An intellectual challenge came up this week that of course I’ve unquestioningly lept on.
(Sarah trying to punch above her weight again, making things hard for herself as she always does.) By the end of the week, I’ll need to get my German back to where it was in my university days, where we were translating into and out of the language and marked with a harshness that still gives me a bit of angst every time I put a German word to paper. I remember the words of my German grammar teacher, Rainhild -- an absolute battleax of a tutor (but very much with her heart in the right place) as we broke up for the Christmas holidays: “Tell all your friends, ‘I am sorry, we can’t spend very much time together. I am a student at Oxford and I have to study”. Of course I ignored her advice and spent my holidays in London trying to play catch up on the fun all my school friends had had at their universities. Life is about choices, as my mentor says. (This articulation is pretty binary, but): We either sit with our declension tables and verb lists for hours on end or we hang out with the tribe of misfits who adopted us in high school and led us by the hand through the city’s rave culture, one of whose mother is an artist and collector of dead objects and houses them in a museum in Crouch End which doubles up as a den for a bunch of teenagers who could do whatever they want, so long as they didn’t touch the dead lamb which potentially had been embalmed with arsenic. Very different from my home, of course, which was similarly chaotic but far less bohemian, where I’d had to dismantle the lock on my window and sit precariously on its ledge to smoke, and in which strange things like the instruction to “go up to your room and learn these 300 French words in the space of an hour and I’ll test you” would descend upon me apropos very little. Weird flex but OK. These friends were great of course, but sometimes they were a struggle to spend a lot of time with, and I’d regularly get comments about the disappearing acts I’d pull on them, too. Trying to integrate the two very different people I was at home and with them felt impossible somehow, like I had no core to fall into. That’s the challenge with us shape shifters, we’re too easily swept up by someone else’s dance and struggle to find our own rhythm. Makes it even harder to find time for those declension tables, doesn’t it? So this week, I’ll return to the dance of proving myself in German, ask myself tough questions along the way. I’m kind of excited about it, to be honest. What is it that has hampered my progress in this area? Since my return from Hong Kong the language, at least the spoken part, has mostly come back. For sure I understand everything without hiccups, and I have fully functional friendships in German. Many Germans I know insist on only speaking English with me, so they can practice their language. I’m starting to push back a little, but I get lazy if I’m honest. The biggest hindrance is of course my ego. Words are my domain, I derive a lot of pride and joy for being the person who just always has the perfect word at the ready, delivered at the speed of a bullet train. In German I falter and grasp for the right ones, arrive at sort of next-best-thing verbal contortions that aren’t exactly what I mean, and cheat a lot by throwing around English words that I know are understood, and just have this serious mental block when it comes to putting words to paper. I understand where this comes from. Speechlessness for me is still sometimes a fright, sitting close to the threat of powerlessness and a loss of agency. Something apt my (lovely) therapist pointed out a couple of months ago. “You and your words. You find them so quickly it’s almost like you grab hold of them so that you don’t have to feel what they mean to you. It’s like, if you find the word for the type of tree you want to describe, and quickly note it down, you won’t take the time to witness how it moves, its smells, its colours, and all of that.” She has a point.
