About a month ago the wood briquettes arrived, and a few weeks after that the winter’s firewood. The prices were good (3.25 per pack for the briquettes and 55 euro per square meter for mixed firewood), and our three meters and 20 packs have all been safely stacked away in Frankenshed. By the Beard. Because according to one of the midwives we met with, I really shouldn’t be lifting more than five kilos (about 10 pounds). That sounds like a shockingly low number to me (and interestingly, the American books on the subject all say that 30 to 40 pounds is fine up to the last trimester), but not wanting to put myself in the hospital for overzealousness, I sat back and let the Beard take care of the moving and hauling. It is a strange feeling, needing to ask for help for all sorts of tasks that I am used to doing by myself. Then again, I was always the kind of person who would drag an enormous peice of furniture by myself for miles before I would take the time to get someone to help. True story.
The last few weeks have seen an unexpected return to summer weather, but in the last few days fall has arrived, the leaves have started to drop, and I swallowed my pride and lit the wood stove for the first time. I like to wait as long as possible to start consuming the season’s ration of wood—especially when I remember that we ran out about three weeks too soon last year. But it was just cold enough that I needed to be overly bundled up to be comfortable inside, and I bit the briquette and lit up. Heating at this time of year is kind of amazing. With ten or fifteen minutes of fire you can get the whole trailer warm for five hours or more.
The wood briquettes, with which I’ve never really heated before, are made of pressed bark. The Wagenplatz down the street has been ordering them for the last few years, and one woman told me that when she throws one of these in the stove at night, she still has hot embers in the morning. What luxury! Since the Beard and I have always heated exclusively with wood (and our wood stoves probably aren’t the most perfect out there), we have never had embers in the morning and have to start our fires from scratch every single day. We figured that this winter, with the baby in the picture, we’d need something to heat with that was going to be a little more convenient. We both refuse to use coal, so here’s crossing fingers, toes, and eyes that the wood briquettes turn out to be as good as promised.
Do you heat with wood? Are your supplies all in for the winter? Have you needed to light up yet this season? (And on the off chance that some parents who live off grid or heat with wood stoves are reading, I’d LOVE to hear about your experiences balancing wood stoves and new borns.)
Nine years ago I was a meat eater who subsisted largely on frozen hamburger patties that I cooked on my George Foreman grill. Later that same year I transitioned into pescatarianism (translation: a vegetarian that eats fish), then later became a vegetarian, a vegan, and finally returned to vegetarianism and then omnivorism (this time without the icky frozen burgers or the Foreman grill). I’ve learned a lot about nutrition and a lot about my body, but the most important conclusion that I’ve come to is that dietary choices are far too loaded and far too complicated to get judgmental or preachy about.
What you eat is intensely personal. You are made of what you eat. You have an intimate relationship with your food. Your food will see parts of your body that you will never glimpse. Your food is the reason you are alive. And every single body is different. Every body can handle some things better than others, or in different quantities, in different combinations, at different times. It is absolutely absurd to start talking about The One True Way when it comes to diet. And yet it seems to be one of humankind’s favorite topics to preach about. These days everybody is trying to sell you their own One True Dietary Way. Well, harumpf!
As you’ve surely noticed, scientists are constantly “proving” that something new is the Best Thing Ever or that something old Is Going to Kill Us All. With that sort of track record I see no reason to trust most of what I read on the subject, and when you stop to consider how easily statistics can be manipulated (or look into who’s paid for a study), well, you can throw a hell of a lot of “science” out the hatch.
There is some scientific evidence that I believe of course. When I hear that you can prevent scurvy by getting enough vitamin C, for example, I believe it because the science to support it has held out for quite a few years and because The Vitamin C Company did not pay for the studies to prove it. In fact, those are two questions I try to ask myself whenever confronted with new scientific evidence. How long has this information been around? And who conducted and paid for the research? (Another question that often comes soon after is how many studies from diverse sources have been conducted on the subject?)
