Permenant and Pertinent Resi(st)dance

I’m gonn’ be real honest here. It ain’t. Ain’t for anybody’s no good.

i’ll add a moody picture because

That week, I just wasn’t waking up much. Whenever I’m lucid, there is a line of voices screaming in succession at all the things I normally wouldn’t bother to pay attention to. My roommate left the toilet seat up, again. This cat that I had to adopt is now looking at me with a special mixture of docile and alert whenever I walk into the kitchen. I made her a spot with her favourite blanket on the windowsill. Next to the plant pot, we have now stopped protecting from her claws and night activities beyond our knowledge. One time, I went rough on her, and she jetted off my bed where her second favourite blanket is laid on my pillow, to catch her butt-wiping routine at least three times a day, before she twists around and settles down for at least 5 hours long nap. Out of a pathetic, desperate drive to claim revenge on the world, I shut my bedroom door after her.

“To be honest, we are all running away from something.” Lou always sounds cheerful when she offers you a piece of cheap countertop wisdom between her sparkling white teeth, blowing out cheap Späti beer and smoke stench. I didn’t open my mouth to let her in on my disdain. Often, one word makes the world’s difference, my love. Just. Stay quiet. The early spring sun is joyfully setting over the ufer. One can hardly overlook the romantic shade cast over everybody’s luxury-branded life, spreading evenly across the banks, emerging in broken sentences with the perfectly recognisable cadences of coming-to-Berlin-youths who think rebellion is codifiable.

There is no room for cynicism; there is some famous German philosopher who wrote lengthy critiques of cynical reason. I’m sitting in the library of a research institute, feeling inadequate, watching everyone carrying pile after pile of books with reservation notice printed on long sheets sticking out of the first couple of pages, dangling over one side of the towers as they walk past the central hallway from the information desk. Sometimes, someone stands up from their cubicle, walks in extreme slow pace around the shelves with a special blank look on their face, the ones are put on when sinking deep in the world of significance. And I am slowly rinsing my shame one step at a time. The first couple of pages of Colonial Art in Mexico were illuminating since I had, in general, very little knowledge about world history. The library is kind to non-proactive non-researchers such as me; you can just put the books you casually pricked out of the shelves in the open reading area, carefully hiding their amateur titles, though no one hardly pays attention, on the empty shelves where the designated return after read area is clearly marked with arrows and signs in four languages.

It is perhaps the week(s) that will end up in history textbooks for future generations to understand the shifting global climate that led to some drastic events worth remembering and analysing, alluding to the general sense of our inability to “learn” from our shared (past) events. It is becoming more and more pointless to point out the obvious. As I’m losing sense of the severity and seriousness of an event. It is a good thing (perhaps) to live in a time where authority is becoming more and more diffused and less centralised, but one must learn not to let the discomfort in living in prolonged confusion, and uncertainty backfire in grooming something harder, denser and blazingly hotter. It is so hard. I want to curl like that cat that occupies my bed until I really need to nudge her away from my pillow, edging into the early hours of yet another hard-to-bear day.

I had given up on gaining and giving sympathy and opted for a more pitiful way of always focusing on the 30% truth in any joke. My therapist said it is a process of healing from my years of masking as a late-diagnosed autistic person. She is paid. I had to watch out for what I give away for free a bit more carefully since the routine weeks of burnout are, apparently, “not how life is supposed to be”. I sat in the kitchen, semi-listening to my roommate riffing on this band performance we just attended, how their new album’s attempt at proposing ways to “stay optimistic in times like this” is but a cheap, ironic, and total scam resulting from band manager and market pressure. I started drifting mid-sentence and savoured the newly granted freedom I had allowed myself in the face of another person, wondering about the possibility of healthy middles. Though I have no positive evidence to support such assumptions. But wouldn’t it be easier for everybody if we just allowed less frequent social interactions with more dedicated attention? And I’m all for getting rid of the idea of the most special person in your life. I’m sorry, Lou. I’m dreaming of a land where I can give anyone, any stranger, any person, being that I’m encountering, for the first time, for the thousandth time, the same level of affection, attention, respect and support.

This place I used to work struggles for years, between this professional impersonal organization and a more casual, personal approach to education, albeit largely due to familiarity and historical inertia. I’m not sure what is required to address these divides in more nourishing ways for everyone involved. I left exhausted and full of resentment, though in the corner of my heart, it marked a very special space of essential value. This guy, I had a brief human traffic accident with, was telling me this year his students would rise to 160, and he was glad that he got more hours and he would be paid more, but then he was already struggling to give each student their due attention, and useful tutoring when it was “only” 120 people last semester. I was poisoned with hatred when my roommate’s boyfriend told me that he teaches at a university in Zurich, and he earns 200k a year. I know it is also because I really dislike this one roommate who always leaves the toilet seat up, never cleans anything in the common area, and is Dutch. I just really disliked the polite distance they embody when engaging with anything. Now I start to think, perhaps that is also a strategy against burnout, just on the radical opposite of my line of optimization.

Can you be warm yet not personal? I think a lot of people would say yes. Especially the ones who really enjoy hospitality work. But can you not burden someone you’d grown accustomed to because, now you are friends, now you are lovers, now you are the most special person in each other’s world, now you can see each other’s special wounds, joys, thoughts, all the things you kept shuttered away from the “outside” world. The stubborn prejudice that you find so hard to give up on, the ones that you find resonance with your friends, over snarly jokes that you secretly hope they share those 30%, but aren’t really hung up on them? The mutual dissing you routinely engage in, like a button you push to release some pinned-up hatred, is modern urban life accumulating toxins that can only be metabolized in this way? Americans, being the easiest target, even with a first-time stranger in a smoke-filled, grungy bar in Neukölln, especially with Americans who made the move to Berlin a bit earlier than the newbies. Anyone, any profession, any type, any personality, anything can be hated on, with full-blown creativity. My personal favourite is swinging between the cool-platformed, decorative-tatted, openings-frequented, brand managers, and the sneakers-cap-baby-trolley-rolled parents living in Pberg. It is an addiction; it feels so good.

It becomes hard to identify the sources of your dissatisfaction when everything feels coming crashing down. How to distinguish between expectation and respect? I mean, it is all meallable right? If someone didn’t say no, does it make it ok to ask them in the first place? What is the limit of allowance given in each situation? Must we give different allowances to different situations, with different people and being, at different times, in different places? It is funny to watch my hand becoming more and more visibly scarred and bruised as metabolism slows down, though I’d been living more and more carefully as age inevitably binds your limbs tighter to their previous positions and inclinations. But if you resist a cliché, you can grow into another, so is the answer, or experiment lies in always hesitating and always turning to look at the other side? And who is judging the result afterwards, I mean, when you (can) no longer care.