Ruby Stark

On Monday, I came home and went into a cooking frenzy and made spinach and ricotta cannelloni and banana pancakes for my housemates and I. I listened to Bob Dylan and sniffed because of my cold and fended the cats off my pots and pans. As I cooked, I pretended I was making supper for a boy who was waiting patiently in the sitting room and that maybe I would serve him his meal and then give him a blow job.

We sat to eat and it was very lovely.

Since Wednesday, I’ve been out four nights running. I have finally had a week in Berlin where I had nothing planned and was busy. Things have happened under their own momentum.

On Wednesday, I went to see Yeasayer. Natasha and her bloke were there, but I didn’t manage to find them, and I invited Malt, my boss, and forgot I’d invited Cal, and bumped into a guy from work and went with him and Cal for a delicious, greasy fried-mozzarella burger in a punk rock place and then got to the venue and bumped into four other people from work so we were a big gang.

We talked about the first track of the album Cal and I are going to write: The Time I Got Thrown Out of The Lesbian Bookshop/The Lesbians Said No. Malt talked about a visit to Kit Kat Club, and so we were able to name track two: I Went to a Sex Club With a Gynecologist.

I wrapped myself up in Malt’s attention, snuggling into his alpha maleness. He is tall, and has an arresting way of towering over me and looking down into my eyes with a half-mocking, half-tender expression on his face.

We watched the gig. I was completely carried away by their rendition of I Remember as the singer’s voice echoed up high high in the rafters. Malt put his hands under my arms and momentarily lifted me up so I could see what his view of the band was like. I am starting to feel that two-people-revolving-around-each-other-within-a-group feeling. I am starting to feel that luxuriation in his company that I feel with Dusk and my closest boy friends from University.

After the gig, Cal, I and four others from work set out into the night. We hiked across a large barren area around the gig venue that felt like no man’s land, like machine gun fire was about to burst out from the darkness. We surged along, a happy gang, laughing and talking and shouting. We got to the bar and I spoke at length about pop music to one guy, and about online-dating to another girl. We drank beer and talked about the Bible and places we’ve lived and drug-dealers and the German language. The beer went down easy and, suddenly, it was two a.m. so I picked up and walked home along the wide, deserted, still, crisp streets listening to I Remember which goes, “You’re stuck in my mind. All the time.” I reached a cross-roads and stood in the middle of the street and looked down at the stillness in all four directions. I got to my apartment building and leaned against the wall to finish my cigarette, and my head flushed with the beer and smoke and filled with happiness and my smile was so wide and I couldn’t help but laugh.

I came inside and wrote all this to Cat, ending with, “I wish I could lie down with you and whisper all this in your ear.”

On Thursday, Dust came for lunch at work. I met him a while ago on the organising committee of those unconferences I was involved with in London. He looks very like Dusk: same smile, same colour hair, same shape of face, and I think my attraction to him is at least partially owing to that. Anyway, he, Malt and I talked about our jobs and it was good.

A little later, Dust asked me if I wanted to go to see Alice in Wonderland with him and a friend. I had put on a dress that morning, chiefly for Dust’s and Malt’s benefit. I now walked to the cinema in it, freezing fucking cold. We sat on a wall like a group of kids slumped on the pavement while Dust and his friend smoked a spliff, then went in. The film was terrible. We went to a Turkish place afterwards and I ate a falafel sandwich and then I walked home, yet again basking in the wonder of living in such a central and lively place.

On Friday night, I went for some drinks with people from work. We drank in a Russian place and cracked coding jokes (from fist import pain) and talked about Wally’s old job as a theatre technician (or, honk, a person with no special skills – “OK, I’m going to need three honks to set up this lighting rig”). We laughed a lot and drank a lot and talked about Dark Star and John Carpenter and the third song, Just Call Me Hank, on Cal and I’s record. A few of us went onto another bar in Kreuzberg and played table football and I walked home drunk again listening to Between the Buried and Me that I discovered on some geek’s blog.

I slowly recuperated on Saturday, making it out of the house for long enough to buy some food. I went up to Prenslauer Berg for Brown’s extremely genteel, grown-up party. The occasion was the installing of her new sofa that conspicuously lacks a boyfriend to sit on it. I talked to the journos about the dying newspaper industry and drank yet more beer and had a long, jokey conversation and half fell in love with with a pretty, blonde-redhead editor who looks like Lauren Lee Smith.

Malt texted me and said he was at Kottbusser Tor and I yipped excitedly inside and left the party about twelve a.m. On my way out, I walked through Brown’s apartment building and felt like I was in a bombed-out Russian hallway heading out into the unknown.

On the way to the U-Bahn, I thought about and interview I’d read with Al Pacino. He said that when they were making the film, he was in love, for one of the few times in his life. And he would come home from the horribleness and the violence to his girl and they would just be together. It made me wish for that railroadedness, that sanctuary, that marked-out-of-timeness.

Malt picked me up at Kottbusser Tor, and, in an endearingly formal move, held out his hand for me to shake it, and brought me inside. He was there with a very old friend from school, an interesting man who told me about his job as a diplomat, a girl he knows from University, and a third woman who, when I smiled, gave me an astonishingly blank expression that felt like a challenge. Later on, she warmed up a bit.

