So safe here. Never feel like am racing rapists/muggers/murderers/thugs to my apartment door. Also, everyone hates guns.
People dress incredibly well in an inspiring way, not in an “oh lookit me, my boots mean I listen to better music than you do” kind of way.
No one has started a conversation by asking what I do for a living.
My rent is $500 a month and that is considered outrageously expensive.
On the S-bahn today I sat between a teenage girl with a mohawk and an elderly gentleman with a monocle.
Twenty minutes one way takes me to Museuminsel, twenty minutes the other way takes me to the beach at Wannsee.
I like colder weather and today, the 4th of July, I had to wear a turtleneck and a trench coat.
Ninety-minute flight to Milan.
Jogging in the Schloss Charlottenburg every day before class.
German is so incredibly fun to speak, even if I’m a disaster at it.
22 hours ago
I’m actually very sad that I won’t get to see
Sex and the City with my girlfriends. Such a cliche, right?
1 month ago
How to be a (modern) gentleman
1. Some things don’t change: say please and thank you and ask questions about other people rather than talk about yourself.
2. Be punctual. Tardiness does not make you look important, it turns you into an arrogant incompetent who thinks that his time is more important than other people’s.
3. The modern gentleman cares about the planet. Be environmentally aware (but not obnoxious about it).
4. Open doors for people and stand up when they enter a room, but do this for men as well as women. The modern gentleman doesn’t treat women like porcelain.
5. Be modest. Bragging is distinctly ungentlemanly.
6. Be a good father. Nothing is less charming than a man who leaves childcare to women.
7. Be honest about wherever you have come from in life. Pretension is spineless.
8. Flirt - with everyone. Good flirting is a form of politeness. Pay compliments and put your companion at ease.
9. Do not phone/text/check your BlackBerry incessantly.
10. Dress tidily. Whatever style you are going for, scruffiness just isn’t in.
- via Times of London
1 month ago
Happy birthday to my wonderful father, a man who has survived hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a gallbladder attack, a Southern Air Force family, innumerable John Gorka concerts, working for Big Auto in Detroit in the 90s, community theater in Ann Arbor and living with three very opinionated women (four if you count the cat). I love you so much.
1 month ago
Reading at Tryst this afternoon I started making a list of various sites I’d like to visit when I’m in Europe this summer. Most of them are either recent memorializations and monuments to state-sponsored genocide or the grounds for major ethnic conflict in various Balkan countries. After some research I found a personal tour guide who will take tourists into the soccer stadium in Srebrenica!
And yet, people are still asking why I’m traveling alone.
1 month ago
I spent the entire day panicked that I’d deleted a crucial folder in my office’s shared drive, one that contains agendas for every meeting I’ve ever had with my boss and a guide on how to do my job that I’ve been working on for, oh, six weeks or so. Three frantic phone calls to tech support, two opened tickets and entirely too much coffee later, a very helpful network guy discovered I’d moved it to the next folder listed in the directory, probably when I turned off my computer last night.
So really, does it surprise you that after the opera last night I tried to walk up a down escalator at L’Enfant Plaza?
1 month ago