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Saying goodbye to a special person
Hi blog, are you there? It’s me, Margaret. So 2023 thus far has been, interesting. A week of gorgeous crisp blue sky opened with more sobering news: One of my mother’s closest friends (and certainly, my favourite) passed away abruptly after a relatively short battle with Leukemia, here in Berlin. She was the mother of a classmate from when we lived in Bonn in the late nineties. We spent most Sundays at their house playing Mortal Kombat as the adults smoked, joked and talked adult things in the kitchen downstairs. Bonn was a happy time for my mother, and I think this friendship was a real contributing factor to that sense of belonging the small expat circle there gave her, at which this friend played the role of glue that held everything together. I’m writing this because she was an inspiring woman, and I feel inspired to write about her. She was a warm, strong and highly intelligent Israeli woman of intense principles. Passionate about politics and a staunch critic of her government, she uprooted her family to start a new life in Germany, where they knew no one. She held onto that rage and indignation such that those political values and strong sense of right and wrong reverberated through her family, so much so that each funereal speech given explicitly referenced the sacrifices she made that kept her moral compass intact, and articulated her anger at the Israeli state within Berlin’s largest (and extremely beautiful) Jewish cemetery. And she did all of the above while living struggling with MS that gave her severe limp, having to provide for her family, while maintaining her wicked wit throughout. A real force to be reckoned with. My mother really loved her. Their large, loud and generous family welcomed our small and awkward one with open arms, and when my mother and I visited her it was so nice to see that bond they shared was just as strong as it always had been, despite years of life they had living apart. “We’re soulmates,” they said. By coincidence, my mother spent the final years of her career researching treatments for blood cancers. They spoke about the drugs she was on, and my mum was pleased and hopeful about the fact that she was on a new and really promising drug. Her friend mused that the MS and the Leukemia could be connected to pesticides used by the Israeli government. “Well, there’s no data to back that theory up,” my mother said flatly, the way she always does when she’s got that scientist’s cap on a little bit too tightly for the room. To be honest, I’ve come to love her for it. She was telling me mostly recently that another old friend of hers has found a new boyfriend who it turns out is an anti-vaccer nutjob who believes pandemics can be healed through singing at a specific vibrational pitch. That was a dinner party that didn’t go well, apparently. “I just tried to explain the science to him,” she said. He got so annoyed at her his border collie leapt to her defense. Imagine that. Being so off your rocker that an animal specifically bred to stand your ground picks the enemy side. But back to our departed friend. More nice things to say about her: On seeing her again last year I was struck by how clearly she saw me. My mum joked about my odd hobby of picking up big rocks and carrying them around when I’m at the family hytta in Norway. “I can see why you like that. Sounds really stabilising,” she said. I told her that whenever my mum sends me pictures of my niece, I respond with pictures of my rats. She leaned her head back and howled with laughter. Seriously. Total badass bitch vibes, even through chemo. On leaving her flat, she loaded me down books, including an analysis of the life of my favourite German playwright (Kleist), and shared my number with a woman who lives near me and likes to go running, the daughter of a Syrian friend who had been trying to teach her Arabic. And another thing, a diamond quote from her shared by one of her family members at the wake. “Do not walk in front of me. I won’t follow you. Do not walk behind me. I won’t lead. Walk beside me, be my friend.“ In which the writer's troublesome but beloved rat passes away
Hermann is dead (long live Hermann). Apologies for the facetious delivery of the news to my thousands of readers who I know are deeply invested. I’ve been in a terrible funk this week. To cut a long story short, Kotti’s death brought about a rapid decline in Hermann’s health. He stopped moving his hind legs, took to dragging himself slowly around the flat using only his front legs, until he gave up moving entirely. Going into more details about his decline seems disrespectful to him, so let’s just say he was obviously very sick and that keeping him alive would have been -- I would like to say “inhumane“ -- but this word suggests humans have some moral standard that is superior to animals. And that’s just bullshit to be honest. Humans suck. Well, some humans. The vet and her assistant were very nice. You learn a lot about people when you find out their feelings on the world’s most perfect creature. I’ve seen it all. Disgust. Wonder. Admiration. Cautious intellectual curiosity and the kind of curiosity that grows quickly into warmth and affection. “I don’t think Hermann likes me,” said my roommate, trying to figure out which snacks she could win him over with. “Don’t worry about it, he’s a total emo,” I replied, as Hermann glowered from his hammock. By the time Hermann and I had arrived at the late night clinic, his misery and discomfort had grown so acute he had started lashing out and biting. I warned the vet and she spoke to him directly, the way a