The bar was upstairs and small, and we were wedged in a corner on stools, surrounded by people and head-nodding techno. After more beer (my tolerance seems to have gone up quite a bit), everyone else left and Malt and I were left alone. We talked my perfect mix of bullshit and serious: his ideas for a terror trombone replacement for the Death Star, my puppy-drowning career and membership in the top 1% of programmers (a running joke), gender politics of the German language and spandex suits. We leant against each other, my legs tucked against his, laughing close and lovely.

Then, the conversation took an alarming and baffling turn. I began on a dissertation about why I think Rails is much better than TurboGears and he attacked my arguments, speaking in a tone of voice that bordered on angry. We vigourously debated the points for a while, and he trotted out the old argument about it not being OK to trust €XX million of the company’s business to default configs. I felt anger rising inside me at the feting of the earning of money. I wondered whether I was talking myself out of a job, and thought I didn’t much care if I was. Fortunately, we were able to get back on track, and had a good laugh again.

We left the bar about five a.m. and I walked home.

I came home from work knowing I needed to do some blasted laundry. I took off all my clothes, packed everything up, slung my bags over my shoulders, set out and lit a cigarette. I bought my disposable lighter when I left England and have had it with me ever since. I don’t keep track, but this is the longest I can remember keeping a lighter.

I sloped through the snow, the bounce of my bags making me feel like a soldier, like Matt Damon in Saving Private Ryan when he says he is going to stay with his company and steps up onto a pile of sandbags and then drops over onto the ground on the other side with a whump and a jangling of gear.

I got to the launderette. All the machines have names and I opened up faithful old Herta and put my clothes in and set her going. I now sit, listening to Sunset Rubdown’s The Ballad of Little Lord and thinking about my Clojure mp3 crawler.

I worked on it all last night, bar a break to make supper and talk to Cat (she sent me a Valentine’s card with a picture of the Queen of Hearts). Usually, I would have rounded off the evening with a bit of a film, or some internet, but I just went straight to bed.

There are certain activities that give me a lasting glow of fulfillment and happiness, but if I do only them, I feel rushed and frenetic. In fact, I could order them from most glowy to most default: going out, volunteering or doing activist stuff, spending time with my friends, spending time with my family, cooking, coding, reading, blogging, making music, going on the internet, watching films, playing video games.

What if i were to only do activities high on that list? Always be producing or setting up potential or creating? I’ve toyed before with the idea of stopping my consumption of entertainment, and that is just a cruder version of this new idea. I wonder if I could do it. Certainly, if I look back at the happiest times of my life, I was spending a lot of my time on activities high up the list.

I woke this morning, aged 29, and felt the hitch in my stomach of another year gone. But, I consoled myself that every day is bonus time, now. It’s hard to live and always keep that in mind, but I try.

I lay around with a slight hangover, then got down to my third attempt to get started with Clojure. When I think of the language, I get a little excited squall in my tummy: possibility, new modes of expression, new discoveries. However, after a day of struggling with classpaths and jars and bash scripts, I was nowhere.

I made a lasagne and watched Dead Ringers, a film about two identical twin brothers who share women and share a gynecological practice. It wasn’t very enjoyable, but the creepiness has stayed with me: the medical instruments, the red surgical gowns, the blue light.

I went out to a bar in Friedrichshain to see an ensemble folk rock band. I bought a beer and asked the barman, Wie vier hour ist das concert? and got back something I didn’t understand and a regretful smile, which I took to mean the gig had been cancelled. I drank my beer and then walked home in the snow. I got back and attacked the classpaths again and finally cracked it. So, I can actually put a library in the right place, include it and call functions from it. Now, I need to actually learn the language.

Yesterday, after I got home, I deployed the dongle I’d bought and sucked down great lungfuls of internet. I did a ton of research about squats, queer stuff and volks (people’s kitchens that serve cheap, nutritious meals). Then, I discovered that my computer had started flaking out: the system preferences and terminal were fucked, and finally it would not boot up. Two complete erase and reinstalls later, I had a working computer and a strong suspicion that the dongle software was poisonous. Thus, I had no internet again.

Today was not great. I set out to buy some food and discovered that most shops in Germany are closed on Sundays. I then waited in for the landlords to come round and mend the internet. They arrived about seven p.m. and failed. They will return tomorrow to try again. I feel completely cut off without the internet. It’s hard to research Berlin, to talk to my friends and family in England.

I have planned out a walk that will take me from Kreuzkölln – the informal name for the area populated by exiles from Kreuzberg’s gentrification – to the Yellow Sunshine vegetarian cafe on Wienerstr. to the area between Kottlier Bhf. and the river Spree where there are reputedly lots of squats and punks.

I’ve been listening to Deerhoof, Des Ark and Dear and the Headlights.

I got the job. I start in Februrary.

This evening, I sat in the bath. My laptop was on the deployed ironing board and, after a few minutes of waiting while the water filled, with Brokeback Mountain paused, the screen went off. The room was dark and I remembered that, last winter, I had a lot of baths in the dark, and usually without a film. I’d just sit in the really hot water as the sweat gathered on my forehead and let me sweep my fringe up and sideways into a quiff, and I’d think. I can’t really remember whether it was a happy time or a sad time, but the memory feels nice.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Berlin for a job interview with a very cool music company. I’ll arrive late at night and take a cab across the city to Alexanderplatz, check into my hotel, get some sleep and then interview on Thursday. I won’t have time see Gertrude, my old auxiliary girlfriend musician whom I cheated on Matte with for several months. I won’t even tell her I’m there, because I will probably not get the job and since I was a bit of a dick to Gertrude, there seems no sense in rocking that boat until it needs to be rocked.