Number Nine. Number Nine. Number Nine. There were plans for this month. Multiple different versions of plans. Probably around nine.

So, what was supposed to happen? New York was on the list. As was Vienna again. I also had hoped to release a software I’ve been quietly working on for almost a year now. None of that happened.

Nevertheless, it was a busy month.

Continuing my quest to finish things, I set up more Mail filters, forced myself to not start more books and Netflix series and went through my YouTube subscriptions. There’s still a bunch I could unsubscribe because they are not my area of interest anymore but didn’t for nostalgic reasons. They don’t upload much anyway so that’s okay.

I did write out a bit more design documentation for Fountain and continued writing down my ideas for the future of vuex-json-api. Depending on how things go, at least one of these pieces might see the light of day in the coming weeks. My general aim is to be more public about what I’m working on. Most of what I do ends up being open source anyway, but historically, I have not been very good at communicating my ideas before they get committed to code and pushed.

While none of the longer-term travel plans materialized, I did end up spending one elongated weekend in Dresden with a good friend. We had our days filled with as many museums and cultural experiences as we could but still enough time left to see the Elbe flood slowly falling and revealing more and more of that devastating bridge accident again.

The trip back to Berlin included a lunch stop in Lübbenau. It was way too warm for the end of September. We decided there to come back to the Spreewald next year and do a canoeing trip. That’ll be fun!

I was supposed to see Taylor Swift this month. It was planned for a year. It was going to happen in Vienna. It was going to be all glitter and joy and nothing bad could ever happen.

But then it did. The bad. Happen.

I won’t talk about this much more. No, I am not okay. But no, it’s not because I didn’t get to attend the concert. That’s sad. Really sad. But also I possibly evaded a catastrophic event. All things considered, it could have been worse. I am not okay because, and Swifties may hate on me for this, Taylor should have reacted earlier and in another way. There were a million opportunities for basic human decency. None was given. Not even, personal opinion, when she finally did say something about Vienna. And that hurts.

However, in the age old tradition of putting the shitty news first to then stack the awesome stuff: I SPENT A WEEK WITH ASH! We built furniture. We went on a lot of hardware market trips. I walked a dog on my own for the first time in my life and now weirdly kinda sorta think I might become a dog dad at some point? (I will. Just, give me a little bit to let that realisation sink in.)

We also had more time to talk than like maybe ever. Like real life, non-obstructed, sharing the same air kind of talk. There’s healing that can only be achieved this way. It’s been three weeks and I’m still not done processing everything. Which is wonderful. Back in January, our time together was supposed to be like this. Mind you, without a balcony and without the joy and sorrow of maybe having drilled into the perfect new apartment floor a teensy tiny bit. Life didn’t quite want us to get that. It’s on the to-repeat list. I just need to figure out how to bribe Rufus into not interfering.

Beyond Vienna, there were weeks full of work and nice summer evenings. A lot of reading. A little bit of coding. This may sound like I am writing the same update I’ve been writing for the past few months, but no. There was something distinctly different now: I am deliberately choosing to not do too much. I am choosing to finish things.

Did I finish anything? No. Not really. But I made progress. An example: For years, setting up rules to sort my mail Inbox has been one of my most procrastinated-on TODO list items. Did I sit down and write rules for everything now? Far from it! But I wrote some. Tricking myself with the oldest rule in the book. I told myself I will setup at least one rule per week. Of course, the thing with having the trainers on happened. I started running. I usually did 5-10 then. Slowly sorting through the accumulation of thousands of mails in my Inbox and moving it into folders.

So progress is finally happening again. My mind however is still just as restless and it’s often times hard to concentrate on one thing for a longer period of time but I am cherishing the small victories. More automation means less caring about mundane things.

Another thing I more or less finalised in August is updating my web hosting setup All of this here and a lot more things I don’t care to list has been on the same server setup for 8 years and was - aside minor corrections due to upgrades - configured to the best of my knowledge of nearly a decade ago. Obviously, I learned a thing or two since then. And the system setup for Debian changed immensely to systemd and all it’s good and bad qualities. So I set out to move and redo everything. Not only is the new setup up decidedly less maintenance heavy, it is also surprisingly much much cheaper than the old one. That’s a big win.

