Influenza Ex Machina

The switch away from summer daylight saving time has happened: so after a grey day with low cloud cover, a long, prematurely dark afternoon has followed.

That said, things are not so grim for me personally:

I began to feel ill on the weekend. I slept most of the day on Sunday, and since then I've written to my professors and asked for time off this week. Today I toddled outdoors for the first time due to a shopping errand: it was not so bad except that I was drained and still felt in the throes of a moderate common cold – an improvement on the baroque flu symptoms (e.g. nausea) of earlier. So climbing onto a bicycle and heading to university would have been a bad idea. An attempt to catch up on homework was not too successful either; it was exhausting.

To pass the time I'm reading romance novels, doing household chores as energy permits, following the news, and watching a bit of Netflix. (Documentaries, with e.g. Greek subtitles to practice the language.)

It might not sound like fun, but it's a luxurious contrast to...: the first two weeks of the university semester were much more demanding and uncomfortable than I expected. I've warmed to the 'forced socialization' aspect that I complained about in my earlier blog post, simply because many fellow students really are quite friendly and do open up. But 8:15 and 8:30 a.m. classes do strain my health. It's clear I'm not seventeen years old any more, or even twenty-eight. On the other hand the intellectual stimulation has been healthy; so has the feeling, after a long and demoralizing phase of doing journalistic work that nobody publishes, that someone (the university bureaucracy) has finally pointed a finger at me again and said 'You Can Do This.'

In the meantime I'm still thinking of working on my 20th century research project or finally writing at length about the journey to Canada. But the same rule of thumb applies: don't overdo it.

Greek Reading and a Recycling Yard Journey

Waking up for an 8:30 a.m. class on a Tuesday has turned into a far less gruesome prospect, by comparison, now that I am also waking up for an 8:15 a.m. class on Mondays. So I arrived at the university this morning, only around 3 minutes late, in good spirits.

The previous professor had left the chalkboard written upon, although the Greek professor is allergic to chalk dust – a simple misunderstanding in her eyes that was easy to fix, but an awkward beginning to the day nonetheless. And three windows gaped open and let in the triumphant roar of lawn maintenance machinery shortly after class began: the first two windows were easy to close, but the last one would not budge.

Nonetheless we forged ahead and began reading a 20th century children's story together.

I'd already copied out a little over half of the story by hand, and annotated the vocabulary, last year. Fortunately I rediscovered the notebook I'd used, read it through again to refresh my memory yesterday, and felt superbly prepared this morning.

A beautiful wine-coloured golden light poured over the turn-of-the-century buildings and the trees, on the way to and from university: yellow leaves rustling down in the breeze like gold flakes in a river, while the sky was a faint autumnal blue.

Afterward, I took the U-Bahn to drop off rags and an old/malfunctioning(?) Intel Pentium processor at the recycling depot. The orange dumpsters at the recycling yard harmonized bombastically with the autumn colours. But the sight palled because the depot was temporarily closed: two flatbed trucks, with pincers that fit into loops on the metal holders and lifted them, were edging forwards and backwards gingerly in the enclosure, switching out the dumpsters and containers. Bitte haben Sie Geduld ('please be patient') said the sign on the locked orange gates.

A long queue of pedestrians, cars, and soon a cyclist had formed at the gates, Fast bis zum Krematorium! ('almost to the cemetery') as a woman who had been waiting for over an hour commented.

A little drama was had.

It was almost as good as a play to wait, as blue-and-white Hertha BSC flags waved at us from inside the recycling yard.

A random assortment of people brought a random assortment of unwanted items: wicker chairs, IKEA dresser drawers without the dresser, a faux-bronze floor lamp, roughly a cubic metre of broad-leaf hedge trimmings, a pair of holey socks, an unglamorous grey wall-to-wall carpet roll that was taller than the man who carried it, ...

We exchanged amused or irate glances — I'd been through the process before and had only had to wait 15 minutes or so, so I chose to be amused. A few of us indulged in more obvious drama and swapped gossip.

Then the dreaded Containerwechsel was done.

An orange-suited recycling expert courageously ventured closer, and unlocked the gates for us. We squeezed in through the gateway rather like a reluctant marshmallow through a narrow tube. Then, one heave of an item into a dumpster at a time, good humour was restored and our physical burdens vanished.

