ich fahre einfach gerne Fahrrad

Happiness for me is presently caused by:

1. Bicycling
2. Nature (insbesondere der Englische Garten)
3. The radical changes in weather that are occuring right now, from sunny bliss to lightly pattering rain to crashing thunderstorms
4. Mellow music, [audio]books
5. Puppets, sketching
6. Coffee

It's funny that my most influential and mood-determining factors in life at the moment are classes, biking, and the softcore and widely accepted drugs of coffee and wine. I am being highly social, though, and actively meeting and talking with people. I suppose everything is just very internally generated right now in that self-centered but nonetheless positive way things happen to be during ones twenties. Even my enjoyment of courses is something I cause, as it is my perception of and interaction in those courses that lead to contentment.

I did experience some melancholic Portland withdrawl feelings a few days ago and wrote, between pages of puppet design, some of it down.

What I miss: feeling a sense of belonging. What I feel in Munich is a territorial ownership of and pride in knowing this city. It still has the 'new car' smell to me and I am excited when I navigate my way correctly to a previously undiscovered place. Yet I miss being able to ask another biker in SE Portland if he has any extra batteries for my light and his reply being to freely go to his house to pick some up. I suppose that this random act - or orchestrated, as I did ask for the batteries - of kindnessis one that could occur anywhere, and in Italy I saw it again, in a more extreme variation, with the students from Padua.

That realized, though, I still miss being surrounded by mindful and kind compatriots and ex-pats who have made their place in the US. Although the Münchners are very informed and also polite, the sense of a shared cultural history, when not thought of in the grand-scale, with World Wars and global economic crises, is lacking for me. I think I am just missing Portland again, as I always do when it rains...


Well then, I leave you with a picture from Lucy Knisley (see above), a graphic novelist/comic illustrator I have been really excited about recently.

Nothing remarkably different has come about as of late, just a continuation of all that is good. I have been listening to a lot of Blind Pilot lately, as well as the audiobook version of The Picture of Dorian Grey. I keep falling asleep to the latter and am therefore led to try to recall whether any dreams were exceptionally violent. None [remembered] so far, but it's still worrisome and probably not the best bedtime material. The last This American Life episode was glorious; if you are in the States GO SEE the theatre version that is playing only once more.