast and sharp, fix him with a glare. He gives me the goofy oblivious grin of every drunken fuckwit guy who knows, soul-deep, that they will never really be brought to task for behaviour like this. He moves onto my friend in a second, and her elbows are as sharp as mine. Our personal space is lined suddenly in razor wire. We say it silently and in words, both: Back the fuck off, right now, buddy. He backs off, shuffles into the crowd.

It's a few bars of a song later. I've had maybe one drag, maybe two, a sip of my drink. Another friend of mine is leaning up on the wall opposite me, and I go to give her a grin, but it's intercepted by- surprise!- the same drunken fuckwit, who wraps himself around her, one hand on her jaw, the other on her waist, faster than she can react. She's already stiffened and brought her hands up to push him away when I've got my arm on his elbow, snapping him away from her, a snarl in his face: "Do NOT touch her without asking".

He laughs. He sneers. His attention is on me now, not her, and in some part of me I am always glad for that: I know enough to stand up to this, not perfectly, but I know enough not to suffer it in silence, and I would always rather draw it to me than watch a friend cringe, and fade, and squirm.

Then his attention is on a squat resident, who has decided, apparently, that enough is enough, and it's his time to go. She tells him to leave. He stays put. She tells him to leave again. He digs his heels in. She grabs him by the elbow and pulls. He grips the floor tighter. My friend and I surge forward, put our weight behind him, and help her hoist him out the door. He struggles the whole way out, but finally he's out.

Except that's as far as he'll go. And he has friends, it turns out. Three of them, four including a girlfriend. And suddenly evicting one obnoxious, hands-everywhere, sexual-harassment-R-us straight guy out of the bar has turned into a fucking riot. He is throwing punches, then his friend is throwing punches, and his girlfriend is trying to hold him back, then they are linking arms and trying to surge back through the crowd of people who have come with us from the bar to ensure a successful ejection (the crowd is mostly my height, my build, some flavour of queer or other but mostly female-bodied). It is the most farcically pointless thing I have ever seen: what the fuck are they trying to achieve? Nobody, nobody at the party wants them there. There are a thousand other bars in this city, at least 10 within a few blocks. He keeps screaming at us that we are crazy, and I think you would fight to the death for your right to attend a party nobody wants you at? And WE'RE crazy?

Because it's turning into that. Fucking nasty. Terrifying. He gets my friend in a strange-hold, and I have to rescue her glasses from the ground before they're trampled. He lands heavy punches. He is bellowing like a wounded animal. The entire display is obscene, like the absolute essense of misogyny laid bare: I cannot, I WILL not, be told by women what to do. It injures some invisible but mighty part of me. I will fight beyond all reason, beyond all logic, to have done ANYTHING other than obey an instruction from a woman*. Or worse: a group of women who have physically overpowered me. I will beat them. I will kick them. I will punch and strangle them. I will shriek at them at the top of my lungs. But if they want me to leave, then by god, I WILL NOT LEAVE.

It calms, at some point. At some point, finally, they are heading the right way down the street and we, hands up, go home on our lips, are heading back inside. When suddenly back he comes, sprinting up the block like a drunken bullet, having shed his bag & his jacket for maximum fighting efficiency. Fists blazing, feet kicking, hurtling through us and seeking to hurt. He grabs at random, kicks at random, finally tumbles down in a dead-mass weight of drunken rage. His girlfriend is sobbing over him (and I can't silence the thought that a guy like that is going to make his girlfriend pay for these indignities at the hands of women, later).

And this is when it gets really dangerous, because this is when the cops show up.

I don't know what happened then, because I was hustled inside promptly with the rest of the party-goers, the doors barricaded behind us. But many of those left outside are arrested. Huddled inside we can hear yelling. Drunken macho-man and his friends are dismissed, told to go home by the cops (and finally, when it's the cops telling them, they go). The cops drive off with several of our number in their vans (we don't know yet if they are charged, if lives will be casually ruined by the refusal of a handful of drunken fuckwits to respect someone else's space).

