On the Cusp of May

It looks like all four butternut squash seedlings are surviving on my room's windowsills. I am now checking the bottom of one of the plant pots regularly, to see when roots begin to push out of the holes, and at that point hope to transplant to a bigger pot.

My other plants are equally loved if perhaps less abundantly thriving.

One spider plant looks especially happy while the other spider plants don't, but I've planted a runner in the former potato pot, and it looks like it might survive another week.

The lemon saplings that I grew from sprouted seeds are also looking really well and should have been transplanted months ago, two forget-me-not plants are hanging on to life and so is the nasturtium, and the forsythia has broad green leaves now.

The past week has also seen a magical conversion around Berlin, like on the banks of the amusing-sounding Reichpietschufer canal. There the rigid twigs of winter that bristled along the banks like a Prussian parade mustache, have now burst into soft shapes of paler green horse chestnut leaves, as well as crowns and canopies of other tree species. A few almost bare trees, likely plane trees, still appear nakedly along the streets, however.

As I wound around the traffic circle at the Siegessäule this afternoon, I also saw that dense thickets of old lilacs (at least half a century old, at an amateur's guess) are beginning to flower. They semi-incongruously embower the plinths underneath the pale white statues of various tough old generals of the Napoleonic era, with the odd shadowy yew sticking out of the plots.

Yesterday I went to the office. T. and I cycled home together afterward. It was nice to see colleagues again in person. Besides it was nice to know that once I was home, I could disconnect from the thought of work duties entirely. And later on I was so tired I went to sleep before midnight or 1 a.m., again, instead of still being 'wired' and wide awake at 3 a.m.. Maybe I'll go more often.

Today I went on another outing and dropped off donations at the LaGeSo complex in northern-central Berlin. A boyfriend and girlfriend were just being asked in the friendliest possible way if they'd like a coffee, at the entrance. And the other people who were picking up donations were scattered across the small lawn chatting with each other, like the last time I was there.

Altogether I was in and out quite quickly. (I only felt like a brigand when I asked for my bag, which had been used to carry the supplies, back!)

The pleasant atmosphere does not mean there isn't a critical situation for food charities in Berlin in general, however. Food and hygiene supplies are needed badly.

Food hoarding in Berlin also still seems to be widespread. I've seen signs in at least 2 different grocery chain stores, asking customers to only buy 2 packages of flour per household. With all due respect for the genuinely poor who might want to save money with this, I really feel like shaking my head that this is necessary.

From Daffodils to Hot Tea and Vectors

In the past week I've absorbed myself quite deeply in a British television series about archaeology, especially of Neolithic, Anglo-Saxon, Bronze Age, Roman and medieval sites, and have stayed there as much as possible.

It's also spring, however, and although the leaves are still small and shy, almost all trees now have them. I see late tree blossoms and forsythia blossoms, late tulips and daffodils and hyacinths, and a few remaining chionodoxa on my outings. My indoor garden is also doing well. A butternut squash that I left in the pantry a long time began sprouting seeds inside, and I've planted them now and they've gratifyingly split open their leaves (well, three sprouts have — the fourth looks quite moribund). I've had to abandon my attempt to grow potatoes as they were befallen by flies and then I forgot to water the plant for a while; the forget-me-nots are not doing so well except for one that might bring blossoms again; the spider plants are surviving; and a succulent is even looking happy.

In terms of reading, I went to Dussmann to redeem the gift certificate sent over by my kind North American colleagues, and ended up with Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom and with James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk.

At work things are still interesting. The hatchet continues to be buried regarding all my previous disputes with colleagues and my own personal situation is all right.

That said, I still worry about other colleagues: I expect personnel developments in my team.

Outside of the workplace: one Russian colleague who has already criticized her president's policies for years, despite her family's Putin fandom, has just published a long Facebook post trying to express again how awful she finds the war in Ukraine — having read the gory details of the news, and taking on herself a heaping burden of guilt. Which is a bit maddening considering that she for one is not parading around with Z symbols, or closing her eyes and ears to horrible abuses and excusing them on specious grounds.

