Through the Wringer

It's been an exhausting week: 10 conversations with the teammates who report to me, about their job performance in 2021 and their salaries going forward, reports and feedback summaries, plus the usual workload and a slideshow presentation to 30+ colleagues.

For the presentation I originally did want to organize it jointly with my teammates, and feel residual guilt for not doing so. But in the end decided that it was such short notice that it would just have stressed out everyone. In a lovely gesture, teammates kindly interjected comments and questions during the presentation as appropriate; this helped greatly. They also offered kind compliments afterward.

I endured one 12-hour work day this week, because of the job performance process, and yesterday was also long.

The past weeks have been a Wild West film where a gang besieges a town, which has decided to arm itself and fight back. It was grueling shoot-outs, a few townspeople falling back to nurse their injuries (i.e. fellow team leads taking vacation days to recover) or lurking in the nearby countryside to regroup and return the next day (i.e. fellow people managers postponing part of their conversations to next week).

I was part of a small contingent that managed to keep up the battle all of this week, so now — all my shoot-outs over — I can rest in the hotel/saloon with a big tumbler of whisky.

Much to my surprise, I found out in my own employee review meeting that not only am I not being phased out of the company, I am actually being given a performance-based raise and evaluated as someone performing above average. So now I'm baffled that all the inter-company communication leading up to this point has been so misleading.

From an employment law standpoint I'm not 100% sure if complaining about this process on this blog is the same as disparaging the company I work for ... So legal disclaimer: no disparagement intended.

This Saturday will be the year 1952 in my historical experiment. But as I spent a week in the Fifties in 2015 (long ago, yet the impression remains vivid) and my family has nixed recreating the early post-war British rationing era, and the phantom of the past is looming over us so eerily anyway, I'm approaching it with a little less gusto. Next week I can do something fancy for the Queen's coronation ... although it's an example of the ghoulishness of the monarchy in my opinion, because the reason she was crowned and people were celebrating her in 1953 was that her father died the year before and left her head of state with enormous responsibilities at the age of 25.

***

I have been investigating coping methods for fuel rationing.

This was necessary during World War I and World War II in the UK, because imports were of course challenging.

But it also feels relevant again as Germany should not be importing natural gas, oil, and coal from the current Russian government as long as the invasion of Ukraine lasts.

Which is admittedly not just an altruistic impulse on my part. I also feel stubbornly perverse about it, as I do not like feeling coerced into propping up an amoral regime.

The bigger problem is the effects on German industry of 'turning off the tap'. I'm unwilling to be judgmental here as I do not live paycheck-to-paycheck and therefore don't have enough skin in the game to afford judgment.

But there's also an individual 'civilian' component:

As a family we've stopped heating with coal a little earlier this year. One of my uncles has turned down the temperature gauge on his gas-fuelled heater, which is a popular measure in Berlin.

I've gone masochistically further: eating cold food whenever possible, sipping cold water instead of boiling water for hot tea (this one is unpleasant; hot tea and substitute coffee have been two of my favourite creature comforts for months), turning the tap to cold when washing my hands...

In terms of computer use, I'm less certain about the relationship of activity to energy use. But I've been having fewer internet browser tabs open and watching YouTube videos in a lower resolution, in case that helps.

It's not fun.

But it's been easy to harden my resolve again: reading appalling news about Mariupol and other places in Ukraine, also worrying about sanctions rapidly undermining Russian civilians' quality of life as well as reading prognostications about missing wheat exports leading to hardship in countries like Turkey.

Besides I think it's easy to prove that at least on the household level these attempts to save energy aren't trivial: I could try to check our electricity counter and gas counter to gauge the actual impact.

While love of experimentation might be clouding my judgment, I also feel reasonably happy about using the World War I-era haybox principle for cooking again.

