January Thoughts
My whiskers detect a woman more beautiful than me at the airport. I study her carefully, half jealousy, half curiosity. I file her away and go back to my book.
A hand politely jolts me awake, two flight attendants are hovering above me. Everyone’s gone, the lights are off. “Oh my gosh! We’re so sorry ma’am, my colleague forgot to check the cabin. She’s new. We didn’t realize you’re still here.” They kindly toss me out of the plane. Three minutes later I’m standing outside on the tarmac shivering, wondering how this is even possible? You can’t just forget people on planes. Next time I’m putting a tiny cat bell around my neck.
Proof of my return to Berlin, randomly took the shot on my way to a meetup. I like how the photo already looked like an old memory the second I took it.
Ever since I got allergies, winter is the best time of the year. Whenever I look out the window and it‘s -1C, I think to myself „Perfect! As God intended.“
A bunch of different parts of me are having a useless disagreement and I’m trying to break up the fight. Everyone back in your cages. I don’t care what you guys decide, I just need to get some sleep.
Sometimes the wisest version of me burns a bridge, and then the dumbest version of me keeps coming back to cry next to it. Or is it the other way around? Some days I can't tell.
I left my bag inside Denns (german Whole Foods) just as the store was about to close up. I’m standing outside their entrance in the freezing cold trying to grab some young employee’s attention. To my surprise, she doesn’t open the sliding doors and just does the universal body language for “I’m tired, what do you want?”. So now I’m playing charades with this stranger, trying to mime an imaginary backpack and desperately pointing towards their bathrooms. She immediately goes to the men’s bathroom. Now I’m offended. She eventually does find it and just drops it on the dirty floor and disappears. I look at it longingly though the glass door, just like the day we first met, hoping we get to go home already.
Henri-Edmond Cross would have probably liked Pinterest. His pink-purple-green color palette almost feels like digital art you’d just casually scroll past on your phone, but it was super unusual for 1896. Not even his friend Paul Signac ever made something that looks straight out of a video game landscape.
All his other paintings feel era appropriate and easy to date, but for some reason he broke the matrix with this one. Maybe we’re all accidentally ahead of our time once in our lives, but we’ll never know.
I can always tell when an investor is visiting our office not by their outfit or latest iPhone model, but by the way they sit on our office couch as if it’s their own living room. No 9 to 5, employed man is ever that relaxed at 1 PM in the afternoon.
The cost of anonymity is that it also strips away a lot of credibility. You realise how much your identity makes your life easier, it gives your words real weight. Without that your character gets examined with a flashlight. I can relate to how offensive that feels sometimes.
I recently read this article about shoemakers that make ballet shoes by hand for prima ballerinas. Most of the blue collar workers have never actually seen any ballet at all. Each ballerina has her shoemaker with his symbol (crown, butterfly) on the bottom of the shoe; she then later scrapes them off so that her competitors can’t see it. You have all these famous dancers who personally show up in limousines to collect their shoes and say thank you, yet in their public life the workers don't exist.
I’ve been looking for a new apartment recently and noticed how messy everyone’s nightstands are, like little art installations. I thought to myself: how can people live like this? Then I went home to check my own nightstand.
My friend asks: Why do you use a metal cup? Are you in prison? (Later edit: the best part of having a metal cup is that you sometimes forget you can’t put it in the microwave. Gift one to your enemies.)
A friend I occasionally meet told me unprovoked that her father is, verbatim, an asshole. And she's not the type to say such things, so it caught me off guard. It still haunts me weeks later, I mean, what a legacy to leave behind. My father is kind and calm and sweet, I tend to assume everyone else's is as well.
People tell me I look younger than I am. I do my best to take it as a compliment.
All of Jørgen Roed’s work has this slight quirkiness to it that I like. Those trees look a bit whimsical to me, like they’re from a children’s book. Maybe I can just borrow this from Kunsthalle and put it in my bedroom, they’d never think to look for it there. I‘d eventually give it back.
