I’ve always loved fish & chips, even before I knew chips were French fries. Now and then my parents would take us to a tiny wood-paneled shop in downtown Englewood where you could get a plate of what to me was the holy grail of food and check out the quirky pictures on the wall. I’ll never understand why we didn’t eat there more often and, at the time, I didn’t realize Arthur Treacher’s was a chain. I guess I thought some dour guy in a three-piece suit with an umbrella once opened this store near the epicenter of the universe – it was just blocks from Cinderella City,


And I still do.

To be honest, I’ve been underwhelmed by the chippies I’ve visited on various trips to London. The batter is always tasteless and the fish too massive. Not to mention the dental disasters frying everything up. Also: more vinegar, please. Mushy peas have proven a nice surprise, though.

And so I was happy when I discovered a little chippy joint at the end of Oranienburger Strasse when I moved here. Astor. I went there plenty by myself and then it became a staple of Sabine and I’s dating years. The evening of Sept. 11 we sat there trying to decide what it all meant. It was the kind of place where I could never tell if the woman behind the bar recognized me or not. It felt like they were always renovating and never getting finished.

Then it closed. I’m sure it’s a shoe or clothing shop now. That area is now for tourists, not natives.

But not too long ago Fischladen opened up in an old fish store on Schönhauser Allee. First one friend recommended it, then other, then I ate there. And I thought of a dour guy in a three-piece suit and an umbrella. The batter is tasty, the fish is actually spiced a bit before it gets a nice coat and the chips might not be hand cut but they’re the better ones from Metro’s frozen food section. It’s more like a high-class snack bar where you can order what’s on the menu or ask them to do a little something special – and they will. Martha and I like to split a small fish & chips and a salad and he always throws something extra in with the greens. “Hey, how about some fried mushrooms?” Last night, with two smalls to go, he made sure to only put vinegar on one set of chips because of the kids. He and the kids also talked about the Ice Age that was playing on the TV.

“It’s Ice Age 2,” Cy assured me.

The cook and the other older guy behind the counter always joke in an odd mix of formality, small talk and wise cracks that only Northern Germans can pull off (Berliners can do the last two bits but substitute irreverence for formality).

So, go there if you’re here.

(That's a pic of the Arthur Treacher's building today, FYI)

Ben Knight, aka Konrad Werner the Newskraut, was doing a story for Deutsche Welle radio about an increase in new businesses last year in Germany. He interviewed Sabine about Pomeranza.

He's nice like that.

The link goes to the written version. The actual audio is below (press play!):



Thanks Ben!

I was just reading this [German] article by Berlin über journalist Markus Albers about how he was forced to detox from Twitter, e-mail & co. while on vacation. These kinds of articles (and books) are riding a twitter thermal to great heights in Germany and, as Markus’ column and this blog entry show, are creating their own echo chamber. Everyone’s talking about how good it is to get away from social media.

Or at least, people who can remember the ‘70s are.

For my part, social media adds a certain rhythm to my work, the way the tap of a bat on muddy cleats belongs to the rhythm of baseball or the drone of air traffic control provides a stilted soundtrack for pilots. As a freelancer, I’m forced to multi-task. I write an article. Translate a few pages of an employee magazine. Do some research for the next article and write a half-dozen emails to various clients. And that’s before lunch.

Social media provides a little buffer in there. A biscuit to clear my mental palate between vintages. When I finish one piece of work, I browse this feed. Giggle at that comment. Follow a link. And when I realize I’ve caught up, I minimize Tweetdeck and turn to my to-do list. Rinse and repeat until it’s 1800 (or earlier if I have to get the kids, but then it just kicks back in once they go to bed).

This routine is difficult. It takes a lot of concentration for a kid who’s used his semi-smarts his whole life to avoid concentration. Clients don't want to hear my cute excuses the way third-grade teachers and college professors would. Clients want results. They want me to concentrate. The social media aspect, the communication overload, gives me a power nap. It allows me to unconcentrate (de-concentrate?).

But back to Markus’ article. He talks about how creative he felt without all that information coming at him, as if the inability to connect to a WLAN or get a few bars on his cellphone had created his own private Walden Pond. Well, a Walden Pond with a wife and baby.

And it made me think about my weekends. For years I’ve avoided my computer on Saturday and Sunday. I don’t want to sit down at the desk and push ‘on’. I can’t bring myself to hit the ‘mail’ button in my cellphone. I feel I’ve let myself down if I do it. My father often emails Friday evenings and is annoyed by the time he sends a second on Sunday. “Can you please answer my last e-mail?” Lately, I’ve been thinking I do it to cater to my shy streak – I use the excuse of a weekend to avoid and deflect. I was starting to think I should actually see what the digital world has to offer on, say, a Sunday afternoon. I should respond to an e-mail or two.

