Thinking Out Loud

I was watching the newest episode of Black-ish, a sitcom about a black, American, upper-middle class family with four children and their trials and tribulations. In this episode, the wife discovers Facebook and sets up a dinner at her home with her old college friends, whom she intends to impress at this very dinner with how great her life is. Some of her husband's work friends are also in attendance, and as they linger around in the kitchen drinking Scotch or Whiskey or something the first couple arrives. What follows are two minutes of manly appreciation for the wife having lost a lot of weight (going from "fat" to "phat"), but now looking really good. A bit later in the episode, one of the colleagues comments that the women he sleeps with have all been recently dumped: he waits for the ones with the smeared mascara next to a food truck in front of clubs, so that when they drunkenly and sadly stumble towards a burrito he is there to catch them, so to speak, and tell them that they deserve better, just "not tonight" as he adds.

This may seem just like ordinary sitcom scripting. Haha, the joke is on the drunken, dumped girls. Or the fatties who are now phat. But for all this show could be, this episode just made me angry.
Ask yourself:

• Why is it ok to spend 2 minutes of a 25-minute sitcom on the male description of a female body? 
• Why is the conversation by the colleague not seen as extremely creepy? Irrespective of how drunk a girl or how much she is crying or what she looks like, it should not be ok to imply that any girl is "easy" and does not deserve to be treated respectfully. 

Here, I am not being oversensitive. I am asking you : what is popular culture teaching the next generation of of young people about how to interact with other humans? 

Consider this scenario: a young woman sends the guy she has been dating a text, saying "It has been nice knowing you", and next thing you know he is standing in her bedroom, surprising her, and they have sex. How did he get into her house? How does she not call the police and say a stalker is in her there and instead reacts overjoyed by dropping her panties?

Well, this is a scene from the box office hit 50 Shades of Gray. I realise this is a fictional story. But considering the audience of millions that the books and film(s) have, I cannot help but wonder why women have to regress into these subservient, superficial roles and why society (through portrayals of women in the media) seems to encourage this? 

Dove has been campaigning for years to 'real' women to accept themselves as beautiful. Always tried empowering young girls through its #LikeAGirl campaign, where doing things "like a girl" equals doing it well as opposed to weakly. Beyoncé sings about women being 'flawless' ("I woke up like this"). There are so many women fighting for gender equality, and yet as soon as the word 'feminist' is mentioned people seem to lose their minds. Feminism does not mean that one gender is better than another, feminism wishes to promote the quality of the genders (if that was not clear). I certainly have to read up more specifically into the history and objectives of the various waves of feminism, but that is the central argument: we are all equal. 

Why then, in 2015, is it still a contested idea? Understandably, there are numerous cultures across the world with a strong history of patriarchy that is hard to erase. But I think that that is exactly the problem: what is the point in women fighting for equality when men do not do the same? 

I dislike being seen as a strong woman. The reason I believe I can cope with anything, the reason I chose to think that I can do anything, is because there was no one else. There was no man to save me, so the only option was to do it myself. Women are not stronger for having had to fight, for having had to do everything on their own. Women are not intimidating for having opinions, for standing their man (so to speak), for living proudly. Instead of falling into a trap of binary oppositions of gender and strengths/weaknesses, I think one person's belief in him/herself should be encouraging to others to do the same. 

Recently, a friend posted Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TEDTalk We should all be feminists, where she recounts how a friend asked whether she was not afraid that men would find her intimidating. She replied that she had never thought about it, because she had no interest in men that would see her that way. 

I would dare to take it a step further even: rejecting gender stereotypes, we should (idealistically) not be afraid that anyone might find us intimidating, and instead see it as the opportunity to learn from someone who has more knowledge in a particular field than oneself does. 

