Gravestones

It's the second day of the week back at work, and by Sunday evening I'd resigned myself to it.

This evening I went to a funeral/memorial service in Kreuzberg. It was for the relative whom I'd written about here, who died last spring. It was in a rather lively graveyard: cars and all passing outside the walls, birds, and full of hectic summer elements like tiny beetles that paraded around my finger, wasps, dry leaves and twigs that got caught in hair, butterflies that dove into the papers that someone was just reading from, a minuscule yellow caterpillar that let itself down from a cedar tree, and slightly too balmy heat and light that made one fear a bit for the very elderly amongst us.

It was reassuring to have an opportunity to say goodbye. I've realized after the memorial service for D.S. that it is very hard to have known someone from a distance, to have liked and respected them a lot, and then to just face up to the abstract fact that they've kind of disappeared. To have the chance, instead, to know what they were like through the eyes of their nearest and dearest (I know more about Angi after attending the service, through the texts that people read out), to meet with people whom you know who also knew them, to have it confirmed that the traits of character that you liked about them were not just your imagination but also observed by people who knew them well, to acknowledge one's feelings of loss, and then to have some kind of marker where one needs to move on with life, is a comfort.

I think a consistent sense of pain I feel in connection with Papa is that he was such a good and inspiring figure to me; and it isn't totally clear (at least to an anxious daughter!) how many people apart from my siblings and my mother really saw the same thing, or remember him kindly.

1 Week Holiday, Day Five: Delivery Man Hijinks and Spaetzle

By now I feel so much better than at the beginning of the week that it reminded me of the premise of the children's book Heidi, where a few weeks in the mountain air, drinking sheep's milk and living life outdoors, sets up the heroine for health.

In my case, I have been sleeping well and even rising earlier than usual, aside from small twinges here and there have been headache-free, most of the bags under my eyes have gone, because I've had time to cook for myself I've been eating plenty of fresh and varied and delicious food, and looking into the mirror I generally see a glowing and healthy face. And today, instead of feeling like going out into hot weather would harm my health as was the case a week ago, I cycled through 32°C weather quite nonchalantly. Which makes me highly question the sanity of returning to work.

Anyway, I baked two olive bread loaves, made a Greek salad, and prepared a Mediterranean-style cornbread with feta, green onion and parsley. Besides I bought stracciatella ice cream.

Around midday I cycled off and dropped off the typewriter at last, by the grace of God managing to put the case right-side-up on the counter instead of embarrassing myself by ignorantly presenting it upside-down.

Various pedestrians seemed hell-bent on imperiling their lives for silly reasons, e.g. crossing the street at random when a crosswalk was five metres away. Cars and delivery vans were causing chaos by stopping in the middle of the street. Altogether the urge to facepalm was frequent.

Speaking of traffic and the urge to facepalm, I think it was yesterday, but I don't know for sure: I was riding behind a parcel delivery man on a bicycle, who was so absorbed in his smartphone and other stuff that he'd pulled out of the bicycle lane, then he slowly pulled back in again and pedalled off only to — after a pitiful handful of metres — bump straight into a construction fence in a snail's-pace collision. It was a fairly classic slapstick moment, which I don't feel guilty for enjoying as he seemed unhurt.

In the evening, J. and I visited T. in her apartment, to eat her dinner together. The ingredients and recipe were pre-ordered, so we watched as she carefully cleaned and set up everything and then pulled the recipe together: spaetzle with mushrooms, tomatoes, spinach, and onion in a cream sauce.

The linden trees are not too parched by the summer heat to still be beautifully fragrant every now and then — one definitely begins to understand why the German Romantics appreciated them so much. ('Am Brunnen vor dem Tore,' etc.)

What I don't appreciate so much is the emergence this past week of a host of mosquitoes. I had red badges of their courage bloodlust scattered on my arm, face, and feet this morning.

It's likely an empty promise, but in the next weeks I will need to think strongly about how much I'm willing to sacrifice for my job. One of my great-grandfathers died of an ulcer, only in his forties and leaving a devastated young family behind; and although he seems to have been a nice person, I'm not eager to follow in his footsteps by taking on so much stress that I die early — even if it's well paid and a steady income.

1 Week Holiday, Day Four: River Sports and Blueberry Cake

It's the second day of The Finals 2022 (lamentably pronounced 'FINN-nalz' on the Berlin evening news), a bunch of German Olympic team qualification events in less frequently televised sports like the pentathlon, 3x3 basketball, and kayaking.