true rat-lover knows how. She told him she knew he was a good rat, really, and she complimented his fantastic coat, wonderful tail and marvelous little fingers. “I really don’t understand why some people don’t like rats at all,” she said. Her assistant nodded. So there we were, three rat lovers surrounding this little, somewhat petulant but really very wonderful, really intelligent, and I mean -- I know all rat moms feel this way -- super special creature, telling him how great he was, and that he would soon be playing with his best bud again, as he lay motionless on the table, his heartbeat slowing until it finally stopped. The vet opened the window briefly, and then shut it. “We always do that when we euthanise an animal here,” she said. “So their souls can go to heaven”. I went home with wet eyes and holding their empty handheld carrier. It took a couple of days to get out of the habit of checking up on them, and making mental notes to pick up their mascarpone and fill their water bowl. But now it does feel like they’ve properly left. It’s an eerie thing to consider their lifespans next to ours. Here they were, these once rambunctious middle aged rat men who had Iived through a spring, a summer, an autumn and winter by my side, growing old while I, I don’t know, took one day after the next, grasping onto to one thing after the other only to feel it gently slip between my fingers. Picking up the crumbled pieces of whatever it was I had begun to build to see if I might make something new out of that rubble. Kotti, an angel in rat form, reenters heaven
As the year comes to a close, our ongoing rat love story arc takes a sad turn. On the 21st, I noticed that Kotti seemed weak and saw him take a little stumble and lie down in the fetal position. I wondered whether he might be too cold, turning the heating up and wrapping him in some cloth. The next day he seemed even weaker. I took him in my arms, felt the limpness of his body and found his normally pristine white coat to be matted and yellowing. I fetched some of his favourite snacks and laid out a feast in front of him. He ignored it all, but rubbed affectionately against my finger with his furry little head and gave me his best blue steel. By that evening we were in an Uber heading to a late night clinic on the other side of town. To lessen Kotti’s stress, Hermann accompanied us, but unhelpfully seemed intent on trying to sit on Kotti’s face. By the time we saw a vet, Kotti was pretty out of it. She couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, but offered to put him on a drip overnight and have him see a specialist first thing in the morning. He passed away in his sleep in the early hours. I can’t really overstate what a nice little guy Kotti was, and what a pleasure it’s been getting to know him this year. It’s cheesy, but there’s a line in Mary Oliver’s famous poem Wild Geese that I think now will always remind me of Kotti: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Kotti will forever represent that soft animal. A soft animal with an astonishing talent for posing for the camera. You couldn’t really take a bad picture of him. He somehow always knew to look straight into the camera like he was God’s gift to ratkind. And, you know, Kotti didn’t have to be good, as the poem goes. But he just was really good. So good I surprised myself even with the number of tears I’ve shed over the loss. And I’m not a crier. At all. Kotti got along with everyone, and would always come up to you just to say hi and see what you were up to. In my head (and this really does make me sound like a crazy rat lady), he talked to me in the voice of Toad from Mario Kart. Enthusiastic. Excitable. Encouraging. “HEEEEEEY!!!! OMG CHICKPEAS!! SOOOOOOOO GREATTTTTT!!!!!” Hermann, by contrast, sounds like the lead singer of Machine Head (in my head). But he’s grieving, too. He’s not been himself at all since I brought him back from the vet. I would do anything to have him back to his rambunctious, knicker-chewing self. But what I have now is a rat son who will sit on my lap for hours on end like a sad cocker spaniel. My mother, an immunologist whose love language is researching aggressive cancers of past-their-prime rats, advised against finding him a new rat friend who might just piss him off or stress him out. So instead I just have to figure out how to be his best bud while he’s still here with us. He was no spring chicken either, when he moved in. For the year end I promised myself I’d get out of town if only for a snapshot of time. So tomorrow I’ll be on a train to Gdansk/ Danzig, a city I’ve obsessed about since reading my favourite childhood book, the Tin Drum, which is about a horrific murderous dwarf who serves as an allegory for everything bad in this world (aka the anti-Kotti). A Guardian review would probably describe “The Danzig Trilogy” as a “grotesque tour-de-force”. My favourite part is when Oskar gets into a bizarre staring contest with an owl, in book 2. Anyway, I’m excited mostly because for the first time in years, if only for a couple of days, I’ll be alone in a city where nobody knows me. That specific exhilaration is something I haven’t felt in years, and which, despite my best, most “grounded”, most “rationally-desirous-of-setting-down-roots self,” I just can’t wait to feel again. If only for a hot minute. P.S. Stalwart readers of this blog (all five billion of you), might have noticed this title being a hat tip to a post inspired by the steely reserve of an old roommate in Hong Kong, "One Cat Come, One Cat Go". Our writer interrogates belonging, community and obligation but mostly just whines about her pet rat Hermann blowing hot and cold.