But Marcus made me realize my weekends offline were my brain’s own way of pulling back. I need the weekends to reflect. I use the time to mull and devise ways of dealing with everything that comes at me during the week – Mondays I shoot off a flurry of emails that go sailing out of my Asus laptop like so many racing pigeons let out of their artificial roost for some early morning exercise. And I’ve even launched a new project or two during my first coffee of the week.

This echo chamber of anti-social-media is partially a changing of the generational guard in Germany’s media blotter and partially an examination of social media’s place in our lives. I really enjoy social media. I’m glad to know what my friends are doing. And I like seeing what others I don’t really know are up to (like Markus). And I like taking part in my own life.

So I’m sorry if I miss your weekend status updates.

Several years ago, when I still worked at home, I got some coffee. As I paused to open the gate at the top of the stairs and head down to the office, I set the coffee on the gray steel support that is the back half-wall of our kitchen. It left a ring.

For several days I walked by that steel support and saw the coffee ring. “Yup, still there,” I thought and went on with my day. I present it as a complete sentence but it wasn’t even a complete thought – just registration that the coffee ring was still there. But after several days the thought fragment jelled into a concept – “Yup, still there. I wonder when Sabine will get around to wiping it off.?” The remark made me confront what I was saying to myself.

In the weird world of men where our reptilian brains make compliments out of insults, that last thought was an homage to her skill as an efficient housekeeper. She cleans things better than I do. Or, as I have learned, more quickly and without thinking she could maybe instead watch the last quarter of the Broncos game, try to kill another 50 anti-terrors in Counter-Strike or even read another chapter of the book. She just cleans. Then plays.

But I had caused the ring. Why didn’t I just clean it up? So I did. I also noticed this thought had become a habit. Everywhere I saw little piles of things to do that I expected her to do but that I could just as easily do. So I started trying to do more. I started putting my own clothes away after they’d been folded. I started carrying my own bills from the kitchen counter to the office. I would empty the dishwasher if I found myself with an extra five minutes. Occasionally, I swept. After awhile, she noticed my housekeeping campaign.

“You don’t have to help fold. I like it but you could do the occasional load of laundry,” she said. So I started doing laundry too. It’s not like I wasn’t doing anything – we have the same division of labor breeder couples have had for years. I do the banking, enjoy doing the banking, and she enjoys folding laundry. We used to meet in the middle. But with her now working six or seven days a week, I’ve tried to pick up the slack even more. I notice the laundry detergent is getting low so I get some while picking up the ingredients for that night’s dinner. I stop by the pediatrician to get a prescription for Cy – she had been responsible for doctor visits. I call to sort out this or that.

This weekend she remarked that I’m taking over some of her role as mother since she’s not around as much. I think I’m just carrying more of my weight as father. Which is fine, I’ve been spending too much time behind a computer anyway.

And I like my kids more since I’ve been spending more time with them.

Last week, the night before flying to my aunt's funeral, I was doing some moonlighting translating an employee magazine for a big pharmaceutical company. One of the articles dealt with a complication of cancer that killed my aunt, and I mentioned how distressing this translation was on Facebook/Twitter.

Susan Ager, a former Detroit Free Press columnist and friend of my aunt and uncle, commented that I must feel surrounded by death and sickness. Though I know what she meant (it's how I felt in the '90s while watching my mother and grandparents die), this time around I just felt surrounded by life. Not the uplifting, inspirational kind but the kind that happens while you make plans.

I was in the midst of tons of translating, reporting and doing television commentary while my daughter was off from daycare (a logistical nightmare for two working parents) and then starting school. Plus, two teachers quit at the daycare where I'm part of a three-member board.

It would be easy to talk about the cycle of life but that wasn't what I felt -- I felt more like I was just watching and even assisting in very different phases of very different people's lives. It didn't seem to me that there was any link or cause and effect related to the differing phases, which is what the cycle of life always implied to me. These were just people I know and love going about their lives while I tried to keep my own head above water in mine.

It just seemed like life. Fatalism, I guess.

Which brings me to my Aunt Christy's death. This was a tough one. My uncle, her husband, died in June and though it's romantic that she followed him so closely, I wish she hadn't. She's more than half the reason I became a journalist.

As a kid, we watched lots of Lou Grant and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, which both glorified journalism. Sure there were buffoons in Mary Tyle Moore but man, Animal the photographer in Lou Grant seemed like the person to be not to mention the respect the reporters commanded. And I went to Damon Runyon Elementary, where they told us Damon Runyon was a partier and a journalist, which sounded pretty cool to me. Then we visited my aunt -- as a newspaper publisher, she had a side office in a newsroom and seemed to be in touch with every story that flowed through there. I thought all the energy in the place came from her. Then the guys in the printing plant seemed to respect her and liked chatting with her.

And she and her ex-priest husband represented a kind of quiet intellectualism accented by civil rights and feminism (this was the '70s) that impressed me.

Who wouldn't want to follow that lead?

Christy's now on her way to be interred with my uncle, Martha is comfortable in her new school and work has quieted down. I hope I'm not surrounded by death and sickness again all too soon -- or life, for that matter.