budweiser ad, then cue obama

It's for stuff like this that I'm glad I'm not watching the "super" bowl, or, television in general. (Super Tuesday, now, that's a different story.) Ads always taste and sound and look like cheese. I don't know if this will swing your average swinging voter, but perhaps it will get a couple of 20-somethings to pretend voting for Obama is kinda like screaming for Justin Timberlake. Whatever works.

don't let the door hit ya

I didn't even know the Pet Goat delivered his last state of the union last night. Shows you what an ocean in between can do to tweak one's perspective, let alone lower one's blood pressure. Tagesspiegel had a nice duo of headlines, however, that let me know that I wasn't alone. "Bush talks, no one listens" was the lede, yet more importantly, the follow-up was an article on Americans playing a Bush drinking game as a way to pass the time while passively listening to such drivel. (Need a cheat sheet? Here's one.) Granted, drowning one's sorrows while contemplating the state of any nation been a "tradition" for decades. There's just not enough alcohol, people.

it's true

I saw them. Birds, that is, flying in V formation, north. (No camera, no proof.) But really. I saw them flying away from the general direction of lands where there is allegedly warmth, and sun, and people building sandcastles, toward our neighborhood, where it is wet and cold and generally rain-pissy. (And no sandcastles.)

Which means it's going to get warmer, right? And I don't have to stare at this basket of Spanish oranges much longer, in the vain assumption that they emit, like little nuclear fruits, previously absorbed Vitamin D?

wine rack

Thirsty? (Or need a napkin?) Competition for wine sales in France has become so dire that the industry has had to bring out the boobs (and I'm not talking Liberty's racks, here) to get people to tip a glass or two. While at the same time (and this is where it gets really weird) the French courts are pursuing requirements for newspapers that feature articles about alcohol to carry health warnings, just like advertising. Someone pinch me. I'm guessing the next step would be to outlaw fois gras, while instituting a 20-hour work week? La belle France, I fear, is suffering from bit of schizophrenia. Which is why the "article" attached to the skin shot (and three others like it, in tasteful black and white, scattered throughout la RVF) amuses me so -- I'd say it was a razzberry at the puritan French police if the mag wasn't on good days such a vapid piece of marketing trash. The story? Wine and Love. Three thousand words on someone's afternoon of Googling "vin" and "amour." Now just try to add a warning label on that one.

das original

Peoples, chill with the tossing of slimy fish from the north to the south. "Flocke" may be a cutie but, per Tagesspiegel, there's only one Knut.

only 300 days left

But you'd think the U.S. presidential election was tomorrow, given the coverage. It will certainly be a year of surprises. My usually conservative mother's traded her mani-pedi money over to Obama; Gloria's slapping the sisterhood around. I sent in my enormous ballot envelope (and paid 4 Euro for the privilege through Deutsche Post) yesterday and got a brief buzz off it. Brief, mind you. My first serious buzz was as a doe-eyed freshperson plastered with NARAL posters and buttons at a Clinton (no, the first one) rally in San Diego, surrounded by conservative nasties, thrilled at the prospect of electing My First President. My second was driving circles in the Nevada desert for three consecutive days, pre-election 2004 -- me and quetzl knocked on doors and chatted with registered Dems about their Superfund site-cum-backyard and the possibility of kicking Bush out of office. We hoped. We and the larger team of volunteers (most of whom were holed up in the Reno Motel 6 for the extended weekend, all refugees from Cali) got 99 percent of the registered Democrats in our adopted Nevada county to the polls. Listening to the returns at 2 a.m. we almost drove into the desert.

I've spent a good amount of time kicking myself for my lack of "political participation" since then but short of kidnapping VP Vader and leaving him pants-less somewhere in Anbar Province, I haven't come up with any strategy that is very constructive. So, I voted, dammit. The clock's ticking.

