On Monday I had a rather interesting day where normally the main event would be that I was in a 100-person hipster restaurant get-together with dozens of colleagues, 20 or so more colleagues from another German office, and the billionaire owner of our parent company.
What was far more pressing for me, however, was the meeting I ended up having afterward with the top management team. After at least two weeks of brooding and brainstorming, in which my conscience shook me like an enraged giant, it was a little exhausting to finally present what I wanted to say.
I was thinking, what are the most important problems facing my fellow team leads and me? what things are not the easy thing but the right thing to talk about? how do I speak moderately without minimizing important problems? how do I overcome my superiors' natural resistance to wish and explain away matters that they might not feel they have time to fix? I finally realized that I also had to build in time for rebuttals.
In the end the essential points were raised, and I gave examples of the problems I saw as well as proposals of how to fix them. But I was not very happy afterward; it's only the next morning where I began to admit that I should be proud of myself because I did a very difficult thing.
Still it feels wrong when I step forward about anything, because the fear of confrontation and of people being displeased with me makes me shy even at the best of times.
I also felt like I shot my career in the foot even more, and even if there are more important things in life it's always a little painful to pull the trigger.
The good news is that now I can focus again on finishing my tasks and improving the speed with which we add new clients to our system, with a conscience at ease.
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For the 1920s programme on the weekends, I got around to playing (on the piano) two Gnossiennes and a Gymnopédie by Erik Satie, since he died in the mid-20s. For breakfasts, I've bought cornflakes to mimic the British trend of American cereals. And I made a baked apple betty in a historically accurate Pyrex dish for dessert, in an autumnal Saturday meal that also included a very un-British pumpkin soup.
(One historical thing I need to do more of, for practical reasons, but haven't done as much, is mend clothes. Two large bags full of ones that need to be mended await, and I'm realizing that a) I have a hoarding problem, and b) I could really use non-holey socks.)
Besides I watched at least fifteen minutes of It with Clara Bow on YouTube. I am still rolling my eyes over the phrase 'the It girl' when it appears in magazine articles today, so it's had a lasting cultural effect. That said, Bow's character's over-the-top languid gazes and the hardcore stalking of her love interest were too amusingly silly in the first place and uncomfortable in the second for me to watch it longer. She is an idiosyncratic actress and I was pretty quickly converted into a moderate fan.
In general I'd be happy to leave the mid-to-late 20s if it weren't for the Thirties, Forties, and Great Depression. Mostly because of the decadence.
Tolerance and freedom are good, yes, but exploitation not. (The prostitution that was rife in Berlin after the First World War, for example, or the biography of Clara Bow and other victims of the Hollywood machinery, are very disturbing.)
Maybe it would make sense, however, to read about all of the international peace conferences that took place in the early 20s, instead, to get a more positive impression of the era.
I bought pump shoes in honour of the decade and, after wearing them for a few hours on multiple days, have begun to trust that I might not fall over whenever I wear them. That said, attempts to apply 20s-style make-up have become consistently worse instead of better. Although, strangely enough given the fact that I've sedulously avoided cosmetics for most of my life, dramatic mascara and lipstick don't look bad on me — at least in a half-lit mirror. Fortunately a lot of YouTube videos have enough vintage clothing, shoes, cosmetics and hairstyles, so that anyone can enjoy 1910s and 1920s fashion vicariously, too.
The visit to a 1920s art exhibition or to a cinema as part of the historical experiment needs to wait another week or two. But I'm looking forward to fish & chips and Jaffa cakes.
***
Lastly, on Monday evening I went to a ballet class for the first time since March 2020 or before.
Two or three of the students and I recognized each other, I think.
The teacher recognized me at once. (The happy glow in her eyes was the same one that I saw in the eyes of colleagues when we greeted each other again in person for the first time in one and a half years, at the work event on Monday morning. It's one of the best side effects of social distancing.) And I almost cried a little when we did familiar combinations at the barré, to the same music as two years before.
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Altogether, though, it does seem like I am going into a mini mid-life crisis, as my voice coach rather perceptively noted before I figured it out myself.
Not just the specter of the Grim Reaper is at fault; a big swathe of hair has also greyed at each of my own temples, and I realize I'm growing older and will have slightly fewer opportunities to have fun once the blood pressure issues, arthritis or who knows what begin to set in.
Besides, like many other people, being at home so much and not needing to adapt to what I think is expected of me outwardly, has made me discover 'new' aspects of myself — aspects that feel so familiar and homey and 'me' when I indulge them, that it seems like I'd always known that they were there. But it also means I'm departing from the behavioral patterns of, say, a year ago.
And being in mental pain lately has made me more eager to find distractions to forget about it, rather like thumping a fist against a chair to distract one's self from the greater pain of a bee sting — although that might be a poor analogy, as I'm not sure anyone actually does that.
Rather than buying a red Porsche, I'm kind of riding out a new 'darn the consequences' attitude, and on the whole enjoying it.
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