From the 'Daily Mail' cookery book [Hathi Trust archive] by Mrs. C.S. Peel:

How to make a Cooking Box.—Line a packing case (a Tate sugar box by preference) with two or three thicknesses of newspaper. Cover the paper with flannel or felting such as is used under stair carpets. Nail this on neatly. The lid must also be lined in the same manner. Make some balls of newspaper; pack tightly into the bottom of the box to a depth of 3 inches. Place the saucepan or casserole on this and pack tightly round with newspaper balls. When it is lifted out a nest is formed into which the pan is put each time it is used.

To test her instructions, yesterday I cooked rice by boiling briefly & putting it in a 'hay box.' It did keep warm for hours.

But that just tackles part of the problem. I use my laptop, desktop computer, etc. a lot, and I love hot showers and machine-washed laundry. Saving electrical energy to a meaningful degree is tough.

Spring, War, and Expected and Unexpected Reunions

It's been a quiet day — Mama away for a family reunion, Ge. sleeping in until after midday, J. waking up a little earlier. I was up before 10 a.m. because the cycling and walking yesterday made me exhausted enough to go to sleep at a reasonable hour the night before.

Yesterday I did drop off recyclables at a recycling yard after 2+ years of thinking 'I should probably do that'! so: triumph. A queue of five or so cars was waiting to unload, rather blocking the quiet residential street, and both a recycling yard employee and I were pleased that I was on a bicycle instead.

I'm still reading the curriculum for an MIT political science course. Samuel P. Huntington's works still make me want to propel things out the window, as their mild tone is mere window-dressing for massive, deleterious, and slightly gormless ethnocentrism. But reading Robert A. Dahl again has been a blessing, and being introduced to Larry Diamond has been enjoyable too. It is my hope that by becoming better educated, I have better chances at experimenting with journalism if my current employer kicks me out. In the meantime it's been massively interesting; aside from American politics of the 1970s and the Vietnam War, it turns out I've been ignorant of the 1970s and 80s.

My listening to the audiobook biography of Jimmy Carter is a good 'Ergänzung'; and it is lending a lot of colour and perspective to my sketchy knowledge of the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

My direct manager asked me to fill out a career development plan last week, so my professional survival until June/July (the next round of performance reviews) is relatively assured. But I'm not happy that it's taken the invasion of Ukraine to make fellow colleagues and me decide that there are worse things in the world than our workplace. We should not be feeling so terrible that war puts it into perspective.

Yesterday brother Ge. and I went for a walk to the former Tempelhof Airport. We dropped off a supply of baby food in a parking lot between Platz der Luftbrücke and the Columbiadamm entrance to the airfield. About five other individual donors or donor groups were there at the time, with a carton of baby diapers and other supplies for Ukrainian refugees travelling through Berlin. Two vans belonging to the Tentaja charity and a truck were parked in the centre of the lot. The red-t-shirted man standing on the platform at the back of the truck cheerfully explained to two donors that his coworkers and he were gathering supplies that would be re-sorted in a hall in the airport, and would then be driven off to various points in Berlin (Hauptbahnhof, Tegel, etc.) if volunteers there requested specific articles.

On the field itself we watched the fairly large masses of people. A DC-3(? Ge.'s the expert here, not I) was standing, pale grey, beneath the roof of the central terminal, quite lost amid the vast architecture. The sun was backlighting large 19th century apartment buildings and factory buildings beyond, and illuminating church spires and the Berlin Fernsehturm behind us.

When we looped back, a colleague whom I hadn't seen in person since 2020 stopped Ge. and me for a chat, looking happy with a big, colourful silk scarf around her throat (an emblem of new extroversion), and clearly enjoying the company of her boyfriend and a friend.

Walking further, I thought I spotted an ex-colleague. He was backlit, however, and I didn't want to be rude by approaching a total stranger. Ge. kept eye contact, however, and nudged me over, so I saw it was indeed the colleague and one of his teammates. It was lovely to see them again. Also a relief in the former case because I'd been worried as hell about how he was doing and couldn't pry without crossing boundaries.