In making my own dietary choices I combine what trustworthy scientific knowledge I can get my hands on (and I love to read about nutritional stuff, even if I can never remember the names of all the nutrients I’ve learned about to tell anyone about later) with my personal experiences with food. Am I right? Am I wrong? There’s no way to really tell for sure, but when I feel great, then I usually assume that I am on the right track. When it comes to choosing between believing my body and believing what a stranger has written on a piece of paper, I usually believe my body, and I think that you should too.
what is real food?
Real foods are whole foods. Foods that have not been industrially processed or fortified or refined. In her book Real Food for Mother and Baby: The Fertility Diet, Eating for Two, and Baby’s First Foods, Nina Planck defines it as follows: “Real food is old and it’s traditional.” What she means is that “real” foods are foods that humans have been eating for thousands (if not millions) of years. Raw diary products, the meat of animals who were not fed strange things like soy feed or bits of other animals, eggs, berries, nuts, leaves, and honey are all “real” food. (I keep putting the “real” in real food in quotations because it seems so ridiculous, almost redundant, to put those two words together. But when I think of what resides between the aisles of the Western world’s supermarkets, I am reminded that the distinction has become necessary. So I’ll cut it out with the quotation marks already.) By “traditional” Planck means foods prepared as humans have been preparing them for thousands of years (for example not pasteurized or powdered, but taken as is or prepared through processes like fermentation), before the intervention of factories.
The concept that eating real foods is good for me feels like a no-brainer. Of course eating an apple I picked or an egg from one of our chickens is better for me than eating something with an ingredient list I can only identify or even pronounce a quarter of. And the fact that thousands of years of human experience has shown us that these foods works makes me feel better than the latest study by Dr. Whoever does, tell you what. The arguments for eating real food appeal both to my logical and my instinctual sides. And they fit well with my growing interest in eating locally, eating organic, and thinking about a diet that could sustain me if all of a sudden the entire industrial complex fell apart humpty-dumpty style and I had to fend for myself. So there you have it: the abridged versions of Nikki’s Thoughts on Food and How My Diet Became What It Is Today, as well as The Reason I Am About to Recommend This Really Neat Book.
real food for mother and baby by nina planck
When I got pregnant my interest in what I was eating and why surged again in a way that it hadn’t since I’d first become a vegetarian. So, spurned on by my interest in whole foods, I ordered a copy of Nina Planck’s book Real Foods for Mother and Baby. And I absolutely loved it. Planck is matter of fact and unapologetic. She’s not finicky about local or organic, but about health and taste. She supports her position with scientific evidence, but she’s open-minded (the book is geared toward a diet including meat, but she always lists options for a vegetarian or a vegan to attempt to get the same nutrients) and very practical (which made me really love her advice about babies’ first foods). And she’s not afraid to admit that she makes exceptions herself—for the occasional pie with white sugar and white flour or a snack for a hungry and disgruntled toddler while out and about, for example.
Her perspective on food and dietary decisions, in fact, sometimes reminded me of my own. Take a look at this passage: “Recently, journalists, foodist, think-tankers, and the classes who chatter have gotten very excited about local and real food. A favorite story line goes something like this. This food is great! But it’s too expensive. And there are too many choices! People are terribly confused. Is organic better than local or the other way round? The same story runs again and again. I recommend you don’t read these articles. Once you have the information you need about food, there is no correct answer. There is only your taste and your point of view. Here’s mine.” I love me a non-fiction author willing to admit that theirs is not The One True Way, that even non-fiction is full of a lot of bias and opinion. And I love her writing style. Here is a book choc full ‘o facts and figures and charts, and it read faster than a sleezey romance novel. Here here, Nina Planck, here here.
Above all, Planck’s message is easy to understand. Unlike most of the dietary advice for pregnant women out there. Most of that advice speaks of numbers of servings of various nutrients and vitamins instead of in concrete language that is easy to understand at a glance. But not Planck. Her advice is some of the most concrete and easy-to-swallow that I have read so far. Take her break down of your needs by trimester: “You have about forty weeks to build a baby. Since we’re all steeped in the language of trimesters, let’s assume it happens in three acts. Your baby’s parts—her tiny liver, lungs, toes—are made of micronutrients called vitamins, so you hardly need to eat anything extra in the first trimester. Just eat well. If that’s difficult, take well-chosen supplements. You baby’s structure—his bone and muscle—are made of calcium and protein, so have plenty of both in the second trimester. You baby’s brain is made of fish, so it’s important to eat plenty of seafood at the end. Of course you’ll want to eat well all the while, and this cartoon of fetal development is certainly oversimplified. It may seem silly at first, but there is logic in it, and it worked for me.”