'tis the reason

for the season, or so the devoted say. But a copy editor is needed here in Pankow. Thus the bunny ears. It's my way of dealing with spiritual, or grammatical, questions.

barbarians in the gates

I am not a number! Or, actually, I am. Along with 12,556 other Yankee passport-carrying immigrants, apparently. The "Statistische Jahrbuch 2007" from Berlin's city hall spits out in excruciating detail the vital (or not so vital) statistics of the hauptstadt, from how few people still have jobs to what little education they can boast or how high their debt still is -- and on top of it all, how many freakin' foreigners are running around amok. The rest of the slide show is here. (image from Tagesspiegel, credit: Ausländeranteil - Grafik: TSP)

back home

I wish someone would tell me what time it is, or better, stop turning out the lights when I'm finally ready to wake up. I've gone from horizontal in bed to horizontal on the couch, to barely horizontal at the breakfast table (as the eggs were too good to sleep in.) Why haven't we invented time travel without this dumb timelag? Because we're too busy building bombs and SUVs, I suppose.

Quetzl told me before I left to "write about being in America!" but I'll be honest, I've come back empty-brained and -handed. Not that there weren't things to attract or elicit even small, whispered words during my mostly-solo wanderings: I swore copiously during a two-hour slog through traffic between Berkeley and San Francisco. I mumbled incoherently while the city's ever-present homeless hit me up for change or tried to hawk a Street Sheet, right in front of the Christmas SPCA kitteh windows downtown. And I said goodbye to lots of people, again.

What was peculiar is that I felt that I had just left yesterday; that virtually everything seemed more or less fairly frozen in time; and that what I thought I had felt as homesickness some months and months ago was quickly assuaged by the realization that, hey, the city's still there. And so are the people. And what seemed like a brief burst of togetherness was just that -- going away and coming home may seem a holiday, but what happens before and after is just the regular stuff of the Alltag, and as such makes an attempt at "catching up" after 18 months (especially in the space of two hours while noshing burritos) somewhat awkward, if not entirely impossible. Which, I think, is why I felt more as if I was just dropping by on a school night; a couple of glasses of wine and lovely hugs and conversation, and then, well, back to work.

I suppose I could say something terribly pithy about the nature of electronic communication keeping people closer and making the world smaller and all that, but I don't think that explains the surprisingly reassured feeling I had when finally landing after 14 bumpy hours in the sky. I got to ride the slow bus home resting my head on a favorite shoulder; and finally, after weeks of sleeping alone, shared a pillow too. Now, that's home.

a small maui diary, illustrated

It rained hard around 4 a.m. The combined noise of the waves (high tide with the new moon) and the storm made it sound as if a jet was coming in for a landing right above us. The park comes out of its night hiding around 6 a.m., and the first rays of sun peek over the mountains around 7.

My brother and I played rummy last night as the sun was setting. I got killed. Our score sheet reminded me of how terrible I played. Made the coffee taste a little stale.

The local birds are creepy. Every morning, the gather in this same spot to gossip. This morning the group was small; usually, about 10 or more huddle in a perfect circle and bob heads and tweet. After a few minutes, they disperse. I think they're planning revolution. Thankfully, island birds are as lazy. Gotta think of breakfast first.

This is the bacon curtain. My parents found this device at Kmart, I think. You drape raw bacon slices over two plastic beams, and when the bacon is cooking in the microwave (of course), all the fat drips into the tray. The cooked bacon keeps its slightly squared shape. In the past week I think we've collectively devoured about four pounds of bacon (one pound was maple-flavored.) Lest you think we're completely deranged, strange pork products are quite the thing on the islands. A favorite snack is spam musubi. Slice of spam on top of rice ball, wrapped in seaweed. Really. So a bacon curtain in comparison is pedestrian.


Sand crabs rule the beach at night, but you can catch them cleaning house in the early morning, kicking sand out of small holes and generally being skittish. This guy was feisty enough to play stare down with me for about a minute before he hid again. The best fun is to watch jet-lagged East coast tourists (who are up at 3 a.m.) enjoying a romantic, pre-sunrise walk along the beach, only to step on one of these guys and squeal.

We drove across the island for lunch, driving through sugar cane fields on the way to Paia. This is Haleakala, a dormant volcano. The welcome sign on the road to Paia reads, "Don't feed the hippies."

