Living with Plan B

Last Friday my first-born child left home.

Even though Christopher has only moved to Vienna, even though Vienna is only temporary, the point is that his parents’ home is no longer where he lives. He will come back of course, but when he comes back now, it will only be a visit, a transitional stop at the most. And of course the “goal” of parenting is to eventually let go, to trust this young person to take control of his own life. Nevertheless, after we packed up the car and I stood downstairs watching Christopher and Peter drive off together, I went back upstairs, looked around at the oddly empty spaces left and just sat down to cry for a bit. Letting go is easier said than done.

Watching (more than helping) Christopher pack, I was amused and touched to see what mattered most to him, what he wanted to have around him in the setting of his new life on his own, what he imagined he would need. Most importantly, he decided he needs his books. In recent years, especially during his last year of school, I sometimes complained that his books were costing me a fortune, especially when he came up with long lists of highly obscure (and accordingly expensive) leftist political history books that he absolutely, desperately, urgently needed. But Christopher is my son, my father’s grandson, Juanita Shanahan’s great-grand-nephew – and he loves books. It has always given me great pleasure to see how excited he can be about not only the contents of his books, but also the books as objects, beautiful, tangible objects in their own right. Unfortunately, in the end it wasn’t possible to fit the last box of books into our car along with Christopher’s mattress. Either the mattress or one box of books had to be left behind for the next trip to Vienna, presumably some time in the near future. Hard choice.

Fittingly, perhaps, Christopher packed all his clothes in the large suitcase that Amy bought for her first trip to Europe with her then two-year-old son when Christopher was born. I can’t remember now when or why that suitcase ended up in Austria, but the pink shoelaces that Amy tied around the handle are still attached, and I was happy to see Christopher take it with him. Christopher also packed up some smaller odds and ends of recording equipment and cables in a child-size suitcase with Star Wars pictures on it. I remembered that Amy found that one for me somewhere to transport some of the things I took home with me after Dad died. It was somehow comforting to see Christopher take that one too. And seeing him pack up his collection of Kachina dolls, I felt – superstitiously, whimsically – reassured that he will be protected with the Kachinas to watch over him.

There are so many things that Christopher doesn’t remember. We have looked at pictures, books, various objects together, and I have told him stories again and again about his childhood, and at some level I think he has made connections, but mental images of his own of having lived his own past seem to have been dimmed, if not entirely lost, from anything before meningitis. So as he packed, I had the impression that he associated emotional ties with certain objects, but not the specific memories that could explain those emotional ties. As is probably usually the case with mothers and children, even where memories have not been obscured by a period of pain, when I look at Christopher, I see all the twenty years of his life at once. I have very clear mental images of memories of him as a baby, as a toddler, as a kindergarten child, a young school child, a pre-adolescent, a young teenager, a 15-year-old delirious with pain, a 16-year-old recovering, a secondary school student struggling, an idealistic young leftist intellectual just beginning to spread his wings … As all of these unshared memories came flooding into my mind, I found myself feeling very lonely. I suspect that memories can only really be real, if they are shared. Perhaps that is another good reason why a greater number of people need to share in the life of a child.

When Peter returned from Vienna and found me among the empty spaces, I suggested that I would be happy to help Paddy rearrange the room for himself over the weekend. Peter firmly stated his opinion that Paddy would certainly not want to spend his last free weekend before starting his “service to society” on Monday rearranging furniture. I believe the technical term for that is “projection”.

When Paddy came in on Saturday, he could hardly wait to get started, and we had the bunk beds that the boys have shared for seventeen years disassembled and removed to the basement within about an hour. Moving things around and cleaning kept us busy for the rest of the day. Although I was a bit startled that Paddy and Susi suddenly announced that they were taking a break to go to the cinema, I was relieved that they brought Sascha home with them afterwards. Over the years, I’ve done my share of lifting and moving furniture, so I was happy to leave that to the younger generation, even though it left us with an absolutely classic situation: Susi in the kitchen making soup for the hard-working young men, Peter trapped somewhere in the back making helpful suggestions that were largely being ignored, me helplessly flapping my hands somewhere on the side, and Paddy and Sascha alternately yelping and swearing as they struggled to move the large black couch from the computer room into what is now Paddy’s room. That too unleashed so many memories – of similar situations all the way back to my childhood, watching my father and his brothers and friends move our furniture again.

