Ramblings on a January Weekend

It is becoming clear that I do not handle Berlin winters well. Technically I should have gone running again yesterday — my heel feels as fit as a fiddle again after the long rest since the 29th of December — but I suspect that my running clothing is not warm enough and honestly the frigid rainy weather was not inviting.

I've been going on walks and to the weekly ballet class, instead. On the walks I've seen that heroic joggers have been striding along the Frankfurter Allee with snow flying in their faces, wearing regular hoodies and leggings to keep warm — no professional gear. But if I were to emulate them, I'd just end up with more disturbing feelings that a strip along my heel has been overextended, more hobbling, more going down train station stairs step by step holding onto the railing, etc., more worrying dramatically if I would ever dance ballet or run more than a kilometre again, and more biting pains at my ankle even when I have been sitting down and exerting nothing. In other words, I'd just end up replicating the emotional experiences (note: that is an overdramatization) for the first week or so of this month.

It's true that I was asked today how my life is going and I was able to say that it's going happily and to feel that this was not a lie — in the moment it certainly felt right. But, aside from feeling like the gloom of winter is permeating my bones and bringing with it the unhappiness I've learned to dread since I was a teenager, I've also reached a nadir of confidence at work.

I am finding it harder to get out of bed in the mornings; and I no longer find work the most interesting and most productive part of my day. Listening to the three feminist audiobooks that I 'reviewed' for the books blog, for example, was far more engrossing, or even staring out the train at frozen Berlin rivers and 'seeing short stories' in the trains and train stations.

That said, I think I am just going one from one phase to another, and need to give up some of the hopes and aims of the old phase to find new hopes and new aims. — Like spring!

Re. hopes and aims: I've been reading more Structure and Evolution of the Stars, which I actually appear to be finishing quickly now that I've weaned myself cold turkey off fiction on the U-Bahn and S-Bahn. I am concentrating on non-fiction because I don't want to tote this textbook and Aristotle's Politics around for another two years. (My intended project of becoming less ignorant about the natural sciences and mathematics should begin to diversify away from this one book, too.) Then I am reading books and listening to audiobooks for the sake of writing more 'book reviews.' But I do want to read up on MySQL and GitHub work, as well, so that I can be far better positioned to help along my team in the kind of professional development that one of the managers would really like us to do.

Unrelated to work, I also want to start supporting more charities, and need to decide how to go about this most wisely. It's purely selfish; feeling useless is the worst feeling.

Then, the piano: Right now I desperately want a new project — playing short pieces as I've been doing is not the right process to help me improve much, and I do still want to 'sink my teeth' into Beethoven's sonatas again, but I should go shopping for new scores again too. I haven't played Tchaikovsky's or Rachmaninov's piano concertos properly, for example; I've been yearning to play these for a decade at least and I've heard them reasonably often. That said, I think that Tchaikovsky is not the composer I play best; it seems too comfortable to play him without intellectual rigour, and I think that I am so short of this rigour that I need to be forced into applying it a bit. I am also a little worried about sitting down at the piano because it requires becoming absorbed in my feelings, at least the way I approach it, and there are feelings one just doesn't want to fall into.

A propos of that, in the Berlin evening news today, a Holocaust survivor replied to a television reporter's question about how she 'felt.' She said, paraphrased, 'I deal with facts; and my feelings aren't necessarily anything that the whole world needs to know about.' Afterward, I realized that it is perhaps what I worry about with this blog — that I describe too many insecurities and worries that people with other mindsets would find self-indulgent. Ignoring for a moment the fact that any parallel of her harsher experiences with my own is impossible, and that she is speaking as a half-public figure of the general public, I think that hers is a worthwhile point of view, and a hundred percent understandable in her circumstances. But I cannot 'connect' with other people and cannot begin to fix things that are bothering me without being open. Also, stoical silence was far easier before I began working at my present job, because then I was absolutely convinced that nobody cared about my feelings, or that if they did care, it would have been a huge burden to them instead of just something that everyone deals with some time or another.

Much of the drama of my life seems to happen after the real interactions — the real annoyances or grievances that everyone speaks of freely. It happens in my brain. So that's why I rarely complain about pleasingly concrete things. I can't complain of what a person did at once, because I don't want to be judgmental or to assign the blame without finding out why he or she did it, why I reacted as I did, and if it was right to react that way. It is less the interaction itself that is painful; it is the thought process afterward, if I don't find a good reason why the other person did something, or if I presume that I was in the wrong somehow. That is one reason why I think that being mean to people is almost unforgivable: it usually drips a poison into the system instead of making a quick and easily healed wound, and one can't guess how much damage it will do.

I also miss Papa because he discouraged, I think, going through life imagining yourself to be the innocent sufferer of the terrible perfidy of everyone else's behaviour (for example, of schoolmates). At some point, one probably needs to accept responsibility for something, too. At the same time, if I told him about a way someone had hurt my feelings or wronged me, he would trust me to be in the right so fully most of the time, that it made me want to be extra-fair to the 'villain,' so that his indignation was not awoken on false pretences.

But I wrote to a colleague about a work-related gripe (that was not about anything he'd done) last week, and his reply helped me to realize again that there are different kinds of openness and honesty, some that I should practice more than others... He replied that venting feelings can be done by pounding the keyboard (for instance!) or by talking to the people involved, instead of mentioning feelings to third parties. That was painful, because it made me worry that I have become passive-aggressive to the point of devious, and that, all questions of principle aside, I'd really annoyed him. Also, it's been a longish while since I've been so worried that I've been doing something genuinely terrible, so I was rusty at the self-examination, and brooded most of yesterday rather exaggerating how perfidious I'd been. But the more I think about it, the more his suggestion makes sense as something to think about whenever I have grievances in future. He has done me an immense favour!