After the meeting, Ge. and I sat down and ate French fries and, in his case, a hot dog. On the way back home we spotted red deadnettle, a tiny white-flowered herb, and deep purple violets along the brick walls of a cemetery beside the airfield. Daisies are also sprouting elsewhere, looking a little tattered and repressed, it is true, but nevertheless atoms of cheer in a gloomy world.

Altogether the spring flowers are profuse.

Snowdrops looking like ghosts of their former bright, white-flowered selves, crocuses in white and yellow and purple, miniature irises, chionodoxa that are the unbelievable fuzzy blue of the sky, forsythia and plum blossoms on trees and bushes, pale yellow buds of Oregon grapes, early yellow-and-red tulips, and finally gloriously large or clustered little daffodils in sunny yellow.

I saw more of these when I cycled to the Kleingartenkolonien this afternoon.

Altogether I still obsess about the war in Ukraine, however, rather than taking a purely pragmatic view of what one can do to help. For one thing I am shocked that Putin's invasion hasn't ended when the reaction of the world has been so definite and strong against it. For another, I am depressed by the report I read today of civilians from the besieged city of Mariupol being 'relocated' by force to Russia. It does strongly remind me of the pages of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and I had thought we'd passed that point in history.

It seems frivolous in this context, but Shakespeare's phrasing from Measure for Measure (via Wikiquote) comes to mind:

O! it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

Delivering Donations at Hauptbahnhof; and a Brief Overview of Work

Today I went on another trip to Berlin's main train station after work.

The white pavilion tent that the City of Berlin set up as a welcoming space in the square in front of the station's towering glass façade is beginning to fill with refugees, who were streaming in single file from the station, pulling their rolling suitcases behind them. They rarely have much luggage.

I saw a Ukrainian mother standing with two or three children (no older than twelve) at a glass vitrine-protected architectural model that was stranded partway along a long hallway. It showed the train station in miniature. She was pointing out parts of the building here and there, as if they were a family on a peaceful weekend outing and they had all the time in the world. It was rather touching, a quiet and intimate moment in the turbulent Hauptbahnhof. It was also depressing as hell if one begins to think of where the children's father is (probably voluntarily or semi-voluntarily trapped in his country, conscripted to fight to defend it).

In general the train station situation struck me as more chaotic today.

It felt as if there were three times as many people as on Monday, confirming the idea that the number of refugees is intensifying. Not that many police to keep people safe. Less coordination amongst the volunteers. (Also: One of them, not in an official fluorescent vest, looked pleased to see that I was bringing donations in the food hall. Then for reasons best known to himself passed me his card so that I could call him some time. ... I was seriously annoyed that someone would try to pick up ladies in the context of a humanitarian crisis. But de gustibus non est disputandum. The card landed in the nearest recycling bin after I left the hall.)

Refugees were being pulled essentially in three directions:

First direction: An open area inside the vast station core. This is where the tinned food, volunteer coordination tables, LGBTQIA counseling, the children's play area, and now a silence room are located. A volunteer was roaming around with a plastic bin at her belly, offering wrapped sandwiches to people.

A densely packed queue of refugees runs from this area to the rooms where Ukrainians can buy connecting train tickets, to friends and family in other parts of German or Berlin. Escalators and glass elevators run up and down, and far below rest the tracks of long-distance trains e.g. in the red of the Deutsche Bahn regional train network.

Second direction: A large hall, connected to the open area. It was ringed with tables where refugees can pick up toiletries, fresh fruit, packaged drinks, coffee or tea from tall metal dispensers, etc.  DONATIONS and an arrow were spelled out on the floor in tape.

A volunteer in an orange safety vest was grandly shaking out mandarin oranges out of their net into a plastic bin with apples and other mandarin oranges, not really aware or caring that he was bruising them.