On Sunday when Paddy and Susi went out for lunch and didn’t come back, because it was a beautiful autumn day and their last free day together, I found myself at home alone again, packing up the few things that Christopher had left behind. In the end, they fit into a shoe box. So that Paddy could turn what had been “the boys’ room” for eighteen years into what is now Paddy’s room, a young person’s room that could be anywhere, in any shared flat, in any city, I started cleaning the dust and traces that Christopher had left behind.

Most of the houses we moved into when I was a child were newly built, where we were the first occupants. The few times that we moved into a house that had previously been inhabited by someone else, I always searched carefully for traces of the previous occupants, some sign that might tell me at least some small story about the people who had lived there before. Conversely, every time we moved out, I always purposely left small traces hidden somewhere inconspicuous, hoping that someone would be curious enough to find them and wonder about me. Perhaps something of that memory was in the back of my mind as we packed up Amy’s things and cleaned her apartment for future residents. I liked Amy’s apartment, when I visited her there in early 2008, before we went to visit Mother “one last time” together. Amy seemed to be in a good place, and I was pleased for her. Cleaning her apartment, I felt that it was important to remove all traces – not a streak on the mirror nor even a fingerprint on the faucet should be left to move the future residents to wonder about who had lived there before them. It was a good space, and I wanted them to be happy there, whoever they might be.

As I cleaned Christopher’s desk, cleaned the window, washed the curtains, vacuumed the corners where the shelves had been, repressing the memory of cleaning Amy’s apartment felt like hard work, but I didn’t want to allow that association to form in my mind. Christopher doesn’t live here anymore, but he is not out of reach. Now Paddy lives here in this room – not so much with his parents, the people with whom he happens to share a kitchen and a bathroom and a television.

With all these memories, it is time for me to remember now what it was that I might have liked to do all those years when I felt there was no time at all left for me. I have that time now. As children grow up and move on, their parents become their past. Being someone else’s past is not enough, though. Now I need to be my own present as well – not only because I want to have something to say for myself, when my sons come to visit.

Perhaps the real test of the progress I have made in recovering my ability to concentrate will be when I am able to blog regularly again – both here and on the other blogs where I am supposed to be a regular contributor.

Here we are again now in late August. For years (how many years actually?) late August has always been a time for taking stock and realizing that I have not achieved the rest and rejuvenation that I had wanted at the beginning of summer. Now we no longer have to face the exertion of the imminent start of school, but the beginning of September has acquired a different significance for me in the meantime. Last year all the plans for commemorating the first anniversary of Amy’s death had to suddenly be put on hold when Mother took a turn for the worse and was expected to live only a few more hours, a few days at the most. I still called her as usual that Sunday, just after the priest had come, as everyone was gathered around her. When she sounded happy, almost giddy, I suggested that even as a theologian, it would not have occurred to me to celebrate the Last Rites with a party, but it seemed like a wonderful way to die, so I congratulated her on that. More than six months too early, as it turned out.

This year I am going to Michigan the first week in September, where we will commemorate the second anniversary of Amy’s death by scattering her ashes at last. It is time to come to an end of dying to go on living. At the moment I’m trying not to think too much about what we will be doing in Michigan, concentrating instead on the loved ones I will see there. I was very happy to hear that the whole contingent from Albuquerque is coming, so I am very much looking forward to enjoying a drink with Kris, being able to have a whole conversation with Katrina, instead of just the disjointed little boxes on Facebook (although I am grateful for that contact), and being able to hear from Russell himself, not just about him from others (although I am grateful for that as well). I also get to meet Emma in person at last, which is certainly something I look forward to with great pleasure. Now the only person that I will not have seen this year is Charlotte. Somehow I think we must find a way to rectify that situation, although I enjoyed hearing from Christopher about how much he enjoyed staying with his cousin in London.