The first thing I did today was to prepare a vegan blueberry cake, baking both halves and letting them cool. Later I would layer them with the rich elderflower-flavoured frosting in the centre, without melting the plant butter of the frosting. Although I guessed a bit at the quantity of olive oil and used larger-crystalled brown sugar instead of the soft brown sugar recommended (adding 20g to try to compensate), the cake turned out quite lovely. (Ge. said that it looked like an enormous blueberry muffin.)

Then I cycled off to the Spree River in eastern Berlin. The Oberbaumbrücke with its distinct peaked towers in pumpkin-pie orange was familiar, but I'd never visited the East Side Gallery that turns off from it. The Gallery itself, likely well known to any Berlin tourist, is a fairly slight wall (presumably concrete) with a rounded topping, which is a remnant of the former Cold War wall and is now host to a rotating display of artworks. But behind it is a conglomerate of boho-hipster and traditional middle-class tourist enterprises: from a white-and-blue riverboat hotel of a familiar American chain that twinned the Ukrainian flag with the one it is already flying, to a multi-level restaurant that seemed like the perfect boozy place for anonymous masses of carousing twenty-somethings, and a museum lodged on an upper floor of the same waterfront building.

Today spectator and other facilities for the Finals kayaking races on the river were set up further down from the East Side Gallery. In front of the mixed modern and traditional industrial Berlin waterfront — a spurious-looking stepped façade on a white contemporary building that was clearly intended to wink at olden times, but also a hulking building of time-softened brick (with windows cut out of for utility more than aesthetics) that had something of the mild charm of a massive 17th-century farm house in a Rembrandt-era Dutch painting — stippling lines of buoys were the racing lanes for the kayaks, and inflatable 'pillows' with advertising on it formed a triangular barrier between these racing lanes and the regular, motorized river traffic. A tourist ship like a paddlewheeler floated by, two or three speedboats sped by. I seem to vaguely remember a few trees, for example willows, gracefully breaking up the human artifacts of the scene.

In the athletes' river lanes, the lanes were often empty where I was spectating. At the beginning I did briefly see two pairs of kayakers competing to cross a finish line that I couldn't see, in the distance, and then another pair paddling out to the starting line. A drone that looked like a cross between a biplane and an insect hovered over the surface where it could get a good look at the competitors, and whirred loudly. Loudspeaker announcements from the commentator. Listless music being played from the stands, quieter than the announcements. And, at a bend in the river, race officials importantly tootled back and forth in their own motorized boats.

And on the banks where I was, onlookers sat in loose groups in whatever shade they could find under the few trees in the dry golden grass. — The temperature reached around 30°C today.

I was far away from the scene of the action, as mentioned. So whenever the sports were out of sight, I indulged my curiosity about the camera equipment and the TV producer(?) who was strolling back and forth, wondering how a professional sports recording set-up works.

And because I risked a sunstroke by staying longer, and I didn't want to venture into the official spectator area if it meant that I needed to lock up my bicycle, I soon left again.

Earlier, along the way to the place, I had passed an office machine shop, and popped in to ask if they'd be willing to repair an old Olympia typewriter and replace the ink band for me. A man came out from a room in the back, alerted by a sensor at the front of the shop, and (gnome-like face breaking into a smile) said he'd be fine with doing so — it'll take a week, though, he warned.

Lastly, I popped into an import shop and returned with Kalamata olives and a feta-lemon dip, ready for the next recipe experiments.

I've lost track of all the observations I made during my peregrinations today. (Except perhaps the amazing fact that some pedestrians respected the bicycle lane. — I'm beginning to see that in Berlin there are strong cultural differences by neighbourhood, and beginning to 'stereotype' places where few people seem to care about the rules of traffic and I already know that I can't rely on street markings, traffic lights, etc. to know where cars, pedestrians, or other cyclists will be at a given moment. Because I'd pigeonholed the law-observers today as tourists, I was especially pleasantly surprised that they didn't moon around in the middle of a demarcated zone for vehicles.) But I'm grateful in general that during all of my cycling this week, I've had the time to indulge my curiosity about sculpture inscriptions, the architectural features and religious affiliations of churches, event posters on public bulletin boards, etc.

In Memoriam, D.S., 1935-2022

"Memories of Alhambra" by Francisco Tárrega

*

Further recommendations:

"Asturias" by Isaac Albéniz (John Williams - YouTube)
"Prelude for Lute, BWV 999" by Johann Sebastian Bach (Taso Comanescu - YouTube )
"Cello Suite No. 1" by Bach (Julia Lange - YouTube )

1 Week Holiday, Day One: Rosewater, Ukrainian Books, and a Radio

It's the first day of a whole week off of work — the first time I've taken off more than 1 day at a time since 2018.