Don't worry yourself

It snowed. 31 of March and it snowed.
The crocuses had bloomed. I had gone to sunnier places with just a thin leather jacket.
It had become seasonally warm (or what goes for warm in this cold place).
Now this. Still wearing your wintercoat in April is not ok. Really, I cannot handle this drabness much longer. Before, I had complained about the weather being too hot, about the sweat underneath my legs making them stick to leathery surfaces when sitting down, about fearing sunburn and being swallowed by the heat at all times. Now I long for any true heat, not this manufactured air coming from the heater under my window. I want to swelter.

In the meantime, a little Fink goes a long way.

Hazelton

What a lovely day spent walking around the harbour and discussing life.
As I was heading home I noticed everyone walking their dogs, and it made me really miss mine. He has been dead for 3 years already, and yet sometimes I miss his extreme affability and good-naturedness. I miss the thick white hair, the cold black nose and black eyes. I miss the hard skin of his feet and the too-long nails scratching on the wooden floors.

A few years back I impulsively took out Animal Poems (edited by John Hollander), and in it found a poem about an old Cocker Spaniel by Robert Penn Warren that was poignantly beautiful:

Reckoner

One day last week was filled with my people. My far-away people. Somehow it lined up wonderfully and I caught up with various friends and family, hearing about their everyday, chatting about silly and not-so-silly things. These are the moments where I think: hmm, maybe, when the end of this M comes, you should go back. They are all there. You could make something of yourself there.

I should probably get rid of the binary oppositions that I see as 'here' and 'there', as being 'far' or 'near', since they aim at differentiating emotions into clear, definable sets of rules. But this situation is not so clear. It is not so easy. Everything changes, evolves, into a different beast, but the same heart beats at the centre of it all. 

I read Why I’m Moving Back To South Africa by Jonny Steinberg, and could relate very well to some of his reasons for returning to the motherland. South Africa is hands coming from the earth and grounding you, keeping you, irrespective of where you might go. Despite the violence, the corruption, the load shedding, despite everything that is bad and that makes you want to love it less, it always pulls you back in. We leave to build lives in other places, safer places, and yet I feel as though elsewhere it is precisely this safety that frustrates me. 

Of course it is wonderful to walk home by myself at 4 in the morning. Public transport is a blessing. The currency having value equally so. But nothing is risked. Life consists of insuring yourself against the possibility of something bad happening. Everyone has their own hardships to deal with, and I realise that here all I see is the exterior of a house that I did not build, but it seems that people live such comfortable lives. They are afforded the luxury of not having to worry about survival since all the insurances are a bubble wrap for bad times. And yet they still worry, still bicker, still constantly criticize a system that to a foreign eye seems to work despite it being a bureaucratic nightmare. 

Steinberg writes: 

I can take in the washed-out light and the expanse of green and I can feel melancholy or light or get lost in private thoughts. But the people who pass are wafer thin. I cannot imagine who they are. It doesn’t matter enough. There is too little at stake. I am in essence alone.

This is complaining at a higher level, I know this. I know that I am privileged to be able to study here, to receive support from the government, to live unafraid and not be as suspicious of strangers. I know that my friends here are good people; I know that this is a good life. And yet there is an undercurrent of not risking anything. I need risk to know that what I am doing is worth doing. If there is no chance of failure, how will you know to work as hard as possible at something? It is asking "what sort of life is worth living".

 Steinberg concludes:

That is what going home means for me. It is to stand outside myself and watch my bourgeois life prodded and pushed and buffeted around by lives quite unlike my own. It is to surrender myself to a world so much bigger than I am and to the destiny of a nation I cannot control. In this surrender is an expansion, a flowering, of what it means to be alive.

At this moment, I am not returning home. In 6 months, perhaps. Or in 4 years. But at this moment, I also know that not going home is not an option in the search for a life worth living.

(The irony of me posting an ad by an insurance company that exemplifies SA when I complain about Germany being over insured)

Trusty and True

When the tears come I reach out to my mother.
No matter how far away she is, I have never doubted her, never felt alone, never felt like there was an obstacle that I could not face. She is the one to talk me down from the metaphorical ledge.
My mother is magnificent.