But altogether I'm having what might be 'compassion fatigue,' in that sometimes in the past few months I haven't entirely reacted appropriately any more when people mentioned difficult situations to me. Sometimes I'm so completely saturated on bad news that any more just pings off me like a rubber ball, and I even more or less find myself smiling. But of course I need to find a way to deal with the feeling, before I seriously offend or hurt anyone.

More trivially: Last Thursday my sister and I met with high-level colleagues from our American parent company.

The highest-level colleague was endearingly shy at odd moments and perhaps a bit exhausted by his speedy tour of Europe. Whether traveling or not, he is an everyman paterfamilias with an uptilted nose and rounded cheeks, settling comfortably into his forties. He is much thinner in person than in video calls — not that he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger there either, but one tends to subconsciously assume that a round face doesn't sit atop a lath-thin physique. He wore a Hawaiian shirt that, running counter to stereotype, loosely concealed a lack of belly rather than the presence of one. And professionally, besides having a fine grasp and pronunciation of German, he was filled with the same genial fire that he exudes in video calls.

We ate at a tremendously cheap restaurant. But I was very much gratified that we all were respectful diners and didn't give the waiters trouble, except for one person who, although generally well-mannered enough, raised his hand for a mango lassi like a Roman emperor in a B movie.

After that, we walked back to the office, where I was one of a series of presenters who explained our teams' work in a slideshow for the benefit of our American guests. It was rather interesting that, considering that 3 years ago I'd become so nervous I could barely talk when presenting to groups of ten colleagues, I was able to present in front of a group of over twenty colleagues plus someone who's been in professional meetings with Jeff Bezos, without really falling flat on my face or feeling uncomfortable about the experience. Out of the corner of the eye I had the impression that even my managing director was a bit of a deer in the headlights, and the chief technical officer had made a rather unsubtle 'pitch' to a magnanimously patient American colleague over our restaurant servings of rice. What really helped is the bonds that have grown between fellow engineering managers and me over the past months, so that I could feel their interest and their willing me to do well as I spoke. Maybe the highest-level colleague's unassuming demeanour also helped.

***

This evening I went on another donation tour for sites that help Ukrainian refugees with supplies, for the first time in a week.

In both places they were very grateful, and again I sensed the strong relief for volunteers if at last new supplies come in that can relieve the strain on their resources for a moment.

It's touching but also heavy when a volunteer is Ukrainian and the donation clearly takes on a different dimension for them: expressing solidarity and care for the victims of war, whom I don't know personally but they certainly do. So I'm not sure whether to feel useful, or depressed.

Next week, I'm thinking of volunteering somewhere, if I can wrangle my work schedule. There are 4-hour shifts one could do on a one time basis to relieve those who have been showing up for hours and hours, even late into the night, as the war drags on.

Right now, returning to the donations themselves, juice boxes and other food are in high demand in some sites; shampoo, deodorant and shower gel for adults and baby/children's food, shampoo, shower gel, toothpaste, and toothbrushes seem to be running low.

Regarding the energy saving situation, it looks like official guidance is finally being released by the German government and European Union bodies on how not to waste fuel, so that we are less dependent on Russian gas and oil and therefore paying less money that can be spent on war. As this guidance largely affects car drivers, which I'm not, and possessors of air conditioning, which I'm not, I didn't really find a silver bullet to apply to my own situation. That said, I think I haven't had a cup of hot tea since I saw the first photos from Bucha, and I'm still eating bread untoasted and always washing my hands in cold water — which is not in the official guidance and is admittedly yet another massive pain in the neck for which I can blame my overactive conscience.

***

Lastly, I've been watching more of an online course on First Nations history and tradition in Canada (while heinously neglecting an Open University course about vectors that could give me a better technical background on machine learning, for my career-related technical development). Now I think it's Week 6 of the programme.

