SueAndNotU

мне пора

2007-02-22T13:05:00.000-05:00

As has probably been perfectly obvious for the past several months, my heart's just not really in this internet business anymore. I feel as though this thing has passed through several life cycles and incarnations over the past few years, and now none of them seem to quite fit. I grew tired of the silly, sassy persona some time ago, the earnest world-traveler is back on familiar territory, and nowadays, what I feel like writing is better written to myself. Besides which, the namesake called it quits ages ago, and that pun is only going to get harder and harder to explain.

The old geezer in me that remembers life before the internet is still pretty shocked that a silly little thing like this actually netted me some people that I now consider to be among my very dearest friends. Hey, who can complain about that? And there's no denying I've had fun yammering on about this and that. But all the same, think it's time to turn off the lights around here.

Right-o, enough speechifying. uh, somebody point me towards the sunset?

snow flake

2007-02-13T19:45:00.000-05:00

You like to think you've crossed some threshold of seriousness by now. Finally mustered up some discipline, squared your shoulders to adult responsibilities and delayed gratification and all the rest of it.

But here you are, nose pressed freezing and fogging the window, fingers tapping the pane impatiently, eyes angled skyward as you take the oldest grade-school gamble and let tomorrow's work rest undisturbed in your bag.

Come on....

Kindred

2007-02-10T20:46:00.000-05:00

We sat with whisky, poker chips, and cigars in this South Chicago kitchen penetrated by the dark breathing of the steel mills and refineries, under webs of power lines. I often note odd natural survivals in this heavy-industry district. Carp and catfish still live in the benzine-smelling ponds. Black women angle for them with dough-bait. Woodchucks and rabbits are seen not far from the dumps. Red-winged blackbirds with their shoulder tabs fly like uniformed ushers over the cattails. Certain flowers persist.

-Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

An old journal found from college years confirms that, somewhere around graduation, I was in raptures over this final sentence. I felt (it seems) positively helpless before this sentence. In three words, everything that was beautiful and noble about the peculiar condition of life in hostile terrain. With such economy, the reason I'd adored riding around the L in Chicago at night, past the backs of old buildings, looking at the pockets of life in lit-up squares, as people made dinner and watched tv and lived their lives in a frame of brick and steel.

Just now, I was looking at an old Kertesz photograph called Rue Vavin. It's a detail of the outside of a tenement building, all rickety shutters and stains and disrepair, but in one window, off in the corner of the frame, just a wild burst of flowers crowding the sill. And, looking at the picture, suddenly I was saying to myself, certain flowers persist.

I guess I've reached an age where you have to play detective with the unbidden thoughts of your own mind. What's that again? What's that from? What is my brain trying to tell me? I'd strewn enough mental breadcrumbs around this particular line that I was able to find the journal, and I found the source, and then by the power of Google, I found two people with whom I have this very curious fixation in common. A certain Mr. Roy Bentley has a book of poems, number 7 of which is titled with my sentence; a Mr. John D'earth has written a jazz-classical fusion composition entitled Concerto for Quintet and Orchestra, the second movement of which is reportedly a jazz ballad called, yes, certain flowers persist.

A peculiar fraternity are we.

(photo by John Graham)

Foundering Fathers

2007-02-01T18:10:00.000-05:00

If you ask me, the Woeful and Lamentable aspect of current political discourse is not that it is so uncivil, but that it is not nearly hysterical enough.

I'm reading a little bit about the debates between the Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists following the French Revolution. The DR's supported France and hated and feared Great Britain, whereas the Federalists were all for trade with Britain and were down on France.

When John Jay concluded a trade treaty with Britain in 1794, an editor wrote "John Jay, ah! the arch traitor--seize him, drown him, burn him, flay him alive." Graffiti on a Federalist's house read, "Damn John Jay! Damn everyone who won't damn John Jay!! Damn everyone that won't put lights in his windows and sit up all night damning John Jay!!!"

In return, the Federalists called the Democratic Republicans "a despicable mobocracy," "Gallic jackals," "frog-eating, man-eating, blood drinking cannibals" who wanted churches to burn and guillotines to appear in the public square. Now that's crossfire.

"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" has a certain lyric and whimsical lilt, to be sure, but lacks some of the gusto and repetitive rhythmic staccato of "frog-eating, man-eating, blood-drinking cannibals." Heritage, not hate!

Quotations from Walter McDougall's "Promised Land, Crusader State"

Esprit d'Escalier

2007-01-16T01:54:00.000-05:00

Back in spring of ought-five, there was a minor group spat over a proposition put forth by Tom, to wit: women will one day covet men for displaying primo video game prowess.

I mean, it's still just so cute and dear that merely writing that makes my bottom lip pout out. But he and his cohorts were quite serious and it seemed only kind to disabuse him of this notion quickly and uncompromisingly. So we argued back and forth (and somehow I missed Matty in comments discovering an entire generation[!!] of women existing behind me and Catherine; I've run to the mirror to check for eye bags and other saggy things).

But why did I spill a thousand words when this picture would have done the job?

[shamelessly ripped from the dashing laoser]

Stir Crazy: Ice Storm Edition

2007-01-15T12:39:00.000-05:00

It's not the ice so much as the stupid drivers, as we all know, so it's really best to sit tight and rifle through cookbooks and drawers for shiny things that will distract you from your torpor until enough time has passed that you think it's acceptable to go back and veg in front of The Wire for a few more hours. Here's what I came up with.

Household Gems my Mother Has Unaccountably Hidden From Me
An apron printed with recipes for Air Raid soup? Yes, please!

Proof that I am a Changeling

My mother folds and carefully stacks plastic grocery bags after returning from a shopping run. Odds that my life will bring her anything but quiet disappointment? Low.

Mad Scientist Comfort Food

That's homemade hot chocolate and a homemade marshmallow [!?!]. I did not know marshmallows could be made. But they can, pretty easily. And when a bit fat pillowy one takes a dip in your sinfully rich homemade cocoa (with just a hint of cinnamon), you don't know how you'll even go back to Ghirardelli, much less Swiss Miss (that cheap whore).

Oh Yes She Did

2007-01-12T15:23:00.000-05:00

In light of David Beckham's announced transfer to play for the L.A. Galaxy, I e-mailed my soccer-obsessed roommate to tell him that I've suddenly discovered a new affection for the sport, and to count me in for tickets next time, uh, the Wizards play the Galaxy.

I mean, the sheer avalanche of ways to let me know I'm a complete retard must have been paralyzing. Not a banner day for the sisterhood; sorry ladies.

Buy Me Some Bubbly and Cracker-Jacks

2007-01-11T00:33:00.000-05:00

Who, me? What did I do this evening? Oh, I took in the opera don't you know. Oh, they're doing Donizetti's Maria Stuarda; it's not canon, darling, but still.
Here's the thing. I spent ten years training as a classical musician. A fine orchestra can make my stomach flutter something fierce. I have flat-out embarrassed myself at ballet performances, I get so fired up. I'm not some hayseed scratching my groin and spitting my tobacky sidewards, is what I'm saying. But opera, I just don't get.

Granted, I haven't been to tons. In fact, the last performance I saw was Boris Godunov in Moscow, which was eh, but I was so jazzed to be at the Bolshoi, I didn't really care. I approach my distaste with the assumption that I am failing opera, not the other way around. Surely I've just not tried hard enough. Surely an open mind remains necessary. And really, there are certain arias that, on their own, are undeniably sublime.

But I think I've put my finger on the problem, and it's that all of my critical faculties for music, theater, literature, and film, are tuned to prize masterful subtlety. The barely noticeable detail that betrays fine craftsmanship. The scalpel not the hammer, right? And opera is a bulldozer. I appreciate the technical prowess of the singers; their control, their range. I knew opera singers back in music school and I know that they work their performances down to the details as minute and fine as any poet. But it still feels like a sledgehammer to me.

Perhaps it's because these virtuoso performances have to be couched in absolute theatrical ridiculousness. Characters with stupid motivations betraying simplest common sense, villains wearing black, heroes wearing white, maidens pure of heart and true in love betrayed by....zzzzzz. Timeless music deserves a better setting than that. I'm perfectly willing to suspend some disbelief for the purpose of drama, but I'm not willing to smother it to death altogether.

Regardless, a fun and diverting evening, and I include in the entertainment my fellow patrons. Dallas, you big ridiculous hairball of a city, sometimes I love you. There was a curious proliferation of gay men wearing black leather pants in the audience; is that an opera convention or more of a Dallas thing? And Dallas women, I salute you. I know it was 58 degrees tonight but you were going to the opera and you'd be damned if you weren't wearing your furs with your diamonds. Women don't sweat, darlin', they glisten. Brava!

Mind the Gap

2007-01-10T13:31:00.000-05:00

Potentially bad news for Tom and Matt. Or have you fellas found a new fashion muse?

Holiday Sloth Update

2007-01-05T14:37:00.000-05:00

1. Roughly 4 years too late, I've now finished watching seasons 1 and 2 of The Wire. Many conversations are now 50% more comprehensible to me. It's pointless, this late in the game, for me to attempt any original commentary, but I'll just join the pile-on: damn it's a fine show. Per conventional wisdom, season 2 is not quite as gripping as Season 1, and I'm fine with leaving the dock workers behind so we can get back to Stringer Bell and the palace intrigue going down in west bal'imur.

2. Roughly 66 years too late, I'm about halfway through reading the Siege of Leningrad, and things are looking grim for the Venice of the North. I forgot how much I love reading Russian history for the sheer gargantuan scale of it all. Unfortunately, the edition I scored from the library is from the 60s, and I imagine the updated edition gleaned a lot more from opened Soviet archives. Even so, a gripping read. The Nazis of Army Group Nord have fully encircled Leningrad and they're tightening the noose. All able-bodied Leningraders have organized into Workers Battalions and are preparing the city for street warfare. They've mined all the buildings, factories, and railways. If the Nazis invade in force, they will simply blow their beloved city into dust rather than let Hitler enjoy his victory parade past the Winter Palace. Next up will be aerial bombardment and roughly three years of blockade and mass starvation. Obviously, I sort of know how this ends, but pretty scintillating anyway.

Question: If Hollywood was as Commie-happy as we've been told since the 50s, how come we've got countless re-enactments of the storming of Normandy and none that I can think of the Leningrad blockade? Spielberg could go apeshit with this material.

The new sue

2007-01-05T03:13:00.000-05:00

I know, it's awfully white. And not terribly original. But we're overdue for a facelift round here; that blue was awfully oppressive. So until I think of something more appealing, this is it. If I controlled the internet, there would be a way for me to just set out a box of crayons and let you all go to town, but nobody asked me.

Me too! Me too!

2007-01-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

I have a music recommendation! Honestly, I do! True, the last time I was really up-to-date on popular music currents was when Young MC topped the charts, but after dipping my toe into the hipster whirlpool of Austin I am so ahead of all y'all.

Voxtrot, the great white hope from Austin. Rock and roll, catchy as all hell.

Listened to their two EPs (thanks, Justin!) for three hours straight driving from Austin to Dallas, partly out of laziness, but by the time I hit Waxahachie I was hooked. Fine, fine driving music.

Here's the part where you all tell me how you're soooo over them already. Go ahead.

