I have a confession to make. The reason you didn’t get a journal last week wasn’t because I was sick. It was because I just couldn’t find the time. Or make the mental space, maybe, more on that in a bit. In my defence, the first two weeks that I skipped the journal, earlier in September, I absolutely was sick. My boss got sick at the end of August, came to work anyway, and a week or so later, I was knocked on my arse. The doctor wrote me a note for the Friday before the first skipped journal. I was home in bed that weekend, the whole following week, the next weekend and most of the Monday that followed. I then went back to work last week Tuesday, and by the time Friday morning had rolled around, I hadn’t made time to write the journal. Since I had skipped two weeks on account of my being sick, I didn’t think anyone would chase up a third week, but I was wrong! A few dear readers were concerned about my well-being, and, indeed, wanted an update, so I am writing this, partially, to set those concerns at ease. For the record, I am sorry if you feel in taking an extra week that I pulled one over on you, that wasn’t my intention.

I very nearly decided not to write a journal this week, either, but I want to try and give you a picture of my life at the moment instead, and hope that it falls on sympathetic ears. I started writing this journal on Thursday night, just after showering and brushing my teeth, somewhere around quarter past ten. This morning, I woke up at ten past seven, rolled out of bed and slipped into the bathroom to wash my face and clean my teeth. I usually, then, make myself a cup of tea and write (not Jeremy’s Journal) for ten to fifteen minutes. This morning, though, I got a call at seventeen minutes past seven from a housemate that moved out earlier this month, asking me to fill in a form confirming that he’s moved out because he needs to give it to the bureaucratic powers that be. Oh, and he needs it by today. After what would have been my tea-fuelled writing time, I ate breakfast and had about half an hour of quiet time. An alarm rings on my phone at eight seventeen every day, which leaves me just enough time to slap on some Old Spice and a pair of jeans before I duck out of the front door. I get to work just before nine. This morning, I called my girlfriend while I stood on the platform and did some banking on my phone while I sat on the train. When I got to work, I filled out the form for the former housemate. I then set about telling my bosses about the Excel sheet they asked me to make while they only half-listened. I took a lunch break at twelve forty with the rest of the staff. Before I started eating, my boss asked me if I’d called one of our vendors yet. I told him no. He tutted. This is the same man who tells me that 'he doesn’t want to be involved in the details of my work, he just wants me to do it’, anytime I get into the weeds about my tasks. We all ate together and chatted about how much more expensive houses have become and how much debt France is in. I went for a little walk around the block. I worked until six. My boss told me today that they won’t be giving me a forty-hour-a-week contract, certainly not until the new year. Huge bummer. I’m applying to rent an apartment in about two weeks, and I was hoping that the new contract would help fortify my application. On account of my having a grumpy day and only having ravioli at home, I swung by the grocery store to buy the ingredients for a pick-me-up pizza. On the way hom,e my train was late. I got home at seven. By the time I had eaten and washed the dishes, it was eight. I then left the kitchen for my bedroom and began writing a cover letter for the apartment application. Though the landlord will only read the application in October, I’ve got to drop it off tomorrow. When that was finished, I had a few more chores to settle up. At half past nine, I thought I was home free when I remembered about the journal. I relaxed for about fifteen minutes before hopping in the shower.

Every morning is identical to today’s (other than the phone call, thank the Lord). I wake up, write, eat, have quiet time, go to work. When I’m healthy, I wake up an hour earlier to exercise after quiet time and before work. My theory is, get all the important stuff done in the morning. Every evening seems to fill itself. This past weekend I was in Cologne visiting my girlfriend’s parents, whom I last saw in June and will next see at Christmas. I arrived home on Monday at midnight. On Tuesday evening, I got home, meal prepped my lunches for the week, made myself supper and returned a friend’s call. We ended up chatting for at least half an hour. Then I showered and got into bed, shattered from the late train the day before. On Wednesday night, I got home, did a load of washing, made supper, washed the dishes, hung the washing and then video-called my parents, which ended up lasting two hours. Which I loved, as an important side note. Tomorrow night, I will leave work and go directly to the new apartment for a viewing. I’ll probably only get home around eight thirty. So you can see how the only time I could have possibly written the journal this week was now. Thursday night. It’s eleven now, bedtime.

It’s not that I don’t like the journal, or that I don’t want to write it—though those have been problems in the past. I think it just isn’t high enough on my list of priorities. I can only do so much. And I am headed for burnout, fast. I need to, maybe want to, take a little time for myself. To play, to rest, to do the things I’m interested in, to zone out. I’d love to be regularly unproductive. As it stands, I end up rushing the journal every week. Just get it out, write something, anything. No matter the quality. I go back and read some of the ones I wrote two years ago and they were so funny! My interest and a sense of playfulness come through in the writing. That’s what I loved about my writing. That’s what I’m trying to cultivate when I write in the mornings. I know it’s only fifteen minutes now, the plan is to try and write for an hour before work. Maybe I can shift my exercise to an after-work activity. Run home. I’m really proud of a lot of the old journals. I haven’t felt that way about a journal in a long time, though. None this year stand out, I think. Whether I don’t like them because I’m rushing them or whether I already resent them for taking my time away, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m finding an excuse not to write the journal. The way I’m writing the journal now, just like a couple other aspects of my life at the moment, feels unstable and unsustainable. What does that mean for the future of the journal? And will you get one next week? I don’t know yet. In the week to come, I already know I’m expecting to work overtime on both Saturday and Monday. Friday is a public holiday, but I plan to spend both Friday and the weekend with my girlfriend before she flies to South Africa for a research trip on the following Monday. I won’t see her for five weeks. You can understand, I hope, the desire to pause everything to spend the weekend with her.

It is not lost on me that the journal in which I lament that I haven’t got enough time to write the journal is the longest one I have ever written, though that doesn’t mean it has taken me the longest to write. I’m sorry for the irregularity of the delivery of Jeremy’s Journal, and for its dubious quality of late. Thank you for reading with me so far, and thank you for your patience while I figure out where to go from here. In case you don’t hear from me for a while, know that I am healthy, safe and in good hands.

No journal this week, sorry! I spent the first half of the week giving my notice to my current landlady and sending out a (very promising) application for an apartment, which all became quite involved. I then woke up with a sore throat on Thursday and spent Friday at home in bed, so please excuse me while I’m on sick leave! I’ve been focusing on recovery and not writing, for the moment. If all goes well, I should be back next week!

No funny joke, either! Sorry again. You can still subscribe if you like, though.

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My Wednesday started fairly well. My alarm rang at the usual time. I brushed my teeth and ate and made my way to work. Whenever I cross over the bridge that sits somewhere between work and the train station on my morning commute, I send my parents a voice note. Wednesday’s was a little anxious. A few things are shifting in my house-share: two people are moving out this month and two more are moving in, and all of the contracts, questions and nerves have been channelled through me. Simultaneously, I have been pondering moving out myself, and somehow the combination of it all: the prospect of finding a new place and a suitable replacement, and dealing with all the other emotions and conundrums of the people around me had me shaken. Work was quite normal. One of the two bosses was sick. I asked the one who had shown up if we could talk about the proposal I’d given him to look over back in July. I’d written up a two-page document outlining why I think I should be working for them for forty hours a week instead of thirty-two. This included an explanation of the roles I’d taken on since starting there, specifically highlighting how many of them fell outside of my original job description. Naturally, having taken on more responsibility, I’d like to be compensated accordingly. It was more than a plea for a raise, though. I communicated that I was all in. The whole hog. I want to throw all of my time and energy into this place and see how much I can help them grow. The deal was that I’d give them the proposal at the beginning of their holidays, in mid-July, and we’d discuss it all in the second half of August, after they’d gotten back.

When I asked the one boss if we could fit the conversation in before September, he said, “well, that only leaves today and tomorrow, so…” I’m sure you can imagine how thrilled I was with that answer. One big reason I wanted the extra workday was because it gave me some more flexibility if I choose to move out. Never mind having more cash, though that’s always relevant. Landlords in Berlin (and all of Germany, I think) will ask to see my pay slip. If my income after tax is less than three times the rent, excluding utilities, they are likely to refuse me the contract on the basis that I am ‘high risk’. Yes, really. So, the way I saw it, a bigger number on the contract buys me a higher chance that Mr Risk-Averse says yes. It was a bummer to know that I wouldn’t have a stronger contract come September. I went home with my sails thoroughly windless. Only to discover that one of my housemates (who will be moving on the day this is published) had taken the day off and had been packing his things all day. They now flooded the foyer and the kitchen. Thankfully, I had planned on having pizza for dinner, because his pots, pans and cutlery had all been rehoused in cardboard boxes. In the kitchen, one serrated knife, some plates and a handful of cups belong to me. Even the table and chairs were gone. I brought my pizza down into my room, where the seating remained reliably static, and finished my dinner. Unfortunately, though, I’d managed to miscalculate my hunger and after I’d cleared my plate, I could have devoured another. This is when it dawned on me that I had no other food in the house. Somehow, grocery money has been particularly tight this month and the cupboards looked like it. I had some rolls in the cupboard and an empty butter dish and a mostly empty bottle of sweet chilli sauce in the fridge. I’d had three or four tortellini leftover, but I’d eaten those while I waited for the pizza to bake. I had no food in the house! If I had been genuinely starving, I’d have eaten the bread without anything on it, I suppose. We weren’t there yet, though. So I lay on my bed and felt sorry for myself and called my girlfriend.

And when she asked me if I wanted to come over, I packed a bag with some clothes for work the next day and hopped on the train. The funny thing is, I felt, at first, that I shouldn’t accept her offer. She represented peace and comfort and provision. She’d welcome me into her apartment with open arms and hug me, rub my back and look at me sympathetically and ask me to tell her all about my day. She’d make me a slice of toast and a cup of hot chocolate and reassure me that I didn’t have anything to worry about. Once or twice in the last two years, I’ve felt that running to her, or to my parents who once provided the same respite, was a failing of sorts. That to be strong, or to be a true man, or something equally daft meant dealing with the unpleasantness alone. Looking for comfort in food or ritual or sport seemed allowed, but seeking it in company, wanting to be held or soothed seemed unbecoming. Odd as it may seem, I’m quite proud that I packed up my stuff and sought the comfort of my girlfriend. I am proud that I didn’t chastise myself for wanting it, or for acting on that desire. For though some part of me seems to think it is a failing, I think that part is wrong.

