So I was coming back from the loo and knocked over a wine glass (then I proceeded to give it a new existence by dubbing it the new ashtray). Which wasn’t entirely hard to do as everything and everyone was sitting on the floor and, being drunk, you normally can’t manoeuvre yourself around so many things without running into something at one point till you’ve gotten yourself safely seated in a spot you won’t cause anything to break until you get up again or reach over to light someone’s cigarette or grab their beer or slap their buttocks.

But being me, this isn’t even hard to do in a sober state. Hello fail blog. Now take a look at some pictures I did not take but found sort of amusing the next day:

I did, however, take this one:

Tomorrow is the day I’d like to launch the new site. We’ll see what happens. Wish me whatever it takes; under specific circumstances that I cannot name now that may be luck. Or something else.

Yesterday was Sunday, but yesterday was also Saturday. Yesterday doesn’t really exist for me in the present, because yesterday I was awake for 32 hours and now it’s all just a dream. I am also in severe need for nicotine though because I used up all my tobacco on Friday, or rather I gave too much of it away, thus having next to nothing left for myself by Sunday morning as well as no more cash and a mysteriously not functioning bank card.

So i just wanted to say now that I found it rather funny, er, quirky.. creepy, that I was just saying on Friday how my blog is turning into this fail blog thing featuring the extremely unintentional clumsiness of mademoiselle moi. (Pardon the wacked language, I am, as I said before, really and truly in need of a cigarette – I’ve already shouted to myself for the one or other unimportant reason at least twice today. It’s almost four and I got up at one thirty. Help.) Then I was just explaining exactly that to some friends very enthusiastically, when lo and behold, exactly 12 hours later (not. it was probably 10 hours and 46 minutes later) I noticed that I had broken a wine glass that evening and proceeded to abuse it as an ashtray. Evidence shall follow. Later.

THEN. After that wacked, sad night I reported about “yesterday”, during which, I recall now, I also unintentionally pretended to be a foreigner in Moabit (!!) whilst trying to help a Spanish-speaking someone light his gone out joint and then ran away from him because I didn’t want to cross the road on a red light, I proceeded, once home and full of porridge and peanut flips, to quietly break my only salad bowl. In the still of the Sunday morning night/light/fright. And there I was again – happy:

Of which I obviously also the lost the first post-processed version. How could it be different. It was beautiful. In my memory.

This is personal. Stop reading here, please.

Thanks. Haha.

So I’m sitting here, having by now downed nearly a complete bag of what we call flips here.
This is, I presume, normally called emotional eating, something I have not done in centuries. Eating something just because it’s there, available, and you don’t necessarily want to eat it, but you want to eat something, you’re not actually hungry, but only eating can satisfy you in that particular moment. Yeah, really forgot what that’s like. Not too bad.
Great, so where am I getting at now? Nowhere, completely pointless, those last sentences.

Why is it that we always seem to lose that drive to stick as much of that junk into our mouth as fast as possible when the bag is not yet empty, when there’s only still this small mound left.. Might be the same phenomenon you can observe when drinking beer from a bottle – nobody wants the last half an inch left in the bottle either. Or we just don’t want to get our hands dirty (I’m back on the chips bag). Well, I don’t mind. Which is how I justify that I did not stop when I observed that that drive was abruptly ceasing to be a drive, but continued through to the very end.

Goodbye, flips. Kind of nice seeing you, but not more than that, thank you very much.

Alright, I’ve got to organize myself a tiny bit here, I’ve been here for probably almost an hour by now and have done the following:

- eaten a bowl of porridge
- eaten peanut butter
- eaten two turkish Oreos (meaning cookies that look like Oreos a tiny bit on the first glance, cost one euro for a pack of about 40, don’t taste at all bad at first but then quickly get quite bland and overly sweet) and milk
- eaten that bag of flips
- checked my financial situation and declared it to be more acceptable than I had deemed it to be. In 5 days all that will be over. I think.
- made a mental note for the 13th time in the past 2 days that Jamie Cullum’s version of Singin’ in the Rain blows my mind. That kind of re-arrangement of harmonic and rhythmic structures is … I have no words. It crosses that thin line beyond which musicians can actually be classified as artists.
- taken the above photographs
- now also had a cup of lukewarm “hot” chocolate
- not really thought about the fact that it is now a quarter to six in the morning and I am past feeling tired
- neither am I drunk the slightest bit anymore, if I was ever drunk in the first place.
- that wasn’t an action, but a thought. So is this.