The sun sets around 6 p.m. and doesn't linger; this brief pink glow disappears quickly and the winds pick up. Two days ago the waves took away all the sand on the beach. Today, they kindly put most of it back. Yet the water is so filled with sand particles it's not very pleasant to swim. I stick to the pool; I can hold on. I'm chicken that way.

lagged jets

Wide awake at 3 a.m. and jonesing for toast. Nasty when you can't turn the lights on (nor find the lights when you've long-lost your glasses on a Polish train and haven't been bothered to get a new pair) because you can't see to find the switch, and, even if you could find it, the light would bleed into the one bedroom, that of course, has no door. The joys of crashing on the floor of the 'rents' one-bedroom flat are many. There will be toast, just much, much later. Until then I huddle (with a sweater! but it is winter, even on islands with palm trees) reading by public-park light and digging toes in sand. There are crabs, side-scuttling, across the beach that's also very much in the dark at 3 a.m., but the stars are liquid and the water warm and the sunrise a good four, nay five hours away. At 4:30 a.m. another night wanderer, east-coaster, comes wandering out and is frozen by the sight of a moving beach, of crabs playing catch-me-if-you-can with increasingly angry waves. He can't be more than 7, and leans almost 45-degrees into the beach, straining to see it all but not move an inch further for fright. Nervous fingers button and unbutton a new Hawaiian shirt and then sweat is wiped from sweaty palms on knees. The light arrives; the boy disappears, to drag out a sleepy father and point, energetically, at the crabs who have long dug holes under us to snooze the warming day away. I've read almost 200 pages in the hours between stars and dawn, and am ready for dinner. Or toast. Whatever comes first.

sweet st. martin

I think the bar for saintdom has risen in the past few centuries. St. Martin, for instance, shared a coat with a cold guy. This does not make him an action saint by any means. It does make him a nice guy, however; the quantity of which around the year 300 C.E. must have been low. (Raiding Visigoth hordes not being known for their hospitality.)

So Martin gets chilly and becomes a saint. (Certainly better than being impailed by stakes, say, or torn apart by lions. I did not eat all the Halloween candy, for instance. Where's my damn saint's day?) But thank God for pagans, as the old traditions at least inject some practical elements into a holiday (like eating sweets.) No one's wandering around with half-torn coats around here; they're eating cookies, roasting geese and wandering around singing (when it's not raining and 4 degrees Celcius) with lanterns. Light of God and all that, but whatever. They look cool, and I'm told they can also double as a place to stash more candy. Practical.

The goose part of the story is probably my favorite. St. Martin, being a nice guy and all, wanted nothing to do with being appointed Bishop of Tours (as the fancy church robes were harder to tear) and so hid in a goose pen. Martin, it must be said, was not the brightest ascetic. The geese gave up the monk with their squacking, and Martin was bishoped, and the geese became dinner. Silly gooses.

relativity

Bit of cultural insight today while watching the morning news. The trains were on strike again, this time a very cheeky whole day and a half. Chilly newscasters stood outside the main train stations in Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin, reporting that there was no one around to catch the trains that weren't there. But German train strikes aren't like French strikes, where you just might as well sit and have another cigarette and coffee 'cause you're certainly not going anywhere anytime soon. German strikes are considerate. They include free coffee. And oddly enough, some running trains. Our local newscaster, after breathlessly reporting that Munich was experiencing traffic delays of up to one hour (has anyone been to L.A.?) said that the S-Bahn in Berlin was running some trains at 20 minute intervals.

Twenty minute intervals? In San Francisco, MUNI, easily one of the worst public transportation systems ever, would consider this stellar service. Drivers would be awarded medals and certainly given a raise, another two months in holiday pay plus a few extra get-out-of-jail-free cards for running over passengers at will. There were evenings where we'd wait on the corner of Geary and Fillmore for an hour and a half before we'd even see a bus -- and when they'd finally arrive, there'd be three. In a row. The first one packed to the gills, as only he would stop; the other two would play drag racer behind the first one and never stop. Some evenings we'd just walk the three miles home. Because it was faster.

Ah, memories. Give me a German train strike any day.

retail ultraviolence

Oi. A retail outlet called Clockwork Orange, based in Ireland, was ransacked by mad shoppers in an overnight sale. The deal: one could purchase items like £300 leather belts for 5 quid, or some nonsense. People tore mannequins apart to get to the duds. Because really, "it's not just about fashion, it's about the life you lead, what you do and how you do it. It's about style," or so goes the shop's motto.

You can't but love such consumerist trash philosophy. Yet it certainly seems to be working. Lead on, lemmings! Burgess writes in his intro to Clockwork Orange (reprint 1986): "...by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange -- meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with color and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State."

eight thingys

Taking the baton, a little bit tardy. Kisses here and here.

