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.
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