Temperatures dropped dramatically, spelling and end to The Great Hermann Revolt. Our furry agitator/pioneer has, it seems, opted against freedom and in favour of the warmth, cuddles and companionship of a life in which the night times are spent behind bars, and the day times are punctuated with spoonfuls of peas, mascarpone and modest excursions. His favourite hole under the kitchen counter is getting blocked up, and little by little, we’ll be blocking up all his other little hiding places. Kotti is delighted. Hermann is only moderately disgruntled. We’ve had a couple more escape attempts, all of which have seemed almost half-hearted. Lately I’ve almost been feeling like he's pleased to see me, and appreciative of my affections. Perhaps these are projections. In Viking Iceland, law enforcement was a relatively simple task. Citizens had to toe the line, because failing to do so meant getting cast out into a tundra in which it was impossible to survive on one’s own. Communities were strong and pecking orders were adhered to because lives depended on one another. You either conformed or you died. I am not sure how I would have fared in that context, to be honest. I hope at least that I would have found some witchy friends to while away those aggressively cold winters with. Because if I had to join any club vouchsafing my survival, I imagine I could find a way to fit in with the one where people get together and draft cryptic texts that claim to ward off dark forces. That’s basically just good marketing. I think I might actually be a witch, you know? Although I’m Googling now and it seems like Hermann’s not a very good familiar. A thread on r/Wicca claims that a familiar should be so in sync with its witch that they would put themselves on the line in battle. If I ever found myself in any danger I doubt Hermann would lift a finger. And he would ultimately side with whoever offered him better snacks and left him in peace. A couple of months ago I brought up my quandary of trying to bring solitary-hero, self-isolating Hermann out of his shell. This was at a discussion at a community art event in a gallery with a grizzly/grim aesthetic. The works looked like death metal album covers in abstraction, and an enormous whale bone was placed at the centre of a large, Huxley-referencing door propped up to serve as a table over which to discuss the topics of belonging and community. Why did I bring up Hermann? Because he wants it all. Total freedom, life on his own terms, his favourite cheese on tap, an infinite supply of my favourite underwear to chew through. I mean, he’s a rat, so, fair enough. I’m just not sure it’s good for him, living with this ruggedly-individualistic delusion that he’s the master of his own destiny who owes nothing to nobody and can tear up whatever he fancies, even if it’s a nice colour and has quite a high silk percentage. Anyway, at the event I made a friend. She’s an artist, originally from Russia, who had spent the last few months carrying a very long black scarf everywhere she went, knitting it longer and longer as a way of keeping record of the emotional things going on with her. Since then she has destroyed it. I asked her how she felt now that her scarf was gone, and with this theme of creation and destruction being central to her process. “Kind of sad, you know. But that’s how it goes. You experience things and you alchemise them.” In which our weary author examines her codependent relationship with her chaotic rat son.