My pizza was also very end-of-the-month. Frozen mixed veg on half a roll of store-bought dough. I didn’t even have mozzarella! I had to use grated Gouda! If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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I think one of the biggest travesties of the current implementation of artificial intelligence is how pliable it makes us.

The Will Smith film I, Robot, is set in a society not unlike ours and only a few years in the future. In this alternate near future Chicago, robots are implemented everywhere. The movie focuses on the newest line of androids rolled out by a major conglomerate that are each driven by one corporate AI. The company promises that the androids are safe and so, naturally, everyone believes them. They become more universally implemented than rudimentary robots. They are fundamentally trusted with every task: from police work to dog walking. Except for one cop, who vehemently distrusts them (enter Will Smith). For the first two acts, his boss, his co-workers, staff at the robot factory, his grandmother, strangers on the street call him a zealot. His grandmother has her android cook him dinner, a recipe of hers that he is intimately familiar with, to prove that they are harmless. He tastes no difference between his grandmother’s food and the android’s. She, just like everyone else in Chicago, has given away task after task to the android until all that is left to do is oversee it and entertain herself. Precisely because of a lack of oversight, at the corporate level, something goes wrong. I won’t spoil the rest of the flick.

In Pixar’s WALL-E, artificial intelligence has been running the show for generations. We’ve graduated past involving AI, robots and androids in everyday tasks. We’ve given up the concept of staying in control all together. The task of human oversight is essentially neglected because the robots prove to be so efficient and trustworthy. In the second act of that film, we see that people have assigned all tasks to various different AI and robots for so long that they are no longer capable of walking. All they do all day is indulge in entertainment and be fed by robots. The logical leap becomes The Matrix: A world in which AI has decided that it’s better off at doing the whole ‘running the world’ thing than we are, and lists several catastrophes on our resume to justify the decision. In that scenario, the entertainment has turned into the only experience available for humans. Their physical bodies are maintained as massive power farms to generate the electricity that the AI consumes. Yes, I’ll spoil that one, you’ve had twenty-five years. There’s another show I’ve watched called Inside Man featuring Stanley Tucci as a psychologist on death row for murdering his wife. When asked why he did it, he replies: “We’re all murderers. All you need is a bad day and a good reason.” I feel like that sums up the flip that AI makes from a WALL-E scenario to a Matrix one.

From the biblical example of Esau giving up his birthright for a hot meal after a long day of hard work, to you and me signing away all kinds of privacy rights just to get next-day delivery: humans seem to be willing to give away more than they should for the prize of convenience. Across these three films, we see a fairly obvious progression take place as humanity gives up involvement, control, oversight to have easier, more convenient lives. Why take the bin out if the robot can? Why cook my grandson dinner when the robot can? Why run that license plate through the system when the robot can? Why run parliament when…

So we’ve been through the Hollywood-ified story, but I want to leave the world of film and jump into the real world for a moment (if you can bear it). My boss is a man in his mid-thirties and runs a business alongside another man in his early thirties. They employ eight people. During the week, we sat in a brainstorming meeting about how we could streamline the company, make more revenue, organise our admin a bit, things of that nature. Naturally, his phone came out and he asked ChatGPT to think of more ideas for us. Some were good. Every week he takes his phone out and asks ChatGPT for help. Whenever he receives an answer, whatever the answer, he believes it. I’ve listened to its frighteningly lifelike voice-to-text function. It’s like talking to a person. Like someone who knows what they’re talking about. Someone I can trust. If the progression takes a turn at I, Robot crescent and walks us down WALL-E lane before ending up at Matrix cul-de-sac, this very much feels like the moment we begin the walk.

I’m not necessarily against AI, though I do resent it coming after my career (or maybe I should resent people for making that okay). I do wonder, though, what our future looks like when we all just believe whatever it tells us. Aren’t these systems built by companies? The very same companies that violate privacy laws? Or, better yet, do what they like while the laws are catching up? How easily shaped are our individual libraries of facts, systems of beliefs, minds and hearts, and by whom? Or, scarier, by what?

This journal will, for the moment at least, remain AI-free. Except for spellcheck. I still can’t do neccasarily. Nessacarily? Necassarily? Necasseraly? Nessacarily? Whatever. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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For the last month, my usually wide array of tasks at work has been whittled down to one: inventory. I’m not sure if my bosses have ever done inventory before, but they grossly underestimated the task. They asked me to record the data for what they believed were around three to four hundred chairs, couches and desks. I personally entered seven hundred and sixty-six individual pieces of furniture into the database I created. Thankfully, the task is now behind me and I can get back to the (mostly) refreshing variety of chores I usually tick off during the work week. While I was measuring the height of sofas and double-checking the manufacturer details imprinted on dining room tables, I kept myself company with a slew of audiobooks and podcasts (I can heartily recommend the Murderbot series of novels by Martha Wells). In one of the podcasts I regularly listen to, Dear Hank and John, brothers John Green (of The Fault in our Stars fame) and Hank Green (co-founder of VidCon, an author in his own right, and too many other accolades to mention here) answer questions posed by their listeners in a mock “Dear Mary” format as well as spend a good lot of time chatting about whatever they please, from silly brotherly rants to deep, emotional challenges. Often, when things get emotional or existential, John’s and Hank’s worldviews differ. Inevitably, John, partially because he is the older brother, and partially because he is a member of a faith community that Hank is not, surmises that their differences are due to Hank being on ‘a journey of meaning’.

While it may not be connected to brotherhood or to faith, I think that I am on my very own journey of meaning. One day, as I locked up the warehouse after a full eight hours of moving the ladder around and measuring kitchen stools, the neighbouring warehouse door that usually remains firmly closed was ajar. The space is a photography studio rented out by a single photographer that offers a variety of product and portrait photoshoots, as far as I can tell. A black leather couch with reflective chrome legs sits in the entryway. A red electric guitar stands nearby. I shoved my other arm through the other strap of my rucksack that hung loosely behind me and I walked down the passage and out into the courtyard, on my way home. I started to think about my future. I’m twenty-five. I’m currently working as the photographer at this furniture place (although it must be said that my job is slowly including more and more other aspects of the business). It’s a good job, I’m satisfied. I think the coolest part of my job so far is actually saying that I’m a photographer. It feels very young and interesting and like people I meet at a party at New Years will talk about the fact that I’m a photographer on their drive home. Even if the future of my career is threatened by the ever-growing threat of AI. Angst aside, I began wondering, if that neighbour were me in five years; if I had my own studio, if I was the boss, running my own photography business, did that feel like a future I looked forward to? It would be a fairly logical career leap. As I considered it, my stomach fell into my shoes. That future felt more like a sentence than growth or progression. If I am not building toward being a professional photographer, what am I building towards?

I don’t know. A year ago, I was working really hard to improve my German proficiency, find a job and find a place to live in. Before that, I toiled to find a way into Germany at all. Before that, I spent three years of my life investing time into acquiring my Bachelor’s degree. For a very long time, I’ve had something to work towards. It seems that I have reached a sort of natural end to the progression: having secured a livelihood and a roof over my head, the next goal is to… continue ad infinitum? I’m not interested in the rat race. Social status doesn’t light me up. It seems that many of the hills my peers choose to focus on climbing seem boring or pointless to me. That thing I feel a life as a professional photographer lacks is some deep sense of satisfaction. I feel that it will leave me hungry. I was listening to an episode of Trevor Noah’s podcast, What Now, that featured Simon Sinek. The two of them, and Trevor’s producer Christiana, discuss identity, work and meaning. Christiana seems to misinterpret Simon’s idea that our work should be meaningful as ‘we should derive meaning from our work’. I have sat with myself for long enough to know that it is dangerous and foolish for me to try and find my identity in my work, but when I engage in my work, I still want it to be meaningful. What, then, do I determine to be meaningful work?

I also don’t know. My uncle has a business producing small medical devices that he sells directly to hospitals. It is my understanding that these devices prevent what would usually be fatal incidents, often in impoverished communities. I lived in his home while I attended university, and one evening at dinner I expressed my increasing disinterest in the advertising industry (the career towards which I felt my university was pushing me). I told him that it felt unsatisfying, hollow. Like the work I’d be doing was ultimately meaningless, and that ate at me. He countered with a scenario. What if I worked for his company or a company like it? What if my advertising, and the increase in product reach because of it, literally saved lives? Wouldn’t that make it mean something?

I told him no. That I wasn’t close enough to the lives being saved for it to matter. I’d still be an adman. I’m not suggesting that the only way in which I can find meaning in my work is by saving lives. Far from it. Until now, the moments in which I feel I am creating the most meaning are when I am restoring old, beloved objects so that they can continue to be used by those who love them. How, though, does that translate into a viable career? Neither spending the remainder of my professional years pouring myself into advertising, nor following my current career path of professional photography, seem to satisfy my professional hunger. How do I define meaning, and how do I build a life that allows me to scrape at that meaning each day while putting bread on the table? I still don’t know. But hey! That’s why they call it a journey, I suppose. I’m only at the very beginning.

Send me your podcast recommendations! Audiobooks, too! If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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I’m addicted to YouTube Shorts. For those who don’t know, YouTube Shorts are short videos (anything from ten seconds to three minutes long) on YouTube that can be created and published by anyone with internet access. Because of this, some of the videos in my feed include but are not limited to: a series in which a young man (who doesn’t show his face) designs and 3D prints something new every day for a year; another young man of South Korean heritage showing off Korean cuisine, documenting the process of different sauces and preserves as they ferment over months; various young people buying fixer-upper houses and fixering-uppering them; scenes from superhero movies with new music inexplicably superimposed on top of the existing soundtrack of the film, often accompanied by vaguely related quotations; competitive cheerleading, though I can’t fathom why; pets being pets; children being funny; and excerpts from stand-up comedy acts, which ping-pong between boring and offensive. If this doesn’t sound interesting to you, these videos have been judged to be especially addictive for me specifically by some system of algorithms buried deep in a secret server farm at Google. Many of the short video platforms (TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels) work in the same way. The longer you use the platform, the more advertisements you can be shown, which incentivises the platform of your choice to keep you using their app for as long as possible, increasing their revenue. To that effect, each of these companies sinks millions of dollars annually into whichever strategies or, indeed, algorithms, might get you to promise yourself that you’ll “only keep watching, like, five more minutes.”