Many folks, particularly vegan folks, do not like Nina Planck. This is in large part due to an article she wrote for the New York Times a while back about a vegan couple who, having decided to feed their baby exclusively on soy milk, wound up with a dead baby. Planck wrote about why soy milk isn’t an awesome choice of baby food and how it is tragic that the parents didn’t have that information. Then her editor gave the article an offensively reactionary title along the lines of “Stupid Fucking Vegans Kill Baby with Soy Milk,” and vegans everywhere started cursing her name. But Planck addresses the issue (both of the article and of soy as a first food for babes) in Real Food for Mother and Baby quite adroitly and having experienced the meddling of editors myself, I for one am prepared to forgive her and order all the other books she’s ever written.
I posted the first “dumpster find of the week” blog in March of last year. What started as a post to show off a mother load of old wooden boxes that we had found (that I later turned into Frankenshed) became the (almost) weekly series that you know, and maybe even love.
But why bother? Why parade random objects before your eyes on a weekly basis? I’ve never stopped to explain the whys and wherefores, and I thought, well, no time like the present. With all this parading of objects, it seemed like it might be easy to get the wrong idea, the idea that this whole dumpster diving thing is more about materialism than anything else. And it is about objects in so far as dumpsters are full of objects that can help you out. But! Lo! It is so much more.
I show you pictures of dumpster dived objects every week because I want you to know what it is possible to find in the trash. I want you—whoever you are, however you live, and whatever you do with your time—to know that almost everything you need can be obtained without money. I want you to know that the silver lining to the dark cloud of living in an incredibly wasteful time and place is that you can feed yourself, clothe yourself, and shelter yourself by dumpster diving and scavenging, that even if society has disowned you or pushed you right over the edge you can live like a queen on the scraps.
I want you to know that you could work less if you satisfied some of your material needs and desires through objects scavenged rather than purchased. And I really, really want everyone to know that dumpster diving and trash picking are nothing to ever be ashamed about or embarassed of. Don’t wrinkle your nose at the lady rooting through the trash. That lady is you in another set of circumstances.
One of my favorite quotes on the subject of dumpster diving comes from the CrimethInc book Recipes for Disaster. “Burdens lift and scarcity is averted when the mountains of trash produced by this insane society become supplies and sustenance. Everything that sucks about capitalism is inverted when the dumpster diver scores. Poverty becomes abundance. Loss becomes gain. Despair becomes hope.” Glory glory hallelujah.
Once upon a time when I was an English teacher I had a lot of German students intent on mastering small talk. So we would practice talking about nothing. “How’s the weather been lately?” I would ask them in a role play. They would respond, and ask me about my family. What they needed to practice wasn’t so much the English itself, but the art of pointless conversation. Which meaningless subjects were appropriate? Which subjects were taboo? And why the hell would anyone want to waste ten minutes talking about nothing in the first place? It’s a concept a lot of Germans just can’t wrap their heads around.
With the students most intent on practicing small talk, I would start each class with ten or fifteen minutes of chatting (most of my classes were one-on-one sessions). What they had done on the weekend, what I had done on the weekend, what we were both planning on doing the following weekend, how horrible the weather was, that sort of thing. Then we would work our way into a variety of other role plays: telephone calls, business meetings, financial reports, or whatever the student needed to practice for their at-work encounters with people of the English-speaking variety. The subject matter of those lessons tended to be bland, but some of the students’ mistakes were priceless.
A long, long time ago I collected some of my favorites, and then forgot to ever post them. So, wa-la, here they are, unveiled for you at long last. I’m not sharing these because I want to make fun of people who make mistakes when speaking a second language. But I have made enough side-splitting mistakes myself to know that the best thing you can hope to get out of a grammatical fumble is a good, long chuckle. And besides, when you’re an expat learning German, it’s nice to see that no matter who is learning what language, mistakes are made and life goes on.
the baby store
“My friend is getting a baby.”