It’s been two weeks since Hermann’s all out rebellion began. Two weeks of trying to do whatever we can to figure out how to get him to return to his cage at bedtime. Of trying to stay vigilant to his clumsy rustling so as to determine where he is, what he is up to, where he is hiding his snacks (his regrettable enthusiasm for my underwear drawer continues), and which of the many water bowls I have left out for him he has inelegantly capsised. Two weeks of waiting, hoping, praying for his approach only to have him tauntingly run over my feet as I’m trying to meet a deadline or look vaguely professional on a Zoom call. Two weeks of meticulously cleaning everything only to find a nice little pile of droppings in the corner of the room that I’ve set out to meditate in. He is technically toilet trained, you know, but has apparently unlearned all of that just to make my life difficult. Meanwhile, the patience of golden child Kotti as he waits lonely and forlorn in his cage for his brother’s return wears thin. He’s having a rebellion of his own, tossing his kale around and making a mess of his litter tray. The anxious attachment force with him is strong. Kind reader, through this difficult time, I’ve even resorted to uttering obscenities. “Do you think he thinks his name is Dickhead, now?” asks my new roommate, who moved in a couple of weeks before the great Hermann revolt began, and who has mercifully shown good humour through this Hermann-inflicted chaos. Still, through all of this, Hermann’s revolt and everything else, I’ve had to ask myself tough questions. What is it about me that allows for all this orbiting chaos, and can I opt out? How far do my responsibilities towards other stretch, really? And with what level of nonchalance can I, like a cat with a precious vase, tip off the table other people’s shit that’s not really mine to carry? Because, the thing is, when it comes to managing my mutinous rat children, I don’t really have much control over the situation, it seems. But a lot of other aspects I do have some control over. So. "Very old person dies," other newsworthy interrogations and some deep philosophy chat.
September arrived, and with it, migrating bird formations, a more rat-friendly climate and the death of a queen. Times like these make me really appreciate not being in a newsroom. The sheer volume of nonsense being published. I mean, Metro ran a story about queen-shaped clouds. This said, annoying as the coverage is, with all the freak news events that have marked the last, I don’t know, decade -- Brexit, Trump, pandemics, harbingers of climate disaster, autocracy’s rise and rise, JK Rowling being rubbish, etc. -- there’s something comforting about an event as innocuous as “very old person dies” making a lot of front pages. It almost feels quaint. Charles’ face on all the money though? This I am uncomfortable with. There are so many other better faces to put on the money. What about Ozzy Osbourne? He’s a real national treasure. Still, the event has made me think more about my own supposed Britishness and ties to a place I’ve managed to avoid now for seven years. That’s right, I haven’t been to London in seven years. That’s insane. My home city. The thing is, I’ve been avoiding going back. I picked Germany as my post-Hong Kong homecoming spot, when it actually, in a way, isn’t my home at all. Here I’m an outsider looking in, as I probably would be in the U.K. now, too. Maybe part of my resistance in finding my way back there comes from this fear of seeing everyone far more settled than I am in the lives they’ve chosen for themselves, while I’m sitting here certain of only one thing: my competence as a rat mom. Still, though, I’ve been told I’m not the only 30-something who doesn’t have it all figured out. And even the ones that do aren’t peddling any ideas that this is the perfect way to be. I say this having been on the receiving end of a trickle of post-pandemic U.K. visitors, most notably one of my best friends from university who’s now a prominent philosopher and whose friendship has been really influential and also, really complex. If I’m honest, perhaps I was always kind of jealous of the stability and structure her life had that I don’t think I see myself having. She’s lived in Oxford now, for well over a decade, has a small house in a village to the north of Port Meadows, a husband and a little black cat, and her career is still going as well as it always was. “I remember there was a time where it felt like my life could branch off in so many ways, and that’s not the case anymore. I’ve chosen what I’m doing. I like it and I’m good at it,” she said. As always, what I admired about her, this focus she always had on the things that mattered to her, was what I felt had always been eluding me. This even reflected itself in where we both are physically. Seven years ago, I got her into yoga after being forced through the brutal contortions made obligatory by the teachers I had in China (one of the first Chinese expressions I learnt was “body