Album Leaves

Although I think that poetry is often pretentious and haven't written a great deal lately also because of the fear of hypocrisy, it feels like a good time to cram out verse that I wrote years ago and that I actually like. (Although they're far from remarkable: poems I churned out as 'sketches' for poems I cared more about and kept only because they could be worse.) These remind me of the oceanside and the streams and the forest scenes I'm no longer likely to see any more now that we've moved away from Canada.

Sea Anemones

Through the tea-like, sunlit shimmer of the water in the tidal pool,
colonies of pudgy anemones in moss-dark green, ring and pad the scaly granite:
their tentacles, as meekly pink as earthworms, extend in peaceful concentricity.

***

The sparkling path

In brilliant glee the crescent minnow wends its
tail through water clear to ripple out its minute
breath in bubbles rising to the air. It chases light
and chases shade and casts its faded silhouette on the static
blandness within the pebbled riverbed. 

***

Lastly, a very non-Canadian nonsense poem about rose branches climbing on a castle wall:

Up the castle walls, winding into the air, the tough brown twigs and bright green shoots and dark-scarlet tinged buds, the wings of stipule and hooked long sepals at the blossoms, where (thin and scented) gather yellow petals and a ring of crinkled brown pistils casts its pollen to the breezes: like incense censers to waft the rose's spring in past embrasures to the stony recesses.

Sutton Hoo and the Dig

It's a fact little known beyond my family that I used to want to become an archaeologist. After reading about it intermittently for years as a child, and starting to read The Greek Stones Speak in my gap year, I attended a Classical Archaeology lecture at UBC and wanted to take courses at the Freie Universität here in Berlin. But I wasn't permitted to sign up for the tutorials officially because the schedule was full.

So in the end I attended a semester's worth of introductory lectures to Ancient History largely in the Middle East, and then did a kind of work-study thing, at the Freie Uni, but only for two days because I felt too impostor-syndrome-y.

Older students who had been at an excavation of prehistoric material elsewhere in Germany over the summer sat indoors, alongside the professor. They took a ziplock plastic baggie at a time with groups of excavated materials in them, and cleaned the bones, stones, pottery etc. with water, toothbrushes, and wooden picks. Even toothbrushes were considered a bit too abrasive, though, so we mostly had to content ourselves with the picks. Their finds were not hugely exciting and they grumbled a bit about it, joking that this or that pebble was the Philosopher's Stone. They also gossiped about all sorts of other things — for example, how one of their professors had been appalled when, in an English-language paper, a student had referred to an archaeological 'dig' instead of an 'excavation.' Or about the headache it was as a parent to wait for a bus, if one bus after another is crowded and there is no room for a child's buggy.

I spent hours on an animal bone that had over an inch of hard dry mud packed into the central cavity, and waited for the soil to soften a little from the water, a process which was barely more exciting than watching paint dry. But to be honest I still didn't finish cleaning it out before I pretty heinously put it back where I'd gotten it from, and hoped no one would notice, à la Mr. Bean. A few fragments of pale honeycombed bone also crumbled in my hand as I worked it, and so I thought I'd done enough damage.

We put the cleaned items onto wooden frames, with metal grids across them, on top of newspaper, to let them dry.

When the artifacts etc. were clean and dry, we put a swipe of transparent glue onto each one. Then, in old-fashioned ink, we wrote the numerical code that was on the plastic baggie onto each glue swipe once it had dried. (It was indeed a good surface to write on.) The professor warned us not to put on a thick layer of glue. I ignored this for an unbaked brick-red pottery sherd, only to see grains of pottery — which had survived thousands of years until I got my graceless philistine paws on it — peel off with the glue. The professor had kindly said that the codes that I'd written on a few items in my tiny script (the despair of school teachers when they had to read my homework) were "sehr akkurat"; so I hadn't messed up everything. But along with the disintegrating bone, the crumbling pottery taught me a lesson that perhaps I wasn't ready to be entrusted with handling the history of mankind yet.

I also realized a little of the gate-keeping that exists in the archaeological world. There are of course many reasons, from grave-robbery to the damage of amateur work like mine. Also, naturally, funding is hard to come by.

And that was perhaps the end of my obsession ... until I discovered the British archaeological series Time Team on YouTube a year or two ago, and bored my long-suffering but polite colleagues with my enthusiasm.

***

This afternoon T. visited as I was making three rounds of cookies. As the supply of hot, chocolatey baked goods vanished, she advised watching a TV series or a film. In the end we watched The Dig, the drama based on the 1930s excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial ship, in southeastern England.

Ralph Fiennes enters the scene as a gruff, laconic Briton who — from one of his earliest moments in the film, knocking at the front door to the disapproval of a butler, then standing by awkwardly — is conscious of his low social status in the stratified English society of the late 1930s. Self-taught, Basil Brown works as an excavator for archaeological digs, Roman and otherwise.

A rich widow with a wavy 1930s bob, an Agatha Christie-esque mansion that is all bay windows and wisteria, and clothing that alternates between flapper chic and cardigan respectability, Edith Pretty, has invited him to explore a series of earth mounds in a field on her estate.

She tells Brown, during the first discussion, that she 'has a feeling' about the largest earth mound. (Believing that the shape of the mound shows that its contents had already been looted, Brown declines to take her suggestion at first. But of course that's where the ship is buried.) The film draws heavy-handed parallels between the establishment's refusal to take Brown seriously because he is an untrained amateur from the lower classes, and Pretty's marginalization because she is a woman.

After a while the cast of archaeologist characters expands. I liked the character etc. acting in the film in general. I'm not sure if Ralph Fiennes was also aiming for an Academy Award nomination but his accent, posture, etc. were all conscientiously fitted to the role and consistently kept, and he does stand out.

As for the archaeology, I was a little appalled that the dig excavation wasn't marked off into neat squares and measured, so that each find could be photographed and recorded in context. But I'm not an expert on the evolution of historical methods of archaeology. All I know is that the method of digging a deep trench (and, apparently, neglecting to sift through the soil that's removed from an archaeological site in search of small finds that might be overlooked) is the typical magisterial methodology that was used by many early archaeologists. So the film may have gotten that right, even if a professional nowadays would shake his or her head.

What I did rightly question was that an untried young woman would be taken on at an archaeological excavation by seasoned professionals just because she was literally a lightweight. In real life Peggy Piggott already had experience when she worked at Sutton Hoo; and she went on to have an eminent, decades-long career in archaeology. Instead, Lily James is forced to play a ditsy role as the neglected young wife of a gay man who's the actual respected professional.

Also when a romantic tension is brewed between Basil Brown (who is married) and Edith Pretty just because they're of the opposite gender and inhabit the same movie plot, I wanted to hit my head on my desk. With the romance subplots I altogether had the uncomfortable feeling of prying into private business that I hate. Although the scene where a husband barges in on a bathroom only to see his own wife in the bathtub, and retreats in horror at the impropriety, is pretty funny and almost redeems it.

I felt that the tension of Edith Pretty's fear of dying and leaving her son to fend for himself, just as she and her son had already been left alone, and her son's fear and determination to find closure for her and for himself, were more absorbing subjects than the cringeworthy writerly matchmaking. The idea that a child might have wise ideas about life and death was gratifying, although of course there was a faint hint of kitsch and implausibility.

Carey Mulligan's approach to her character in general also lent interest and tension. She played her as a bit spoiled in her role as a queen of local society, posh in her diction and upbringing. At the same time, she was physically fragile and she also had an entirely different role in her private life: she was also motherly. Through it all she was aware of her vulnerable position as a woman whose father and husband had died, leaving her to represent her own interests in a world that ran roughshod over women or (in the case of the archaeological world) outsiders.

But she was let down a little by the screenwriting. The tinge of widow's desperation to find another man, leaving her to stare at her shattered dreams in a mirror when it didn't work out, seemed like a cheap stereotype. And I also felt that her love advice to Lily James's character was a little out of character.

The film did a fine job (as far as I know without having been there) of capturing the malaise of Britain when grim memories of World War I began to collide with the reality of preparations for a new war — signaled by the radio news, groups of recruits in khaki being ferried around in canvas-roofed automobiles for their training, and hordes of fighter jets flying in formation overhead — just before Hitler invaded Poland. The events end in around 1942, and the reality of air raids is signaled when Pretty is on a visit to a doctor in London.

As far as the cinematography goes, I didn't always find it appropriate. For example, the swooping camera view as Ralph Fiennes pedals his bicycle toward the mansion felt artificial; and then the handheld camera work with the haphazardly composed field of view when Brown first visits the Pretty mansion and the butler opens the door was a little meh. And I thought it was too unsubtle to mirror shots like Pretty's lonely walk down a sunken path to her husband's grave, with her walk down the trench into an Anglo-Saxon noble's grave — a meditation on death and grief across the ages, etc. Not to mention when Brown is curled in the fetal position and Pretty is also curled in the fetal position ... But the landscape looked luminous, warm fields and mists and raindrops on reeds and leafy trees ranged along the fields and meadows. And I appreciated that the flyovers of military aircraft did not look CGI'd.

The props, the farmyard where the Browns live, etc., were also pretty great. I liked the touches like Edith Pretty pouring water into an urn on her husband's grave before sticking in the roses and clearing up the petals that had fallen onto the grass — the everyday details of what people would be doing while talking, moving around, or thinking were well thought through. Although, shockingly, Robert Pretty never seems to go to school.

But I had doubts about the musical score. I found it invariably generic and too pompous: growing dramatic at the smallest touch of a shovel to the soil of Surrey, and not paying much homage to the time, place, or the subject at hand.

Anyway, after the film, I instantly Wikipedia-searched any biographical information I could lay my hands on. Perhaps due to the film and someone's resulting intention of accommodating the viewership with extra material, there's tons of gratifying detail to complete the picture.

