Blood! Gore! Fabulous Accessories!

In case it is not immediately obvious, this post is going to count as Way-TMI-Land to people who don't like hearing about periods. So, you know, read at own risk, etc.

Need something bright & colourful in your life? Then I strongly suggest you take a trip to etsy.com & search for "menstrual pads". Which is what I did this afternoon, and have had my mind blown by all the happy-fun-time-super-joy! coloured & patterned pads. Mushrooms! Polka-dots! Tasteful understated florals! Accessorisation options!

So, I am thinking: it feels like I've moved on enough from The Great Divacup Disaster Of '05, and even the Traumatic Gushing Experiences Of '07 & '08, to consider going eco-friendly with the bleeding again.

I bleed hellishly, and horribly, and frequently in ways that are absolutely incompatible with existing in public while retaining a publically acceptable denial that there is blood gushing forth from my body at an alarming rate. I have been blood-splatter humiliation girl, and oh-holy-shit-I-am-so-sorry-about-your-chair/sheets/carpet girl. I have sprinted down the side streets of Newtown with crimson gushing down my legs, thinking jesus fucking christ it's day 5 this is not fucking fair. And I have been all of these things in my 20's, rather than my teens when I could possibly have brushed it all of as just being clueless (although I was never clueless in my teens- I started bleeding age 10, by 13 I knew what was what, pretty thoroughly). It's just that things got so much dramatically worse around age 24 or so, it was like being caught out as a kid with a brand new bodily function and no idea how to manage it, all over again.

So since the crimson tide became a regular crimson fucking tsunami in my life, I've been a bit busy just trying to figure out how to manage that, and I gave up on the whole eco-friendly bleeding products thing. The Divacup didn't work for me, and I didn't have the time/patience/initial outlay to figure out another solution that also might not work, so back to the hideous, plastic world of disposable things it was. And not just any old disposable things, cos I am beyond the capacities of modern tampon technology. No, it was a sad return to the hideous world of attachable pads. Which are fucking gross, and insanely wasteful, and have glue on them which stick to my pubic hair, and AS IF you need extra eye-watering painful moments in the middle of an eyewateringly painful period!

But, a couple of years later, I feel like I've kind of got it under control. A little bit, at least. I am no longer surprised by the amount I bleed. I have some faint confidence in being able to handle it. And I fucking hate wearing toxic, plastic, irritating imminent-landfill in my knickers. And I have been spending a hell of a lot more of my time with hippies, which means that rad-pads/lunapads/moonrags/whatever are as much a part of the obligatory "Gah I'm Bleeding Offer Me Sympathy" round-tables that happen in all dyke sharehouses (well. All the ones I've ever lived in) as your usual, commercial, disposable options.

So, the obvious conclusion, I would like to invest in a set of cloth pads, and see how they are. And since they are such a fantastic cottage-industry dealio, they are available in about 10,000 variations of shape, layering, construction, size- and of course, fabric. I want one with rockets, and one with tentacles, and quite possibly one on which I will embroider bloody, melodramatic lines from poetry:

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"

Unfortunately I probably won't be able to buy any til I get back to Australia, unless I find a local Berlin craftster making them, because I can't get parcels mailed to my Berlin address. But if anyone Aus-side knows of good non-online suppliers, let me know.

(this lovely illustration comes from Mari-Chan, and features on at least one stylin' lady I know's tampon case)

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Addendum, some time later: I am finding it strange to exist at once in the laissez-fair, anti-shame world of the hippy menstruation crew, which tends towards a particular relaxedness about human blood- natural process, hang onto the pads and chuck them in the wash later, never mind the occasional blood-stains on the sheets, etc- and also in the "I cut people up and put needles in their skin for fun" crew, which is absolutely, obsessively, compulsively strict about the containment & curtailment of blood, once released. The happy-hippy-no-shame part of my brain is all "oh cool, you can get cute 'wet bags' to chuck blood-soaked pads into between washes", and the well-trained blood pervert side of my brain is going "OH MY GOD HOW CAN YOU BE SO RELAXED ABOUT A CUTE ZIP-UP BAG FULL OF HUMAN BLOOD?". I have experienced similar cognitive dissonance in relationships, sometimes: there is When I Am Cutting You Up, which is all latex gloves + sealed containers for anything that becomes bloodied, and then there is when we are on our periods, which is all being mightily relaxed about blood on the sheets & sometimes each other. Hmm.

