Here's one of the things everyone loves about Berlin--the Ampelmännchen, or "little walking men" created in 1961 by traffic psychologist Karl Peglau. The green one saunters along like he owns the world, hat tilted back on his head. The red one reminds me of the robot in Lost in Space; arms spread, hat on very straight, he means business.
I dropped ten years on the first day. Yes, it's paradise. The sounds of the city. The all-night "Spätis," meaning "Laties"--they're open 24/7. Lots of them, too. Restaurants: the Uzbeki one, the Brazilian one, the pizza place. A Lidl and a Rewe a short walk away. People on the street look purposeful and stylish--or stoned and stylish. A woman ran up to compliment me on my velvet cancer lady hat--I did not inform her it was just a cancer lady hat--because she admired the way the deco butterfly went with my scarf. Which it did.
Where I'd been living for the last twenty-odd years, that scarf/butterfly combo would have been considered eccentric. Or disreputable. All the other ladies wore S. Oliver and Jack Wolfskin and similar brands--expensive and unflattering.
I love thrift and second-hand clothing stores.
"But the clothes could have come off a dead body!" said one of my German lady friends. I did not say, "there are these things called washing machines." But I continued to buy everything at the second-hand store. There was only one good one in all of that small city.
But here! Flea markets galore. Second-hand stores all over the place. For furniture, too.
A committed New Yorker, I used to mourn the loss of what I considered the best city in the world.
Berlin isn't second-best. It's better. Paris a close second? Maybe. New York is all about the very rich, the very poor, the ugly hypodermic needle skyscrapers puncturing the air over Central Park and casting long shadows. The $19.00 glasses of wine in very ordinary restaurants. The potheads toking away on Central Park West--and everywhere else. No, thank you. Yes, I know there are potheads here--but it's still possible to escape the smell by walking fast.
I live on the ground floor in an apartment that was apparently unoccupied for a long time. Beer bottles, worn-out shoes and occasional unidentifiable detritus appear on my window sill. This evening, two drunk dudes were whooping it up right outside my window--beer bottles clinking, whoop, whoop, har-de-har-har.
I Googled "drunk dudes outside window, Berlin--call Police?" Not a useful search term. Then I tried translating, "Excuse me gentlemen, could you be a bit more quiet? I live here and need a bit of quiet."
Entschuldigen Sie, meine Herren, könnten Sie bitte etwas leiser sein? Ich wohne hier und brauche jetzt etwas Ruhe.
"Oh, yeah!" said one, when I asked. "I saw the light in your window." His companion smiled, apparently too plastered to speak, but they were both very sweet and offered to drink across the street. La la la la la!
It's the latest in cancer meds for women with estrogen-positive, progesterone negative, Her2 negative or low metastatic breast cancer.
Another funny name of another funny pill. Supposedly it looks like Viagra:
Needless to say it doesn't have the effect I'm told Viagra has, but how would I know? I'm a Viagra virgin. Never took the stuff, never saw the stuff. Elascestrant might also be compared to "that gentle little blue pill" advertised for insomnia back in the day. Like most cancer meds, it's pretty strong stuff, but the pretty blue patina makes it seem friendly. To me, anyway. And that name--where did they get that one? Elacestrant? Sounds elastic, like a rubber band that'll snap you back to health. The Facebook page for this one sounds like the drug does do that --for some. Hoping to be among those chosen few, I'm happy to report almost no bad side effects. Any tummy trouble is resolved with chamomile or peppermint or fennel-anis-caraway tea--or a couple of bananas. And there are good side effects: I'm getting my eyelashes and eyebrows back. Fuzz is creeping across my cranium. Can't wait til I have enough to buy hairdye.
Bored? Want something new? This is easy and tasty. Ingredients:
Chicken drumsticks
Salt and pepper
Vegetable of your choice (I used a red bell pepper)
Elephant garlic
Can of creamed asparagus soup (or mushroom, or anything else you think might go with chicken).
If you want to get fancy, a container of cream. I didn't happen to have any around when I made this, but it turned out fine.
Steps:
Arrange chicken legs in Pyrex baking dish
Slice pepper and distribute pieces around chicken. Ditto with garlic
Salt and pepper to taste
Pour can of soup over all:
Put in oven at about 200º C (about 400ºF) for an hour or less. Serve with rice or polenta:
Pleasant with white wine, rosé or beer.
I can only imagine it--what I imagine arises from recollections of reading the English translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1962 novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Arctic circle cold, near-starvation rations, chains, isolation. For months, Navalny's family has been reporting that he's not getting food--he was allowed to buy bowls of oatmeal, but these were only shown to him. He was not allowed to eat them. Did he just die of starvation or was he killed? After all the man has been through--the poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent, the trumped-up legal humiliations, charges, prison--I somehow still thought he'd survive. I hoped for an outcry, a rescue, a return to civilian life; I hoped he'd be up on YouTube again.
What matters is his courage; no matter the consequences, he said what he thought. I hope he will be remembered; I hope his work will be valued; I hope his sacrifice will move Russia toward the beginnings of democracy.
As President Biden said, “He was everything Putin is not. He was brave, he was principled, he was dedicated to building a Russia where rule of law existed and where it applied to everybody.”