My direct manager had been on a work trip for one week, then a week of vacation; we had our first meeting after that on Friday. When I told him something of what had been going on (culminating in finding out that D.S., one of my father's cousins, had died), he said that frankly he himself wouldn't feel able to work under those circumstances, and he recommended a week off.

I put my work matters in order and, already past the end of my tether, took the advice.

So I woke up today, knew that I didn't need to open the laptop, and then realized that there was a feeling that I usually feel on workday mornings that was absent — and that this feeling might be intense self-loathing. It's a relief not to measure myself by a procrustean professional standard for once.

That said, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the frantic array of activities I generally take up whenever there's a gap in the work schedule, might not be the wisest approach.

Saturday in 1963: An Invitation, Quiches, and Linden Trees

Today any thought of remaining in the bubble of 1963 was impractical due to the fact that I'd invited over colleague-friends.

But I ended up making a lot of Mediterranean food, feeling very pleased at the meeting of two aims.

After waking up, I made two quiche doughs. One was far too dry, the other too watery. But I put both in the refrigerator and hoped for the best.

Cleaning was 'easy peace lemon squeeze,' to quote a colleague's endearing message at work last week. My mother keeps the apartment visitor-friendly because she regularly invites people over herself, so there was very little vacuuming to do. I did regret not cleaning the stovetop.

(Also, I was unhappy about the plastic recycling overload: the dumpster in our courtyard is overstuffed. It sounds like the plastic recycling pick-up might have missed a week? So we were forced to keep our bags in the kitchen. Ge. reported that he'd noticed dumpsters being demonstratively/desperately wheeled out onto sidewalks in our neighbourhood: I did sight one too. In terms of the massive garbage strikes in Naples and Toronto in past years, however, I guess these are small peas.)

Then I cycled off to the Markthalle at Marheinekeplatz, where I bought San Marzano tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, strawberries, and blueberries.

Before that, I'd visited a refugee welcome centre. The glass building foyer where it had been hosted was empty, the signs removed, and it was ghostly. (On these occasions I always remember Jane Eyre and the description of Thornfield Hall when she returns after her stay with the Rivers family.) But I found the new volunteer space, asked what they needed, and when I came back with some coffee, they were — a little surprisingly — over the moon.

Along the way to the centre, all kinds of weeds and herbs were flowering: spiky, pale purple bee balm flowers I recognized, many other flowers I didn't; and the linden trees were blossoming and spreading the most wonderful fragrance in the air, and littering pollen that was sometimes intensely ochre-yellow onto the ground.

Back at home, I finished preparing Nanaimo bars, although for the second day in a row the fluffy yellow centre wouldn't fluff properly.

And I bought more ingredients for a vegetarian quiche and for a cake. But I had to abandon the cake: my debit card was declined and so I gave back a few ingredients so I could pay in cash.

But I was quite relaxed about this, only felt sorry for the shoppers waiting behind me in what was generally a tense and exhausted atmosphere — instilled I think by both the weekend rush and the intense heat today.

The reason it was declined was because it hit the limit, and I wasn't entirely unprepared for that. Against the odds, I had just managed to squeeze in another errand: buying a farewell present for a teammate who'll be leaving the company soon. Because of the migraines, ordering online hadn't happened. But this afternoon I found a games shop in Wilmersdorf. Once I'd arrived per bicycle, I needed to repress the feeling that I could browse the puzzles and board games and animal figurines etc. etc., and fulfill unrealized childhood dreams, for ages ... to quickly find what I wanted. The salesperson was interested when I asked their help and outlined what I wanted, and they beautifully wrapped it up.

(I've come to like talking with shop owners, salespeople, librarians, etc., to find good things together and watch them use their expertise.)

Lastly, I went by the usual Covid testing centre I go to, only to find it closed — apparently permanently. Fortunately, I already had a back-up plan, and self-tested at home.

As for the event itself, I will be uncharacteristically? discreet, and only say that it was very good and made up a great deal for a rather awful week.

In Ailing Victorian Orphan Mode

It turns out that after the onsite meeting I did very little at all, because I developed a migraine headache by the end of the lunch hour.

I excused myself from my voice coaching session, drooped miserably at the round table in the stifling heat — the windows weren't open due to the street noise intermittently — and was eager for the meeting to end. Then I cycled home as well as I could even though I was a little worried about falling off the bike or not having enough strength. (But the fresh air was good: the headache and nausea dissipated after a while.) Then I had a nap because I was exhausted.

