Rike in Berlin

I haven't been writing anything in a pretty long time now, but still everyday someone's checking in. So whoever you are, I owe you another entry.

Life has been busy lately, even more than usual. My half-time soon to be full-time job has kept me tied up pretty much. The Games Convention in Leipzig is coming up, and although this fact has been generally known and talked about, nobody seems to be prepared. We still have no floor, no flyers and no clue. Right now we're bound to do nothing as long as the bosses haven't decided something about the whole corporate identy thing. We should really hire a designer for questions like that...

I'm just showing you these pictures to make sure you see what a serious kind of job I'm doing.

I'm getting very exited about the summerschool project because I'm going to introduce our Motion Capture System to a group of people who want to learn the difference between key-frame-animation and motion capturing. I haven't really done this before, I haven't even tried to capture the motion of the whole body of the performer, just the face. And I'm only going to have time to try that out on the first day of the summercamp. On the second day I will already show it to them. I really like teaching people and I'm used to the fact that most of my students are older than me and male. So I don't expect much I cannot deal with. I have never pictured myself as a teacher, but the more I have experienced it, the more I like it. It's always kind of hard because I constantly have to prove that girls can be as smart as boys. Fortunately they don't know how old I am - most people really freak out when they find out.

And I am growing older all the time! Last week, for instance, was my birthday. Come to think of it, I have never had any particular feeling about my age. All my life I have been the youngest in class, so I was always too young to join the moaning-about-getting-old club. Also I have always felt older than most people I met, older in terms of maturity. So I think I might be the only person alive who just feels good about her age.

Still, the party was a bummer. Nobody showed up! What the heck was that all about?? I invited about 20 people, normally at least 10 of them bother to show up. This time it was only like two. Same with my roomies. It was fun anyway, except for the time, later that evening when one of my guests switched to energy drink and revealed first time to me that he was suffering from attention deficit disorder. When I was getting a headache and tired, he started poking me and throwing things at me - I'm not sure if he would have tried to paint my face if he could. Felt like that time when I was babysitting my sisters boyfriends brother. That bloke almost made me go bald.

In September I'll be going on my first real holiday to Ireland.
It's going to be in the middle of September and afterwards there probably will be a lot of stories to tell...
More about this next time.

instead of telling everybody over and over again how important it is to preserve normal peoples privacy (you kind of already know that, don't you?) I just ask you to be a part of it.

    News. I've been to Paris in the spring and it was very springlike, beautiful and romantic. Apart from the prices which where blooming and growing like flowers. It had just been my sisters birthday so I wanted to get her a very special birthday gift from Paris. And not just some stupid T-shirt saying 'Paris'. So when we were crossing 'pont des arts' we saw some beautiful paintings attached to the balustrade with clothes-pins. In the signature of those paintings I could read the letters 'LODE', which really surprised me, as this is my last name, a very rare one. After talking to the artist who was painting on towels it turned out that his father actually was german and that we probably are related. What a coincidence! Of course I bought some of his paintings for my sister and me - I knew she would be thrilled.
  
    What wasn't really a coincidence was the fact that I forgot the damn paintings later that night in an italian restaurant because I was absolutely drunk. I kind of knew it all the time that I would forget them somewhere. I always do things like that. Especially when I'm drunk on wine.

    So last weekend me and my whole family went all the way to Lüneburg where my sis Josy is living and studying. Saturday morning we had an amazing breakfast in town and a little while later we already had to get back again. My bro Simon didn't mind - he couldn't wait to get back to Potsdam. Saturday the 'Baumblüte'-Festival in Werder started. If you have never been there - don't ever go there! I'm serious. It's awful. People, people, everywhere people - drunk people, stoned people, stupid people - people drinking like fish, people getting into fights, people bleeding. After half an hour we left - when we picked up Simon again after 1,5 hours, he was so drunk that he couldn't walk straight anymore. That's actually pretty easy with the 'Werder-Kirschwein' that tastes like juice and intoxicates like pure vodka.

