Two Years a Transplant

Here’s something I probably should have mentioned sooner: I’m not actually from Berlin. I know. Some of you will need a moment. The rest were going to unsubscribe anyway, so consider this your clean exit.

Two years now since I arrived. And what have I done with them? Work, school, blog, sleep, eat, wander into rooms full of people after midnight. The city unfolds like an RPG from the nineties—district by district, each one a new zone with its own rules and its own ambient weirdness. I’ve been exploring it methodically without meaning to. I haven’t saved any orphans. The dishes are still in the sink. Obama and Angelina are handling the larger humanitarian concerns; I’ve outsourced those.

Third year of my apprenticeship at aperto is coming up. The last round of vocational school with Gulcan and Thomi and a classroom full of pretty girls that someone really should have turned into a TV series. My Japanese course starts soon—I’ve been watching everything with Japanese audio as preparation, which has the side effect of making me sound unhinged when I try to explain what I’m doing. And Nora and I are getting married, which feels like the most Berlin thing I’ve done yet: building something deliberately in a city that usually just happens to you.

I don’t know what the third year looks like beyond the appointments already on the calendar. That’s probably fine. The first two were mostly unplanned and they turned out to be something.