Welcome to The Blonde Prerogative

Where you may find out what unnecessary torture I've put myself up to, on a weekly basis.

This is The Blonde Prerogative, a weekly newsletter where I answer the question, “What on earth is Deanna up to now?”

I have become increasingly flustered trying to answer it of late, never knowing where to start and my response never seeming to end, so I thought that by starting this blog, I could update interested parties and also keep an active log of my doings and thoughts for my own sake – because God knows my memory alone cannot keep with all the chaos that seems to follow me.

When I say chaos, I refer to how I manage to work on multiple things simultaneously and still continue to add more. For example, this blog will chronicle my experiences as I:

• Write my book about learning practical Japanese: “Japanese for Anyone, Really!”, whose summary you can read on the site I made here

• Work for TRUCK Furniture as translator, PR person, sales rep; any and all things English- or international-related at the company

• Work at ESMT in Career Services

• Write my Master’s thesis for my degree in North American Studies, concentration in Sociology and Politics at the FU Berlin

• Apply for Italian citizenship recognition via jura sanguinis (descent)

• Study German (B2 level)

• Develop ideas for a start-up / consider doing a web-dev camp

I write about these things primarily to demonstrate that none of this, in my humble humble experience, is linear. Or even circular. It’s an endless, indecipherable scribble.

Every other blog I read about people developing their books and start up ideas or whatever is written retrospectively, with all the gritty challenges, mishaps, mistakes, and general realities all tidied up and glossed over. Sure, they tell you it’s tough, but you don’t really know what that means. But here, you will. One day I’ve got a brilliant idea for my thesis, two days later I’m fifteen browser tabs deep in Google rummaging for any semblance of relevant data and teetering on the crisp edge of snapping my laptop in half as I’m forced to toss yet another golden eureka moment into the trash. And when you read my thought process here, you’ll know why.

In addition, I’ll write about other random topics, like how I’m a shoddy cook — how do you SURVIVE, Deanna?? – and am trying to learn how to be an okay one while still being roughly as cheap and lazy about it as I’ve always been. Or my all-time favorite, can’t-imagine-life-without purchases, like the little baby iPad Mini that I can’t help but gush about when I take it out. Or my personal theories about learning and teaching.

In sum, this is not a diary. It’s a progress and reflection journal for myself and those who care to follow along. And I’d be really happy to have you there with me.

More Formal Introduction Time

It’s me! In graphic form!

For those of you who don’t know me, or perhaps haven’t been in touch with me for some time: My name is Deanna, I’m 30, I’m from Baltimore, Maryland (USA), and I currently live in Berlin. I say currently because as a single ex-pat, residences never seem permanent. I told myself every year of the seven (ish?) years I ended up staying in Japan that it was my last one. Now I *plan* to stay in Berlin indefinitely, but I also am planning a brief move to Monza, Italy next year so that I may apply for my Italian citizenship directly. Will I ever move back to the US? Honestly, I have no idea, but I’m quite happy in Europe and especially Berlin at the moment, or rather, currently.

So how did I get here? Whew, good question. It all started with my big move to Osaka, Japan.

Why were you in Osaka, Japan and what did you do there?

Once I graduated from university, I figured that the predestined route following my English degree was to become a teacher, but I also wanted to move abroad before I got “stuck”, so I found a job teaching English in Japan. It was at a private company that had two branches in Tokyo and Osaka, and I was originally assigned to the Tokyo branch. I was vocal about my resistance to Tokyo — when I did a 4-month study abroad to Japan, I was in Kobe/Osaka, and I didn’t want to move to the more expensive, crowded, and unfamiliar Tokyo all by myself. I mean, I would have been fine, but I enjoyed my time in Kansai (the region containing the cities Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto) and wanted to go back to what I knew. The company ended up informing me about a vacancy in the Osaka office, and I gladly took it.

For the first two years, I was self-studying Japanese intensively while teaching English at local companies and later elementary, middle, and preschools. I was also doing private English lessons for more money. Eventually, I got tired of teaching — for reasons I’ll have to dedicate a whole separate post to — and since my Japanese had improved significantly, I began working part-time as a translator for a furniture company. This is another long story short, but while doing private lessons, someone inquired me about doing a voice-over for a project, and this person wound up being surf photographer Tatsuo Takei, who I became good friends with, who knows and used to surf with the owner of the furniture company. We met at the company-owned cafe and — another long story short — he hired me to translate his furniture Backstories and help the staff with international emails. In the end, I pushed him to hire me as a full-time employee.