    When I came home my ex-room mate Nico had moved out ... and with him the whole kitchen. When I called him to ask why he left us without hearth or sink for a week he just said - "I had the car for one day". Well, "mate", you're not getting invited to the next party. I have to eat pizza and toast for 4 days! And I have to wash the dishes in the bathtub. Actually - I'm not really using many dishes, so I'll just pile them up in a corner and wait for the caretaker to bring the new sink. And of course, I'm looking forward to get to know the new roomie, Linda. Let's hope there are going to be some witty stories about her next time.

    I'm just waiting for my life to wind down. There's been happening so much in the past months, it's giving me a hard time. Maybe I'm getting old ... I need my routine.

    See you soon ... if I don't die of old age.

    Some weeks ago I stopped being a student which didn't really feel bad because I was unemployed, but since I'm in the red now, I figured I must earn money anyway. So now the people who recently educated me, are employing me now. My job is top secret so even I don't really know what I'm doing - but that might also be, because I just started and things are a little confused around here. Today I was fighting with a stupid presentation who just refused to put the white letters in front of the green box, where somebody actually could have read them. Dirrty office talk, huh?

    I have to say that there is a lot more work done here than you can see from the outside. When I was still a student, hanging around outside the professors offices, anytime a door would open, you could just see people drinking coffee, joking and enjoying themselves. Of course everybody drinks coffee around here, as they do in every office, but most of the time we work. Or yell at the computer. Some people don't know it, but there are computers who are a bit hard of hearing and they're doing their work a lot faster, when you ask them politely but loud "HOW FUCKING DIFFICULT CAN IT BE TO SET UP A STUPID PRESENTATION???"

    Some people won't believe it, but I have a bike. For all of you, who don't know me that well - I'm never riding a bike. I did when I was young and stupid, and what I learned from my experiences was - don't ever do it again! I will spare you all my horrible childhood stories about broken brakes and a whole school class of kids who roared with laughter ... it's just to painful, and I'm moving on. Since I'm no longer a student, I don't have a "semester ticket" anymore, and a monthly ticket costs around 60€. Have I mentioned that I'm totally broke? So my dad told me about this old purple ladies' bicycle that loitered in his shed, and next thing I know is seeing it in my apartment. After that I didn't have much of a choice anymore, so I'm going to work on my bike everyday. At least thrice a week and that's more than enough if you ask me. Everyone's telling me the pain in my butt will ease if I keep doing it, but now I think they're lying. Anyway, even if I'm soaked through and foul-smelling, I am proud of myself everyday and going nowhere whithout it. The good thing is, it's so ugly, that nobody would ever steal it. I think there will be lots of stories about the bike when spring finally starts, the rain and the cold stops, and there are places, you want to go to on a bike again.
Until then,

    It's been exactly 16 days since I can call myself a free person. I am no longer a student but a bachelor of science, or should I call it bachelorette? My oral exam was a pretty easy thing. I knew it couldn't affect my total grade much or at all, so I just put up some slides the day before. Luckily I knew what the examiners didn't like about my work, so I critized myself - after that, there wasn't much to say about it for them. Then they asked me some questions about my work which were not that difficult to answer, anyway. The part where they were questioning me about random things they knew I had lerned during the last three years. It was useless to learn anything about that before the exam - you cannot keep the learning matters of three years in your head, but a lot of things I remembered pretty good. The examiner who was also my supervisor during my bachelor thesis asked me some questions he always likes to ask - because nobody knows the answers and that's making him look pretty smart. They both knew that there was no chance to change my final grade... so it was a relaxed atmosphere and lots of laughter.

