The Size Post, Part II: The Solution

Having made the great sacrifice of getting my butt down to Valencia on a nearly all-expenses-paid trip (thanks to a fortuitous sugar-daddy opportunity) to do Important Public Health Research, I went personally to meet the man who may be responsible for saving lives among the differently endowed in Spain. As far as I've been able to confirm, he's the only supplier of a fitted condom in Spain. But I continued in my tireless pursuit of safety+pleasure for the men of Spain, as I have subsequently engaged in hours of intensive product testing. I can testify that I have convinced a confirmed condom dodger to dutifully don the right-fitting tool, who, once properly equipped, subjected these condoms to prolonged, rigorous and highly successful use. Ladies and gentlemen, a drum roll please as I introduce at least a partial solution to the size conundrum, thanks to top-notch German engineering (is there any better?): MY.SIZE.

A few more words on this product: it appears to be a simplified version of TheyFit, although it does not resolve the unfortunate assumption that equates length with width. The wider condom sizes are longer (perhaps too long, though better too long than not long enough). It's a good beginning though there's definitely room for improvement; I'm convinced it's still possible to develop a fairly simple scheme. My ideal would be two or three different lengths for each width, meaning a total of 12 or 15 sizes, which seems to me imminently more marketable than TheyFit's 70 or more.

MY.SIZE also provides a measurement guide that can be printed out, just like TheyFit, isn't that nifty? Then there's the handy educational My.Size video (for the moment available only in German) which engenders the strangest feeling in me -- could there be anything more droll than a German male armed with six differently-sized dildos providing condom use instructions?? Perhaps I'm most consternated by the fact that I understand virtually every word?!

To those otherly-endowed men in Spain: run, don't walk, to the source that will make your life much much more fun and imminently safer: RAMASAnitaria, www.ramasa.com.

Give Me Fever

Just as I re-surfaced from a wicked heat wave (nine days of 97°F/36°C plus or minus 1°C) in Madrid, after three days of practically arctic temperatures (no higher than 90°/32°), I was hit with another birthday and rising temperatures yet again, up to 35° yesterday. Slogging my way through the birthday aftermath, I'm contemplating the feverish dreams my brain has seen fit to devise for me over the last couple of weeks. Now I'm no Jungian, and it's undoubtedly for the best that I hardly ever remember my dreams. But this fitful sleeping in hot and stuffy little rooms is a perfect dream factory, and it's very difficult to avoid the conclusion that my subconscious, at least, is simply not signed onto the fact that I live in Madrid now.

All three dreams have centered around Berlin, and two of the three, unsurprisingly, involved lusciously cold weather. In one, I seemed to have misplaced a lover somewhere in another country, and turned up another, ill from alcoholism; all the while the Lidl/Kaiser's/Robben und Wientjes area north of the Prenzlauerberg S-Bahn had turned into an ice-skating pond (doesn't that sound great?)! In the second, that previously misplaced lover inexplicably turned up with another woman on a bus in the German countryside, while I had apparently become invisible to him and his friends. Before I had time to become too distressed about this, the bus stopped and dumped us all out somewhere well outside of Berlin, with lots of snow and no clear way to get back to town. To put the icing on the cake, I was completely on my own while everyone else, somehow, miraculously had cars. OK, so, angst and displacement, perfectly explainable, particularly as I'd seen the very very eccentric Anti-Christ (Lars von Trier's latest) the night before the second dream.

But it's the one from last night that has me freaked out, as Mr. Not-a-Gentleman, about whom I hadn't thought for months, somehow replaced Sergi López (picture me wailing in distress) in a faintly-related and definitely sexual reprise of Isabel Coixet's movie, Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, that I just saw last night. López, one of my favorite actors since the oh-so-sexy Une Liaison Pornographique, was also fabulous in Dirty Pretty Things and Harry, Un Ami qui Vous Veut du Bien. In Tokyo, he meets a Japanese lover weekly at a "love hotel" with thematic rooms, Sergi Lopez's character's choice being one done up as a train car (I do admit to that being one of my own particular, ahem, preferences, as well). I can't recommend the movie (for me the plot's too weak), but there is one particular scene where López comes up for air, after pleasuring his co-star's character, and, with the coyest look possible, acts out removing a pubic hair from his tongue. Fascinating concept, that: a French woman directing a Spanish star in a scene that pointedly features (gasp) oral sex au naturel. I do believe it should be required viewing for all Spanish adult males in 2009. Oh my poor, poor brain, please try again tonight, to get it right.

