In the daylight hours there is too much to do to write to you, dear readers. And at night, well at night there is also too much too do. Lately I have little more than a few sentences and pictures to offer you. Despite the snow Saturday, it is Spring. Things Are Happening. It Is Beautiful.

friday

My muscles ached from carrying meter-long stumps, still heavy will water.

The wind had ripped several trees out of the ground in the courtyard across the street, and the chainsaws of the university’s grounds people got the rest.

I stalked the construction site entrance for hours before I saw someone who I could talk to. The person I found was Gregor, dressed in red overalls. “Those stumps lying back behind the building, can I have them?” I asked through the grid of construction-site fencing.

His German was hard to understand, accented with Polish sounds, or maybe Russian. He would ask his boss, he told me, and come by later to let me know. I assumed I would never see him again.

A month ago some univer- sity people felled a tree across the street. They needed room for their metal construction-office cont- ainers, now piled two high in the place of grass and tree. When we asked about the tree stumps they told us that, no *snort of disdain*, we couldn’t have them. Then they shredded them into mulch and threw it all away.

But Man in Red did come back later, and he had good news. “You can have all the wood you can carry. Tomorrow we put it all in a container. Trash, you understand?”

I nodded, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the thought of free heat. He took a step closer to me, “You live over there?” He pointed toward the wagenplatz.

“Yup.”

“You live with other people? ”

“Umm, there are about fifteen of us, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No, no, women.” I was beginning to guess what he was getting at. I had hoped he wasn’t going to go there. There is a certain kind of man who assumes any favor he does for a woman should be rewarded with sex. A lift offered on Craig’s List, a drink, or talking to the boss about giving away some trash from the construction site; the details of the favor are irrelevant. “Women, you understand? You know, brothel? Brothel.”

“No.” I was not in the mood for this conversation. I am never in the mood for this conversation.

“But you, you live alone?”

“I live with my husband,” I told him dryly. (Ha! Husband! It is hard to say that word with a straight face.)

“But other women?”

“Sorry, no idea what you’re talking about. But hey, listen, I’m going to go start hauling wood then. Thanks a lot for talking to your boss. I’ll see you around.”

I hauled one load in a tiny hand-cart before getting The Doctor and the tractor for the rest. (I wish I was an ant.) Man in Red came out on the balcony of the building they are emptying to watch. I waved. Eight more men emptied onto the two neighboring balconies and lit cigarettes, leering.

“I feel like we’re in the zoo.” We started loading stumps onto the trailer while the balcony men yelled to others who were cutting down a tree behind the tractor.

A burst of laughed came from above. The Doctor speaks a little Polish. “They just said something about whores, I caught the words whore and work,” she told me across the birch stump we were carrying.

“Construction workers certainly are good at reinforcing their own stereotypes.”

There were at least 8 cords of wood for the taking, so we called in reinforcements. As soon as a few men showed up, the balcony men stopped their cat-calling and went back inside. If I had a category called “Why I Hate the Patriarchy,” this would be one of the many stories filed in it.

The good news, however, is that we hauled wood for hours (results pictured here) and haven’t even managed the half of it. And in three years it’ll be ripe (re: dry enough) for burning, and we’ll have enough wood to heat several community wagons for the entire winter.

There used to be a small wagon between the red wagon and the spot where my future wagon will be. We call it “the suitcase.” A few days ago we moved it to another part of the wagenplatz.

Before:

After:

Where did all that space come from? The suitcase is small, three meters, tops, yet now, now! I look around and my eyes fill with the garden that will, in a couple of months, have taken the suitcase’s place.

Energy is seeping back into all of our bones. Around the wagenplatz it feels like everyone is getting ready for a big party, and the party is spring.

All of us, more or less, are avid pickers of trash. So throughout the year we end up with a lot of random stuff. Some of it becomes useful, some of it gets built into our wagons, and some of it ends up rotting outside, unprepared for a life with Weather.

Come spring we start rounding up the stray bits and pieces and tossing them onto the bonfire pile. We rake leaves and bottle caps into the bushes, and wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of un-burnable junk gets rolled across the street to the Sperrmüll (re: “big trash”) collection point.

Even though it’s still frosting, is still jacket and gloves weather, I spend every day outside working on something, and the world feels friendly, big, and full of opportunity.

The bonfire pile (it might look small in the photo, but it is almost as tall as I am):

Some day, just before the end of the world, but years after I’ve left this job and moved on, I’ll tell you all about that time when I worked at a publishing house in Frankfurt. For now however, I’d rather not give anyone an excuse to get their panties in a bunch, so I’ll let you jump to your own conclusions with a few vague winks and nods.