“Is he adopting?” I would usually ask. This one was too common to even warrant a stifled chuckle. You see, in German you use the verb “to get” when talking about having babies, and so of course everybody just translates it directly. At least the first time. “Is he buying it at the store?”
“Uuuh, no.” Then I would remind them of the difference in verb usage, and they would slap their foreheads and never make the mistake again. But it was always a lovely reminder of how arbitrary language can be. Does saying “having a baby” really make any more sense than saying “getting a baby”? Well, to my English trained brain, yes. But when you really step back and think about it? No, not at all.
funny because it’s not true
“I am very interesting in reading.” For some reason a lot of German folks have trouble getting the difference between expressing their interests (“I am interested in…”) and loudly advertising their personal charms (“I am interesting”). No matter how many times I heard this I never stopped needing to repress a laugh. Often because the people who said it were anything but.
the cross dresser
Almost every beginning foreign language learner is stressed out at the thought of talking on the phone in his/her adopted language. Calling strangers in any language tends to make me nervous, and I still vividly remember the days when the thought of calling someone auf Deutsch to arrange a ride share made me break out in a cold sweat. (The upside: once you can handle that, you can pretty much handle anything.) So, understandably, a lot of my students wanted to practice the telephone calls they expected to have to make with their English-speaking colleagues, and our teaching books were full of prompts for just this sort of role play.
My prompt to the student: “You are on the phone. Describe yourself to someone you are going to meet at the airport so they can recognize you.”
The answer, from the conservative business man with the suit and the $5,000 watch: “I will be wearing a black dress.”
If only it were true. He might have even been able to pull it off. When I explained his mistake, he was embarrassed, but very happy to have gotten it out of the way in the classroom and not in front of his boss.
new age girl
One of the topics covered in every business-English textbook was “agreeing and disagreeing.” This usually involved a list of potentially controversial conversation topics. I would take one of the topics and make a statement like “war is wrong,” and then the student could practice politely agreeing or disagreeing with what I’d said. One of the topics I particularly enjoyed tackling was vegetarianism. And it also led to another amusing mistake.
Me: “Vegetarianism is a healthy lifestyle choice.”
Student: “I agree. Some of my friends are vegetables.”
Me: “I certainly hope not.” At which point the student looked at me quizzically, and I explained that a vegetarian was a person who didn’t eat meat, while a vegetable was a person who was in a coma and hooked up to machines in the hospital. It’s another one of those mistakes you only make once in your life, an unfortunate fact for the comic relief of English speakers everywhere.
and last but not least
From the überhetero macho business dude with the trophy wife, 2.5 kids, and the sports car obsession during a small talk session: “My boyfriend, and I went skiing this weekend.”
“Really? Well, knowing that you have a wife, I’d guess you might want to phrase that differently. You see, the term ‘boyfriend’ in English always refers to a romantic relationship. Did you mean boyfriend?”
“No no no no no no no no NO!” He looked mildly horrified at what he’d said. “Friend! Friend!”"
One of my favorite things about the German language is that the words for “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” are the same words that you would use for “platonic friend” (and because German nouns are gendered, you get the information about the partner’s gender within the word itself). But it can easily lead to a misunderstanding, both for Germans translating their thoughts into English, and English speakers trying to tell a story about a platonic friend without confusing the point.
And there you have it, another post from the “Nikki cleans out her overflowing blog drafts folder” series.
Want to read more about my adventures teaching English?
