12/23 Traveling to Puerto Rico all day. Four-hour delay at JFK. Lucky not to have lost the rental car. Arrived in Rincon past midnight.

12/22 Traffic island in the middle of Broadway, knee-high fence separating the cars and the nondescript bushwork. That fence has christmas lights wrapped around it. Who decided to put them there, and when, and how? Also: Where do they get their power from? Is there really an outlet right there, on the traffic island, just for those christmas lights? The question only occurs to me now, late at night, and I will not be able to investigate this, probably not this year at all, since we are leaving for Puerto Rico tomorrow.

12/21 The contrast between how I think as a German and as an American is unbelievable. You’d think it’s nuance and some funny differences in how you express yourself. It’s not. I feel like I’m a different species, living in a different universe, that strangely shares the same alphabet.

December 20. The essay – the first one I wrote with my new half-hour-a-day regime – is good. Encouraged by the others, I submitted it for publication. That’s making me tear my hair out and pace up and down the apartment for hours. I hate this. I don’t want this. I don’t need this. I’ll have to lie to myself about it, and make sure not to pay too much attention to myself lying. I hope it gets rejected – catches nobody’s attention – and I can publish it just like I normally do.

December 19. I did not expect that the book about the Coronado Expedition of 1540, which 30 years ago I had to request from the vault of a State Library in Germany, would be digitally available today. It is. Right there in Google Books. Perhaps my irritation over the slow pace with which the print universe becomes accessible, the stubbornness with which it sticks to paper, is just a little too impatient. One century stuck in copyright hassles, that does not amount to much.

December 18. For the longest time I thought that the wind howling through Manhattan today was a crazy revving motorbike going up and down Broadway. When, a few minutes later, the neighbor started singing her usual, not-quite-on-pitch scales, I did think, for a moment, that it was the wind.

December 17. I’d rather not know how far an 8- or 10-year-old would have come with my volume of piano practice by now, after two years of consistent effort.

December 16. Played a little Bach minuet with J for the first time. It’s still far too difficult for me, it takes me half an hour to decipher the first four bars. But I’ll be able to play it in a few days.

December 15. All I can get myself to do is screw a replacement hinge into my portable keyboard. No energy for anything beyond that. Asking myself to do four, five demanding things every day on a regular schedule is depleting my reserves quickly and thoroughly.

December 14. Back in New York. On the sofa, I read until the book has fallen out of my hand several times in a row, J works on a Sudoku, her newest discovery.