Twelve More Sleeps

The menu was mine—every typographic decision on it—so when Na-Young, my favorite project manager, called to say she was taking me out to Chi Chu as a thank-you, I wasn’t going to turn that down. We ended up four at a corner table in Kreuzberg: me, Na-Young, Thomi, and Basti, drinking mild Nep Moi and staring at the Ohyun Kwon piece hanging on the back wall. The food was genuinely good and the owners had that quality of being warm and slightly eccentric without performing either. Worth it.

Afterward we went to see Wall-E with our intern Susen, arriving twenty minutes late because Berlin’s inner-city traffic had other plans. Didn’t matter. I fell for that little robot immediately—funny and sad and tender all at once, mostly wordless, holding something in you that’s hard to name afterward. Susen, as it turned out, was exactly as chaotic as the night called for, and she steered us to Rosie’s afterward: possibly the most genuinely deranged neighborhood bar I’ve been to, all wrong angles and questionable lighting decisions. The music was good though, and the crowd was real—nobody performing coolness, none of those overdone types who show up at bars to stand there looking expensive.

Twelve sleeps until the move. I’m picking off the logistics one at a time. Phone and internet sorted with Congstar. Mail forwarding goes in Monday. The last thing is green electricity with LichtBlick—Na-Young’s recommendation, the reviews back it up, and there’s a song that pushed me toward it too, though I can’t explain that logic without sounding unhinged. I’m still waiting on Lisa to text me the meter number.

Still haven’t figured out what to do with the walls in the new place. I keep telling myself I’ll think about it properly when I have a free hour. Today might be that day, unless I fall asleep first.