I met my Boggart today.

My music career probably just peaked…

… if you’re very lax about the definition of “music career” and count “occasionally putting up covers but being way too lazy to do so regularly”.

In August 2017 I posted a cover of Wicked Game on Instagram and I shit you not, two minutes later I had a DM in my inbox. ‘Some guy’ asked me whether I would be up for recording a cover together and since either I’ve made good experiences with befriending complete strangers on the internet or my defense mechanisms against online strangers is just very lousy, I immediately agreed. Coincidentally, at the time we were texting, I was trying out a catchy song I heard on the radio: Your Song by Rita Ora, so we agreed to just cover that. You know how it is when you first meet someone? There’s this awkward atmosphere of not being entirely sure how to assess the other person and the small talk is actually not something you’re interested in. Thank God, Friedemann was just super chill and we got along well istantly. We recorded the song in two or three sessions at his flat and it was the first time for me seeing the possibilities of voice editing and how time-consuming the whole process was! I had a lot of fun working with him –  or rather being in awe when watching him work. To this day I still don’t understand how someone with Friedemann’s talent, musical career and expertise voluntarily felt up to doing a project with the pinnacle of inexperience: me. I felt terrible having to sing some lines repeatedly because it just took so many takes and some a lot of tweaking was involved.

We brainstormed a few ideas for the video and decided to do a simple one-take loop cover. Fun fact: by the time we shot the video, the audio was far from done because it consisted of only my vocals and a sloppy piano accompaniment, which meant a lot of improv on Friedemann’s part at the shoot. We looked around his flat what kind of things we could use as instruments and came up with random stuff like the cup song and of course the glass bottles. He later recorded it on his own and the finished product just sounds amazing.

 

We got really great feedback and we stayed friends and did a couple more songs together, but Your Song was a done deal for us.

Imagine the surprise when in February 2019, one and a half years (!) after we released the song, Friedemann received an E-mail from Glamour. At first, he was sceptical (you know… online scam and whatnot) but his research checked out and he asked (out of the blue) whether I’d be up for a Skype interview with Glamour.

WAIT WHAT???

I knew of the You Sang My Song segment from the magazine and suspected that this was gonna be it, but I didn’t allow myself to give my hopes up too much in case it wasn’t – after all, the e-mail from the producer just said it was gonna be an interview about Rita Ora’s music and how she inspired us.

I remember the day after the e-mail I tried not to think too much about it. I told some producer friends of mine and they were more excited than I was. HAHA. I got home late that day, which was fine because the interviewer was from New York and considering the time difference, 10pm at our place was 4pm in NYC. The interviewer, Friedemann and I had a group call and then she asked to interview us separately. He went up first and when I was waiting for my turn, he wouldn’t spoil anything, so I still had no clue as to what this was about.

Then the call from New York came in. The conversation started with questions like what gave us the idea to cover the song, what’s so special about Rita Ora’s music and how she has inspired us in our own music. To be honest, because the cover was such a random idea, I had to improvise a little bit on the answers. But then the interviewer sent me a link to a video, a reaction video to be exact! Suspicions confirmed! You can judge for yourself how convincing and genuine my reaction was 😉

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2018 Retrospect

Without a doubt, 2018 has been the greatest year of my adult life.

People say it’s impossible for the ups in life to last long without being interrupted by some kind of down, but they never specified the period of time so I would say 365 days is well within the scope of incessant serenity.

Exactly a year ago I was cramming for my Pathology final exam, one of the (if not the) most feared examinations in our entire 5,5 years of studies. It included dissecting a cat and detecting the cause of death as well as analyzing various pathological conditions and their differential diagnoses. Followed by the nightmare that was Pharmacology and Medication Order in February 2018 did start kind of stressful, but the euphoria after you passed all your exams is simply indescribable. Besides, despite having exams in a bi-weekly rhythm, I did go out and got drunk more than I had during the previous years of university, as well as actually pulling off a random musical project.

The house party we threw after my last exam was E P I C. The 16 people we crammed into our 50 square metre flat are still talking about it today. I travelled around the world with the people I love most, seeing new cities like Budapest, Stockholm and Los Angeles all in a matter of a month.

