Sunday, As It Should Be

Today was a delightful, relaxing and happy day. I showered, browsed parts of the newspaper, watched an unusually funny clip from The Daily Show on YouTube, charged our videocamera (which we haven't used in over ten years, I think), printed out short story fragments, looked at old photos, and played the piano. J. and I also walked to the Kleistpark; it was sunny but not too warm. Dinner was gulasch (beef and vegetable soup; with rotini in our case), with ice cream, Dominosteine and Lebkuchenherzen (the latter two being delectable Christmas confections that have just begun to appear on the shelves of Plus). Uncle Pu also phoned and invited us to his birthday party, which will take place next Sunday.

Among my works that I printed out today there was a play (which I started to write perhaps a year ago) based on Beowulf. It's rather light-hearted, considering that people are being killed, but I prefer to think of it as a children's version rather than a callous version.

Anyway, this morning my parents and I, sitting in the living room, heard a continuous drumming sound coming from further down the street. We were quite annoyed. When Joachim and I went to the Kleistpark later there were still police vehicles and officers standing around, and an orange city works vehicle was sweeping up plastic cups from the road. Yesterday, at the same location, there had been refreshment stands for participants in a roller-skating race. It turns out, on consulting the Berliner Zeitung website, that the Berlin Marathon took place today; this was probably the source of the ruckus.

The Berlin Marathon is only one big local event that I've basically missed; there were also the elections. To summarize the elections, they were for the Berlin parliament, and coincided with the elections for the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (a separate German state) parliament. In the Berlin elections the SPD (a left-wing party) candidate for mayor, Klaus Wowereit, was re-elected. Without knowing much of the party platforms I lean toward the SPD anyway, so I'm content. In the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the neo-Nazi party NPD received over 7% of the vote; about twice as much as the Green Party. This result made me considerably angry, for evident reasons. I don't want to condemn people whom I do not know, and I certainly don't want to callously pass over the misery of unemployment, but voting for a neo-Nazi party not only implies support for despicable morality, but it also implies monumental stupidity. I'd as soon vote for dinosaurs to come back to roam the Earth. But I don't think that these election results prove anything of larger importance. It is amazing to think that sixty-five years ago Berlin was "all white," and then to look out the window and see Turkish families walking by, or the African man in tribal costume, and to feel that it's completely normal and unremarkable. I don't think that people are better now than they were then, I'm just happy that the circumstances are different and that skin colour is no real issue to most people at present. I felt similarly contented when I saw the photo of a jubilant Klaus Wowereit embracing his same-sex "partner" (I use the quotation marks because I personally would prefer to use another, less bland term) on the front page of the post-election Berliner Zeitung. My faith in progress as a historical concept has been shaky for many years now, but this is one of the rare times where I admit that there is some basis for it.

But now T. would like to go on the laptop . . .