I am not getting anywhere at all. So much for being “personal”. If you just continued to read when I told you to stop – probably because you thought I only wrote that so you would continue reading at all – you might be able to tell by now that this is, in fact, so personal that my head is so messed up and over and around (with) that I have to push everything that isn’t exactly what is really going on out of there first in order to be able to communicate on that personal level at all, even if it’s only with my computer keyboard at present. I need a cigarette.

So. Berlin Film Festival. A couple of short films, today two Forum films. I don’t want to talk about the films, just about what they did to me. For reference, the first is called FIT, the second Territoire Perdu.

FIT was awful. It left me empty – with my mind simultaneously full to bursting with questions, feeling for characters that didn’t deserve it, analyzing stupid little fidgety details nobody should care less about in a concept that is so clearly just no good. What really frightened me though is how I just stop talking under these circumstances. I might have quite a bit to say, but the more there is, the less I can actually hold onto tightly enough to be able to spit it out. I wander about staring at the ceiling with this indifferent, resigned but slightly melancholy, sad look on my face and am truly under the impression that I do not have anything to say. And when I do say something, it’s only a dumb, unnecessary little comment about something someone else said or did. Actually I feel exactly like those comments – dumb, superfluous, dispensable. And I can’t explain it. This state. I can only say how awfully close I feel to those extremely awkward characters, those bad actors, that screenwriter that might have had a higher intention, that director that might have made his movie in such a mediocre way … on purpose?

But then it’s so blatantly bad there can be absolutely no purpose behind all of those elementary school level structural fails, horrible lighting and sound and overall disconcerting atmosphere – but embarrassingly disconcerting. Not the kind where you get goosebumps because the director used some extremely well-played tension-building devices. This was the kind that hurts because most of it is obviously not intentionally disconcerting. And still..

And then I find myself feeling for that slightly retarded, uncomfortably emotionally straightforward woman. Because the whole thing is just plain horrible. I feel for the director, I feel for the actors, I feel for all of them. They’re close to me because I can see what a waste of time the whole thing is and was for everyone; cast and crew and audience. And them? Do they see it? The audience maybe. Some might find it just alright, maybe not worth the 8 € ticket price, but ok. For others it’s unbearable. Most of those vent their frustration at whoever produced such a shitty motion picture. I take it in and stir it around in my head, stir it up with all my own problems and questions and uncertainties.

Then we have a beer and a couple of cigarettes and I find a glass of wine on a bookshelf in the foyer where we’re waiting to get into the next movie and take it because it doesn’t seem to belong to anybody and every time I do something like that I feel like I’m showing off – whatever it is I may be showing off, I don’t really understand myself – but I’m also just being honest to myself and the people I’m with because hey, if there’s a glass of wine and nobody wants it and it looks clean; there’s no immanent danger of catching some incurable disease if I drink it and in this state wine can only pick me up so here goes…

The next movie was gorgeous. I regained my ability to laugh and smile normally, but my voice was still rather non-existent. Afterwards, as I was listening to a discussion about philosophy and what it means to know and accept certain rules and restrictions, in this case put there by the teacher, in order to be able to think beyond those rules, I was thinking again about how little I know of the world, how little I think about the world. Because I’m so caught up with myself and how I function and the way my mind works and how my emotions can take me over so completely sometimes that whatever I’m supposed to be doing, I can’t do it, no matter how harshly I tell myself to just pull through for once, for God’s sake.. that is why I feel so dumb sometimes. I know so much about myself and so little about everything outside of me. I went to the washroom and thought about that, thought that’s why I sometimes find myself unable to take part in conversation actively – I have to be carefully and lovingly lured out of my snail’s house – and then I came back and was greeted with the news that the group had just unanimously agreed upon the fact “Esther is cool.”

Then I put a smile on and didn’t take it off again until some guy fainted in the bus on my way home.

Um, are you noticing something? This is turning into a sort of fail blog, Esther-Clumsy-Edition. (Get it? Esther-Clumsy… Extra-Clumsy… no? Ok, forget it.)

So this was me rushing to empty the espresso maker to make more, MORE, right away, so I don’t fall asleep later as my fellow art and philosophy and other students do our best to let ourselves through the door of two months of lecture-free blissful oblivion. Without the oblivion. Hopefully. Whatever. I don’t know what I’m saying again. And I’m not drunk or anything. Hello caffeine kick.

Have a great weekend!

