On the morning of March 3rd 2024, as I sat down at my desk to start my workday (also known as procrastinating at the dining room table) an invisible force tried to steal my life from me.
What I thought was just an insane migraine, characterized by sparkling vision and an unusually quick onset was actually a stroke. And that headache was a side effect of a blood clot conveniently wedging itself deep in my brain starving it of oxygen.
What we later pieced together after numerous puzzling conversations with the neurologists at Charité (I was 37 after all) was that the seemingly inconsequential fall I took skiing two weeks earlier had actually sheared a bloodvessel in my neck. The resulting blood clot took some time to form, eventually dislodged and travelled up to the right side of my cerebellum.
I’m mostly fine now. I take a tiny aspirin (ASS 100, nice) every morning and a slightly larger Statin at night. And I have a blank spot in my vision which, on my best days, I refer to as my ‘bright’ spots.
This is largely irrelevant to what I intend to share here (though maybe I’ll share that experience in full at some point, it’s a fun one) but at the same time says everything about why I intend to share: I might die, right here, right now. And everything that’s in my head would be trapped forever. Along with the infarction.
This all sounds dramatic. Maybe I should have gone with:
My mother-in-law says I’m a good writer and I’ve got a few ideas rattling around.
As someone who is deeply fascinated with what makes an audience laugh and react and lean forward, particularly with the backdrop of living in Germany, and as someone who gets an enormous amount of pleasure out of making audiences laugh and react and lean forward, even in Germany – I’ve stumbled into a career as a comedian and ‘educator’. And, for better or worse, I’m pretty good at it (at least that’s what my mother-in-law says). And because of that, for the last 15 years I’ve unwittingly focused most of my energy on just that. In Germany.
This will be all about what I know, what I think I know and the occasional personal example of that. It will be my own blend of humor, creativity and (ugh) critical analysis. I plan to be consistent knowing full well that opinions change. I plan to be dogmatic, knowing full well that what people are interested in is never binary, not even in my own tastes. I’ll share tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way, opine about things that I find irksome and I’ll try to stay focused on things I like and why.
And maybe, at the end, we’ll all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
And maybe we’ll hold hands at the end and sing Kumbaya.
And maybe we’ll sing Kumbaya at the end, all holding hands.
You choose.