But as the snacks were being picked up like hot cakes by refugees, and the 0.5 L drink bottles I'd brought on behalf of my work colleagues were sorely needed, it's likely the fruit was eaten before the bruises could fully form anyway.

Third direction: The white pavilion outside the building.

Today two ambulances were parked between the tent and the train station. While wounded Ukrainians have been known to arrive in Berlin, luckily it didn't appear as if medical attention were needed for anyone while I was there.

I think this pavilion is where refugees are intended to be able to sit down, rest sheltered from the frosty winter wind, and receive advice e.g. about paperwork and medical treatment and job prospects.

At any rate I was able to drop off the donations and then cycle homeward again.

***

As for work, I don't want to be insensitive by writing dramatically about it right underneath a post about refugees.

But by my own standards and my own life experience, every morning is a little like stepping into the ocean water off Maine and hoping that the shark from Jaws won't attack.

It's depressing, but I have put together a work survival routine to cope with the stresses of my interactions with top management colleagues.

I eat more vegetables and whole grains, and I make sure to stay hydrated. I observe my lunch breaks and make sure not to work too much overtime. I make sure to tend the plants, because that is therapeutic; take sun baths; and pour out my woes on the piano. On Wednesdays I pour out my concerns to my voice coach/psychologist; she has also helped me think through what else I could do if I'm fired from/quit my job after I asked her about it this week.

I try to help colleagues wherever I can. If being depressed and otherwise unhappy in my life has been good for anything, it has been to feel comfortable knowing where one can make things better vs. what would make things worse for other people who are struggling. Even if I don't seem to have power over my own life, I still feel confident about the power not to make other lives worse.

And I mentally repeat two tips I once read about how to withstand torture before I go to sleep, so that I can brace for the next day at work.

Less dramatically, I repeat to myself this phrase from time to time as comfort: "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

All of that, and even more importantly the kindness and distractions of friends and family, are helping me cope with the past months at work better than I'd have expected.

But right now I feel like I'll never ask the HR team or the managing director for help ever again; I doubt they can connect the dots from the crisis in our company to its source without assistance, and I have too many inhibitions against tattle-telling to lay out the gory details.

The Scene at Berlin Hauptbahnhof

It's been a long day, but perhaps the most interesting part came in the later evening.

Before noon, a colleague had pled with us to bring food to the Berlin main train station if we could. She had been volunteering, and the tables were almost empty. To help show what was needed, she shared a donation request list.

It was around 7 p.m. when I finally wrapped up work. The following won't be my finest reportage, as I'm tired and there are, as always, other things going on:

First I went to two local stores. I tried to get as many granola bars as seemed decent (I didn't want to buy everything on the shelves), as well as a few deodorant sticks and a set of FFP2 face masks. Besides I was bringing along an empty notebook, for children to draw in, which I'd originally set aside as a gift for a colleague's birthday. My attempt at subtle purchasing didn't really work at the local Lidl store, I think, where the cashier more or less raised an eyebrow at my deluge of granola bars.

Then I cycled off to the train station. It was tremendously strange to be travelling past the German Parliament building, the Chancellor's residence with two policemen chatting quietly on the vast sidewalks (now almost empty of tourists), and then across the bridge to the train station itself, at this point in European diplomatic and political history. I don't come by there that often anyway; the last time was during the Berlin Marathon, for example.

The white pavilion tent of the German Red Cross city of Berlin, set up on Washington Square beside the station to deal with the more serious needs of Ukrainian refugees, was visible from a distance. Its rows of wooden benches in the seating area inside the pavilion were lighted but untenanted, however. Two volunteers in their twenties or thirties were partly sitting, partly standing, and chatting (one wearing a fluorescent safety vest, the other not) in French in front of it.

A few travellers speaking Ukrainian or a similar language were walking out of the train station and arranging their connecting journeys. At the doors and inside the glass hallway, there were quite a lot of fluorescent-vested volunteers.

I knew vaguely where to go. But I was also relieved to see the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag posters with arrows, which acted as signposts.

