aber ich bin ein cheerleader

woke up at 3 p.m., left the house at 5. went to the "linke buch tage" thing (got lost first...thought it was gneisenaustraße 29 instead of 2a) and "listened" to a talk on football and nationalismus before splitting for a talk on street art in berlin and elsewhere...also in german but i was able to understand much more. "gentrifiziung," for instance...this guy who had put together a beeaaaaaautiful book of photos of street art spoke of 3 general categories/purposes of graffiti: something about the area, communication/dialogue (tag party, anyone?), and something else. also he distinguished between street art and graffiti (heterosexual, lots of signatures) but i couldn´t really understand the specifics...

then decided to head home to pick up my phone in case govinda or pax called but on the way from heinrich-hesse straße ubahn to mi casa i ran into pax on a fuckbroken bike and we went to the schwarzer kanal party together. time fucking flew...i felt like i was there 20 minutes but we talked about class privilege and watched part of "but i´m a cheerleader" in german (i think i like it better in german actually) and hung out and then she took off to get the ubahn back to xb and i left a little after...bed is appealing.

thoughts: guilt vs. consciousness (of privilege)...i take my uchicago education and then i fucking use it, not just to enter academia but subversively and excitingly and however i want. i said to pax "you know...in art or in performance or in whereverthefuckelse" and she says "yeah but art isn´t everything, you know? like i felt guilty about not being a visual artist for so long but"
interesting. she called me a trust fund baby and i responded with a good solid "fuck you." at the same time i can´t totally deny my suburban white liberal middle class upbringing. i feel instilled with a solid consciousness of how much i´ve been given but is consciousness enough? and the "consciousness"--the activism--that i´ve experienced in hyde park is sometimes really dissatisfying. there´s still a distance, a Volunteerism...it is suddenly ridiculous that i have no hyde park friends, only a few black friends...

a little lonely, ratherquite drunk, kind of quiet. lots of words in me but i´m a quiet drunk...time flies, i watch and listen, when i speak i speak too loudly which contributes to not speaking at all. but to me it is okay, it is comfortable...but a realization.
i was whistling mendelssohn and dispatch all day after i got food (can´t whistle before there´s something in my stomach) and this lovely guy that i ran into 2ce but didn´t get to talk to (across the street und so was) just gave me this wonderful big smile. it totally made my day.

dear berlin,
ich liebe dich.
-a

lb crush.

on potentiality (lb´s blog, supervalent thought)

this woman is brilliant. today i woke up at 3 in the afternoon and read her blog entry on potentiality. her writing brings tears to my eyes while inspiring a hope for a better life or reaffirming the practices that have brought me to the happy life i find myself in now. it´s a good mix of emotional responses and the language is....swimmable. i swim in it, sometimes almost drowning, mostly slipping through and feeling it surround my body.

as i was reading some of her most recent blog entries i suddenly remembered something which may seem strange to suddenly remember: i have been miserable for a long time. rephrased: for much of my life i have been miserable. this thought brings a familiar feeling to mind, a very known taste and time of night and lack of breath. the way lb writes about trauma in another entry, "bound by the guarantee of the repetition of her impossibility," i think i know this feeling though i am not claiming trauma.

another aspect which i have developed, partially perhaps affected by being really unhappy for a long time, is the conviction that i don´t really know much about anything. i have begun to offer up common experiences in conversation but not authoritatively...it is rare that i would offer advice where instead i could struggle to clarify, to better understand, and through that conversation maybe to bring some light.

it is a strange, lonely place to find myself in though, to know a little about a lot, nothing about everything. when comes this changeover to adulthood, where people speak authoritatively instead of questioning? where observation is secondary to documentation? i am not sure that i want to become another version of myself, though i have a sense that i am storing up all of my observations and knowledge and conversations for some big BAM....a collage, an art project, a conversation, survival, the moment before my death.

this is the two-facedness of potentiality for me. i see potential everywhere and curse myself for being too lazy or busy or underqualified to bring the potential into being, to enact it. yet my mind discounts or overestimates the sweat and difficulty of the process.

i definitely need to take another class with lb this year....what a phenomenal opportunity. perhaps that is enough to keep me at uchicago.
off to a street fair in kreuzberg...bis später.