Introductory German, housemate-style

Using German, and being understood, is one of my greatest (small, beautiful, every-day-life) joys. Week by week the length of the interactions I can have all in German increases (from mere seconds to almost entire minutes at a time!). Not fast enough to satisfy me, and I am burning up to start proper German classes, but the glow of successfully making a purchase, or asking directions, or responding to pleasantries, without needing to switch to English- ah, it's so lovely. If I manage to avoid English for a whole conversation I often get asked if I'm from the Netherlands- apparently, that's what my accent sounds like in German.

I am not in school, and I don't watch the television, so the German I learn comes from: housemates, street signs, overheard conversations, and the Turkish Markets (zwei stuck bitte! Ja, alles!).

Some nights I sit in the kitchen and pester my lovely housemates for more words, more sentences, stringing them together clumsily then practising til I get them right. This being a gigantic political housing project in Berlin, it stands to reason that the sentences I learn are 99% beer & cigarettes. I find these phrases scrawled on ripped-off pieces of paper, tucked into my notebooks and pockets.

I just found the post-it notes with my first housemate-German lesson:
"Kann ich mir von dir eine cigarette drehen?"- Can I roll a cigarette from yours?
"Kanst du mir eine cigarette drehen?"- Can you roll me a cigarette?
"Kann ich hier rauche?"- Can I smoke here? Or the more formal: "Ist es OK fur dich wenn ich hier rauche?"- Is it OK for you if I smoke here?
"Alter, mein tabak!"- Gimme my tobacco back!
And the first phrase of German I learned, on landing here back in 2005: "Hast du feuer?"- the social glue of Berlin, I think, is that simple little phrase.

Tonight we covered:
"Mochtest du bier?"- Would you like beer?
"Mochtest du noch bier?"- Would you like more beer?
"Ich mochte ein bier kaufen"- I'd like to buy a beer
Which morphed into...
"Ich mochte gerne bier kaufen, bitte!" (there was some bickering between housemates about whether one was more correct than the other)
and then a lesson on:
"Ich wurde gerne (something) kaufen"- Ich wurde gerne guthaben kaufen! Ich wurde gerne tomaten kaufen! I want to buy something!

Then we got into wanting things (my spelling goes a bit wobbly here, cos we were well into the bier by now):
"Ich mochte schlafen bitte!"- I'd like to sleep please!
"Ich mochte bitte jetzt schlafen!"- I'd like to sleep now please!
There's some scrawls under that about "schaffen"- to work, build, create, "schaff"- sheep, "scharf"- sharp, "schlaff"- hanging, tired, saggy, which leads directly to:
"Ich fuhle mich schlaff"- I feel saggy! As in, god, I feel wrecked.

And then scharf comes out to play, cos when we really really really want something, we're totally sharp on it:
"Ich bin scharf darauf tanzen zu gehen!"- dude, I am so keen for a dance, you have no idea.
"Ich bin scharf darauf meine haare zu bleichen!" Hell yes my hair needs bleaching!
"Ich bin scharf darauf schwimmen zu gehen!" But it's -2C out, so maybe swimming isn't SUCH a good idea.

For anyone tempted to try to learn German from these transcribed notes, please be aware that there are several dozen crimes against umlauts in the above as I haven't figured out where the umlaut key on my netbook is hiding.

A Bird Released

So life gets cold; it's what happens in Europe when the summer ends and the autumn rolls in. I knew this in theory but to experience it in practice has been enlightening. Within a month of the start of autumn the temperature had fallen from the equivalent of the warmest Sydney summer day, to the coldest Sydney winter night. A shift that takes 6 months in Sydney takes place in weeks here, and then it gets colder, then colder still. It's the pace of the change that is startling, how much more climatic variation is packed into the months than I'm used to.

I spent the first few weeks of the coldest weather freezing, and grumbling, until I eventually sorted myself out. There is strategy and technology for dealing with the cold, stuff I've never had to learn. Stuff about layers, and materials, and adaptability. The entire city starts dressing alike, and it becomes impossible to distinguish individuals at outdoor events, because we are all wearing exactly the same thing: thick trousers, heavy boots, a torso-distorting puffy vest, black coat, flip-top gloves, wool hat, scarf wrapped up and over your face. Gender is impossible to distinguish, body language is muffled: glasses, height and taste in hats become our only identifying features. I become exceedingly popular when I make a hat with detachable, button-on beard, because it serves the twin purposes of keeping my face warm and identifying me in the shapeless crowd.