From Dushanbe, With Plov

2007-01-03T23:28:00.000-05:00

You know that gorgeous part of James Joyce's The Dead, where the protagonist's wife is telling him the story of young Michael Furey, a beau who courted her when she was a young girl and walked through the rain for her and caught his death? And after hearing his wife's secret tragedy for the first time, he grimly thinks something like, "So. She's had that love in her life."

Well. New Year's is the time of year when I am reminded of a certain secret treasure in my own life: my lovesick Tajik translator. I have had that in my life. May you all have one some day.

Few years back, I was in Tajikistan, doing my thing. Had a translator, Saidmuhiddin, who was very sweet and helpful and asked me charmingly odd questions like "Are there many trees in your country?" Things like that.

After I left, Saidmuhiddin sent me an email proclaiming his affection for me in a most elaborate manner. I was shocked—not only by the sentiment, which seemed outrageously misplaced—but by the language he used. I feel sort of awful about broadcasting part of it. I've been hemming and hawing and really, truly, I shouldn't. It's not kind, it's not classy, it's a bit dishonest and unfair. But god, it's so funny. Forgive me Saidmuhiddin. Here is an excerpt of what my lovesick Tajik translator had to say to me.

Indeed, for me now, it is not easy if not difficult to confine the flood of wishes storming out of my heart and mind into the lake of language, and words can’t express my ultimate wishes at the moment as human language is not ever able to convey the load of lush magnificent notions you wish to express.

You see? I responded with a note telling him that it was a pleasure to meet him and I enjoyed the opportunity to work together and other benign pleasantries in hopes that he'd get the idea. And perhaps he did, but now every January I receive a lovely New Year's greeting from Saidmuhiddin, and when I do, I remember the whole story and it makes me smile.

Only this year, I read the New Year's message and it all looked a little familiar. With a quick search, I tracked back to previous missives, and, can you believe?! The whole business about the storming wishes and the lakes of language? Are in every one! Verbatim! My lovesick Tajik translator is sending me form letters! Upon how many other ladies is he conveying loads of notions, I'd like to know??

Harumph. A lovesick Tajik translator with an itchy cut-and-paste finger. So I've had that in my life.

Country Roads

2007-01-03T15:25:00.000-05:00

I thought my expertise at hauling cars out of mud and snow was pretty solid, until I saw #1 on this list of Most Dangerous Roads. Georgia clocked in at #3, but from the looks of the photos, there's a sizable danger gap between Bolivia (#2) and Georgia (if you control for wine consumption). I mean, holy cow:

A Not Atypical Conversation Snippet Overheard in Austin

2007-01-02T22:33:00.000-05:00

"Oh hey man, where did you get your shirt? My girlfriend is, like, really into pirate ships and she has a ferret, so you know, it would be perfect."

Such Sweet Sorrow

2007-01-02T22:27:00.000-05:00

Oh God, did I seriously start crying when I drove away from Austin this afternoon? Oh yes. Yes I did. What the hell is wrong with me? Some theories follow.

a) I have become a psychotic crybaby. I am a few hormonal shifts away from turning into my mother, who cries when Lee Greenwood sings that he is proud to be an American.
b) Austin rush hour, which apparently begins at 4pm
c) My Nintendo Wii arm is still sore from knocking Justin out cold on his ass. In Round One.
d) Lingering heartburn from having outrageously good queso and tacos for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And brunch. And linner.
e) My dancing feet still hurt from a barn-burnin' New Year's Eve and the post-party limping around downtown barefoot, but for socks pilfered straight off the feet of the aforementioned sparring partner.
f) Because leaving Austin sometimes feel like that part of the movie when Dorothy comes back to Kansas from Oz, and all the lovely super-saturated colors and lollipop-bearing munchkins and jolly singing companions switch to black-and-white and dust and a lot of old people hovering around. If this strikes you as rhetorical overkill, it is because you do not yet know that my original metaphor was going to be the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. So this is me being restrained and subtle. Remind me again why I don't drop out of school and while away my days slinging coffee grinds for a living?

Greetings from Austin

2006-12-31T19:02:00.000-05:00

My New Year's wish for all of you is that you have a place in this world you love so much that it feels like it can save your soul, fortune cookies that can make you cry, and a friend who'll give you vintage cowboy boots that you'll wear and wear, even if they are a little big.

Happy New Year's, ya'll!

Fried Baloney and a Little of the Ol' Domestic Violence

2006-12-23T14:55:00.000-05:00

or: Notes on Texas

I guess maybe I've been out of Texas too long because when I heard that my brother tried to make a fried baloney sandwich, I thought that was the punchline of the story right there. But apparently fried baloney is a Thing. A Thing that exists and that people know about. I have lost touch with my gastronomical roots. Blue states: this is what the heartland people are apparently eating! Fried baloney! Look upon the lunchmeat, ye mighty, and despair.

The punchline of this story, in fact, was that he was trying to make a fried baloney sandwich and kept heating the oil to insane temperatures because he was waiting for it to boil. Nearly burned his house down; I scribbled "Fry Daddy" on the holiday shopping list real quick-like. A friend of mine in high school burned her kitchen to a crisp in a ill-fated attempt at jalapeno poppers, so this is a genuine concern. We were supposed to go see a performance of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite that night at the symphony, so it was kind of a theme evening.

* * *

As long as I've been in Dallas, the place had some sort of identity crisis. Probably dates back to the oil boom, if I had to guess. There's a real yearning there to take its place with the cool kid cities, to have the restaurant scene and martini bars and high-end shopping and high culture accouterments of the Manhattans and the L.A.'s, even though each and every resident of Dallas would claim they'd rather be buried alive than live in either city. And at the same time, the place can't get too far away from just being down-and-dirty Texas, and kind of likes that too.

So when you're in Dallas, you can kind of kick it either way. You can hit the see-and-be-seen circuit, or you can do like we did last night and just head on over to the bowling alley, and break up a little domestic violence in the parking lot on the way in. Seems more fitting, somehow. Seriously, this couple was wailing on each other, and the man had several marked bruises on his face, and seemed to be pushing her towards the open trunk when we walked up to interrupt. She was howling something about their five kids and why'd he gotta wail on her like that. We called bowling security on 'em and wondered if there was some kind of deal, like, break up a domestic fight and get a free pitcher or something. We were sorry for the couple of course, but it sort of felt like a nice and proper homecoming. Undiluted Texas, yes sir.

Good Thing She's a Little White Girl

2006-12-23T14:30:00.000-05:00

When it came to dishing out the common sense genes in my family, I think I wound up with slightly more than my sis, but we're both cursed with pretty meager servings. So this is not to lord it over her, this story, because god knows I've pulled some boneheaded stunts while traveling and precisely why i haven't ended up sobbing, passport-less in more consulates in this big world is kind of a mystery.

But this is about her boneheaded stunt, reprinted without permission.

So little sister is traveling from her home in New York to Texas for the holidays. She's running late, she's frazzled, so she accidentally leaves her carry-on at the security checkpoint and dashes to the gate.

Turns out her flight is canceled, so she has time to notice that she has left her bag unattended in a New York airport. Woopsie-daisy. Back to the checkpoint, she notices a cluster of security guards ringing her bag. At this point, naturally, one's mind frantically catalogs the contents. Oh god, what's in there? Tampons? Beef jerky? At least, that's what I would be thinking. Little sister had a little more to worry about.

What was in her unattended bag in a New York airport? Why, her Arabic dictionary, some journals on terrorism, and her hand-written notes on Al-Qaeda for an article she was preparing for work. Talk about pretending to be a terrorist.

For all that, it defused pretty quickly. She announced that the bag was hers, the guards gave her a stern once-over and told her not to do it again. It's true, she doesn't look very threatening, but times are tense and girlfriend was maybe one allahu akbar away from getting herself disappeared. Instead she was upgraded to first class; there is no justice to be had in airports.

Five Things

2006-12-20T13:24:00.000-05:00

Catherine wants me to tell you 5 things that you didn't already know about me. Let's see how uninformatively revealing I can be.

1. I am not going to Albania in January. Related: this is most definitely the first time I have voluntarily foregone foreign travel and perhaps reflects a certain growing maturity. (Lies! It reflects the fact that Mom said she'd take me shopping if I didn't go.)

2. Did I ever mention that my first career choice was to be an orchestral musician? I was a pretty serious clarinet player in my day. And I was a music performance major for my first year in college before I realized that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life confined to practice rooms and emerge with a conversational and intellectual range that didn't extend beyond the relative merits and demerits of reed brands. So I dropped the major, transferred to the University of Texas, and never looked back. Now and then I miss the euphoria of playing in the midst of a top-notch orchestra, but if I ever find a local screwball woodwind quintet that would have me, I think I'd be satisfied.

3. My arm gets totally sore from throwing darts.

4. I had a brief but illustrious modeling career that landed me on a cover. Of a free Dallas-area gambling magazine. I was wearing a wedding dress, and there were slot machines. The issue was about Vegas weddings. Although you'll choose not to believe me, I swear on everything I hold dear that this was a favor for a friend and not a product of my own ambitions.

5. My brief but illustrious modeling career also led to another favor, in which a friend who designs formal wear for drag queen pageants asked me to pose in some gowns. I choose to believe this is because of my height, and dwell no further on it. Those girls do not have hips, let me tell you. Photos of #4 and #5 are hoarded by Mother as incendiary blackmail leverage. I am definitely going to have to produce grandchildren.

Globetrotting

2006-12-18T15:31:00.000-05:00

Apropos of the previous post, I have a chance to go to Albania in January for a week, and I can't decide if I should do it. I know, this is a ridiculous problem. Bear with me. On the one hand: January in Albania! I've been such a gloomy gus for ages now and nothing perks me up like faraway climes (and frequent flyer miles). On the other: it'll bring me back the very day that spring semester classes begin, I'll have to leave Texas a few days early, and retake an oral core exam that I'd miss. Also, Catherine would probably crucify me for missing her birthday. These are all fine reasons for not going, and probably I should not go. But oh, the wanderlust, the itchy feet. [dramatic sigh; eyes gaze pitiably into the middle distance]

Guess I'll ponder it on the flight back to Texas this evening. That's right, I'm riding off into the sunset and touching down in the homeland. New Year's Eve in Shanri-La (that's Austin for the uninitiated). Yeeha, ya'll!

Blind Item

2006-12-17T13:49:00.000-05:00

What Romanian former NBA player thinks that yours truly is a CIA agent with an uncanny taste for vodka? Hint: even by pro ball standards, he is freakishly tall.

NSFWiki

2006-12-13T16:12:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia, sometimes a less-than-authoritative resource.

tech support

2006-12-12T08:41:00.000-05:00

Does anybody happen to know how I might go about backing up my cell phone contact list onto my Powerbook? I just have that itchy feeling I get when my belongings are about to be lost or stolen, and I don't think that in the age of Bluetooth and what-have-you that I should take to pen and paper like a sucker. And yet, I can't figure it out. Thoughts, suggestions welcome.

(Tried this, but they didn't seem to support my phone.)

Vivisection Saturdays!

2006-12-09T11:53:00.000-05:00

This morning I got a call from my dearest childhood friend Clarissa, previously introduced in these pages as the Ringwraith and "Flossie the Freaky Bitch."