On Wednesday I took the afternoon off as the migraine returned and I felt like a tight band was pressing on my forehead. Fortunately I was not too sick to finish listening to an audiobook, which is pretty much the most useful thing I could do at the time. That said, that was also the day where my skirt was due to be picked up at the tailor's, so I tottered to the bank and then to the tailor's in the smothering heat (the humidity must have been the killer, as the thermometer was only at 25° or 26° Centigrade), feeling rather sleep-walky.

Since then I've been wavering back and forth between mildly migraine-y and feeling pretty fine.

I've been a pitiful object in general. Today I aired to my kindly concerned team lead colleagues how alone I've felt since one colleague I worked with very closely is out sick due to anxiety, and the other was on holiday for two weeks. And I was briefly on the verge of tears when J. was at the hospital today for what was supposed to be a small operation to fix a stomach issue, and I gradually became nervous at the lack of updates, not because it was really that dramatic but because I've just been that fragile. (And also feeling strong urges to overshare, which really explains this entire blog post.)

The team leads and I also agreed about the toughness of the zeitgeist in the past two quarters. The industry I'm in is battered by a confluence of adversary forces: supply chain crisis, inflation leading to lower advertising revenue, war leading to hardship for colleagues and also leading to lower advertising revenue as the Russian market is debarred and certain types of advertising (e.g. computer war games) now look insensitive, stock overvaluation per my uncle Pu, and slow hiring due to intense market competition for technological jobs, ...

From my lowly perspective, this means that pressure is high to perform, but we don't have the people-power to do it: when colleagues leave, their positions stay empty far longer. We miss them, and those of us who remain need to work harder to stay level with the previous output. If we need to expand, only certain positions in our whole team will even be put on any website to advertise for hiring.

That said, one of my management superiors has made it their mission keep expectations reasonable; so they're currently the Atlas holding up the Earth. And my direct manager has emphasized over and over again not to do overtime.

From a cool-headed, microeconomic vantage point, too, we've been told that this is an excellent opportunity to re-focus on the essential outcomes of our work and figure out ways to make processes more efficient. So we will rise like a phoenix from the ashes when the winds of the market turn in our favour, etc., etc. (Which is sometimes reassuring, sometimes not, depending on my frame of mind at the time.)

Either way, I can still wipe up my tears with Euro bills, so I'm not really the demographic that requires much concern.

That said, the past week feels especially useless as I ended up not dropping off any food or hygiene donations; so the capitalist circus that gives me the opportunity to redistribute the wealth, doesn't even currently feel productive in this minor way.

Saturday in 1962: Mediterranean Marketing, Donations, and the Looming Onsite

Reading of the world events of 1962 and, in preparation for next week, 1963, has been endlessly fascinating; and so has watching YouTube videos of the music and reading about all the books, films, etc. that came out.

This morning my family had the usual Saturday breakfast of baguette, croissants, and coffee, while disputing political questions.

In addition, however, I was determined to perform the 7 to 9 hours of average daily housework that British women apparently still did in 1960. (In the end I managed at least 5 hours, if one counts shopping and other errands.) So I hand-washed dishes before the breakfast, and took out the compost and paper recycling to the bins in the courtyard.

After breakfast I set out through the sunny weather to the street market. I was one of three people whom I saw in the great masses of people who bothered to wear a face mask. I bought red beets, white-green chicory, new potatoes, an onion, celery stalks, strawberries, blueberries, beefsteak tomatoes, and a bunch of parsley. On the way home, I asked in a winery for a French white wine that would go well with a soup of ham, onion, and potatoes ("Soupe Catalane" in Elizabeth David's Book of Mediterranean Food). And I finally bought 50 grams of cooked ham in an Italian import store.

The market stall owners and every cashier or shopkeeper in a store whom I spoke with today were tremendously enthusiastic about the upcoming long weekend — Monday is Whit Monday — and their 'Schönes Wochenende' were especially emphatic and cheery.

In the market, summer flowers throve: lobelias and a pink oleander plant amongst them. There were as always artificially distressed wooden furnishings, woven baskets and carved bowls, incense sticks and holders, jars of honey, skeins of knitting wool, necklaces and bracelets, eggs, Turkish flatbreads, Mediterranean dips, big blocks of Gruyère and other cheeses, vast arrays of spices in plastic baggies and vast arrays of licorice and roasted nuts in plastic baggies, cherry tomatoes, squat dark green marrows, papayas, apricots, peaches regular and donut, nectarines, green grapes, artichokes, lettuces, ginger root, lemons with and without leaves attached, cucumbers, etc.