And this is the price, always, in the end: it is the sharp, hard edge of the world that I am always brought to confront. That to stand up for my right not to be groped, my friend's right not be groped, my community's right not to endure harassment at the hands of fuckwits with a point to prove, is to invite police attention (because they will not leave, they WILL NOT LEAVE, despite a city full of other options for places to go). And that police attention will not fall on them, it will fall on us. Because we are queer, we are women, we are breaking the society-wide rules of putting up and shutting up. And for long minutes in the bar I am filled with regret, thinking is it worth it, to have put this community at risk, to stand up for my right, and my friend's right, to defend our bodily autonomy? If people go to jail, if this squat suffers even heavier police harassment: is it worth it?

Until my friend, the one I pulled him off, thanks me for it. Thanks me and hugs me close, for standing up for her, for telling her that her space and her right to exist in it safely is important.

Even then, I do not know that it's worth it. I am comforted by it, and comforted by the friend who mentions to me that these kinds of scenes are not so rare at this place. Comforted by the knowledge that I am not the one who decided to turn a polite request to leave into an all-out deathmatch. I don't want to regret standing up for us, but fuck, the devil's bargain of making a scene and attracting attention has never been so blatantly clear to me. But I wonder if we on this scene are supposed to learn in the end to swallow it down, and paste on a smile, because a drunken fuckwit with his hands on your body is a lesser harm than a squad of riot police outside your doors waiting to arrest you, evict you, deport you?

I finally finish my beer, a long time later, shaking with adrenaline afterschocks, my arm around my crying friend (she is bruised from the strangle-hold, but her glasses survived). I ride home on my own, hyper-alert, hyper-sensitive. My bike chain slips a few blocks into the ride and I stop to turn my bike upside down and enact a quick fix. A man comes out of the bar near where I have stopped, beer in hand, grin on face: "Bike problems?"

And I fucking snarl at him. "Not tonight, just- not tonight. Go away, leave me alone. Not. Tonight."

Later I will be able to tie this experience in with my long-running knowledge that it is at the point of declaring space, and space safety, that these confrontations always occur (I have had more punches thrown at my head for asserting that no, we don't need your company, random dude, we are just fine on our own than for any other reason, ever). Later I will be able metabolise this, incorporate it. But for now I am still fucking incoherant with it, with the ridiculousness of it, the futility of it, the fucking blatantness of it. I want to record the last hour of my life and show it as a film reel to anyone who wants to tell me that misogyny doesn't exist, that patriarchy is a fairy tale or a feminist invention.

I need to wallow a while longer in the surreal knowledge that I got into a mass punch-up tonight because I told a guy to stop touching me, and stop touching my friend.

Fuck.

*Not everyone there was female-identified, but I am going to guess with 99% certainty that drunken fuckwit dude would not be aware of that.

Sleep, now.

Hey would you look at that, there's a name for how & when I sleep!

"Delayed sleep-phase syndrome (DSPS), also known as delayed sleep-phase disorder (DSPD) or delayed sleep-phase type (DSPT), is a circadian rhythm sleep disorder, a chronic disorder of the timing of sleep, peak period of alertness, core body temperature, hormonal and other daily rhythms relative to societal norms. People with DSPS tend to fall asleep some hours after midnight and have difficulty waking up in the morning."

That's been me, my whole life. Forever. Since I was a little kid. My very earliest memories are of battling with my family about bed-times, and having to be physically, forcefully evicted from bed in the morning for school. Being really little- 4 or 5- and creeping downstairs to sit near the door of the livingroom to watch the television until my parents turned it off and went to bed, and then lurking around some more, and then finally, maybe, being able to sleep. Hoarding books in my bed to read for the hours when I couldn't sleep. Being exhausted, always, forever, at school- primary, then highschool. Having my family struggle for years to figure out a way to ever get me into bed on time, then out of bed on time. Spending entire weekends asleep to catch up on the hours that I lost in the week.