The Grinding of War, continued

As the war in Ukraine keeps on going long after I'd expected it to end, and more and more grueling stories come out, I'm finding it increasingly difficult not to be dispirited in general. One or two days I just refused to read any war news. Today I nudged myself to go and donate again (this time back at the Berlin main train station, where hygiene articles and baby food have been especially wanted lately). But especially because there are fewer donations in general — one Berlin organization has reported receiving about 1/3rd as many donations as 2 or 3 weeks ago — it feels more and more like a small drop in the bucket.

Along the way I passed the Holocaust memorial near Brandenburg Gate. The heavy feeling of not doing enough became a bit weaker, as I reflected whatever one does to help people who are at the mercy of some overpowering force, whether war or their own government, is at least a step in the right direction.

What makes donating things that one can buy in a grocery store (or drug store) a bit more awkward is that there has been a trend to hoard food in Berlin, to guard against rising prices due to fuel scarcity and dwindling Ukrainian and Russian agricultural exports. I've become increasingly uncomfortable about buying large quantities of things in stores for fear of depressing cashiers etc. with apparent greed, and of course feeling embarrassed.

Berlin's main train station, glowing in the dusk, was not as busy as at the beginning of the refugee ingress from Ukraine. The white welcome tent definitely had people in it, blue-vested volunteers, and security personnel guarding the entrance in a friendly way; but the blue and yellow flag signs had largely disappeared. Picnic tables were set up in the large hall where food (and hygiene supplies) were made available, and there was less apparent hurry and more of a willingness to settle in for a while, eat and reflect, amongst the people who were there. A friendly English-speaking volunteer accepted the little hoard of shampoo, shower gel and deodorant that I'd brought, based on a request list online.

***

I have a few people management challenges at work, and I'm fairly anxious on behalf of a few colleagues. A higher-up colleague will also be visiting from the States.

At lunchtime I've been playing piano more often: Scarlatti sonatas, a bit of Albéniz and other more modern composers, and passages from Bach's Art of Fugue, which I'm still sight-reading slowly from cover to cover and is less emotionally dry than I thought it would be. My recent theory that being overworked and miserable gives one exactly the right frame of mind to interpret Bach's music better, continues to be confirmed. It's a little relaxing.

In the evenings, the muezzin has regularly been calling to mark the breaking of the fast for Ramadan. The restaurant tables on the sidewalk underneath the apartment are packed at dusk. It always feels nice to know that people are enjoying themselves again in a way they couldn't for a year or two, since Covid-19 began spreading in Europe. So that's also relaxing.

I've been trying to finish listening to the Jimmy Carter biography audiobook (taking a bit of solace from the fact that world politics were crummy then too, but intermittently improve), have read all of Delphine Minoui's journalism memoir I'm Writing You From Tehran, and I'm now in the middle of Bonnie Tsui's delightful non-fiction book Why We Swim.

And I'm also trying to break into 'citizen journalism' again in my spare time. The Ukraine war keeps hitting me over the head with the realization, 'There are really important things you could be occupying yourself with right now.'

Right now it's easy to find story ideas, and to be a bit frustrated that professional journalists apparently aren't picking up on the obvious.

I wanted to research past oil crises in the 1970s, and which lessons they can offer for today.

I also wanted to research European energy independence. But I realized that I don't know the first thing about the science of household energy or about the policy of energy independence: one or two Foreign Affairs articles already left me in the dust with two terms I'd never heard about: blue hydrogen and green hydrogen. It is easy to inadvertently write something so terribly wrong that it is like drawing a Mickey Mouse cartoon to illustrate a serious mouse biology research paper.

