Night In

It's a Friday night, your banya plans have fallen through and you are utterly without any prospects for the evening. Do you panic? Do you cringe with anxiety that you are not taking advantage of every waking moment of your time here? Do you foresee a day, one year hence, when knuckles are white around a steering wheel on the Beltway and you think of that warm night when you lived back in ramshackle Tbilisi when you should have gone looking for adventure and stories and instead stayed in? Well, do you?

Of course you do. These days you're a twitching bundle of neuroses and emotional calamities. But only for a minute!

Then you set your jaw, clench your molars, squint yer eyes, and tie a frilly apron round your middle. You uncork a bottle of wine (with screwdriver and pliers. note to self: buy corkscrew), you harvest a mountain of grapes from your balcony, you set iTunes to French crooners and you start making grape juice.

And now this night, when you think of it one year hence, will be the night you got drunk on $2 Saperavi and watched a mad thunderstorm roll in and made your very first ever homemade grape juice.