Anyway, here’s a non-sneaky peek. Click and it’ll take you to the beautiful “under construction” site yonder on the shores of serendipity-brought-anchovies.com.

But alas, there are still a couple of things that do need looking after, er, over, like my fridge, which is fearfully empty yet again.. ah, and wouldn’t it be nice to be able to launch the new site on the 22nd, the day on which, two (!!) years (two exclamation marks, one for each year. Yeah.) ago this here little olde weblog came into full existence.. (meaning: it was there quite a while before, put kind of in hibernation, or still in the womb, waiting to hatch. What the hell, in its litt’o mummy’s womb waiting to be born or in its egg waiting to hatch. Whatever.) Um, pretend those brackets didn’t happen.

What I was meaning to say: This blog will turn two in four days, and on that occasion I am very much looking forward to introducing its new little sister. Its little, immature, green and maybe sometimes kind of rude little GERMAN sister. Because I think that’s what’s been missing. A chance to rant in German. Because it is, after all, my mother tongue and I do speak and think in German more or less all the time lately (sadly? I don’t know). Consequently I also get mad in German. And Laila, who really was my little sister once, will be, and actually is already, the voice I want to give to my anger at whatever big and not so big shit life hurls at me. Because it’s coming steady and fast these days, not even necessarily from “outside”. And it’s what makes life interesting, so hey.

So now I’m stumbling over closing words again because I feel like I should say something like “Hey, I’m looking forward you, new readers I’ll gain instantly when my blog looks exactly the way I want it to!” or “to start something new you first have to finish what you started.. a while ago..” (???)

But yeah. I guess I’ll just leave you with:

See ya. Write ya. Read ya. Hear ya. Soon. Lalala.

Yes, my dear readers that probably don’t even exist anymore by this time. I think I might be right. See, I am back in the place I once was, so long ago, in a distant time I wouldn’t have dared to reach back into again during the past few months or even years. The place where everything I did was mediocre and complete and utter meaningless shit. So I thought. And think. The difference is that now, I’m finding it ok. I think I like it, just doing my thing, feeling stupid now and then, specifically when drunk and in the company of philsophy students who are capable of discussing the death of the author at 4 in the morning whilst completely stoned und wrecked in general.

So here I am – yes, the opening word to almost everything I used to have to say here is also back – today I am sharing with you the product of this morning’s clutzyness on behalf of being sort of messed up, not in the mood for showering and much less for attending the very last painting seminar of the semester of which I attended one single meeting since winter break…

I only wanted to sit down in my very favourite spot in my whole flat – large as it is, haha – to have my cinnamon and agave juice infused coffee (I realize honey or the like might be better, don’t ask) and smoke my wonderful crossroad tobacco that has actually undergone a severe reduction in price since last week (FIFTEEN CENTS YEAH), as the wonderful people over there clearly know who needs and wants it the most and can’t really afford to pay those fifteen cents anymore, but wouldn’t buy it anymore for reasons that do no concern YOU (yes, you) if it was suddenly as cheap as say, pueblo. Ah, what was I saying? Well, this is the spot I’m talking about:

… when the thing happened that NO YOU HAVE NOT GUESSED BY NOW BECAUSE I WAS JUST ABOUT TO TELL YOU BUT THEN THE PHOTO JUST GAVE IT ALL AWAY. Yes, call me stupid, I deserve it. Wait, no, I don’t, I was only preoccupied. Forgive me, for I do not know what I am saying.

So I picked up my ashtray, the wonderful one I bought on the way home from my landlord 2 days after I moved in, the blue one, the one that inspired me to this, the lighthouse, or rather the bay…

and dropped it.

And then I sighed, and went forth to photograph the beautiful mess and comepletely indulge myself in the fact that I now had an “excuse” not to go to the seminar. The end.

Not. I still need to rant about why I think I’m REALLY blogging again, and my fears that this might be an exception, which I sincerely hope is not the case, because even if you, my dear readers, do not exist anymore, I really think I have missed these useless non-essays on this blog of mine which is turning TWO YEARS OLD soon and might even be clothed in some completely new and beautiful CSS by that time.

Though now that I think about it, that might warrant a separate post (I am very unsure about the correct use of the word “warrant”), as those topics are extremely complex and eloquify-worthy. If you get my drift? Good night. I’m glad I’m back. You too?

Isn’t it lovely how you can make just about any meal look pretty with a flowery plate and a flowery dishcloth?

not to eat.