On the play-reading front: tonight, either Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Der Besuch der alten Dame (previously reviewed in this blog) or else Tom Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet and/or Cahoot's Macbeth. (I considered Hamlet itself, the one by old Bill S., but the online text I found was 152 pages long, so not.)
Last week at play-reading: The Tempest. By Bill S. himself (or someone else of the same name). I was so glad to have done it!
The previous week at play-reading: The Real Thing, I think it was called, by Tom Stoppard. Levels inside levels, confusions inside confusions, mix-ups and apparent wife-swappings and who knows what else.
On the lake: ducklings growing up, me imagining myself swimming there, just across the street from where we live. Some neighbors saying yes, go for it! Some staff members saying no, you wouldn't want to put your body into that body of water!
(It's not very short anymore, is it? I must learn!)
Just so you have a feeling there is a reason to read this post from Berlin and I am not from podunk writing (which soon I will be, no Bloomington I am not trying to insult you): on the street the other day, to redeem me from sitting in my half-basement office working all the time and not riding the bus or the S-Bahn so not running into good human-interest copy: a man came up to me and said: did you just see an older man walking down the street that way? (pointing) I had seen an older man, in fact a man I knew, who is a tall, smart, nice, older man who had told me a cute story about the ducklings not long before, so I said: yes! a tall older man walking that way [in fact, I named his name] - all the time I was trying to figure out who my questioner was. He was a young, energetic, dark-skinned man - I thought he was connected with our institute. Right about the time he said no, not a tall old man, a pretty short [demonstrating with his hand held out] I was able to read his name tag - he actually works for the retirement home down the street. [I was walking between the institute's residential villa, where we reside, and the institute's main buildings, where we work, so you see why I thought he might be with us; also in Berlin there are not so many dark-skinned people but at our institute there is a larger proportion than elsewhere.] - and seconds later a woman came running down the street from the retirement home's direction, pushing an empty wheelchair in front of her, calling to my interlocutor, and gesticulating. So it was a short old man who had run away from the home, but a man who generally hung out in a wheelchair?!
I had to go inside to my half-basement office and never did find out whether they found their missing man. I guess I hope so.
Did I say anything about disciplines and routines? Next time, maybe. Mostly, I embrace them! They make my life SOOOOOO much easier! For instance, just opening up the blogger.com dashboard makes it a whole lot easier to quickly write a post; and trying to teach myself to write shorter posts makes it a whole lot easier to quickly write a post and not have so much time go by in between; and trying to convince myself I am not competing with my son's blog, which chronicles a. a so much more exciting external life, and b. a rather more interesting internal life right now, and c. impresses me by being wonderfully well-written - as I say, trying to convince myself of all of that makes it easier too.
Soon on your friendly local blog (if I remember and manage it)
- what I've learned from my year in Berlin which is almost over
- what I've learned from blogging
- what future blogs I might be writing
(and if you've read this far the chances are extremely high you are a woman [scientific research tells me this; I'm not just saying] so I can also tell you this: I'm thinking of starting a blog called something like Me and my Female Body, just for my female friends, where I can write about things like peeing in the woods on my jog this morning and issues to do with the waistband of my pants, and the WHOLE saga of birth control this year in Berlin which so far only Cynthia and Alex know I think, and great great great detail (great in the sense of lots) about my weight watching efforts which some of the current readers of this blog don't really want to read about - you know, all that good stuff that happens in and around the body of this particular almost-48-year-old female person - would that be cool or what?) (and please, please: if you're a non-female person and you really did read this far and you mind what I wrote: let me know! we'll talk about it!)
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