Clarissa wants to know, will I go with her to the museum when I come to Dallas for the holidays? Why sure, Clarissa, what's showing?

Well, says Clarissa, they took a bunch of human bodies and dissected them and posed them. They're all preserved and plumped up, somehow, she said. And they posed one dude as a basketball player so you can see how his muscles work. And one is a pregnant woman and you can see the fetus inside of her. [pause] I guess that one's kind of controversial, Clarissa allowed.

Nobody wants to go with me, she grumps.

And neither do I. I'm not so enamored of muscle groups in action that I really want to gawk at a bunch of skinned and flayed human bodies posed about in a gruesome macabre zombie nightmare freakshow of a science exhibit put together by a German doctor, of all inappropriate nationalities. I can only imagine that this is going over like gangbusters in Dallas.

Diary of a Gimp

2006-12-08T10:05:00.000-05:00

When you're ambling about town with a clunky orthopedic boot on your leg, baby, it's open season. You're a target for every old lady on the bus who wants to recap her catalog of historical complaints and offer unsolicited advice on how what you ought to do is get a rich man to marry you, is what you ought to do.

Also, homeless people have stopped asking me for money; perhaps some sort of infirm solidarity?

Redemption

2006-12-08T09:58:00.000-05:00

Please, please let this be true.

Scaredy Katze

2006-12-08T00:00:00.000-05:00

If there is something scarier than being in a bathroom with the lights off, blindly pawing for the door handle, and catching a glimpse of your reflection moving in the mirror (without realizing there is a mirror there), I'd like to know what it is.

Related: I used to think blitzkrieg was the most deliciously chilling word, but it's overused. Now I think it's wehrmacht. Today I read some phrase like "when the Soviet Union broke the back of the German Wehrmacht," and I swear I got a shiver.

If I ever meet a German moving about in a dark bathroom, I am going to lose my shit.

I'm Melting!

2006-12-05T20:10:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone. Do you remember, once upon a time, when I threatened to quit the blog because I was pretty sure it would end up a big ol' steaming pile of pedestrian whining about graduate school? Then, like 3 of you told me not to. And none of you told me to scram. So here we are. You can only blame yourselves. Don't say I didn't etc.

Sigh.

Look, actually, secretly, I love it [school, not the blog. gross]. In many ways, this is an incredibly decadent, luxurious, nigh-on narcissistic exercise, all this book-larnin'. It's an expensive exercise, sure, but it's also quite indulgent, nurturing your mind and burnishing your resume instead of cranking out widgets and gizmos in the looney-tunes Dr. Seuss factory that (in my personal mythology) signifies the real world. So, while it's obvious that I'm becoming somewhat unhinged, I'm also aware that it's incredibly indelicate to complain about such a privileged and fortunate position.

Anyway, let's get to it.

Oh my gawwwwd.

How to tell you how much time I have spent in the library. I just drew up a Harper's Index-style table to illustrate the numbing reality, but it seemed sort of sad and obnoxious and so I erased it. Suffice to say, a lot. I'm closing down the library more times than I've closed down bars. Sometimes I wander over to celebrity gossip pages and look at Lindsey Lohan and think about her having orgiastic starlet meltdowns all over the west coast and think about myself sitting quietly in the library chair through my 20s and find it funny that girls these days have such choices, or anyway, such outcomes.

I should be more positive about my temporary residence. It is nice that my signature chair, like Memory Foam, is now nicely cushioned about my cushion, even when I'm not sitting in it. And I think I've developed a crush on shelf DS 918 - DT 108.4, what from staring at it so long.

And at least I'm not alone here; there's always the comfort of camaraderie. The girl with far too much faith in the soundproofing capabilities of plywood who goes into study rooms to shut the door and freak out singing Bonnie Tyler. The Europeans who get up to take smoke breaks every 45 seconds and explain football tournament rules to anyone who will listen. My poor, harried study partner who always turns up in the library looking haunted and frantic about something, stutters about for a few desperate seconds, and then, having made up her mind, flutters off to quell some crisis elsewhere.

I just sit here, watching the parade, forcing my fingers to make clacky noises on the keyboard through sheer force of will and epic, feeble mind games. Did you see Lord of the Rings? I'm the Gollum.

I would like a tangerine. [says me]
You don't deserve a tangerine!!!
But I would like one, and I'm fidgety.
Your fingers will get sticky! Type two more pages and then have your sticky tangerine!
I'm picking it up.
Put it down!
Okay. ... I'm picking it up again.
Put it down!
Okay.
I'm going to write a blog post.
No! Two more pages!

Sigh.

The tangerine's lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And yards to write before I sleep
And yards to write before I sleep.

Incidentally, have you heard Robert Frost was a total ass? And didn't know horses from shinola?

N E Wayz

2006-12-03T21:46:00.000-05:00

So, you know those notes we used to write in junior high? The ones we'd fold up just so, with the little pull tab sticking out? That we'd slip into locker slots or hand off in C Hall before third period? Well, having just lobbed one over a row of study carrels at my friend (my muscle memory for folding the things seems impeccable; the aim, less so), I had an alarming thought. Do Kids Today even do that any more? Is the fine art of note-folding obsolete among our nation's bratty pre-teens? Do they just, I don't know, text one another?

Well, no time to dwell on that. My friend replies that she has spotted a cute boy in the hall and I need to go find out if he likes her (yes or no).

You Lose Some, You Win Some

2006-12-03T21:27:00.000-05:00

Con: Texas had a disappointing football season, resulting in an embarrassing Alamo Bowl berth.

Pro: I can go! Wooohooo!

I haven't seen the Horns live since I was a student back in 1801. Madly excited.

Blue Christmas

2006-12-03T10:09:00.000-05:00

The freakishly balmy days are finally giving way to more seasonable temperatures, and I'm finally burying the flip-flops and resurrecting the earmuffs. Must be the holidays! My favorite time of year; a season I observe by ritualistically watching Irving Berlin's White Christmas and reading about world-historical tragedies!

Last year, I was mildly disturbing my companions on weekend ski trips to Bakuriani by snuggling up to the hearth apres ski with hot cocoa and Gulag, followed up with Harvest of Sorrow. This year, I think I shall alarm my family by cocooning myself in down comforters with The Siege of Leningrad.

I have not seriously considered the impulse driving me to mix holiday cheer with the depths of human wretchedness. Surely there are some interesting psychological impulses at work here, but I am satisfied to chalk it up to my being a twisted little freak and leaving it at that. Ho, ho, ho!

Hocus Pocus

2006-11-30T12:55:00.000-05:00

When I was a teenager, a fortune teller read my palm and told me that I would find true love in my life, and together we would be married and happy for ten years, but after those ten years my true love would die.

Now, I'm usually pretty skeptical. Not hard-nosed cynical, but skeptical. I don't believe that things happen for a reason, I am churchily agnostic, I don't mind opening umbrellas indoors, I am scared of ghosts despite not believing in them, and I'm not entirely sold on electrons.

But unaccountably, I instantly believed this little nugget of tragedy and still somehow do. Amidst all the balderdash I hear and dismiss in a day, something in this rang sad and true in a way that must have satisfied some sense of calamity in me. Now and then, when I remember the death foretold, thoughts of future success and contentment are dogged by an image of me weeping over love lost and wistfully recalling those words and thinking how I knew it all along.

Why am I telling you this? Because there's one other piece of nonsense I believe in, and that's that you can jinx your fate by saying it out loud.

Sea Change

2006-11-29T15:57:00.000-05:00

Man, the degree to which the rhetoric on Iraq has changed since the election can really make your head spin, no?

I'm basing this on my apprehension, not on LexisNexis searches, but don't you think? Am I way off, or has inevitable withdrawal from Iraq become conventional wisdom, instead of cut-and-run defeat-o what-have-you. And NBC is sacking up (courageously throwing their lot in with premier experts on the subject) and calling the damn thing a civil war already. And a FT columnist not given to "mindless hyperbole" is calling Bush "arguably the worst president since the US became a world power." Used to hear that kind of thing before, but not from any corner offices, so to speak.

In this age of entrenched political machines and inertia-wracked institutions, it's hard to imagine that an election really can make that kind of a difference. I'm not talking about policy revolutions; we'll wait and see how that all shakes out. But we finally, finally pulled a loose brick in the Bush administration's fortress, and the walls come a tumblin' down.

Hot Peace

2006-11-28T12:28:00.000-05:00

Please forgive the uncharacteristic foray into talking shop; I should return to the regular trivialities shortly.

Today, discussing foreign policy and Russia, Matt says:

There's an obvious deal to be cut here [...]we can return Russia's "near abroad" to Russia in exchange for Russian cooperation on Iran and North Korea, or else we can have a series of standoffs across a wide Eurasian arc.

While we can’t return anything to anybody, we can certainly dilute our support of Georgia and thereby remove one of the vanishingly few obstacles between that small nation and Russia’s heavy hand. Our support is less key to Ukraine, and with Yanukovych grasping at foreign policy reins in Kyiv, Russia can play a very different game there. Ukraine and Russia may work out an accommodative relationship, Georgia and Russia cannot. Gas prices are the latest weapon of choice, winter is coming, and if we’re lucky it will be cold, not hot.

Obviously, my sympathies rest heavily with Georgia. They’ve been given every reason to believe that they have Western—and specifically American—support. We have been the premier cheerleaders of their democratic reforms, we have funded, we have trained-and-equipped, we have lavished high-level diplomatic attention. They reportedly have the highest per-capita troop involvement in Iraq, and (as every cab driver in Tbilisi will point out) they even named the highway from the airport to the city after George W. Bush.

But Russia can stonewall on Iran and North Korea. As Russia continues its punishing policies designed to break Georgia, we can push back to a certain extent—throw some mid-level diplomats over to issue a tongue-lashing—but we will not antagonize them to a degree that would threaten our broader interests in nuclear sanctions. Nor should we, I am very sorry to admit.

We’ve already had a taste of the US inclination to accommodate Russia, in the latest UN Security Council resolution on Georgia. The language was a joke, practically printed on Kremlin stationery, placing the blame for recent escalation squarely on Georgian shoulders and cautioning them sternly to tone down activities in the Upper Kodori Gorge—which is on uncontested Georgian territory. I can understand the necessity of these concessions, and there will be more to come, but I don't have to like it.

There’s much, much more to say but I’ll restrain myself. A depressing situation to be sure – our driving interests as a nation must be elsewhere, but Russia domination of the energy transit corridor across Georgia (transporting Azeri and ultimately Central Asian oil & gas to Europe bypassing Russia) is, let’s say, not what BP is angling for. On a human scale, if sentiments from my friends there are any indication, there is a growing sense that the chance of this generation will be lost, and perhaps this winter.

Wrong Mailing List

2006-11-27T14:57:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure who sold my contact information to the US Naval Institute, but I fear that anybody whose sales pitch begins:

Dear Ms. S,
Knowing your military interest and background...

has gone and wasted a stamp.

My military interests are decidedly narrow.

Wild Turkey Day

2006-11-26T23:24:00.000-05:00

I believe it was after dinner, while our tummies set about the task of digesting glorious globs of Thanksgiving goodness, that Charles' Mom collapsed into a folding chair with a glass of white and an exhausted "Goddamn."