Since today is International Women's Day, I thought a bit about practically having been raised solely by impressive women, all with hardships of their own, and all with infinite capacities to love, to share and to support one another.

My Afrikaans grandmother is a very tough nut to crack. She is unyielding, unaffectionate and at times annoyingly unwilling to accept other worldviews beside her own. Then again, she is 86 now, and despite all her flaws she came back when others left. My ouma might fail when it comes to expressing love directly, and yet she tries, in her own way. She multitasks when reading books, she knows how to preserve any kind of fruit, and she can garden like no other. Although I have felt her to be disappointing in her persistence on old ways of thought, it must be crippling to be slipping constantly nearer to dementia. Perhaps when you can't remember if you have eaten it is comforting to remember your own childhood, your deceased husband, the better times of past memories relived in this unmemorable present. As much as her cracks have started showing ever clearer, she has been there, and her tiny, shrunken body crumbles even further when the time for departure arrives. And despite all her mistakes I have no other ouma.

When my ouma went home after a few months of staying with us, our cleaning lady Rosina stepped in. She was a lady in her late 50s/early 60s with patches of white skin that appeared in between the brown. Rosina always arrived dressed very smartly (after having taken the bus and taxi from Shoshanguve for what amounts to two hours if I remember correctly) and she came by twice a week. The highlight was coming home to her mashed potatoes and green beans. When I was still prepubescent she would meet me at the robot and we would walk home together. Rosina must have seen so much of the tiny intricacies and difficulties in our household, and yet I know nothing really of hers. I seem to remember a husband that was no longer present, and her sister's kids playing a role. When I was done with school she retired, and I have not seen her since. Strange (and worthy of closer investigation) how many white children have been raised (in part) by black (or coloured or Indian) women, and then how the children distanced themselves from their caretaker (their surrogate mother even) as soon as they would reach an age where racial division would appear to be socially imperative.

My sister is the fourth impressive woman, even though I think she does not trust her own capabilities at times. Over the years we have had epic fights and disagreements. We have lived separate lives while living in the same house. But she is also the one who drove me around before I had a licence, who let me borrow her ID before I was 18 to get into clubs, who has shared uncomfortable single beds with me whilst travelling, and who has offered advice I actually took. Whereas I will feel brazenly, openly (and often stupidly), my sister has a calmer, more rational demeanor that is hard to shake (although at times I would very much like to shake her until she actually tells me how she feels).

Besides these four admirable women there have been wonderful female friends whose influence I am very grateful for. They are all passionate, intelligent, embracing and I have a great respect for how each of them has faced /is facing the big, unplanned events that make life just a bit harder than it needs to be.

In that spirit, to all the women that have raised me and all the ones that keep enriching my life, I thank you for being phenomenal.

Phenomenal Woman
BY MAYA ANGELOU

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size   
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms,
The span of my hips,   
The stride of my step,   
The curl of my lips.   
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,   
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,   
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.   
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.   
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes,   
And the flash of my teeth,   
The swing in my waist,   
And the joy in my feet.   
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered   
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,   
They say they still can’t see.   
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,   
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.   
I don’t shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.   
When you see me passing,
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my heels,   
The bend of my hair,   
the palm of my hand,   
The need for my care.   
’Cause I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.

The last unicorn

After a while, things aren't exciting anymore.
A routine becomes apparent.
It is just the day-to-day, with people living for the weekend and events planned too far ahead to be exciting, really.

Maybe it is because we moved a lot when I was little, maybe it is just an increased emphasis on mobility and travel by modern society, but my bones are aching to pack my bags again, head out into the unknown.