    Later that night I threw a party at our apartment. It was a friday night, so people got tired early and it wasn't as wild as usual, but the police came to tell us to turn down the music - so it can't have sucked that much. Not so many of my fellow students showed up which was a bit sad - and none of my family (because I told them, they couldn't sleep here this time), but this time I needed some privacy and you can't really have that if you're sleeping in one room with four people. Still, it was fun, and I needed to celebrate my achievement as I felt nobody really appreciated it. Some guy at the party said: "Your parents must be really proud of you." and I had to answer: "My dad hasn't called me, so I don't know if he is proud and my mom doesn't even know about it.". I wish I could be proud of myself as much as I deserve, but to be that, I need those ignorant self-centered people to be proud of me. The truth is, they are not. Why does it matter what they think? Why can't I just be happy without them appreciating my work?

    So now I have to focus on my job which is going to be soo great - once they accept my application. Which they totally have to do since I am the best person for the job - anyway, that was what I told them in my covering letter. Let's hope they agree. If everything goes by plan I should be starting to work in two weeks time. Until then I have huge problem with my wallet. I kind of forgot that my student loan and child benefit is paid before the month, while salary is paid after. Both payments stopped when I stopped being a student. So next month I'm gonna miss 600€ and it's gonna be a tough job to make my wallet accept that. It's kind of stupid to ask a bank for just a couple of euros, so I thought - why not ask my mom? ... mmmmmh. Why not? I should've known better. I should have known my mom better. She agreed to lend me the money. If I would be looking for a job. This might sound a bit arrogant, but: I didn't study to work as a waitress. No offense - waiters are great people. But I have been working really hard to finish my  studies on time, I've been working alongside for 1,5 years and some time ago I swore to myself I would never labour again because I've got brains to earn money. Anyway, she doesn't seem to have problems paying my siblings whithout making them work, so it seems totally unfair to me. But now she managed to give me a bad conscience. We'll see if I can suppress that.

    But now some good news: There has actually something I have ben so happy about that I wrote a new song: It's called "out of my head". Check it out on myspace and tell me if you like it.
Cya...

    From midnight today until 3pm tomorrow the public transport is striking. That means I had to walk like 40 minutes to get here. Me! Can you imagine? I could go back to sleep right now.

    So what's happened? The last weeks I've been working really hard to get my bachelor thesis done. Which I did. I handed it in last monday. That was a relieve! But unfortunately the good feeling of getting something done didn't last very long. It's just inhuman to have to pass 5 other courses while writing your bachelor thesis. In one course we actually have to submit 4 assignments. Although the only thing I should be preparing for is the colloquium, I still have to write a 10-paged book report, a 6-paged article about content creation of games, I have another oral exam next friday, a five minutes presentation about the book report on monday, a 3-days-course the week after. Then I will have a one week vacation during which I will need to visit all my doctors to make sure I'm still alive and after that I have to work AGAIN. Is that possible? Only one week of vacation in six months? Stupid me, thinking being a student means taking the easy road...

    The worst thing is, the last week of work will be: supervising the students from second-term, who seem to have serious problems with programming. I think their problem is more organizing themselves. Although it feels like we're still in school - small classes, you get to ask all kinds of questions, ex-cathedra teaching - the point is, we're all here because we chose it. You don't get to chose school, so if people are rebellious and say "I don't WANT to learn that" the teacher would answer "but you HAVE to". But you don't have to be a student. In fact, I think you cannot and shouldn't be a student if you're not willing to. If you don't really really want it you might never make it. If you want to gain knowledge you have to do it yourself - nobody can MAKE you understand. I'm afraid most people in second term have false expectations about what is the teachers responsibility and what is theirs.

    The last weeks have been so stressful, I think the last time I didn't look at the computer once the entire day, was christmas day. I was working so hard I felt I like I didn't even have time to eat. And when I finally managed to make something, I wasn't hungry anymore. I was feeling like losing all the control over my body. I love to eat. There is practically no day or night time I'm not in the mood for food. And suddenly I wasn't able to eat. Not even when I was hungry, not even when I had something really delicious in front of me. Of course, I still ate a little, but it wasn't fun, it was just to keep me up. That was really hard for me to take. I guess it made me a little depressive because there's nothing I hate more than being powerless. Since the pressure is slowly decreasing and I talked about it to everybody who's important to me, I'm feeling a lot better and eating ok now.