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After all this time, I write again just to tell you about the weather?

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I was supposed to leave Berlin for Barcelona at 6 o'clock this morning, but I didn't.

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I have been somewhere strange (compared to what?). Long, quiet months watching this beautiful city shift through late summer, autumn, early stages of freezing. Putting off decisions, putting off life. Traveling not as an exuberant hurling outwards of self, no: traveling as a muted, reflective space. I could say 'disconnected', but that would be a lie: there have been connections, strong and beautiful, finding their way to me through miles of cotton-wool vagueness. But mostly there has been me, my own company, sifting and shifting and observing, and sometimes nothing so active- just existing. Me, this city, my bike. Canals and swans and trees changing color up and down the banks. Cobblestones growing slick and slimy beneath growing layers of fallen leaves.

To emerge from that space is a recent surprise. Oh! I think. This is who I am with my volume turned back up again. Here is me with pom-poms in my hands, chants on my lips, swelling with pride at a fearsome squad of queer cheerleaders I somehow helped to create. Here is me on this dancefloor, that grin I forgot I had, these silvershiny stomping boots, a flick of hair and I'd love to buy you a drink. Here is me manning this squat bar in this broken concrete lot, newly occupied space, us in here, the cops out on the street, knowing something about this culture and these people, the ways they (we) live, the things they (we) do. Here is me living, full of life, engaged again. Thank fuck whispers the part of me that has been in some shaky kind of shock since the days before I left Australia.

I find myself beaming at the beauty I am surrounded by. An afternoon spent getting to know a girl and a truck, a city-centre wagonplace with flocks of geese bustling busy through yellow leaves, a tiny perfect hedgehog (igle) in a pile of rusted bike frames.

So. I decide not to leave, not to go so far so soon. I make the equally terrifying decision to stay, for a little while. I have a job, somehow, or at least a little bit of work, and every day of work is another adventure I can afford to have. I want to go places nearer to here (Prague next week, maybe, according to a bubbling and excited conversation in a wood-heated wagon tonight). I want to revel a little bit in this somehow-surprising place I find myself in: Europe, and happy, and alive, and thrilled with it.

Pretty Much Totally Unrelated To Traveling.

Please to enjoy unrelated photo of this pig I embroidered on a hanky.I've been getting a little excited, much to my surprise, about recipes for home-made vegan cheeses. I think I'm missing my vegan homies in Sydney, who always ALWAYS made it worth my while to go to the extra effort of cooking vegan (especially if what was being cooked was delicious vegan baked goods). I am enjoying a brief fantasy of returning triumphantly home at some point to prepare a vegan pizza with vegan mozzarella cheese on top THAT MELTS. I haven't attempted any of these vegan cheese recipes yet, but I'm gonna, in the next few days. I need a challenge (cracks knuckles). A culinary challenge.

I was casting my mind back today, trying to pinpoint when I went vegetarian. I remember being in the US in 2005, and eating meat there (and oh boy, I suspect that the American relationship to meat was the beginning of the end of my relationship to meat). I think I can remember the moment, actually: not so long after I came home from the US, I flew to Perth to visit a friend. We got dinner at a dining hall in a nightclub district. I got some kind of duck soup (I used to really like duck). It was fucking revolting. I thought I am done with eating animals. And I'm pretty sure that was it. The moment I went from gently disparaging vegetarians at every turn, to being a vegetarian.

But I'm kind of one of THOSE vegetarians. I wear leather. I eat eggs (although, less and less often). I use composted animal shit in my vegetable garden. I eat cheeses made with calf rennet, sometimes. Once, I went fishing with my ex-girlfriend, and we caught some yabbies, and I ate some (which appealed much more strongly to my sustainable-living, know-where-your-food-comes-from ethic than driving 40km to buy a packet of soy sausages made with ingredients sourced from fuckknowswhere). I'm less of a all meat is always totally disgusting vegetarian and more of hey, I don't need to eat meat to live, so as a general rule I won't! vegetarian.

The puritanism and (self-and-other-) judgment of striving for ethical dietary perfection annoys me (and "bad" food vs "good" food sounds sometimes an awful lot too much likethe normalised body-hatred of a woman chastising herself for eating a chocolate bar). It irritates some portion of my brain that wants to point out the ridiculousness of logical extremes (I use milk on my tomato plants to combat fungal disease without recourse to heavy-metal-based fungicides: does that make my tomatoes non-vegan-friendly? What about those tomatoes at the supermarket, shipped from fuckknowswhere and grown with petrochemical fertilisers?). But the other side of that annoys me too: I do not agree with all the tenets of veganism, so I cast it all aside as ridiculous. Or, I occasionally like to eat bacon, so I see no point in trying to limit my meat consumption.