Tech Culture and Everyday Sexism

I've finished reading Loathe at First Sight, which is packaged as a romance novel but is really a fictional look at American women in the computer gaming industry.

It's not a bad book. It reflected my own workplace, broadly speaking as a workplace in the technological sector that mainly employs younger people, 'through a funhouse mirror'. The Jira tickets, the 'deliverables' and project managers in charge of them, stand-up meetings, etc. were all familiar.

What I found less believable was that all of the heroine's projects were always ready on time; this is the exception rather than the norm in my experience. That said, I've only worked at one technological company so my ability to compare and generalize is tightly limited.

But as a romance the book rather failed, considering that what the leads know of each other is as much as someone could find out in a 10-minute conversation.

And from a psychological perspective I would say that it's frightening if people in their late twenties — as the main characters in the book are — still have such nuance-free views on personal relationships and professional behavioral standards.

(Note: I've been reading so many books lately that this one has faded in my memory a bit; sorry if I get any facts wrong.)

***

I'm not sure if the book is just written for teenagers and so it makes sense that adults think like high-schoolers, or if the book reflects the culture of the Pacific Northwest.

(I seem to remember that the book is set in Seattle, which I've never been to but is of course not that far away from Victoria and Vancouver.)

Crossroads in January

Work is a never-ending fountain of drama lately, and just as one spring bubbles down, another takes its place. Hopefully all of this is vague enough to preserve the anonymity and credit of the institution for which I work.

I said candidly in the team leaders' meeting on Monday that I felt that we needed to address what happened during Black Friday 2020, with regard to assigning new projects to teams that need to concentrate on meeting our old and new clients' expectations. There was agreement and so the idea was to ask for a 'retrospective' meeting run according to Agile principles, with the team leaders and management. Then we could figure out what to do differently next time. My suspicion is that management will not want a retrospective, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, I felt at last that I'd conscientiously and thoroughly thought everything through. I could pause the hamster wheel of thought, and no longer wake up in the night and not be able to go back to sleep, no longer stay awake until 4 a.m. because I was too worried. I'd just need to tell myself that I'd been over all of these problems and have come up with a few solutions and explanations. This week I've finally begun exercising regularly again, too.

So I thought that I might finally settle down. I had, for a while. But ever since my last 1-on-1 meeting with the now-CEO and a human resources colleague, I'd been sleeping badly because he didn't answer my question if there's a plan to coordinate task assignments during Black Friday 2021 so that my team is safe from Aug. 15th to Dec. 1st. He said that there were plans to have a steering committee, but was vague about what its aims would be.

... Then in a new meeting on Thursday — that's where the next round of drama began. This time it did not involve my team directly, so I'm temporarily cheerful. Besides I'd asked colleagues for 'spoilers' because I had no idea what the meeting was about when it was put on my calendar and I didn't want to be in suspense. After the meeting I started randomly chuckling for the rest of the day whenever I remembered that the CEO had said that I'd 'pushed for' the new teams that have in fact been making me miserable for months; T. (who was also in the meeting) also said that she found that part amusing. Presumably he meant 'pushed forward,' because I have participated in the planning for those new teams?

But hearing how exhausted and disillusioned other team leaders are was saddening. I remembered them being bouncy and resilient and calm, two months ago; but today either they were just having a bad day or there was a major metamorphosis. We talked about their perspective today; and by the evening I was so wound up and anxious that for the first part of my vocal coaching lesson after work, my coach just worked on restoring me to a halfway calm state again. But on the whole this one is a fight I can sit out; I've just thought of a few methods and techniques to try to create positive change in my own sphere of influence.

But, in general terms: If being in the company is ruining my health and I've lost faith in the leadership, I need to face up to what is happening to me and keep asking if it's worth the cost. But it's been so good to me in the past and of course I adore the colleagues ...

What I'm thinking of is gathering more technical skills that are still useful to me now, but also helpful elsewhere. Also, learning data science for journalism, and beginning to build up my competence in a new but semi-related direction.

Vienna New Year's Concert 2021

This year I was going to be less satirical about the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert. Maybe it is because I've grown up and finally appreciate the work that goes into the mini-films that accompany the Philharmonic's music. Or maybe it is because during a coronavirus lockdown I am desperate 1) for an event, 2) for armchair travel. But in the end I think I have relapsed to old habits.

The first glimpse of the orchestra on the stage of the Wiener Kunstverein, the hall itself vast ranks of empty benches, was a shock. Not wearing any masks, not noticeably distanced from each other, I was speculating 1) whether they'd just decided to infect each other, or 2) whether the musicians had been quarantined from the sight of family and friends or confined to a large and precarious 'bubble' like professional athletes, for the past two weeks. Their happy air hinted at a lighter regimen of corona testing instead.

[After that concert Mama was channel-surfing when we spotted another, really distanced concert. Chairs in regimented formation were dispersed across the stage and beyond the stage. A menacing army of masked singers was standing to attention and barking forth in post-apocalyptic form. A few extra singers, looking frankly like Hitchcock's birds, perched up in the loges in black gowns, standing in 3/4 profile for some reason. Everyone had a tortured expression on their faces, in service of the passion of the music perhaps or in general woe. I then felt better about the lack of masks in Vienna — from an aesthetic perspective.]

When the music began, conductor Riccardo Muti — he's said he trusts the Vienna Philharmonic to run themselves, but I suspect that the presence of an audience usually inspires him to greater efforts — looked almost bored at the podium. Then he decided to infuse showmanship here and there, hopping up and down once in a way that impressed me considering he's no longer twenty, and then apparently ducking underneath his music stand to look for cobwebs. But he seemed never to stop feeling weird when he turned away from the musicians and bowed toward an imaginary audience/a single cameraman.

Moving on from corona, I had feminist doubts about part of the way the orchestra was presented. In my view, the surface differences between the female and male musicians could barely have been emphasized more: heavy eyeshadow, the blush on one lady that you can spot from fifty yards, false eyelashes, and ostentatiously styled hair. Whereas a few men displayed heartening symptoms of a 'corona haircut' in the uneven strands draping the napes of their necks, etc. Perhaps they were permitted to concentrate on the music. If it was the women's own choice I sincerely apologize and of course television make-up is never subtle; but I could not imagine focusing on music with that much going on in my face.

The flowers were unusually prolific in the concert hall this year: roses, lilies, carnations, orchids, etc., and unfortunately the anthuriums for which I will uninventively recycle the term 'butt-ugly.' This year the anthuriums were largely pale green, floating around the flower arrangements like lily pads in a garden pond, and pale pink; the pale pink ones were worse and their artificial bubblegum shine highly suggested plumbing cleaning fluid and u-bend pipes to me. Later on, two taxidermied birds were propped in the blossoms. The second one, a nice little yellow bird, was fine; but the first, a larger concoction which looked like a parrot that had been stuffed underneath a couch cushion and had reemerged with a vague tousled stump instead of an identifiable head, was a little disconcerting.

This year there was less Strauss music than usual, I felt, with Franz von Suppé, Carl Zeller, Carl Millöcker and Klaus Komzák compositions mixed in. It had less energy in the first half of the concert, more energy in the second half; I think what also really helped is that the musicians made a little noise at the end of pieces in the second half by tapping their music stands to applaud soloists — the percussionist who handled the cuckoo box and the bird whistle, the harpist, etc. It was less incredibly creepy than the faceless applause that was streamed in from live volunteer listeners. The musicians had to stand and accept this applause at length with pained grins as they stared at the empty auditorium; it felt mechanical and to be honest rather dehumanizing.

***

During the intermission, there was of course the film that annually celebrates Austrian tourist destinations with excerpts of chamber music. This time it celebrated a centenary of the Burgenland state in Austria.

As the start year was 1921, we were led around the Burgenland landscape by a young man who wore early 20th-century motoring breeches, a jacket and goggles as he conducted a dazzlingly clean motorcar (they must have wiped down the windshield between takes to get rid of the bugs and dirt) through the leafy green forests and hilly fields.

Independently, the camera showed gleaming white plastered churches and further landscapes like fields of sunflowers that could barely have been filmed in a cheesier way.

The time setting was a little uncanny: 1921 was of course soon after World War I and I couldn't help thinking that war amputees, shell-shock and poverty would have been a more frequent sight in Austria at the time.

As part of the 'plot,' the young man (it turns out based on the official notes that he is supposed to be an American GI tasked with drawing the new borders between Austria's Burgenland and Hungarian territory according to the peace agreement) would peer through telescopes embedded in land surveyor's equipment, and make stops to photograph farms where peasantry chopped wood for kindling, etc., in traditional shirts and dirndls. This celebration of rural customs was unluckily a little reminiscent of 1920s and 30s homeland propaganda. Anyway, the young man would group together the peasants in doubtful lighting conditions, lift another period camera that must have been kindly loaned to the production crew by a museum, and then make another haphazardly composed photo.

(I might sound needlessly mean by talking about the photo composition, but one thing I've noticed about early black-and-white photography is that there was an artistic ethos to it, where the photographer always wanted the proportions to be accurate in a way that reflects traditional painting and sketching, more than photography as an independent medium. For example, I think — and, yes, this is a bit of a 'hot take' — that Ansel Adams is generally more an Expressionist painter on film than someone who took photographs as photographs. So the sloppy composition of the film's amateur photographer felt like a historical anachronism that I'm willing to be pedantic about.)

Maybe the film production had qualms of their own re. superficial echoes of Nazi propaganda. When the camera glided away to show a crew of five uniformed men trooping up a tower for a ceremony that involved swinging a large gilded white flag from the top (and no I still don't know what that was about), green boughs and red roses were thoughtfully taped to the barrels of their rifles to show that they came in peace.

