notes for myself

zines in berlin...
Papier Tiger Archiv in Kreuzberg: Papier Tiger is open to the public two days a week (Monday & Thursday from 2:30-6 PM, and they have a women's day on Friday (every 4th Friday). They are located at 25 Cuvrystrasse in Kreuzberg.
Fleischerei: Torstrasse 116 (in the Mitte, right by the Rosenthaler Platz U-bahn stop)

sleepy
mixed
dirty
--dirty clothes, dirt under my nails, dirty teeth, dirty face, dirty feet, dirty hair--
scratches on my arms
bruises on my legs
need haircut.

it won´t stop graying.
i´m reading "querelle of brest" about gay sailors. it has this to say today:

"Too much trust, however, must not be put in the security of a smile, in its power to dissipate the gloom. A smile can induce fear, first on your teeth bared by receding lips, and give birth to a monster whose foul features will bear the exact imprint of the smile on your lips, but later the monster will continue to develop inside you, to cloth and inhabit you, till it ends up by becoming something far more dangerous than could ever be supposed from a phantom begotten of a smile in the dark." (82)

i lost my little black book and was very sad until i refound it today at school.
on my way home from alexanderplatz--coming home at 2 is a rarity--i ran out of lucky strikes and stopped to ask a woman if she had a cigarette. i didn´t realize i had a spiel until she glassed her eyes and shook her head quickly and my spiel ended mid-breath. just before i walked away, still holding out the 21 cents, she looked at me and didn´t look through me for a second. i was already turning away but i saw that she thought for a moment about it, in another context might´ve, anyway that automatic response that is so easily learned was momentarily disrupted.
i think that´s one of the saddest things that happens in cities, or maybe everywhere. people learn how to say no before the other person opens their mouth--the drunk man at the bus stop or the woman nursing a baby wearing tattered beautiful clothes who asks, "speak english?" in my first three days here, i learned to say no, "nein, nur deutsch. kein englisch."
i´m always a little surprised when people ask me for money. i see them, make eye contact, and they come up to ask for directions or some question and then there´s this buzz of german and a beseeching look and i´m startled into repeating my mantra: "kein geld, ich hab kein geld. es tut mir leid."
i have to imagine the glassy eyes and dismissal of a request without consideration affects the person more insidiously...that it creeps in and keeps them from looking around on the train or noticing someone at the bus stop. perhaps it is not a fear of being raped or killed. but maybe a fear of being asked is sad and awful too.

i think
i think
i think
(much.)
i´m always hungry.

today i had lunch (pizza with gorgonzola cheese and spinach cut into a deliciously uneven 8 pieces that i engulfed in 10 minutes) with an american, a girl from stanford. we commiserated about intensely academic university communities and discussed gender neutral bathrooms.
on my way home i wondered if i had talked about queerness incessantly...if i had fucked up.
i thought i might say, "sorry, am i being too gay? i´m not hitting on you or insulting you or something...i just end up talking about queerness a lot."
it struck me what a hilarious sort of excuse that is...to exist.
when i walked out of the jewish museum a few days ago, i had one massive question circling around my mind...how can a mainstream or majority culture fail to recognize itself as a way of life, as having the same generic characteristics or categories which exist in a subculture? kosher rules are not so strange when one considers that most people have tons of implicit rules about which parts of the meat are good, how much it should be cooked, when the appropriate time to eat is, what one should wear at the dinner table. on one of the panels in the museum it emphasized that judaism provides a way of life. this shared way of life leads communities to develop in particular ways, perhaps to be more or less insular or differently situated. yet comparing two different ways of life does not immediately create this hierarchy which is emphasized in comparing "mainstream" to "those other people."
the same idea-situation translates to a certain confusion about the situation of queer culture relative to heteronormative. homophobia allegedly arises frequently from fear and disgust about gay sex practices, which are rendered incomparable to heterosexual practices. this incomparability, which perhaps is what butler termed "unimaginability," suggests that queers are hateable simply because they HAVE sexual practices, just as jews are hateable because they HAVE a particular way of life incomparable to the invisible, unmarked norm. this is clearly a great fallacy, but its mechanisms are interesting in terms of community and human psychology.

so what this really relates to in my mind is this concept that when two gay people kiss on the street they are somehow "shoving something distasteful in the face" of the heteronormative world. actions become exaggerated. traditional jewish clothing are not simply clothing--they are endowed with difference which at first marks them and some people respond to this angrily, as if they have been personally insulted by this show of difference. is it because they feel their own invisibility? what is their relationship to this incomparable relation?

i think, i think, i think.