I was hoping for warmer weather but there is snow today and I am cold sitting at my desk. Down in the streets there is an old man schlepping his body, upheld by a cane, piecemeal through the icy wind of Waldemarstrasse. His brown hat completely covers his face that he is hunching into his Bordeaux anorak. Two Turkish men are collecting plywood in the streets, it's not good if they use it to burn it because the smoke of it is highly toxic. A father pushes his little child through the cold which wants to discover the world and touches every little beer can lying in the streets. They disappear in #37. The two Turkish men in #35. The old men's gray pants are still recognizable from far, slowly melting with the desolate sidewalk framed by leafless trees and gray walls.

I just finished a paragraph continuing yesterday's letter thinking about American "balls" versus German "eggs".

In German we call "balls," "eggs." It doesn't mean that we play football with eggs but it means that we don't have any expression such as "he's really got balls," instead we would have to say "Der hat aber Eier," which would not be understood the same way. Instead we "go onto each other's eggs" which means we get on each other's nerves. We also say " Du kriegst gleich eine in die Eier" which means I am going to hit you in the balls. Everybody knows that this will hurt the most, it means that I am ready to hit you on the weakest point of you're body and that I don't need a lot of physical power to do that. So German "eggs" are considered to be very sensitive, they break easily and there is no strong shell, but of course no one expects them to be big for that, almost every man has balls as well as he has eggs, but you don't think about courage, power when you consider the fact that somebody has balls. And in contrary, small eggs (from chickens) are better, because they contain more protein and less cholesterol.

The expression "balls" is kind of a linguistic displacement, in my opinion. Balls are usually imagined not to be as small as tennis balls and instead pictured to be big such as baseballs, basketballs, footballs etc. These balls are far too big, imagine you would have to hide them in your underwear! Isn't that strange that you associate balls with power, things that are only there to play a game with, a thing that in the best case a whole team runs after in a game? No those poor little balls get thrown in many different directions, they land in a basket or in a net. In German you think of "eggs" which you associate with fertility, health, food (sunny side up) and therefore power in a completely different sense, you don't throw them you have to be careful if you don't want them to break. In German the eggs sunny side up are called "Spiegeleier" which is a "mirror egg" because you can reflect yourself in it.....

Has anyone written about that? It sounds like it would fit into the "Myths of daily life"? I am eating yogurt with elder jam. A white bowl with white yogurt and a red circle of jam in the middle, nice. And I don't want to work, but have to get going.