no good!”) I have stupid, t-rex arms and very stubborn hamstrings, so I can’t say I was ever especially good, but I was definitely not as terrible as I was when I first started. And I was interested. In all the stuff about mind and body and breathe, where there was tension in the body and how to relax it to deepen your stretch, getting out of the thinking mind through movement and all that. It appealed to her, too, and she’s said that she always associated her practice with me. In my first years in Hong Kong I was still devoted. I joined one of those intense morning Mysore groups, where you go, nobody talks and you do the same sequence again and again, everyday, until your teacher tells you you’re ready for your next pose. And guess what? After two years he stopped giving me new poses and I got bored and stopped going. So now, guess who, out of me and my friend, can do all the fancy stuff that happens at the end of classes, and whose Utthita Hasta Padangushtasana brings shame on their former (very quiet, but very nice) Mysore clan? (yes, I had to look up that term). This said, I can now throw a competent punch, figure out how to elude a take down without running away from an MMA sparring scenario crying my head off, run really quite far without getting that tired, and do lots of other things that I might not have learnt or experienced had my focus zeroed in on this one thing. So maybe drilling down on one specific path was never really what I was designed to do anyway, and that’s OK. (Have you read range by David Epstein? It’s quite good). It was funny because while me and my old university friend were yoga-ing here in Berlin; I felt a faint trace of competition between us both quietly observing where the other was. Even though comparison is the biggest no-no there is in the yoga world. I noticed the smoothness of her transitions and she, presumably, noticed my now increasingly obnoxious guns. Over drinks afterwards we talked about old friends, and caught up on all the stuff happening in the stretches of time in which we’d lost touch. My abrupt departure from Hong Kong? “Well, at this point I’m just collecting nervous breakdowns,” I joked. The thing about those is that you do come back from them stronger and more self-aware each time. She talked about her career. “The thing about analytic philosophy is it’s like chess. It’s just a game that I’m really good at, that I don’t necessarily think everyone needs to understand or even like it, to live a good life,” she said. About embodiment. “Yep, definitely a thing”. About rats, obviously, and all the other things in our lives that felt meaningful and had made us happier people. And I guess it was just nice, to be in that moment and feel kind of at peace with all of it. Reflections on whether its at all possible to "win" the career game without playing it. And some comments on the pump.
Some intense days of a freakishly hot Berlin summer are behind us and the rats are starting to look a little bit less like life is not worth living. And I almost think Hermann has forgiven me for the baths I tried to give him hoping it would cool him down. Facetious rat analysis aside, there is something quite scary about these temperatures, knowing that each summer it’s going to get just that little bit worse. I was googling “eco-friendly air conditioning alternatives” just to see what the nerds are coming up with for a point in time when Berlin will be as hot as Canberra (that’s apparently 50 years away). I hope they are working hard on this, because it is a Big Deal. But then there are a lot of Big Deals that the nerds must be very busy with -- they might be quite overwhelmed as it is. Maybe I should email them pictures of my sad rats as motivation. “Breaking!” screams a tweet from The Independent. “The world is woefully unprepared for the risk of life-decimating volcanic activity,” (or something to that effect). Well. I mean, first of all. Is that Breaking News? The World is Woefully Unprepared for a lot of Things. It already shut down for two whole years over a stupid virus (as in, a stupid virus that posed a very real threat to a lot of lives, obviously), completely underestimated the threat of populism, and orange-faced presidents and a horrible gnome-faced man in the Kremlin. We underestimate a lot of things, really. It’s what we do. That, and overthink the things that don’t matter. I don’t know. The solution is obviously to ignore all these problems and focus on small wins, like finally crossing the 50kg mark on your clean and jerk after months of going down deep and dark questioning tunnels questioning everything you ever knew about how to move a barbell swiftly from your thigh to your shoulders, and building up a back muscle infrastructure along the way. “But why would I want to do that?” This is a question that has actually come up a lot, and one that I don’t really have an answer to. Most recently one of the older guys in my building, who wears a flap cap and compliments me on my mastery of Bach (cool!), but also seems to be a bit weirded out about how fond I am of carrying Eric around. Eric is my 15kg slam ball. I’ve been neglecting him, lately, just as I’ve been neglecting my explosive strength (the most fun of all the strengths) and fast twitch muscles in favour of an astonishing dull hypertrophy-focused programme my training buddy wanted us to do that is supposed to make our muscles “pop!”