Elderberries and Autumn

Autumn weather is beginning to drift into Berlin: rusty and golden leaves have been shimmering in the trees here and there, and underripe acorns are firing out of oak canopies like oval-shaped green rockets. Throughout the day the first proper rain has fallen in weeks, beneath a ponderous, grey sky.

Last weekend I went to the allotment gardens, and brought back a harvest for a cake that J. was baking. The damson plums are ripening now, but I've found subjectively that they tend to be either overripe or underripe this year. A gardener handed me a red-and-orange peach that she was about to put out in her basket. Various apple and pear species have already been ripe for a while, while late cherry plums the colour of dusky red wine are still falling off the trees. Elderberries are dropping their berries, too, which look black as they are ground into an indistinguishable pulp on the shadowed path beneath their branches, by passersby. Wasps were out in full force. Hibiscus bushes, sweet peas, early asters, and butterfly bushes, dahlias, and late summer roses added colour. And the Hokkaido pumpkins are plump and bright orange.

On Saturday we'd visited Uncle Pu in Brandenburg.

Returning to today, I went to the supermarket in the early afternoon to buy green onions and eggs for a Denver omelette, and cooked it for lunch. 5 eggs, a splash of milk, with 1 chopped green onion, about 2 tablespoons of onion, and 1/3rd of a green bell pepper — the vegetables all chopped fairly fine; and I melted gouda cheese into it. To replace the omelette's traditional ham, which I didn't want to bother buying, I used a teaspoon of dehydrated onion. With buttered whole wheat toast that I spread with clementine marmalade, the omelette tasted extremely good, likely one of my best cooking improvisations.

Afterward I found out I'd missed two calls from a prospective employer: a lady looking for someone to help out with a kitchen renovation. After I'd emailed her back, she wanted to call me to confirm her address, and I suspect also to get a feel for whether I was going to steal her best furniture and run away instead of actually helping. By the late afternoon we'd sorted it all out, to our mutual satisfaction. I'll be earning around €150 in the middle of next week, and don't need to bring anything along except for shoes with closed toes, clothing that can get dirty, and a German government ID.

It feels thrilling because I was crestfallen after not being able to find a summer job earlier this year. The pre-school where I'd applied to work as a back-up seems to have ghosted me. I also don't know yet if I was paid for my student election work in early June; it didn't appear on my June bank statement, at least, so I've been temporarily neurotic about budgeting. Not finding a summer job might have made July and August more restful, however; so I can see that part as a blessing in disguise.

I'm also progressing in the essays that I still need to write for the last university semester. One scholarly article I've already taken notes on, and I've started (re)reading Descartes's Discours de la méthode to get an idea of a classical philosopher's idea of an Enlightenment man.

Tomorrow I plan to be volunteering again. Last week I was serendipitously invited by fellow volunteers to help at the baked goods sorting tables. It was truly the peak, acme, or paradise — I can't find the right word — of food-sorting jobs. None of the bread or pastries were mouldy or weevil-infested. It looked epically delicious (I'd happily buy and eat it). I left with my appetite intact. The fellow volunteers were cheerfully collaborative; it's truly a skill, and sadly one I haven't developed at the volunteering place yet, to make sure that everyone has a task to feel engaged and helpful. Not only that: when we did have to throw away bread that was stale (or cut open already at the bakery), it mostly went into dry, tidy bins to be fed to sheep later, not into maggot-infested compost bins that reeked of ripe decay.

Anyway, the second-best thing I've been doing lately to feel happier, aside from meeting up with former work teammates, is to play the piano regularly. First I rushed through my siblings' and my old Royal Conservatory of Music programme (to be clear: none of us went to a Royal Conservatory; that's just what the standard programme for Canadian piano pupils is called) pieces. Now I'm playing bits and pieces of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

An August Evening Run, and Carrots Whose Glory Is Past

This evening I waited until my smartphone reported that the temperature had finally declined from 34°C to 29°C, then set out for the next phase of my couch-to-5K running project.

It was the same project I already tried in 2018. The running always felt mildly disagreeable (the phrase 'runners' high' felt like a joke) and then I pulled a tendon or something in my foot on Christmas Eve; hobbling sideways up and down a set of S-Bahn stairs after that convinced me that, as the German saying goes, 'Sport ist Mord'. What nudged me into retrying the programme was watching the women's footballers in the Euro Cup last month. Fortunately, cycling to university regularly has made me feel far better cardiovascularly equipped than I did back in 2018, which makes the running more comfortable. Besides I unearthed an old stopwatch, perhaps from the 1990s, while sorting through old boxes in early July; even despite my general indifference to gadgets, the thought of having a 'new' toy for the pursuit was charming.

This is Week Two of the programme, so I had to walk-and-run 5.6 kilometres. As it was past 8:30 p.m. by the time the weather had cooled from a car exhaust heat to a tepid sauna warmth, I literally ran out of enough light to see my stopwatch after ten to fifteen minutes, except if a street lamp was close by or when I reached a floodlit sports field.

But it was agreeable to see people sitting on the sidewalks at restaurants, as a man lounged in a doorway speaking in Italian. An ice cream shop was still doing a little business. In the park, youths were listening to hip-hop, while a lot of joggers and dog-walkers crunched on the gravel, and someone was apparently poetically singing live to the accompaniment of a ukulele on a bridge. I took a sip from a public drinking fountain on the return trip.

All in all, the outing took 57 minutes, plus a little additional walking. Back in the apartment, I had some of Ge.'s excellent sweet potato and carrot soup, and a boiled egg, to reward and restore my energies.

***

Tomorrow I'll be volunteering at the food-sorting place again.

I've had semi-hallucinations where I superimpose memories of bad food onto the good food at home: A carton of fresh raspberries / a carton of raspberries with a disgusting dribble of decomposed bell pepper that's leaked into it, exuding a vinegary smell that lingers in the nose. Crispy orange carrots / plastic-wrapped carrots with dark grey spots all over them. Etc. To put it melodramatically, I think my relationship to food has been disturbed.

That said, the fellow volunteers are friendly and helpful.

In the meantime I've been beginning to read A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh in the evenings, following up on The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Mio, My Son by Astrid Lindgren in a series of revisiting books that I liked as a child.

Besides I've tried out a cleaning schedule from the 1910s. Since I apparently have a low threshold for excitement, I have been quite thrilled about what a difference it makes to 1. wipe down the stovetop, 2. brush the dust off the mat in the entranceway, and 3. make a cup of tea, first thing in the morning; and 4. to make the bed after breakfast, so that it has time to air out.

Lastly I've been watching Netflix, catching up on Orange Is The New Black, which I heard about when it came out in 2013 but never saw until now. Technically I think it's very good. Barack Obama's Our Oceans is very soothing. 

Besides I am watching the British young adult series Heartstopper — only a few minutes at a time, as it reminds me disagreeably of my own school years, and because I'm watching it more to see what 'the kids these days' are watching than for entertainment... It's seemed to me that some of the popular culture for teenagers since 2020 is considerably kinder than anything I encountered back at the turn of the millennium; but as there's also a far-right backlash amongst the younger generation, I fear there is likewise a seamy underbelly.

On the whole, I fear that my social life has gone under during the university semester. It was so important to me to get through the work and get reasonably good grades, but it required putting my personal life on hold and letting my hobbies slide. One reason why I haven't written more blog posts, for example, is that I frankly think I've become boring!