Vegatarianism has meant, for me, eating and cooking way more interesting food than a meat-based diet. Veganism is a food nerd's DREAM, full of fascinating and delightful substitutions and food processes (making brownies by first making a white sauce! No, really! It's amazing! SO much more intriguing procedurally than just blending some flour, sugar, cocoa, butter & eggs). And, vegan cheese! Made from nuts & tofu! Allegedly, types of vegan cheese that melt. Learning to make dairy cheese was food-nerd heaven, too. I am happily looking forward to occupying the entire spectrum of cheese-making nerdery.

Love from Kreuzberg

I wish I could show you photos of the most beautiful moments of Berlin, but I can't, because they're all from a bicycle- and I've gotten a hell of a lot better at riding, but not quite good enough to take photos while I'm doing it.

There's the long ride down the curving paths through the towering trees on the way to the kleingarten, slow and meandering. The ride back in the warm light of a peachy sunset, on the road with trucks rumbling in my ear- my friend riding a bikelength ahead of me, glazed in sweat and grit, the retrofutures of the television tower at Alexanderplatz looming over her shoulder. There's the breath stolen every time I cross the bridge at Warschauer Strasse, watching the lights flicker over the canal stretching to either side, the massive graffiti murals stretching along the banks. And all the late-night foolishness, hands freezing, blood warm, riding in packs of revellers from bar to bar, crossing the city for 5am pizza, 6am more beer, home on the dawn light.

I am cautious of how much I love this place, of how heavily I've fallen (knew I'd fall) for gritty streets and filthy queers and the fucking profound beauty of every part of it. But I have no caution on my bike, have no need to protect myself from that particular fierce joy, the true love of wind in hair and pedals going and me, and the city, and the machine, and the roads.

I love that every night I go out on my bike will be a good night, even if the venue sucks, the music's shit, the crowd has a bad attitude and the beer is warm. The sheer pleasure of riding there and riding home will make it worthwhile, leaves me free to shrug and leave whenever I want to (and ride to another bar, on the other side of town if I like, for the company of silence and wheels turning).




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The first month I spent here was almost pure, uninterrupted sunshine: glorious, magical. I was glad I'd first fallen for this city in late October, when Autumn gray and freezing rain ruled the streets, lest my love become some silly fleeting Summer thing. On those Summer nights I slept naked with my window open, high enough in my old hospital room that nobody below could see me. I woke one morning, just a couple of weeks ago, with Autumn tickling across my skin- the sharpest, fastest season change I have ever felt. It wasn't the end of the warmth, but it was the beginning of the end, and I have watched Autumn settling in with fascination. We don't have seasons like this in Sydney (and San Francisco seasons are a beast unto themselves). I am hypnotised, delighted by the slide of temperatures and the greying of days. I want to be here when the city unfurls again, defrosts into Spring. I want to live here and watch the seasons change all the time.

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It's a funny thing, me, Berlin, this time. I'm having a lovely time (but I'm sad). I'm sad (but I'm having a lovely time). It's so beautiful, and I am so happy to be here, and there is nowhere else I'd rather be. But I am sad, necessarily sad, and peaceful with it. This sadness is a learning thing, and this beautiful city is fitting itself in between the serious business of sitting in windowsills with cups of tea and good friends (new or old) and talking, about things, and working things out.

Once upon a time I declared, louder and prouder every year: life gets better with every year. That belief has been seriously shaken, a number of times in the past few years. I have fallen, and landed hard, and been furious to discover that gains I'd made had been lost again, and that sometimes it was harder to get back to the point I'd started at, the second time around. Life, and people, will do that to you, I have discovered (and raged against). But a lot of tea and a lot of windowsills later, and I think of a lovely mermaid on a lovely mermaid's wall that says: Knowe Thyself. And it's worth it, and it's not easy, but it does get better. Maybe even better than before.

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I have to show you this picture, too. Germans are SERIOUS about their veggie gardening.

Worked out

I am sticky-salty-sweaty from a kickboxing class: a room full of well-muscled women in comfortable clothes, a blur of trying to follow along and catch up to the German instructions, the pound of gloved fists on gloved fists. Worked and worked and worked out until my arms were too weak to hold the gloves up to my face any more, until we poured sweat freely from our bodies, wore glossy grins and endorphin-glazed eyes.

