A Lunch, A Fit of the Vapours, and The Wind

This day began, promisingly, with rain. I decided against taking along an umbrella since powerful winds were forecast. A raincoat still seemed too warm. In the short trip from and to the U-Bahn, I didn't really need it.

At around 9 a.m. I entered the courtyard at work with bicycles wedged in racks, dandelion-yellow plaster, a squarish piece of sky at the top, and a warning that 'roof avalanches' were possible from the good four or five stories' apex of the buildings. Then I climbed the creaky old stairs with a linoleum-like covering to our offices. The door was open, the lights were on, and although absent from her computer at the moment, T. was already there.

There was work from the day before that I finished, and then I agonized a while about an email I had to send with information that a colleague could pass on to clients. And then the full routine began, clicking and going through pictures of hundreds or thousands of products, etc., and listening in passing to dramas with the technical aspects of the work that I don't quite understand.

At lunch we briefly broke off our efforts and sat together. I like being in one of the rooms more than the other because conversations about 'girls never grumbling about anything, wink wink' and 'the national habits of the Finns' are rather too nationalistic and sexist (philosophically speaking) for me not to squirm with discomfort internally; and the vegetarian round has more of the kind of tame, friendly, and politically correct conversation I like. This time I think we were too famished to talk. We had a Turkish take-out lunch. Broth-flavoured bulgur wheat kernels (I think) with thin scraps of noodle mingled in it, served in a large round tin for everybody; another tin of a vegetarian meal that had, as I recall, beans and tomatoes in it; meatballs (köfte) in another sauce that likely had tomatoes and red capsicum in it; and a fourth large round tin that had an iceberg lettuce and cherry tomato salad with a little lemon juice sprinkled into it (I surmise) and tiny spears of shadowier arugula here and there. The köfte were garlicky and therefore flavorful, but the rooms were inconveniently perfumed afterward; and I always enjoy the salads from that take-out place, even if a colleague characterized it as 'rabbit food' and I admit that the tree-trunk-like lengths of green onion that were once thrown into a salad seemed a little impractical.

Although grumbling about the food knows no boundaries, it was a good sign that the vegetarian and vegan colleagues seemed happy today, too. There was no significant injury of the delineation between vegetarian and non-vegetarian food — such as meaty burritos being mislabelled for the vegetarians or the emergence of ham in the vegetarian pasta — In general, the great partitioning of the workforce into those who partake of the general meal and those who want to order food more to their liking individually — a partitioning suggested on Friday — has not taken place after all.

The wind 'wuthered' so powerfully this afternoon that it repeatedly slammed shut the windows, which were tilted open at their tops, until the colleagues near the windows closed them. (The fact that they were shut was also why the lunch's garlicky aroma lingered.) Right after lunch I went for a short walk up and down half the block in front of the workplace, which I generally do to reattain a state of equanimity or just because it's nice to be out of doors, and the wind had raked up a mixture of dry leaves* and an embarrassing 'find' of garbage into the middle of the sidewalks. But I like this weather, and the surprisingly chilly air leafing through my hair and taking away the tepid warmth and any trace of the sedentary, and perhaps taking away some of the grumpiness that accumulates too in the course of a tangled working day, was a real restorative.

* Although the linden trees are shedding their early petals, as usual, so they are perhaps not as unseasonal as they seem. And golden seedheads and pollen have sown themselves over many car hoods I've passed in the streets and even, I think, foamed the street gutters in recent rains.

I had tasks until after 9 p.m., and T. was there that long too, so I fetched sugary fruit candies from the table outside the kitchen and consumed them one by one in the last minutes. To be honest, I still haven't figured out the proper balance of water, food, exercise, and stress, because I appear to get more woozy feelings from drinking or from eating something sugary, when under stress (at home I am far less sensitive), than I would if just not eating except at lunch. When I feel stressed or angry or particularly ill I have sometimes also climbed around three or so flights of stairs up and down in the building, so as to get the effect of a longer walk in a brief time. The good news is that I haven't really turned into a hypochondriac, because there have been two days without wooziness that have pointed out the difference between my normal perceived state of health and this. But in general I am not too worried about it, because to be honest I've never particularly objected to enjoying trifling physiological ailments as they arise and measuring symptoms, etc., like a four-year-old child playing doctor.

When T. was satisfied with her work, we left together. So I shut down the computer quickly. She made sure that all the windows in the other main room were also closed, although colleagues of ours were gathered in the Conference Room, so that they would not have to do much housekeeping-style checking before they left.

We walked from work to the Südstern U-Bahn station along broad residential sidewalks, shaded under leafy trees, brightened with rosebushes and perhaps oleanders and other flowers in beds and flowerpots, a few modern shopfronts but also formal elderly buildings in brick that were once (apparently) benevolent institutions, and one soccer-pitch-turf-green television screen after the other transmitting the noise of Wales vs. Portugal's soccer match for the UEFA European Championship semi-finals in the shade of restaurant and cafe awnings. It was noisy enough that we could hear it down and across the street.

Not as many football spectators, perhaps, as in gentler weather or for a German game — but patrons were gathered, sitting on benches and at tables on the sidewalks. It was 0-0 at that time in the first half of the game, and since I have little enthusiasm for Portugal as a team whose joint effort makes it worthy of a championship, or Wales as an exemplar of excellent football (though this may be unfair), I surmised that a tedious match was being realized.

In the end, then, I only watched the last ten or fewer minutes of the game, since my parents were watching it at home.

Note: I forgot to mention the U-Bahn trips. Jan Morris's descriptions of Peru were my reading on the way to work, and on the way from Südstern station I was in the middle of the part of The Quark and the Jaguar where the author describes how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics. There are more frequent U-Bahn ticket patrols, by the way, and I never really like them. A few Berlin political parties have proposed that public transit be made free, and I like that far better than trying to catch people out. I also find my conscience inconveniently tumbled about, since every single U-Bahn ride in the evening so far seems to have meant a panhandler asking passersby for money. I don't know quite how to come to terms with it especially, as I will say self-commiseratingly, at the end of a long day's work.