When I reach that unknown, it is always shit, initially. I remember not having friends the first year we lived in Geneva, and then when I had found some in the second year we moved again. In Mexico City it was a different language and different children, and again I had no friends. Again, it took me a year of stalking my older sister during break time so as not to be alone. Again, when I made friends in the second year we had to leave. But this time was different. Notions of family life changed, everything cracked a little, everything became a little harder than it needed to be. And then, after school, after having found people, I needed to leave, to get out from underneath it all.

The leaving, that is the only constant.
And now, man, now having things seems stupid, having a tiny life seems stupid, having meaningless to-do lists seems stupid. There is no value to this.
So I look at my things, calculate how much they would be worth, imagine where I could sell them and make what I want fit into a suitcase again.

Choice Kingdom

"In late modernity, what it might mean to conceive of oneself as belonging to a nation is an interesting question. Are notions of national belonging based on geographical location, ancestry, race, ethnicity, culture? Are they a construct, the result of social and political structures? Might one hold multiple nationalities or none? Is nationality somehow fixed, set, or, in a modern, cosmopolitan context, is it possible to conceive of nationality as a choice?"

On the occasion of a conference on JM Coetzee in the World in Australia, in her article Is JM Coetzee an 'Australian writer'? The answer could be yes Claire Heaney questions whether Coetzee can still be seen as a South African writer, or whether he has become an Australian, both through his moving there in 2002 and his claim of Australian citizenship in 2006. More than the debate surrounding his work and choice of continent the paragraph quoted above spoke to me (also because it just consists of questions I constantly ask myself).

What does it mean to belong and what is it based on? When I am in Germany, I never feel at home; I can't breathe fully and at times an unknown darkness creeps in, like an octopus whose tentacles insist on wrapping themselves ever tighter around my body and my life. And yet, South Africa is ever so slowly losing what was 'home' about it. My mom lives in a different city now. Turns out my sister is not capable of showing that she cares over long distance.

This moment in time is entirely frustrating. On the one hand I want to build a life somewhere, settle in for a bit, meet up with people where I don't think that the friendship has an expiration date whilst knowing very well that if both don't put in an effort all friendships eventually drift apart. Is there just a small percentage of people who will consistently inquire about the well-being of the important ones in their lives, irrespective of distance? Is it only a special breed that insists on not giving up when the kilometres increase?

I desperately want the life of my choosing, the problem remains that I don't know what to choose. Do I go back, do I make the argument for being close to my mother, close to a few I remain in contact with, close to sunshine, close to mangoes? Or do I plant some roots in the Northern Hemisphere, get a retirement fund, forget about leaving all the time? Do I choose weekend-trips to Zürich and all the places I haven't been before? Do I embrace the possibility of actually wanting to make new friends that last?

More than the question of belonging to a nation, in your twenties the question is simply of belonging when your world is no longer a fixed place.

Colour me in

At the end of Closer Natalie Portman walks down a crowded road in New York in slow(er) motion as The Blower's Daughter by Damien Rice plays. From that moment onward I have been a fan of this man's music. He had not released any new material in years so I never imagined I would get to see him live. But my friend wrote me an email saying that he would be in Zürich and that both of us would miss this show since she was not home and I was in SA. However, he was ON TOUR and would be in Berlin in November. In a somewhat strange situation I joined his mailing list while boarding a plane to Istanbul in Johannesburg (the mailing list people would be able to book tickets a few days earlier and I was certain the show would sell out instantaneously). Then after a few days I waited in front of the only computer in our hostel to buy the tickets. Luckily all the cyberactivity paid off and I reserved two tickets in the third row.

In the end no one could come with me, but in the event's FB group I found another student who also really wanted to go so the two of us met up at the concert and settled in. The show was held at the Admiralspalast, an old theatre with lush red seats and a beautiful ceiling in central Berlin. It was a very mixed crowd, with people from all walks of life attending.

