Kaiserschmarn Counts as a Vegetable
German telecom bureaucracy has a particular talent for turning simple things into paperwork. My phone line switched on unexpectedly, which sounds like progress, except they assigned me a new number along with an activation fee, which means my existing DSL contract—held with a different subsidiary of the same company—has no knowledge of the new line. So I sent a fax. Yes, a fax. Processing time: one to fourteen business days, depending on who picks it up. Whether it works at all remains an open question. I’m watching this the way you watch a slow-motion collision—not angry anymore, just curious how it ends.
Being vegetarian is ideologically fine but logistically exhausting when you work in a hospital kitchen. Usually the vegetarian option is the last thing anyone touches, so there’s always something left by the time the rush clears. But yesterday the menu listed Kaiserschmarn—that shredded Austrian dessert pancake dusted with powdered sugar, the kind of thing Bavarians treat as a dietary birthright—and suddenly every single person in the building remembered they were vegetarian. By the time the lunch rush cleared, my options were rice, potatoes, and a bread roll from the morning that had clearly given up on itself. Fantastic.
At least Manu is in the same boat—also meat-free—and he invited a group of us to a barbecue Saturday night at an empty house he’d somehow gotten access to. The place looked like a horror film’s establishing shot: no second floor, a basement that smelled like regret, a swimming pool, and a series of dark hallways where you kept stumbling over couples who’d found a productive use for the darkness. We grilled vegetables and stood around the pool and it was, despite the setting or maybe because of it, a genuinely good night.
Spring is doing what spring does. I’ve been clearing out the grey-weather songs and loading in things that match the light—not that anything I listen to is ever entirely free of that undertow, but at least the tempo has shifted. The sun is out. Close enough.