See that picture? That’s me feeling all content and at one with the universe (and 20 weeks pregnant). Last week I asked Click Clack Gorilla readers if they would consider buying the Beard and I a cloth diaper from our baby registry. And you responded! So many of you responded! People I have never met in my life! Because you like my blog and my story and my writing! Well, you’ve done it. I’m blushing. I went from worrying that we were going to end up having to fork out a huge chunk of (imaginery) cash (that we don’t have) to get Peanut in environmentally friendly diapers to being totally overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers (and non-strangers, don’t think I’m forgetting you, you’re frickin awesome too, but if we’re friends you probably already know that I think that). I would name you all by names but maybe you are one of the few still maintaining a low internet profile. You know who you are, and I raise my cloth diaper to you.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking into cloth diapers, reading blogs about people’s experiences using them, and browsing various diaper-selling websites lately, and I’ve noticed that they all have one thing in common: cloth diaper brands all have absolutely ridiculous names. Happy Heinys. Rumparooz. FuzziBunz. Bummis. bumGenius. And in Germany, Popolini. (“Popo” or “Po” is the German cutesy word for “butt” or “bum.”) And I have to wonder who it is these companies think they are impressing with these names? (Though I am partial to the name “Happy Heinys” myself.) Just as I have to wonder why baby clothes all have to be printed with cutesy bullshit sayings and pictures. The only people who are going to be enjoying these objects, who are even going to be consciously aware of these objects and their names and patterns, are adults. So why design them as if they’re supposed to please kids? The day someone opens a cloth diaper company called badASS will be a day on which I go shopping.
I’ve also realized something else. I have no fucking clue how to put on an old school cloth diaper. My mom used them, hell, people have been using them for hundreds of years, and I have never once seen someone put one on a baby (by the way, the technical term for “old school diaper” is “prefold,” another fact of which I was not previously aware). So yesterday I watched a youtube instructional video and thought about how sad it is that youtube has become our main purveyor of cultural knowledge. The Beard taught himself how to play banjo using youtube videos. I learned how to put on a cloth diaper.
In another era, this would have been information that we would have learned from our community. In another era, I would have seen people taking care of babies throughout my life because I would have lived with people of all ages, not self-segregated with those of my own age, and I would have already known how to put a baby in a prefold diaper. But now we learn these things from strangers on computer screens. Modern technology sure is good at preventing us from communicating with each other directly. She says as she writes a blog. Case in point.
But I was talking about the baby registry and fawning over your genorosity. We’ve been given 15 diapers, two diaper covers, hemp diaper inserts, two packs of diaper liners, the Dr. Sears Baby Book, and a breast pump. And some of the diapers have glow in the dark skull and crossbones on them! Holy shit. Literally. If there was anything that could make me excited about having to deal with a lot of shit in the near future it was a glow in the dark pirate vessel.
Thing is, we still need a few more (our goal is to collect between two and three dozen to make sure that the washing machine gets a break now and again), so if you’re a Click Clack Gorilla fan and want to support the site, please pretty please click over to our baby registry and buy a cloth diaper for the baby gorilla. Only eleven more diapers to go!
How does my garden grow? Not well, not well. I started out the year with humble goals and reaped even humbler benefits. My very first garden in Mainz was a raging success. Beginners luck? Must have been because every year since some disaster has come between me and a decent harvest. I mean, damn, look at these pictures from the garden I threw together in 2009. We were up to our chins in tomatoes! I ate spinach salads every day! The sage plants I started from seed that year are still alive today!
Alas, the following year things did not bode nearly as well. I bought seeds from the flea market and none of them came up. 2010 was not a Click Clack Garden year.
This year I planned small. I would grow spaghetti squash (which I don’t see around here often, and I miss terribly), nasturtium, arugula, spinach, savoy cabbage, and red beets. Mama Beard gave us lettuce and garlic (both of which died very tragic deaths early in the season), strawberries (still kicking but non-producing), and chives (also still kicking). I decided against planting tomatoes, but got almost 30 volunteers from the unfinished compost that I used to fill most of the garden. But you all know what happened to them.
A week after the tomatoes went, the spaghetti squash plants followed. The arugula was lovely, the red beets were smaller than my pinky nail, and the savoy cabbage and spinach made brief, un-noteworthy appearances just before the nasturtium took over the rest of the garden in a brilliant show of orange and red that made me feel a little better about the loss of almost everything else. The herbs all came back on their own and did well (sage, lemon melissa, mint, oregano). Plants I don’t have to attend to always do come out on top.