It has never changed. It has been absolutely constant in my life since I can remember. My exact sleeping hours DO change- 2am was pretty consistent for most of my teens, but 4am has been more common for the past few years- but I have never, ever been able to regularly sleep before midnight, or regularly rise before 9am without the application of brute force and the consequence of constant, all-day exhaustion.

It meant I sucked at school. I mean, I didn't objectively suck that much at the 'school' bit- I went to a selective school, and got a good mark when I graduated- but I was beyond appalling at 'turning up' bit. I was on time to school maybe two days a week, in the last few years of highschool. I nearly got thrown out of school for persistant lateness, and truancy (many were the days I'd stay home feigning illness rather than facing the humiliation of slinking in 3 hours late again). I'd fall asleep on the train on the way in and sleep til the end of the line. When I finally hauled myself in, I'd be braindead til some time in the afternoon, when I'd (usually, depending on how sleep-deprived I was) perk up and be able to pay attention.

It also means I have sucked at every 9-5 job I have ever attempted. With enough application of willpower, alarm-clock setting, making my housemates come rouse me, and the crippling sense of knowing that I will be fired if I don't, I can (kind of) turn up to work at 10am. But I'll be useless til 3pm, anyway, then probably stay back late to get work done in the hours from 3pm-9pm when I'm actually perky & focused.

It didn't mean that I sucked at university, however. Because at university, for almost every course I took, there was an evening class option. And I was sweet! I'd actually go, and actually be able to get involved! Except for the years when I was also trying to work a 9-5 job. Then it didn't really matter if the classes were running during my peak awakeness times, I was a fucking zombie anyhow from trying to make it through on 4 hours sleep per night.

It turns out that I fit every single one of the criteria on this list that doesn't involve laboratory measurements. Up to and including the "occasional non-circadian days". That was Monday of this week, when I had to be at a client office early in the day: it was easier to just stay awake and not sleep at all, that day, than to try to get a few hour's sleep beforehand.

At this point in my life, I have known myself & my sleep patterns for 26 years. I know how I operate. More importantly, I know the futility of trying to force myself to operate on a more socially acceptable schedule: I have thought myself lazy, castigated myself for being a shit employee, considered it a matter of willpower and discipline to sleep & wake earlier, have tried the most ridiculously involved and outlandish strategies to try to shift my sleep back a few hours, and it has never worked for more than a few days at a time, at the cost of any and all mental alertness.

So. These days, rather than trying to fix it, as much as possible, I structure my life around it. I know that I do better at, and try to seek out, night-shift jobs and work-from-home jobs. I try to maintain relatively regular sleeping & waking times, because even if you are sleeping from 4am-1pm, if you screw around with that too much you'll suffer. I try to make sure I get enough sunlight, because depression will hammer you into the ground if you have the double assault of (a) sleeping anti-social hours and (b) never seeing daylight (this one is a bit of a challenge in a late European Autumn: the sun sets at 4:30, and the afternoons are uniformly overcast).

It's a fairly recent thing, this coming to terms with my sleep patterns rather attempting to force myself into more normal ones. I've known it about myself forever, and suspected it was the case for some other people, but hadn't known it was any such thing as a recognised 'disorder' until about an hour ago. I suspect my coping & success (as defined by regular periods of sleep) will improve as I stop trying to artificially manipulate my sleep-times. It's a bit rough, though, knowing (accepting) that there are entire categories of employment that will never really be open to me- that attempting to take on regular-hours careers is never going to be any more successful than the unrelenting zombie-state failures of the past. That it's probably not a matter of just having a little more discipline, a little more willpower, a little more focus, and then being magically normal. A little bit rough, too, to accept that mornings (which are sometimes so beautiful) are probably not going to be a huge part of my life, except as experienced from the 'wrong end' of having been awake all night.

And to accept that I'm probably not lazy. It's probably not a personality defect or weakness of character. It's the way I am, and have forever been, and most likely forever will be. It sucks that the way I am happens not to co-incide with the way most of the world works, but like many other things about me that don't co-incide with the world's usual way of doing things, I guess I'll figure out my own way through it.