Mostly the train station was quiet. But the far end of the first floor below ground level, the area which has often been photographed and touted recently, was maybe not noisy but certainly crowded.

Security tape separated me from the absolutely packed area where refugees were thronging along the tables and collections of donated items. It was like a crowded bazaar where nobody had to pay anything, with a line of people coming in and a longer line coming out, almost tripping over each other's rolling suitcases and struggling to get through. The general vibe was of exhausted people in a hurry to be somewhere else.

It was a relief to see a group of black-clad policemen walking through the refugees, too. Recently there have been reports of Ukrainian refugee women dubiously being offered lodgings with single men, and the police are also there to prevent this sort of thing.

A woman, in a bright orange vest and perhaps a Ukrainian accent to her German, kindly let me through the security tape and led me over to where I could drop off the donations. And despite the recent deluge of do-gooders, she and the other volunteers seemed happy to see someone bringing donations and were extremely nice.

Food was handed out from a long series of tables: plastic bins with juice and water bottles, packaged sandwiches, cookies, etc. The volunteers behind the tables were struggling to keep up with the demand of the refugees in front. (While the refugees were keeping track of each other, what they needed from the tables, and their smartphones.)

In another area, baby food, diapers, toilet paper rolls, etc. were being dispensed, with waist-high bins of shampoo bottles and deodorants behind. The children's area was closed off into a safe niche; paper crayons bristled from the table where they could sit down and draw together, and a table held cardboard boxes with stuffed animals and other toys.

Two volunteers also stood over tinned sardines and other goods.

An information booth was also set up for LGBTQIA refugees.

I figured that speed would be most convenient for all concerned. So I figured out where to drop off which items, then hopped out of the building again as soon as possible.

In the end I had better luck than I deserved considering my stupidity: my key was still in my bicycle lock, because I'd forgotten to take it along with me; but my bicycle was still in the parking lot.

And I cycled home toward the stars of Orion, hovering over the canopy of the Chancellor's residence. Quite relieved to have been mildly useful.

That said, the situation in Ukraine does inspire despair.

I haven't caught up on most of the news yet. But the Russian government's suggestion of routing 'humanitarian corridors' straight into Russian territory from Kharkiv (which they've been industriously bombarding), for example, was quite enraging to read about this morning.

Besides I have the feeling that we'll regret not having NATO no-fly zones over Ukraine. — Not because I think they're a great idea, but because I have the feeling that other countries will be drawn into the war later regardless. So we're just refusing to accept the inevitable end of this, sacrificing the safety of Ukrainian civilians in the meantime. But hopefully I'm wrong.

*

Tomorrow will be a statutory holiday in Berlin: Women's Day.

A Snapshot of a Sunday, Southeast of Berlin

This afternoon my two youngest brothers and I visited our uncle Pu in the wilds of Brandenburg. Caught in the grip of winter still, the grass was short and greyish with remembered frost, the trees leafless as ever. Limbs or whole trunks of pine trees were slung over the forest floor where they'd been broken, uprooted and fallen during the storms earlier this year. A haze of ice crystals appeared to shimmer on the surface of a pond. Deep pits in the forest floor beside the road looked to me like potential bomb craters from World War II, which of course made me wonder why we'd opened up another chapter in this unenjoyable history of conflict.

But when we turned into our uncle's driveway, timid little stands of snowdrops were huddling in the grass. The moles had also formed more colonies of earthy hills in the lawns. Early signs, perhaps, of spring even outside the warmer microclimate of the city centre.

When we arrived home late in the evening, we were delighted to find T. there. She had popped by as her food delivery had landed on our doorstep instead of hers. We foregathered in the corner room, J. and then I hopped onto the stove, and T. and Mama were wrapped in sleeping bags while we chatted.