"Es is' jeden Tag det Gleiche," a woman had murmured to her companion while passing us on the sidewalk.

(And now I need to go off, to do more Spanish homework.)

Third Time's the Charm? Returning to University

It's been an intense first week of classes. Of course I'm grateful to have gotten into university – after passing the second part of the latest exam, I was told that the registration was completed lickety-split the next evening.

What I'd forgotten, though, is how much first-year classes are not for shy people. In the upper semesters it's, I'll generalize, taken for granted that everyone will be absorbed in their own subject matter and have taken on a smaller group of friends with whom they have a proven, specific rapport. But in many of my seminars this year, we're being smushed together like platonic Barbie and Ken dolls, told to socialize and form groups amongst each other, and I hate it. It's not that I don't like the other students; but that doesn't mean we necessarily have a good chemistry when it comes to teaching each other, completing a task together, or otherwise mutually bringing out good academic qualities. I'm still used to the experience of having classmates be indifferent or unhappy about being paired up with me in group projects, from school, and I can't say that reawakened trauma and awkward social interactions are a wellspring of academic genius. And I don't know why adults think that everyone who is, say, 18 years old, has so much in common that the whole class is soul twins.

Anyway, the week started with Romance-language literature, Greek, and a Spanish language class.

In the Spanish-language class, the professor was friendly and strict and thoroughly fed up at the same time, looking at tables practically bulging with students and whipping us through our paces. (The classes are overfilled, and he had a cold so that his voice was hoarse.) He set us the topic of journalism. He seemed pretty annoyed when a student innocently mentioned a celebrity magazine as an example of that journalistic genre, interjecting that maybe we should use Der Spiegel as an example instead. He mildly blew his top when someone also innocently said 'There are the ...' as 'Hay los...'; 'If it's a definite article like el, la, or los, you should use the verb 'existir,' not 'hay'.' I on the other hand wept on the inside when a fellow student said 'There is no need to be too informed' and one or two students proudly claimed that they got their news from social media...

(Which also made me rant internally about people saying that they are 'not political,' without realizing that their attitudes about everything from poverty through immigration to whether or not to adopt a climate-friendly clothes closet are quite deliberately instilled and stoked by political actors. If they don't live in a cave and shun human contact, their words and actions are in fact furthering someone's political agenda. It's important to learn about political science and history so that these hidden strings – that sounds too conspiracy-theorist, but I can't think of a better term off the top of my head – are revealed.)

Since I haven't spoken Spanish regularly since around 2002, the fellow students came across as linguistic geniuses to me when it came to their prompt and snappy replies to the teacher. It was only as I heard one trivial grammatical mistake after another, including adjectives not declined to the correct gender, that I began to feel like I fit in.

We had homework assigned for the class, which I have not quite finished yet and it's haunting me like a disgruntled spirit.

Then more Greek, where I translated German into English for the benefit of a fellow student, and I wept internally because I'd spent hundreds of Euros and over 11 hours of exam-writing to prove that I knew German... when the university uses English a lot anyway.

Last evening there was some excitement, if mainly online, because a group of 20 (police figures) or over 40 (university press release figures) broke into the university president's offices. Apparently computers were damaged and at least one red triangle (associated with the militant group Hamas) was spray-painted somewhere. The police were called. The president of the university appeared on the evening news.

I still think that the university's media strategy is totally out of touch with the opinions of students and I've gotten the sense many professors. Thinking that the best way to honour the survivors of the Holocaust is to pretend that 40,000 Palestinians are still alive in the Gaza Strip and there's nothing to worry about, is not just useless but also totally beneath our intelligence. It has nothing to do with ethics, just with a shallow notion of public relations. It just makes us look like hypocritical idiots. Besides to me it's part and parcel of a socio-religious/racist construct whereby 'Arabs' are inherently 'fanatics.'

(I guess with Lebanon it's the case that Syria and other countries have been pulling the strings of its political system from the outside through violent means for decades or centuries anyway, but also given the severe economic situation that's already created deep hardships, I'm still frankly shocked that the invasion of Lebanon isn't raising more eyebrows. Maybe it's easier to grasp the cost if one has known a Lebanese person; one of my former colleagues mentioned that he brought along medication every time he travelled to the country – because the stocks in the country are so low or the prices are too high, I've forgotten which.)

