The Really Interesting People

A year ago, I wrote this post wherein I laid out five things I wanted to accomplish last year. Let's see how I did.

1. Get my own apartment: YES! It wasn't the best timing, but I have my own place and am paying about 80% (including electricity, internet, and the tv/radio fee) what I paid before.

2. Earn more money: sort of! I continued to have my steady job, and I also had a temporary gig copyediting a board game and did two books for a Big-5 publisher. (One of which is coming out soon! I hated it, though, so I won't tell you what it was.) I also got a mini-job, which is a super-part-time job that's limited to around 600 Euros per month in income, and it's tax free. So as long as I can keep that job, my rent and utilities are more than paid for, so my other income gets to go to things like health insurance, retirement savings, food, my bus pass, and all that stuff.

For the coming year, I'll have the steady job, the mini job (through June for sure), and potential Big-5 books. I'm also probably translating a book into English for a small press in the US, but I haven't signed the contract yet. (The terms are fine, but some of the wording is a lot more relevant to authors than translators.)

3. Rewrite the space diner book: Not really. With all the paid work for other people plus moving, any time and brain power for writing was basically done. But I spent a month writing most evenings in the week and made progress both in word count and planning (which counts as writing work!) I've also spent the last two weeks on break from work (partly because there is nothing to do because most people are on vacay) and writing. It's up to 45k (out of a target of 75k). I need to have it finished by the end of March, because April and May are currently blocked for translation.

4. Clean up my computer: LOLOLOLOL

5. Finish the baby blanket: YES! It was about 2 months late, but I finished it and gave it to parent at parent's birthday gathering (where they promptly wrapped Baby up in it because it was a little cooler than expected.)

I thought I wrote about this, but I can't find a post. I live in a city with a ton of things to do (too many, honestly!), but I usually sit at home. So I wanted to do a cultural activity every month: Call it 75%. I started off strong with a trip to a museum of GDR culture in January, a concert in the Philharmonic in February, and the Leipzig Book Fair in March. Then April I had an editing gig and no time to do anything. But in May I went on my first Labor Day protest, a bike ride which went partly on the A100 highway. And then I spent 6+ hours on regional trains to take the citizenship test, which I finished in five minutes.

For June I was out of the country and/or packing up all my belongings. Then in July, I went to the Jewish Museum with my aunt and her boyfriend and also up the Reichstag cupola, which I hadn't done since 2014. In August I went to the Dyke* Festival.

September had several things, though I think only one of them falls under "cultural activity" in the way I originally intended, and the other two are "experience German culture." The first one: I went on a walking tour of Marzahn, which is a neighboring district to mine and was also built from nothing to massive apartment blocks in the 1970s and 80s. I didn't know there was a cute Altstadt with an old church and rustic row houses! Then my Genossenschaft had something called a Wohntag (residents' day?) in one of the big courtyards. It involved food stands, crafts, and musical performances, including a choir that sings pop music over techno beats, which ... well, this is Berlin. The final event was the 40th birthday/anniversary of Neu-Hohenschönhausen, the district I live in. It was in a park a short walk from me, so I went over. It was basically a street festival, with sausages and beer and the fire department giving tours of their trucks to little kids. That sort of thing. I didn't stay long.

In October, I took the regional train to Potsdam to see an exhibition of art about the GDR apartment blocks (Plattenbau). It was interesting, and some of the art was contemporaneous, and some was from after the end of the GDR. But what I was most interested in was this one that was snapshots of this guy's life in the same block I currently live in (but several houses down).

I don't know what happened to November, but I didn't do anything according to my GCal. Do I count going to a Christmas market as my cultural activity for December? It's German culture for sure, but I've done it many times before. So I dunno. Calling it a 75% completion, basically.

2026

1. Get a finished draft of the space diner book to a couple writer friends who want to beta it. Like I said above, March is my intended timeline, and if I write for one hour every evening that I'm home, I should manage it.

2. Continue taking advantage of the assortment of things Berlin offers. I subscribed to a local magazine that lists upcoming exhibitions and shows, which I hope will get me going on that.

3. Invite people to things (with the hope that they invite me to things in the future). Seeing my local social circles off having fun together while I'm home with my cat makes me sad. I don't know how to get people to invite me to things, so I guess the only way to show people that I 1) like doing things 2) with them is to do things and invite them. (I have one person I can and do ask to go places, but she's not always available or interested.)

4. Take better care of my body. I'm turning 50, so it's important not just to go to the gym and keep skating but also to stretch, sleep enough, and drink water. Also eat right. And do proper dental hygiene.

So, enough about that. I'm going to write another post later about what I did in 2025, because on a personal level, a lot of it was good, even though on the grand global scale, a lot of shit happened.