I find that telling myself that I’ll stop in five minutes essentially never works. I’ve switched to an only three more videos strategy in the past with a slight increase in success, but I often flub that boundary, too. I sit on the bench at the gym, I stand in the train, I sit on the toilet, just scrolling through YouTube Shorts. I enjoy some of the videos, but I think I am drawn to the platform more than I am to the content on it. I find the same is true of the cinema. Occasionally, I find myself going to the cinema because I want to watch a particular film, something I did with two friends last week—The Fantastic Four: First Steps was great! Sometimes, though, I’m just in the mood to go to the movies; it doesn’t really matter what I see, as long as I see it on the big screen while I munch on some dangerously over-flavoured salt and vinegar popcorn. The operative difference being, I suppose, that the cinema experience hasn’t been expertly constructed to flood my brain with so much dopamine that I seek to fill essentially every waking moment with popcorn-riddled activities.

I think that’s what makes this an addiction and not a habit. I have unhealthy habits. Most evenings after dinner, I think to myself that, having eaten my vegetables, I now deserve a block of chocolate (or four). I love sweet treats, but I can recognise that at a certain point, my indulgence becomes overindulgence, and I can alter my habit without much fuss. A maximum of one treat a day, for example. Just recently, I have undertaken a change in my caffeine consumption habits. In the last month or two, I’ve regularly been having two coffees a day instead of one. However, my body becomes quite caffeine dependent, getting headaches when I miss my daily cup of joe, in my case, and I don’t want to be beholden to a bean. So I’ve intentionally dialled back to a single pull of espresso a day. I like consuming coffee and sugar so much that I sometimes consume too much, and then I have to remind myself to slow down.

Contrary to caffeine and sucrose, I don’t enjoy the actual process of consuming YouTube Shorts. Each time I consume YouTube Shorts, it is without the feeling of restraint or control, and it feels impossible to adjust my desire to engage. Any resolution to spend less time scrolling through Shorts lasts less than a day. I don’t especially connect with the videos. Yet I find myself craving the activity. I have genuinely been on the way to the toilet at work and then turned around to grab my phone from my desk so that I could watch Shorts while I sat. Whenever I watch Shorts, I am unaware of time passing. I will invest whole evenings into making Google more ad revenue and emerge from my hypnosis some hours later, only to be nauseous at the realisation that it’s time for bed and I never actually got to relax or even realise that I’d arrived home from work. It is ridiculous to be so reliant, so incapable of experiencing interstitial time (time in between stuff, like waiting for your kettle to boil) without the accompaniment of my intravenous dopamine. So if I don’t like it, it’s not good for me, it takes all my time, and I just keep coming back, it’s an addiction, right? The crazy thing is, even after writing all this, I can’t even bring myself to delete my account. Even though I want to stop, I don’t really want to stop enough…

In Germany, they serve nachos at the movies! Can you believe it? And absolutely no slushies in sight. My uncle would always get the largest slushy he could when we went to the cinema together. I think it was a one-litre cup! If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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I’ve written in previous journals about always having my eyes peeled for South Africans in Berlin. Coming back from work on Wednesday evening, I saw a South African couple on the train. How did I know this, you ask? I didn’t strain my ears to identify the wonderful lilt of Afrikaans; I spotted a K-Way logo. The oom wore black Salomon shoes, charcoal technical pants and a black K-Way fleece. His partner wore very fancy loafers with pointed toes, well-tailored trousers, a white blouse and a red headscarf that completely covered her hair, the tail of which extended just past her belly button (at a guess, her belly button was not on display). They seemed to be in their fifties, and they were speaking English. This was, admittedly, a little disappointing to me, since I find a quick Afrikaans comment to be the most effective way of breaking the ice with other Saffers. I was standing about four metres away from the couple, who stood adjacent to the train car door. I removed my earphones and put my cellphone in my pocket in preparation for our chat. I contemplated going over to the couple and introducing myself, but then I feared that we might hit awkward silence before I had to get off the train. I had half a dozen stops left. I resolved not to introduce myself, but to cry something in South African slang as they got off the train. I have done this with much success in the past. Only last week, I saw a kid about seventeen years old wearing a t-shirt sporting the South African flag. I yelled, “Aweh bru!” And his spirits were naturally lifted, as were mine. Easy. We came to the next station, and it appeared as though the couple in their fifties were getting ready to leave the train. It was at this moment that I realised that I was, perhaps, too far to shout something in a fun or encouraging way. I’d really have to yell for them to hear me above the bustle of a peak traffic, post-work train station in the middle of the city. So, instead of being the crazy man inappropriately shouting at strangers, I held my peace. I watched as the K-Way man and his partner walked away and down a flight of stairs. A stone fell into the pool of my stomach and sent cold ripples to lap at my ribcage.

I doubt I would have said anything of substance to that gentleman. Most of my interactions with South Africans I meet in the wild are simple and memorable. This week, or perhaps last, I helped a couple of co-workers of mine deliver a sideboard. We pulled up to a part of the city I’d been to before. My co-workers got out of the van and rang the bell. We carried the sideboard up five flights of stairs (though both men, one in his forties, the other in his sixties, did not allow me to touch the thing much). We were welcomed into the customer’s apartment. We even assisted him in moving his old sideboard into the hallway. Just as we were leaving, we spoke to him about a brass lamp he had bought from us. His partner was under the impression the lamp was dirty, but my co-worker explained that what they suspected was grime was really the patina (a discolouration that occurs when brass is exposed to oxygen over time). The customer seemed a touch confused at this and relied on one or two English words. In English, I then explained the patina to him, and how it was a very similar process to the discolouration of Lady Liberty (though iron turns green while brass turns brown). We spoke a sentence or two more in English before I asked him if he was South African. Turns out he’s from Kuils River!

About a month ago, I went to Hamburg for the weekend with some friends. Just before departing Berlin, as I took the escalator down onto my platform, I saw a couple in their forties with two huge suitcases. Both suitcases had a massive K-Way logo plastered across the side. Naturally, as I walked past, I called, “lekker naweek julle!” They both beamed. As my train arrived, the section of the train that I had to board was on the opposite side of the platform. As I crossed the platform, I passed the couple again, this time accompanied by two more South Africans. When I walked by, the man leaned over to his friend, pointed at me and said, “hierdie oukie is Afrikaans!” “Ek’s eintlik ‘n soutie!” I called back over one shoulder. All four roared with laughter.

I’m not sure there’s a deeper meaning to the sadness I felt after missing the opportunity to say hello to a fellow Saffer. I think I was a little ashamed at the shyness I felt. I reasoned with myself that I shouldn’t say hi, that it might be awkward or that it might interrupt their day. Which is so not South African. My experience of South Africans is that pretty much everyone everywhere is keen for a chat. Especially with strangers. My uncle often jokes that he leaves my aunt in the queue in Checkers for two minutes to get a loaf of bread, and by the time he returns, she’s talking to the guy in front of her about his mother’s health. I felt like if there’s anyone I should feel comfortable walking up to and wishing them a lovely evening, it should be South Africans. Especially K-Wayers. Next time I’m going to choke back the doubt, stroll over, and say, “En waar kom julle vandaan?”

I must say, the headscarf threw me. But then again, the last time I was at Dischem, the woman working at the counter took one look at my ID and told me, “Maar jy lyk nie soos ‘n Snyman nie…” If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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My girlfriend and I have wisely invested the last two months or so in our cultural education. We are both watching the entirety of the Star Wars Saga for the first time. All nine. I’ve seen a few of the movies before, but a long time ago (and in a galaxy far, far away). She, having fulfilled her need for fantasy stories with a Harry Potter obsession, was as of yet ignorant of Star Wars. In fact, she thought of Star Trek and Star Wars as one and the same franchise, as I’m sure nearly all twenty-two-year-old women do. I have subsequently dissuaded her from that delusion. The really shocking thing to me is just how into it she is. I thought that our watching the movies would involve much eye rolling and sarcastic commentary (as there is when my mother is present for the viewing of any science fiction film), but in actuality, she is a total convert! Every time a lightsaber is ignited (ignited? Unsheathed? I mean turned on. When it makes the bwzzz noise) or a spaceship jumps into hyperdrive, she looks at me with giddy excitement. I, of course, return the giddy look, excited to so openly and wholeheartedly share in a new fandom together.

I’ve been doing the inventory this week. Both of my bosses are taking summer leave that overlap for about three weeks and as they’d prefer their shop to operate well in their absence, they have endeavoured to give each of the team members a large holiday project to work on while they’re gone. Because I’m such a lucky boy, my special project is to create an extensive and detailed inventory list of the five-hundred-some lamps, sideboards and sofas on offer in our shop. I also have to cover the warehouse. And the workshop. And basement. We’ve often chatted about the creatively ambitious projects I could get my fingers stuck into. An idea at the top of the list was to create a series of large posters that we could hang in the shop, informing our customers about each of the furniture designers whose pieces we stock, sharing a little about their style and legacy, and displaying examples of their iconic pieces. The bosses and I have also discussed totally redoing the store front window, plastering it with massive (but tasteful) vinyl stickers advertising our in-house upholstery and workshop. This week we also received two large, blank light up signs (the ones you never see in Cape Town, that stick sideways out of the wall, advertising the shop to people walking down the street, rather than those standing in front of it). At some point I’d love to set about turning those into attractive branding for the store. The upholstery and I have also played with the thought of showing off their process more creatively, considering building a wall display of several dining room chair seats at different stages in the reupholstery process. All this to say that my project was, instead, to assign every single piece of furniture with an index, note its designer and country of origin, take its measurements and enter this and a handful of other data points into my very interesting, very creatively fulfilling spreadsheet.

In the interest of taking my mind off of my wonderfully exciting inventory taking, I popped down to the library on my lunch break earlier this week. It poured with rain, my train was late, and I was still frightfully hungry despite putting away a bowl and a half of chicken penne, but, not all was lost, I did manage to successfully retrieve a single item from the library: a Star Wars video game. It’s been raining in Berlin all week and this weekend is no different, so after no time deliberating at all, my girlfriend and I decided that we would do a cosy weekend. We have yet to define exactly what that entails, but it certainly means hot chocolate, staying in our pyjamas all day and, I thought, a solid chunk of time turning my lovely round eyes square.

The only trouble is, I lost my nerve a little once I’d actually borrowed the game and brought it home. I considered a whole day spent tucked into bed, watching TV, playing video games, chatting and relaxing. With the weekend coming closer and closer, what had sounded fantastically comforting in theory, now seemed wildly irresponsible. I’ve got to register myself with the German government for yet another bureaucratic ring I have to jump through, I haven’t written for myself in an awfully long time, there are some crafts I’ve been meaning to get to. I feel like I have to spend my free time (of which there seems to be a dwindling supply each month) doing things that are strictly good for me. No TV or video games. I feel like I’m fifteen again enjoying my school holidays and can hear my parents telling me to put my iPad away and suggesting that I read instead. The only difference being that those comments probably would have come after I had shut myself away in my room for eighty consecutive hours. I know that I’m not lazy. I wake up at half past six most mornings and only arrive home twelve hours later most evenings. I pay my rent on time and never forget to wash my clothes and I budget my finances well and I eat vegetables every night for dinner. I don’t know why a lazy day makes me feel guilty, but I’m not sure it’s a very good instinct to have.