1. Both of my names -- Aimee and Michelle, in the middle -- have separate origins. Aimee (with the accent on the first e) is French; I am not French, but I was born at French Hospital in San Francisco, which for decades now has been a satellite Kaiser office, on Geary Blvd. My parents thought Amy was a boring spelling. Michelle would seem to continue the Frenchy theme, but really, my dad just loved the Beatles.

2. The longest train ride I ever took was from Istanbul to Belgrade and then on to Budapest, and then 24 hours later (this part probably doesn't count, tho) on to Prague. The train cut through Bulgaria, where border guards collected the rest of my hard currency for a "transit visa" (this was 1996) leaving me with nothing but Turkish lira and Czech crowns; when I arrived in Belgrade at midnight, my friend wasn't there. (He had forgotten I was coming, and had left town.) I got back on my train still idling at the station, and convinced the Serbian night crew to let me ride black until the Hungarian border. They did. Once in Hungary, I had to convince the Hungarian night crew to let me stay until Budapest; they did as well, my ticket being my ability to slug homebrew out of a plastic Coke bottle. I only puked once.

3. I love watching adults eating ice cream. It's an activity that instantly sheds years off anyone. I can only eat sorbet; the milk makes me icky.

4. Really not keen on drowning, although it's not really full-blown aquaphobia. I can't swim terribly well, but I can swim OK, as long as my feet can touch something solid, preferably ground. This prevents me from learning how to scuba dive, although I've been told it's freaking awesome.

5. The first language I studied was French, in high school. I also started Russian then too (it was the first-ever country I visited; I was 16) as well as Japanese. That, however, didn't last long. Russian was my major in college; at one point I was fluent, although now I have to think really hard to conjugate verbs. I can speak food and wine French fairly well. I've approached German a bit like a sponge, that is, if there's language around I'll soak it up, but I'm not really actively looking for spills. I fear I have one of those heads that people who claim they don't *get* languages kind of hate. I hear patterns, and more often than not they stick. Perhaps I'm just part parrot.

6. I have a Pavlovian response to certain musical chords, that when I hear them I tear up. It's lame, as this happens at particularly inopportune times, like during a commercial for adult diapers or some such. I'm sure someone's done research on this.

7. I certainly wouldn't have been able to say 10 years ago that when I hit my mid-30s I'd be writing about wine for a living. My resume is certainly schizophrenic. But I think I prefer it that way. A linear path makes for a linear brain. And that's boring.

8. I started reading the travel section when I was about seven years old. There's always been a gypsy in me; I think I got it from my grandfather, who ran away from his family farm in Iowa to San Diego, to join the Navy. I feel no emotional ties to the U.S. as a country. I wish people could wander where they wished, without this damned paper trail and visa nonsense. Berlin is cranky and charming, and has so far treated us fairly well. I still have dreams of a half-dozen pieds-a-terre around the globe, to share with dozens of others who share a similar wanderlust. Who needs furniture and mortgages?

And, lo, perhaps the Fairfax crew and our favorite SF shutterbug will take up the baton?

never mock manual labor

I would type more, but I can barely move my fingers. Stuck behind a desk as I usually am, I have renewed appreciation for the world of people who labor for a living. I couldn't move this morning; my fingers are suffering from RSI of the meatpacker kind, from repetitive motions ripping leaves from towering Riesling plants. They give up a fight, but aren't as persistent as the spiders, who like to sprint up arms and wander around necks while you wonder whether it's a nasty on your neck, or just a loose hair.

My time in the fields is up, but the bizzare band of Poles, Turks and Germans I've spent the past 48 hours with get another three weeks, hopefully under the sun, to pick and sweat and fight with eight-legged wildlife. I loved this experience but man, I´m happy to think that come Monday, all I'll have to do to 'get' to work will be roll out of bed. Now, all I really want is a beer.

