I'm sorry for my German.

Two winters ago, I read an article about Haruki Murakami's routine of sitting down to write every morning for several hours, even if he had nothing to write and indeed wrote nothing at all. I was inspired to do the same and started a story called "I'm sorry for my German," which began with the mistaken reading of a sign on the other side of the river I used to run along that said "Anlegestelle." For weeks I had thought it said, "Angelnstelle," which I thought to mean a place for fishing, and wondered why I never saw anyone fishing there. Somehow the story developed into Otto wandering aimlessly in Vienna and then abruptly ended when, being driven nearly mad by the noise from the neighbors above me, I fled to New York to stay at my grandmother's empty house, where I discovered the terrifying loudness of solitude.

I don't remember what I meant by the title, "I'm sorry for my German," but I liked the sound of it, and that's approximately how I felt at the time, or maybe more accurately sorry about my German, and sorry about many other things as well.

But now I remember. I thought that my writing would inevitably contain some German words and phrases for which I couldn't find appropriate English translations and, knowing that this might be annoying and even come off as pretentious, I wanted to apologize from the get go. At the same time, it is true that here in Germany I often did feel sorry for those who had to endure my imperfect German and wanted sometimes to tell them, "I'm sorry for my German."

Today, while walking home from the U-Bahn station where I had sat for a while listening to the cellist, I thought that the inclusion of German words and phrases in my posts could be a theme for my blog. Thinking of the cellist, whom I gave 10 Euros, I thought of writing that maybe "das war ein bißchen übertrieben," although I actually don't think so at all. This time he didn't play any Bach, but what I once paid $10 for at The Stone, I thought, wasn't at all necessarily better.