New job day one: Umm… What?

New job day two: Well then, why not? Sweet.

Enter “Weekend.”

Fin.

And now for something completely different.

Money. The blessing and the curse. The more money that I have, the more it stresses me out. When you have no money there’s no reason to spend any time thinking about it. If rent and food are covered regardless (here I can always pay later, and you guys all know about the food in the trash), then what’s there to think about? Nothing in the bank, nothing to think about. See what I mean?

When you have it you think about what it would be best to do with it, you beat yourself up for spending it on the wrong things, and suddenly you find yourself noticing when it’s not there anymore.

Money being the societal obsession that it is, it strikes me as strange that a lot of people don’t really talk about it. It’s considered rude in certain company to ask someone how much she makes, or how much he pays for his car or apartment. But why? (Class is the most obvious answer to this question, though perhaps there are many factors.)

When I worked in publishing in the United States, I had to sign an agreement promising I would not talk about my salary with my co-workers. They didn’t tell me why this was necessary, and I assumed it had something to do with preventing mutiny, which meant that they knew there would be a reason to mutiny should people start talking freely about who was making what. They prided themselves on being an employee-friendly organization. Hmm.

Two days ago I asked my boss when I could expect my first paycheck. “Middle of April,” his secretary answered from across the room.

“Would it be possible to get a partial payment beforehand?” I wanted to know. “I have exactly enough money to take the train here for the rest of the month, but that’s it. If you want me to work I at least need to be able to get here.” I said it cheerfully. In another life I think I might have found this admission embarrassing.

Boss-Man laughed, and they arranged to send me a payment for my first two weeks early. Now he probably thinks I’m one of those people who says “I don’t have any money” and mean “I have plenty of money, but don’t feel like spending it on this right now.”

If he didn’t think that, he would have been asking himself how I planned on feeding myself until then. I wish he had asked me. I would have liked to have seen the look on his face when I answered.

You might have noticed that I don’t have a blog roll. This is because I don’t like cluttering up the sidebar with lists, and in a weird social-anxiety sort of way, I always felt like I couldn’t keep up with returning the favor to all the nice people who have blog rolled me.

But since I still want to promote all the bad-ass people writing good things on the internet, I thought I’d give you a blog roll in a post, and award my favorite bloggers with honorary gorilla-dom. Oh and, not to be forgotten, the legalese: I am not responsible for any content on any of the websites listed below, duh.

ten blogs preferred by gorillas everywhere

Ecowhore // This is my favorite blog on the whole wide internets. But! It is subscription-only, so go read her previous blog Hobo Stripper for a taste of the stripping/living in a van/living in the woods/alaska/diy/rewilding stories that you can expect from Ecowhore and then subscribe already.

Fish In the Water // Written by a delightful co-possessor of Stewart genetic material (what’s that word? nepotism?), this blog centers around food. Local food, seasonal recipes, starting your own organic farm (which she is in the throes of doing), post-vegan meat and cheese eating, and general gorilla-esque thoughts about life and how it could be lived.

Birds Before the Storm // Steam punk author (Steamy Punk, Mythmakers and Lawbreakers) Magpie writes about “airships, anarchism, etc” and is pretty much the only reason that I had any idea what is going on in the wider world of anarchism and activism. A hundred gorillas to you, Magpie!

I Am Not Afraid of Winter // Author of zines Dirt and Cheese and hunger, love isn’t afraid of winter, of riding freight trains, of hitch hiking across the US, or of writing about all of it. And as far as I know she is the lifelong holder of the infamous prize (that I have just invented): “best metaphor on the internets.”

Periodista Costilla // Katey Sleeveless, endless fountain of creativity, inspiration, and beautiful music and writing, posts occasional updates of her wanderings and doings here.

Love Luck Sabotage // Songs to get executed for. Dirty anti-civ folk. From the author of the now-defunct Rube Vigor.

Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness // Strangers on Strangers: “Strangers is a remarkably tiny collective dedicated to the gift economic practice and the encouragement of alternative culture.” They put out fabulous things like The Super Happy Anarcho-Fun Pages, and you can download lots of fine zines from their website for free.

Urban Scout // This is another rewilding/diy/down-with-empire blog that I was very excited to discover recently. So far it’s like reading things that I could imagine having written myself, except with a different perspective and style. Sweet.

Snarky Tofu // What writing! What adventures! What hilarity! Fucking fantastic travel blog, mostly focusing on Asia.