After eating the blueberries and vanilla ice cream and a chocolate-covered popsicle, I set off again to buy and drop off donations for refugees: as requested, soap, men's shower gel, milk powder for babies, and shampoo for babies. On the way home, still cycling, I detoured to the Gedenkbibliothek in Kreuzberg for a quick reconnaissance, as I want to familiarize myself over time with which books they have in which aisle — not by section, but by title, author, and country.

After drinking a refreshing coffee and cold cocoa, I launched into housekeeping in my orange apron. For that, I deep-cleaned part of the kitchen, lamenting however the patent fact that the kitchen walls and the window frames and doors need another layer of whitewash. The window frames, Mama insists with evident justice, need to be professionally done.

Fortunately I didn't need to cook anything, as the other three concocted an enormous dish of lasagne.

In the evening I broke my ban on computer access and looked online for real-time requirements lists. Then I purchased apples, mandarin oranges, bananas, baby shower lotion, wet wipes, and a package of diapers, to donate to a Ukrainian welcome centre. The Berliner Stadtmission has also asked for more volunteers at the Hauptbahnhof; let's see if I muster the energy and the anti-covid test.

*

On Tuesday there will be a work onsite meeting. While it ends up being nice to see people face-to-face, I can hardly stress enough how much dread it inspires beforehand in a few other colleagues and me to be asked to an onsite meeting.

It means we wake up an hour or more earlier than we usually would.

And to submit to having a corona testing swab stuck up my nose, because I'm still relatively conscientious about Covid & not infecting people with it. But because the onsite meeting will begin earlier (I just innocently arrived late last time) the testing centre I use might not be open in time. The most reputable one, which I've also gone to, is a few minutes in the opposite direction, requires registration in advance and is awkwardly tucked away in a courtyard. A self-test seems less reliable but likely the best option.

Then I'll be cycling for 9 kilometres.

Then I'll be reaching the office and performing about 10 different ceremonies to secure the bicycle and let myself into the building and then let myself into the floor and then check if the internet works and see which room is free and also make sure my hands are washed, because the new building is so sprawling that walking along the central office corridor feels like walking on a treadmill.

Then for 6-ish hours I will be totally unavailable to any colleague who is not in the room and will have no idea what is going on elsewhere in the company. The colleagues who have put together the meeting will face these same disadvantages and will, in addition, have had to plan the agenda and in one case I think commute all the way over from another North German city. (When I compliment the effort and thought they put into it, I do so sincerely; but it's kind of praising the suppleness of the organic fibres that they have interwoven to hang themselves and all the rest of us with.) Many team leads who should be there if we want a decent consensus will be on holiday or unavailable.

Last time we also did a warm-up exercise that forced me to stick my arms in the air even though my t-shirt sleeves were short and I hadn't shaved my arm pits. This is too much information, but so was this situation; so the form of my telling will follow the function. That morning I had asked myself: 'Should I wear a longer-sleeved t-shirt?' and answered myself 'No, there's no possible reason why in a professional context I should be forced to raise my arms high enough for it to matter.' I'm too old and battle-hardened and feminist to be easily embarrassed by this and just did my best to stick my arms up discreetly, and my colleagues are good at minding their own business; but I was peeved.

[Not to mention that we did lots of 'icebreakers' in school and I have mostly only liked the ones we do in my own little work team since then. The school icebreakers implicitly emphasized that some of us had friends who'd twin with and support us whereas others didn't, some of us were cool and could offer great answers and ideas while some of us were not and could not, that our classmates were always secretly judging us, and that teachers didn't see or mind a social hierarchy so rigid that I barely dared to talk to any classmates for years even about things like whether to turn off or on a light switch for fear that I (as a bit of a loner) would seem needy and clingy. What was the most offensive and gaslighting was that something that made me feel uncomfortable and lonely and worse about myself was packaged as light social entertainment. Fortunately work is not high school, but I'm just not very happy to be reminded of those times.]

Then I will cycle partly back home, but not all the way yet because I also have a voice coaching session that day.

Then I will arrive home after 9 p.m.. Then I will catch up on all of the email and Slack messages and meeting notes that I've missed, coming to terms with not having worked on any of my assigned tasks.

The next day I will awaken exhausted to a double workload of accumulated tasks and new ones.

Fun, fun, fun.

***

But first, tomorrow and the day after: no work!