The opening act consisted of two ladies, one from Iceland and one from Sweden, called My Bubba. One of them was wearing black pants with white horses printed on them, so I was already won over. They sang quite softly, wherefore I (and most people in the audience, judging from the occasional 'We can't hear you' shouts) couldn't really hear the lyrics. One song stood out: they only used clapping as 'instrument' (it is called Dogs Laying Around Playing, the video is also rather sweet).

Damien Rice then started 15 minutes late (in Germany! Oh no! The tardiness!). But he made everything so cool: as he was playing his first song people still kept coming in and finding their seats. As he was strumming on his guitar he would say : "Ah fuck, where is seat 17, fuck, sorry" or "I know I am late, but you are realllly late", which made the entire atmosphere of the theatre very intimate and familiar. What follows was the best concert of my life. Just him, the guitar, and a stage show that consisted mainly of different nuances of light and darkness. Sometimes Damien had one spotlight on him, sometimes hundreds of LEDs shone in the background as he was hidden in the blackness. Sometimes we all listened, enraptured, and at other times we all sang along, forming a canon with older hits. Damien would also ask the audience to shout what song they wanted to listen to and would then play well-known and obscure songs, joking in between about his long absence: "You know how you get up, go to work, go to bed and wake up the next day to do it all again? Well, I woke up 7 years later". The concert lasted for more than two hours, and what made it so wonderful was how one got to see a great performer at work. Damien Rice does not need a spectacular stage show or large band or a whole horde of other people on stage to make his presence felt. At times he even sang without the microphone and still the entire theatre was filled with his voice.

After two encores I left to catch the last train home, elated by this performance. Having someone to go to concerts with is great, but in all honesty I was happy to have seen him on my own, because at this concert I never felt alone.

The next day I went for dinner with my father and two others and saw that Damien was playing a secret show at a hotel nearby. Man, I wanted to jump into the nearest metro and head over, but was emotionally bullied into remaining at the restaurant (which was not a great decision, because I simply did not speak for the rest of the evening). Fortunately, the Michelberger Hotel filmed the performance, which is a shorter version of the Admiralspalast concert. Here is the link:

Thunder on the mountain

I am at the university, waiting for the clock to strike 17.00 in order to talk to a man about an upcoming exam. All very exciting. Outside the wind is howling, with trees struggling to remain rooted in this wet earth. In order to concentrate, I am listening to the rain. Not actual rain outside, but a collection of rain sounds on my iPod. The rain sounds drown out the voices of the other students in the common room discussing their various projects, it drowns out where I am and what I somehow still need to do today. The rain sounds mute whomever is snoring in the room at the hostel we booked, they make my roommate watching TV in another room less audible, they surround my head in a space of white noise crafted for thinking and concentrating. 

I wrote to a friend of mine that I wished we could all turn off the social media, our phones and tablets and gadgets, since often they distract us more than they help us. My task app keeps reminding me of tasks that I know I still need to do, making me more nervous and feeling as though I can't accomplish anything. Whatsapp messages, spam emails, FB messages, they all distract. And not because I am actually that popular and receive a lot of messages, but rather because once I have the phone in my hand I will check all social media channels and emerge 30 minutes later wondering what I was even scrolling through. It is making meaningless meaning, continously reposting outdated information to satisfy our desire for constant online stimulation. 

Then again, I am reliant on exactly these media to remain in touch with friends an family in far away places. Without Skype, FB and WhatsApp living far away would mean restricted communication. Perhaps a resolution here is not to give up these media, but to gain controll of them again, to not be reliant on the to maintain contact, to not be a voyeur in the lives of people who could just as well tell me the stories that fit whatever it is they posted on social media. 

20 minutes left. 20 minutes of possibly answering emails, of prepraring for a meeting when I would much rather just be at home already. 

Reminders, Defeats

This year, man, this year.
The days a twisted game of Jenga,
with stacks of bureaucratic paperwork
and nothing really to look forward to.
Alas, this is just what everyone feels like
when big changes
are just around the corner
ready to shout "BOO!"
when you least expect it.