In the meantime, in case anyone was still wondering, Christopher was sadly not taken at Guildhall. It turns out that the odds were even greater than we realized at first – about 3700 applications, from which 150 were chosen for the second round (including Christopher), from which 28 lucky winners were selected – so we still think it was a great achievement that he made it into the second round of auditions at two of the three schools he applied to at first try. Of course, this still requires more explanation than would be the case with a simple “Yes!” or “Hurrah!”, but he learned a great deal from the process and is determined to continue trying.

Also in the meantime, Paddy made a zombie film for a competition for short zombie films. Paddy’s film, as it turns out, also made it into the second round, but not the final shortlist, from which the winner will be announced in September. Considering that Paddy is only 18 and this is basically only his second film (although he is not sure himself that he really wants to count the first one), this is also still quite an achievement. His film has also been selected for screening at a new “Slash Festival” in Vienna, he has entered it in a youth film festival in Upper Austria (where Christopher has been invited to moderate again), and of course he will enter it in the Crossing Europe festival as well. The film exists now, it has been well received by everyone who has seen it (I will also be taking subtitled DVDs with me to Michigan), it will be seen by more people – but of course this is still not as simple and straightforward as just winning a competition at first try.

As an old leftist feminist, I have always been happy that my sons are not competitive, not fixed on “winning” or “excelling”. Sometimes, though, when I read articles and blogs about social media, which so often stress self-promotion, when I see so much self-promotion everywhere I look, it seems, then of course I start to wonder whether I have put my sons at a disadvantage by encouraging them not to be competitive. On the other hand, when I think about the dire state that the world is in today, brought about by competitiveness, individualism, greed, then I feel that the world really needs more people like my sons, and I hope that there are many more and that they will be able to find each other. One of the things I enjoy most about listening to my sons talk about their activities is the appreciation and admiration that they are able to express for others. Filmmaking is what Paddy wants to do, and it was a great joy to watch him doing it, but it was also heart-warming to hear his enthusiasm about everyone who took part in this adventure. He wants to make films, but he is well aware that films are not made by one person alone, and I think the kind of appreciation he is capable of is important. Christopher, too, never seems to be quite as happy as when he is working together with other people, whether on stage or making music or organizing something.

As they set out on their own into this dark world as young adults, that gives me some hope that they will be able to survive – and perhaps even make a positive contribution to a world that is a little bit better.

The dreaming started in August 2008, or at least that was when I first became aware of it. That was when Christopher started showing me the acting schools he was interested in applying to and talking about how to go about applying. That was before he passed the exam that allowed him to continue into the final year of school without repeating another year. It was also before Amy died. Yet Christopher continued dreaming, even attempted to inject a little realistic planning into his dreams. He decided not to start applying until he had actually finished school, so that he would have time to prepare properly. He gave up on the idea of applying to Pace University, because the costs prohibited even dreaming about being accepted there. During his trip to Ireland last summer, he realized that the course he was interested in at Trinity College wasn’t being offered, so he couldn’t apply for it. That left three acting schools that he began applying to last fall: Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and Guildhall School of Music & Drama. How much of a dreamer do you have to be to apply only to three schools that choose only about 20 students from among some 2000 applicants?

Of course, the dreaming didn’t just start in August 2008. It started about ten years before that. Wanting to go into theater has been one of the few constants in Christopher’s life since he was about eight years old. First and foremost, we have the Mason family to thank for that: from the time they were five and seven years old respectively, the boys’ summers were spent in Wilhering watching preparations for the baroque opera productions of Opera da Camera. Watching Henry work first inspired Christopher to want to learn to spell and to be able to write in both German and English and then motivated him to join a children’s theater group. When Christopher became unhappy with the children’s theater group in the second year, because he said some of the kids just wanted to be on stage so that everyone could look at them and that wasn’t fun or interesting, I thought that at least he had the right motivation. And over the years, he has had enough contact with actors and theater productions that I feel reasonably confident he has no illusions about what a hard job it really is. A glamorous career is one thing he is not really dreaming about.

