the month in me: Marchish 2026

Apr 20, 2026

life

Still in Europe. I’m struck by how much of this extended vacation is spent managing my vacation. Booking hotels and trains. Buying new luggage and questioning my choices. Figuring out how to do laundry in new places. I’m happy to be here, but also looking forward to being home, where I know where everything is.

Anyway, here are some places I’ve been.

Glasgow

Glasgow was a home base for me this month. I endured the rest of my time at a bad Airbnb, then (after a week in Oslo) moved to a delightful hotel. I mean, the hotel was good. But the location! Across the street is a walking path that ramps down to the River Kelvin. Under the Great Western Road to a plaza with a subway station and a little cafe where everything is made with care. The plaza widens to a park, with little pop-up restaurants, like food trucks without wheels. You can follow the footpath along the river into Kelvingrove Park, 85 Victorian acres, with a bandstand and a museum. What a way to live!

Cultural highlights: The Glasgow Short Film Festival, full of insight. A Play, A Pie, and a Pint, a model for unfussy theater. So many different kinds of tea! And Everybody to Kenmure Street, a documentary about a day in 2021 when a thousand or more Glasgwegians dropped what they were doing to come and stop national immigration enforcement from kidnapping their neighbors. There were so many parallels to Minneapolis. I was holding back tears the whole time.

Arthur's Seat, a green hill capped by craggy rock, seen through a narrow gap between apartment buildings.

I also made short trips to Aberdeen, where I saw a ruined castle and some standing stones; and to Edinburgh, where I mostly saw gamers, because I was at an RPG convention. The con was in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat, though, and wow, what a thing that is to see through a space between buildings! I enjoyed the panels, especially the ones Avery Alder was on.

Berlin

My one-word summary of Berlin: “grand.” At least in the parts I was in (most of which used to be West Berlin), everything was big and imposing: big buildings, big streets, big plazas. “Grand” is usually a positive, but I’m ambivalent about it. It was often beautiful, but I missed the human scale I find at street level in most European cities.

The Kaufhaus des Westens department store, a seven-story building that takes up a full block, with a giant culorful banner in the center. — Even the department stores are grand.

As I looked over lists of World War II museums and memorials, I found myself wanting to skip ahead to what comes after: to hope, because I’m craving hope these days. But of course after the World War comes the Cold War. And after the Cold War comes whatever we’re in now. Berlin was a good reminder that history doesn’t have happy endings, or any endings. History continues.

The Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of many gray concrete slabs of varying heights. A woman in a long red coat passes between them, a short distance from the camera. — I don’t know this person.

Also I had nice visits at the zoo with a code friend and at brunch with a theater friend. I never go to zoos, but this was a good one.

Oslo

I went to Oslo for the Short Notice Improv Festival. What a beautiful city! Beautiful and steep! My duo partner Chris and I walked all over the central city, from the Vigeland Sculpture Park to the Oslo Theater Center. I’ve been spending a lot of time either alone or meeting new people, and it was wonderful to spend so much time just hanging out with a friend. Also we had a show!

arts

There’s been a lot more art-making this month. The high point was definitely SNIF! Two’s Company did a show that we were happy with, and that was almost embarrassingly well received. I also accompanied Adriá Lerma’s solo show, performed in a fun mixer, saw a lot of great improv, and took workshops from ImprompTwo and Jen Hardy that helped me think about where I want to focus my improv next.

And I got to hang out with improvisers! Sometimes I’m too shy to talk to creative people unless they’ve seen me do something first, so my schedule (music on Monday, show on Tuesday, workshop Wednesday morning) served me well. Also, SNIF is amazing at fostering community. One of the things that drew me to it – which in turn fueled this whole foolhardy three-month journey – is that on Thursday, they don’t have any shows or any workshops. Instead, they get on a train and then walk into the Norwegian forest, where they have a potluck picnic around a fire and throw pine cones in the lake. And talk, and drink, and do bits. Sometimes there’s a wedding. It’s a great party, and the next day our improv is even better.

SNIF has lots of return performers. It’s a long way across the Atlantic, but someday I hope to be one of them.

Other good times:

A workshop with the Improv Cooperative in Glasgow, on “Differing Without Disagreeing.”
An improv jam at the Glasgow Improv Theatre, although I was too shy to sign up.
A music jam at the Maverick, where I played two freeform jams with host/clarinetist Jack Heavenor and a player named Bailey on the cajón. It was fun! And also made me homesick for Bible Study at Berlin (the real Berlin).

A door and accompanying buzzer, covered in graffiti and stickers At least one of them reads 'Synthesizer Museum Berlin.'

I’ve seen and played a lot of synths this month! First I went to Synthesizer Museum Berlin. Hidden behind a door full of graffiti and stickers, it’s basically a suite full of synths, most of which you can play. So it’s just a bunch of people wandering around trying out different toys, if they can make them out over the sound of everyone else doing the same thing. (There are headphones.)

At the museum I overheard people talking about GLOSS, the Glasgow Library Of Synthesized Sound, so when I got back I signed up for a synth jam. This is an event where you’re assigned to a team (or you can bring your own), you’re given some equipment (or you can bring your own), you draw some prompts from a box (ours were home, dusk, haunting, and lush), and you have one hour to figure out how to make something musical together before you play it live for the other participants. It was fun!

And I visited the Gearfix workshop with a friend who was there to check out the Moog Muse, so I checked it out too, and peered at all the drawers and boxes that accumulate over decades of working on synthesizers.

A plastic toolbox full of little drawers, most labeled 'FADERS.'

code

I’ve been building a sliding block puzzle. It’s not going to set the world on fire, but it’s fun to code something nobody else cares about for a change, and it’s a learning opportunity.

A square sliding block puzzle showing a jumbled skyscape, with Reset and Shuffle buttons.

Specifically I’m trying to learn about three things:

Solid, a JavaScript UI framework. On the surface it’s like React, but everything works a little differently because underneath the surface the model is entirely different. Which means I both can and can’t bring my React experience to bear.
Elementary, a JavaScript library that provides a functional library for generating digital audio. It feels a bit like using React to produce sounds, which is a weird way to produce sounds. I like this because it makes my brain buzz.
How I feel about using LLMs for software development. This could be a whole post. Probably a lot of posts. I probably won’t write them. If you know me, ask me next time we hang out.

onward

I’m actually in Sweden now, but I’m not going to write about it until I’ve left. From here I head to Switzerland to visit friends, then overland to Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf. Then back to Glasgow, then the Liverpool Improv Festival, and after a few short stops I expect to land back in Minneapolis. What will that be like, I wonder? Minnesota, how are you doing?