about a year and a half ago I posted a list of 100 Things I Want To Learn (More) About…. I wrote the list when I was in a more active phase of my DIY Masters, a very slowly ongoing project which I can say has led to many good things in my life even if I haven’t yet earnt and given myself a DIY degree. Anyway, the list had a lot of random skills and activities which ranged from learning how to cook family recipes to more advanced work skills.

A couple of friends started to write their own lists and a couple even made it up to 100. Recently Pete Hindle, returned to his list of 50 things and updated it with comments as to what had been achieved and his current thoughts on his list. Pete almost died and so has a) a really good excuse for not finishing things on his list b) his life has changed drastically which definitely changed his opinion about some of his learning items. It will be interesting to see if the life changes I’ve gone through (finally meeting a good man, getting a job, getting another job, travelling away from Berlin a lot) have affected how I feel about items on my list.

100 Things I Want To Learn (More) About… Updated!

1. Botany
   Hmmm. I haven’t yet learnt to identify plants using a taxonomy. So. No.
2. A musical instrument: guitar or cello
   Let’s just say that 360 days ago I was given a beautiful guitar and can barely play 3 chords. So this learning task is active, but moving slowly. Actually taking lessons might be the next step.
3. Haircutting
   I can cut boys’ hair if they have some curl to hide the mistakes. The mistakes aren’t as often or severe as they used to be. But I haven’t learnt any fancy techniques (yet).
4. How to make a sponge cake
   Really, why would I make a sponge when there are so many other amazing cakes to bake out there? Not Yet.
5. How to maintain my bicycle
   In general I’m better at working with bikes thanks to a couple of sessions at Regenbogen Fabrik’s bike workshop. But my bike in Berlin is not currently maintained – sadly the type of maintenance I know won’t make it better, it will just keep it existing for longer.
6. How to make bagels
   Nope. One day, when I’m making brunch for people. I do finally have a recipe I want to use.
7. Throat Singing
   Hah. I find the idea of throat singing fascinating, but I don’t want to learn it that much. Let’s just say I may have still wanted to impress my ex at this point.
8. Bookbinding
   Not yet. I don’t have anything I want to bind at the moment, and it’s pretty easy to get amazing notebooks in Berlin.
9. Basic Arabic
   Nada. But my amazing new flatmate is doing Islamic studies and she can write essays in Arabic.  I know who I’m going to ask for help.
10. How to make better Karelian pies
    I’ve not made a Karelian pie for ages. I think that visiting friends in Finland and buying Karelian pies has to be higher priority than making my own… I’m getting really good at making Spinach pancakes, one of my other Finnish food desires.

    (more…)

Over the last year, one of the things I’m most proud of  is having stayed put. I didn’t move to a new country*, I barely took any planes and apart from regularly visiting the bearded maths captain [BMC] in Linz, Austria, I was VERY stable. For me at least.

Even though I fell head first, properly and oh so significantly into love with the aforementioned BMC, I didn’t suddenly drop everything and move to Linz. Considering the catalysts for the last two moves to Sheffield and Berlin, this is incredibly surprising.  But maybe, despite having no regrets and being rather grateful for those experiences in their own odd ways, it appears that I’ve learnt something.

Or perhaps I feel at home.

And when considering learning from my experiences or finding a home, I should add in finally. I mean, to move countries on the spur of the moment for a man is romantic, but to do it twice (in one year, and for different men) is not just careless, but also incredibly foolish. I don’t know what Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell would say about a third time, but considering how she felt about the loss of a parent, I can’t imagine she’d be very kind. So maybe I should focus more on the fact that I feel at home in Berlin, and one of the things that has helped that has been that I’ve been very happy in my apartment.

I’m in a great position in Kreuzberg, my room is south-facing and full of light AND has nice floors, and the bathroom and kitchen, while not perfect – do satisfy my requirements by having a good, hot shower and a stove and oven that don’t suck.  I’m friends with several of my neighbours and know almost everyone in the building by name and have babysit half the kids and shared cake with their parents. And until recently, I had managed to maintain a relatively good relationship with my flatmate, only to have it sour from some hideously poor communication on their behalf in the last couple of weeks.  Myeh. I could go on for hours. But I won’t.

Anyway, I might be looking for a new place to live and that honestly petrifies me.  Of course there are the general considerations of whether there’s enough light to keep my happily provided with Vitamin D,  and building repair and cost which are tempered somewhat by the bright sides of maybe finally having a native German speaker for a flatmate. But then there are some more Berlin specific challenges to deal with, like whether I would end up with coal heating and what discount supermarkets are nearby.