Such a different sport to karate. SUCH a different sport. I can't even put them in the same place in my head, the serenity and discipline and focus of karate against the frenetic whirl of kickboxing. Different sports, different highs. It felt so good to make my body move like that again, and I love the high of the pushburnHARDERFASTERmoremoremore work out, but I missed the precision and ritual of the dojo.

It felt so good to make my body move like that again. It feels so good to sit, now, sticky and achey and enjoying the drift of my body's biochemical response to exertion through my muscles and my mind. Exercise, like eating and fucking and brushing your teeth, is a normaliser: a stabiliser. It is something that brings you to yourself, to a place like home, no matter where you are or how you are. And I am in Berlin, far from home, with no plans, and I am OK (but not great): and my body feels so good right now, like mine, like an achievement, like home.

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I have been thinking so much about an aborted, disrupted reality that I jointly created and occupied for a few intense months before I left Sydney. I have been thinking about how much I wanted it, how deeply I believed in it. I have been thinking about the bubble bursting, the reality dissolving, about the trauma of that moment, that breaking experience, and the trauma of how the truths revealed in that breaking moment reflect on the entire reality of what existed.

I have been thinking about how all of it has left me with an intense distrust of myself and my desires. I have articulated that thought, but can think of no way past it, no possible solutions, no platitudes of progress. For now I just sit with the knowledge, and some memories, in a city far away, and wait for something like perspective.

The city that everybody loves

It's a hard city because it's an easy city. Everyone comes to Berlin, and everyone loves it. The rent is cheap, the beer is cheap, and the best party you've ever been to in your life is happening every night in 20 different places around town. There's an amazing squat with an amazing history on every block, a voku on every night, a queer performance art convergence every weekend. There's a fucking radical language school to go study at, if you want to learn German as well.

It's easy to have a really good time here, but really fucking hard to get a local to smile at you. Because they're sick of it. Sick of the tourists, sick of the travelers, sick of living in the world's coolest city.

Warmth comes hard, and slowly here.

So here I am, a traveler once again trying to settle myself in a place that has hardened itself against travelers. Where I could while away every night of the week having the best time ever (in the company mostly of other travelers), but where, perversely, I don't want to. I have fixated on this idea of a life, of space, of markets and cooking and learning German and going to political meetings, of forcing open a niche for myself in the rockface of this over-traveled city.

I have a room, a sublet for 2 months, and it is the most beautiful space. I sit on wide, solid window ledges and smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, watch the sunlight and the wind in the trees. The room is in an old squatted hospital grounds, legalised now but beautiful and rambling and chaotic still, with heavy doors and institutional concrete staircases. The doors have brackets bolted into them for barricading, and I have been shown the heavy wooden beams for barricading and the airhorns (in case of Nazis or police) and given a pocket-sized can of pepperspray (in case of the creepy local guys who like to hang out around the doors downstairs, knowing that mostly women live here). This is normal, yes: this is life.

I have a bike, and I am brave enough to ride on the road- even the chaotic, busy roads around central Kreuzberg. I can ride for miles and miles in this flat, easy city, and barely feel it in my legs. Today I rode to the language school, then through a park where (inexplicably) chickens and goats and donkeys grazed, then past the canal where I sat 5 years ago on my first visit and fed the swans, then to the Turkish market, and then home (vegetable-laden).

I don't feel like a visitor here, caught up in the whirl of vacation: sights, museums, galleries, party nights. I feel like I am living, creating a life, carving a space, finding a rhythm. And I find that I want to, even against the hardness of it, even against the dismissive people and blank stares. I want to live here. I want to seek out the pockets of warmth (like my new housemate, inviting me along to her kickboxing class tomorrow), I want to prove myself to the doubting faces who expect me to vanish on the Autumn like every other well-meaning, wide-eyed traveler, I want to learn the language and watch that slow nod of respect that I gain from the locals whenever I am able to avoid reverting to English.

I don't know if my plan all along was to stop in Berlin, to get caught here, but I suspect that the idea has lingered in my mind ever since I first visited. This place fits me, somehow, or I feel like it fits me (maybe everyone who comes here feels the same way), even in it's hardness, even in it's wariness. I think that I am a person, a life, in search of a purpose. And in the absence of a purpose, there's always Berlin.