Ruby Stark

Happiness is a rare thing. I hate thinking of all the times I forced myself to go to bed to avoid being tired for work, even though I was in the middle of working on a project that was making me happy. So, I have resolved to let happiness rule.

I need to be involved with something. I haven’t been involved with a long-term project since the social centre in Northerncity.

I relentlessly find activities and events and things that take me outside the house. But I’m always alone when I am in society.

My idea of making myself unceasingly busy was a partial success. I’ve watched two and a half films in the last ten days. This is an unusually low number, and I was also out on Tuesday (Lisp meetup), Wednesday (Brown for supper) and Thursday (abortive film at a lesbian bookshop). However, I don’t think I’d quite understood the required ingredients: I need gobs of all-evening events every night for days on end, plus the desire to get back to a project or exciting book. I now have the latter: I’m reading Jensen’s Endgame, I’m watching Peepcode screencasts, I’m working on my Clojure mp3-crawler and I’m really excited about trying out Node.js. I’m going to a queer femme show tonight, and meeting Dust for crepes tomorrow lunchtime. But I need more.

Last night, I went to see my friend, Delicate, the one I didn’t realise was still living in Berlin. I knew him in Northerncity. We had supper at his dusty, exposed-plaster walled and wood-floored apartment in Prenslauer Berg. We ate pasta and tomato sauce and talked about when I died and about when he got beaten up and I troughed down some dense, brown, German bread with Parmesan and we talked about how he had a time when he did absolutely nothing: two hours over breakfast, then maybe a walk in the park, lots of thinking.

We walked around his neighbourhood in the snow and melt-water and talked a little about novels that, in the same sentence, zoom into the mundane and earthly and then out to the expansive and sweeping.

I came home on the tram and wrote some Clojure. I thought about a sensation I’ve had before, of experiencing events as they happen through the frame of my blog. Ariel Schrag reported the same thing in Potential. But, that is a cruder version of the way I put it to Cat in my letter to her this evening:

“I sometimes feel this cleaving of experience from events. Like, if something weird happens, or something fun, or something that will make a good story, I think of it in those terms, rather than just revelling in the moment. I almost compose the diary entry as it happens, re-appraise my character in terms of this ‘experience’.”

Tonight, I went out for a drink after work with a couple of colleagues. A girlfriend joined us, and we drank and it felt like a good, laughing night out with people I half click with. We talked about hypothermia and the Rocky films and German customs and Berlin residents and The xx (they played here recently and I missed them, sadly) and freelance graphic design work and dress codes. I idly thought about having sex with the cute girlfriend and the colleague. I ate some truly horrendous noodles drenched in cheese which I am at a loss to even describe. Supper turned into another bar, a kind of art gallery type place with white walls and projections and lots of hipsters. I struck out to another bar with the other colleague and we found ourselves standing in the rain in Kreuzberg, unable to find the place, so I decided it was time for home.