From the beginning, Christopher wanted to go to the LISA – Linz International School Auhof, because not only is English the language of instruction, but most of all because drama is a required subject from the first year on. Both of the boys were incredibly fortunate to have had such an inspiring teacher as Beverly Flower-Hofer and benefited tremendously from her encouragement.

Nevertheless, when it came to the point of actually submitting applications to acting schools, just the way the questions were phrased indicated that the usual course of procedure requires multiple rounds of applications to numerous schools and intense and extensive preparation to get past the first round. The audition procedure itself is apparently part of the experience required to prepare for going into theater professionally. In fact, Christopher did learn something from his experience of the first audition in Bristol, where he was not invited to a recall audition. After that, I started getting nervous.

As a feminist mother of sons, it has always been important to me that my sons should be aware of how incredibly privileged they are, that they must learn not to occupy too much (physical, acoustic, atmospheric) space, so as not to block access for people less privileged – to learn to share all different kinds of spaces equitably. Of course, I think my children are wonderful, but I wanted them to realize that many other people might be equally bright, clever and talented, but forced by different circumstances to devote more of their creative talents simply to survival at different levels. Seeing Christopher facing rounds of auditions, however, I started to worry that, having been taught from an early age to stand back and leave room for others, he might not be assertive enough, self-confident enough to cope with that kind of competitive situation. So I worried that it would be my fault, if my poor child got run over and flattened in the process. That is, of course, one of the occupational hazards of being a mother: no matter what you do, it’s going to turn out to be wrong in some way.

Last week Christopher was in the UK again. First he flew to London, from there he took an overnight coach to Glasgow for his audition at the Royal Scottish Academy, then back to London for his audition at the Guildhall School the day after that. Much to everyone’s happy surprise, in Glasgow he was one of the ten people chosen from twenty-five applicants that day to stay for a further audition in the afternoon. At the end of the afternoon, he was not among the five finalists chosen, but he returned to London happy to have made it into the second round, happy to have made such interesting acquaintances, and feeling encouraged by the kind words of the decision-makers. He left thinking about how to approach the next round of applications and auditions next year. Even though he still had one more audition, somehow I felt that he was right in thinking, that was it.

It wasn’t. It’s not quite over yet. At the end of the auditions at Guildhall School the next day, Christopher was the only person in his group to be invited for a recall audition the end of May. The odds that he might be accepted there are certainly a bit better – now 200 people vying for 24 places, rather than some 2000 – but it still doesn’t really seem possible. At this point, I’m not sure which looks more intimidating, the list of notable alumni or the fees and tuitions section of the school web site. What is only slowly dawning on me, however, is that Christopher applied to only three prestigious acting schools and actually made it into the second round at two of them – at first try. Despite being Christopher’s mother and convinced that he is wonderful, I’m still finding this a bit difficult to grasp.

Next round of maternal anxiety: will this achievement go to his head? Instead of being too little assertive and self-confident, is there a danger he could become conceited and self-important now? After all, it is still his highly privileged position that gives him an opportunity to get this far. But I am reminding myself that Christopher is still essentially Christopher, and being insufferably conceited has never been one of his character traits. Most of all, though, it is so beautiful to see all the warm and enthusiastic encouragement from so many different people who all know and love Christopher too.

Does it matter whether Christopher is ultimately accepted at the Guildhall School? I’m not sure. I am sure that he will continue with his love of theater in any case. I am sure that he will benefit from the wonderful opportunity of simply being invited to take part in two days of intensive theater work. What he does after those two days will be decided when he has been notified about whether he has been accepted or not: specifically on 28th May, his twentieth birthday.

While Christopher is working hard to prepare, the rest of us can just enjoy twelve more days of dreaming.