I’m unlikely to move away from Kreuzberg, and from all reports coal heating is rarely in use in the former West German parts of Berlin, but I’m wary.  I spent a month in a coal heated sublet when I first moved to Berlin and despite the coziness of having an actual fire in your bedroom, the novelty of hauling fuel and old ash up and down stairs and waiting 3 hours for your room to defrost is over in about a week.

More realistically I’m worried about what stores might be nearby. I’m pretty sure that besides the weather and the state of the S-Bahn, discount supermarkets are one of the most frequent topics of conversation amongst people living in Berlin. Unlike weather and public transport which are more universally recognised, the matter of Berlin grocery shopping is very localised and has its own language: Is Netto or LIDL better? Does your Penny Markt actually carry any stock? Is visiting ALDI a soul destroying experience for everyone? Which place has the best range of organic goods? Why did PLUS close? Why is Edeka easy to forget about? Do you find visiting the Karlstadt basement (a ‘proper’ supermarket) akin to a religious experience for you?

Of course, there are proper supermarkets which have everything you’d expect in a store – but due to both cost and convenience, most people end up shopping at their nearest discount store only to find that it doesn’t carry certain products. Then, because they have a favourite type of cheese or coffee they end up schlepping to the store that does stock it anyway.  In the end you develop favourites, and even though it’s a little further away than a couple of other supermarkets, Netto seems to have won me over, they’ve got a good  range of organic food that I can actually afford, stock Spreelinge pickled cucumbers and have a proper section devoted to baking goods.  So that’s another reason why I love my apartment and am hesitant to leave it, I might end up far from a Netto store.  And what would happen if there was only an Aldi nearby? I’d be liable to turn suicidal.

* Unlike 2008 in which I started in Adelaide, re-visited Helsinki for 4 months and would have stayed if I’d been able to find a job I loved, moved to Sheffield in the UK temporarily and then, after making a temporary stop for a couple of weeks in Hong Kong and Hanoi, went back to Adelaide to properly pack up before moving to Berlin. Eek.

There’ll always be times when keeping up with your mindapples (the mental health 5-a-Day) just aren’t enough – and you find yourself overwhelmed with anxiety or the sads. For example, I know that the heavy grey skies of Berlin can really affect my mood, regardless of any steps I’ve taken to avoid depression.  So I’m always looking for ways of walking and talking myself out of a sad or anxious mood.

A couple of years ago I posted a step by step approach to dealing with bouts of anxiety or depression. It was some home brewed cognitive behavioural therapy that got me through some heartbreak. The bad times passed and then I deleted the post.

And even though I still followed some of my own advice, I’d forgotten how specific and useful a paper (or electronic) set of the reminders could be in times of the crazy sads.

A few months back an old housemate asked me where the post was and I couldn’t find it in either my archives or anywhere online. But yesterday I hit paydirt and found the text again. I twittered it and was told by a follower that she’d forwarded the link to a friend who’s going through some tough times – and that her friend had printed up two copies to keep by her side.

Which of course made me feel all happy, that maybe this list of actions might help more people than just me.

So… here is the In Case of Emergency list again. Please feel free to leave comments or further advice.

Over the last while, and most especially the last couple of days I’ve been struggling against thoughts of poor self-esteem and self-criticism all tied up with a sense of perfectionism which would never allow me to complete anything even if it let me actually begin something. Tricky.

Luckily I can recognise these thoughts for what they are, thoughts. But they are thoughts clever enough to swoop in when I’m tired, under the weather or hormonal. The thoughts, once they’ve invaded, perch along the edge of my outlook crowlike and squawking.

“Hah! We’re better than you, you’ve never done anything worthwhile and you never will!”

from on .

My latest vodcast – as recorded on May 29th, 2009.

I only just realised that I could have included links to bands, projects and friends using the amazing power of titles.

Oh well.

My friend Marc, is the writer behind http://www.un-understand.co.uk.
The Australian band I mentioned was Brillig http://www.brillig.com.au.
And my friend Andy Gibson http://sociability.org.uk is the founder of Mindapples http://mindapples.org!

As part of my 100 Things I Want To Learn list I’ve made my first video blog post. I learnt how to export from iMovie and how to wait patiently while videos compress, get uploaded and then converted by Vimeo. So I guess I did learn more about 64. Video recording and editing to the level required for good vodcasting

from on .

Self-centered personal blogging ahoy!