    I'm looking forward so much to my week of holiday, I could start right now. I'm gonna go to my sisters place, the little apartment in the woods right at the lake. My mother invited me to her place, too, but it's just depressing there. I know I grew up at that place, I lived there for 19 years, but I can't feel at home there anymore. She made all kinds of changes to the house, nobodys got his old room anymore, except for her boyfriends daughter, everything looks strange. And it's unbelievable cold in there, it's very expensive to heat such a big old house. And the worst thing: it's lonely. My mother is working til late and going to bed early, and nobody else is there, except for the cats. I hate it that she likes one better than the other. And I've got no car to get anywhere. Even if I did, there is nowhere to go. It all feels so dead to me. My mom said, I could go to the 'city' by train. The 'city' is called Schwerin and the deadest place of all. What would I do there? Go shopping? I can do that so much easier and cheaper here in Berlin. Right now I wonder how I could ever bear to live there that long.

    Funny, how you feel at home at a place you've just lived at for a couple of months. Maybe I'll load up some pictures of my room next time - although I'd have to get rid of the christmas tree first...

    This was just a crazy night. While waiting for midnight, we were playing Singstar on Playstation and getting drunk on Prosecco. My roomie Nico and his friend had found a house in the Frankfurter Allee, where they could get up right to the roof. So we wanted to get there a couple of minutes earlier to enjoy all the fireworks from above - and I wanted to make sure not to get hit by a rocket. Unfortunately Nico told me the house was in the Karl-Marx-Allee which isn't quite the same. So when it was midnight and the city turned into a theatre of war, we were on the streets, right in the middle of it all - and it wasn't that bad. I actually didn't scream and drop down on my knees everytime something exploded next to me, at least after a while. When we had searched for Nico and the roof for almost an hour, we gave up. My friend Mellie and her brother decided to go back to the Singstar party, but my way lead me to the next real party. The party I arrived later turned out to be the lamest thing going on in the whole city. Just when I was leaving I met the guy who had invited me and after a lo-hot of talking he convinced me to stay for one drink before heading to the next party. He started a discussion about the Iraq war and Germany turning into a surveillance state, which was interesting, but obviously this wasn't the right time for a topic like this. Finally we were leaving.

    The subway was so crowded we all felt like sardines in a can. Arriving at our stop of destination we squeezed out and headed for the exit - or so I thought. When I turned arround to check if my companion was still there, I realised - he wasn't. I lost him. I walked around for a couple of minutes but couldn'eingang
t spot him anywhere. I don't even know, if he stayed in the subway or took another exit - he was gone without a trace. Soon I was remembered of how drunk I was and I decided to get to the party - maybe he had found it himself.

    It was kind of tough, finding the right entrance with the right house number, but after calling several people, I managed to get in. This party wasn't lame at all. It was packed to suffocation but I met my other roomie Danilo and my drummer, who seemed to have a lot of fun. Suddenly I knew I was so drunk I had to sleep it off first. After that I felt really refreshed but was put back to sleep by two incredibly boring guys who probably were trying to impress me with their ability to talk.

    Dammit! Again I've kind of missed a nice party because I got drunk to early! Damn Prosecco! My New Year's resolution for this year: No more prosecco and be on the roof before midnight.

    There are six days left until xmas and for the first time I won't spent it at home. Every year it's the same thing: I just want to have a few nice quiet days with my family because we don't see each other much and every year I think: We are all a year older, we are more mature, it cannot be that complicated for everyone to behave. And every year I am wrong. Because there is always someone who is not able to enjoy it and needs to spoil it for everybody else or someone digging out some old family corpse. Interestingly, most of the time it's the "adults" who don't behave. So I'm tired of waiting for them to grow up and I decided to make my own peace with my own christmas. It's been a while since I spent christmas with my dad because he lives with another family - now the "family" situation is too complicated to have a nice christmas there, either - my sister is going to Rügen to spend the holidays with her boyfriends family and the only place I could figure out was - my flat share. My roomies will be with their familys of course, and I invited my dad, my brother and my other sister to come to Berlin. Many people promised me to experience a very quiet city. We'll see about that.

