Rain on my furry hood

Things are losing their newness, or my eyes are losing their new baby sheen. Today i woke up on my own sure i had slept in but then pleasantly finding i had gotten up right on time. I bought a new coat, gray army green slightly poofy but not bulky. i hate when i feel trapped in clothes, the jacket too stiff on my elbows or some other restrictive capture. it has a hood that snaps under my chin and hangs a rim of fake fur right on my eyes. it makes me feel like a little kid and falls almost to my knees.

i always wondered about my identification with clothes, if it was shallow and superficial but i can't get beyond their reality. we touch the cloth and feel it hugging our bodies more than we touch anything else and their concrete reality and detail can be liberating or entrapping. i feel safe and silly and warm in my new coat that looks like an old one.

I caught the right bus on time, waited for ten minutes with a little boy about ten. he started humming to himself while we stood standing there in the leaves, the sky a pearly overcast. Is it odd to feel close to strangers who are busy pretending like they don't know i'm there?

I rode the familiar route to my school, a long narrow former factory that has a few restaurants before it turns into an art school with sliding glass doors that i'm sure one day i'll be unaware of and ram into while one of the austere german boys smoking in their pea coats and oversized beenies will watch. it's ok, i have briget jones like clumsy honest charm.

down the hall were ray and simona, luiza and pedro showed up a little later.

Ray is the ultimate nice guy from Taiwan, helpful and considerate and self-deprecating and unassuming, Simona is an art student from Romania and is strikingly fae, pale eyebrows hair and skin, luiza and pedro are a happy couple from brazil who are following their dream to come here, pedro has a long brown ponytale and is sports a comfortable i'm-the sound techie guy aesthetic while luiza sports business chic meets 90s rockstar. We all sat through what was to me an unbearably long and indecipherable intro to renting recording devices, after which ray and i grabbed a quick 2 euro meal in styrofoam and literally ran with it dripping in our hands for a bus.

Today was the first day that i traveled outside of bremen since i got here three weeks ago, we were checking out a class.

The trainride was beautiful, drenched green fields, abandoned lonely crumbling structures interspersed with wind power sentinels and quaint equivalents of suburbs and sheep.

The class was moving at the speed of slow, it's a required course and the teacher is supposed to be an easy grader. it's a waste of time except its a hoop you have to jump through. it makes sense to jump through the easiest hoop.

Walking home behind the the carnival going on, getting drenched but my little coat kept most of it off me, though my fake seude shoes made sponge noises suctioning off the damp cobblestones, smelling sausages and licorice hearing the dance music blasting from every ride dulled and mixed with the sounds of people laughing i couldn't help but smiling. I dont know why, nothings changed but i felt wildly optimistic about the future and happy to be walking myself home late at night in the rain.

it's such a tenuous balance.