Lonely Girl Travels // Lauren on Lauren: ” Lauren Quinn is a travel-addicted freelance writer. She’s actually not that lonely, but does love traveling sola. Lauren is not a corporate escapee, reformed 9-5er or English teacher living in Asia—she’s a waitress, poet and former zine maker. Raised in Oakland on punk rock, malt liquor and Marxism-Leninism, Lauren has traveled independently (and once illegally) to over twenty countries across four continents.” Sweet travel writing, and on top of it, Lauren is incredibly kind to me and my writing. Back at you, Lauren.

So there. I hereby present you all with the Gorilla Award. Have a banana, a kiss, and a few of my readers.

Other neat things and people:
Wagendorf: News from all of Germany’s wagenplätze.
Hacked IRL: Hilarious street art.
CrimethInc: People who deserve lots of high fives.
Food Not Bombs: More people who deserve lots of high fives.
Literary Bohemian: Beautiful, beautiful writing. Wow.
Have You Seen This Girl: Another fellow gorilla.
Swift Sparrow Swallow: Yet another fellow gorilla.
Frugal Roo: An insane amount of information about living like a king on no money.
Letters Home: Ex-pat blogging from Hamburg.

Further nepotism:
BTA: Poetry, String Felons’ Tour Diaries, usw.
Soulgasm Records: Release and show (up)dates, if you happen to be in the Baltimore area.
Shattered Wig Press: Long live Normal’s Books and Records, Shattered Wigs, and the nights belonging to them.

If I haven’t managed to get yer website in it, just post it in the comments below. I am weary of copying and pasting links and code, and there is so much interesting shit going on on the internet that it almost gives me hope. Though perhaps what I hope most of all is that some of it lands on paper before the end of the world. Cheers.

What I’ve been doing the last few days is building this, Franken-shed, new home to my winter wood and summer kitchen. From the back (it still needs a few more boards so the rain can’t get in):

I can’t get a good shot from the front (tree and other wagon in the way), so here is a close up of the right side:

This is the kind of building that I like. Chaotic, like putting together a puzzle with a hundred different possible end results. In this case the puzzle pieces were about seven pallets (hauled here in several loads on a hand cart from the enormous university trash corral), two wood shelves (from the across-the-street trash), some beams I found lying around the platz, an old bench, and a bunch of other scraps with origins unbeknownst to me (some dumpstered at the building supply store, some found just lying around). Except for the screws (which I borrowed from a neighbor) and the tools (borrowed from another neighbor), it’s a 100% trash house.

The minute I finished building Franken-shed, a wind storm came and ripped off half of the roof. The now-missing part of the roof had only been temporarily attached because I needed one more piece, and where there were no grommets under the screws there is now no roof at all. (By the by, the grommets that are attached to the remaining side of the roof are beer bottle caps, an idea I was especially proud of having when I discovered that I had no grommets at all.) One piece fell straight down to the pallet floor, but the second piece has disappeared. I imagine myself taking a walk a week from now and discovering it somewhere absurd and improbable, stuck high in a tree somewhere in the next town over.

The wind shook the red wagon all day, a three-story-tall pine has been ripped out of the ground, and there is an enormous garbage can in the middle of the street. As the doors to the trash corral are closed, I like to think the wind picked up and tried to send it to Oz, but settled for building a barricade when it realized taking a paper collection bin all the way to another dimension was much more work than it was worth.

When I walked across the street for my I-start-work-in-two-days shower, I jumped up and down to see if the wind can move my weight. It seemed like it did. I giggled and jumped again and giggled and jumped. Over breakfast this morning Cabbage told me that highways and train stations were closed because of the debris that had blown onto their tracks and lanes.

Have you ever seen those dictionaries in the humor section of the book store titled “Woman-English, English-Woman” (or sometimes Man-Woman, Woman-Man)? On the escalator in the train station several days ago I saw a cardboard cutout advertising one of them from the window of the first-floor bookstore.

A pudgy, middle-aged cardboard man in a Cosby sweater stood holding a copy of Langenscheidt’s “Deutsch-Frau, Frau-Deutsch” dictionary. He was smiling, as if he’d finally been given the key to a lost civilization he’d always wanted to contact, but now knew how to conquer.

Maybe I would find these books mildly amusing—and I do assume that they are meant to be humorous—except for the fact that there is always an entry in them that goes something like this: “no means yes, and yes means no.” You’re supposed to laugh and think things like: “How true! Those crazy women! So passive aggressive! Never saying what they really mean!”