Anyway, then the film paid tribute to Franz Liszt, who lived in the Burgenland. A trio of a pianist (a lady who wore a bright red gown to keep her apart from the male musicians who were clad in standard, more nondescript professional concert attire ... honestly), a cellist, and a violinist sat or stood on the green sward beside a bland pedestal with an oversized bronze bust of Liszt on top that looked it might fall over at any moment because it was so top-heavy. The music itself was a little... pounding, but that's just Liszt. Haydn's trio that was turned into the melody of the German national anthem, played by a different group of colleagues earlier in the intermission, was a little friendlier.

Then the film ended with a trio on a flat tourist boat on an empty lake, the sun setting in the background.

These landscape concerts always require me to cross my fingers, clap my hands and very strongly believe that a) the instruments are perfectly safe from harm, and b) that the acoustics are remotely like the pre-recorded ones we're hearing.

On the boat I imagine there must have been a loud flapping noise from the ship's flags, a loud roaring noise from the motor and a loud blustering noise from the wind.

Again, I stewed a bit because of my feminist convictions. The lady musician was given a powder-blue blazer that matched the colour of the boat (why?), while the gentlemen as I recall wore regular, monochrome suits. Likely I'm over-interpreting, but this arrangement where the gentleman is the visual stem and the lady is the visual flower is a gendered trope I'd expect more from an André Rieu concert where feminism is a faraway evil banished from this technicolour paradise. (Note: I do not actually have an idea of Rieu's stances on gender issues.) It's true the violinist looked fine enough with the adventure. If the women are going to look differently from how professionals in the Vienna Philharmonic usually look, though, the men should also be wearing crimson apparel or pastel blazers. If that's not going to happen, the film production crew should think why that doesn't make sense to them.

***

Later, in the second half, the dancers appeared. This year the costumes were by Christian Lacroix, acid-colored ensembles that were ruched for the larger dance, a little raunchy but still elegant, cannily adapted the 1920s aesthetic even if Lacroix himself is more 1980s. The ballet dancers cavorted in pointe shoes across closely cropped lawns and gravel paths, which made me shudder; it might be just because I do beginner's ballet but it seems like a messy and risky type of ground to dance on. This year I liked the choreography, however, and the acting.

There were two dances, of course, to illustrate different compositions on the musical programme. One was the more classic dance at the Gartenpalais Liechtenstein in Vienna. Then there was another dance in an opulent 1900s bank/department store house designed by Adolf Loos* with mirrors and wooden panelling: picture a little Edouard Manet and Auguste Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec mixed with a little Alphonse Mucha, and then you have it. The dance had influences of tango in it, the shoes had heels, and the dancers' costumes were drop-waisted and flapperish. Three women flirted with a man and two danced along with each other, and that was the plot; and one woman ended up being chosen while the other two philosophically shrugged their shoulders, and that was it. I was, for once, not offended.

* The Wikipedia article amusingly narrates that "It was said that Emperor Franz Joseph had not only avoided passing next to Looshaus for the rest of his life by using the exit at the Michaelerplatz, but also had to leave the windows of the Hofburg nailed so that he did not have to see the 'hideous' house anymore."

Many arabesques, leaps and pirouettes were performed in risky-looking places. For example, right at a glass platform with a stately carriage in the Gartenpalais. (I thought this was for the Kaiserwaltz, where aside from mustache-heavy portraits of 19th and 20th century Emperors and the burlesque red and gold furnishings of a formal room, we were also treated to opulent portraits of Empress Sissi. But since the Gartenpalais celebrates the royal family of Liechtenstein instead, I must be wrong and I'm probably thinking of images from that were screened without any dancing, later on.) Or, in the 1900s house dance, the dancers were swinging their legs right at thin white freestanding joists in a low roof, or the mirrors and gilt railings ... I almost literally had my hands glued to my cheeks like the scream emoji.

The 1900s house perils recalled the James Bond film The Living Daylights. Specifically, the scene where the American arms dealer who has an obsession with toy soldier battles has a final showdown with Bond in a roomful of glass cases and sculptures. But nobody whistled "Rule Britannia," there were no glass shards or blood spatters, and the dancers were all safe in the end.

***

While a representative of the orchestra also spoke earlier (in German and in English) to offer the music as an emblem of hope, the conductor Riccardo Muti also took the opportunity to address the heads of state who like watching the concert. He said that there was medicine for the body, but also medicine for the mind; music is medicine for the mind. He hoped that governments would recognize that culture — and I was glad that here he was speaking of all forms of music and other culture, not the Vienna Philharmonic or classical music narrowly — is a primary need. I thought it was a brave and helpful message. Then came the Prosit Neujahr! greeting, and the Blue Danube Waltz encore, as it does every year. And then the Radetzky March...

My annual modus operandi for the Radetzky March in the New Year's Concert programme is to drag a blanket or hoodie over my head, dramatically moaning in horror and anguish at this darned March, as one or two family member laugh with a startling lack of empathy.

But this time I was wondering how the concert organizers would handle the clapping that the audience usually contributes to the piece, which is the part I detest most. So I stayed unblanketed, and was rewarded because... This year there was no clapping! (Well, all right, there was clapping from two of my brothers and Mama, but not. from. me.)

At last, after seventeen years of dedicated dislike — and of course I am a misanthrope for preferring the silence of humans there — I almost liked that encore.

***

Disclaimer: I've undoubtedly mixed up many details. Official, but German-language, details of the concert are here:

"Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker 2021: ORF überträgt zum 63. Mal live im TV – erstmals ohne Saalpublikum" [ORF]

"„Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker 2021“ live in ORF 2 und Ö1" [ORF]

"Neujahrskonzert 2021 mit Riccardo Muti" [Wiener Philharmoniker]

Thoughts After an Inception Film Night

When I'd woken up in the morning, I stumbled into the kitchen to see a resplendent masterpiece by J.: it is his annual gingerbread house. This year it is a stave church made of gingerbread walls, cappuccino chocolate sticks as the roof poles, Mikado chocolate-dipped biscuit sticks as the roof joists, and thin slices of candied ginger and Turkish delight as the roof tiles. Dark cranberries and paler candied fruits have been added to brighten the colour scheme, and he has also sprinkled coconut for snow and crumbled gingerbread for a path to the front door. It took him several days to make it. Supportive sister that I am, I looked at his intricate architectural plans sketched on a piece of baking paper and at the delicate process of making things stay in place using the egg-white-and-icing-sugar frosting; and I kept inwardly thinking, 'It'll never work!' It was wrong of me!

*

In the evening, my work team had its holiday event.

The coordination fell into place with surprising success.

We had all received a vegetarian snack box to eat while watching the film. —  (Except, sadly, our Californian colleague. She had received a kind special exemption from the Finance department, and an office manager and I had collaborated to find and send an American snack parcel on behalf of the company 'to arrive from December 17 to 22.' ... But she didn't get it in time.) — It had a bottle of Austrian red wine, a carton of tea bags made of an Ayurvedic blend, a chocolate-covered almond paste bar, chocolate-covered freeze-dried Amaretto cherries, a coconut bar, chocolate-coated almonds, and an orangey chocolate chip cookie. I didn't open it until just before the film, and it was so lovely to have the surprise.

As for the film itself: we surprisingly settled which one to watch in ~30 seconds, at least a week ago, as M. suggested Inception and no one had strong objections.

And everyone was able to attend, our Californian colleague and our shyest teammates and a colleague who recently transferred to another team included, which was a great pleasure.

***

A colleague who has gone to film school theorizes that Inception is based on jottings in an ideas journal that you are encouraged to fill out when you study to be a director. The scenes were all lovingly put together but a jumble: ideas that the director was passionate about but that weren't terribly coherent as a whole, and patched together by the excuse that these are all dreams anyway.

To be brutal, I hadn't made it into the film five minutes before I thought that it was incredibly self-indulgent.

Leonardo di Caprio had his moments of good acting (an accolade because I am a Caprio-skeptic). I also 'believed' Michael Caine as a professor and Elliot Page as a brainy student. But I felt that none of the characters had a personality that sticks in one's mind after the film is over. The psychology was unrealistic and underdeveloped. And wherever I looked I saw a famous actor (Ken Watanabe, Lukas Haas, Marion Cotillard) and it always took me a few minutes to get past it.

Altogether to me, the film was aesthetically handled like a comic book. Really quick cuts between scenes just like frames in a comic book; and execution and mood and drama, and a creative satisfaction on the part of the artist, mattered most. Exaggerated reactions defined the characterization (e.g. a dramatic eyebrow raise where a look of mild confusion would be a normal reaction, or a straightforward murderous glare to express hatred). The clothing badly pinpointed any kind of timeframe or continuity: it would shift between a grey shirt without a black blazer, grey shirt with a black blazer, maroon shirt, etc..

In my view this treatment would have been more appropriate for a superhero movie or another comic book or graphic novel adaptation.

And altogether I felt that the film was intended to be about deep themes but it wasn't; it really was just an exercise in transferring mental images to film.

The ideal world that di Caprio's and Cotillard's characters were in was creepy and I could not understand why one would be nostalgic about it. And I felt that a few home videos and a photo album or two would have been a fine replacement for eternal reminders of a lost beloved. So the film failed as an embodiment of, or meditation on, nostalgia in my point of view.

If it was supposed to be a metaphor for an addiction to computer games, book series, television, or comic books, or whatever, then that's not really what came across.

I also didn't think that the way the children were depicted was compelling. In reality a parent would be worrying about all kinds of details (their diet, if they're getting along, etc. etc.) if they were suddenly separated from a child. And the children would have specific needs and personalities. Instead, we just got generic photo studio portraits of towheaded little angels gambolling about. For realism, the screenwriter(s) should also have lined up child therapists by the end of the film to help them cope with the sudden disappearances of both parents. The 'Eh... They'll sort it out' approach to childhood psychological development adopted instead by the screenwriter(s) made me want to bang my head against a desk.