    I took care of the presents weeks ago. I had the perfect idea: just order everything on amazon. I just took a CD, DVD or book for everyone and was done with all the shopping after half an hour. It all got delivered to my doorstep in no time and I can totally pay this. I also made a plan in case anyone asks me what I want for christmas. When I told my mother I wanted a bathrobe she was really happy, too. So I could use the next days to get a move on with my bachelor thesis. The problem is just: I am absolutely not motivated.

    Three years ago when I was at grammar school my main subjects were german and english. All I did was writing. My final exam in english was a six hours examination. Six hours writing. I wrote about 15 - 20 pages, no problem. I read a book in two weeks. But in the meantime I had to sit in front of the computer all the time and barely ever had to read or write much. Now I realise, I'm so used to this. I take an article and start to read and instead of reading I think about all the things I still have to do or I'd like to do better than what I should do right now so I don't really understand what I am reading. And the deck of articles I still have to read is only growing and growing. So today I got the final signature for my request to hold off on the closing date. It's only going to be two more weeks and then I will have several closing dates in one week, but I will still need the time.

    On thursday I will be at the setup of the Vicon System for Motion Capturing for the second time and then I will hopefully be done collecting information about the practical part of my thesis. Last thursday I was in Frankfurt(M) with my prof and his helper, visiting one of the biggest motion capture studios in Europe. The use a fixed Vicon System with about 34 cameras and introduced a new software to use, called 'Blade', which we will probably use shortly. So I can write a whole chapter about how to use that new software (if I ever figure out how to use it myself) which could be useful as I am sick of reading and writing about the different approaches of facial modeling and animating and I'm not sure that I can really fill up 40 pages with what I've got now.

    Anxway I still have to get some christmas hats so we can all look like funny little santa clauses.
See you guys next year...

    It's been almost a month since I wrote the last entry. Since then we had a really funny Halloween party in our apartement, several other funny partys in other people's flat shares, our show 'stories about pain' was on and went very good, I finally managed to attend an IMI meeting and was at the Ryan Adams concert in the 'Arena' last Friday. By the way I'm writing my bachelor's thesis which is due in 6 weeks (like I'm realising what that means...), giving tutorials (today I totally screwed up because I couldn't explain how a linked list works), and do the normal stuff like shopping for food or washing my clothes.

    With all this on my back it can be pretty hard to keep on track of the everyday stuff. I arranged to meet my roomie Nico for shopping (he has a car) in three days time although both fridges are absolutely empty. Last night I had to undertake an emergency purchase of coffee and salt and I am very thankful that Kaiser's is open until midnight. There is just no time left. When I got in the underground this morning I realised that my fingernails are awfully dirty - I have just no time to care about things like that anymore.

    Still, I enjoy it. I don't even feel pressured very much. I won't have time to do it all AND do my best, but that's ok. I will get it done somehow and I'm positive it will never get boring. I'm not the kind of person who pretends not to have any obligations and has a mental breakdown when it gets too much. I pretend to have no obligations until my calendar is packed with red writing and 'LAST REMINDER' notes and then begin to work. But I stay relaxed. This worked every single time until now but I have to admit: It's never been that tight.

    I am very proud of me because today I managed to get up at 8, I gave a tutorium (which was only halfway-screwed), I was at the library and got a library card (for the first time) and got a book about animationg the face aaaaaand I was at the copyshop and copied my high school degree certificate. So I have been very busy and thought ahead for more than a week - I will apply to some kind of company to get some kind of job. I will be unemployed and no longer a student in 3 months time and I guess a job could be just the thing to ease the situation. Also my mom might start breathing again.