Unlike my fellow students who either already had a job lined up or directly hunted for a position upon finishing the last exam, I was simply too lazy to start working at 23, so luckily the student office enrolled me for another semester – just so I could keep my status as a student. I signed up for classes I never had the time to take: a French language course, Ballet and Archery (Completely random college sports classes, but I thought it’d be fun). Prior to the French class, I had never been in anything that threw together students of different degrees. The veterinary programme was pretty exclusive: we had our own campus with a canteen and a library and our courses didn’t intersect with anything from other degrees resulting in a rather isolated university life. It took me two years to actually eat lunch at the main canteen in the city or enter the main library. I signed up for these classes not to make friends, I didn’t even expect to interact with anyone farther than the absolutely necessary. All I ever heard about classes with attendees from different degrees was that you maybe tolerate the others for the semester, but never hear from each other ever again after you sit the exam. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I met the most interesting people through my French class and even developed a very unlikely friendship that ultimately resulted in more or less a stable circle of friends in my city – something I never had in Leipzig before. These are people that I would never have approached or started a conversation with but now we’re friends and I still can’t quite wrap my head around it.

My graduation ceremony was in May and my mother flew to Germany for that. She stayed for six weeks and I had worried that that would be too long a period for everything to be peaceful, but even that went smoothly and we repaired some cracks in our relationship. We included a short trip to Prague during that time and she travelled on her own, too which got her off our backs enough to keep going with our own lives. All in all, a pleasant visit.

The summer months were simply bliss. I had never partied and went out as much as I did then. It felt like catching up on all the things German students usually do during their college life: Barbecues in the park, sunbathing and drifting out on a raft on the lake, board game nights and cooking dinner together, museums and philosophical talks, Yoga outside and open-air pools, photo meet-ups and outdoor shootings. In hindsight, it’s quite embarrassing that I hadn’t done any of these things during my studies, on the other hand, I didn’t the other vet students were people I wanted to do these things with. Ultimately, it was voluntary isolation.

A highlight this summer was the highly anticipated Kellerparty at my best friend’s house near Stuttgart. His parents were on vacation and the opportunity was not wasted: We organised a party for around 40 people in the basement. It wasn’t the typical house party, because next to the typical stuff like DJ booth, drinking games and snack table we had tons of little gimmicks and activity stations like mandala painting (yes, you read that right) and the Zwiebelpfanne station where anyone could cook onions if they got hungry. Friends came from all corners of Germany for that party and aside from one neighbourly complaint, everything went smoothly (I might have exaggerated on the alcohol…). The fun thing about the party wasn’t the night itself, but actually, the preparation for it and throwing something in that scale had been a new experience for me as well.

Jakarta was the next chapter of Summer. To my delight, my boyfriend joined me for nearly two weeks. We travelled to Borneo and despite the Orang-Utans and our boat trip, the most memorable thing was the Jellyfish incident that had us both gulping painkillers and even landed my boyfriend in the hospital. When he left for Germany again, I kept myself busy with visiting family members, or at least those that I can stand. I dreaded being alone with my family given the strained relationship I have with some individuals but even that was manageable. I discovered my shining aptitude of giving a cold shoulder and ignoring people living under a roof with me. Honestly, Jakarta no longer feels like home to me, yet it’s obviously not a holiday location either. Flying out of Soekarno-Hatta is always bittersweet, although this time it might have been more bitter than sweet. It felt a bit more final than usual, maybe due to the realisation that I’m losing more and more ties and connectedness with the country’s mentality and what it represents, to the detriment of my family. Nationalists can curse me all they want for that statement, personally, I don’t perceive this as something tragic.

What bothered me more when I returned to Germany was the fact that the semester was ending and extending my enrollment at university was not an option. Impending unemployment seriously gives you indescribable anxiety. Making matters worse is not knowing what you actually want to do. I’m pretty sure veterinary medicine is not my true vocation. At the same time, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do. My job hunt was, admittedly, messy. I sent out letters to practices and clinics as well as to research establishments. Obviously, the positions of clinician, researcher and doctorate student have little in common; that’s how indecisive I was. By chance, a former classmate informed me of a position at the Institute of Veterinary-Anatomy opening up due to a person going on maternity leave. After vexatious affairs with German bureaucracy and permits, I was on board and welcomed into an amicable and supportive team.