In the end I felt that the children were McGuffins.

The 'searching for the children' aspect of the film might be logical to people whose children are raised by nannies, governesses, boarding schools, or their other parent. But I think it is emblematic of the emotional immaturity and navel-gazing quality of the film that parenthood is so unconvincingly portrayed. Although to be honest I am just judging by the way my siblings and I were raised, so 'your mileage may vary.'

Then there were a few other logical contradictions:

For one thing, if we're working with dreams: are they ever as clear-cut and precise as the scenes in this film? I'd say that they're far more often vague and swimmy like a Salvador Dali painting. There was so much creative work done on subconsciousness and dreams in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Spellbound with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman, for example — that this glib version is a big letdown.

For another: I also complained to the team when a van drove off a bridge. The van was properly nosediving off a bridge at first, 'properly' because of course the engine is toward the front of the van and is the heaviest part. Then — and this is what I object to — suddenly it flipped upside down and parallel to the water before sinking. But maybe I just fail to appreciate dream physics.

In the end, a high school English teacher whom my sister T. and I both appreciated taking classes from in Canada said many years ago that 'books need to be real, even if they are about dragons.' Let's apply the same standard to films. I do very much appreciate the special effects in Inception, which are cleanly and finely executed, and I guess they do pay respect to reality because the director recognized that they needed to be pretty convincing. But otherwise, by this metric, Inception has very little to say.

*

In any case, the film night was so nice that we hope to have it again. Next time we'll order pizza. And next time I hopefully won't write such an ungrateful critique!

A Rambly Look at the Post-Black Friday, Pre-Christmas Situation

I'm still trying to fight my way out of the mists of the Black Friday season. Things are fine again in terms of workload, but as I was complaining to Mama and the siblings today, it still feels a bit like my self-confidence was doused in gasoline and set on fire.

Even as the team is heartwarmingly kind and friendly and hardworking as ever, I feel like I have messed everything up as a team leader. And whenever I feel like (on top of things I actually feel guilty for) I'm being blamed for additional things that are neither my fault nor my responsibility, then I do feel like it's my responsibility to bring other people to a point where they feel willing and able and eager to tackle these problems.

Besides I've been doing a ton of 'meddling' lately. The impression dawns that these things are often something that should be done by the HR team instead. It's also an unfair world: Some good intentions and a little work mixed with a boatload of tact gain far more gratitude and goodwill than a boatload of good intentions and tons of work mixed with little tact. And I don't want to get more credit for the former than other colleagues get for the latter.

It often feels like having tact is like a sneaky superpower. But I think simple rules do great good even if one doesn't intuit why they're needed. (Whereas intuition hasn't been a problem for me lately: the tendencies toward empathizing with others have become creepily intense to the point that I need to check that I'm not overstepping.) For example: There's nothing people love more than having most of the work prepared whenever they're asked to implement a new idea, and then they can just add finishing touches and leap ahead. (Besides, I think that the best proof that I genuinely believe in an idea is that I'm willing to try it myself; and I like the principle that Papa cited that one should never ask e.g. employees to do what one isn't able and willing to do.) So that's what I try. But instead, a lot of colleagues have great ideas and then dump the work needed to put them into practice onto the person who is benefited by them — unaware that this is likely going to tick off the beneficiary, no matter how pure and helpful the intention is. The beneficiary is quietly working along and then they're being 'helped' by being given more work; the natural instinct is to think indignantly, 'What?!'

It often worries me that a situation where people could easily get along, turns into a butting of heads. And sometimes observing workplace interactions is like watching a collision between two cars in slow motion...

St. Nicholas Morning and Bible-Thumping

Today we celebrated St. Nicholas Day surprisingly well, considering that I'd completely forgotten about it while the shops were still open yesterday.

The table was set with a new saffron-yellow tablecloth, a candle in the centre, and new placemats where needed. We had little saucers for our food, dark brown to go with the faintly 70s colour scheme, and I put out the flower-sprinkled Gmunden tea cups for the traditional weekend morning coffees.

Mama cycled off to the bakery (the one with the nicest people in Berlin) and fetched croissants, Schrippen, and so on. When she returned, T. was just rolling along the street toward us to join us for breakfast.

Fortunately we had general Advent-time supplies left in the pantry. So for breakfast we had plates of fondant and gummy stars, hearts, circles and squares; Printen bars with dark candied sugar and an almond slice in the centre; Spekulatius, in the traditional windmill shape; Zimtsterne; marzipan 'potatoes'; and mandarin oranges. There were three chocolate St. Nicholases that we divided amongst ourselves. Ge. heated milk and whisked it, then poured us all cups of warm café au lait.

A little blasphemously, perhaps, I put Barack Obama's new memoir on the table, because I'd just bought the hardcover paper version at Dussmann yesterday, and it is almost like a St. Nicholas present to us all.

(Due to coronavirus safety measures, a long line of people led from the entrance of Dussmann around the side of the building, and shoppers were being let in gradually by a bouncer. Neither Mama, who had come along with me to look for a Latin grammar to help with her university studies, nor I, wanted to keep the people who arrived after us waiting. So we browsed very swiftly. But of course from a bookseller's perspective she was delighted to see the interest in a bookshop.)

After the meal, T. tried to set up Steam on Mama's laptop, so that Mama could play Age of Empires as a multiplayer game. I've liked playing Age of Empires, too, but it's a 'time-suck' for me and so — like manga and animé — I've decided that it's best to avoid adding it to my list of guilty pleasures for now.

*

My plans for the rest of the day are to listen to audiobooks and maybe begin reading A Promised Land. A Hundred Years of Solitude, Don Quijote de la Mancha and a few other books that I've started in paper form are also waiting for me...

I've already played Christmas songs on the piano, including St. Nicholas songs ("Lasst uns froh und munter sein") because the lyrics are necessarily only relevant for a brief window of time; and perhaps that has filled the musical quota.

A colleague passed on a link to a petition about the Rummelsburger Bucht, a bay on the Spree River here in Berlin that is being redeveloped, and I might do more research about it today.

Then I might take up my art supplies and do a bit of drawing. An HR colleague has commissioned me to make illustrations for the electronic thank-you cards that we use in the company, if I have time and without setting a hard deadline.

Perhaps I'll also do my half hour of daily exercise again; the programme has lagged lately because (probably in a reaction to the high-pressure achievements of the pre-Black Friday season) I feel weary.

Then there are letters that my father wrote in the early 1970s. I don't know if it's good for me to read them or not. They are excellent biographical material, but I don't really like myself for feeling so much self-pity over the last few months for not having Papa around any more.

I need to appreciate the good, feel grateful for having had a father whom one can miss so badly, and keep remembering that he died quickly and on his own terms, so that from his perspective it ended as well as one could expect. During the first months when he died, I felt that I need to honour his memory by taking things well. Inwardly I'm still throwing a few howling tantrums; and I might not be crying in my room every day as I did for a few weeks, but it's undoubtedly a life-changing experience.

***

In the meanwhile, Mama and I got out a stack of Bibles and, for the first time in years, we looked up the Vatican's suggested readings for today. It was nostalgic because when Papa was alive, every now and then Papa, Mama and I would feel more 'Catholic' than usual and do the same thing, in 2017 or earlier. Generally, the Bible being what it is, some of the readings would leave me thinking 'What the hell did I just read?'.

It feels awkward to read the Bible out loud even when the readings are more sympathetic, and I don't manage to do so in a natural way. I don't believe that everything I'm reading is right, and it sometimes feels like I sound like a bigoted Bible-thumper in a Hollywood western. It's also a little overawing to read an old text that has been processed by millions of people over thousands of years.

A Bulletin for St. Martin's Day

It is growing very November-y, as cold seeps in through the windows, the leaves remaining on the oak trees grow brown, and a chilly, hazy mist descends whenever the sun is not shining through the clouds.

Today it was St. Martin's Day, and we had an anti-coronavirus-measure-friendly celebration:

Mama had prepared goulasch soup, and then cut leafy lettuce and radicchio into fine strips for a salad and made a vinaigrette to go with it. In the living room, we had bowls and dishes of faded-green-and-red Boskop apples, colourful oranges and clementines and mandarin oranges, peanuts and hazelnuts in the shell, Pfeffernüsse and Marzipankartoffeln, Lebkuchenherzen and Spekulatius. It was really nice even to work in the living room earlier in the day, with the cinnamon fragrance of the Spekulatius making the atmosphere very warm and homey. Then J. stood at the stove and patiently prepared 2 kilos of flour's worth of Pöfferkes, and sprinkled icing sugar over them when they had finished deep-frying.

Then T. visited us in the early evening. When T. had cycled home again with a small supply of leftover Pöfferkes, and we were just finishing watching the Tagesschau evening news, uncle M. arrived.

I'm afraid I've eaten so much that it's wiser to put off the customary half-hour of evening exercise — which is fortunately happening more often again, as the work schedule has unexpectedly relaxed this week — for another day.

***

"Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket" (1875)
by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
via Wikimedia Commons
currently part of a special exhibition on Belgian symbolist painters
in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

A Change of Pace in the U.S.

Earlier this evening I did what I'd done fifty times or more this past week: refreshing the main page of the New York Times hoping that the bar of electoral college seats for Joe Biden would pass the threshold of 270 required to win the U.S. presidential election.

Much to my surprise, enough votes had been counted in Pennsylvania (and soon thereafter in Nevada) to be able to declare that Biden and Kamala Harris had won.

