The flu of last week has subsided. On Thursday and Friday I'd felt like a malingerer, although it was clear I might still be contagious and I did feel mildly weak. On Tuesday my conscience eased: during choir practice it was clear that in fact the respiratory illness had put my lungs through the wringer.
University is exhausting but engrossing as ever. On Monday morning at the ungodly hour of 8:11 a.m. I walked into the Spanish classroom, pleased at being early. But I was only the second person there, because in fact the class had been cancelled. (My fault for not checking the university email account after 9 p.m. the day before.)
Spanish did take place on Wednesday as scheduled. We were asked to do an assignment in pairs, and I still haven't arranged that due to feeling too shy to ask anyone; more homework is looming like the sword of Damocles.
Tuesday was Greek, Wednesday was also Greek with an instructor I'd never had before... the professor ran out of the room with a runny nose due to allergies and came back in with a rolled-up piece of paper towel in one nostril. It was quite distracting. In any case I was in a bit of a brain fog and felt rather overwhelmed.
It was also the U.S. election day. I found out after the Spanish class due to chatter in the university hallways that Kamala Harris had lost.
My legs went a little bit wobbly, if I'm honest, while I looked up the home page of the Guardian on my smartphone. The reports of world leaders congratulating the 47th president on his victory put the proverbial nail into the coffin of my optimism.
But I consoled myself with reading Michelle Obama's memoir before the next class, picturing an alternative reality. It was a nice surprise to meet my mother outside the cafeteria, and she gave me a hug before continuing to her seminar. I had a slice of apple cake as comfort food. And later, while I was sitting in the hallway reading, my regular Greek professor passed by and happily greeted me when she saw me; that was also comforting.
Anyway, after a feeble walk to make sure I got some exercise, I got home and soon had such a bad migraine that I slept for most of the rest of the afternoon, and then all night. In the morning it was cured, but...
I hadn't done my homework for Thursday, and that was also pretty obvious when we went over the exercises in my Greek class...
That morning, I'd had another political shock when, in a chat with friends, I saw that the Chancellor of Germany had fired the finance minister, thus alienating the FDP coalition allies and essentially precipitating a new round of federal elections.
The actual Firing Ceremony at the presidential palace did make me cringe with sympathy for the finance minister. But other than that one would need to be a massive fan of FDP policies, I think, to feel sad about his departure. Hypothetically speaking, anyone else might be quite willing to wish that the door would not hit him where the good Lord split him, on his way out...
But I'm not eager to see xenophobia, short-sighted economics that don't take into account the financial risks of climate change, or swivel-eyed distrust of the federal government due to what some blithering idiot recently said on a 9-minute YouTube video, become the defining characteristics of federal policy. Thus I am not eager for new elections.
My theory, oft aired to family, is that Chancellor Scholz saw that the 45th President of the US had won the election again, and decided that there was no way he wanted to deal with that mess.
In general the world political situation feels so bizarre and unstable that the morbid metaphor has come to mind that I have to do my part for humanity along the lines of the musicians on the Titanic: keep playing the instrument to keep people calm as we sink beneath the waves of the Atlantic.
Anyway, Thursday (yesterday) evening wasn't spent just talking German politics or watching the Tagesschau. I reviewed my Spanish linguistics professor's slides from last week and read the first paragraph or two from the prescribed reading, which was about phonetics. I only glanced at a worksheet that was assigned as homework but would, I thought, also be done on-the-spot in class...
But when I entered the linguistics classroom this morning, the others were reviewing their finished worksheets in groups of 2 or 3 to compare their answers...
The last class of the week was about classical Latin transforming into vulgar Latin into, for example, Old French and Medieval French, into Modern French. I liked the subject matter, along with the examples of words that had changed over time. It was also nostalgic, because at a Canadian university I'd been taught the medieval French work Lai de Lanval, in a bilingual text where we were allowed to stick to the modern French transcription.
Afterward I had enough energy to get small presents for a friend's birthday, before reaching home in the very November weather.
Since then I've admittedly been pretty useless.
It looks like the years that I spent worrying about my workplace are now wreaking their vengeance: every time I come across the smallest stressor at university, like a test or a bit of forced socialization that I don't immediately feel comfortable with, I go off like a rocket. And I don't have much time to climb down again. (I need to do homework in that slot, for example, or sleep before class the next day instead of lying awake, or take care of other obligations. Admittedly sometimes the feeling of getting a piece of work done does cure anxiety.)
Either way, homework needs to wait for tomorrow.
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