June. The halfway point. Like clockwork, the year marches on unimpressed by day-to-day shenanigans. I keep on standing on the sidelines, watching the scenery move past me. No, that’s not quite it. That’s the wrong image. I am still on the train but I have misplaced my ticket and there are no destination displays anywhere to be found. “The journey is the destination”, I tell myself. The meanings of “journey” and “destination” however becomes quite unclear when it feels like one is constantly being tugged in a direction that does not look very promising.

So, all this to say: I am turning to move forward again. I spent a lot of time in June figuring out what is blocking me, and quite a bit of time to remove those blockers. What’s annoying me most is that I don’t dedicate as much time as I would need for happiness toward coding and my main creative outlets - composing music and 3D modelling. I also felt constantly behind on what’s going on in the world.

Acknowledging that creative output works best with a hungry but rested mind, I tackled the latter first and finally got on to setup a FreshRSS instance for myself. It is ridiculous that I do this kind of infrastructure setup all day at work but when it comes to my own stack, I somehow forget that this is a skill I gained. Now, FreshRSS seems like a good solution for the server side, but frankly, that web client? It’s horrendous. Me being me I did not arrive at that conclusion by accident. I didn’t intend to use that web client for more than the few necessary admin-y tasks now and then. Back in the day, when Google Reader (R.I.P.) still existed, I discovered the wonderful Reeder app by Silvio Rizzi. After a lot of procrastination and also a few bits of unexpected setup struggle I finally have a feed reader system again. This is a problem now. I loved a lot of blogs back in the day. Most of those died. I’m excited to find out what new things I will discover and what old magic I will fall in love with all over again.

Other than that, June was uneventful. Apparently, we’re having the wettest year since the beginning of regular weather recordings something like 150 years ago. It saddens me that most of this rainfall does not have a chance to really soak into the earth since the landscapes around Berlin have been so deprived over the decades. It’s no one’s fault in particular, everything happened for a reason, but we as a people need to act now. Not everything is broken. Just technology.

Some people stay.

Most people leave. Or rather, as Peyton Sawyer said, people always leave, but sometimes they come back. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes we don’t want them to leave in the first place.

I find myself thinking about love a lot these days. Not necessarily the romantic kind. There are so many more ways to love people or things than just romantically. It’s a pity that pretty much all of them have no place in the modern entertainment myths about love.

Well. Mostly. But more on that later.

A characteristic I look for in people I want to be around is wether they can charge my batteries and wether I can charge theirs. I care a lot about too many things that drain me. It’s oftentimes not the best of traits. However, at the end of each day are micro-interactions with my friends who, even by telling me how shitty their day was, lift me up. I sometimes wonder if they know that I sit there smiling and relaxing while I’m reading their narration of a perfect storm on a sunny day. That is the thing though. That is what I mean by battery charging. With the right person, communication becomes so effortless that any topic emanates energy. One might also dare to call it love. You telling me you had a really bad day after me asking you how you’re doing is - after all - the long answer. People who always just answer good on that question aren’t worth being around.

Here’s the thing though. I’m a professional over-thinker. So, while I gain precious life juice from these interactions I keep wondering, questioning, if I even deserve that. Am I giving anything back? That can be a tormenting thought. A thought I don’t want to entertain. Because, that’s what I want to term the on-the-spectrum friendship fallacy. You think you are friends with someone because they are nice to you but because they are nice to you they must be mean to you eventually. Because people always leave.

Sometimes they come back. And when they do I’ve learned three simple words that I hope transport everything I cannot put any other way but want to be known to them.

Dear friends: I love you.

Which brings us full circle to pop-culture and the beginning of this post:

“Love you, Sammy,” Dong Hyun said.

“I love you, too, Grandpa.” For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.

– Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin

Remember how I wrote April was a self-care month? At this point that’s apparently a euphemism for not doing a lot. Also, it’s even more wrong to say this than it was about April.

Anyway. I have spent a lot of time this month thinking about my love languages and writing and all of the things I adore doing. It seems there is never enough time in any given day to make a dent in the things to - seemingly - be done.

But let’s start at the beginning. Love languages. (Don’t worry, this is an update post about this month.)