My brother Daniel called me in my office yesterday to tell me that Mother died peacefully in her sleep during the night. Unlike Amy’s death a year and a half ago, this was not unexpected, not a sudden life-changing shock. Nevertheless, it means that I am technically an orphan now, bereft of both parents as well as my beloved little sister. In a sense, of course, that simply indicates that I am an old woman, at least old enough not to actually need my parents. Thinking of my own children, though, I hope that being needed is not the only reason for living.

Scattered across various computers and bookmarking systems, I have a multitude of documents and links relating to Mother’s illnesses, her mental and physical state at various times, her care needs. Almost all of them were things that Amy sent me. Since Amy’s death, I have been calling my mother every Sunday at five to talk as long as she was able to – always about an hour in the beginning, then half an hour, in recent weeks only about fifteen minutes. I’m sure I never understood as much as Amy did, but I hope we were able to cover everything she still needed to talk about so that she could die peacefully last night.

Now someone will need to take Mother’s ashes and the small container with part of Amy’s ashes to San Antonio to be interred with Dad at Fort Sam Houston. I have sometimes thought that person might be me, but it doesn’t appear that that will be the case now.
Sometimes it feels as though we have been saying good-bye to Mother almost since Dad died twelve years ago. In a sense, perhaps we have. But even the longest good-bye eventually comes to an end – and still feels unexpected.

So now I find myself faced with the choice of being an orphan or just an old woman – or maybe both. Or maybe something else?

In the meantime, I am grateful to be able to leave the writing of a proper obituary to my darling niece, while I try to figure it out. Somehow I forgot to prepare for that while I was busy saying good-bye.

Ina Ruth Whitlock Derieg,
15 December 1933 - 6 April 2010

Some time shortly before Christmas, when I was still feeling energetic and determined to finish everything before our visitors arrived, Paddy suggested one evening that we could watch Lord of the Rings together. By the time we got through part I and part II, I had actually finished all the ironing, but then we were a bit stymied, because our part III DVD was inexplicably missing. It really was very enjoyable watching the first two DVDs together with Paddy and without being sick, since Lord of the Rings is what I usually watch when I am curled up in a blanket drinking camomile tea and feeling miserable. It was much more pleasurable to recall together with Paddy what our first impressions were, the circumstances of seeing all three films together in the big cinema when they first came out.

Although I just managed to stave off the flu bug circulating in Linz throughout the brief, but emotionally intense visit from my family over Christmas, as soon as everyone was gone (including Christopher and Paddy, who flew back to London with the others a few days after Christmas), the bug defeated me. In the end, I was feeling too miserable to even dance a waltz with Peter at midnight on New Year’s Eve, our 23rd wedding anniversary, when Peter kindly stayed home to keep me company, instead of going out to enjoy music with his friends. He assured me that he didn’t mind, but warned me that if I asked him one more time, he might really start regretting it. I stopped asking and just felt comforted by his company.

Finding myself felled by the flu at the end of the holiday season, however, left me in something of a predicament. Since Paddy and I had so recently watched “The Fellowship of the Ring” and “The Two Towers”, it seemed too soon to watch them again, and “The Return of the King” was still inexplicably missing. Although I enjoyed the more recent version of Pride & Prejudice and yet another different film version of Wuthering Heights (my very favorite book when I was young), which I had received as Christmas presents, I still needed proper flu entertainment. In the end, I turned to Pirates of the Caribbean.

I owe my familiarity with Star Wars from the beginning to my younger siblings. I remember taking Amy and Pat to see the first Star Wars film, when it first came out. I think it must have been the summer when Pat was 9 and Amy was 10. When the lights came up after the end, Amy flopped impatiently in her seat, rolled her eyes, crossed her arms in disgust, and announced quite audibly, “Well, that was wasn’t very realistic!” It was perhaps not very wise to tell that story to the boys when they were little, and Christopher in particular was dying to see the new Star Wars, but I was resisting, because I thought he was still a bit too young. Unfortunately, both of my sons have always been better at math than me, so it didn’t take Christopher long to figure it out. When he started asking repeatedly, “And just how old were Amy and Pat, when you took them to see it?”, I lost that argument fairly quickly.