Of course I was greatly amused to read that Trump had tweeted within the past hour or so that he had 'WON, BY A LOT!!'. This was an attitude I'd rarely seen since I stopped playing board games or sports with hyper-competitive children who invented their own rules as they went along. But for once I felt that playing golf was the most constructive thing he could have been doing at the time. In the meantime it was edifying to watch videos of streets with cheering, whistling and honking cars in New York City.

Due to my nerdy instincts I played Beethoven's variations on "God save the King" on the piano from start to finish for the first time, because the melody is the same as "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."  (These variations are definitely not his finest compositional achievement, by the way.)

There was tangible relief on the Tagesschau evening news here in Germany, both correspondents' smiling faces betraying them a bit and only the anchor keeping her composure. Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel and Frank-Walter Steinmeier of course have all said they were looking forward to the Biden presidency, and I'd really love to have been a fly on the wall to hear what they said in private.

It is still peculiar to think back to all the US elections I remember. Bill Clinton's presidency was so full of animus at the time of the 2000 election because of the Lewinsky scandal that George W. Bush's election seemed inevitable. That intelligence, independent thinking and skill would be in such short supply in future, and that a president of greater moral turpitude would be greeted by the Bible-thumping establishment fifteen years later, was not clear to me. Then, of course, John Kerry's loss was pretty inevitable but a strong blow nonetheless, one I absorbed on a Canadian university campus with lots of other disappointed students and professors and (per email correspondence) family. Followed by the moral purity (in a way) of Barack Obama's decency, the experience of seeing him speak in person at the Siegessäule in Berlin after going through Secret Service security portals, and the televised sight of the Bushes lifting off from Washington D.C. in a helicopter and Cheney also sliding into the historical record. Then the shocking blow of Donald Trump's election when Hillary Clinton's election seemed almost inevitable.

This time I didn't feel like singing "Ding, dong, the witch is dead" as I did 'in honour' of G.W. Bush's leaving the White House. But I think that's also because there was better, stronger opposition to the absurdities of the Trump administration. I feel that once the person is gone, the bad policy will follow suit; and the good thing about a single presidential term is that the spirit of wrongdoing doesn't have time to settle in lastingly. So there was far more to 'kick out' after the Bush administration; and I still think it paved the way for the Trump administration to a great degree, e.g. because the manipulative role of the polemical rightwing media was embraced as part of the more 'respectable' political establishment.

Besides, the important point of this election was not the win or loss. It was about finding a president who is going to be actively better for all voters. Biden won't negligently kill thousands of his citizens per purposefully bad coronavirus policy. Biden won't shrug at paid contracts to kill his soldiers (in Afghanistan) and at a Washington Post columnist's death (Jamal Khashoggi's) and at the torture of an American citizen until he was brain-dead (Otto Warmbier) in North Korea.

What I really hope is that wise coronavirus policy in the US will also lead to a lessening of the pandemic's effects internationally. Of course this would be more on the economic than the medical front, since US citizens have been forbidden from flying to many countries anyway, and so I presume most contagion is not taking place across the US's borders.

Lastly, I suspect that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be able to speak to the President of Japan without harassing him for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

Now I'm interested to see what President Biden will do in the first 100 days in office.

***

As for work, the workload is still high but the 'political' tension has decreased. My team has been given as much time as we need to take care of Black Friday work and do solid planning, and I feel that our autonomy is respected more.

But I need to have a person-to-person talk with a colleague in the extended management board, I think, to make sure that the board begins consulting more people before implementing plans.

Much as I appreciate how much colleagues often like and watch out for me, I'm not entirely sure sometimes why this same kindness isn't extended to other colleagues as well. And even if he's caught on to the fact that I have feelings, I'm not sure if he's caught on to the fact that e.g. the rest of my team has them too.

Anyway, a second conversation with the manager took a huge burden off my mind and has calmed me down considerably, as it has convinced me that my team is appreciated and safe.

I've also been asked to help give input for a mental health plan for the company. I intended to set aside time to filter through the material that the HR team has gathered, this weekend. But I am not a huge fan of advising people on how to deal with their mental health if 1. I'm a little hypocritical if I pretend I know the answers; and 2. I am not a qualified psychologist. I've gotten so much medically inadvisable advice over the years about how to lose weight, what healthy nutrition is (e.g. that a weight loss trick is surviving on soup made from bouillon powder ....), and so on and so forth, that amateur tinkering in anything medical horrifies me.

(Besides I am too conservative to approve of New Age methods, [Edit: or, rather, I'm not well-informed about them and perhaps I struggle with being reminded how much any form of spirituality is 'choose your own adventure' rather than easily verifiable] but these might really help others. Having read that meditation has been proven to help veteran soldiers deal with post-traumatic stress disorder has given me a healthy respect for it; but I really dislike any implication that one regimen can fix one's life or that this is even desirable. It might be trivial of me, but I don't really like that we are in a secular world where organized religion is seen as obsolete, but then replaced with other belief systems that in some ways have similar forms and aims. This feeling that we must live and think correctly or else we deserve the ills that fall upon us. What if we live correctly and we still have bad things happen to us? what if there is suffering that nobody deserves?

I like the idea that thinking carefully of the happiness of others and of one's own ethical standards is a good 'pathfinder' in life, but hopefully I do not believe that this is a way to guarantee my own happiness. And I don't think there is a bulletproof way to remain healthy (or that morality should be applied to one's own health), although one's chances can be improved. Seeing people whom I am fond of, losing their grasp on reality and dying as pale shadows of themselves, through no fault of their own, has convinced me of this.)

What I didn't mention is that there were structural causes of stress, one of which is unanticipated changes at the busiest time of year. But I did ask the manager if there would be any more changes before 2021. (Because I want to be mentally prepared.) And he kindly reeled off three developments that we could expect, the third of which was secret. Because one of the non-secret ones was sad and now everyone knows it anyway, and of the other two I couldn't remember which one was secret, I haven't blabbed.

A Jeremiad about the Workplace

I haven't felt much like writing lately. I have been so tremendously miserable at work, and so much of my time is spent on work, that it feels impossible to write anything that anyone would enjoy reading, or that I'd actually enjoy looking back on in two years.

To give a summary:

We have ~14 new clients to 'integrate' and 200+ clients for whom we need to maintain service. In addition, our manpower is low.

One person is leaving the team and another person's role is changing. We are having trouble hiring new people, because the applicants' technical abilities or motivation don't seem high, except in one case, or they don't appear to know what they're really applying for. I can't in all fairness hire people who will suffer and wilt away in the hellhole of my team's work.

We did find one applicant we were enthusiastic about, but I was told immediately after the interview that we were only supposed to hire one new person. I'd thought it had been agreed that we needed two people and I'd been so happy that we could say yes to more than one applicant. I wrote a detailed letter explaining the team's workload to the CEO and manager, and they promptly and kindly agreed to let us hire a second person.

Then we sent the hiring offer to the first applicant. As we were finalizing the salary details, I was told that a colleague (not the CEO or manager) had said that we should only hire this applicant on a freelance basis. Much of our team's work would soon be automated anyway. [Note: I have not been told which task would be automated, nor how the data quality would be kept at a high standard, nor how much time this would save. The team that might do the automation doesn't have available resources. ... And I was told by a fellow team leader just a week or two earlier that I was being paranoid for saying that my team would soon be downsized.] (Fortunately that person was persuaded to change their mind and the person will be hired for a better contract.)

I was so furious at this that, to be honest, I have put off contacting that person about an unrelated topic. I don't want to be nice to them until I've reached the stage of forgiveness where it would be genuine-nice instead of fake-nice.

In the meantime, my team is overworked. For the first time I've started asking the team to self-assess on a scale of 0 to 10 how anxious they are, and there are lots of 5s and 7s.

Today they were touchingly helping each other out with some of their tasks with the last vestiges of their own strength.

In addition to this, I've been appalled by the Mass Exodus in other parts of the company. My direct supervisor is leaving the company, one funny data scientist colleague has left the company this week (abruptly for me, but I think it was expected to those in her team), and a graphic designer who is one of the longest-serving colleagues is also departing.

Then I heard at second hand that the CEO thinks that our team works hard, but has sloppy data quality standards.

In addition to this, I was told that our team needs to be restructured, and that the planning needs to be done by January 1st. This is the peak season and colleagues will be on holiday in December.

***

The news that the team would be restructured came out abruptly on Thursday the 15th.

In the management level, the idea of taking the four teams that specialize in Front End, Quality Assurance, etc. and remixing them into multi-specialized/cross-functional teams had been floating around for months, it seems. It was suggested by another team leader who does work directly with my team, but not that much. Then a colleague in one of the current mono-specialized teams — who has also been hugely overworked — seized on the idea in a conversation with the CEO in the first week of October, and thought it would be the solution to all their team's Black Friday season problems. Another colleague who also leads a group agreed that it might be a good idea.

Two weeks ago, I talked with the colleague who first suggested the idea. I mentioned that people were leaving my team, and the colleague was worried that it would affect their plan to work my team into the new groups. I said drily 'Oh, great. That'll really help with the knowledge-sharing,' and was cautiously pessimistic and sarcastically upbeat, but figured that due to the great reworking of our company, our being split up was inevitable. The person felt it was an idea that might be put forward soon by management and talked over with the team.

But I almost burst into tears afterward. It was so odd that these plans were being discussed without consulting me or my teammates. Did people think I was too incompetent? too stupid? to have valid ideas to offer? Then I did write to the person saying that although I knew that was not his intention by any means, I felt really disrespected at not having been consulted. And I asked if it was fine to let my team know about it at once, so that the team would not feel as I was feeling. The person offered to speak to management to get permission for me to discuss it, which I thought was a very open and principled way of going about it.

For a day I heard nothing. Then I received an email on Friday evening from the CEO saying, à propos of nothing, that I should appoint people from my team to join new teams that would handle all incoming clients. And at that point I knew this would all go to hell.