RIP, garden, RIP. This week I’ve been working on getting the bed ready for winter—ripping out all of the weeds, mixing in compost, and collecting fallen leaves to cover the bed. The garden might have been a failure, but I did get five spaghetti squash, a basket full of beautiful purple beans (that someone else planted and placed next to my bed), and the red beets and lettuce from a friend’s garden who has been away all summer. In loving memory, a short photo stretch of Click Clack Garden 2011…
In the beginning there was a layer of cardboard, a long battle with a role of chicken wire, and far too many wheelbarrows of compost:
This year I decided against an early start in the greenhouse and went right for the seeds-in-the-ground approach (dumpster dived that little red watering can too):
And now it’s crossed over to jungle, the nasturtium the only surviver in the battle of the best-at-strangulation:
The harvest has been miniscule, but at least it’s been pretty:
New to Click Clack Gorilla? Try one of these on for size…
I learned how to make sauerkraut patties (essentially vegetarian burgers) from the lovely people down at Camp Mainusch. Soon I will use them to take over the world. Once properly aged (hardened) they also make good frisbees/hand grenades. This is also one of the most flexible recipes of all time, and every single one of the ingredients involved is incredibly cheap (plus the flexibility means you can use it to make use of whatever you have around). Once you get the basic idea there is no end to the patty flavors you will be able to make, and sauerkraut is one of the healthiest foods there is. These are instructions for my standard sauerkraut patty.
Ingredients:
>sauerkraut (one or two bags, yes you can purchase sauerkraut in bags, but probably not if you are in America, here in Germany a bag is about 40 cents)
>oats (the amount will depend on how much moisture you’ve got in your patty dough)
>a few pinches of the flour of your choice (optional, but can help with the consistency, I usually leave it out)
>salt/pepper/garlic/spices of choice
>onions (optional, despite their high super-hero factor)
>grated zucchini/carrots/other grate-able veggie (also optional)
>beans or whatever else you have around (lentils, sunflower seeds, quinoa, or crushed nuts all work well)
>your frying oil of choice
Instructions:
Fry the onions and the beans (if using) until the onions are browned and the beans softened. In a large bowl, combine the sauerkraut, grated veggies, onions, beans, and spices (salt, pepper, garlic, and curry paste, if you’re me most of the time) with a few handfuls of oats. Keep adding oats and pinches of flour until the mixture reaches a consistency just sticky enough to form patties that do not fall apart in your hand. Heat up a generous amount of oil in a frying pan and fry patties until browned on both sides, adding oil as necessary. Wa-la! You are finished. Commence to gorge.
Disclaimer: The Beard and I attempted to make these in the United States, but could only find sauerkraut in a can, AND IT WAS AWFUL. So awful that we, dumpster divers both, actually threw away the whole bowl of dough and started again sans kraut. You have been warned. There ain’t no kraut like Kraut kraut.
Further disclaimer: Sauerkraut patties will not actually save your life.
I’ve been cleaning out my shed to make room for the baby carriage—until now parked in a spot where it wasn’t completely covered and was getting hit with leaves and the occasional rain and bird poop—which has meant I’ve been carting things over to the trash across the street. Most of it was stuff I’d gotten there in the first place and, despite my best efforts, hadn’t ultimately found a use for: a rather ugly cabinet, a beautiful wooden box/potential cabinet that I never managed to get open, some stray styrofoam I didn’t end up needing for the insulation.
Last night on my very last trash run I found this:
At first I had been thinking that we wouldn’t really need a car seat. After all we don’t own a vehicle, and we rarely ride in cars. But, then I realized, duh, Black Diamond tour. Because the next time we go on tour little Peanut will be coming with us (along with someone to babysit while we’re on stage). So now that we have the car seat, any one want to give us their seven-seater van?!
And while we’re talking about dumpster-dived kids’ stuff… Almost six months ago I also found this stroller (pictured below), which will be a nice light-weight alternative to the transformer warrier (the thing can fold into so many different shapes it’s ridiculous) carriage that will be Peanut’s main ride.