The woman had expertly marshaled 30+ rambunctious Thanksgiving Day guests through appetizers, two quickfire furniture rearrangements, an exceptional dinner, all the while making sure everybody was mingling, introduced, and intimately familiar with the well-worn path to the booze station. A break was due.

That was when I let slip the news that in my family, there's no drinking at Thanksgiving. There is turkey, there is ambrosia (don't ask, yankees), and there is sweet tea, but there is no booze and there is no carrying-on. She was appalled, her face a mix of pity and frightened wonder—the sort of look one might have had after the 2004 elections upon realizing that one's fellow citizens are inscrutable, damaged creatures.

Guys. It's so much better with the drinking.

You get a Thanksgiving featuring toasts such as "All Hail Jim Webb", "All Hail the Stuffing"; there are lascivious song & dance interpretations of "My Humps" by a doe-eyed seven-year-old [who was probably not drunk, but egged on shamefully by the rest of us. It's all funny until child protective services shows up.]; younger cousins suffer heinous atomic wedgies at the hands of the older; a grandmother gleefully proclaims that she was grandmother number 3, but has moved up in the seniority rankings after another grandma kicked the bucket. And Grandma number 1 (who had better watch her back) lords it up all over, announcing to anyone who cares to listen: "I am the matriarch!". I don't know about the rest of you, but I will probably procreate if only to be able to use that line before I die.

I probably should have had a few more drinks myself, but there were squirmy young cousins to lift up and swing around, and I didn't want to drop any on their heads, as did certain parties I could name. Thanks to the Grays for a virtuoso Turkey Day, although I'm sorry (I think) that there wasn't a repeat of last year's storied hot tub episode. Next year I'm bringing my bikini (just in case).

Thanksgiving

2006-11-23T12:09:00.000-05:00

Last November, I was sitting in a makeshift guesthouse behind a gas station in a little town halfway to nowhere called Akhaltsikhe. The woman who ran the place, half-Russian, half-Georgian, would come hang out in my room because they gave me the one with heat and it broke up her long evenings. She's smoke cigarettes and we'd watch TV and try to chat best we could, in my broken Russian.

She asked me what Thanksgiving was all about, and I tried to say that when America was young, people came and winter was cold. And the, uh, people that already lived in America gave them food so they lived in the winter. So we say thank you every November.

She politely smiled through her utter confusion and went back to the cigarettes. I told her the story but I missed the whole point. She wouldn't understand about Indians and maize, but she'd have understood something about being grateful for what we have. About recognizing that we can't make it alone in this world.

I'm so very thankful, this year, to have people in my life who help me when I need them, and I am thankful to have people who need me to help them in turn. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The Skinny

2006-11-21T13:13:00.000-05:00

Dear Fashion Industry,

You can do all the blitzkrieg marketing in the world, but I'm still not going to pay $158 to look like a pear. We are not all Hepburn-hipped, and this poor model probably weighs 98 pounds soaking wet.

Hugs,
Sue

Resolved.

2006-11-20T19:13:00.000-05:00

No matter how much it amuses me, I really ought to get out of the habit of provisionally titling serious documents with ridiculous headings.

In my addled old age, I forget to go back and change them upon completion, and I very nearly just emailed out a paper on UN transitional administration titled "Light in their Loafers." (It's about UNAMA's "light footprint" approach in Afghanistan, see? Ha?)

And these kids today and their music?

2006-11-16T17:13:00.000-05:00

I can't say for sure, but evidence is mounting that I am becoming an old lady before my time.

1) I have taken to saying "Bless his heart!" about everyone. Old.

2) I have sudden urges to write thank you notes to people. Old.

and most recently, I have found an anti-drug advertising campaign both cool and persuasive and heartwarming instead of totally lame and out-of-touch.

Tell me if I'm wrong. [click on the ad called "Little Brother"] But it seems to me that the kid's catch phrase in this spot is miles above the "Just say no!" and "It's not cooool!" responses we were indoctrinated into.

Or shall I just start dying my hair blue and get it overwith?

This is Your Mind on Vicodin

2006-11-15T16:05:00.000-05:00

I wonder. If a gay man wants to make a comment to an unfamiliar woman in a public setting that would be off-putting or inappropriate coming from a heterosexual man, but charming coming from a gay man, will said gay man queen it up in that moment, in order to broadcast to the woman that she can be comfortable with his comment? For women who do not have gay acquaintances, could this lead to a general perception that as a group, gay men are far queenier than may actually be the case?

Here Comes the Sun

2006-11-15T15:39:00.000-05:00

Right, so the last two days have been much, much better. God decided to stop spitting on me, my shoulders are sore as hell, but I got an orthopedist to see me today.

It was probably one of the absolute best medical experiences I've had in my life. I showed up an hour early by mistake, but they saw me immediately anyway. The receptionists were genuinely friendly, the regular physical therapy patients all knew one another and the doctor and they were bandying about clever nicknames and cutting up. The docs were slapping me on the shoulders and giving hugs when it turned out that my break was in a location that didn't require a cast. Really, it felt more like a neighborhood pub than a clinic. Minus the booze. Although they're very generous with the Vicodin prescriptions.

Now I've got this incredibly over-engineered boot on my leg that is so awesome, I can almost get around without crutches, but definitely can manuever without having to dangle entirely.

And my dear friends have all been lovely and kind and supportive: T hauling my ass around town and offering tips to stay in shape while I mend; K sitting up in the emergency room for six hours on a Friday night with nary a complaint that might make me feel guilty (I did anyway); my roommate playing butler; Catherine coming over last night with her feminine intuition sussing out that what I need is Texas beer and chocolate ice cream and her sweet self; and bunches sending kind wishes by email.

And DC, I must say, has been incredibly friendly. The bus drivers make sure other passengers watch out for my foot, and without exception, somebody has jumped up to offer their seat the second I get on. Even if there are open seats, somebody in the seat nearest the front will get up so I don't have to shuffle on back. Strangers on the street change walking routes to open building doors for me, classmates carry things around, and generally the whole world has conspired to end the pity party.

So thanks, friends and strangers! Spirits high!

Fetal Position Mondays

2006-11-13T17:57:00.000-05:00

One very much wants to avoid, in moments of angst and discontent, turning to the internet in order to broadcast one's trivial woes. But today has gone and reduced me into the emotional equivalent of my 13-year-old self, and in this state of mind, shrieking at my diary is entirely appropriate. Shameless pity party to follow:

So, I broke my foot on Friday night and the ER put a temporary splint on it until I could see a real orthopedist. Today was the first day I've had to commute around town on the crutches, and damn. I'm in decent shape, but that is hard. Also it was raining, and umbrellas are not easy to manuever when you need both hands to propel your body down Massachusetts Avenue. I therefore begin my day wet and disgusting, with a big fat foot covered in garbage bags. (I'm imaging Justin Timberlake descending from the heavens like a superhero, finding the distressed me in order to bring the sexyback. Makeover show pitch?)

Also, orthopedist offices were unobliging with appointments, unnecessarily rude and cutting, and condescending to boot. I was called—I do not jest—kiddo, after being told I'd need to wait 3 weeks to see someone.

By the end of the day, the commuting-about on crutches took its toll on my arms, which started to quiver a little, but I managed to arrive at my bus stop, collapse on the bench, and wait to go home. After 20 fruitless minutes of waiting, a passerby told me that this bus changed route weeks ago, they just haven't changed any signs, and I'd have to march myself elsewhere.

So a bit watery-eyed and sniffly to go with my disheveled and garbage-bag footed couture, I slug it to the other bus stop, but was stopped along the way by a concerned old lady who said, "My dear! Please be careful on those crutches! Be sure you don't jam them into your armpits!"

"Yes, ma'am. I'm trying."

"My girlfriend just died from that!"

Fantastic.

"Of course she was 93."

After these and other serial indignities, I find my bus, I eventually collapse at home, and what should be waiting for me there? But the pair of sexy, killer pumps I ordered a few weeks ago. I look at the arching, delicate shoes, I look at my big block bandaged foot.

Internets, I need a hug.

Good Morning, or should I say, Buenos Dias

2006-11-09T00:04:00.000-05:00

Colbert, last night:

Tomorrow you're all going to wake up in a brave new world. A world where the constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags! Where tax-and-spend democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio and teach evolution to illegal immigrants!

The Morning After

2006-11-08T12:36:00.000-05:00

What a fun night. In retrospect, I'm sort of embarrassed to recall the number of times I used the word "bloodbath" or "bloodletting." A bit much, really. Get a hold of yourself, woman.

Celebrated with two lovely ladies who have spent so much time in the trenches of the minority, I could visibly see the difficulty with which their lips tried to form the words "majority" as they imagined their new voicemail recordings. Watching the election returns in DC, of course, is like watching the World Cup or the Super Bowl anywhere else. Continuing the metaphor, one of my friends enlightened me, "Yes. And working in the minority is like losing the big game to your rival team every single day."

Election Day

2006-11-07T13:15:00.000-05:00

Civic duty for the day completed. But no "I Voted" sticker. What gives?? Budget cuts? It's like not getting a cookie after donating blood. Furthermore, I continue to be shocked that I do not need to produce any sort of ID at my polling station so long as the name I say to the pollworker happens to be on the list. While observing elections in remote Ukrainian or Tajik villages (pop. in the double digits), I always feel guilty watching the pollworkers greet incoming neighbors that they'd known since birth, then cast a wary eye upon us overseers, then mumble to the neighbor that they'd need to see some ID, please.

Not to mention, at least when I'm observing parliamentary elections, it really sticks in my craw to watch each and every voter exercise a right that I, as a DC citizen, don't enjoy. Blind leading the blind.

At my polling station today, we had the choice of paper ballot or touch-screen. For my highly sensitive and crucial DC vote, I opted for paper. According to the pollworker I asked, everybody's going for paper. That cheered me, a little.

What didn't cheer me is the number of educated, politically minded acquaintances I have that happen to be registered in other states (some hosting crucial races) that didn't bother to get an absentee ballot. What does it take, people?? I have great reservations about mandatory voting systems such as Australia's, but perhaps the threat of a $20 fine would be greater motivation to my friends than, oh, wholesale dismantling of the value system they hold dear. Whatever it takes.

Terrible Music Fridays!!

2006-11-03T15:30:00.000-05:00

The way I see it, somebody around here has to do the dirty work and counteract all the fine and inspired music recommendations offered by those in the know. They give you forgotten favorites and undiscovered gems? I give you...

Blestyashie!

Please, no need for thanks. If I can be your source for terrible Russian pop, that is thanks enough.

How to describe the agony and the ecstasy that is Blestyashie? (It means "Shining" or, like "The Shiny Ones"). Like all Terrible Russian Pop, they feature repetitive unoriginal beats, heavy-handed production, general yowling of inanities, and lots of gratuitous flesh. And I love it.

It was not always so. Their blockbuster single Vostochnaya Skazka (An Eastern Tale) was all the rage in Tbilisi last year, so I heard it about 800 times, scowling and sneering all the while. But then, right around the 801st listen...the toe...it started tapping. The throat, humming. Well, I slippery sloped it all the way down and now I listen to Blestyashie while tooling around town on my bike (like I'm in some kind of bizarro world Wes Anderson in Moscow movie).