. Is this really what I want? I have no idea. They are popping a lot as it is, according to an increasing influx of comments. Anyway, back to flap cap man. ”Why would you want to build more muscle?” he asked. “I don’t know,” was my response. “But if anyone is giving you trouble, you know who to call”. Maybe flap cap man doesn’t realise that resistance training dramatically offsets osteoporosis in women and has a lot of other health and longevity benefits. Should I have explained this to him? Maybe, but the truth is I find that most social interactions are improved slightly if you leave them communicating very little except that you’re a dangerous person. It makes people more polite and less likely to offer unsolicited comments about your body. On this note, it has come to my attention that I might need a bit more help on the communication side, both professionally and personally. So I have sought guidance. Now I know that when called upon with a question that challenges me, I have a tendency to break eye contact, sigh loudly, and waffle. I can see how this might not come across well. The thing is I never wanted to be the kind of journalist who cares more about their presentation skills than their work. That I kind of get from my father. “Filed more memos than he did stories,” he once said of a former colleague who went on to be a hotshot lecturer. Newsrooms can be awash with them. These talkers. They talk so much and expect you to nod in awe and wonder, especially if you are female. A friend of mine stuck at a famously “boys club” newspaper struggled a lot with this. She was highly competent and couldn’t figure out why she never got promoted. It was something she complained about pretty much every time we met. For years I sat, listened, and commiserated. Our friendship was born in a newsroom and the challenges of surviving in such macho spaces is what had united us initially (alongside my appreciation for her devilish humour). We, I suppose, “trauma bonded” over being managed by chaotic bullies. Editors who would walk up to your desk and bollock you loudly for something that was actually their fault. She would be reduced tears and I would take her out for coffee and make her promise me she wouldn’t submit and apologise. "Hold your ground, otherwise he wins,” I’d tell her, preparing my eyes for a week of glaring in her editor’s direction, contemplating whether it would be weird if I started growling whenever he approached our desk. She in turn helped calm me down when I’d get a similar treatment from my editor. Where she’d burst into tears, I’d stand up and shout back -- a response that won me endless adoration from the subs' desk, but which wasn’t very strategic in the face of middle management’s endless power play. But anyway, back to why she wasn’t getting promoted (beside the obvious sexism). After listening to what might have been her 1000th rant about it, I finally spoke up. “You know, your problem is that you’re really not good at hiding when you’re unimpressed. I kind of like it because you’re funny and I always know where I stand. But I’m guessing your boss doesn’t.” My Texan friend -- marathon Maria -- had a similar work problem. “I just hate kissing ass,” she used to say, also complaining about never getting a promotion despite being a total workhorse. She’d then tell me that she refused to look her CEO in the eye because she disagreed with some of his strategies (and his very Texan “ass kissing” style of networking). “You don’t have to marry the man, Maria. But it probably wouldn’t hurt your career prospects to not be openly hostile to him,” I said. “That sounds like ass kissing to me, Sarah,” she replied flatly. The thing about handing out career advice to friends is it’s way easier to do that apply sound judgment to your own life. Which is why sometimes you do have to suck it up and seek external advice on what it is you suck at so you can suck at it a little less. Besides working on my presentation skills (there are now a billion videos on my computer of me explaining my work and I think it’s only the last three in which I don’t look like I want my audience to die suddenly of something horrible and painful), I’m getting coached on self-advocacy. The thing is, so much of a good journalist’s toolbox is about advocating for others. But I’m learning gradually that so much of being able to have the time and energy to do anything well hinges on being able to advocate for yourself. (and, by extension, your rat children. Mama needs to buy them a little fan). In which our weary writer investigates the lure of DIY napalm, and whether we can ever truly know someone.