One of the goals I have in writing this blog is to depict what life in a tiny caravan in an intentional community is like. What is different about living in such a small space? In having a kitchen with no running water? In having to walk outside to go to the bathroom? How is my daily life different living with 17 people? Making decisions in an intentional community? Living next to (and being part of) an autonomous center? It’s too many questions to tackle all at once, but every once in a while I like to describe an average day so that anyone who has never visited a Wagenplatz or lived in an intentional community can try on the glass slippers. For a really detailed description of the ins and outs of life here, you can also read my Marauder’s Guide to Wagenplätze.
It is hard to really depict an average day because my days are all so different. Some days I spend hours wandering around town. Some days I work for a publishing company in Frankfurt (currently from home shaBAM!). Back when I was still allowed to lift things I spent a lot of time doing various projects outside or hauling things to and from the big university trash area a few blocks away. At the moment things are extremely relaxed, and though I really miss working my regular two days a week (I’m down to 4 hours a week at the moment because of some ridiculous bullshit involving getting on the Beard’s insurance policy), I’m enjoying the time it gives me to relax, write, and enjoy the pregnant calm before the baby storm.
so it goes
I wake up around 9 am, and lay in bed contemplating the coming day. A Monday. Hunger eventually drives me out from beneath the covers. The clothes I wore Sunday are hanging on the curtain rod between the closet and bed. I smell them, decide they’ll do, and put them back on, admiring how round my belly has become in the mirror as I do so. On the way out the door I grab the large blue pot (dumpster dived!) I use as a night time chamber pot and empty it in the bushes. Squatting beside the garden I take a piss and remind myself that I really need to get around to clearing out the weeds that have taken over the entire bed.
In my trailer I pour oats in one of my favorite brown bowls (flea market woo!), then cut up an apricot and add it to the mix. I grab a book, an empty cup, and the bowl and head to the kitchen next door—my milk lives in the refridgerator there. With milk in my glass and bowl I walk to the center of the Wagenplatz, close the large umbrella blocking the morning sun from the picnic table, and eat breakfast. I usually mean to read and end up watching the chickens instead.
People walk past on their way to the bathroom trailer and say good morning; others arrive with their own books and coffee and join me at the table. We bullshit and read, read and bullshit. The biggest topic of conversation at the moment is where the Beard and I are going to be able to move our trailers so that we can be away from the noise of the house (that autonomous center I mentioned) when the baby arrives in February. Eventually I get hungry again and head back to my trailer to make lunch and check my e-mail.
Lunch is shredded savoy cabbage fried in butter, two eggs fresh from the chicken coop, and three slices of bacon. I click around the internet while they cook on the single electric plate I use as a stove, then return to the picnic table at the center of the Platz to eat when they are finished. It’s getting hot now so someone puts the shade umbrella back up, and I head back into the cool of my trailer to write for a few hours.
The dishes are piling up, and my sense of smell remains too intense for any sort of jungle rot, so I let the dirty plates distract me and head back outside to grab the large metal bowl hanging on the outside wall and fill it up with hot water in the house kitchen. I carry it back to my trailer where I put on an audio book and wash the dirty dishes. Once clean, I lay them out to air dry on top of some (dumpster dived!) dish rags spread out on the counter. I empty out the water in the bushes (don’t worry, I buy dish soap designed for this, not chemical bomb soap) and hang the bowl back on the hook on the outside wall. Something still smells funny in the kitchen, so I light a candle and sit back down at the computer. The windows and door are thrown wide open all day.
After another few hours I’m getting hungry again, so I hop on my bike and head to the next bakery to pick up some bread. In a little over five minutes I’m packing paper sacks of wheat and pretzel rolls into my backpack and splurging on am 80 cent donut. I’m still looking for a German donut that has actually earned that title. I stop at the supermarket on the way home to pick up olive oil and more apricots. I want to buy everything in the produce aisle, but convince myself that, yes, I will go dumpster diving tonight god damn it, and I don’t need to spend money on all this food. At home I eat, read, and write some more. I’ve been feeling the baby kicking off and on all day.