Similarly, I am indebted to my children for introducing me to a segment of popular culture that would otherwise have passed me by. So much of my work involves media theory and academic analyses of popular culture, and I have always felt that this gave me some valuable “weapons” in the battle with mass media and marketing over my children’s imaginations, but my children, in turn, gave me an opportunity to actually enjoy films I would otherwise never have seen, but only read about in analyses and discussions – if at all. Sometimes it even seemed helpful to find my sons intrigued by positive, sometimes slightly different fictional “role models”. At the time, for example, I felt quite grateful to the actor Orlando Bloom for proving in his portrayal of the elf “Legolas” that it is indeed possible to be extremely cool, even if you are tall and thin and pale and never get dirty in battle scenes. Johnny Depp’s performance of Captain Jack Sparrow was certainly surprising and especially enhanced a film I would never have expected to enjoy. As a feminist mother of two sons, I felt that this was the kind of pirate I could live with reasonably happily. Of course, I especially liked the lovely “damsel in distress”, who got tired of waiting to be rescued and took matters into her own hands. In retrospect, I think it might have been Pirates of the Caribbean that first sparked Paddy’s extensive interest in film-making as a whole. It certainly piqued his interest in Johnny Depp’s other films, leading to a much broader interest in other directors and genres – also in the Theremin after watching Ed Wood.

There are certainly more intellectual and critical pursuits, which I am always happy to promote in my household. Nevertheless, I’m happy that my children introduced me to such enjoyable silliness, before they grew up and became intellectual and critical themselves. Perhaps it is good to be reminded that popular culture is popular for a reason.

But now it is time to stop being ill and get back to work like the sensible intellectual that I am.

When I first met Peter, one of the things that most intrigued me about him was realizing that he hears differently, that he hears things most people don’t hear, are not aware of. Over twenty years later, I am still trying to understand his perception of the world, but it is still not always clear to me. It seems that Paddy, in particular, largely shares in that special perception of the world. I remember when Paddy was quite little, one day I found him going back and forth between the washing machine and the vacuum cleaner, putting his hands on first one, then the other, listening intently, humming oddly, back and forth, back and forth. At first I was mystified, but then I realized he was exploring the different sounds of their respective motors, and it made sense in the context of what I had learned about his father’s different perception of the world. Sometimes, when the two of them are engaged with music, I have the impression they at least partially inhabit a shared world that I can only access intellectually, circuitously, but never entirely.
As Christopher became more and more involved in hip hop, learning to understand music through sampling, listening carefully to the texts and writing his own, it gave me tremendous pleasure to be able to share with him the poetry that I have always loved, reading poetry with him in both English and German in between listening to his records, and seeing the expression on his beautiful face change as he “got it”. It seems there is something very moving and powerful in being able to share that kind of joy – like a joy in music or poetry – that cannot really be explained. More recently, I have had the tremendous privilege and pleasure of being able to share something else that matters deeply to me with someone else close to me, with my “other son”.
When I hurt my hand in the summer and had to start turning down work, Seth came to my assistance for an extra job. It didn’t have to be perfect, it just had to be reasonably intelligible English, and Seth said he thought he could do it. When he brought me his first draft of the first part of it – more quickly than I would have imagined possible – I was completely flabbergasted by how well he had turned the awkward bureaucratic phrasing of a project report into smoothly flowing English. I was impressed not only by his insightful questions about the content, but also his intelligent questions about formating and using the word processing program. When he asked about other online dictionaries, I hastily showed him where I had a collection that could be added to the Firefox search bar, and by the time I ran back through the room again, he had already set up a Delicious account for himself and added all the dictionaries and reference works to the search bar. What impressed me most, though, was when he told me about how he had been thinking about the similarities between German and English, but how differently it would work to translate the same ideas into Twi. And suddenly I had this wonderful feeling: he gets it.
Since then, Seth has been helping me with more translations. That means he is translating into his third language (English) from his forth language (German), which he has only been learning for the five years he has been in Austria. In fact, I think that because we always speak English at home, sometimes I forget how good his German is. Considering that he only started translating a few months ago, I am still amazed at what a great job he does. What gives me the greatest pleasure, though, is being able to share something so very important to me with someone close to me, who grasps – beyond the point of where it ceases to be explicable – how and why it is important. The other night, Seth and I went to see a film the others had already seen, and afterward we sat at the bar and talked about languages, how words and sentences and ideas are constructed in English and in German, and he explained to me a little bit about how that works in Twi. What a great pleasure it is to be able to have a conversation like that.