At the time of writing this week’s journal, I have successfully logged three-hundred and ten items into my inventory list. And all it took was about a dozen espressos and double that in biscuits. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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If you haven’t yet, try out the voice over version of Jeremy’s Journal! Click the button above to start listening to this week’s journal (then go back and listen to last week’s)

I was about seven or eight years old when my parents began giving me weekly pocket money. I got fifteen rand every week, which probably could have bought me a Steri Stumpie and a Chomp at the time (have you ever read a more South African reference?). My parents also constructed a (compulsory) budgeting system for me. Every week, my fifteen rand, given to me in coins, would be sorted into four empty Melrose jars, only one of which was designated for immediate and frivolous spending. I think that jar was only fed about three rand fifty weekly. Once teaching me their budgeting system, my parents often emphasised that my money was only as powerful as my discipline. It was my decision whether I’d be satisfied with short-term gains like milkshakes and chocolates, or whether I would like to set my sights on something larger, like LEGO sets, or even video games. Soon, I began saving any money I got, whether from my weekly (and later monthly) pocket money, birthdays, Christmases or on those random days a grandparent would sneak a paper note into my hand as we left their house after a Sunday lunch. Though I was a dedicated saver, my deposits were never very large and any toy of substance regularly took months to save for. This resulted in my calling Reggies from our home landline on an almost monthly basis to check if my PlayStation 2 game of choice was still on the shelves. Eventually, after saving my pocket money for twenty weeks, I’d walk into the store and finally buy the game I’d been eyeing. I’d then proceed to play it slowly and methodically, trying never to indulge too much in one go, knowing that I’d have to make it last until I could afford to buy the next one.

I’m a big tea lover, a tough position to be in in the overwhelmingly coffee-preferring nation of Germany. I’ve been to many a traditional coffee shop (read: not hipster, no milk alternatives) that simply serve black tea. What kind of black tea? Well, black, of course. I come from a home where we’ve got Earl Grey, English Breakfast, Ceylon, Assam, Lapsang Souchong and Darjeeling on offer, and those are just the black teas! The first time I ever went overseas, to London when I was nineteen, my parents told me about all of their highlights in the year they lived there. It included a shop called Whittard of Chelsea, a stunning tea merchant established in the year eighteen eighty-six. When I visited the branch on Piccadilly, a tea caddy for each of my parents hopped into my carry-on and flew back to Cape Town with me ten days later. Very good tea, very pretty tins. My mother then visited England a year or two later and tried a ‘carrot cake’ tea brewed by Bird & Blend, a modern, British tea company putting a twist on the classics. Every time I’ve been back to the UK since, I’ve bought myself or my parents tea from Bird & Blend (their chocolate digestive tea is jaw-droppingly brilliant). I’ve struggled quite a lot to find good alternatives here in Berlin. There’s a frightfully expensive Berlin-based tea brand called Paper & Tea, but I’d have to sell a kidney to afford one hundred grams of tea, and based on how quickly I consume the stuff, it doesn’t seem like the best long-term plan. There’s a national organic grocery store chain that does a half-decent Earl Grey blend, and another easy-to-find brand that sells a respectable English Breakfast. That said, I am still clinging to the last few grams of Woolworths tea that friends brought over in December last year.

For my first Christmas in Germany, I got a glass teapot and some tea from my girlfriend’s aunt and uncle. It was very kind and very thoughtful, and I do like tea, but the tea in question was a box of eight or so of those enormous dried Chinese flowers. The idea is that you put the flower, which has been packed into a sphere, into the glass teapot and pour boiling water over it until it is submerged, and you then watch it as it slowly rehydrates and unfolds. Dinner and a show, as it were. Unfortunately, while the tea has oodles of charm, it isn’t my favourite to drink. Nineteen months later, the box is still untouched. The teapot, though, is sitting on my desk. I’ve used it a great deal in the last year and a bit, especially in the winters, especially while rewriting my resume, especially while I was job hunting. While lovely and, again, a very gracious gift, it is an unbearable pain to clean. The spout is very narrow and has a steep curve and after a week of use, it looks like the concept of a sponge has yet to be explained to me. All this to say, I’ve been looking to replace the thing.I’ve found the perfect candidate, too: A yellow Bodum French Press. It’s five hundred millilitres, the perfect size for two cups of tea (or coffee, I suppose), and the mouth is lovely and wide—a breeze to clean. It’s cute, it’s colourful, it’s even reasonably priced!

And yet, I find myself revisiting the webpage again and again, just like I did with my LEGO games, checking if I reallywant to spend my hard-won money on this particular item. Yes, initially, when I first started handling money, my parents dissuaded me from foolish buying behaviour. Every milkshake I bought would be an extra week’s wait to save up for the video game. Later, though, it became my own system of discipline, continually sacrificing the smaller purchases in favour of larger, more worthwhile investments. In my twenties, I’ve developed a problem: what if I haven’t discovered the thing I should be saving up for yet, the proverbial video game? What if an item like this French Press is, in truth, the milkshake, and not the video game I believe it to be, and in reality, it is a waste of money? After all, the teapot I’ve got isn’t broken, just a little… meh. Somehow, despite my deep and abiding love of tea and my relative dislike for my teapot, despite now budgeting a portion of my paycheck specifically for fun stuff like this French Press, I just can’t bring myself to buy it, though I’m not sure what I should be saving the money towards either, yet. Some nicer kitchen appliance, I’m sure. There is a stunning single tang carbon steel pan that’d look wonderful in my kitchen…

Fine, fine, I caved! I bought the stupid thing and even had to pay extra for the shipping! There, are you happy, now? If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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Like the observer effect in quantum mechanics, my stomach seemingly grows in size whenever I stand in front of a mirror. Where I expect to see a slim, lithe trunk, a sturdier one than imagined greets my eye. This has been the case my whole life. There’s a very charming picture of me as an eight-year-old wearing very long, very baggy swimming trunks, a pair of translucent turquoise swimming goggles, and a brightly coloured beach towel. The towel is tied around my neck like a cape and my fists are on my hips in a Superman pose, pushing out a very round tummy. My smile could not be wider.

Being curvy runs in the family. I know a couple of my older loved ones struggle with knee and back pain that is, no doubt, exacerbated by any extra weight. I also know a few family members who may not be physically hindered by their weight, but struggle or have struggled with their weight socially, especially in their youth. I was certainly bullied because of my voluptuousness. Luckily, because it’s something that affects all of us (whether it’s up to genetics or our behaviour), I was equipped with two tools to combat the social difficulty I faced. The first was access to the experience and wisdom of those who had come before me. Two generations of people who had been outcast at one time or another because of their body shape, who had experienced embarrassment or shame or harassment, who had overcome the jeers and stupid comments from the crowd, who had affirmed their value despite all this, taught me how to do the same. They taught me to look at what I liked, not what others didn’t. Even when I struggled to like my tummy, I learned to like other stuff, like my dark, curly hair and my blue eyes. I had hair and eyes just like Superman’s, hence the smile in the photo. The second thing they provided me with was safety. The swimming pool at school was a nightmare. The idea of taking off my shirt in front of the other kids, including the boys who poked fun at me and the girls I wanted to like me, terrified me. When I swam in Granny’s pool at a family gathering in the summer, I had no reason to be ashamed of my big tummy—mine was the smallest one there!

I was speaking to a young woman earlier this week about our bodies. She had experiences similar to mine. As with my body, she had experienced moronic, insensitive, cruel comments shared with her against her will by people who seemed to think they had a right to have and share a hateful opinion. The difference being, she wasn’t a victim because she was fat, but because she was a woman. Since her body began resembling an adult’s rather than a child’s, she was inundated with crude, unwelcome comments. My heart broke for her as she hesitantly shared this with me.

I spoke about the tools my family had equipped me with, discernment and a sense of safety. She agreed, that she had been given access to both in her childhood, too. The biggest difference in our stories, perhaps, is the divergence after childhood. I went to high school where my (compulsory) engagement in school sport leaned me out a little and then on to university where my weight was less easily targeted. In fact, as the culture changed and the body positivity movement grew, it became more and more taboo to comment negatively on someone’s body. My safe space grew from being the size of Granny’s house to just about everywhere, except still maybe the swimming pool, on a bad day. For the young woman with whom I spoke, her safe space diminished. As she moved on to high school and then to university, where she began engaging larger groups of strangers, the comments occurred more frequently. What’s more, at the same time that the body positivity movement was swelling, sexual harassment seemed to be far more easily swept under the rug. I was ashamed to have a body worth commenting on, I cannot imagine the shame, anger and fear that an endless stream of comments must generate.

I am most shocked that I am largely ignorant of this kind of behaviour. In my everyday life, I have the impression that I never see women being harassed. According to her life experience, though, and to many other young women’s, I’m sure, it is something of a daily occurrence. I have no solution, I have no recommendation, I have no resolution. I don’t know what to say or do at all.

There is one comment on my weight that stands out in my memory. In our biology lesson, when my fourth-grade teacher asked a few of her students how much they weighed and I answered fifty-five kilograms, she put her hand to her chest in shock and announced to the class that she only weighed fifty. I can’t remember if I cried about it afterwards or not, but it clearly made an impression if I can recall it fifteen years later. If you enjoyed this week’s journal, please subscribe.