I doubt I need to actually point out to you why this is incredibly fucked up, but I will anyway. 1. It furthers the stereotype that woman aren’t capable of communicating what they want, thus leading to a tendency to not take them seriously, and 2. it furthers the fucked up mindsets of the kind of people who rape and/or abuse other people, because of course that “no” meant “yes!” I mean it must have, that’s what humorous books and television shows have been communicating to me my whole life, and we all know there is some truth to every stereotype!

Blech. Barf. Yack. And the dictionaries about men? They translate almost everything a man could possibly say into “I want to have sex.” Sigh. There is still so far to go, and I think we lost the map.

In the dressing room I removed layer after layer of coats and sweatshirts, and the scent of my sweat and my skin filled the tiny compartment. In context, I don’t smell bad. I like the way I smell, my lover likes the way I smell, and the people who I spend most of my time with smell similarly.

In the context of a store full of formaldehyde out-gassing clothing, however, my scent stands out. I wondered whether the other shoppers in the store could smell me. I wondered if they were offended. I wondered if my smell was capable of giving them the headache that the store smell and perfumed-people smell was giving me. I doubted it.

I shimmied in and out of pants, most too tight or ridiculous to actually buy. I don’t usually sweat much, but the store was hot—the employees were walking around in the T-shirts that had already replaced the sweaters on the racks—and I was dressed for outside temperatures. All this is to say that I started to sweat like I had been jogging, and I started to think about standards of hygiene, sweat, and scents.

Once upon a time I showered everyday, but these days I shower maybe once a week, usually once every two or three. As I gradually stopped showering so obsessively, I started to dislike the penetrating aromas of many soaps and perfumes. There are still some I find pleasant, but it’s an area where I appreciate moderation. Excess gives me a headache, and when a group of people run past me on the track for the sixth time, and I smell only their deodorant and shampoo, then, well, wow.

Back then, I used at least five scented products daily. There was the shower gel, the shampoo, the conditioner, and the shaving gel. After the shower there was lotion, under-arm deodorant, and a spray of perfume on the nape of the neck. Oh, and there was also the mousse I put in my hair when I blew dry it straight. That means some days I used as many as seven. How many do you use?

When I stopped shaving my armpits I also stopped wearing deodorant (I’m not much of a sweater anyway). When I stopped shaving my legs I cut out the shaving gel and the lotion (when I stopped shaving my legs, the skin on them stopped getting dry). Not wanting to carry around a heap of bottles when I went somewhere to shower, I also cut out the conditioner (didn’t need it with shorter hair anyway) and the shower gel and used the same soap for both my skin and my hair. I can’t fathom how much money I’ve saved since.

A story from one of my platz-mates: at the doctor’s office she sat down in the waiting room with a handful of other patients. A woman to her right sniffed a few times and became agitated. “What smells like smoke in here? Do you guys smell that? I think something is burning! Maybe we should tell the nurse.” It was just the scent of wood stove on her clothes, unnoticeable at home, but in the sterile waiting room context it stuck out like two sore thumbs.

Another time I sat outside near the bonfire and listened to two women talk about how irritating it was to always come home from our summer concerts smelling like wood smoke. And I wonder, why is it that Summer Rain, Paris Hilton, or Twilight are more desirable scents than Wood Smoke, My Skin, or Your Hair?

Is advertising to blame? (Absolutely.) Is it “civilized” human’s desire to separate themselves from the animal kingdom? (Very probable.) Is it a puritanical desire to repress the sexual? (Maybe. You can read a blog contemplating that here.) Is it that cities mean living in such high concentrations of people that we are constantly forced to come in close physical contact with people we wouldn’t like (a situation that can become especially unpleasant when crammed together on poorly ventilated public transport) and must shower obsessively to make the situation tolerable? (This is probably what helped advertising get its sticky little fingers in the hygiene product door in the first place.)

When I think about the smell of un-scrubbed skin, I smile, and then I think of something Karlsson once said. Paraphrased, it went something like this: “My theory is that there are so many shitty people in the world because everyone showers too much. Nobody smells the way they actually smell, just like soap and perfume, and they end with a partner they never would have been able to stand being close to otherwise.”

An interesting theory, and though I doubt that the children that come from partners tricked by a delicious perfume could really be so shitty, I do wonder what effect a mismatched scent could have on a relationship’s health. (Though I kind of hope science never manages to wrap its stainless steel claws around. I can see it now, “‘Attraction’ Pheromone, Isolated, Perfume Companies in Bidding War for Patent.”)