A journalist friend of mine once said that going on dates is like interviewing a source. You show up, keep things light and breezy while delicately accumulating all the data points you need. I mean, ideally, along the way, you have fun, too. Besides storytelling, the journalistic skill that came most instinctively to me was interviewing people. I know how to ask the right questions, and how to gently and unobtrusively steer a conversation in a way that delivers the goods. I know how to build trust, how to shut up and listen, how to encourage in the right moments, and stimulate if a conversation feels to be running dry. I know how to shoot rapid fire, sharp questions with the intellectual fast talker types who seem to need that rhythm and tension to pay attention to me, but also, when to play ‘dumb’ enough to get eloquent quotes and not convoluted jargon. And I know when to start being that little bit difficult and annoying if someone who owes me an answer is being evasive. My mentor, Joyce, who used to be White House reporter, said that when she interviewed officials, she’d often deliberately ignore social cues. “People would get so uncomfortable, they’d just say anything to get rid of me”. Of course, the key difference between going on dates and interviewing sources is that only one of those activities is supposed to be in service of a story with your byline on it. Recently, I was at a bar with some friends where I wound up talking to this guy for three hours. I got that look your friends give you when they think you think you’ve met someone pretty cool -- when actually what has happened is that you’ve discovered you’re talking to a recovering firebug and DIY napalm expert and you want to learn everything you can about their little hobby. Through the course of that evening, I found out:
For the record, I had disclosed early on in our interaction that I was a journalist, and, in fact, he was the one who pushed for the interaction to be pursued at a later date with the aim of a story coming out of it. He said he felt like I really understood him. At that point, I felt kind of guilty. I wondered: Did I really understand him, or was I just really good at making him feel understood so that I could satiate my own curiosity about him? As I read this back I also think, what if I was the one who was actually getting duped that whole time and he’s not a firebug but a pathological liar who’ll say all sorts of stuff to pique and sustain a journalist’s interest? For anyone who is interested in the power games often at play between journalist and subject, I’d recommend Janet Malcolm’s The Jounalist and the Murderer, a seminal work in the murky ethics of our game and a must read for anyone in our industry who wants to do what we do with something approaching a clear conscience. Malcom interrogates the work of a journalist, Joe McGinniss, who covered the trial of Jeffrey MacDonald, a man accused of murdering his own family. In putting together his book, McGinniss got the convicted murderer on side by lying to him that he believed he was innocent, when in fact what he published was a damning story of a ruthless psychopath. Malcolm meticulously interrogates the trial and how it is reported. She interviews the documents McGinniss accumulated, studied, and transformed into the material he needed to support his thesis. She also interviewed the accused murderer -- who claimed innocence -- to gauge his character herself, and found what I love about her work: no definitive answers about who he was and whether the evidence against him stood up. She observes rather a person “characterless” enough to serve as a canvas onto which McGinniss could paint the perfect murder story, and sell a lot of books. There’s a really nice passage she has about the work journalists do in interrogating our fellow humans as we commit their story to paper. She writes that the truth is people aren’t characters in books -- they’re a lot harder to pin down than that. They change, surprise us, confuse us, bore us, behave in different ways with different people, contradict themselves. The rules we apply in trying to make sense of them are never that stable. Fun, isn’t it? To force oneself to get out there and already be drawing parallels between your own ‘research’ and the study of an accused murderer. In which our writer summarises what it is she has been doing with this blog for the last three years.
Recently I’ve been wondering about why I've been carrying on with this blog. For sure, It helps me organise my thoughts and feel a bit like a character in an ongoing story, which I guess is nice. But surely there must be a purpose beyond that? I thought back to why I started writing and working as a journalist in the first place. Ultimately, you want to share the things you’ve discovered and learnt in a way that helps people. I wonder, how can I make my work more helpful? This blog began on my return to Europe from Hong Kong. In that time, I’ve lived like everyone else has through a seemingly unending pandemic. I navigated the ups and downs of a career path here that has involved trying to make comprehensible dense computer science topics, alongside a lot of other things. I’ve studied Europe’s media landscape and tried to process the highs, lows, and frustrations and despair that came with covering one of the world’s most fascinating and maddening places in the five years that preceded my time here. And I took pains to ground myself in a city I had childhood memories of that I might be able to call “home.“ I swam in the frosty Norwegian fjord of my mother's home town, ran my first half-marathon, said goodbye to my battle-axe Mormor my brainy grandmother, and my lovely uncle Paul, and tried and failed to master a confident armbar. I also persisted in what has been probably my most comprehensive research project to date: trying to find a way to live in harmony with my own story and all the complexities, challenges and joys that have come with that. So what are the key learnings that I’ve uncovered since this work began? Here’s a list:
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Sarah KaracsA Berlin-based writer engages in the study of belonging and in-between places after years spent faraway from 'home'. Archives
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