    But still, I haven't told you anything about my last month than the facts. The Halloween party was funny and packed and loud and wasted and I am just gonna put one picture online to prove that:

    Two weeks later my best friend Mellie and me had our show 'stories about pain' where she read her poems and stories and I sang my songs. There were just about 30 people there which was a little bit disappotinting, but I had told everybody if they don't get the flyer or don't like the idea of it they should just not come. This is a topic not suitable for everybody. If you listen to my music it might not affect you much because the lyrics are english and a nice (yet gloomy) melody makes the message easier to bear. But listening to what Mellie wrote made a lot of people feel very uncomfortable. She writes about suicide, rape, violence, pain, despair and other deep feelings everybody has felt sometime ... but not everybody has processed these feelings. Some people knew both of us very well, some just one of us, some we had just met. But it was still very personal.
    During my first song I was shaking so much that you can hear the guitar banging on my knee on the record. I was really nervous, I mean: I've been on stage before, I've been playing in front of a lot more people, but this was three years ago and it wasn't so much about me. I don't think many people got my songs but at least most of them liked them and that's enough to me. Everybody asked us when we will do it again and it needn't to be said that this was a one-time-thing. Mellie said we might do it again in 5 years (when we have new material) in the Max-Schmeling-Halle (kidding) but I wouldn't even make jokes about doing that again.
    One major reason is that all of this meant a lot more to her than to me. I like being on stage, I like it if people appreciate my work, but I really don't need it. After the show, people came to me and asked me if I ever thought about being famous. Like I don't know I'm good. I'm damn aware of what I can do and that my work is special and could bring a lot of money. But that is the reason why I'm good. Because I don't do it for anything or anybody else than me. Even every person on the planet hating what I do wouldn't change my attitude. But for Mellie, the audiences reaction to her work is a reason to keep doing it. Or not. I wouldn't let anybody judge me or what I do.
    That's why I decided to have no applause during the show. I don't want every single piece of it to be rated. I wanted the show to be a whole thing, not depending on the audience. Some people liked that, some didn't. At the end there wasn't as much clapping as I had hoped for. So I asked people about it and my roomie Nico explained that he thinks, clapping contains the message "Thank you for entertaining me" and he wasn't entertained, he was very contemplative and that was what the show was about: to make people think. And he would have liked it best if nobody had clapped at all. Still, applause is the fastest way to get a reaction - it's just not possible to talk to everybody afterwards and get every single reaction. But all in all, people were really thrilled (although this might be the wrong word, too). Before christmas I hope we will manage to put the DVD together (so I don't have to worry about presents) which is not for sale. We're not commercial, remember?

    And last Friday there was the Ryan Adams concert which really knocked me over. It was very boring to wait for them to let us in and to wait for the band to get on stage but I don't want to talk about the bad things - they probably always happen. When they got on stage I couldn't recognise anyone. Someone went to the mic and said "We're The Cardinals from the fucking United States" and then they started right away with a heartbreking song (aren't they all?). I don't remember all the songs they played, 'cause it's not important, but I do remember they played only three or four songs from the new album which should be presented on this tour, but I liked that even better because I couldn't sing along with the new ones. I was a bit sad because he didn't play the harmonica, but he played amazing solos on his guitar and he played the piano, too. All the time he wore a riddiculous green wolly hat with a bobble and huge shades, and that way you always knew which one he was. The rest all wore shirts, vests and and ties. I was surprised how well thay all could sing - for several voices! After the break everybody ran to the front so you couldn't sit and watch anymore. I enjoyed it sitting and not watching, standing and dancing and standing on my chair (really good view - for me). Next to me there was a guy from iceland who got there more or less by accident. He just realised, that it was the end of the concert, when it was over. "I thought The Cardinals were the supporting band" There isn't much more I can say about the concert, I just can recommend it to everybody who enjoys to feel the pain like me, although it might take more than a year until he comes back to Germany.

I kept my promise. The new song 'waiting' is online! Enjoy.