About two years ago, when I found myself in the unhappy position of having committed to a job that was really way over my head and more than I could possibly cope with by myself, Orlando introduced me (virtually) to his friend Laura, a professional translator who had stopped working full time to devote her attention to her two (meanwhile three) small children. I really need to thank Orlando again for that introduction. The first thing I learned from Laura (and subsequently from two of her former colleagues that she recommended for the project later) is what a huge difference professional training makes. Having learned to do it by myself over the years, mostly through trial and error, I was very impressed. What I also appreciate about Laura’s translations is how she can make the English sound so natural. I haven’t lived in an English-speaking country in over thirty years, and I think sometimes I tend to forget that English is not merely a vehicle for transporting ideas that sound much better in German. Since I have benefited from working with Laura, I was absolutely delighted to hear Seth talk about how impressed he was with Laura’s work on a huge document they have been translating alternately – again that wonderful sense of “he gets it”.
In the course of all this, we are now working together on transferring my “translation office” to the online office system OpenGoo with energetic support from Kerstin, who has courageously taken on the task of helping me organize the administration work. The first thing I realized in the course of this process is that in scheduling work, I seem to assume that I not only have superhuman powers, but I also have more than the conventional 24 hours of a day at my disposal to get the work done. I think I may be gradually beginning to understand why I have felt such tremendous pressure from work for so long. I realize it is demanding and unreasonable to ask Kerstin to keep reminding me that, in fact, I do not have superhuman powers, so I am all the more grateful to her for taking on this ridiculous task. Figuring out how to use OpenGoo together is again a matter of trial and error, but it seems to be working, so I hope I’m not the only one having a little fun with it.
Along with Seth, Laura and Kerstin, there is also Sophie, whose sympathy, understanding, encouragement and lovely sense of humor have become absolutely invaluable to me, since she jumped in and took over for me when I suddenly had to fly to Michigan last year. I have had a business license since 1991, and I have worked so hard since then to establish myself as a translator and be able to earn a living that way. After all that time, now, as my little world is changing around me, I am so very grateful to find that I am not alone, and I don’t have to do everything by myself, because there are things – important things, things that matter very much to me – that I can share with other people: people who “get it”.

It’s done. I have it in my hand now, and it’s a completely different feeling. Before the album was an abstract thing stuck on my hard drive, but now it’s in my hand staring at me. Ever since Friday, the day I got the CDs and my release party, I’ve been walking around with my rucksack taking my CDs along with me always. I am so incredibly relieved, and so glad about all the support I had from all the people around me, all the people that made music with me, be it for the album or just simply made music with me in the past, all the people who came to the release party and kept encouraging me and simply all who know and support me, in whatever form. Thank you. It’s just so incredibly freaky to have released an album, to have that as a reference point, to have seeped through all the music I made and boiled it down to 15 tracks and stuck to those long enough to see it through to make an album out of them. I was asked in interview not to long ago what I think my greatest achievement was and all I could say was that it’s finished, but I have to add that there is no way in hell that I would have been able to finish anything if it weren’t for the people who helped me. Right now I could really just write a long thank you note to so many people, and then I’d forget someone and have to edit this blog post another 15 times and get really pissed at myself, so instead all I will say is “thank you”, to everyone who helped in whatever way. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.