So, feast your eyes and ears upon Vostochnaya Skazka, (feat. Arash, who is apparently some Persian popstar that can be trained into speaking some Russian). And despite the slutty get-ups, these girls are empowered! Sort of. At one point in the lyrics, Arash says, says "Hey beautiful girl, I really like you. I already have three wives but you can be the fourth." Then the girls are all, "Look dear, I already have 5 husbands. I love them all, but if you want, you can be the sixth." Devushka power! (I swear, listen to it 800 times, you'll looooove it).

Dumbstruck

2006-11-01T00:05:00.000-05:00

All this talk about Iran reminded me of the time, almost exactly a year ago, when I was as close as I've ever been to the place. I was down in Lankaran, in the very south of Azerbaijan.

There are two things I remember about Lankaran, Azerbaijan. One is the exciting nearness of Iran (a rather pathetic theme in my life: I get my kicks from orbiting the forbidden at a demure distance), and the second is that it is the first time in my life I've been utterly and completely unable to communicate.

Tried to grab dinner at a hotel restaurant, but the menu was only in Azeri. I asked the waiter in Russian about various dishes—everyone I met in Azerbaijan had spoken Russian thus far—and he looked petrified. Turns out, it was Farsi or Azeri or nothing. This sounds, I realize, entirely unremarkable, but it was unprecedented for me. In all the places I have ever gone, I was either able to rely shamefacedly on English, communicate in Russian, or get by with simple bits of the local tongue or place-names.

But with this waiter, nothing. It's an indescribably helpless feeling, being stripped of that basic faculty. Like I'd just lost a leg but kept trying to stand on it anyway, not able to fathom that it's not there. I am sorry to say, I involuntarily pulled the ugly-American-with-a-twist and continued repeating words in Russian, certain that he'd get it if he only tried hard enough. I ultimately pointed at some kebab or another at random and hoped for the best.

It's odd enough to live in a linguistic environment in which you can communicate, but are not fluent. Prior to my year in Georgia, I hadn't really appreciated how much my personality would change when I could not rely on subtleties of meaning, wordplay, sarcasm, innuendo. There, I was intensely agreeable, always smiling to exuberantly communicate good intentions where my words failed. With most of my Georgian friends I spoke simple English and adopted their phrasing and, although I really don't know why, I almost never cursed. (My terribly potty mouth has returned in fine form now that I'm stateside. So has my scowling and general unpleasantness.)

Back home in the U.S., one of the early unexpected moments of elation came when I comfortably chatted with a salesperson in a store and then even called her back to slightly adjust my request. No silently rehearsing words under my breath, no steeling myself for questions I can't completely understand, no covering embarrassing gaffes and misinterpretations with exaggerated shrugging. I had my language back, and I felt incredibly powerful.

Now that some months have passed, that thrill is gone. But recently I wandered into a Latino-owned grocery on my corner and ordered some ground pork from the butcher, only to find he didn't know a lick of English. Spanish was about a decade ago, and so I stuttered some words and I shrugged apologetically and we both laughed exaggeratedly and I pantomimed until I remembered how to say half a pound. I had lost my language again, but the game was back, and I felt incredibly nostalgic.

Salads Don't Have to Suck

2006-10-27T12:23:00.000-04:00

Lunch was looking bleak. No promising leftovers in the fridge, and despite a personal credo to not worry my system with crap, I was making eyes at my roommate's Hot Pockets.

But I rummaged around a little further and, well. I've just gone and impressed the hell out of myself by concocting the most delicious yuppy salad you ever heard of. Check it out.

It's got locally grown spinach from the farmer's market last weekend, some sliced apples from my apple-picking excursion at the Carter Mountain orchard, some delicious fresh Bulgarian feta that I forgot was living in our fridge, and to top it all off, I emulsified into a vinaigrette some of the fresh sunflower oil I bought on the roadside in eastern Georgia next to the sunflower fields. Rich and nutty and pungent.

I didn't know I had it in me. Suck it, Rachel Ray!

Right on the Kisser

2006-10-27T00:36:00.000-04:00

When it comes to greeting friends and acquaintances, I've said my piece on the cheek-kissing vs. hugging debate elsewhere, so there's no need to cover old turf. (In sum: cheek kissing is FAR superior and keeps you from having to choose between impressing your body against a middling acquaintance or coldly shaking hands. Naysayers claim that the kissing is Euro-mimicry of the worst sort, but aren't social hugs so phony, really? I will agree that consciously adopting a kiss-culture in the midst of a dominant hugging norm would mean you are a total tool, so I merely bemoan the status quo and do not prescribe a revolution.) Georgia was a firmly cheek-kissing culture and my social interactions were far better for it.

Returning to hug-centric America has generally been uneventful. I know that folks here hug, so I hug. The social norms are easy to navigate. But what about the friends I made in Georgia that are now here in America with me? Our default social greeting was always the cheek-peck, but here, that seems somehow affected (like all those study-abroad-in-Italy types tossing off ciao well after re-entry). And yet, adjusting agreed-upon interaction after crossing an arbitrary geographical border seems equally silly.

The dilemma has real consequences. Just today, I bumped into a Georgian friend from Georgia. He's been in America about six weeks—long enough to pick up on our habits—and when we met there was simply an awkward bobbing back and forth towards each other...cheek-no!...hug-wait!...and we simply settled for swaying stupidly and exchanging business cards. The real DC hello.

Cold Worriers

2006-10-18T22:37:00.000-04:00

Bizarrely, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev was in Midland, TX. I guess the speaking circuit is really taking him to the dustbowl of history.

He's jawing off about the Tortilla Curtain being the new Berlin Wall and how the murder of Anna Politkovskaya is big-B bad for Russian democracy.

Incidentally, the murder of Anna Politkovskaya is all the rage in my political Russian language class these days. We're supposed to discuss Russian news, in Russian, so it's all murders and intrigues and sanktsii against Iran and North Korea.

It's a bit funny, focusing on political vocabulary when my regular speech in Russian has slipped so much. We're all a bunch of ignorant little Brezhnevs now. For example, I am perfectly comfortable telling you that the relations between the two countries are built upon a foundation of mutual cooperation and trust but I can't ever remember how to say "I woke up."

Kick Back and Deliver

2006-10-18T01:44:00.000-04:00

So the new gig is this. Mentoring DC public high school kids from the far side of the Anacostia river, trying to give those with college aspirations the extra little oomph they need to make something of themselves. Seems a nice way to escape my recent preoccupations with navel-gazing and antisocial library-dwelling, and T, who has been doing it for years, sings the praises of this program.

Last week I met the other mentors, and we're a fine looking group. We got the skinny on what to expect from our students, and how to handle the inevitable rough spots. Don't expect a Hallmark card, they warned us. The students are in the program because they want to be, but there are broken homes and behavioral problems and some of them have endured abuse and gone numb to violence. You may be, they told us, the first person of your racial or ethnic background that these students have closely interacted with, and it can be challenging to earn their trust.

The organizers emphasized the importance of meeting the parents early. Introduce yourself, let them know who their child will be periodically running off with, explain the program if they're not aware, try to enlist their help in making sure the student shows up and makes an effort. I confess this made me nervous. It can be incredibly sensitive for a middle-class white girl to show up in the home of, say, a single mom working 3 jobs to get by, and explain that she'll be taking over from here. Toes can be stepped on, unintended implications of poor parenting can be transmitted. It seemed important that I find a way to explain my participation in the program (and in her daughter's life) in a humble and non-self-righteous manner.

But finally, last night, after much anticipation, I was to meet the student I'll be working with this year. We all gathered in a large meeting room, where the students clowned around and flirted and glanced at the mentors, wondering the same thing as we were. "Which one is mine?" The organizers started calling names and mentors paired off with their students. Some pairs looked like they could be sisters. Others, like the reluctant gangsta boys paired with eager PWC accountants made you long for a documentary filmmaker to tail them. I was so ready for this. Silently rehearsing my stand-and-deliver speech. My tough-love game face was on. I'm thinking Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds. Time to make a difference! Somebody needs me to believe in her! To push her onward when all the odds in the world are stacked against her! The chasm between our different worlds shrinking as understanding blossoms!

I was still burping out inspiration when Shanice sat down across from me. An adorable little thing with a quiet laugh and a ladylike air. My project!

"So," says I, indulgently. "Have you tried to think yet about what you might be interested in studying at college?"

She looks at me squarely. "Yes. International Relations."

Well.

This was unexpected.

"Wow. That's what I study," says I. She is happily surprised. "Have you thought about any schools yet, or should we start looking at programs?"

"Oh I pretty much have my list down - Cornell, Emory, a few others. I want to leave this area."

Aha. Uselessly, I glance down at the sheet of icebreaker questions handed to us by the organizers.

"And, uh. What activities do you like to do in your spare time?"

"I'm interested in photography. Other than that I just read and write a lot. But if I could, I would just want to travel all the time."

Sweet Jesus on a stick, this girl is like a 17-year-old Southeast quadrant me.

We skipped over the icebreaker questions and got straight into it. Career paths in international affairs, the future prospects of Latin American area studies, the ups and downs of working stateside versus in a field mission. My Michelle Pfeiffer playbook was worthless; this girl is more together than I am.

So I got a delightful young lady who is going to be a piece of cake to work with. I don't know what I can do for Shanice—though she seemed pretty psyched about coming to classes and talks around campus—but as for me, I want to find out how a kid like that comes out of Anacostia with such unblinkered determination. I have got to meet these parents.

White people do the darndest things

2006-10-18T01:37:00.000-04:00

If only my friend T had watched The Wire, she would have known better than to follow the address of this establishment and take her visiting father on a traumatic tour through West Baltimore searching for pie. And probably, she would have taken that first modifier more seriously.

(Also.)

Strategic Helplessness and Home Depot

2006-10-16T19:03:00.000-04:00

or: Betraying the Sisterhood for a Power Saw

I never worked it enough in bars and clubs for my alleged feminine charms to earn me free booze or underage entry. Batting my eyelashes never got me out of a ticket when caught by the fuzz. In fact, I was starting to think this whole feminine mystique business was all a hoax. That is, all until that hot Texas afternoon when I visited Home Depot in a sundress.

It was a simple errand—needed some nuts and bolts and washers and I knew what size and everything. But after being tailed by an oversolicitous salesboy who slipped the goods into a tiny paper sack and winked that I could just take them "compliments of Home Depot," I started calling them doohickeys double-quick.

That's what I learned. Sweety-pie ignorance can be exchanged for hardware in the exchange market of Home Depot. I managed to cash in a few more times, but my needs there are generally few.
It's a slightly awkward pose, for those ladies of my generation raised to bare our intellects the way our mothers were meant to bare (or burn?) their bras. No excuses these days for playing dumb so boys will think you're cute. But pretending, say, that you don't know a language when you do? Or pretending that you don't know that it was Professor Plum with the lead pipe? Very useful at times.

Well, I fucked up a bike thing.

I borrowed my roommate's bike, see. Rode it over a few blocks, took out the u-lock to fasten it up outside the flophouse, and inadvertantly managed to reset the combination, relock the u-lock, and then spin the dials. Bike was v. v. stuck.