I sent an email back — @ing everyone in the email chain to let them all know that a massive communication fail was happening because, yes, I was a little mad — saying that I couldn't give a good opinion unless I had a better idea what the teams would be composed of and what their aim would be.

The team leader who loved the idea explained that events had moved too quickly to consult me in time, and they apologized. They also laid out the composition of the teams, to make it a bit clearer what exactly would be happening: the idea was that there would be one person from my team in each new team, 4 people in total, 1 person from QA, 2 people from their team, etc.

This plan clearly showed to me that practical problems hadn't been thought of. We have 14 clients in the team's pipeline now, as I mentioned earlier. A few people in the team have explained that they can only focus on one client at a time and still do a painstaking, accurate job. Which means that if we cut down the number who work with new clients to 4 people, they could only address an average of 2 clients each. What about the 6 clients for whom we wouldn't have time? What if someone goes on holiday or can't work on a client for other reasons?

On Monday, the CEO talked with the team project manager and me to show the new structure he wanted. I had no idea what to say. I didn't know if any opposition would be felt to be disrespectful, and it didn't feel as if our opinion was needed because the plan was happening anyway.

But then I let the other team leaders have it (which was perhaps unfair, because I should have really vented on the CEO if I was that annoyed). I tried to explain how impractical it looked from my team's perspective, how much stress this was putting on me during Black Friday season, and that my team was already in a precarious position.

It had mixed results. The person who originated the idea felt that my worries about the practicability were justified, expressed sympathy, and hoped for the best without being very optimistic. A new Agile coach colleague who was in the call seemed to be wondering what kind of menagerie he'd newly been hired into. And the team leader who loved the restructuring thought that I was completely overblowing things and that I needed to be humored. They'd talked to their team right away, and didn't appear to believe me when I said that the CEO had told the team project manager and me that he wanted himself and the manager to be part of the communication to our teammates.

If one or two technical details need to be ironed out, it wouldn't be so bad if the team leaders who like this plan were really taking the problems seriously and helping. But their 'it'll all work out' attitude baffles me — leaving all of the labour of considering the details to us, who didn't suggest the reconstruction in the first place. It is firstly really unfair and secondly it will likely lead to catastrophe.

Of course I really like the other team leaders. I just don't know why this is happening. They're nice people who surely don't like to rule by diktat. And if they were thinking coolly, they would not want to disrupt the functioning of my team and put timelines in danger by discarding badly-needed resources in a haphazard new hierarchy.

It is so senseless for my team. The team project manager for my team has redistributed the workload to more painlessly and quickly meet the practical and emotional needs of teammates. This workflow is far better than what we had before, and I see how much effort the project manager puts into it maintaining it every day. If we need to take into account 4 new teams, then we will need to destroy this workflow and rebuild it.

Now the team project manager and I are now trying to design a new workflow before January. It is the peak season. The team project manager is also trying to retrain for other work. I am overworked from the regular workload already and also emotionally stressed. It is so unfair and so illogical it makes me want to thump my head against the wall.

Lastly, given our company's professed new adherence to Agile ideals, I do not understand why so many decisions are being taken without input (or 'buy-in') from most of the people directly affected. Even I find this far too undemocratic for my tastes. And I'm not sure why the team leader who is enthusiastic about the restructuring doesn't recognize that it's a bit cruel to make huge decisions on behalf of eleven other people whom they barely work with.

*

The next problem, after talking with management (I owe a life debt to our manager for talking me off the ledge, but still feel that I need to figure out better how to work with the CEO) and admittedly wrangling a bit with the team leaders, was to figure out how to let my team know what was going on. This stressed me out so much that, I woke up in the middle of the night before this Thursday and couldn't get back to sleep for a while.

In the end the team project manager and I anxiously went for this idea: On Thursday we asked the team to participate in an exercise to plot out all of the workflows we currently have. Then we'd inform them about the changes and work out the new team structure in the next meeting.

In practice, it did not work as we'd hoped. A few of the teammates had a hard time getting used to the tool we were using to chart the workflow, the meeting overran the time limit, a few teammates were cranky and one was just exhausted because they had felt ill that day anyway, and they were all in a hurry to get back to their work. At the end of it I tried to explain what was going on and what the purpose of the exercise really was. Silence. I felt really inept.

I still have no idea what the team thinks.

In a leadership training earlier this year, the HR manager who coached other team leaders and me said that when a large change takes place, it's really important to go through all of the stages of resistance and anger. If this is repressed, it will lead to years-long resentments and difficulties. So I think I will need to prod genuine reactions out of my team, only give my opinion when asked (then I think I have to give genuine reactions too, because they will know if I'm not being truthful and would be skeptical of any neutral, evasive thing I say anyway), and still let them know that eventually we'll need to get around to the implementation and that they need to have their say now because in a few months it'll be unprofessional.

*

Even outside of this — and the meetings regarding this change have swallowed up a lot of time — I've been working eleven-hour days for weeks...

My private life is worse, too. I could be doing things I love like cooking and baking and looking at art and learning new music. I could be practicing Greek and Spanish and other languages, making Christmas cards and shopping, tending plants and buying flowers, researching French history or reading new books. I could be writing emails or other messages to friends and relatives. The weather will be grey and cheerless soon enough, and I want to see the yellow trees.

My work problems are creeping into lots of private conversations; admittedly this is my fault.

My siblings and mother have also been comforting me for hours and hours, for weeks now. So has an ex-colleague, who very kindly reassured me that I was a good person who really did try to do right, and that I can't 'save' everyone.

In the meantime...

I feel too exhausted to ask more bluntly what's intended for me, although perhaps I should. But it appears likely that I'll be removed from a middle-management position before the end of next year. 

Likely until November 27th and beyond, I will be working 11 hour days. I will not be taking a holiday except if, for the third time this autumn, I feel so stressed that a half day is needed.

After that, perhaps I can expect a demotion. And I might see the dissolution of a team — either through further restructuring, or through people leaving due to overwork without the sense of unity and autonomy to make it better — where — for 4.5 years — I'd tried so hard to build up trust, humane management, and a feeling of true personal fulfillment in the workplace.

What I just wonder is, how does this serve the company; why do we need to stare common sense in the face but then ignore it; and what did I do to deserve this? Have I not represented my team well enough?  Is it bad if I mention that the team or I are stressed, because people will think I'm fragile and irrational and that the problems I mention lie in me and not in the workload or in poor decisions? Have I let the team down? In the end I know that I tried not to let them down, but it is so hard to know why this is happening and I feel so unhappy.

Rambles on a Hermit's Escapes to Berlin-Friedrichshain

Yesterday afternoon, T. and I cycled through a quiet Berlin-Mitte to Volkspark Friedrichshain to meet with a colleague. It was greyish weather, and light drops felt like the harbinger of a proper rainfall, but the weather forecast had insisted that at most 0.2 L of precipitation would fall per square metre for the next hour.

We reached the corner of the Volkspark where the plane trees and others embowered the pale brown stone and frothing white waters of the Märchenbrunnen, then pedalled along the sidewalk outside the park, then through the fence along the dirt paths into the park itself.

In the park there were throngs of pedestrians, joggers and cyclists that flirted with the boundaries of social distancing.

There were brooding lines of shadow underneath the old trees, dark red berries glowed from the underbrush; and in the flower gardens, a few roses in yellow or pink still flowered. The first touches of yellow and orange and even brown were tinging the foliage.

Then we reached the area where a sunken swimming pool has been reused for beach volleyball courts — the sands were deserted that day. The crown of a bouldering ring rises above it like the footprint of a modern megalith, and children were climbing all over it.

At the side of the park, the berry-dark brick of a church tower rose above the old, tired autumn green of the trees. It might have been a village church if it were not for the pale grey and white street lamp posts, bus stop, apartment house façades, cars, etc. between the tree trunks.

T. and I passed the time armchair-critiquing two parents, a twenty- or thirty-something gentleman in a black hoodie and a baseball cap and a lady in a rainbow woven poncho and blonde hair. They let a boy barely two or three years old ride a mechanical scooter in his size down an asphalt hill, and a girl who was two or three years older rode a bicycle. Other people were coming and going on the path, and it can be chaotic with cyclists, joggers, dogs, etc. It's true that the girl-cyclist was wearing a helmet and a puffer jacket and gloves, and the toddler-scooter driver was also padded, although I think he had no gloves. The parents stood at the top and bottom of the hill and didn't take their eyes off the children... But I think I've developed a pretty good radar for Playtime Ideas We Will Regret, as the eldest of five children; and this pinged the radar. Of course the children fell off their vehicles, nearly tripped over their machinery, and burst into tears at least twice, then cheered up again, while T. and I tut-tutted.

Then playtime was over. The father lifted his boy-toddler under his right arm like a sack of potatoes (or like a disgruntled gnome), as the infant screamed. The two adults retreated in defeat, the girl riding her bicycle more philosophically ahead of the others. As an armchair critic, I felt that this illustrated the virtue of parents who are willing to say no when it's in a good cause.

Working-class Berliners in their forties were sitting on a bench near ours and they were undoubtedly German. A thin man in a metal-studded jacket pedalled up on a bicycle with a wagon behind it, as a wolfish-looking black dog trotted alongside. We heard American-accented English from a few 20- or 30-somethings nearby. And a French-looking lady in an elegant red coat was throwing something to another dog who might have been a Jack Russell terrier and who galloped across the knotweed and grasses with the grace (but fortunately not the purpose) of a fox-hunter.

It began to rain more and more, until a large-dropping silvery torrent poured out of the clouds that looked like a shower in early spring; the park looked more English than ever and it was a little like being submerged into a storybook. A glimpse of blue sky kept beckoning, and lingering off to the side.