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I’ve written before about the various creative hobbies I find myself dabbling in. While I was still in school, I attended extra-curricular sewing and knitting lessons (my cricket coach nearly fell over when he learned this upon asking why I was five minutes late to practice one day). One year, I participated in an after-school club in which we made mosaics. At home, I made little figures out of modelling clay (often stolen from the movies I watched: I remember making the Lord of the Rings characters, Stitch and the Minions). In high school, I started making functional things out of material. In the tenth grade, I repurposed a piece of leftover fabric my aunt had lying around (she was in a furniture-flipping phase) and turned it into a pencil case for myself. I was especially proud of the zip. In university, I even tried my hand at redesigning a shirt of mine. I removed the narrow, blue piece of fabric that sat beneath the buttons on a white button-up and replaced it with a rose-patterened fabric. I also replaced the navy buttons with white ones, bar the very bottom button, which was red. It wasn’t especially en vogue or well done, but I took pride in it at the time, certainly. I also modified a pair of jeans which had worn through in a few spots, such that it had a green sunflower bandana underneath large rips. My grandfather, who retired while I was in high school, worked as a buyer for a shoe manufacturer, which meant that he had cupboards full of leather samples. Naturally, I took a shot at leatherwork, making a low-profile wallet for myself, among other things. A good friend of mine that I met in university was an excellent leather craftsman, and I eventually gave him rolls and rolls of the leather that my grandfather had initially given me (at my mother’s partial disgust, I think, since he only cleared them out of his garage at her insistence—I suppose she wasn’t pleased to see his clutter make its way into her home). A total dreamer, highly detailed and a fanatic for all things flamboyantly masculine (moustaches, motorbikes, well-made knives, forestry, red wine), he made truly stunning leather items. He gave me a leather pouch for my twenty-first birthday. It’s in the drawer of the desk I now write at.

There’s a YouTuber I enjoy watching called Beau Miles. He’s an Australian outdoor maniac who happens to be very similar to both my father and this leather-crafting, moustache-touting friend of mine. He goes on wild ‘backyard adventures’, as he calls them, like planting one thousand four hundred and forty saplings in twenty-four hours (which is one a minute for those of you keeping score at home) and choosing to walk the ninety-kilometre commute to the university he lectured at. He’s a big advocate for recycling. Yes, the throwing your plastic bottles in the right bin kind, but he’s really into a much bigger, more radical kind of recycling. He finds and holds onto junk for years. Things like rusted old nails and bolts, chicken wire, old wooden railway sleepers, scrap sheet metal. He squirrels it all away in his barn (he lives on a small farm) until he can use it all to make something new. In his most recent video, he makes a stunning office for his wife underneath an old oak tree in the corner of their property. He builds the whole thing himself, only using the junk he’s saved from landfills and picked up off the road. He spends something like ninety dollars on some paint and silicone sealant, but the rest of the cabin, with a fence to keep the cows out, a patio, a lovely desk, a rainwater collection system and a wood-fired stove, is made completely of what other people deemed unfit to keep around. He’s done this before, renovating his office at the university only using old desks and bookcases that other departments threw out. He built a bench in the woods using only stuff that locals dumped in that very forest.

Almost all of the creative hobbies I engage in now sort of make use of the same system. Last year, I built a chair out of reclaimed wooden pallets (though it ultimately collapsed due to my lack of woodworking experience). The bed I’ve slept on every night for five months, I built using reclaimed pine (or possibly beech) that I pried the rusty nails out of myself. The wallet I made for my girlfriend, the wallet I made for my mom and the updated wallet I made for myself have all come from scrap leather. My latest project entails sewing squares of fabric that were thrown away by the upholstery at work together into a patchwork, that I will use to recover my chair that I found on the side of the road. Something about seeing value in the things others overlook feels rewarding to me.

Beau says that he believes that his desire to reuse the old junk he finds, turning it into useable, characterful, often beautiful things, is that he identifies with it. He sees that the old furnace is a little dinged up and has rust in a few spots, but it’s still got plenty of life in it. He reckons he’s the same: a little dinged up, but still working just fine. I don’t know the fella, but that seems about right. I think that might be my philosophy about all people, and a good few objects, too. We are valuable despite the rust and scratches we accumulate. I think my reason for hoarding items bound for the tip stems from believed potential. That old oak sideboard could be a brand new dining room table, if you only gave it the chance. I’m in favour of seeing the potential in everything, perhaps especially the stuff, and more critically, the people, that we so thoughtlessly throw away.

That oak sideboard thing wasn’t a random example; there is a real oak sideboard that lived in my girlfriend’s mother’s house that I disassembled (read: destroyed) upon request. I dream of turning the wood into a dining room table. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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I don’t really want to write the journal this week. It’s Wednesday night at a quarter past nine, I’m sitting at the desk in my room and typing away at my laptop. My forty-centimetre diameter tabletop fan is oscillating to my right. As it turns its head towards and then past me, two rooibos tea bag tags hanging from my teapot flutter. My forearms stick to the desk. The long, humid day has left a sweaty residue on my body, and I can feel my skin stretch and pull as I move my fingers over the keys. I didn’t go to gym before work this morning, I can’t remember if it was because I got to bed late or if I didn’t sleep well. In any case, I opted to wake at seven-thirty instead of six-thirty and forfeited my hour of moving weights around. I arrived at work just before nine. I then spent the following nine hours moving chairs, tables and sideboards into the corner of the warehouse I photograph them in, photographing them, and subsequently carrying them away again. I had a good lunch break. Chili con carne. Had a coffee break around four, too. Then I came home to an interview with a potential new housemate. One of my current housemates is moving out this month and returning to Brazil. She didn’t plan to leave so abruptly but was forced to because of some difficulties involving her job here. The surprise, unfortunately, means that we’ve got five days to find someone to rent the room to, or the rest of us have to split the cost. Very exciting. Mercifully, I’ve just received my first paycheck having worked a four-day week (instead of 3), and I should be able to find the money without losing a hand to my bookie if it comes to that. After the housemate interview finished at seven, we conducted another one at around quarter-past. Which was quite irksome, considering the second candidate had said he’d be there at five. He gave only one-word answers to all of our questions and, frankly, made my fellow housemate and I (for two had left by this time in order to attend prior arrangements) feel uncomfortable and unsafe. It’s a no, then. I finally dragged my frame upstairs at twenty-eight to make myself dinner. I watched a series on my laptop to keep me company. Once I’d finished my grub and scrubbed the pan clean, I came downstairs to lay in bed and finish the episode. At about nine my fingers began to itch with the feeling that if I did not take advantage of what little free time I had remaining, that the journal wouldn’t get done this week. Which, brings us all the way back to where we started. Tired and sweaty, reluctant to write.

And yet, writing all the same. I will share with all of you what I have as of yet confided in only a few: I have often considered stopping Jeremy’s Journal. Especially in the last few months. Between the various massive changes in my life recently: moving, living with strangers in a house-share for the first time, struggling to find work, finding work, battling to establish work-life balance, working even more. I am under no delusion that I am suffering an unfair schedule. In working a thirty-two-hour week, I have more free time than many, if not all of my readers. I hope it is still fair to suggest that the acclimatising process is still a lengthy one. After five months on contract, it feels like all I do is work, eat, wash the dishes and sleep. I have often resorted, in the last month or two, to writing Jeremy’s Journal during my lunch break at work. The beginning of this paragraph was. The voiceover for last week’s journal was recorded in the corner of the warehouse where we keep the excess cushions for sofas and armchairs.

I like to think that there is a reason for my keeping the journal alive, though I’m not sure what it is. I have often thought, in those moments of doubt, that I could do other things in the time I spend writing, illustrating and now narrating the journal each week. I could be writing my book. I’ve occasionally dreamt of sewing and embroidery projects (especially now that I’ve got a bin full of upholstery off-cuts to dig through). I considered buying a 3D printer and experimenting with what kind of products I could design. Whenever I have expressed doubt, the immediate feedback I’ve been given is to keep going. I’ve had about ten really good ideas for other long-term projects, like Jeremy’s Journal, that I could spend a little time on each week. One involved shouting the praises of film photography. Despite how exciting these ideas may sound, I can’t seem to make the trade. This publication is not growing (though, admittedly, I do little to help it on that front). Sometimes it is not even particularly good. But there is some thing, some heart or kernel that keeps me coming back. I get the sense, perhaps it is a hope, that I will reach a point at which I turn around and look at the journals I have left behind me and they will count for something. Whether they sharpened my communication skills or kept me writing fit, or brought structure to my life, or, I hope most of all, something of value to yours. Here’s to that moment.

The train to Cologne, the cushion room in the warehouse, the park bench at a holocaust memorial, the couch in my girlfriend’s lounge, on my phone in the gym and sitting at the bus stop in the rain are just a few places I’ve written the journal in the last month or two. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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My dad and I are nerds. Not like, mega-super nerds. We haven’t hacked into a government database (or maybe my dad still intends to have that father-son talk) and we don’t dress up as the Caped Crusader on the weekends. I do, however, have a LEGO portrait of Iron Man still hanging in my childhood room, and Dad has only got about a thousand science fiction anthologies. Our particular brand of fascination is less tied, though, to intellectual properties, and is want, rather, to follow thought-provoking conversations, mentally challenging games and envelope-pushing science and research. It looks like my dad sending me an article on the scientific benefits of barefoot running. It looks like me sending him the music video of a brother-sister band whose confluence of soul and funk seems to be re-shaping the New York music scene. It looks like crosswords and book lists and email chains. When I was a kid, it looked like puzzles, too.

This week was a busy one for me. On Monday I was in Leipzig for the day, catching up with an Irish friend of mine that I first met at summer camp in New York and whom I haven’t seen since. Tuesday through Friday I was at the office; I spent Tuesday evening with my girlfriend just catching up, and then saw her again straight after work on Thursday to go canoeing on a lake near her university. Friday after work I jumped on a train that took me to Hamburg where I woke up this morning. I’ll spend the whole day with a friend, taking photos, and then drive back to Berlin with him tonight. My dad is probably the reason I’m into photography, too. He and Mom got me my first digital camera when I was seven or eight, and it was his old film camera I stole and fell in love with in the last year of university.

There was one puzzle my parents bought me, I can’t remember when, I must have been a pre-teen. It was one thousand pieces. Not only that, but it was a special kind of puzzle made by a Dutch company called Wasgij (which is jigsaw backwards, if you’re having one of those days). The picture on the puzzle we got was of the first Olympic Games in ancient Greece. The tongue-in-cheek, cartoonish illustration depicts boxers and shot-putters dressed in white tunics and horse-drawn chariots racing one another behind them. The thing about Wasgij puzzles is that the picture printed on the puzzle pieces themselves is never identical to the one on the box. Though the box showed the very first Olympic Games, the puzzle was of a modern version of the games. The crowd had cell phones and above the audience seating were billboards with adverts plastered across them. We had to discover this as we went along, of course, since there was no way of knowing what you were building until you were building it. That fit Dad just fine. He didn’t believe in using the box when we built bog standard puzzles in any case. Dad and I expropriated the dining room table and worked on the puzzle for weeks. Constructing the edge was a doddle. Of course, once we were left with only middle pieces, the real work began. It was tricky to match any two pieces together. We began grouping them together according to their colour or pattern. A bit of leopard skin here, a bit of cherry red there. Even so, we’d often seem to be going down the right track, believing we’d locked in one whole section of the puzzle, only to find that about half of the pieces we thought belonged to the hurdler’s green jersey, were lime and not emerald. Back on the pile they went. That’s how we made progress; in fits and starts. Some days I’d only manage to do one piece before school. Some days Dad completed about two dozen pieces after returning home, having walked the dog. Some days neither of us touched it. In the end, though, the thing was finished. We left the puzzle on the table for the weekend before crumbling it together into the box and putting the box in my cupboard.