Today was Operation Liberation and it was no easy feat. The internets suggested that hacksaws might work to loose the punier u-locks. But this lock? Laughed at the hacksaw. The internets further suggested (take note, budding criminals) that a good car jack could be inserted into the u-lock, jacked up, and the thing would pop right open. Jesus, I don't know. The damn thing is yuppy proof or something because this was a failure.

So it's back to Home Depot. Did you know they rent power tools? I mean, anything. I saw dudes returning jackhammers and all kinds of crazy things. And they just hand it to you, like here, have a chainsaw. I don't know what I expect exactly, maybe a user's manual? Or a waiting period?

So I'm standing there with all the contractors and day laborers waiting my turn. "Whatchu need, girl?" asks Marvin, the Home Depot clerk. "I don't know!" I chirp happily, smiling with teeth. "Something that cuts metal." "Whatchu cutting?" "My bike lock." I scrunch my face unhappily to show what a silly girl am I, and Marvin snorts in amusement.

Marvin hauls out a power saw with a reciprocal metal blade, reckoning that'll do the trick. He plugs it in to test the power, and as it whirs to life I skitter back noticeably. "Aw, don't tell me you're scared of the saw, girl?" "I am scared!" I allow. I am not sure, but it is possible that nobody has made Marvin feel as biguva man today as I have done so far. I assume that my points are accumulating.

The saw was a disaster, it didn't even make a dent. So it's back to Home Depot and to Marvin. "It didn't work at all," I pout, waving the saw around. Marvin is stumped for a moment but settles on a freaking giant circular concrete saw. "Now this is a little heavy," he warns me. I aim for doe-eyed. "I'll try..."

The concrete saw, I must admit, was not ultimately wielded by yours truly. In fact, yours truly might have been cowering in a stairwell while other parties did the heavy work of showering sparks all down Florida Ave. Incidentally, it is worth noting that in Washington, DC one can free a locked bike with a massive circular saw that sparks up like the fourth-of-july and the cops will not bother you. At least if you are white. I haven't tried it any other way.

So insane overkill in the way of power tools (shock and awe, ya'll) led to the ultimate success of Operation Liberation. This is one lesson you can take from this tale. Here's the other. With mission accomplished, I lugged the saw back to Marvin to settle up my rental fee, smiled sweetly, and I'll be damned if the man didn't knock off half the price.

Knigi

2006-10-08T00:27:00.000-04:00

Right, so the books. Let's get to it.

1. One book that's changed your life
You sort of want to go back to your first, great childhood book obsessions. Anne of Green Gables, say. Madeleine L'Engle. My brief but pronounced period of paganism after reading the Mists of Avalon at age 11 (I sat in Mass praising the Goddess under my breath). But for satisfying cause-and-effect, I'll name a poem instead of a book, and that's Anna Akhmatova's Requiem. From there it was a straight line to the rest of Russian literature, history, then language, then politics, and next thing I know I've spent a year in Georgia—birthplace of Stalin, destroyer of Akhmatova's family. Well, one doesn't start into Russian with an eye on happy serendipities.

2. One book that you have read more than once
Michael Cunningham "The Hours". Before there was a movie. I was so enraptured by his prose that I picked up a few of his other books, and none of them did a thing for me. But this one slays.

3. One book you would want on a desert island.
Physicians desk reference. Hollowed out. Inside—waterproof matches, iodine tablets, beet seeds, protein bars, NASA blanket and, in case I get bored, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. No, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

[But seriously? Probably some Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One in particular seems appropriate for the circumstances.]

4. One book that made you cry.
Where the Red Fern Grows. A more interesting question would be: what book made you accidentally throw up on yourself? And the answer to that would be Isaac Babel's Collected Stories. I'm not being cutesy or metaphoric. This incident involves a nasty bout of bronchitis and a Goonie's impersonation but we can save that story for another time.

5. One book that made you laugh.
Confederacy of Dunces; it's been said before, but I have to agree.

6. One book you wish had been written.
My former colleague and friend is a Russian emigre and her mother survived the Great Patriotic War, the blockade of Leningrad, and escaped the blockade across the iced-over "road of life" only to learn that she'd lost a brother years before to Stalin's purges. She wrote her memoirs, and my colleague stubbornly and inexplicably denies my constant pleas to translate them into English. I wish she would.

7. One book you wish had never been written.
Oh, The Kite Runner can suck it and so can everybody who recommended that garbage to me.

8. One book you are currently reading.
I assume a copies of my syllabi wouldn't be too revealing. Time permitting, I supplement the grad school reading regimen with a re-read of a collection of Vaclav Havel's essays, "Living in Truth." Started it up again with this torture business looming in my mind.

9. One book you've been meaning to read.
The Adventures of Augie March. Martin Amis calls it the Great American Novel, so one of these days...

(Aside to Yglesias)

2006-09-29T15:12:00.000-04:00

Yes, yes, I saw. See, I've been in blogging semi-retirement so the gears are a little creaky around here. I'll get on it soonasican.

Trouble in Georgia

2006-09-29T15:03:00.000-04:00

As you may have heard. Russia is pulling its ambassador, no longer issuing visas to Georgian nationals, and evacuating Russian citizens from Georgia. It's a low point in already abysmal relations, but it's hard to see how either side would benefit from pushing matters too far beyond this. Although, per my correspondents from Tbilisi, gas and electricity worries are running pretty high.

Liberty

2006-09-29T07:42:00.000-04:00

You ever get the feeling that eternal vigilance might be a discount price, after all?

We're already pretty wised up, lots of us. We know the politics of fear, we know what craven little despotisms masquerade as patriotism. Nobody here is fooled by terror mantras chanted by august congressmen who can only think of november. We've seen this playbook before; there's nothing new under the sun. A pretty vigilant bunch are we.

But it didn't work. We just forfeited. We did just the thing we weren't supposed to do. We stripped the powers from our institutions and blinded our courts and lamed our laws and we placed final judgment in the hands of a man. And it doesn't matter, in this case, that he's a small and limited man. Even if he was the man that some true believers fantasize him to be, it would be a treachery, what we've done. We're heirs to a rare creed that our system is up to any challenge, that it thrives on the bright light of scrutiny, that justice is indivisible, that we do not have to compromise human dignity for victory. But we chucked it all for secrecy, fear, and the weakness of closed doors. We did all that. And then what? We got angry, we watched some tv, we had a drink, we did our laundry. In the rooms, the women come and go, speaking of Michaelangelo.

I suppose something dear as liberty must have a higher price than all that.

Or to say it more clearly, what does a person do?

I don't know, and I have tried. I want something more than writing a check or talking to my friends. I want an action that exacts something from me, that puts me at risk, that marshals my will. Because knowing what's going on and not liking it doesn't cut it. I'm as complicit as hell and I want out of it.

Baby You Can Drive My Car-tel

2006-09-22T13:58:00.000-04:00

Car-tel
Originally uploaded by SUE&XU.

Noticed yesterday. Hee.

"We ask for the cooperation of the public and ask your pardon for the inconvenience."

2006-09-19T21:18:00.000-04:00

This is like, what, the politest military coup ever?

Assassination Vacation

2006-09-05T16:23:00.000-04:00

A live grenade lobbed at Bush, and now surface-to-air-missiles narrowly missing John McCain's escort helicopter. And the Georgians generally like Republicans. Dear Obama: stay. away.

My Very Educated Mother...

2006-08-24T21:47:00.000-04:00

...Just Served Us Nine...what???

But the Tex-Mex is Really Top-notch

2006-08-15T12:33:00.000-04:00

Being in Texas is sort of like being in a foreign country.

A foreign country where, at your local dive bar/pool hall, the band in the corner tucks into a rendition of the National Anthem.

A foreign country where big-necked Bubbas, upon hearing the Anthem through the din of bar noise and smacking billiards, will turn to your friend who is (oblivious to the music) scouting a tricky bank shot, and say to him:

"Boy, that's the National Anthem playin'. You better turn aroun' and put yer hand on yer heart or I have ev'ry right to go git my gun and shoot you in the head."

What I meant to say...

2006-08-12T13:58:00.000-04:00

Fellow Fulbrighter Stephan Clark is just back from his stint in Ukraine, and in fine writerly style, is perfectly content to set aside the What-Does-It-All-Mean burden that was dogging my consciousness two posts ago, and lay out a few simple weirdnesses of re-entry. Show, don't tell, etc.

I agree with him emphatically, especially about the bread. I do miss sticking half my torso into the small bakery window off the street, feeling the blast of hot, yeasty air, squinting into the subterannean pit where stocky men tend the round beehive oven below me, and emerging with long flat loaves of fresh bread for abot 35 cents a pop.

(Incidentally, Stephan's blog is well worth a read in entirety. He's a fiction writer who spent the year investigating Ukraine's bustling mail-order bride indstry, and perhaps all the talk of nuptials went to his head because he came out of the deal with his own blushing bride. [Not an agency perk, an actual girlfriend of some lengthy courtship.] Best of all, in the quest for an immigrant visa for his Russian wife, is his discovery of an Embassy job I never would have fathomed. The person inhabiting this position is no petty government bureaucrat but a sage, an oracle, for he is tasked by mandate of the U.S. Government with divining from a sheaf of dog-eared photographs and stacks of evidentiary emails whether love is true.)

In the red

2006-08-11T11:25:00.000-04:00

It was at the welcome-home barbecue thrown by mom at my childhood home in Dallas that long-time neighbor Joe sidled up to me in the kitchen, leaned in, and whispered, "I've got a question for you, and I won't tell your parents."

Oh dear.

"Just tell me," he continued sotto voce, "are you democrat or republican?"

It is a time for snap judgments. For I am in red Texas. Where it is perfectly acceptable to sit in a Mexican restaurant and publicly proclaim how the illegal Mexican immigrants are destroying our American Values even as they fry our chimichangas a stone's throw away. Where the W stickers on cars outnumber valid registration stickers and the wrong bumper sticker can rend the fibers of your family values.

I, a sometimes student of Soviet history, eyed neighbor Joe quickly: informer or fellow traveler? I gambled.

"The first one," I whispered, unwilling to risk voicing the d-word in the crowded kitchen.

A wide smile greets my answer. "I thought you might be! I just had a feeling. You're one of us. One of the few."

"What, do you have a secret society going or something?"

"Yes, basically. You have to keep it quiet around here. But we're there, we're around."

He stepped back and appraised me critically.

"Look, you can run for something here. I'll manage your campaign! And you," his smile so wide it nearly splits his face, "will lose spectacularly."

Goodbye to all that

2006-08-09T01:16:00.000-04:00

It turns out I'm no good at this at all. What does it all mean? What did I learn? What do I take with me? How have I changed, how I have I not? The end of my time in Georgia calls for such a wrap-up, a dreamy montage with a world-weary and wised-up voiceover. But I think I numbed my mind and bubble-wrapped it tight to prepare for the move, and it's not yet shaken loose from all the batting. Reflection is, I'm afraid, too much to ask and so I'll simply recount my return without further elaboration.

