Back in the saddle
8 October 2003God help me, I'm working again. Full-time until Christmas, at which point the contract is up for renewal and I may be able to negotiate some flexibility into my schedule. For now it's just as well, we need the money (everything I earn before the end of the year is already spoken for) and I should at least make an honest effort to see how we fare with a five-day week. It's probably hardest on Annette, who now must assume a 44.4% share of all domestic and parental duties (distribution based on the fact that my income is 80% of hers). We are so hiring someone to clean the house. Spending less time with the kid definitely sucks, although she's currently distracted by visiting grandparents and doesn't appear to notice my absence.
Being at a big web development agency is like traveling back in time, to 1997. I'm in this huge, zero-privacy open-concept office with futuristic furniture (bad points: you can't surf and write emails all day, and you have to go to the bathroom every time you need to pick your nose, which given the dry air in Calgary is about once every half hour; worse in winter). The building's a converted warehouse with lots exposed brick and concrete, ductwork everywhere and a gorgeous vaulted wood ceiling. Downstairs there's a subsidized canteen and pool tables. It's just like a Dave Eggers book. Only unlike the pre-crash days, you can go home at five, provided you make it in by eight-thirty. Incentive: make it in by eight and you get free breakfast (in practice this means come in at 8:25 and eat at your desk, which is why I had three years' worth of food debris in my keyboard - I requested a clean one). There are two in-house Jack Russell terriers.
I'm surviving the early starts. It's not too bad, really, the commute is only a 15-minute ride or 20-minute skate along the river pathway, with very little actual street travel - one traffic light total. I'm planning to ride all winter with special steel-studded Finnish ice tires, though when it's thirty below and snowing I may be less enthusiastic.
I miss Berlin. Currently I'm pretending that I'm there. I imagine that I'm not working at [X] but at Pixelpark. Early in the morning I trade chatty emails with my German friends. I listen to Radio Eins on the headphones, splash a nostalgic wallpaper onto my monitor (a view of the rooftops across the Hof from the window of our Kreuzberg loft apartment) and decorate my workspace with "Ein Sandmann auf großer Fahrt" postcards. All I need to complete the illusion is better stationery: Leitz binders and A4 paper and some decent pens. Soon I will sport a groovy Ossi-chic DDR Fußball-trikot, just the coolest thing in this the summer of Ostalgie. It's my own private form of internal exile.
Meanwhile, I'm on the ice three evenings per week and trying to be the best long-track speedskater I can be, given my advanced years. To that end I will soon spend a disturbing percentage of a month's salary on some new ice boots. I manage to get out on the road bike every Saturdary morning for the Bragg Creek masters' ride, weather gods permitting (of late they have been - since the unfortunate snow episode in early September, the weather has been glorious) but otherwise not much cycling, hardly any dirt riding on the mountainbike now that my days are full.
Life is suddenly very busy, rushing home at five, spending time with my daughter, keeping house, working on various leftover reno chores (and thinking about the winter projects: interior work, replacing the old too-large plaster fireplace with an art-deco oak mantel). Training. Reading. Thinking. Maybe even writing - I just might have a little freelance piece on the go that will not only be fun, but should pay for the skates. The usual.
I love my daughter to bits, I really do. God she's funny. I really need to take more photos and record some of the things she says. We bought a region code-free DVD player and can now order German kids' shows for her. Tierfreund Rudi etc. (also, for us, Good-bye Lenin, Sonnenallee and Helden Wie Wir). She seems to be coping with full-time day care. (Certainly better than I am.)
On the daily life front, we've just had Annette's parents here for a week, staying with us half the time, her sister the rest. My father-in-law has spent most every day down in the basement finishing various small jobs: building window casings, adjusting closet doors, installing baseboards, trying to discover why the new shower insists on leaking. I've been completely uninvolved save for a few hours shopping and baseboard painting on Sunday. I'm off to work before anyone else is out of bed, then barely home in time to help organize dinner.
It's a long weekend coming up, (Canadian) Thanksgiving. Suddenly I care about long weekends; when I was home doing nothing they normally meant nothing more than an irritating lack of day care. This weekend I'm somehow juggling the usual training (Saturday AM ride and Sunday PM skate) plus the world road cycling championships broadcast live from Ontario both days (whoo-hoo) plus one child's birthday party (not ours) plus one or possibly two Thanksgiving dinners plus some end-of-the-season garden work plus painting the window casings and touching up the baseboards in the basement plus my parents being in town.
Reading time is of course greatly diminised now that I am (sadly) employed. Nevertheless I am continuing to slog through my pile of library books. The current read is Prague, by one Arthur PHillips, a novel about North American expats in Budapest, circa 1990, who sense vaguely that the real action lies in the city after which the book is named. Tales of the new Lost Generation. It leads me to ask myself, did these latter-day Fitzgeralds and Hemingways who decamped en masse to the newly liberated cities of Eastern Europe manage to produce even one significant literary work? (It's too soon to decide whether this novel, published thirteen years after the author's own spell in Budapest, will reach such heights. It's clever, but too self-referential.) The external conditions for this exodus were obvious enough, the political revolutions of 1989, but I've begun to wonder whether there wasn't some unique to the cultural and social conditions in the west that lead so many young people so self-consciously eastwards.