• Physical touch
• Words of affirmation
• Active listening

Okay. Those being dropped here feels like I’m writing a dating profile page. So hear me out. Despite being regularly read as an extrovert I am not actually a very outgoing person. But if I like someone, I want the distance between them and me to be as darn close to 0 as possible. Not all the time, mind you, but reasonably often. Now, that - one might infer - does actually include touch. Hugs, after all, are infinite life juice transducers. But it’s fucking hard to have all of these feelings when one of the dearest humans in my life goes through half of a decade worth of trouble in a matter of weeks but is for all intents and purposes a lifetime away. So I was sitting there, doing what I do, listening, cheering when necessary, finding words to hopefully form blankets for them to fold into.

As I am typing this, it feels oddly unnatural to write. That feeling is something that has been bothering for a while. In many ways, it is the reason why there were no updates at all on here for literal years. Not writing or at the very least being afraid to started out of nowhere a couple of years back. Ever since then I’ve been collecting thoughts and thoughts on those thoughts and thoughts on those thoughts on the thoughts. That’s my version of overthinking. I think about thinking about things I should’ve just done when I first thought about them but instead chose to think about the effects of doing the thing. Now. Back in April I wrote that I took to note taking. That is still far from becoming habitual. However, I am daring to declare progress in terms of thought sorting. Ask Ash. She knows. I don’t. So yeah, still trying to hopefully soon untether the downward spiralling, yet stuck corkscrews from all the magical flasks full of prose and poetry and cracks on the wall.

All the other things have largely not happened. Some of course have. However, nothing else that happened remains on the top of my head.

So that was May. And that was a good month. That wasn’t all that happened of course. Just a tiny fraction. The thing is, friendship - as an age-old credit card advert would say - cannot be paid for with money. And this is time. Time well spent.

Während ich - zur Abwechslung - ein wenig für diesen Post recherchierte, fand ich heraus, dass One Day nicht das erste Buch von David Nicholls war, welches verfilmt wurde. Schon sein Romandebüt, Starter for Ten, kam 2006 in die Kinos. Der Cast dazu liest sich ein bisschen wie ein All-time-best-of des britischen Fernsehens, man könnte auch sagen, wie ein Klassentreffen von Doctor Who und Sherlock. Catherine Tate, Benedict Cumberbatch und Mark Gatiss waren da unter anderem mit von der Partie. Auch ist die Häufung von Schauspielern, die später größere oder kleinere Rollen im Avengers Universum gespielt haben auffällig. Aber genug davon.

Wer mich kennt, weiß dass David Nicholls seit meinem Zufallsfund von One Day zu meinen Lieblingsautoren zählt. Damals wünschte ich mir, dass One Day von so vielen Menschen wie möglich gelesen werden solle, weil es mich so sehr in seinen Bann gezogen hatte. Damals. Ein paar Monate später wurde aus One Day ein Film der zwar, wie es das typische Schicksal von Buchverfilmungen ist, nicht meinem gelesenen Kopfkino entspricht, mich aber doch recht glücklich macht.

Genug nun von vergangen Zeiten. David Nicholls hat, wie sich wenn die Lesende oder der Leser bis hierhin durchgehalten hat unschwer erraten lässt, mal wieder ein Buch geschrieben. Zu sagen, “Us” ist ein Reisebericht, wäre eine wahre Aussage. Auch wahr wäre: Es ist eine Coming-of-Age Story, es ist eine Liebesgeschichte, es ist keine Liebesgeschichte.

“Us” ist die Geschichte von Douglas, Connie und Albie. Es ist die Geschichte von einer Reise durch Festlandeuropa, von Straßenmusik, Museen, ausgeraubten Frühstücksbuffets und Waffendealern. Und es ist die Geschichte von einem Portmonnaie, dass von seinem Besitzer durch eine Bahnfahrt und eine offene Gefängniszelle getrennt wird.

Wer Geschichten mag, die nicht offensichtlich sind, obwohl der Erzähler einen Plan hat, wer Lust auf einen Kurztrip durch die Kulturgeschichte Mitteleuropas hat und wer schon immer wissen wollte, warum Dänen besser Englisch als Schwedisch sprechen sollte sich diesem Roman hingeben.

“Us” von David Nicholls ist 2014 bei Hodder & Stouton erschienen. Die deutsche Übersetzung “Drei auf Reisen” wird von Kein & Aber herausgegeben.