We took shelter underneath an oak tree — the ground was peppered with dark brown acorns, which have been noisily falling from other trees where we live still this past week — alongside the French-looking lady.

As the thickest rain subsided, the weather forecast on T.'s smartphone changed and suggested belatedly that the precipitation would amount to over 1 L per square metre...

Then we saw the colleague and began talking and walking through the park, past a white pillar with a greenish-black bronze bust that must have been from the Napoleonic era judging by the three-cornered hat, over slopes and down slopes and over the gravel. Finally we reached the restaurant.

It was crowded to an irresponsible-looking degree, but we waited patiently. The tables were smallish so that I felt like I was risking the health of the other two a bit by directly speaking across ours, but I was happy to remove my scarf... Sparrows were almost as plentiful as the people. There were larger ones that I _think_ were males, and littler, spryer ones that may have been females. They were not impertinent, I think. Aside from gathering on one tabletop as if it were a birdhouse full of fresh seeds, they skipped and pecked at the blotchy ground that the rain had wetted.

We ordered Kaiserschmarrn, fried chicken, and — because the kitchen had run out of their pumpkin crème brûlée — a salad. I thought the menu was hipster-Teutonic-Bavarian-Austrian, to which I have no objection.

My salad: baby red beet leaves, lamb's lettuce drenched in the vinaigrette, and purple carrot cut into long pale ribbons; deep orange, roasted pumpkin with a rich, salty flavour, wedges of plump fig, and golden-brown pine nuts. Maybe also arugula. It was nice, filling, seasonal, and definitely a dish I would not really want to go to the trouble of making myself.

I also peeked at what the others ate. T.'s fried chicken was presented almost as if it were molecular gastronomy. But it just had three little dabs of lemon mayonnaise spread along the rectangular serving dish, so I figured the kitchen hadn't gone too wild. And P.'s Kaiserschmarrn seemed to consist of halved cooked plums, the fluffy golden pancake itself, snow-clouds worth of powdered sugar, and a vanilla ice cream that looked like it might be the lighter (some might say, less indulgent) kind that tastes like it's made of quark or something similar. I had non-traditional ice cream of that sort when I went to München in 2008, and felt that it was a little like eating flavored scrapings of a freezer box; but that may just be because I'm a philistine.

It became really cold later on, and the terrace was more sparsely attended; the waiter still ran back and forth.

*

T. and I had a little adventure as we were cycling both to the park and back, as the chain jumped off the sprockets of my bicycle — well, Mama's bicycle — when I hit two bumps. (I guess it's another time one could misquote Oscar Wilde: To lose the chain once may be counted a misfortune, to lose it twice begins to look like carelessness.) It was useful to find out how to fix the problem and I felt like a skilled handyman for once.

When we arrived at home, I ate a few (as much as I could manage under the circumstances) leftovers from the Oktoberfest dinner that the brothers and Mama had been eating: two or more sausage varieties roasted in the oven, sauerkraut, red cabbage, mashed potatoes with carrot, malt beer and regular beer.

Then I baked vegan cookies, two different types; and rather regretted not making a cake, which seems like a grander and more elaborate gesture; for a cake-eating today.

***

Today I went on a bicycle tour to the office again. I felt silly keeping on my scarf as a mask inside the office; but as I'd felt a bit sniffly earlier in the day, did so anyway. In retrospect I probably felt sniffly because the corner room I was working in at home was extremely cold; before I left the coal stove had been turned on and I 'magically' felt much better. Another case of the triumph of hypochondria over common sense! I feel a little exhausted, but to be honest really welcome a break from just thinking about work all the time. Meeting with colleagues again and eating nice food and talking made me realize that there is more to life: serious things that are also enjoyable.

Far Afield Twice on the Bicycle

Earlier this week I felt sleepy, properly sleepy, which was great except that it was before 10 p.m., which felt too early in the day. It was a nice change from having the feeling that there is more, and more left to do, and not being able to rest as a result. But I've also been late to start working twice this week, which is awkward.

*

Most of this can probably be attributed not just to the workload being smaller, but also to T. hauling me out of the apartment to go on bicycle trips with her. First it was the Drachenberg, a mound that is respectably like a hill for Berlin's geography, where despite the cloudy day there was a vast view of windmills, a radio tower, the Fernsehturm and Potsdamer Platz and City Hall grouped together, the green dome of the Berliner Dom, then the buildings near the Technical University at Ernst-Reuter-Platz, etc. The wildflowers have mostly shriveled and turned brown, but green crept underneath near the roots of the grass, it was not too cold, and the foliage on the adjacent Teufelsberg was still thriving. The only thing that disgruntled me (because I am that petty) was that the silhouette of people against the crest of the hill was reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's paintings.

Then, in the middle of the week, we went through a settlement near Tempelhofer Feld and to the airfield itself. The acacia trees with their dark, deeply grooved trees (like twisted and split bread crust) looked like a Claude Lorrain painting, and the evening sunlight had a bronze colour that looked like aged varnish; the sky had washes of cloud in pastel colours that had the kitsch of nature; and the sun itself dissolved behind the trees in a glowing globe of dark orange.

T. bought a currywurst to eat near the basketball court, and I took one of her French fries. While we talked, the person at the stand kept yelling that halloumi was done, to the people gathered at the picnic tables.

Across from Tempelhofer Feld, on the way there and back, the rush-hour vehicular traffic took ages to stop flowing, and to leave enough of a gap so that we could cross the Columbiadamm.

But altogether it was still relaxing, and leaving the apartment (insofar as it is my place of work) appears to do wonders for my mood.

Hoarfrost, Early and Figurative

On Saturday and on Sunday morning I was in a rather fabulous mood, which turned into what I used to consider an 'emo' mood.

It has kept up, although during the middle of the day I felt briefly cheerful, and so this evening I listened to the aria "Lascia chi's pianga" by Georg Friedrich Handel. Montserrat Caballé fudges a few of the transitions between notes, or so I think, but for the clarity and brilliance of her tones I like her performance [YouTube] a lot. The less said about the piano accompaniment from a compositional point of view, the better; there has to be a more original and striking arrangement.

In a similar vein, I looked up the lyrics in Wikipedia and found that they're tedious in the more popular version. An earlier version, however, by Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, sounded pretty good to me:

Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa;
tu vai cercando il tuo dolor.
Canuta brina per mano ascosa,
giungerà quando nol crede il cuor.

In roughly translated English: 'Leave the thorn and cull the rose; you seek out your pain. Hoarfrost through a hidden hand will come when the heart least expects it.'

Lascia ch'io pianga [Wikipedia]

Anyway, I need to 'wind down' and go to sleep. To sound narcissistic, in the age of video calls at the workplace, amongst all the other, more important symptoms of stress, one can't help but notice if one's facial skin is in bad condition from lack of sleep.

The Second Coming (of Black Friday)

This morning, or this afternoon, I looked out the window and saw a green-leaf tree that was beginning to have clusters of golden leaves on its branches, and realized that I haven't been outside in maybe two weeks and that's why I didn't notice it before.

The past week has been stressful at work, but far more stressful for other colleagues than for me. I was just vaguely thinking of William Butler Yeats's verses:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

In the peaceful and happy microcosm of our company, it hasn't become too bad. But there are a few personnel changes, comings and goings, difficult decisions, and strikings out of people to avoid stress. Also, there is a lot of work that seems to have been suspended in the first ominous lull of the worldwide coronavirus quarantines, then restarted and accelerated as businesses try to catch up in the Christmas season to compensate for their previous economic losses and inactivity.

Of course there is also the maelstrom abroad of the US election, where the ineptitude and lack of character of the president do determine the tone of international politics; the ongoing suffering from the virus; the troubles in Belarus and the refugee camps of Greece and elsewhere; the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the shifting face of the US Supreme Court and its interpretation of the American constitution; ...

What I've been doing lately on my microcosmic plane of existence is waking up at 10 a.m. or later (or, as was the case today, earlier), then working until 1 p.m. — the company lunchtime — and taking 10 minutes to an hour to find food. But often I am still finishing my breakfast oats at lunch, because once or twice I've been so stressed that I've lost my appetite or other times I'm too busy to eat.

Then I resume working with full concentration until around 7:15 p.m., and other times still have so much to do then that I don't lose concentration then either. And as the evening news comes on for Berlin at 7:30 p.m. and Germany nationwide at 8 p.m., I listen in while doing more work, sometimes taking a break to eat or chat.

After that I watch Miss Fisher's Mysteries or an early Agatha Christie's Poirot episode or another Agatha Christie adaptation (Death on the Nile with Sir Peter Ustinov) or Dr. House out of the corner of my eye while doing more work. But on Monday I interrupted my work almost totally to watch the Emmys television awards.

Then, generally after 9 p.m., I pack up my laptop. I might exercise with YouTube videos. Then I might watch cooking or book reviews, and read news and opinions in Twitter, the Guardian and Facebook. Then I read ebooks to wind down.

Lately I've been able to sleep soon after I go to bed, although this might be after 2 a.m. But last night I did have trouble going to sleep again.

A few of my colleagues, however, are also working half or full days on Saturdays.

*

That said, I always go into what I call a 'Marxist-Leninist' phase at this time of year. The way I see it 50 retailers, all in tooth-and-claw competition to survive alongside each other and the Death-Star-like Amazon, sell the same cheap or expensive, thoughtless and aesthetically shoddy items.

These items mean millions of acres of logged forest that makes way for fields, mass agriculture, indentured servitude or regular low wages, slaughtered animals whose skin is used for leather, oil wells and tar sands. The way they are manufactured means the death of small agriculture, the death of traditional fabrication techniques and design and artwork (homemade or professional) that existed for centuries before the Industrial Age and certainly before the age of the assembly line, and also the death of the very expensive and refined craftsmanship that likely kept at a peak in the 17th through 20th centuries.