Further culinary strangeness

In the absence of a garden, I have taken to tending a glass jar full of a murky, milky, bubbling mush. I feed it daily with a spoonful of ginger and a spoonful of sugar, and keep it nestled warm & cosy beside the heating outlet in my bedroom.

It is a "ginger beer plant", a developing colony of little beasties that are in the business of turning sugar into alcohol. Well, it's mostly the yeast that's doing that, eating the sugar and shitting out carbon dioxide & alcohol, but my reading suggests that the addition of ginger means that there should be other beneficial bacterial and/or fungal life forms in there as well, getting in on the hot fermenting action.

I need to feed it for another few days before it'll be ready to strain out the liquid and bottle it up with sugar syrup to develop into either ginger beer or some kind of sugary explosive device (I have been extensively warned about the explosive possibilities if I get the bottling process wrong). I'm hoping to have a batch of ginger beer ready to consume before I leave in a couple of weeks- we'll see how THAT goes.

I'm specifically aiming for dry alcoholic ginger beer, which is why the long developing times. I think if you're aiming for low/non-alcohol varieties you can get it all done in a few days. There's a million different recipes out on the net, I've gone with a mish-mash of a bunch of them (so far, essentially: sugar, grated ginger, sachet of baking yeast, half a juiced lemon & a bit of lemon peel into a jar with some water, stir, continue to feed sugar & ginger daily).

I am quite taken with the evidence of life in my mysterious jar of gingery mush- it bubbles, it froths, it rearranges itself into funny strata of ginger, liquid & yeast gunk at the bottom of the jar. If this works, I think I'd like to take on brewing & fermenting as a regular old hobby: I mean first there's the fun of feeding it & watching it do it's thing, and then there's the PRACTICALLY FREE BOOZE. Just so long as the bottles don't detonate in the process, what's not to love?

Tahini: I was doing it wrong.

I have never loved tahini. Of all the new & interesting foods that came into my life when I started hanging out with more vegetarians + food creatives, tahini was a bit of a let-down. I mean, I love many of the products of tahini- hommous, and salad dressings, and halva (actually I love halva to an extent that is probably indecent). I get that a jar of tahini is a Good Thing to have around. But the (many) people I've witnessed dripping plain tahini, straight from the jar, over toast and calling it breakfast?

Blech.

Tahini by itself is oily, bitter grossness in my mouth. I really, truly Did Not Get the love for it.

And then I moved to Berlin, and learned that we'd been doing it wrong, all along. Having learned the trick, I am now a total tahini devotee, gleefully joining in with the rampaging consumption that means that my kitchen needs to re-stock the mega-sized jars of tahini every week or less.

The trick? Is water. And not only does it make tahini delicious, turning oily, bitter grossness into something light, creamy, and delicious on toast, it is also incredibly awesome in a food-nerd-love way.

So you start out with a bowl with a bit of tahini in it. It is thin. It is oily. It is not appetising. Then you add a little dribble of water, and whisk it vigorously. Lo! The addition of water does not result, as you might expect, in watery tahini: no, the tahini thickens, often to a completely solid state (still not especially appealing, but exciting in a WTF! kind of way). Then, you add more water, little by little, and the curdled-looking lump of solid tahini thins out to something with the consistency of thick cream, much paler in colour than the original tahini you put in the bowl. The amount of water you add depends on whether you're going for a spreadable thing to eat on toast, or a liquidy thing to dribble on salad, but that's pretty much it. Tahini alone= GROSS. Tahini + water (+salt, pepper, lemon juice or whatever you want)= light, creamy deliciousness! And if you thin it out too much, and the tahini starts looking curdled & wierd again, you just add another spoonful of tahini and whisk again til you've got the consistency you're after.

And it's all due to the magic of emulsions.