One week and one day ago, it was my last day in Georgia. I spent it in the most perfectly Georgian way possible—neglecting the untended heaps of belongings loitering around my suitcases at home and instead accompanying my favorite Orthodox monk to visit his vineyards in eastern Georgia. Not the most responsible of tactics, but I can tell you that anyone who has spent time in Georgia and hasn't adopted "it'll all work out" as a personal motto, is probably nursing ulcers and anyway missing out on all the fun.

It was a perfect summer day, and before stopping at the vineyards to check on the progress of this year's grape crop, we went to Father Theodore's wine cellar to unseal the final kvevri of last year's vintage. The kvevri is a giant clay pot, buried up to its lips in the earth, and as Georgians have done it for over a thousand years, it is where the wine ages, protected from the vagaries of temperature and weather by the constancy of earth, until the seal is broken and the wine is ladled out. So we opened the last kvevri, and sampled the heady, tangy wine, honey-colored and clear.

I've brought back three liters and promised that I would not dare squirrel them away for a special occasion.

It was an idyllic afternoon, but too soon I was again in Tbilisi and back to the grim business of suitcase-stuffing and separating the necessities (plum sauce, wine horns) from the expendable (shoes, bathrobes, towels). Funny to see your shifting priorities in such material form, cluttering up your living room floor.

I had a five am flight to look forward to. Three in the morning is a lonely hour to arrive at an airport in any circumstances, and unbearably so when it's a final leave-taking. Somehow, though, I lucked into the most extraordinary of friends—ones who (on a work night) would stay up with me drinking champagne until it was time to leave for the airport, and then wait with me in the terminal from three am until four forty-five when I finally finally cleared passport control, clowning all over so that I would be laughing and never alone.

And that was it, really. It's not so strange to be back. I lived here for 26 years, and what's one away compared to all that? A few impressions stand out. How casually Americans dress. How strange it is to communicate so easily in English. How annoying it is the way we divide up checks so clinically and scrupulously. How I have to stop myself from shouting my wishes to waitstaff across the room. How grocery stores with ten bays of milk varieties can make me laugh out loud. And the water pressure in showers! Now that is fine living.

Perhaps numbness explains how easily I moved from crawling about ancient mountain monasteries to attentively noting the attributes of the microplane grater at a Pampered Chef party in suburban Dallas. But somehow Georgia doesn't feel so very far away, or dream-like, so I don't feel too acutely the separation.

I am at a bit of a loss as to what I'll write about next, however. The muse may be a bit withered up, and if that's the case, I may call things quits around here. Graduate school looms, classes will start soon, and I'm not sure I am willing to turn this into a forum for pedestrain plaints about finals or worse yet, an outlet for all the "this one time? in Georgia?" stories that I will restrain from (for the sake of my friends) in everyday conversation.

But whatever happens, thanks for coming along for the ride.

Beating the Clock

2006-08-01T09:14:00.000-04:00

The elegant farewell-to-Georgia post that was fermenting in my brain is just going to have to wait until I reach Amsterdam airport and its sweet, sweet, wireless internet connection. I have to go return my DSL modem to the internet company and then do something about all this junk lying around my house instead of inside my overstuffed, overweight suitcases.

Among the items I shall attempt to bring into America:

3 liters of Georgian wine made by a monk and only this morning ladled out of the clay pot where it was aging
Smoked cheese made by monks
Fresh, homemade sunflower oil
Tkemali - that special tangy-sweet plum sauce that goes great with pork
The spicy Megrelian tomato sauce my Georgian teacher's mother made for me
Churchkhela - the tasty but weird-looking grape-and-nuts on a string contraption

Let's see what the FDA has to say about all that! 12 hours until take off. I have a lot to do.

Unrelated to paramilitary militias or incongruous wildlife

2006-07-25T15:26:00.000-04:00

Sorry to do this. But DC-area residents, a question. Are we hating Cingular? I used it before and don't remember the coverage being so terrible, but online the complaining is pretty voiciferous. And yes, the customer service was abysmal. But my family all uses it and the free in-network deal is nice. But is it so bad I should avoid? And how is T-mobile? I hear their customer service is great but how is DC coverage?

Bearly legal

2006-07-25T15:03:00.000-04:00

In a lot of ways, I am actually ready to go back home (next week, gulp!) But there are some things that I'm going to miss about life in Georgia.

Like, for example, when you're enjoying a night at home and you hear a strange inhuman howling commotion on your front stoop, and you're trying to identify the source. Maybe Zurab the drunken sentinel who lives on my stoop has become quite ill. Maybe raspy-voiced Lado of the midnight yelling bouts across the way has something particularly foul caught in his gullet. Maybe.

But here, one of the explanations you can't rule out is that it's a bunch of men who have inexplicably deposited upon your steps two wooden barrels holding baby bears, and that they have decided to have an impromptu supra above them.

Sorry for the crap pictures (damn you, autofocus!!), I just choked in the moment. I had to stick my head out into this scene, and I really couldn't really make heads or tails of what was going on. I'm sure there's not a better commentary on the cultural divide present at that moment then the fact that when I retrieved my camera to take photos of the bears, some of the men grabbed their camera phones to take photos of me. As the commotion settled, the men lifted their vodka high as the bears slashed out with paws already wicked with claws, and called aba khalkho, siqvaruls gaumarjos! (Alright, people, cheers to love!)

Really, I don't know. I like to think that they somehow felt that baby bears and my front stoop were absolutely central to a proper tribute to the abiding power of love. Sometimes it's better just not to know.

Why I'm not a Reporter: Lack of Objectivity Edition

2006-07-25T13:27:00.000-04:00

Tense times everywhere, these days, and the Republic of Georgia is no exception.

A fascinating spectacle is unfolding in the wild, uncontrollable west of the country where parliamentarians and well-coiffed ministers are squaring off with warriors and wise men from another time. It's as perfect an illustration as you could ask for of the whole untamed spirit of this place in the modern world; at times wearing modernity like an ill-fitting suit.

In the Civil War that dismembered Georgia in the early 90s, the Kodori Gorge was the only part of separatist Abkhazia that never fell into the secessionist hands. Since then, it has been defended by a local militia chillingly called Monadire: the batallion of the hunter. I am sure if I could speak with one of the Svans living in Kodori, fighting with Monadire, he would describe his defense of the far-flung valley in terms of the fighting his father had done, and his father before him, and his father, and his. The long grey line, stretching back into that place where history blurs into myth. Defending home the only occupation worth knowing.

President Shevardnadze tried to co-opt the militia, brush it up a bit with a smart shine and a uniform. He made it an arm of the defense services, not that these enlistees would answer to any orders, should anyone be so foolish enough to offer any. But there was a revolution back in 2003 and Georgia is now European and Modern and a few cobblestones away from coronation as "the next Prague." And one simply cannot have half-cocked and mountain-wild paramilitary units running amok and defending the motherland god-knows-how all in the name of the Ministry of Defense, can one? So in 2005, Monadire was disbanded by the Minister of Defense.

But this week they've come back in a fury. The leader of Monadire, (a warlord says the press with a palpable tremor) is chest-thumping his defiance to the central authorities. The government demands that the men surrender their arms and Georgian troops are slouching towards Kodori. President Saakashvili becomes completely unhinged, issues a speech flecked with profanities and threats and worse still, words like "ours" "us" and "them." Parliamentarians have boarded their jets and Ministers have summoned their press secretaries.

Meanwhile, in another age, Kodori gathers itself for something it must know well, and prepares to settle the matter among its own. While rhetoric flies in Tbilisi, the council of elders has gathered in Kodori. The reports say that these respected citizens, who really run the valley, are in negotiations with the warlord on the one hand and the Ministers of Defense and Interior on the other. Men of means and power, all of them, their guns and laws supplicant before the old ones who rule by the dictates of history and tradition.

The seriousness of the matter simply can't quite dispel my enchantment for the storybook of it all. backgrounders here and here, for a start.

Big Time

2006-07-19T14:45:00.000-04:00

Via my little sister, I see that Georgia (the Republic of) made the front page of the NYT. Cool! And also, terrible! Ah, the eternal struggle between wanting the best for your little treasure and hoarding it secret from the world.

It Takes a Village

2006-07-17T08:54:00.000-04:00

A tip for any do-it-yourselfers out there with aspirations at home ownership in the South Caucasus. Well, first: don't. Between the local construction-materials cartels and the slipshod workmanship, Paige Davis herself would turn into a cursing banshee before the commercial break. But if you nevertheless persist, and advance to the stage of interior decoration, a word of warning. The demure, understated, sophisticated tones of, say, Ralph Lauren paint have not yet made it to the Tbilisi bazroba. The paint colors on selection there are, like Georgia itself, undiluted, abrasive, and eye-popping.

John needed something to cover over the bare door and window frames in his house in the village of Sighnaghi, and he compromised on what seemed the best choice available: take-no-prisoners green. When we pried up the lid and took a peek inside, there wasn't much to say. "That's definitely...green." "Yup. That is very...green." "Maybe it'll dry...subtle?"

I had come along to Sighnaghi for that fresh country air and for a promised supra that evening, and ended up looking like I'd just been dragged under a St. Patrick's Day parade. Two hours into my painting duties I was standing with one foot propped on a splintering chair, one on a windowsill, balancing a bowl of paint in one hand and with the other spreading thick goops of the greenest green onto the window frame, when I noticed that a small boy was in the room staring at me.

I planned to yell out there there was a miniature invader in the house, but I quickly remembered myself. I am in a village, where your business is everybody's business, your home is everybody's home, and strange foreigners on the block is better entertainment than a movie.

Perhaps he'd been hypnotized by the green. When I broke his stare to say hello, he asked if he could help, so I outfitted him with a brush and a stool and we quietly worked in tandem, assaulting the unsuspecting window frame with concentrated leprechaun guts. "Why didn't he buy another color?" asked the kid with wrinkled nose.

Kids are like ants, you know. When you see one, you know there are hundreds lurking nearby. By the time the boy had finished up the window, legions of neighborhood children were wandering into the house, poking at things, tripping over paint buckets, stepping on glass, grabbing and giggling and mess-making. My job was to keep the little rugrats occupied and away from the other construction happening in the house. If you've ever tried to entertain a gaggle of pre-teens, particularly when you don't speak their language, you know the kind of odds I was up against. And that was why, with great trepidation and a few incantations to the Blessed Virgin, I broke out the secret weapon:

The consensus was that mine was a pretty sweet computer, despite not having cool games on it. I showed them how to browse through iPhoto, where my finely wrought artistic creations didn't hold a candle to the excitement kicked up by the shot of the dead dolphin from the Outer Banks in 2003. Undying coolness. They even got a kick out of Microsoft Word, and in Georgian phonetics, wrote me a poem. I understood the first two lines, which went like this: "I love you like yoghurt." And then something about a car. And then something terribly naughty, I presume, because when I read it out loud they howled with the sort of laughter that only comes when pre-teens and dirty jokes combine. I told them thank you.

I guess they had a pretty fun afternoon. After wearing themselves out on all the cool toys, one slumped onto his fist and sighed, "It's so great here at John's." And another tugged my sleeve and whispered out of hearing range of our host so that he could be surprised, "Amerikulad, rogora 'magari khar'?" "In American, how do you say, 'you are cool'?" A technically very correct question, as I suppose the British would phrase it somewhat differently.

