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February 05, 2006
Another wilfully obscure post
Last Thursday week I stood in a boardroom of the German Department of Education in Berlin, and delivered a presentation - my first - to a room full of largely non-native English speakers. I didn’t do too badly (at least, my boss was kind enough to say I did quite well). More than anything it was a relief to get something done that I’d been dreading all week.
I have this odd memory of when I was being inculcated as an altar boy. Myself and the other inculcatees (I’m happy making up words now) were laughing non-stop at one particular guy who loved the attention and couldn’t keep his mouth shut no matter how patiently the priest hushed him. That said, there were two or three of us who pointedly wouldn’t laugh at anything he said, instead acting all grown-up and un-amused. I was laughing along most of the time, though I’d keep seeing them not laughing and wanting to be serious like they were. I wanted to be like the altar boy geeks!
Now the demands of this job that I sort of wandered into are changing me into the ideal required for this job. In the meantime whatever it is in me that I’d like to think would resist such gerry-mandering currently seems okay with both the gerrying and the mandering, let alone the combination. I don’t think this is quite what I thought I’d be like when I was all done growing up. Then again, blow slightly too much air into a balloon and it pops, right? So my hope that I’ll stay true to some core of myself seems largely based on a metaphor I stole from House. Hmmm.
After the presentation I got to go back to Berlin’s Jewish Museum. Fallen Leaves is still great.
Posted by Oliver at February 5, 2006 01:22 AM
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