I have been looking around the net for explanations of this emulsion process to satisfy the ravening geek within me, but haven't found anything particularly enlightening (you can read here about the use of tahini as an emulsifier in commercial food prep, or a brief explanation here of how to make your hommous creamy using emulsion magic). And beyond knowing that the emulsion- the balanced suspension of oil and water particles- works so well due to some emulsifying property of the sesame particles, I am pretty clueless about what's actually going on there. I'd love to know, for instance, why the emulsion magic works this way for tahini, but not for other high-oil-content nut butters I've tried it with (to date, adding water to almond butter or peanut butter just results in watery almond or peanut butter).

What I really want is an episode of Good Eats or similar, with Alton Brown going geeky with some diagrams about the interactions of oil, water and other particles (in tahini specifically- I'm pretty sure I've seen him explain emulsions re salad dressings & mayonnaises). Then I would be even happier whisking the morning bowl of tahini together, able to picture what the hell is going on in there to create something so very delicious.

Blood! Gore! Fabulous Accessories!

In case it is not immediately obvious, this post is going to count as Way-TMI-Land to people who don't like hearing about periods. So, you know, read at own risk, etc.

Need something bright & colourful in your life? Then I strongly suggest you take a trip to etsy.com & search for "menstrual pads". Which is what I did this afternoon, and have had my mind blown by all the happy-fun-time-super-joy! coloured & patterned pads. Mushrooms! Polka-dots! Tasteful understated florals! Accessorisation options!

So, I am thinking: it feels like I've moved on enough from The Great Divacup Disaster Of '05, and even the Traumatic Gushing Experiences Of '07 & '08, to consider going eco-friendly with the bleeding again.

I bleed hellishly, and horribly, and frequently in ways that are absolutely incompatible with existing in public while retaining a publically acceptable denial that there is blood gushing forth from my body at an alarming rate. I have been blood-splatter humiliation girl, and oh-holy-shit-I-am-so-sorry-about-your-chair/sheets/carpet girl. I have sprinted down the side streets of Newtown with crimson gushing down my legs, thinking jesus fucking christ it's day 5 this is not fucking fair. And I have been all of these things in my 20's, rather than my teens when I could possibly have brushed it all of as just being clueless (although I was never clueless in my teens- I started bleeding age 10, by 13 I knew what was what, pretty thoroughly). It's just that things got so much dramatically worse around age 24 or so, it was like being caught out as a kid with a brand new bodily function and no idea how to manage it, all over again.

So since the crimson tide became a regular crimson fucking tsunami in my life, I've been a bit busy just trying to figure out how to manage that, and I gave up on the whole eco-friendly bleeding products thing. The Divacup didn't work for me, and I didn't have the time/patience/initial outlay to figure out another solution that also might not work, so back to the hideous, plastic world of disposable things it was. And not just any old disposable things, cos I am beyond the capacities of modern tampon technology. No, it was a sad return to the hideous world of attachable pads. Which are fucking gross, and insanely wasteful, and have glue on them which stick to my pubic hair, and AS IF you need extra eye-watering painful moments in the middle of an eyewateringly painful period!

But, a couple of years later, I feel like I've kind of got it under control. A little bit, at least. I am no longer surprised by the amount I bleed. I have some faint confidence in being able to handle it. And I fucking hate wearing toxic, plastic, irritating imminent-landfill in my knickers. And I have been spending a hell of a lot more of my time with hippies, which means that rad-pads/lunapads/moonrags/whatever are as much a part of the obligatory "Gah I'm Bleeding Offer Me Sympathy" round-tables that happen in all dyke sharehouses (well. All the ones I've ever lived in) as your usual, commercial, disposable options.

So, the obvious conclusion, I would like to invest in a set of cloth pads, and see how they are. And since they are such a fantastic cottage-industry dealio, they are available in about 10,000 variations of shape, layering, construction, size- and of course, fabric. I want one with rockets, and one with tentacles, and quite possibly one on which I will embroider bloody, melodramatic lines from poetry:

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"

Unfortunately I probably won't be able to buy any til I get back to Australia, unless I find a local Berlin craftster making them, because I can't get parcels mailed to my Berlin address. But if anyone Aus-side knows of good non-online suppliers, let me know.