When I start getting tired I wipe down the counter with water and vinegar and haul my laptop into the other trailer. The Beard is on tour in Switzerland right now, and the enormous bed feels empty without him. When he’s around we usually read or watch an episode of the Simpsons before bed, but tonight I’m writing and piddling around on the internet instead. Someone knocks on the door and—holy shit—two musician friends from England who I thought maybe weren’t coming after all have just arrived. We chat and they head back to their van to cook dinner and relax, and I head back into the trailer to finish what I’m working on. I brush my teeth, spitting the foam out the front door and onto the stumps we use as steps, and ask myself: Will I go dumpster diving tonight?
Did you know that today is reunification day in Germany? Ho-fucking-hum. I’m out of olive oil and all the stores are closed. Is Germany a better place now that it’s one instead of two? I couldn’t tell you. I can tell you this: there are very few holidays that interest me and now that I live in a country where most of those don’t even exist I have slid further down the spiral of holiday apathy. I would like it if Germany got more into Halloween though, and they do give Christmas an alcohol-infused flair that can be quite pleasant.
The weekend found me on the road with the Beard’s newest musical project (Gorgor Noisid) for their first two shows (Cologne and Frankfurt). I had been mildly worried that I would be passed out in a corner come ten o’clock (when I’m usually passed out in my bed at home), but this must be the good part of the pregnancy because I managed to stay up until two and midnight respectively without flinching. I hadn’t been to a concert in a long, long while. You see, the thing about the smoking debate amongst radicals in Germany is that there is no smoking debate. Radical venues and autonomous spaces are almost unanimously smoking locations. Yes, the smoking ban has arrived in Germany, but what the law dictates has never played a large role in the decisions of autonomous spaces.
I don’t enjoy the smell of cigarette smoke on the best (or most unpregnant) of days, but the potential risk to the Peanut from second-hand smoke has meant that I hadn’t been to a concert since the last time we played with Black Diamond. Then two weeks ago Scissors suggested we make one of the Mainusch concerts smoke-free so that I could come. I don’t like asking people to go out of their way for me, but I wanted to see the concert, so hell, why not? Though a smoke-free Mainusch meant an empty Mainusch between (and before and after) bands, it was pretty sweet to be able to hang out again and see some live music.
In Cologne the show was at the AZ I featured pictures of after we played there with Black Diamond this summer. We had played an early-evening show in the courtyard out back, but this time the show was in the basement. And it was a non-smoking place! Halle-fucking-lulah, I said. And then everyone smoked inside anyway, and the Beard and I spent the rest of the evening hanging out on the steps outside. Which was no big loss because, awesome as Grrzzz are (crusty disco dance music!) I probably would have just watched them from the couch anyway.
In Frankfurt I had expected to have to sit outside for the show: it would be held in the dank, moldy Ex cellar in a city (so I was told afterwards) known for it’s ornery smokers. But my friends didn’t want me to sit outside by myself while the bands played, so they spread the word that the concert room would be a non-smoking area. This is what I love about radical communities. It is usually really important to everybody to make sure that no one is excluded because of a situational thing that can be compromised on. But alas, it came to words with one smoker who was incredibly perplexed and irritated at being asked to put out his cigarette in the concert room.
“If you’re pregnant, why are you even here?” That was his first question. Gosh, you’re right! *Smacks head.* I should be at home in front of the stove where I belong! Pregnant women really shouldn’t leave the house. Or attempt to have any semblance of a normal life. Or to ask people to not smoke for 30 minutes so that they can watch their friends make music. The nerve! Unfortunately I am never witty or biting or particularly articulate in situations like these, and I left it at a simple, “Should I not be allowed to see my friend’s concert because I’m pregnant?!”
He thought about that for a little while, then, when the room was briefly silent between songs, leaned toward me again. “You can’t be in a room full of smoke because of the baby, but you can be in a room this loud?” He gave me a look that said “check mate, asshole.” I furrowed my brow. “Umm, smoke has been proven to cause damage to unborn children, whereas loud music can’t harm them because of the amniotic fluid.” I’ve done a lot of research on the subject. I’ve talked to a midwife about it. Had he? I doubt it. But by the end of my sentence the next song had begun, and he didn’t hear me.