learning to serf

The trouble about putting your money (or sweat, or tears, or sore muscles) where your mouth is (or has been) is just that -- you've got to do what you've said you were going or wanted to do. So this explains why I'm waking up early tomorrow to train down to Geisenheim to pick Riesling grapes for a Hessian prince. Really. Which makes me a serf, I think, since I'm certainly not getting paid. All in the noble, if not particularly haphazard, pursuit of deeper agricultural knowledge. Or deep mud. Whichever comes first. (Quick weather report check: Yup. The latter.) Underneath all my pre-travel butterflies (I love the travel but the details weigh. Train across country; must rent bicycle; must ride bicycle up large hill to rented room in nearby town; it may rain; must buy poncho; etc.) is a very, very excited city slicker about to do her first nature thingy. Which could lead to other nature thingies, perhaps. (Though maybe not as a serf.) But for now, zum Wohl! I'm off to get dirty and commune with Bacchus. Wish me luck.

tropical depression

Me and Dean, we've been downgraded. Much more fun to throw back a cocktail or twelve and bash up some beach front, than sit sullen in a gray apartment looking at a laptop. But we pay the price for our revelries. My personal Grecian god mourns, here; thing is, I've got to keep sacrificing goats and the odd P'berg child to keep him around, now that the Island Bug has struck. And how could it not? Vitamin D is a more generous drug on the 37th parallel than it is up here on the 53rd; I like the glow such hangovers give. I'm laughing at myself, remembering pre-teen times when I held on, white-knuckled, to the slipping days of summer -- and here I am again, pre-40s, doing the same.

i'll be good

What cobwebs. I was actually happy that summer had disappeared, given the soul-crushing paralysis of deadlines that Must Be Met before we can run away to Vacation, as it's easier to sit at a cluttered desk when it's dreary. But before we pack and bumble along like the rest of the pasty hordes from Northern Europe to coasts of shores and 45 degree temperatures (pasty hordes + inferno heat = exploding marshmallows) Berlin has generously offered another week of summmer (hurrah!) before the rain comes again (boo.)

And everyone was at the Mauer park on Saturday, the kids and the kites and the punks with dogs. A festival for Footbaggers (footbag is apparently a hackysack. I thought it was a sock.) Another festival for progressive women musicians who sing about progressive things. Or something along those lines; John knew about it. (making him more of a progressive woman than me?) Bike vendors tumbled over brat vendors who screamed over independent artists, who scribbled profounds words like, "Capitalism sucks" on postcards, then, uh, sold them to Spanish tourists; just another normal day in the park.

But lest you think Berlin is a hotbed of anarchy and free sausages, think again. The Ordnungsamt was on patrol. Really. There's an "Office for Order," and they have T-shirts to prove it. Two small squadrons poked and prodded the Wiener man for his papers, then stuck it to a bike seller who seemed a bit put-off about the possibility of having to ride 20 bikes away at the same time. The hand-painted sandals seller looked about to bag her wares and run. The patrol thankfully didn't descend Paris-police style, with batons waving (and at least in the Parisian version, fake Gucci bags flying), they politely yet sternly asked for the required dead trees in triplicate. And considering most vendors sell crap wearing nothing more than a fanny pack and a pair of neon-orange running shorts, there was a slim chance of papers being procured.

"Wir kümmern uns um Sauberkeit, Ordnung und Ruhe," or so goes the Ordnungsamt pledge. We scurried away for fear our dusty feets might fall under some prohibited code according to the Ordnungsangelegenheiten. Or, Things that are Just So. So watch it.

grounded

Perhaps there's a technical word for the feeling one gets when too much of a body's recent movement has been mechanical. That somewhat queasy, rocking feeling you get lying in bed following 15 hours of rail-riding; that lighter-than-air, free-fall effect when a plane stumbles over "unexpected" turbulence (because if it was expected, the pilot would avoid it, right?) or claws its way through a take-off while your ears make their way to the back of your head, only to right themselves after a 32,000-foot plummet from heaven to tarmac.

Over the past four weeks I've chalked up some 3,000+ kilometers through four (or five?) different countries, and it just all seems too easy. As super-cool as the TGV can be dashing through thunderstorms at 400kph, it's disorienting, in a sense, to be here and then be there, so quickly. (It might be that the scale of my childhood in California has scrambled my ability to adapt to Europe; 120km from Berlin is another country; 120km from San Francisco is, er, San Jose.)

And so I've grounded myself for a bit. Returned and put on my pj's and sat and read Harry Potter for 24 hours, because, well, that's a good way to ground. While I've always considered myself more gypsy than nester, it is certainly nice to be back home.