In the end I don’t know that it really matters which we choose, but I do think it’s important to ask ourselves why we’ve chosen it.

The last time I scrubbed off all the dirt, a few friends came up to me almost ten hours later, sniffed a few times, and asked me what the hell was going on. “I had an interview.” Ooooh, they said, so that’s why you smell like that. The rest of the time it’s skin, unwashed hair, and wood smoke. Home.

One cup of coffee. Just one. You don’t need to drink anymore, Nikki. One is more than enough.

No matter how often I tell myself this, I still find myself with an empty pot beside me, and weird jittery energy that I don’t want or need. One cup of coffee is just right sitting next to the pile of greens and scrambled neighbor-chicken eggs and toast on my breakfast plate. Just one. So far so good. Today, I think, will be a good day, even if it is raining.

It has reached that dangerous time of year when you can’t come inside without tracking mud all over the place, and you can’t really go outside without a coat, but well actually maybe you could, so you do and one last head cold lurks in your lack of caution.

Although I prefer snow to rain when it’s cold, this rain is welcome, because this rain heralds the coming spring. I can barely wrap my head around the idea that next month I can start planting things in the green house. Every year I find myself shocked that spring really will come again.

This afternoon with my little pink umbrella I will brave the city in the rain because I need to buy a new pair of pants. Yes, buy. Why? Because next week I am starting a job where I actually have to show up at an office twice a week, and I do not own a single pair of pants not patched and/or ripped in several inconvenient places. I think you can probably patch pants in a way that would make them acceptable in an office, but I tend to prefer the obviously patched with the pretty hand screen-printed something-or-other from that band that played here last week/artist friend.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my new employers didn’t seem to mind the pink dreads, so I figure the least I can do is scrape a little of the crust off for those two days a week. As of next week I’ll be the editor man for the website I’ve been blogging for for the last year or two (this one). Indeed.

I have mixed feelings about starting a not-from-home job, but curiosity got me in the end, curiosity and the scent of a new challenge. That and the price of plane tickets that I would very much like to buy for Banjo and I’s epic trip stateside next fall, and for the wedding-celebration I so very much would like to be at in July even though buying so many sets of plane tickets goes against all good reason.

For now, however, I must leave you: the kitchen is unheated, my breakfast plate is empty, my fingers are going numb, and I can’t find my fingerless gloves.

This is part sixteen in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here.

The twins birthday party had been chaotic and exhausting. The entire kindergarten class had been invited and Anna and I spent the evening herding, chasing, and picking up after them. It was more or less just like the birthday parties I’d been to as a kid, except they opened their presents right away, as people brought them, and there were different games.

Schlagtopf (hit the pot) is the only one that I remember now, a ridiculous game in which one person is blindfolded and candy is hidden beneath a small pot somewhere in the room. The blindfolded person is then given a big wooden spoon and crawls around on the floor hitting everything with the spoon until she hits the pot. Everyone else sits around and laughs and gives bad directions about where the pot and the candy are.

Now it was Jens’ birthday, and there was going to be a dinner party. We (we being the younger kids and I) ordered Chinese food, and Janet instructed me to give the kids dinner in front of the tv, to keep them upstairs and away from the guests.

The dining room had been laid out for thirty people, all white table clothes and silver candlesticks. I had forgotten to get something to drink, and when I walked into the kitchen it had been transformed: four women in cartoonish white chef hats were crowded around counter and oven, preparing the meal. This, Janet had told me, is what she had spent so many hours on her computer for in the last month.

Guests started to arrive around the twins’ bedtime. Franci went quietly, but Jo was agitated, aggressive. At the mention of bed he’d started throwing toys, toppling the tiny chairs and table where we would paint and draw on rainy afternoons. I got Franci into her pajamas, and then came back to try to get him to talk.

“Jo, you know I can’t do anything to make you feel better if you don’t explain to me what’s wrong. Will you try to tell me what’s wrong? Even if it’s hard?”

At first he didn’t react, distracted in his attempt to tip the wooden play tent that sat in one corner of the room, all the while making the same crashing, exploding sound effects he made when he was playing with his little metal cars.

I sat down on the bed and watched him, repeating myself every couple of minutes. “Maybe if you told me what was wrong I could help.” Finally he got out a few words.

“I hate them! My parents don’t love me. I’m going to burn down the house and run away with the dog.” Five years old.

He threw himself face down on the bed and pounded his fists against the mattress. I patted his back gently. There was nothing left to topple in the room, and soon I was tucking him in and singing him another goodnight song.