No Rest

2015 gives me great pangs of anxiety before it has even begun. This is perhaps not the right way to start a new year, but what is a new year? Just a change of a date, not the clean slate most purport it to be. Little rays of sunshine in the form of Skype sessions with friends and family interrupt the permanent sensation of panic (that is, in part at least, self-inflicted through my procrastination and weak prioritisation, which goes a bit like this: hmm, we should read those texts. Ja. Let's bake cookies instead and iron the clothes that have been gathering over weeks. Smart move.).

Yesterday I spoke with two friends, both currently in Pretoria, both complaining about the heat and the mosquitoes, both in summery clothes. Then there was me, heater turned up, with a cup of peppermint tea in one hand and an enormous sweater wrapped around my body. We talked as though distance did not exist about the trivial things, the everyday embarrassments and tiny bits of gossip. My one friend was knitting and laughing as I told him about a series of cringe-worthy events from the past week. It was wonderful.

Sons & Daughters

My mother.
My mother makes the best food.
Sometimes she'd make Spätzle, and my sister and I would steal a few noodles before they went into the oven until the cheese melted over them.

Because I found some Spätzle flour in our cupboard (and after the insects-in-flour-scare of the cookies), today I made some. It was easier and quicker than expected, although there were a lot of dishes involved. Spätzle are a Swabian noodle type, originally made by scraping the dough from a wooden board into boiling water where they float to the top when they are done. These days there are Spätzlepressen if you are making a potato kind or Spätzlereiben for the egg-type. I have a Reibe (it looks a bit like a flat grater that attaches to the pot), so I made the egg Spätzle with some added parsley in the dough.

The recipe is quite simple:
One egg for every 100g of Spätlzeflour, plus some water to make the dough more elastic
I used:
300g flour
3 eggs
120ml water
A pinch of grated nutmeg

You need to beat the ingredients together until the dough becomes elastic, quite a task for the arms. After letting the dough rest for 10 minutes, beat it again.
Then use the Spätzlereibe to drop the dough into boiling water.
When the noodles float to the top after a short while, use a ladle to scoop them off.
I then fried an onion and added the Spätzle and some cheese to a pan until the cheese had melted. Some salt and pepper and it's a done deal.

Elastic dough. 

Orange sky

Breakfast of Champions.

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. 

Breakfast Club, Breakfast at Tiffany's, He stayed for Breakfast, Breakfast in Paris...

The list goes on as breakfast becomes a social and cultural institution. People eat in the mornings, simple as that. Or at least grab a muffin and a large coffee on their way to work. On weekends people brunch, Mimosas in hand. 

And yet I am not a fan. Never have been, never will be. When my parents were separating my grandmother came to live with us, and she would have none of my nonsense. Everyone has to eat breakfast, me included. For a while there I ate yesterday's leftovers, preferring pasta to corn flakes or toast. Then I progressed to weetbix, and from there I discovered instant oats, preferably the strawberries & cream flavour. 

Somehow, my grandmother forcing me to eat in the mornings has remained with me, so now I do it without thinking too much about it. The best thing is overnight oats, where you marinate an equal amount of oats (with a tablespoon of linseed) in water or milk (so 1/2 cup of oats in 1/2 cup of milk) the evening before, and the next morning you have a delicious porridge. Add some yoghurt and fresh fruit or compote and boom, it's going to be a good day. 

My other favourite is muesli, the crunchy kind. In store it is superexpensive and has raisins, which I also don't like that much. By comparison, a 500g pack of oats costs 0,39€, so I now make my own muesli. It is easy peasy and you can adapt it as you want (or with whatever you have at home). 