The consumers who buy the products are rarely going to cherish and keep them, and then they end up in heaps on the sidewalks like I've often seen in Berlin, or thrown in the landfill. Or the items are dumped directly in landfills by the retailers if they are still unsold at the end of the season, to keep up profit margins by artificially keeping the items rare.

Black Friday season is like an annual punch in the face. I have an income, health insurance, wonderful colleagues, and the consciousness of my employer's ultimate aim of reducing this consumer frenzy a little, which makes it better.

But the thought occurs again and again, why don't I finally do something to 'square the circle' and bring forth something good? And this year, rather masochistically: doesn't it make sense that I suffer emotionally and physically a little if I am in this sometimes good, often horrible industry?

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

An Interlude in an Italian Restaurant

Yesterday evening Te. and I cycled to eastern Berlin where our office is. The trees are still very green, but lacings of linden leaf-petals are curling along the edges of the sidewalks, and elsewhere I've seen chestnuts and acorns scattered along the chestnuts. As it was Friday, the customary madness had set in, and we were amongst scores of hipsters who had gathered to sit in front of restaurants, throng at the waterfronts, ride bicycles along the infernal car gridlock of Skalitzer Straße (where a red ambulance, a fire ladder truck, and a white-and-blue police van managed to squeeze past the compact cars and BVG public transit bus), walk hand-in-hand in parks, drink and socialize. We rattled along under the mildly grubby, postered and graffiti'd classical-style plaster façades and sett stones of Friedrichshain, bypassed the Rigaer Straße regions, and found the Italian restaurant.

We were meeting a former colleague, our manager, for the first time in person since he left the company. I sat down at the golden, lacquered table underneath the awning and ignored the red-tasseled menu for the present to look at the tree with splashes of gold (like sunlight), the beige-yellow house façade, the red-and-black-brick church that was very 19th century and oddly rural for this city district, and the dipping long tail of a magpie that swooped in silhouette beyond it. The sky was blue and the clouds wispy and few, the temperature milder than it has often been lately. To. came striding up very soon after, and Te. came back out to the table, and we had a lovely meal and conversation.

I was wound up tensely as a jack-in-a-box after what have frankly been awful-and-partly-wonderful-but-as-mentioned-also-awful weeks at work.

But by the time my pizza with its thin pieces of eggplant, crinkly champignon mushroom, wine-flavored artichoke, and grainy parmesan had been dissected and eaten, and we had talked about tons of topics — babies, bicycle lanes that had popped up during the coronavirus era, soccer, Israeli elections, Netflix, .... — I began to feel relaxed and happy again. He also talked of his partner and his family, we talked about our brothers and mother too. It was nice to glimpse the larger circle of people whom he cares for, and to know that some things are turning out very well, as we wish for him.

I naïvely said that I hadn't seen many signs of the economic depression that had been predicted as a consequence of the coronavirus. He set me straight by pointing out that people he knew had lost their jobs, and that sectors of the population would have trouble finding their first job or regaining a last job before retirement. It was a reminder that I and my colleagues are exceptionally lucky to be employed and paid well.

To a degree, I still think that I have a small right to be unhappy with how things are going, at present, in the company for which I work. But there are of course so many bright spots in it as well. I hope that finding safe ways to meet with colleagues and others again will cheer me up. My social distancing was less rigid for a while. But then I realized that even if I do not catch the coronavirus or become ill from it, being quarantined and forcing everyone I've recently spent more than 15 minutes with to suspend their lives likewise, is the type of risk that one needs to think about properly. So that's why I've felt a little tense, too.

Spanish Literature and Semi-Quarantine

 After the boiling fury of the summer sun, we have been wafted with a few strong prevailing winds into an early autumn. A glacial humidity lies in the air, the evening light has turned from a fiery glow into a golden touch on the still-green leaves of a distant cottonwood, and the crescent moon in the sky tonight had a pensive air.

This summer has been one of thunderstorms that were forecast but failed to appear, often just (at most) being a low rumble or two that was practically swallowed in the frequent masses of pale grey cloud, and a decent quantity of rain. Yesterday, large silvery drops of rain.

***

I have taken advantage of the raininess to read a lot of books. My eyes were definitely bigger than my stomach, and one of my reading projects hit a stumbling block when I tried to find one book from a Spanish author about Spain, and yet failed to find just one that satisfied me. With Don Quijote de la Mancha, I am still stuck in the prefaces and acknowledgements; the story I read by Juan Marsé and the abridged Juan Ramón Ramirez failed to really grip me; a crime novel by Dolores Redondo was more lurid than what I'd usually read and in my view rather a TV crime episode in book form than anything more real and engaging. But in my perplexity I finally decided to ask a colleague from Barcelona, whom I don't know very well, if he had any books he'd recommend. He was, surprisingly and reassuringly, delighted, and based on what I said my tastes were, sent me this list: 

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

Mortal y rosa, by Francisco Umbral
Berta Isla, by Javier Marías
La sobra del viento, by Carlos Ruis Zafón

CLASSICS

Benito Pérez Galdós - Fortunata y Jacinta
Vicente Blasco Ibáñez - Cañas y barro
Camilo José Cela - La colmena
Carmen Laforet - Nada
...apart from El Quijote, of course

***

It has come at an excellent time.

On Friday I got a minor 'coronavirus scare.' Someone I met this past week mentioned then that they had been advised by a doctor to have themselves tested for the virus. I was too busy working for the news to sink in, but the moment Feierabend arrived, I had much too think about.

It was all indefinite, but I decided that in all prudence I had to distance myself from my mother and brothers. Just shutting myself up in my room seemed grim and overreacting, so I'm afraid I've gone for a lighter, 2-metre distancing and frequent ventilation arrangement. (As well as excusing myself from sports I'd planned to do with colleagues today. And repressing a sudden urge to go grocery-shopping, which became far more tempting once it became forbidden fruit.)

As a result, a comedy routine has been staged in our household. I yelp in shock if I accidentally find myself close to someone, but generally manage to avoid this by listening for voices and craning my neck to look through doorways.

I keep the window open to let in the inhospitable warm balminess of the day and the nipping chill of night, in defiance of normal rules of common sense, just so that my room is well-ventilated. And I touch light switches, sink handles and doors with my elbow.

A general choreography of movement and placement has taken place during breakfasts and lunches. I eat dinner on a 'naughty step' in the corner of the kitchen, unfortunately too far away to pinch someone or jab someone with the elbow if they deserve retribution for a cheeky remark. And my mother, Ge. or J. put a cup or a plate at the end of the table, and then like an unsociable cat reluctantly approaching its tin of cat food, I come forward when they have backed away, to pick it up.

Anyway, it is hilarious, and of course the person whom I was in contact with has far more to complain of than I.

But I am especially grateful to my colleague now, because I have a new pile of Spanish books to take my mind off things.

— In addition to audiobooks, I have also turned to my old friend, the piano. Today I immersed myself in Schubert, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Brahms again, excerpts of Rachmaninoff and Granados in between; yesterday I think it was Beethoven sonatas.

Because Gi. played Chopin regularly for a while, the clothbound pale-brick edition of his mazurkas and polonaises was gone from the music room. Now it's back, and I love the mazurkas so much. (The polonaises are, of course, not bad either.)

On an Excursion with Colleagues

It was raining and thundering today as T. and I began cycling to Friedrichshain for our company's latest team event. We were split into teams of five, and sent off into the neighbourhood to walk around and take photos of ourselves, and photos of buildings that we were asked to guess based on hints.

I was put in a group with members of the team that handles the cooperation with our clients and of the Front End team, a new colleague from the Back End team, and the leader of the team that gathers statistics to report to our clients; and I think our rapport was relaxed and happy.

We saw the Stasi Museum where the East German secret police used to keep their archives, and it was eerie, quiet and empty. We visited the teeming centre of Frankfurter Tor with its two towers designed in the late 1950s in imitation of the domes at Gendarmenmarkt and its tram lines and its heavy traffic streaming from the city centre and Alexanderplatz. And in between we passed the printmaker and florist and local fashion designer shops, Spätis, cafés, and cobble streets, homemade cloth banners that had graffitied slogans against 'Nazis' and a 'fascist USA' in the leftist zone around Rigaer Straße, posters that railed against rent raises and the high cost of living, a Dalmatian dog and maybe a dachshund? and other dogs, two white and blue police vans, the pockmarked brick façade of a 19th-century? street church, and the hollyhocks and other flowers of high summer.

After the other teams won the competition, we met colleagues in front of a Späti or went home. T. and I cycled home together. On the way to the office, T. and I had seen a protest march crossing the bridge at Warschauer Straße with a police escort, declaring events planning(?) as an essential service that should be protected financially despite social distancing measures. The way back was not as eventful, but it was nice to talk with each other.

When my team travelled by train from Samariterstraße to the station near the Stasi Museum, it was the first time I had taken the U-Bahn since the middle of March. I think that some people are militating against the mask policy or are forgetful. The Berlin transportation authority is running an automated loudspeaker message that persons caught without a mask must pay a 50 Euro fine, as per the anti-coronavirus policy. Anyway, the trains weren't too full. It didn't feel too strange to take it again, either.

***

But in general, I feel like the Lady of Shalott. While I was working in the office between June 2016 and March 2020, I metaphorically went for a nice walk around the neighbourhood, spoke with the townspeople, felt perfectly normal (although a little quirky as always), and was no longer the Lady of Shalott. But now — not knowing how or when it happened — I am in the tower room again, seeing the world merely through a mirror. And it is not entirely nice, although in having my mother and brothers around, there is still a lot of entertaining and comforting interaction. But today was a break in the enclosed life.