(this lovely illustration comes from Mari-Chan, and features on at least one stylin' lady I know's tampon case)

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Addendum, some time later: I am finding it strange to exist at once in the laissez-fair, anti-shame world of the hippy menstruation crew, which tends towards a particular relaxedness about human blood- natural process, hang onto the pads and chuck them in the wash later, never mind the occasional blood-stains on the sheets, etc- and also in the "I cut people up and put needles in their skin for fun" crew, which is absolutely, obsessively, compulsively strict about the containment & curtailment of blood, once released. The happy-hippy-no-shame part of my brain is all "oh cool, you can get cute 'wet bags' to chuck blood-soaked pads into between washes", and the well-trained blood pervert side of my brain is going "OH MY GOD HOW CAN YOU BE SO RELAXED ABOUT A CUTE ZIP-UP BAG FULL OF HUMAN BLOOD?". I have experienced similar cognitive dissonance in relationships, sometimes: there is When I Am Cutting You Up, which is all latex gloves + sealed containers for anything that becomes bloodied, and then there is when we are on our periods, which is all being mightily relaxed about blood on the sheets & sometimes each other. Hmm.

Introductory German, housemate-style

Using German, and being understood, is one of my greatest (small, beautiful, every-day-life) joys. Week by week the length of the interactions I can have all in German increases (from mere seconds to almost entire minutes at a time!). Not fast enough to satisfy me, and I am burning up to start proper German classes, but the glow of successfully making a purchase, or asking directions, or responding to pleasantries, without needing to switch to English- ah, it's so lovely. If I manage to avoid English for a whole conversation I often get asked if I'm from the Netherlands- apparently, that's what my accent sounds like in German.

I am not in school, and I don't watch the television, so the German I learn comes from: housemates, street signs, overheard conversations, and the Turkish Markets (zwei stuck bitte! Ja, alles!).

Some nights I sit in the kitchen and pester my lovely housemates for more words, more sentences, stringing them together clumsily then practising til I get them right. This being a gigantic political housing project in Berlin, it stands to reason that the sentences I learn are 99% beer & cigarettes. I find these phrases scrawled on ripped-off pieces of paper, tucked into my notebooks and pockets.

I just found the post-it notes with my first housemate-German lesson:
"Kann ich mir von dir eine cigarette drehen?"- Can I roll a cigarette from yours?
"Kanst du mir eine cigarette drehen?"- Can you roll me a cigarette?
"Kann ich hier rauche?"- Can I smoke here? Or the more formal: "Ist es OK fur dich wenn ich hier rauche?"- Is it OK for you if I smoke here?
"Alter, mein tabak!"- Gimme my tobacco back!
And the first phrase of German I learned, on landing here back in 2005: "Hast du feuer?"- the social glue of Berlin, I think, is that simple little phrase.

Tonight we covered:
"Mochtest du bier?"- Would you like beer?
"Mochtest du noch bier?"- Would you like more beer?
"Ich mochte ein bier kaufen"- I'd like to buy a beer
Which morphed into...
"Ich mochte gerne bier kaufen, bitte!" (there was some bickering between housemates about whether one was more correct than the other)
and then a lesson on:
"Ich wurde gerne (something) kaufen"- Ich wurde gerne guthaben kaufen! Ich wurde gerne tomaten kaufen! I want to buy something!

Then we got into wanting things (my spelling goes a bit wobbly here, cos we were well into the bier by now):
"Ich mochte schlafen bitte!"- I'd like to sleep please!
"Ich mochte bitte jetzt schlafen!"- I'd like to sleep now please!
There's some scrawls under that about "schaffen"- to work, build, create, "schaff"- sheep, "scharf"- sharp, "schlaff"- hanging, tired, saggy, which leads directly to:
"Ich fuhle mich schlaff"- I feel saggy! As in, god, I feel wrecked.