Besides it's unfair to reduce Israel and its people to a military campaign. Why can't we espouse Israeli literature, show the spectrum of opinions and interests in that country in their full diversity, instead of throwing ourselves behind a Netanyahu policy? By contrast, I really like that somebody put a literary calendar page with a photo of the Israeli author David Grossman on a door in the humanities building at the university: it always reminds me of the dissidents, and of the complexity of nationalities and experiences.

Anyway, there was a protest this afternoon 'for Jewish life and the right of Israel to exist'... One of my professors told the lecture hall that she'd be fine if we skip class to attend it. By the time I passed, it was 15 people holding Israeli flags near the biggest cafeteria, as two police officers who looked relaxed stood beside them. As I've mentioned in the past, insofar as I have a Jewish family history I do not identify myself one iota with the waving of Israeli flags in the context where it's an endorsement of killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, so the 'for Jewish life' part... Did the protestors look fanatic, though? – No, they were just quietly chatting.

Do I wish that students who are pro-Palestinian activists would concentrate more fully on raising funds for medical care, or on giving a platform to moderate speakers from Palestinian territories, Palestinian refugee camps, Israel, or Lebanon, to become more informed without attempting to instrumentalize these speakers for propaganda? – Yes.

Anyway, I still have homework to do, and shopping, cleaning, and food to prepare for friends on the weekend. But after walking through the autumn leaves at Dahlem under a sunny sky, writing all of this, and already making sure I have no homework for the last class I had today, I feel a little less disgruntled.

Passing the German Gauntlet

In more recent news, the latest Swiftian acrobatics to secure a spot as a full-time university student have been fulfilled: Last night I really tried to go to sleep by midnight, but ended up tossing and turning past 1:30 a.m. Waking up later than intended, after 7:30 a.m., was a less painful process than feared. But because of the prescribed 1 hour fast after taking my iron supplement, I went to the spoken German exam unfed.

Stirrings in the U-Bahn of teenage and twenty-something passengers proved that a few students have already begun the university semester one way or the other. But the vast halls of the Rost-/Silber-/Holzlaube building were largely empty.

Much more easily than when I was a fledgling student in 2011, I found the correct rooms (for the exam).

Half an hour early, it took a while for signs and chairs appear at the rooms. But the examiners were as friendly as I remembered them being during the written exam; the applicant who was taking the exam in the time slot after me was outright charming.

After being given a topic and 20 minutes to prepare, I was ushered into a second room, clutching my sheet of notes. Then I gave a presentation to two ladies from the German language centre – a presentation that I vaguely suspect extended beyond the 5 requested minutes.

Their eyes glazed over now and then, because really how many new and striking things could one say about the topic? But they perked up other times, and even laughed once or twice. I didn't stumble over my words as I do at other times where accurate German is asked for. The sense that the examiners wanted us to feel at ease and show our skills, rather than feel terrified and hide our knowledge, was reassuring.

And at the end the examiners both looked highly relieved at being able to pass an applicant with flying colours. They told me that I have a DSH level 3: the highest one.

(My journalistic experiments of the past year admittedly have made me feel like I've been cheating when I write exams. Formulating clearly formatted texts or speeches about random topics, after a brief period of preparation, is basically all I've been trying to do since early 2023. Even if it has rarely if ever been a success.)

Let's see if the registration works and I can really, genuinely study in 1 week!

*

After that excellent news, the question was whether to eat lunch on campus, or to go straight home; I went straight home.

Around 5 p.m., the sleep deprivation sank in and I felt my eyes begin to hollow out. But I'd promised to appear at choir practice at 7:15 p.m.

The air felt warm and muggy. But of course rain was falling by the time I walked home from practice!

That said, I have been relieved when returning from the travels in Canada to find that the tree leaves haven't all withered away in our absence. Last time I think there was a nihilistic before and after, which appeared to justify my previous Fear of Missing Out on interesting occurrences in Berlin. It also just felt morbid.