So I turned back to doing the readings (in Foreign Affairs, Journal of Democracy, various books and articles by Samuel Huntington and Fareed Zakaria etc.) for an old MIT course about democratization, so I have a better grounding in political science. I've reached week 4, and the readings offer Singapore as an example of a reasonably functional government that is only semi-democratic. I hadn't thought of it in that light before and am fine exploring it. But I would also question in Eurocentric, armchair critic fashion how transferable its model is to any other context (e.g. countries of more than 4 million inhabitants, countries less in thrall perhaps to modern remnants of the British colonial worldview).

Besides I'm progressing in taking Ukrainian lessons via Duolingo.

But underneath it all I'm really desperate for the long Easter weekend to arrive.

More War, Less Peace

Work has settled down a bit. More energy has been consumed in worrying about politics and I've reached an entente at least temporarily with every colleague with whom I've had major disagreements. Yet again, colleagues have done something incredibly nice and sent me a generous gift certificate for a favourite independent bookshop.

If I understand the situation, my Cassandra-like concerns about work environment stress are now actually seen as less bothersome by the top management circle. Maybe because I haven't made any lately. Maybe also because since I pointed out that our Russian colleagues badly needed reassurance that we weren't blaming them for the war, and was proven right, they put more faith in my assessments. It was a little bit weird because I put infinite effort and thought into defending other colleagues in other matters, but am being figuratively praised for weightlifting a pillow after being used to handling 25 pound barbells!

We're in the middle of turning off any remaining services to Russian websites, and it doesn't feel very good because it's a slippery slope.

I've read a lot about World War I propaganda, and don't really like the stage where one begins to split the parties to a conflict into good sheep and bad sheep, and also to treat it a bit as a game where we're happy if Zelensky 'whacks the bad guys' and sad if 'the good guys' face a defeat. First we were talking about the Russian president, pro-government media, oligarchs, and other government officials being at fault, and differentiated Russian dissidents and military recruits. Now, all Russian soldiers are being considered as confirmed or potential war criminals.

I'm worried that we'll begin to find all Russians (and Belarusians?) suspect, and begin to dehumanize Russians in general. Such dehumanization generally ends up tyrannically targeting the innocent who have the least defenses against the type of opposition that should be aimed against the harder but culpable target. I don't want us to produce stories like — to leap ahead in time and take an example from World War II — a young George Takei growing up in a Japanese-American internment camp.

But I can partly understand why it's harder to resist the urge to dehumanize. Protests have been quashed in Russia, in the streets and in its newspapers. So there are fewer images of the other face of Russia. Our view of what it means to be a Russian in these times is becoming one-dimensional, either the jowls of varied pro-Putin oligarchs or high government officials, or the dead stare of the head of government, or the frowzy venality of Ramzan Kadyrov.

What I do think is good is that a UN official will still dutifully point out that Ukrainian government soldiers and militias are also accused of sexual violence — in service of credibility and justice to the victims, even if one despises the idea of creating another kernel of truth that a propaganda machine will misuse. I'm not going to blow these things out of proportion to the rest of the conflict. But I think many people who know war, and even those like me who don't, were already pointing out at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine: one reason why it was so heinous of Putin to start this is that it unleashes the scenario that make these actions and abuses possible, loading not just the 'bad' side but also the 'good' side with a burden of guilt and psychological damage that will follow them for the rest of their lives.

That said, I also don't want to argue too far along this line, because I don't want to in any way endorse the narrative of victimization that some pro-Putin groups in Berlin have adopted.

On Thursday I took a half day off in the morning and went donating for refugees again. It was strangely peaceful to meet Ukrainians who were waiting to pick up care packages. Individuals and families were standing or sitting on lawn chairs outside a one-storey Berlin Senate building, waiting for volunteers to register them or call their names with the finished package. It was like a tentative-but-friendly neighbourhood gathering.

But I'm still worried about not doing enough. I saw on Thursday that while the volunteers appeared to have what they needed — thanks most likely to money donations —, there were 1 or 2 people bringing in-kind donations compared to over 20 needing them.

Let's see if my half-holiday on Friday will give me enough time to help out again.