Nicolai's Digital Garden

<p>Vor ein paar Wochen war ich mit einer Freundin unterwegs und wir kamen auf das Thema, wer der aktuelle Schiller der deutschen Literatur sei.

<p>Like so often, I have fallen into the dangerous trap of reorganising my files—it’s three hours later and the only thing I have to show for it is a more complete (but still spotty) understanding of Obsidian’s bases syntax.

<p>Because I’m a deeply insane person who loves making more work for myself, I volunteered to update the <a href="https://annotating-literature.org">annotating-literature website</a>.

<p>The house was an odd thing to look at, a relic from the first settlement, refusing to be replaced by something grander.

<p>Just now, I was drunkenly on the phone with my sister and wrote a terrible text about quitting the play I’m in.

<p>It’s been a few days since I launched this site, and I thought it might be worth documenting what I’ve built here, both for my own reference and for anyone curious about the technical (and often insane) decisions that went into it.

<div class="title-page"> <h1 class="play-title">Die Urne</h1> <p class="play-author">Nicolai Plenk</p> <div class="title-page-info"> <p class="meta-line"><span class="meta-label">Draft date:</span> 07.11.2025</p> </div> </div> <div class="page-break"></di…

<p>Editing the theatre scripts was among the biggest mistakes I’ve made—I thought it’d be a fun activity to kill time, but now I’m reading the same sentences 20 times, trying to add some semblance of style and sense.

<p>I made a grave mistake this semester—and I did so twice!

<p>I don’t know exactly why, but for the past few years, I’ve written much less than I’d like to admit, and I’ve been meaning to get back into seriously writing for the longest time.

<p>I’ve finally finished <a href="https://bruchbuehne.de">our new theatre website</a> (something which took far longer than it should have because my first version broke due to various PHP issues I still haven’t been able to fix (ugh ugh ugh) and I then k…

<p>i rarely think of the future, but sometimes i dream. i shall, of course, wear purple. but, above all else, i dream of a place so much better that people will criticise me for prejudices we haven’t even begun to imagine.

<p>I can’t sleep.

<p>When I was a child my grandmother gave me a perfume sample she didn’t much care for, but I fell in love with.

<h2 id="oder%3A-eine-neue-exillyrik" tabindex="-1"><a class="header-anchor" href="#oder%3A-eine-neue-exillyrik">Oder: eine neue Exillyrik</a></h2> <p>‘Willst du Penthouse an Penthouse mit Andrea wohnen und dir ein Helipad teilen?’

<p>I’ve always loved writing(fn Well, more the idea than the process which is usually rather tedious for me.

<p>In meinem Leben gab es drei Pinienwälder: den zuhause, den in der Toskana und den in Stockholm.

<p>For a while, I’ve wanted to leave my Fachschaft to move on to bigger and better things (the next ladder of inane university politics because I have many friends there), but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

<p>Is life not what happens in between the tension of freedom and obligation?

<p>Mit dir bin ich groß und klein, was auch immer du brauchst, aber jetzt bin ich alleine und falle schrumpfend in ein schwarzes Loch.

<p>sometimes i am tortured by dreams of success—it doesn’t matter what it looks like, it’s always dreadful. ich weiß nicht wieso, aber ich kann mir einfach keine zukunft vorstellen, in der ich—oder irgendwer, tbqh—erfolgreich und glücklich zugleich ist. s…

<p>The first time I saw a photo of Yayoi Kusama I knew she had drowned.

<p>Their faces were, thanks to the lights hanging above, a tad too bright and devoid of shadows.

<p>‘Water under the bridge.’

<p>I’m lying in my bed, heart beating like the wind, listening to Yumeji’s Theme, pondering why my writing morphed from playful fantasy to overly sombre ‘literary fiction’ when I transitioned from German to English.

<p><s>Summer had always been my favourite season.

<p>All those upper middle class people looking at a deconstructed barbecue grill and you just stand there, warning them if they take one stop too many toward the sacrosanct line.