The last two months of 2018 I learned the ropes of the basics of laboratory work and not bumping into the glass pane of the laminar flow cabinet with my head. My colleague’s patience and thoroughness in my training deserve a special mention here because my biggest worry happened to be blindingly apparent ignorance and incompetence in the lab environment.

In comparison to the bustling beginning of the year, the setting of winter, Christmas and New Year’s Eve were rather calm and quiet. I spent the holidays with all my favourite humans in Berlin and Stuttgart. We had an astonishingly luscious Christmas dinner and unusually sober pre-NYE nights. I have to say that some dynamics with several people were a bit off, but I’m not worried. Midnight of the 31st I looked down from a vineyard into a cloud of smoke and sparkling lights. Yes, I have a growing hate towards fireworks started by strangers/people I don’t trust and it’s difficult for me to enjoy New Year’s Eve, especially when not drunk.

All things considered, 2018 has been nothing but good to me. Even the objectively unpleasant parts like broken relationships and lost friends, short-term unemployment and neurotoxins didn’t kill me so it’s unreasonable to complain. In the end, it’s all a matter of perspective and I am beyond grateful and blessed for everything that took place this last year.

To new adventures, new highs and new lows, new insights, growth and health in 2019!

Cheers! 🥂

violence

Is the violence in our nature just the image of our maker?

Rise Against – The Violence

My brother moved out yesterday

Incoming clingy sister post.

After five years of sharing a flat, my brother moved out yesterday and it’s a strange feeling that I can’t express properly. It’s not like he’s been wiped off the surface of the earth. In fact, I’m going to visit him in two weeks time, yet it still seems weird that when I walk into his room at midnight, he’s not at his desk studying nor will he be there for the foreseeable future. Not that I did that on a daily basis. Most days in the past years we had different schedules and only sat together for dinner, watching one or two episodes of a series we were trying to get through, then proceeded to spend the rest of the night in our own rooms to study.

But there were frustrating nights during exam-intensive seasons where one of us would go to the other’s room just to grump about the workload, distract the other person in the process and then we would lament over the fact that we were neither members of a royal family nor as clever as the Baudelaire orphans (which is not true on my brother’s side, because he gets very close to Klaus). With our final exams half a year apart, he had the time to quiz me in pharmacology (to which I rarely had the correct answer) and when it was his turn to face the finals, I would inquire about the Ross procedure (which, of course, he could explain perfectly). Veterinary medicine and medicine aren’t so different after all.

While this sounds like we’re crazy unsociable nerds, that was only true on my part. Which is why I appreciated it, that he would sometimes invite me to parties or lunches (mostly parties) with his friends. I am super lazy about social events, especially if it involved fake smiling for people I didn’t know and ending up sitting by myself at the end of the evening. Eventually I found people I enjoyed hanging out with, but he kind of kept me from social isolation for a while and having mutual friends, also meant mutual gossip. Lol

Many people in Germany found it weird that we, as siblings, lived together. It’s an extremely uncommon thing and most would shudder at the thought of having to move in with their sibling. I feel that in comparison to the Asian culture, family ties in Germany are detached, thanks to the expectation that children will move out at 18 anyways. Sure, as a parent your (legal) responsibilities don’t end there, but many many people I know are lucky, if they have a family gathering three times a year, Christmas and maybe birthdays. So while you do have to pay for your kids until they’re 25, not many actually call or visit regularly – and while that is considered as anak durhaka in Indonesia, Germans have made their peace with it since the day that child is born. This “detachment” is passed on in the family and is apparent between siblings as well. There’s literally only one German family I know, where #siblinggoals would be applicable.

I feel like we were extremely effective together: we had agreements that just worked. Like going grocery shopping only once a week, on Saturdays and he would carry the two six-packs of water bottles while I took the grocery bag. Or that I was in charge of cooking and he had to do the dishes. We scouted for cheap flights and hotels and traveled together. I don’t actually remember fighting, maybe a little passive-aggresivity or a night of silent treatment, but that was the absolute exception. A major form of levity and ease led to the most possibly pleasant co-existence, without just ignoring each other and I will truly miss that.