I’m not really sure how to feel about my life right now. It feels like I’m playing with those pieces again, putting some into place only to realise that they don’t quite fit right, and deciding instead to toss a few back into the pile. I’m not sure how I feel about having such a full schedule. But then, doesn’t the week I’ve had offer the reliability of a schedule with the flexibility of adventure? If how I spend my days is how I spend my life, is this how I want to spend my life? The little kid in me, the puzzle-completionist, wants to see all of the pieces in the right places. I want my house, kitchen, shoes, teeth, job, relationship, savings, to be just so. I don’t why the sense to organise and complete the puzzle of my life is especially strong at the moment. I think it probably has something to do with finally stepping into my career and being fully (or, at least, apparently) independent. Maybe I just need to keep myself busy now that I’ve got the job and the house and the residence permit.

What I came to realise in writing today’s journal, though, is that my dad and I didn’t frame our puzzle. We didn’t even look at it for very long once it was complete. For us, though I may not have known it at the time, the thing that kept us engaged was the solving, not the solution. The fun is in playing with the pieces, turning them over in your fingers, considering how they all fit together. We didn’t rush. We didn’t fret our mistakes. I wonder what I might see if I were to focus on the pieces of my life instead of worrying about what the picture on the box looks like.

I’m slowly nerdifying my girlfriend, too. She’s got the whole book thing covered, now we’re working on watching Star Wars. Her favourite character is Jar-Jar Binks… If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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My phone began ringing on Wednesday morning and I answered it with hesitant confusion. “Ha…Hallo?” The evening before, I had received a phone call from an unknown number. A man asked me if I could see the dog downstairs. When I asked what he meant, he replied by asking me if I was Uber. “No.” “Lieferando?” “No.” “Oh, sorry, wrong number!” He hung up before I could tell him that he hadn’t been a bother at all, that I hoped whatever was being delivered to him got there safely, and to have a lovely evening. When my phone screen displayed another unknown number on Wednesday, I thought it’d be a confused Uber customer again. I had already begun considering how to get in touch with the delivery driver who seemed to be using my details. I almost swallowed my tongue when I recognised the voice on the other side of the call. It was my co-worker’s. He offered his help, incase I needed to move any heavy pieces of furniture while I went about photographing them that day. I thanked him and insisted that I would reach out if the need arose. I hung up and returned my gaze to the screen in my hand. I hadn’t saved his number.

After four months of plying my trade at the small furniture company that employs me, I have saved only three phone numbers as contacts in my phone. The first two are the bosses’s numbers. They’ve been in my phone for longer than I’ve worked at the place. The third contact was the one I saved on Wednesday morning. It was the all-round handyman, whom I have had cause to call several times before, whose number appeared on my phone this week, whose number I had not yet committed to my address book.

I haven’t got many co-workers, but more than two-thirds of them remain numbers in a list in our company chat. I greet them as I walk into the building every morning and as I walk out every evening. I look them in their eyes and shake their hands. I often eat with them during our breaks. There isn’t a standardised break time, so I end up eating earlier or later than some or most. On Wednesday, I microwaved my chicken curry and rice and sat outside to eat it about fifteen minutes before the others joined me. I finished my food with them. We politely chatted. The weather or the lunch menu are often favourite topics. The conversation, unlike my lunch, is dry and stale. It is, more or less, the same conversation we had last week, and the week before.

I did not sit with my co-workers in the shade of our building and shoot the breeze for the rest of my one-hour lunch break. I never sit and shoot the breeze with my co-workers for the entirety of my lunch break. I often find myself going for a walk or reading a book or writing something or buying a snack (in rare cases where my breakfast was not filling enough and I was forced to snack on my lunch during the day to such an extent that I needed to supplement my mid-day meal). One could argue, quite convincingly even, that I choose not to spend the entirety of my lunch break having a chin wag with the other furniture pedlars because I do not prefer having such a long break in the middle of the day only to end work at six. One may suggest that I struggle with the thought of losing so much time while at work and so choose, instead, to reallocate some of my break time for relaxing or, perhaps, for something more productive, like writing. Hearing this plea, I would roll the arguments around my mind, savouring their justification and considering their relevance. I would then pose another question. It may be, that I prefer to utilise a portion of my break for personal (read: antisocial) activities. Why, then, do the phone numbers of the co-workers with whom I have pleasant albeit brief interactions remain unsaved?

I don’t know. For me (the task-oriented over-thinker), not having a number saved to my phone is symbolic of holding one at an arm’s length. I don’t save a number in my phone when I believe that I won’t have a lasting or important relationship with said individual. A fellow university student asking me for the answers to some benign exam question; the person I sold my Nintendo Switch to. Largely inconsequential communications. There isn’t any particular reason I haven’t saved those work numbers. I tell myself that I’ve been busy, and I have. I wonder, though, if my subconscious has been at work. I wonder if I feel, in any way, that this job is temporary. My au pair job was only ever going to be for one year. Somehow I can’t see myself at this place in five years. Just like au pairing was a way to get my foot into the door that is Germany, I feel (though I have not always felt) that this job is me getting my foot into a career. Or real financial independence, at least.

They aren’t bad people, my co-workers. They can all be funny and kind and generous. I am happy to serve them and serve with them. Something in me, though, believes (or hopes, even) that it is only for a time. So do I bother to save their numbers? Have they saved mine?

I’m trying to pitch The Task-Oriented Over-Thinker to Dungeons & Dragons as a new legendary monster for players to fight against. Far more relevant (and challenging) than a yawn fire-breathing yawn dragon. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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But how can it possibly be? And in June, no less. In 2025. Which still sounds like a positively ridiculous and absolutely made-up year to my ears, despite being practically halfway through it, now. I’m trying to figure out just where all of my time goes. I think it has something to do with the routines I now engage in. As most Jeremy’s Journal readers are painfully aware, in my year as the Acting Representative South African Au Pair to the City of Berlin, my days were wildly different from one to the next. I did have little routines; I woke up at ten to seven every day, dragged my dishevelled person across the foyer and into the bathroom, where I first washed my face, then brushed my teeth and, finally, applied sunscreen. These small rhythms, though, did little to induce a feeling of homogeneity in my day-to-day life. Whether there were craftsmen in the house replacing the living room window at a quarter to eight in the morning, or if snow had fallen overnight and a relatively simple walk home from kindergarten turned into an adventure, I felt as though I were a hiker in the alps—slowly and consciously ascending and then descending each day of the week, only to arrive at the weekend, looking back at the journey I’d travelled, enjoying a well-deserved rest (and maybe a beer). Now, I have left the Alps far behind me and have stepped into an intergalactic vessel that travels faster than light, and only once we exit the wormhole after work on a Friday evening, do I become aware that the points of light visible through my windshield which had slowly stretched like taffy as we zoomed passed them, were, in fact, Tuesday through Thursday, and I have quite miraculously found myself blinking at the weekend without knowing how I’ve gotten here or what destruction drifts in my wake.

This, of course, leaves me with a pile of laundry I haven’t quite finished folding, a closet that is a little less than organised, a mail to my canoeing course that I should have sent weeks ago sitting in my drafts folder. My intention was to do these tasks throughout the week, as I did during my tenure as the ARSAAPCB, but when one experiences no week due to warp drive time dilation, when does one do all of these things? I must remember to be grateful for my starship, of course. I have forgotten just how many nights I lay in bed, distraught at the prospect of dragging a five-year-old to the swimming lesson he hated and then continuing to amuse him for forty-five minutes while his older brother attended the successive class for yet another week. I longed, I wished, I prayed for a boring nine-to-five. Four months later, I’m still trying to decode just what I wished for, and whether I should have wished to inherit an excruciatingly large sum of money instead (though I imagine that comes with its own unique subset of headaches, like tax and the jewellery I’d have to buy my girlfriend).

In my frequent and heady bouts of self-reflection, I have been trying to unpick the particular cause of my dissatisfaction. One theory is that I just have less free (or flexible) time now. Twice a week I’d escort the oldest au pair kid to soccer practice and sit on a nearby bench for the entirety of the ninety-minute training session. I’d read or listen to an audiobook. On occasion, I’d call a friend and I think once I watched most of a movie. I was on the clock the whole time, mind you. This, along with zero commute and a thirty(ish) hour work week left me with a little more personal time. Even when I was working, I could mostly check my phone whenever I liked, or pop in an earphone and listen to music while I packed the dishwasher. My days are far more rigid now (also a facet of work I longed for; there’s no checking out at exactly eight in the evening when you’ve missed the bus because the littlest lamb dawdled on the walk home from the swimming pool); I commute for about an hour every day, mobile phone usage is (understandably) frowned upon at work. The biggest difficulty to face is the limited free time I have in the evenings. After knocking off at six and walking to the station, if I time everything right, I’ll be home around twenty to seven. After dinner and washing the dishes, that puts me at about seven, maybe seven-thirty. Then I’ve got three hours to relax, engage in hobbies, do chores around the house. Most evenings I only manage to do one of those (and it rhymes with schmetflix).

Another theory has to do with the actual work itself. I’m very happy to be in the job I’m in at the moment; it is far superior to any other realistic options I had. I work at a small company, where I am the only person of any marketing or visual communication qualification. As such, I work closely with the bosses, have relative creative freedom and am in the process of earning trust (and therefore independence). I am, however, the first employee of my kind in this company, which is reflected in my paycheck (as is the fact that this is my first serious career venture). My bosses also have no clue about creative work, such as how much time each task requires. They also seemingly have little interest in pushing creative boundaries, which often relegates me to the laptop monkey, instead of the Photographer and Marketing Strategist(yes, this is my real title; cool, right?) All this to say that the work isn’t bad, it just isn’t particularly exciting. I helped a friend out with a commercial photoshoot a few weeks ago: I had total creative freedom, full (and unearned) trust straight off the bat; I worked alongside other creatives and we got to exchange lots of complicated, obnoxious shorthand about lenses and discuss whether the mood created by a certain piece of architecture in the background was quite right. That work was electric.