I have a warm mug of substitute coffee beside me, and am just catching up on my evening relaxation routine and doing my best to ignore a tense headache, before going to sleep and waiting for the next work week to begin. (If you know the 'glorious chaos' emoji of Elmo from Sesame Street against a dramatic background of flames, you may picture it here.)

Springtime Outing

It's been colder again lately. But that hasn't prevented the crocuses from blossoming further, the daffodil buds from shooting up, the birds from chirping, the skies from being blue, or the flowers to be coming out on the boughs of bushes

Yesterday I went on a somewhat misguided mission of mercy to drop off donations at a collection point, only to find out that their storage space was full (which of course is a good thing). Trains of Ukrainians continue to arrive in Berlin's main station, two thirds of them on their way to find relatives or friends in Germany, greeted by volunteers handing over food and help in other forms.

Today I had the usual Saturday breakfast with the family, eating croissants and slices of baguette as we all chatted about politics.

Then in the early afternoon T. came over and, after the obligatory Covid test, we set off east to a small café in Friedrichshain. With home-style radiators, shelves of English-language bestsellers from authors like Jodi Picoult and Jonathan Franzen, informal woven dark grey couches, it serves meat pies, cakes, and assorted drinks in a menu evidently masterminded by an Australian chef. I had a cappuccino and a satisfyingly large slice of cheesecake with cinnamon, apple, cream cheese, and crumble layers, and we caught up with a former colleague.

It was quite blissful not to talk about work, and altogether I had the nicest few hours I've had in weeks.

After returning home I discovered that a job description that has been released on a career website describes a large part of my work. And I'm agonizing again about a colleague-and-friend who was fired last week. Then occasionally worry about world news takes over.

But I have to think about other things; when there are already so many sources of misery, it would be cruel to add more.

And besides I am focusing on the good things: conversations with family that are silly or profound, the joy of seeing friends, the lifting of anti-Covid restrictions as Omicron variant cases decline, and the ways in which one can still try to help others — and unexpectedly be helped in return. I will also try to think of what my father would have advised.

Two Thousand Five Hundred Years of Occasional Misanthropy

A professor at my Canadian alma mater shared this quotation when George W. Bush was re-elected President of the US. (After well over a year of disastrous wars that many classmates, professors, and I deeply opposed.)

Πολλά τα δεινά κουδέν ανθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.

When researching the quotation years ago, I found this translation:

MANY a wonder lives and moves, but the wonder of all is man,
That courseth over the grey ocean, carried of Southern gale,
Faring amidst high-swelling seas that rudely surge around,
And Earth, supreme of mighty Gods, eldest, imperishable,
Eternal, he with patient furrow wears and wears away
As year by year the plough-shares turn and turn [...].

From Sophocles: The Seven Plays in English Verse (1906) [Project Gutenberg] by Lewis Campbell

Leaping to the present day, and watching in the TV evening news the rubble to which Ukrainian apartment buildings are reduced during the ongoing invasion, I think Sophocles was wrong. I doubt whether we rule the Earth, and would propose that the Earth subsumes us.

Either way the word for 'wonderful' is etymologically a twisty word in ancient Greek; looking at the root of it, δεινός can also mean "fearful, terrible." (Ungeheuerlich in German.)

*

Far less ambivalent, this passage from Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers:

πολλὰ μὲν γᾶ τρέφει 

δεινὰ καὶ δειμάτων ἄχη, 

πόντιαί τ᾽ ἀγκάλαι κνωδάλων 

ἀνταίων βρύουσι: 

Many are the horrors, dread and appalling, bred of earth, and the arms of the deep teem with hateful monsters.

I think it was as a figurative piece of fantasy; but these metaphorical horrors and monsters we can recognize as the spirits inhabiting our physical landscape today.

From Aeschylus (1926) [Cambridge: Harvard University Press; found on Perseus] by Herbert Weir Smyth 

*

These 2,500-year-old verses make me think again of my Opapa's findings:

As long ago as ancient Egypt, history has just kept repeating itself.