Ingredients:
One elephant garlic clove, pressed (or any large clove of garlic)
Lemon juice from half a large lemon
Good greek olive oil (slosh it in--a tablespoon or two)
Fresh ground pepper to taste
Bits of deli chicken slices and/or ham
A ripe avocado
Grated fresh Parmesan or Grana Padano
Most of a head of Boston lettuce (but you could use other)
First, press the garlic and add the lemon juice and olive oil. Beat all together and add the pepper to taste. Then the meat, the avocado (in small pieces), the Parmesan. Last the lettuce. Toss well. Enjoy with a glass of rosé.
I find this the perfect meal to accompany the binge-watching of Suits. I like pretending lawyers can really pull these stunts.
You might chase your meal with a square or two of Tony's Caramel Sea Salt Chocolonely. Mmm, mmm good.
Haven't used the thing in a blue moon. But why not? It's there, it does everything for you, and all you have to do is load it up.
I loaded as follows:
A piece of parchment paper (since fish otherwise tends to stick to the bottom of the pot)
A few slices of fresh fennel
A piece of frozen salmon
Salt and pepper
A slosh of white wine
A handful of cocktail tomatoes
A few slices of lemon on top:
Took about an hour and a half, since the fish was rock-solid frozen. Over rice, it was quite delicious. A glass of wine, a plate of perfect fish, and Netflix (binge-watching Suits at the moment).
Nikki Haley said, “We’re not a racist country. We’ve never been a racist country.”
That's true and untrue. The Declaration of Independence is remarkably forward-looking. In 18th century colonial America, women could not vote--about 60% of men, mostly white, mostly landowning landowning men could. Having any voters at all was a new, radical idea. And the idea of all citizens voting was there--it just took a while to include women and nonwhite persons.
The famously ambiguous Declaration states: "all men are created equal," a loopily insane statement if taken to mean "of the same talents and attractiveness"--unless you've read through Jefferson's letters and know something of his biography. Unless you have a sense of the personal experiences giving rise to that political remark. Briefly: he was the genius child in a highly unequal group of siblings, two of whom were either very slow learners or intellectually disabled. Keenly conscious of the inequalities in his own family, he tried to even things up, arranging for his slow brother to take violin lessons. He wanted his siblings to be intellectually equal to himself--a tall order.
His letters show a more realistic grasp on equality: there, he wanted an artistocracy of virtue and talent rather than the European one of birth and wealth.
So his goal, like Nikki Haley's, was “lift up everybody, not go and divide people on race or gender or party or anything else.”
Haley was referring to Jefferson's aspirations--not to the systemic racism that came with slavery and Jim Crow, and which has now, through the legislature envisioned by Jefferson, been vanquished. Long vanquished.
In other words, Nikki Haley is my second choice after Biden.
In a nuanced Quillete article, John R. Wood reflects on Dr. Martin Luther King's connections to the notion of systemic racism; having fought for basic decency for African-Americans, King wanted to tackle the economic problems of the poor, believing that whites in favor of ending crimes against blacks were not pushing for actual equality. Yet King regretted the Black Power Movement--Wood points to this:
“Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout ‘White power!’—when nobody will shout ‘Black power!’—but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power,” Dr. King declared in 1967, in the last year of his life.
King was well aware of growing up in a middle-class family; his experiences with racism remained matters of coldness and distrust rather than brutality, and he advocated for an affirmative action policy forcing companies to hire a certain percentage of black workers and for boycotting companies refusing to employ blacks. But he never lost faith in the basic message: win people over with persuasion and love. Seek and find common ground. Identity politics and "affinity" groups based on ethnicity rather than common interests build walls, not unity. Likewise, trotting out dubious statistics about what percentage of "black people" and "white people" think "white people" are superior/part of systemic racism.
The strength and the weakness of King's message was his believe in Agape--love--and its healing power. Yes, that's the right message. But love is far more ambivalent than hatred, because love makes people vulnerable. To find the courage to love, rather than hate--that's an essential feature of any person or institution seeking to reduce racism.
The content of a person's character--the line immortalized by Shelby Steele in the book we would all do well to read, especially today--is what we should think of when we judge people. Not immutable traits like their skin color!
It's hard to believe how necessary it is to repeat this message in 2024. Happy Martin Luther King Day; take to heart his methods and philosophy.
Side-effects are well-documented; some of us have them worse than others. But we're all bald, and for most of us, that means no eyebrows and no eyelashes. Which means your eyes take on the look of a lizard's--note that many lizard eyes have pupils and irises resembling human ones (apart from being surrounded by Green reptilian skin). But none of those reptiles can bat their eyelashes. Until recently, I had about six eyelashes (a young relative counted them at Thanksgiving). Now I'm down to one, and it looks embattled. A very few eyebrow hairs remain, but they're going too.
Eyeliner does camouflage some of the damage--or I think it does until I see a photo of myself. But the tumor markers are down! Ladies and Gentlemen, the tumor markers are down. I feel okay, apart from needing more naps and forgetting things, especially the day after treatment.
You're also--more ickily--deprived of nose hair. Which means keeping a tissue with you at all times, and strategically deploying it to your nose the nanosecond it tickles, or before. Or all the time. Otherwise, it will drip like a leaky faucet and you won't notice until a few disgusted stares remind you.
Eyelashes aren't just cosmetic--they protect your eyes and make it easy to wear contacts. I think nostalgically of the last time I used mascara.
There's always microblading, a semi-permanent tattoo for cancer ladies, but I think I'll go for the low-tech approach--stencils and pencils. Previous experience tells me that once I'm off chemo, eyebrows and eyelashes grow back--curlier, too, like the rest of my hair. So what if it's steel woolish and dry? So nice when it's there!