And then scharf comes out to play, cos when we really really really want something, we're totally sharp on it:
"Ich bin scharf darauf tanzen zu gehen!"- dude, I am so keen for a dance, you have no idea.
"Ich bin scharf darauf meine haare zu bleichen!" Hell yes my hair needs bleaching!
"Ich bin scharf darauf schwimmen zu gehen!" But it's -2C out, so maybe swimming isn't SUCH a good idea.

For anyone tempted to try to learn German from these transcribed notes, please be aware that there are several dozen crimes against umlauts in the above as I haven't figured out where the umlaut key on my netbook is hiding.

A Bird Released

So life gets cold; it's what happens in Europe when the summer ends and the autumn rolls in. I knew this in theory but to experience it in practice has been enlightening. Within a month of the start of autumn the temperature had fallen from the equivalent of the warmest Sydney summer day, to the coldest Sydney winter night. A shift that takes 6 months in Sydney takes place in weeks here, and then it gets colder, then colder still. It's the pace of the change that is startling, how much more climatic variation is packed into the months than I'm used to.

I spent the first few weeks of the coldest weather freezing, and grumbling, until I eventually sorted myself out. There is strategy and technology for dealing with the cold, stuff I've never had to learn. Stuff about layers, and materials, and adaptability. The entire city starts dressing alike, and it becomes impossible to distinguish individuals at outdoor events, because we are all wearing exactly the same thing: thick trousers, heavy boots, a torso-distorting puffy vest, black coat, flip-top gloves, wool hat, scarf wrapped up and over your face. Gender is impossible to distinguish, body language is muffled: glasses, height and taste in hats become our only identifying features. I become exceedingly popular when I make a hat with detachable, button-on beard, because it serves the twin purposes of keeping my face warm and identifying me in the shapeless crowd.

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After all this time, I write again just to tell you about the weather?

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I was supposed to leave Berlin for Barcelona at 6 o'clock this morning, but I didn't.

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I have been somewhere strange (compared to what?). Long, quiet months watching this beautiful city shift through late summer, autumn, early stages of freezing. Putting off decisions, putting off life. Traveling not as an exuberant hurling outwards of self, no: traveling as a muted, reflective space. I could say 'disconnected', but that would be a lie: there have been connections, strong and beautiful, finding their way to me through miles of cotton-wool vagueness. But mostly there has been me, my own company, sifting and shifting and observing, and sometimes nothing so active- just existing. Me, this city, my bike. Canals and swans and trees changing color up and down the banks. Cobblestones growing slick and slimy beneath growing layers of fallen leaves.

To emerge from that space is a recent surprise. Oh! I think. This is who I am with my volume turned back up again. Here is me with pom-poms in my hands, chants on my lips, swelling with pride at a fearsome squad of queer cheerleaders I somehow helped to create. Here is me on this dancefloor, that grin I forgot I had, these silvershiny stomping boots, a flick of hair and I'd love to buy you a drink. Here is me manning this squat bar in this broken concrete lot, newly occupied space, us in here, the cops out on the street, knowing something about this culture and these people, the ways they (we) live, the things they (we) do. Here is me living, full of life, engaged again. Thank fuck whispers the part of me that has been in some shaky kind of shock since the days before I left Australia.

I find myself beaming at the beauty I am surrounded by. An afternoon spent getting to know a girl and a truck, a city-centre wagonplace with flocks of geese bustling busy through yellow leaves, a tiny perfect hedgehog (igle) in a pile of rusted bike frames.

So. I decide not to leave, not to go so far so soon. I make the equally terrifying decision to stay, for a little while. I have a job, somehow, or at least a little bit of work, and every day of work is another adventure I can afford to have. I want to go places nearer to here (Prague next week, maybe, according to a bubbling and excited conversation in a wood-heated wagon tonight). I want to revel a little bit in this somehow-surprising place I find myself in: Europe, and happy, and alive, and thrilled with it.