Somehow, it felt fair to me that the au pair work was boring and occasionally awfully trying because it was just as flexible. At least I had time to myself. The hyper-creative photography was terribly time-consuming, the crew showed up half an hour late and I was only given lunch at five. I’d do it again tomorrow. Somehow, having a whirlwind week, barely finding time to fit in the mundanities of life because my work keeps me so creatively engaged feels justified. And, when the work is boring and repetitive, a larger slice of personal time pie feels right, too. Right now, I’m seemingly somewhere in the middle; doing marginally creative work that takes up most of my time. I have yet to overanalyse why, but I can’t stand it. It makes me want to lock myself away in my room each night and frantically work on my next project of creative genius so that I can deliver myself from this predicament. But then, maybe that’s the idea…

I’m afraid I used all my wit in conjuring this week’s journal, so no quippy one-liner for you this time. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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I walk through the S-Bahn door as it hisses and slides open. Before my seat touches the train’s, my mind is on fire. I am running a visual deconstruction program, into which I have loaded the latest of my designs for a leather wallet. The main problem I’m trying to solve is maintaining a slim profile without compromising its utility. It must accommodate at least five cards (although as many as a dozen would be ideal), cash and coins. I consider the validity of separating the coins from the cash; I hate digging through one to find the other, especially under pressure in a long queue. I psychically rotate the wallet I’ve conceived of. It has two main compartments: one with a zipper that holds coins and, possibly, cash - I make a note to revise this; the other isn’t totally enclosed, but is folded over. It unfolds to reveal five cards that have been tightly packed together. By their design, cards are the most compact when they are also the most impractical. I need to access a considerable amount of the broadside of the card in order to identify, access and use it, but storing it like this is noticeably inefficient. The inverse is also true: storing a card in its most space-efficient orientation leaves none of it visible, such that I can differentiate the cards from one another or select any individual. The challenge, then, is to store the cards in their most efficient form, but as soon as I want to access them, i.e. open the wallet, their orientation is altered such that they become visible and accessible, and, therefore, useful. I consider how this impacts the size and complexity of my design. I consider the materials I may need and compare them with the ones I have access to. As I am mentally ripping seams and removing layer upon layer of leather, altering their shape, my subconscious mind notices the familiar silhouette of the skyline outside of the window. I jump, and come jittering through the unforgiving train doors milliseconds before they shut again. I almost missed my stop!

In my first year in Berlin, I always had a project I was busy with. While working thirty five hours a week as an au pair and fitting in twelve hours of language school in my free time, I managed to find the will to design and produce two leather wallets (I designed the first for my girlfriend and recreated it for my mother at her request); I sewed a simple leather toiletry bag for my girlfriend’s sister for her birthday; I sewed two patch-work book bags for my girlfriend and a friend of hers; I embroidered seven flags into the strap of my go-to travel bag; I made a new strap for my wristwatch; I threw about five ceramic coffee mugs, none of which I was especially impressed with, and therefore subsequently never fired; I designed and built myself first a small and later a larger coffee table; I reframed a mirror for my girlfriend (the original frame of which I had accidentally destroyed); I built a (very wonky) bookcase to fill the gap between the wardrobe and the wall in my girlfriend’s room; I even invested about fifty hours into stripping a wooden pallet to turn the raw planks into a chair which ultimately collapsed and went straight back into the dumpster I’d rescued it from.

I’ve done painfully little of this since moving and switching jobs. I’m not convinced I’m busier now than I was then, though I am, perhaps, not at home as often. It occurs to me that this list may sound long and exhausting, like a list of chores, to some (my mother comes to mind), but to me, this is my favourite hobby! Bringing ephemeral things that exist only in my imagination into the physical world. I think it’s a damn shame that I have precious little to point to that I have conjured from my mind in the last four months. It would be easy to villainise the job and the move and ‘adulthood’, but I think the real issue is small and rectangular and fits in my hand. I’ve noticed a considerable uptick in my phone usage since starting the photography job. On the train to work, I watch YouTube. On the train back from work, I watch YouTube. That’s already an hour. I’m starving when I get home, so I pop on a show and cook myself dinner and then queue up the next episode to accompany me while I wash the dishes. At the end of the day, I come down to my room, tell myself I’m too exhausted to write or read or sew or think, so I watch a movie until my eyelids succumb to gravity.

I don’t love this pattern. I even have a fear, hidden somewhere within my bowels, that it will kill some part of me - legacy or achievement or success or creativity or satisfaction or something. What shall I do to adjust my behaviour? Slowly alter my routine to displace the activities I dislike with ones I find more stimulating and rewarding, step by step, leading to a healthier, more balanced lifestyle? No! An immediate and legalistic digital detox, of course! On the day this journal is published, my girlfriend and I are going on holiday with her family for a week. I’m not downloading anything on Netflix, I’m not finding a new audiobook, I won’t be scrolling through YouTube alone in bed while everyone is downstairs: I’ll be packing a book and a journal and a dice game. My girlfriend has vowed to detox with me. My hope is that the time away triggers some latent idea that I find so brilliant and absorbing that I simply won’t have a choice but to go back to daydreaming on the train!

I’ll also be taking a week away from Jeremy’s Journal - see you again on the seventh of June! If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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When we adopted our second family dog, I called him Waffles (though I was ten at the time and insisted that his name should be spelt Wafflez on his name tag, evidently because Zs were, or possibly still are, cooler than Ss). My dad certainly has used our dog’s given name, often yelling it at length, attempting to recapture him after the scallywag decided that chasing after prize geese or young lambs seemed fun, but when Waffles is behaving himself, Dad rarely calls him by his name. Dad prefers numerous and often improvised pet names for the dog in the form of gibberish said in a sweet tone. I enjoy these names and have co-opted a selection for my continued use. Mom has adopted Wafi as the capital name for our pet, which, albeit more sensible, is still a nickname. The dog is rarely ever addressed in full, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

My parents have also got a nickname for me, they call me Jem. Somewhere after university, I read To Kill a Mockingbird, in which the protagonist’s brother is called Jeremy Finch, but she (the protagonist) always calls him Jem. It was the first time I’d heard the nickname used for anyone other than myself. Naturally, most of my extended family has followed suit and calls me Jem, too, which I quite enjoy. It seems to be more popular with my mom’s family than with my dad’s, with the only reasonable explanation I can think of being that Dad’s family is first language Afrikaans, and somehow Jem just isn’t as comfortable in the mouth. The nickname never caught on with my school friends. Aside from one friend in high school who almost exclusively called me Jezza (which I first heard the Top Gear boys use to address Jeremy Clarkson), my school friends never really had a nickname for me. My grade head for the final year of high school, whom I continued to befriend after completing my bachelor’s, would shout down the hall when he saw me, calling, “Jere-you!” Pointing at me with both arms fully extended, elbows locked and then bringing both arms swinging back towards himself with thumbs extended, finished off by cheering, “Jere-me!” He was very proud of that. Otherwise, I had no sport or academia-related names like ‘short stop’ or other nonsense in the movies. No surname-related names, either, or shortenings of my name. I was only ever Jeremy to my school friends.

Somehow, Jem stuck with my university friends. One Saturday in First Year, my parents (my mom) told me to organise an outing to a favourite farmer’s market of ours and invite all of my uni friends so that my parents (my mom) could meet them. Of course, I thought this was enormously embarrassing. Of course, my friends had a great time. That’s when they first overheard my parents’s nickname for me and decided to carry the torch.

I was always quite disappointed that my school friends never preferred using a nickname for me. As a child, around the age when I thought Zs were cooler than Ss, when prompted by a video game or computer to choose a username, I defaulted to J-man. Perhaps it’s best that that didn’t catch on. Since living in Germany, my patience has been rewarded. Jerry was a popular nickname with my girlfriend’s dad when we first met (to my mother’s disgust, in whose opinion the name has been sullied by Jerry Springer). After spending some more time with her family, I was subsequently given the name Jerres, the suffix of which is very evocative of Cologne, it was later explained to me. My name was a little too foreign for some older members of the extended German family, to whom I am now known as Jeremias (which is a more familiar version because of the biblical figure). The most recent incarnation of my name, and the most unique of all, is Jaymo. There are three nieces in the family. When I was introduced to the oldest, she could speak well enough that she didn’t trip over my name as she said it. The youngest has just turned one and is yet to tackle a word quite so complex as my name. The middle niece, however, whom I see the most often on account of her also living in Berlin, when attempting to say my name, could only utter Jaymo. I love it. Everyone calls me Jaymo now, even my girlfriend. Everyone except for Mom and Dad. I’ll always be Jem to them.

Come to think of it, a few of my school friends called me Jerry, too, until my mother expressly forbade them. Maybe they were too frightened to try another and decided it was safest to stick with Jeremy. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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My parents and I are close. Partially, perhaps, because I’m an only child, but throughout my childhood, my parents intentionally cultivated our relationship such that it was filled with mutual love and respect and thoughtfulness and a sense of inter-dependence. Being twenty-five and now both geographically and fiscally independent from my parents, there is little need to rely on them the way I did as a child, but I still seek to actively involve them in my life; I ask my mom for recipes, I ask my dad for book recommendations. Every weekday morning (or most, I occasionally forget), as I walk over a particular bridge on my way to work, I send my parents a quick voice note about my life. Though it’s me we’re talking about and practically nothing I say is said quickly, so I dump a five-minute-long, sometimes rambling message in the lap of my parents each morning. I think they like it. Not only that, but we try to video call at least once a week, too. Just as we did when I was a child and I was being waved off to school or to Granny’s house, every time we hang up the phone and at the end of half of all the voice notes we send one another, we say ‘I love you’.

Although we never actually say, “I love you,” anymore. For the first year of our relationship, my girlfriend and I had a long-distance one. Five months after we had first met and two months after I had asked her to be my girlfriend, she came to South Africa for a week to visit me. While we were at a wine farm on her second day there, I told her that I loved her for the first time. Thankfully, she replied in kind. We then continued to repeat it that week, as young lovers do, over and over, not quite believing our own giddy voices. Once I had put her on the plane back to Germany (and dinged my car in the airport parking lot, I was in such a state on the way home), we clung to our new phrase. It would be another two months before we saw one another; this time, I’d be visiting her in Germany. I think partially because we were brand new and all couples go through that phase, and partially because we couldn’t hold each other, because there was no other way to process our newfound love, we continued to repeat I love you to one another incessantly. Of course, we found it to be perfectly normal and practically necessary, but in the process of repeating the words so much and with such excitement, they began to morph. The plain English turned sing-song, and the distinctions between words began to fade away until what was said was one conglomerate phrase: Ahlafyu!