During the remaining five (holy crap) years working full-time as the in-house translator, PR rep, assistant to the boss, and English teacher with the furniture company, I got ideas for writing a book about Japanese (the “Japanese for Anyone” project I am working on now). I was also doing a lot of random little side jobs, like doing backstreet bar tours of Osaka, interpreting for an old-school bookmaking workshop in Kyoto, posting on a website answers to questions about English explained in Japanese, editing the film and art section of a local English publication, and even translating and writing with credit for Tatsuo’s book, Authentic Wave.

Why are you in Berlin now?

So, the thing about Japan is that it’s a lovely, beautiful, clean, and interesting country. The food is the bomb; public transport is top tier. You can easily live comfortably, cheaply, and happily. But it’s also quite stagnant as a culture. Things don’t really change much, and I wasn’t happy with the social networking opportunities I had. Japan, even for expats, is not a place for the ambitious. At least that’s not how I found it, and I didn’t see myself growing in the ways I wanted to or expected to anymore, so I decided to leave.

But where to? When I thought about going back to the US, the decision quickly overwhelmed me. Back to Baltimore? Stay where? Do what? When I looked up jobs I was interested in, none of them seemed to care about international experience and all-over-the-place skillset I had. They wanted Master’s degrees and years of work experience solely in that one field. With only my Bachelor’s degree, I felt behind, and when I considered that I still had debt from my undergrad, getting a Master’s in the US was a ridiculous idea. And what would I study anyway? To even apply I would first need to take the GRE, and study and prepare for that, and I would need to get a high score for scholarships so I could afford the degree, but what degree? What would be most cost-effective and interesting to me? So I kicked around this idea for about a year, wondering what else I could do, and in the meantime I took a trip to Berlin.

I stayed for two weeks with a family who I had met during their visit to my furniture company in Osaka. I had a lovely time and felt some sort of familiarity and comfort with the city that I hadn’t felt in other cities. I made friends; I liked German. I knew I wanted to come back. I bought two German textbooks to take back with me and made that my next goal.

But moving to Germany, to Berlin, brought up similar angsty issues that moving to the US did. What would I do? My failsafe was working as a tour guide for Japanese visitors, but I didn’t feel fully comfortable with that idea as I didn’t want it as a career. I dug around, and somewhere found out that German universities are basically free for international students. You read that right. Free! But, obviously, most schools teach only in German, so that’s a big catch. I managed to find a few schools that taught courses in English and offered a North American/US studies program. My goal was/is to use the knowledge and connections from my degree to start an organization that would combat social and political polarization in the U.S. Yet another long and complicated story short, I applied to three schools (FU Berlin, Humboldt University, and Leipzig University), got in, chose the FU Berlin, and moved there the following year (January 2021).

I asked my boss at the furniture company to keep me as a remote employee, because I didn’t want to leave them nor my regular salary, and he agreed, but I took a deep salary cut. So after about a year of living here in Berlin on that, I got a part-time job at a business school here, where I work as an assistant in Career Services.

And now, here in Berlin, I’m doing all of the things I mentioned at the top of this post, plus going to therapy, being physically active, and making time for my truly fantastic network of friends all over.

So what’s next, and why should I subscribe to this newsletter?

I am going to write every week from now on detailing the “progress” of my aforementioned involvements, so if you subscribe to The Blonde Prerogative, you will get a new post like this one in your Sunday inbox.

By subscribing, you

• get weekly content that you find interesting, relatable, or insightful

• learn for yourself about the process of writing a book and a thesis, and founding a startup, and applying for foreign citizenship from someone who has never done any of those things before

• give me confidence and validation that what I write actually is interesting, relatable, or insightful,

• make me accountable, so that I keep up with my goals and not skimp on writing and reflecting on them,

• help me better understand what I need to do, or need to stop doing, in their pursuit,

• and encourage me to become a better, more consistent writer.

And I must say, I am truly stoked to start this progress journal and share it with you! Thank you for reading this far, it means a lot!

But there’s one more thing before you go – tell me, which long story short would you actually like to hear the whole long story about? Comment below and I’ll make a post expanding on it as you request.

Til next week!
~Deanna