You need: 

- 1/4 cup  honey

- 1/4 cup brown sugar

- 1/4 cup oil

- 3 cups oats

- 1/2 cup bran flakes

- 1/2 cup coconut flakes

- 1/4 cup sesame seeds

- 1/4 cup sunflower seeds

- 1/4 cup finely chopped hazelnuts (or almonds)

Alternatives:

- other nuts

- cranberries

- dried apple

- linseed

1. Preheat your oven to 150°C.

2. Heat the honey, sugar and oil over a medium heat until the sugar is dissolved. 

3. Mix the dry ingredients together before adding the sugar-honey-oil mix. Mix well, ensuring that the oats are evenly coated. 

4. Spread the mixture on greaseproof paper and bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes, stirring one after about 15 minutes. 

5. Let the muesli cool. As it cools it will harden and little muesli clusters will form. 

6. Store in an airtight container. 

Tadaaa. muesli. Easy. 

Don't you worry about it

No one has a clue what they are doing. What the point is. And yet most people pretend at it so well that it intimidates the few who are ready to admit they realise no path is final, no choice set in stone. As a tween I wanted to be a chef, then a marine biologist, then a lawyer. When I started studying, I still had notions of becoming a lawyer. Luckily, what I felt was bad luck intervened at the time and I was presented with a way that I was not even aware of.

2015 is the year of big decisions that weigh heavily on the heart and mind at night. After this place of friendly people, water and small universities, where do I go? What do I do with my stuff? WHAT IS THE PLAN SABINE. And always, always this question, ghost-like behind everything I do: what do you want from your life?

I don't know. I honestly don't know what it is I want.
I want to learn. I want to teach. I want to make it better, not worse.
I want to spend Christmas with my mom and sister. I want to get to know places, not merely travel them. I want a room full of books. I want a dog (or 2) again. I want to smell yesterday, today, tomorrow in spring. I want to have my own space. I want to have things but not be bound to them.
I want to find a place that again feels like home.

Remnants

During December everything seemed to happen at once. I had an additional job working at the Christmas market, suddenly the lecturers at the university decided that we needed to complete everything we hadn't done in the past months in a few days and yet it was the month of Christmas parties and having to be social when all you want to do is sleep for eternity.

I spent the 24-26 at my friend's mother's place in Göttingen where we played boardgames, ate too many cookies and sweet things and hung out by the Christmas tree. As a present I had gotten a very cool cookie cutter, so when my friends came to Flensburg for New Years I had to bake some cookies.

The recipe was for Jamie Dodgers, which I found attached to some Jamie Oliver cookie cutters I had bought earlier:

- 250g softened butter
- 140g icing sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 egg yolk
- 375g flour
- 30g caster sugar (for sprinkling the cookies when they come out of the oven)
 - 170g jam (I used watermelon-strawberry jam that I had made in the summer)

1. Mix the butter and sugar until it is fluff. Add the vanilla and the egg and beat well. Then sift in the flour and work the dough into a ball with your hands. This took a little while because the dough is rather dry. Then cover the dough ball in clingfilm and put it in the fridge for an hour. I left it there overnight and had to let it soften quite a while before it could be rolled out.
2. Turn your oven to 190°C. Prepare 2 baking trays with greaseproof paper or spray 'n cook.
3. Roll out the dough on a floured surface until it is about 3mm thick.
4. Here I multitasked: I used the 'eat-me' cookie cutter to just cut out some plain cookies, and used the other round cookie cutters for the Jamie Dondgers. You need to cut out an even amount of cookies and then Jamie uses a mini cookie cutter to cut a shape in the middle. Since I did not have a mini cutter I just used a knife and attempted to shape little hearts. It worked fine.
5. Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes until they are pale gold, not golden brown.
6. Sprinkle them with the caster sugar and wait for them to cool.
7. Once they have cooled, use the jam to sandwich together the cookies.

And now for the bad news: I had to throw ALLLLLL the cookies away, because I used 'Dinkelmehl' (Spelt flour) and the brown pieces which I had thought to be the actual spelt turned out to be... little insects. So ja. In the end my friends saw the cookies, and then they were quickly dumped in the trash. NOOOOOOO.