As part of our weekly communication, my father sent me a voice note on Tuesday night. He was referencing my thoughts on an article he had sent me earlier that day, one that reflected on how phones are making people worse at tolerating boredom, especially in the small moments in between activities, like sitting on the bus (these moments are called interstitial time, I learned). The article is very Dad: smart and niche and thoughtful. I enjoyed the piece and had felt (as any YouTube shorts addict might) vaguely attacked, and processed my thoughts on the article with him. His message in response was, again, very Dad: wisened and sensitive. His greeting, though, was entirely my girlfriend. After his clear and concise summation of my thoughts, his voice sing-songed Ahlafyu! through my phone’s speaker. I realised on Tuesday evening, after listening to his voice note, that my dad and I now say I love you to each other the way my girlfriend and I do: with audibly upturned lips and an unabashedly silly tone. Upon reflection, I realised that my new expression of adoration is sung to everyone I hold dear.

My girlfriend is far better at being silly than I am. Though, in the last three years, she has done rather a good job of eliciting my inner silliness. About a month ago, she and I bought Nerf guns and ran all through her apartment, hiding behind doors and giggling through the kitchen, shooting foam darts at one another. My idea. Our silly, sappy, fabulous sing-song ‘I love you’ is a credit to her joyful, exuberant spirit. How wonderful that it has spilt into all of my relationships. My mom is really good at going ham and singing Ahlafyu! into her phone at the top of her lungs, regardless of where she is. I don’t often wonder how my girlfriend has impacted my life. I live in Germany and speak German at my day job, the answer is fairly plain. I don’t, however, ask myself how often she’s impacted the lives of the people I love. It’s surely in more ways than this, but I think that introducing a little silliness, a little more joy, into a phrase my parents and I share almost daily is a wonderful legacy of love. Don’t you?

I know you’re curious, and, yes, I absolutely demolished my girlfriend playing with Nerf guns. I blame her parents for giving her only sisters to play with and hundreds of books to read as a child. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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On her visit to South Africa, I had to remove my girlfriend’s helix piercing (I had to google it too, it’s that one sort of three-quarters up the curve of your ear on the outside). After relative discomfort ever since getting it two or so years earlier, it finally became infected on her visit. I removed the metal and tended to her ear. In addition to that piercing, she also has two in each earlobe, a relatively common sighting in Berlin. In fact, it feels like about half of the people I sit across on the train have piercings somewhere, regardless of class, nationality or sex. Earlobes are still the most common, with septum as the runner-up. About once a week I’ll see an eyebrow or lip piercing. On the train last week a woman about my age sat across from me. She wore a black tank top, a cropped, blonde bob and a frown. The middle of her bottom lip was pierced with a silver ring. Perhaps it was the frown or the inherently un-chatty climate present in any U-Bahn in Berlin, but I felt like the lip ring made her look a little more menacing than the average passenger. Reading my thoughts, I’m sure, she then promptly flashed a wide and gracious smile at a homeless man as she added a few coins to his extended paper cup. The genuine care I saw on her face immediately shattered the assumptions I had projected onto her because of the jewellery she had chosen to wear.

Shortly before my twenty-first birthday, I had my left earlobe pierced. As a kid and teen, I was always a bit of a straight shooter; I wore a sweater vest to school in winter. I never would have imagined, back then, that I’d be touting any kind ofpiercing. Three years in design school must have done something to me, because on one of the last Saturdays in my university career, a good friend of mine drove me to the tattoo studio that had done his ears and ten minutes and one waiver later, I had a small silver stud in my ear. I would have preferred a silver hoop, but only had the presence of mind to ask for it once the initial piercing was already in and fiddling about with a freshly bloodied ear is not recommended, apparently.

A week or two later, my mom and I held a big, joint twenty-first-and-fiftieth birthday bash (her birthday is five days after mine) with all the family on both sides and a good few friends as well. I couldn’t wait to unveil my new piercing and shock the family that this straight shooter had turned punk rock! (Or indie rock, maybe?) I would say that the reaction to my radical new style was underwhelming, but that would imply that there was any reaction at all. Not one of the two dozen partygoers said a peep! After hugging him hello and passing by him several times as I carried food from the kitchen to the patio, I corned my grandfather and asked him if he saw anything different about me. A fellow type-A, I expected a tongue-in-cheek ‘Is this what it’s come to?’ or perhaps a headhung in mock disapproval at the crazy things kids do these days. His love never wavering, of course.

I did not get what I wanted. After incorrectly guessing that I had shaved my beard or grown a moustache, I finally pointed at my ear. He leaned forward and squinted and asked if it was real. “Yes!” I said. He leaned back and blinked. “It’s very nicely done,” he said. Is that it? I thought. I’ve gone and overturned everything! I’ve swapped collared shirts for Hawaiian print, long curls and an earring! (I told you I was type-A). Clearly, my piercing wasn’t as shocking a statement to my family as it was to me. Perhaps they had asked themselves why it had taken so long, after leaving coding for design, for me to finally get the earring. I joke about coding, but I can say with confidence that without having befriended this particular young man at university; without bonding with him over comics and trail running; without visiting his home and rewiring his speakers so that we could listen to his Springsteen vinyl; without sitting in my thirty-year-old hatchback (that he hardly fit in, at almost two metres tall) in the baking sun with the windows rolled down, talking about girls and film cameras and legacy and running shoes; without him teaching me how to stand-up-paddle; without the two of us writing and shooting a short film together, I never would have gotten my ears pierced. I never would have thought that people like me got their ears pierced. But he was a little like me. And I wanted to be a little like him, so in the silver stud went.

I don’t wear my earring anymore. After having it in for the last little stretch of university and my first couple jobs afterwards, and my time working as a camp counsellor in New York State and while falling for my girlfriend, and while making the move to Germany, I decided to take it out after living in Berlin for a few months. It began to feel like the earring said something else here. I didn’t feel like it connected me with my good friend anymore or to our shared passions or to our history or the feelings I felt as a young man in Stellenbosch. I felt like every other person in Berlin, like every other Berliner. I didn’t feel like I was like everyone else here, so I didn’t want to look like them. I judged that woman for wearing her lip ring, wondered why she’d felt like she needed to express her identity in that way. But then that’s exactly why I took my earring out, because of how I chose, and continue to choose, to express my identity. And I didn’t smile at the homeless man at all…

The earring I wore the most was a gold-plated one I bought on the West Coast of Ireland while a couple of friends and I were on a road trip from one end of the island to another. Months later the gold plating wore off and I finally bought myself the original silver hoop I wanted. If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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There are a lot of people in Berlin. Whether it's due to the socio-cultural shift I’ve made in moving here, where everyone walks to the shops and takes trains to work and all watch soccer in the park together, or if it’s simply due to the sheer density of the city and its almost four million inhabitants—I see a lot of people. I must clap eyes with upwards of one hundred strangers a day, and more than double that on the weekend. More than just seeing them, I hear them, too. And sometimes I listen.

There are several languages, I’ve found, that sound a little like Afrikaans. I’ll often be on the train with my earphones in (listening to the Little Women audiobook, how fantastic) when the rhythm of a conversation happening behind me draws my attention. Out comes the left earphone and I pick a spot on the dental hygienist advert plastered to the interior of the subway to focus my eyes on while I train my ears on the conversation. I wait for the strangers to speak. Yes! I think to myself as some of the familiar, guttural tones of my motherland eke out over the noise of the train. The tone is definitely right, and I certainly hear the rounded, motor-bike R used in Afrikaans and Spanish, rather than the high-in-the-palate, growling R characteristic of French and German. That tannie’s spiky, blonde haircut is certainly helping the case! As the couple rise from their seats to exit the U-Bahn, I strain my ears one last time to be certain of my hypothesis. Alas, as they pass, their Afrikaans slips into Russian and in goes the earphone again.

This is not always the case, though. About a year ago my girlfriend and I were sitting on the U-Bahn; two young women in their early twenties were sitting diagonally across us. As they chatted it became clearer and clearer to me that they spoke with the familiar lilt of Capetonians. Without any K-Way or Sealand branded items on them to confirm my suspicions, I was forced to take a leap of faith and asked them where they were from. Thankfully, I’d nailed the accent, and they were both from the Southern Suburbs. The first was in Berlin working as an au pair, and the second was living in the Netherlands but had come for the weekend to visit. I was just about to get their contact details when our stop came up and we had to go. Another time, I had my Sealand bag with me and I overheard a guy on the Tram talking about the clubs he’d like to visit in his last week in Berlin. Again, there was familiarity in his voice. I shouted from across the Tram car (as South Africans are want to do) and told him to have a great last week here. He saw my bag and we chatted for a minute before I, predictably, had to get off at my stop. Once, while buying dumplings at an Asian market I overheard two women about my age struggling to choose between the brightly coloured packages. I showed them my favourite brand and filling and without skipping a beat, one of them turned to me and asked, “Are you from South Africa?” To which I replied, “Of course I’m from South Africa mah bru!”

My favourite encounter deserves a line break. I was walking down the road to the nearest grocery store (as the Germans do) and crossed the street to head to the entrance. I saw an older woman with a walking frame and who I guessed was her grandson exit the shopping complex as I was about to enter it. As always, my ears were on high alert. The exaggerated Rs and Gs that carry the fingerprint of Afrikaans emanated from their conversation. The earphones came out. They got closer and I began to understand a word here and there. “Praat julle dalk Afrikaans?” I asked them (are you perhaps speaking Afrikaans?). A resounding, “Ja!” was the reply. We stood and talked about where they were from and how long they’d been here in Berlin and when last they’d been back. We chatted until I was out of Afrikaans words (for they have grown few and foreign in their lack of use) and they waved me onward. I missed my bus.

It seems like just about all of us three-and-some million Berliners speak a different language. At any one time, a single train car will bear witness to Ukrainian, German, Arabic, Turkish, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili. I keep listening for Afrikaans. Whether I’ve got my ears full of an audiobook or if Billy Joel is serenading me at the end of a work day, I’m always on the lookout for fellow wanderers who also find themselves a long way away from home. Net om ‘mooi loop’ te sê.

While I’m in Germany, the Southern Suburbs feel like they are right next to my home in the Northern Suburbs. Then I go home again to discover that it’s a two-hour drive away and essentially as far away as Berlin is (to those driving-lazy Capetonians, at least). If you enjoyed this journal, please subscribe.

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