I’m playing with my gifted video camera and the idea of different levels of honesty, intimacy and immediacy afforded by edited text and unedited video.

Also, I’m in the middle of trying to work out what happens next in my crazy life. Writing hasn’t worked so far. Maybe talking to an inanimate object will help?

So anyway the challenge is to know (with more certainty) by August, what I do next in my life. I’m not sure if I make much sense in the video.

A wise woman* once described her self-help ethos to me:

“It’s called ‘Having a talk with yourself.’”

And it was all based on the understanding that it’s far easier to give other people advice than it is to apply those same principles to your own life. When one followed the principles of Having a talk with yourself, you basically talked sense to yourself rather than wallowing and repeating the same behaviour.

If you were feeling sad you should cheer yourself up in the same way that you’d cheer up a friend. Apart from ensuring you ate high quality chocolate, you’d also have a talk with yourself.
Not sure what direction to take your life in? Have a talk with yourself!
Broken up with your girlfriend? Have a talk with yourself!

Of course, it’s far easier to give other people advice than it is to apply those same principles to your own life. Sadly, the wise woman never actually wrote the book or provided me with any more advice about the practical side of having a talk with yourself and taking action afterwards.

Though, I have an idea that one of the best ways to do the “talking” is with regular journalling. The summer that I moved to Helsinki I made some amazing life changes and I feel that the main reason for that action was that I was writing Morning Pages every day for several months. Every morning I effectively was sitting down to a conversation that was about the things I needed to deal with in both the short and long-term. And because I checked in with myself every day, I made sure I took action. It was brilliant.

Frustratingly in the couple of years since I left Finland, I haven’t been able to return to the habit of writing 3 pages a morning. I’ve tried to restart the a couple of times and it just hasn’t felt like the right or the easiest thing to do. Now though I feel like I could start to develop the habit of Morning Pages again. I’m waking up earlier and I have a calm, light room that I want to spend time doing things in. I have a chair I found on Skalitzer Str and a desk my landlord gave me when he was cleaning out the cellar. Now I just need to try and keep waking up earlier every day!

* The wise woman is my old housemate Marlaina Read. You can check out her photos or take a look at the online arts journal Invisible City that’s she’s launching this week.

When I changed battlecat servers at the end of last year I briefly read over my previous I Would Like list and removed the list from my major links. I’d just moved to Berlin and was feeling very unsure of myself, so I didn’t take the time to review what I’d achieved in the 2 and a half years since I wrote the list, nor did I consider adding any new goals.

This week however, there’s something in the air which is prompting me to look over the list, refresh it and then work on it. Maybe it’s the slightest hint of the forthcoming spring, the return of my beau from 3 weeks abroad or the realisation that I’ve now spent more than 3 months in Berlin. Realistically I think a lot of this feeling has to do with the latter idea, specifically with the knowledge that I stop subletting and move into a permanent flat with a great flatmate this week.

For more than a year now I have been hopping from country to country and from temporary housing situation to temporary housing situation. The last year hasn’t been about travelling, and it hasn’t quite felt way I imagine a nomad’s lifestyle to be either. My experience has in some ways been exciting, but primarily it’s been exhausting and unsettling. While I wouldn’t say that my relatively privileged position of some saved funds and usefully flexible citizenship is anything like that of a refugee’s situation, I now have a greater understanding of the feeling of displacement.

So, this weekend I’ll finally have A Room Of My Own again. I’m not sure whether to panic and run away, or to celebrate and invest in very heavy objects that are difficult to move. Even though I’ve spent the grand sum of 9€ on an extremely portable desk lamp, I think that I’ll be commemorating this move with reviewing these lists and working out how I can move forward without having to move for at least 6 months.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever noticed this mental phenomena or if it even has a name, but hopefully I’ll describe it in a way that makes sense.

You might regularly pass along a street and so the facades of buildings become familiar. Then for some reason, an appointment, the purchase of a specific item, you enter one of the buildings and it is no longer a facade facing a street, but a real(ised), three-dimensional space filled with people, objects and stories. From that point on, whenever you pass along that street, you can comprehend the form of the building, and as such it becomes far easier to imagine what might be happening inside. The physical world is still the same size, but somehow the representation of its space in your head and imagination has become larger.

This is not to say that you can’t imagine what is behind a facade without walking through it, but imagining becomes far easier once you have a collection of the real in your mind to draw from.

