had a 10-hour phone call with steph in san francisco . . . it was one of the best and strangest phone calls i’ve ever had lol

. . . she and i cooked multiple meals during the call!!

UPDATE:

poor nora has to put up with texts like this from me pretty much every day LOL

Yesterday would have been Marlene Dietrich’s 124th birthday. And so saying, I made yet another pilgrimage to her grave at Städtischer Friedhof III cemetery, which is not far from my apartment here in Berlin. My sister came along with me. By the time we got to the cemetery, the grey clouds above hung low and the sidewalks were slicked with sleet. We passed through the iron-wrought gate into a completely empty cemetery.

It was dark as hell in there, what with the cemetery being fortified by a stone wall and canopied by leafless winter trees. Some of the graves had still-lit red candles inside lanterns, the light of which flickered dimly in the darkness like little ghosts.

We made our way to row 34, and there she was:

Upon her tombstone (which reads “Here I stand at the milestones of my days”) and the gravesite before it were pictures and flowers and little mementos. Someone had gifted Marlene her own little lantern with a Christmas candle inside. I have to say: it touched me that so many people had shown up for her birthday, and with the cemetery soon closing for the night and the temperature dropping fast, I figured we were perhaps the final visitors. We stood in silence for a moment and then zigzagged back through the quiet labyrinth of the cemetery in the direction of home.

saw a little dude on the U7 line last night

gego and i chilled all day in a post-christmas stupor . . . then elina the estonian girl, who may as well be a little sister to me, came over and brought me an estonia mug and forced me to go to a restaurant so that i would leave my apartment lol

. . . sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

moby-dick

people often tell me that the sincerity and sensitivity with which i come at the world are good things. every now and then, perhaps out of self-preservation, i am able to convince myself that is true. but truthfully, i am afraid that eventually i am going to be completely annihilated by them LOL