on the art of writing and eating haribo smurfes.

my friend julia told me on skype the other day that i was very funny after i made some sort of clever remark and she burst out laughing. that was nice to hear. i trust her judgment above most; definitely more than my own and lately i have not been feeling very funny. i have not been feeling very ... anything at all really. most days i would prefer to stay in bed and once i am out of bed i would prefer to be back inside or at least have a blanket with me that i can pull over my head. not that there is a good reason for it, because everything is just freakin' fine.

the past month has been rough. while my dad is recovering nicely and i managed to get from feeling freaked out and completely overwhelmed to pretty normal, i now struggle to get from feeling okay to feeling excited. excited about what? well, to tell you the truth i am not picky at the moment, i would like to feel excited about anything really.

yesterday was the first day i was getting somewhat excited about writing again. i didn't exactly have a writer's block, but i was definitely unenthusiastic about writing the last few weeks. but now i had to get down and dirty as i had some assignments long overdue for the travelettes. i found my excitement while writing about the khmer rouge and the killing fields and while that is undoubtedly a bit weird to get excited about, i was happy to have the mojo back. and though it may sound even weirder, i think i wrote one of my best stories yet.

now i feel like all i want to do is write. funny stories, sad stories, fragmented words, coherent dreams. okay, well i don't think i ever had a coherent dream in my life, but you know what i mean. i write right now after too much rosé, i think about sentence structure in the shower, and i felt happiest today when i wrote a little blog post for my company in german. yes, me, happy to write in german! i know it is unheard of, but seeing my fingers fly over a keyboard is the only thing that has brought me some level of positive emotion lately.

i never really told anyone but i was supposed to do nanowrimo in november. that is basically an online program with an online community that anybody can sign up for who has the plan to write a book.

i hate to admit it, but yes, i am one of these bloggers - i want to write a book. there is a handful of people who read all my stories and who keep on telling me that i should write a book. complain to them, but for some silly reason i eventually started to believe it. yeah...i'm a sucker. the only thing that has kept me so far is my own lack of discipline and nothing else. so i thought nanowrimo was the perfect outline to help me get organized and commit to writing 50.000 words in november come rain or shine. well my november came with my dad almost dying and that made me less productive than sunshine and no wind on a saturday afternoon.

i already had had a post planned about my workstation at home. then i adapted and prepared a post showing you my newfound workstation which was a fancy desk at my radisson hotel room. but i realized that all i could manage to do was to eat wiener schnitzel from room service and haribo smurfes and of course wash both down with copious amounts of wine while watching gute zeiten, schlechte zeiten. all i wrote in two weeks was text messages to my sister, my brother, and my three best friends and sometimes even these were copied and pasted.
i wasn't able to do anything else and i felt bad for it. i felt worse for it, because i had signed up and tried and realized i couldn't cope. maybe some people can find an input, an inspiration in absolute misery. i think it would actually be quite great. but that wasn't me. my book wants to be funny and witty and clever. it will need the right kind of light inspiration. seeing as my fingers are flying right now, maybe it needs to be wine fueled, maybe it needs cape town sunshine, and wind that drives me a bit mad.
i am actually not sure yet. but i know it will come when the time is right. till then i will enjoy eating smurfes and just be happy that my dad and i both coped, even when there is no funny story to prove it.

about me.

i recently made the decision that i want to upgrade this blog on a whole lot of levels. but as i mentioned in my last post i am a lazy sock so despite me having a lot of time right now (see, i already did learn to admit – i am not too busy!), not a whole lot has happened yet. add to my general state of mind that i have to pack for a camping trip in desolate wilderness beautiful platbos forest and you will see me in a slight state of panic not conducive to writing or making blog upgrades.

so i decided to do a go-to post for lazy socks bloggers and make a list with random things about myself. under the pretence that it will eventually move into the about me section,  it will thus qualify as part of the upgrading and not be a complete and utter sign of my laziness.

x things, i didn't count how many, about me:

apparently i'm a funny and not only by german standards.

i speak english with an american/german/south african accent. my uncle still calls it my bloody yankee accent but he also calls my motorcycle boots cowboy boots so his americanisms are clearly a bit off.

i like to travel and to come home equally much.

compared to mine, modern family is quite old school, most days i'm okay with that. i have A LOT of cousins and sometimes i number them for easy reference but not necessarily in the order or importance.

i like to drink wine and do yoga equally and together on special occasion. therefore i claim the title queen of wine.

i teach bikram and find that any other forms of yoga are stupid just not for me.

my parents made me take a typing class after school. that was the single most useful thing i ever learned though i hated it at the time and they had to bribe me with mc donald’s lunches.

giraffes are my favourite animals so i tend not to post very many cat pictures. if that is what you came for, sorry.

i have very messy hair. i use de-volumizer and to the demise of most tie my hair up all the time because i end up looking like a baby bear if í don’t.

i was a complete failure in physics. my teacher said i owed him a six-pack for enduring me in his class for a whole semester. i told him this logic could work either way. we called it even and nobody got beer.

i do kiss and tell sometimes. i kiss well and tell good stories too, so just consider yourself flattered if i involve you in either.

as my mind is busy packing for said camping trip i may or may not have forgotten important details about myself. so if you detect something that I missed and you need to know – just ask away, I will answer almost anything. 

Not funny.

So apparently I'm funny. A lot of people tell me after reading my blog. I guess I'm not as funny live. Not sure what this says about me, but I tend to be a glass is half full kinda person so I just take it as a compliment. There is also the usual amount of suspects that pretend to be amazed to find out that I am German. What? A funny German? Never heard of that! It's like an English man with good teeth. (In all fairness I personally know plenty of funny Germans and no English man with good teeth, but I would hate to feed the stereotype.)

These days I am not feeling very funny though. I don't want to constantly mope, but life is just feeling niggly at the moment. Though post-Morocco depression is slowly vanishing, it seems to just have made space for dull, everyday normality. Summer still far away, money from the travel agent of doom still not transferred, and my date request still unfulfilled, except for my aunt mentioning a nice guy Dude, who I will only be able to meet next year and whose real name she can’t remember. Hey Dude, want to go for a drink? Bleh. Can you tell I am having a hard time spicing things up? So I do what any sensible person would do, I drink more, but besides that this statement makes me sound like a true alcoholic, I feel dreadful the next morning with my bikini figure slipping further into the bottle.

The one and only thing that really helps right now is again yoga. Unfortunately not in the comforting, peaceful way, but in the let me kick your ass really hard way. Everything feels more intense than usual in my practice and I often get a simple feeling of well, if I survive this, I can survive anything. Yesterday when I had this thought I almost started to cry. Then we went into camel and it kicked my ass right out of it. Try it – next time you feel like crying for no stupid reason or other – do a camel. The crying I postponed instead for when I was in bed. No idea where it came from, but it actually wasn’t so bad. This morning when I found the tissues and remembered, I couldn’t actually remember what initiated the little outbreak. Oh, well. Sometimes you need to cry and sometimes you need to be kicked in the ass by a camel and if you really lucky the sun might just shine when you wake up.