I feel that it’s the same with people. Names and faces are facades, but until we interact with another person’s mental and emotional space, it is much harder to imagine what that person’s life is like. Of course, once you begin to know a person, it is like rooms in their self open up in your mind. As with physical spaces, the more human spaces you know, makes it easier to imagine what an unknown person is experiencing and feeling.

Almost two years ago I ended up living in Finland. An imagined land of snow and Moomintrolls was now a three-dimensional space of parks and lakes and islands and streets, cafes, kitchens and living rooms, workspaces and tram-tracks. The abstracted population of “Suomi” became a community of real people, people with stories and feelings and goals and failures. They were mothers, fathers, coworkers, customers, bank-tellers, friends and strangers I smiled at on endless summer days as we drank cider in parks.

about a year later, back in Australia, the news of a school shooting in Jokela, a few hours north of Helsinki, really shook me. This was a violent act taking place in a culture that I had come to know, even though I hadn’t visited the town. I could imagine the faces of the students, what clothes they wore and food they ate, how they spoke and interacted with their families. My exposure to people and places meant that the Jokela violence affected me far more intensely than similar incidents in the United States, a country I have never visited.

Surely this wasn’t a just way for me to react? What makes the lives of people we can’t easily imagine less valuable than those who are already “real” in our minds? Sometimes, imagining and remembering places and people I know, feels far more authentic than the empathy I can muster together for people I am _just_ imagining. Then I have to remind myself that I’m not alone in the continual practice of combining memory, place, people and imagining to understand more about the world.

As far as I can tell, this practice of imagination and empathy for people takes me one step closer to becoming compassionate in the true sense. In isolation from people, compassion is possible, but difficult. However, once you know how some individuals feel, it is far easier to feel empathy and thereby be moved to compassion towards a greater number of people.

To me, that is why travel is so important in making a person grow towards a better state of being. Countries which may have just been marketing images in a magazine now become real, living spaces full of life and smells and sound. When traveling, one is not just confronted by new spaces, they’re also meeting new people and learning their experiences and stories.

Exposed to new people and places your heart begins to stretch so it can accommodate and acknowledge these amazing new experiences and memories. Of course, once it becomes easier for your heart and mind to feel and empathise, it also becomes far easier to miss and long for the places and people you are no longer near. Despite the longing and missing, you know that you can always experience just one more place and make connections with a few more people, safe in the knowledge that your heart will stretch that little bit more.

On the windowsill of my room in Merihaka I have a temporary garden of lettuce, parsley and thyme in jars, mugs and reused plastic containers struggling to survive out of their traditional hydroponic environments.

At times I miss Adelaide horribly. I miss the way the park by my bus stop smells on a warm evening and the sounds the rainbow lorikeets make. I miss the Farmers and Central markets and the fact that I don’t need to buy airfreighted fruit and overpackaged food from a chain store. I miss my friends, Queen St and my old job, my bike and Womadelaide. I miss it but it all feels a bit unreal. I miss my garden and my ridiculously large house which is both a blessing and a burden.

But I’m back in Helsinki and that means that I’m surrounded by a tremendous amount of good stuff. I’m love that Ninnu and Sid are an hour away and that I have friends in Helsinki too. I love that there is snow even though it’s the warmest winter in a century. I love the drying cupboards in the kitchens and fact I can shower as long as I like and not have to carry the used water on to the garden. I love the smell a wood-fired sauna makes and that I don’t need to talk or think when the löyly hits my skin and my head. I love the amazing design surrounding me and the scale and density of the city and the public transport. I love the range of salmiaki in the pick and mix section of the video store and the rye bread. I love that even though I never studied the language I can actually understand some of what I read and hear.

I’m flattered that here I’m greeted like a minor celebrity by some old customers “Hei! You! Australian Girl!” and that my English is international enough to confuse some people into not knowing where I’m from at all.

For all the good stuff here I’m frustrated too. I’m kind of bored because I don’t have a job to fill up some of my days and let me meet new people. I regret not studying Finnish because I understand enough to know that it will be years before I was ever fluent in a language only 6 million people speak. I’m frustrated that I feel heartbound to Adelaide but intrigued by Finland and that so many people are leaving while I’m away (not that my presence would have kept them there).

Every couple of days it seems like I switch moods between “I shall stay here and work at the bar so I can stay for the summer…” to “I need to go home and make radelai.de happen right now!” and then to “Ooooh, maybe I should apply for a Masters program here… It’s free!”. I half make plans for a summer in Europe and for May in Australia.

I am confused by choices and I don’t want to give either one up just yet.