Aufwiedersehen, Sexless Berlin

When we were in college, my sister had a superstition about street lamps. She used to think that just walking by, she could turn them on or off. After she told me about this, of course, any streetlight that flickered in my presence became some sort of sign – generally I thought of it as an indication of just how much chaos had accrued to me in a given period of time. It never occurred to me until this winter, living in Kreuzberg, that I should think about this more closely. On the bridge where Kottbusserdamm crosses the Landwehrkanal, there was a street light that constantly switched on or off when I walked under it. One cold night I remember standing at the end of the bridge and watching for long enough to see that it flickered on and off quite regularly – some sort of short circuit, undoubtedly. Life is sort of like that streetlight, I suppose. Unless you take the trouble to step back and observe more closely, it probably seems like it’s pretty much all about you.

Recovering from a terribly damaging love affair nearly completely blinds one to others’ suffering, and certainly robs one of any capacity for mercy. Starting with my trip to India, one year post-break-up, I began climbing out of that particular deep, dark hole, and it feels good to lift my face up to the light. On an impulse, yesterday, after vacating my sublet du jour and with hours still to go until my night train, I SMS’d Mr. Performance Artist. He was painting at home, and we “connected” in the obvious way but more importantly spent hours talking, including one last trip to drink large hot chocolates at the fabulous Kakao. Among other things, I found out that the reason he hadn't shared Berlinale tickets with me is that the Email I had for him was his third-level account. I can't exactly wonder why he'd never bothered to upgrade me, as I'm afraid I wasn't the most fun person to be around in, well, the year 2007. As for him, he’d been going through an on-again, off-again break-up himself all last year, of which I had had only the vaguest idea, but of course that was a function of my own self-involvement. There is a destructive, selfish side about him, which he is actually confronting, while engaging in some serious self-reflection. That is something I greatly admire, particularly given the rare occasions that I see it in men.

As I’m on the night train, Berlin to Paris, I’m finishing this post. I was all set to write something quite different, reflections on my time in Berlin, but it's time to close that damaged and difficult phase of my life. I have to admit that a certain part of what I experienced came from inside me. Perhaps it was an interaction between what I was living through and the way that Berlin is. So it's appropriate that life intervened on my last day in Berlin, to steer this post in a rather different direction. Though Berlin for me has been so hard, still leaving feels difficult as well. I'm struggling with a nostalgia for certain things, principally the idea of home, which Berlin had for me, to some degree, since at least it had become familiar. But I've decided to work a bit more actively on the pursuit of happiness. My friends, this may be the end of this blog, I haven’t quite decided yet. I may keep it open for the likely possibility that I’m back living in Berlin, at least temporarily, next fall. Or maybe it will be my dark-side blog, but I need something else for the sunny attitude that the thought of Spain is engendering in me. So for now, aufwiedersehen.

Decision on Spain

The rather anemic voting by my friends (my thanks to those who did) has left me completely unswayed; the decision is Madrid. The good news is that the fast train -- under 3 hours -- from Madrid to Barcelona just opened up. And the good news continues -- the cheapest ticket is just 40 euros one-way. Madrid to Sevilla also has a high-speed train and beautiful Granada is an easy bus-ride away from Sevilla. Now to the challenge of finding housing!

On to my new Wonderful Life

Rolling with this new wave of energy, I will briefly comment that the day before yesterday I had three, count them, THREE, unsolicited exchanges with men within 24 hours, as I was just making my way about town. This never happens in Berlin; there must be some sort of glow about me, some sort of happy little rainbow over my head. [For you long-time Berlin residents, I will qualify this by saying two were foreigners and one was a Ukrainian nationalized as a young child, thus not at all inconsistent with my continued contention about German men]. I will say that this absolutely proves my point about men in general -- disaster is guaranteed up to and until a woman truly reaches the point of not giving a good goddamn. Then all is golden. And grrrllls, I am finally back at that point again. So now all I need to do is sit back and amuse myself by watching the proceedings. In the meantime, enough of unsexy Berlin; I'm making my plans to escape. India was a potent reminder of my need for sun and sensuality. My only problem is, I cannot possibly decide which Spanish city to pick, so I'm asking you to help me with this nifty little poll.