February, Flowers, and Easy Programming

Three weeks ago, one of my superiors at work kindly helped me sign up for an SQL (structured query language) at Coursera, an online university. Since then, I've been watching videos, practicing new techniques, and reading supplementary articles and even skimming a few academic papers; and it's both absorbing and rewarding although I doubt I could have gotten much out of it if it weren't so pertinent to the workplace.

Fortunately I already knew a lot of SQL that my sister had inculcated into me, by precept or by example, over the past 3.5 years. The methods of reorganizing tables of information by using a cross/Cartesian join, self join, outer join, or right join are confusing me, however. And when the readings refer to SQL in relationship to the programming languages R and Python, the explanations are wasted on me entirely.

It has confirmed my opinion that university — lovely as it is for others — is not for me except as an appendage to my working life. If I am not really enjoying the courses and absorbing information easily, and if the effort expended into it has no immediate, real-life application for me, I simply don't have a sense of purpose.

But despite my reservations about academia, it's incredible how much easier it is to learn something in a work or university setting when I'm used to the heavy friction and resistance of trying to learn things on my own.

Anyway, the course leads to my staying 15-60+ minutes longer at work per day than I otherwise would. So I have had less sleep than customary, and arrived quite late to work twice or so this week, and my slight tendency to anaemia has struck again.

Other things are going on too: Last weekend I threw a party for two work teams. It turned into such a wonderful evening — thanks to the guests, and the snug setting of the Corner Room and the kitchen, and admittedly also the way that it accidentally turned into a chance to play the piano and pick up the violin again (although this sounds selfish, and probably is) — that I felt amply rewarded for the effort.

The week before that I had a cold, which I had to respect (so to speak) because it made me a bit wobbly — I took half a day off work to sleep in and regain strength — but which was otherwise the mildest and most agreeable cold I've ever had.

As for spring, the florists are full of pussy willows, prunus branches, primroses, cowslips, grape hyacinths, hyacinth bulbs, narcissus (generally the small-flowered ones that come in tight clumps), tulip bunches, and pansies. I bought a few native English species for the party, and it was so nice to have an excuse to put a yellow primrose, willow and cherry branches, a pot of ivy, and a fern around the apartment.

Returning outdoors, I spotted a snowdrop blossom a long time ago, in December. Now there is a yellow crocus — only in the bud, and a little collapsed — near work. Long catkins are streaming from the Turkish filberts and from other shrubs and trees in the hazelnut genre.

The rose bushes seem to be spending the winter remarkably well. A few weak rose flowers in roadside plantings remind me of Beauty and the Beast, because they persist in such an inhospitable season and place:

Il neigeait horriblement ; le vent était si grand, qu’il le jeta deux fois en bas de son cheval, et, la nuit étant venue, il pensa qu’il mourrait de faim ou de froid, ou qu’il serait mangé des loups, qu’il entendait hurler autour de lui. Tout d’un coup, en regardant au bout d’une longue allée d’arbres, il vit une grande lumière, mais qui paraissait bien éloignée. Il marcha de ce côté-là, et vit que cette lumière sortait d’un grand palais qui était tout illuminé.
[...]
Il regarda par la fenêtre et ne vit plus de neige ; mais des berceaux de fleurs qui enchantaient la vue. [...] Le bon homme, après avoir pris son chocolat, sortit pour aller chercher son cheval, et, comme il passait sous un berceau de roses, il se souvint que la Belle lui en avait demandé, et cueillit une branche où il y en avait plusieurs.

(It snowed horribly; the wind was so strong that it threw him under his horse twice, and when night had come, he thought that he would die from hunger or from cold, or that he would be eaten by the wolves whom he heard howling around him. All at once, looking at the end of a long alley of trees, he saw a great light, but it seemed very far away. He walked to that side, and saw that this light was coming from a big palace that was all illumined. He looked out of the window and did not see snow any more, but flowers that enchanted his sight. The good man, after having taken his chocolate, went out to search for his horse; and as he passed underneath a cradle of roses, he remembered that Belle had asked him for some, and he picked a branch where there were several others.)*

Anyway, other rose species are just speckled with intensely red rose hips and have not flowered in months. But in all species, strong dark green leaf shoots with streaks of red are now thrusting from the twigs.

And a few potted plants, like geraniums, survive nested in balconies and in receptacles on the sidewalks. The forsythia on my windowsill, however, is losing the remnant of its desiccated leaves. At least the pith of its twigs is green, and promising leaflets have emerged from the tips of two twigs.

The city birds are as resilient as the late roses. A week or so ago I saw a pigeon retrieve things from the dusky ballast stones of the U-Bahn bed and fly up into the whitewashed Art Deco roof beams at U-Bahn station Bülowstraße, repeatedly. Because something that looked like a dead leaf fluttered down again from the beam, and because of the pattern of flights, I surmised that the pigeon was not eating but that it was preparing a nest.

The days are growing longer, the temperatures are nippy but it could be worse, plump buds are gathering in heavier and heavier accumulations on the tree and bush branches not just of plant species that I know. Altogether, the feeling that I've had since last autumn that this winter would not leave me 'seasonally depressed' has turned out to be justified thus far.

* French text taken from "La Belle et la Bête" (1806 edition) by Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont,
at Wikisource.