In the end, children are exhausting. But somehow, it was comforting to know that even in a tiny hilltop village halfway around the world, kids here are just like kids at home: captivated by shiny blinking noise-making devices. And periodically shoving foreign objects down their shirts to look like boobies. Obviously.

On the Border

2006-07-11T14:59:00.001-04:00

My South Caucasus hopscotch this weekend was a success, and so after dipping my toe into Armenia, I re-entered Georgia with a fresh new stamp in my passport and the 90-days of visa-free residence that come with it.

It's a strange thing to cross an international border on foot. I've done it twice now, and both times can't quite shake the refugee feeling that comes with it. There should be sacks bowing my back and kettles clattering and some momentous feeling of relief or grief upon stepping over the line. But instead, I just drift over somewhat lackadaisically, sidling up to Armenia like up to a hot dog stand.

I think the Armenian border guards, too, prefer some appreciation of the dramatic at their little outpost, because they were not pleased when I told them I was just using their country as a tawdry waystation until I could step straight back into Georgia.

"Who told you that you could do this?" they'd gruff. And other complaints and moans and snide snickers at my terrible Russian. But through all the moaning, they were preparing the Armenian visa, obsolete little thing that it was.

With the visa firmly pressed into my passport, they clamped down a bright red entry stamp for me. Great. That's fine. Now for my exit stamp, please, and I'm off to Georgia again.

"I'm sorry," sneered the guard. "There's a problem. You need to stay here a minimum of four hours before the computer will register your exit."

"Four hours! But my friend is waiting there on the Georgian side! I can't wait four hours."

"You should have thought about that before," he shrugged.

With the scene thusly set, we enter into the Soviet pas de deux, whose cherished steps linger into this modern age.

The leading partner, I lean in conspiratorily to the little window and eye my partner. "Really, now. Four hours? Is it absolutely not possible to do less?"

Picking up his cue, the border guard swivels and gracefully shrugs. "Of course. It's possible."

"What can we do?"

"Maybe a little something to pay."

"How much do you want?"

"How much can you manage?"

"You'll let us back at once?"

"At once."

The rest is just haggling, but in the end, for $20 each, my friend and I were waltzing our way back into Georgia with Armenia at our backs. Elsewhere, they say it's hard to put a price on freedom, but 90 days of it in the South Caucasus will set you back $30 plus $20 extra to grease the wheels.

Alien

2006-07-05T07:43:00.000-04:00

You know those illegal immigrants, and how they're the problem with everything? Living places without permission, leeches on society, don't speak the language, something something about health care and education? Funny thing about that. As of midnight last night, I suppose I'm one of them.

God, if it's not one thing, it's another.

It's not strictly customary to celebrate Independence Day with near-deportation, but sometimes, see, you just get something set in your head. Maybe it's your mother's birthday, maybe it's the time of your flight to Pittsburgh, but you're so very sure about it that you don't even think to check the calendar or the e-ticket, or what-have-you.

So it was for me and my visa to stay in the Republic of Georgia. I knew it was wrapping up at some point, I just didn't know that that point was yesterday. The 4th of July.

Luckily, I caught wind of this yesterday morning, and in the 45 minutes of spare time I had, I hustled down to the consulate division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to get my one-month extension. Done it before, it's no real hassle if you don't mind throwing the odd elbow at pushy pensioners now and again.

But it's never really so easy as all that, and I couldn't even summon the requisite outrage when I faced down the consular officer and he intoned the dread words that have spelt defeat and doom for Soviet citizens and their descendants for generations: "I'm sorry. There's been a new law."

Three days ago, they passed it, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs no longer issues visas. At first I laughed brightly and proffered my passport a second time. "Very funny!" I chirped, suspecting the old dog was just flirting. "Anyway, one month please."

"Do you think I'm lying to you? We don't issue visas. I can't do anything for you."

"You're the consulate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and you don't issue visas," I barked. "So what do you do?"

Well, young lady, that line of questioning gets you briskly sent out of the consulate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and on your way to the Ministry of Justice, with 15 minutes until you must be elsewhere, and no idea what department you need.

So what you do is, fling wide the doors of Justice, walk entirely at random into a room, and with rising agitation, start waving your US Passport about and asking "Visa? Visa?" until someone ushers you into the appropriate line, behind an antediluvian old codger who seems perfectly willing to while away his final hours on this good earth jawing about the ages of his grandchildren to the desk clerk while you fume ostentatiously over his frail shoulder.

When I finally earn the attention of the desk clerk and explain my needs, she sweetly responds, "There's been a new law." They no longer do one-month extensions. One must instead present themselves with notarized translations of invitation letters, diplomatic documents, receipts from any educational stipends received, hospital certifications showing that the bearer is HIV and Hep C negative, and a whole lot of USD.

"This visa expires today," I impress upon her, stupid stupid tears starting in the corners of my eyes.

"You have a ten-day period to gather these materials. Thank you!"

Oh New Georgia with your new laws and your aspirations of anti-corruption. Back in the day, they say, it would just be a crisp bill across the table and I'd have whatever stamps I needed. And a few have whispered to me that they have a brother, or a cousin, well-connected you see, who can do this no problem. But it's just not the way, these days, so I'm opting for the less bureaucratic alternative: this ten-day window, so they say, will also allow me to cross an international border and return with a new Georgian stamp and a new 90-day visa. So this weekend I'm making a run for the border, Underground Railroad-ing it probably to Armenia, where I'll walk across, then U-turn back to Georgia, hoping the whole way that the border guys know about this ten-day rule and that nothing goes wrong in the gray space between nations where there are no laws, new or old.

Snapshots

2006-07-02T03:51:00.000-04:00

The plowman mentioned the smoke pall when I was talking with him in the afternoon, and I asked if he knew where the fire was.
“Canada,” he replied.
“What part of Canada?” I asked.
“The whole of it,” he said. “They tell me the whole of Canada is ablaze.”
“That’s a big fire then,” I answered. “Canada is a large place, larger than the United States even.”
The plowman considered this distasteful pronouncement a moment.
“Well then,” he said, “it is a big fire.” But he added cheerfully, “Anyways, it’ll have to cross a pile of water ‘fore it gits to us.”
I nodded in perfect agreement, for this seemed a spiritual rather than a geographical discussion, and I felt instructed and renewed.
--E.B. White; from "My Day"

I had only lived in Georgia about five weeks when I returned to Dallas, Texas last fall for a wedding. At the rehearsal dinner, the dollishly petite, impeccably shod blonde fiancée of the bride’s cousin summoned all her best debutante breeding and courageously hazarded a conversation with me. “I hear…” she started hesitantly, “that you are living on…the island of... Georgia?” A pause. Sensing her miss, she surrendered charmingly. “I’m sorry. I just don’t really know where that is.” It was so dear, her earnest trying, her genuine attempt to throw wide the borders of her general concern for the sake of polite conversation, that it seemed petty to be pedantic about such things. So I just said, “Yes, that’s right.” And why not? When I told the story back in Tbilisi, a Georgian friend concurred readily, if sarcastically. “We are an island! And island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism!”

* * *

Oh Moscow? The republics are getting uppity.

At the Tbilisi airport, checking my guest's luggage at the counter for her flight back to the states, via Moscow. We watched as they affixed to her suitcase handles the bright pink tags announcing SHORT CONNECTION.

“It’s five-and-a-half hours,” she laughed. “That’s short?”

“We have to do that for Moscow,” chimed in a Georigan airport employee in the high clipped English that belied British tutelage. He raised his brows condescendingly, flicked his forefinger against his neck in the old Soviet sign for drinking, and said something rather funny coming from a Georgian. “They’re always a little drunk there.”

* * *

I have a different explanation. They say that time bends as it approaches the event horizon of a black hole, stretches out until one minute, one second refuses to end and make way for the next. This is what happens to time at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, which also sucks away all light and all hope, and sucked in too the hapless traveler K.

K was traveling to Georgia for the first time, to Tbilisi via Moscow. The connection in Moscow was tight, but she made it to her next flight with time to spare. The plane for Tbilisi sat on the tarmac in clear sight, but between K and her seat stood the Russians with arms folded, telling her the flight was full. "You will go tomorrow," they told her.

Guards escorted K and the other stranded passengers and paired them up in bare rooms to pass the night. If they stuck their heads into the corridor outside of their rooms, they saw the guards holding vigil, lest passengers en route to Madrid and Tbilisi flout the rules and escape running into the Moscow night, disappearing into the city's underworld, and without a transit visa! No phones, so K could not call Tbilisi to tell them that she was detained, and when she'd arrive.

K and I hadn't met, but she'd found my blog in anticipation of her upcoming Georgia trip and we'd corresponded a time or two about practicalities. I'd passed along my number, told her to give me a ring when she arrived. K arrived at midnight in the Tbilisi airport, a day late, with nobody to meet her at the airport, no idea where to go, and no way to communicate. A taxi driver loaned her his phone, she called me, and I directed the driver to my apartment.

When they arrived, I was still crippled and couldn't hop out to the taxi to negotiate the fare. K called out how much the driver wanted. I yelled out to him "It's too much!" Giorgi the drunken sentinel who lives on my stoop and Keto from the market next door wanted to know how much this driver was asking. "He wants thirty!" I said. "No!" they shouted and soon half the neighborhood was negotiating the taxi fare, at midnight on a sweltering Tbilisi night, me hopping sock-footed, the driver roaring back that it was his business, not theirs, and poor K standing in the middle wanting nothing more than a pillow under her head and a roof over it, and what's five lari here or there?

Welcome to Tbilisi, K. Hope things are looking up.

Hungry Like the Wolf

2006-06-30T07:36:00.000-04:00

As I recline, pondering my swollen ankle, I realize that I have stumbled (ha ha) upon a surefire two-step weight-loss plan. Call it the Bikini Season Panic Ankle-Twisting Two-Step

Step 1: Fall

Step 2: Recline far away from where the food's at

Oh, and ladies! A bonus tip: if you don't elevate the injured portion or apply ice, you'll get skinnier faster!

Hubris is...

2006-06-30T05:22:00.000-04:00

...thinking that you can, just like the local girls (sure-footed as mountain goats), navigate streets like this:

in shoes like this:

Well, ouch. Now that my ankle's the size of my neck, I'm going to be contemplating my ceiling for a while. But don't pity me yet. What it means for you is a long overdue update or two on the goings-on here in the land of Georgia. It's like a long-distance air-strike from my adoring reader(s?). Alright, already, I'm writing, I'm writing!

Okay, okay, I get it

2006-06-19T10:47:00.000-04:00

Hey, I just noticed that the Dallas Mavericks are in the NBA finals. Normally I would absolutely be cheering for them, seeing as how I spent the plurality of my life there (see how neatly I avoid calling myself from Dallas? neat, huh?), but I feel that this Susan-is-gone party that America seems to have been throwing all year has gone on long enough.

Let's recap. I leave the country and what happens?
1) University of Texas wins the NCAA Football Championship
2) The Republicans slide nigh-on comically into some kind of perpetual-motion scandal generator (I mean, hookers? Come on karma, you're overplaying this just a touch.)
3) Dallas Mavericks play in the NBA Finals

If it all goes too well for the Mavs, I fear that my welcome wagon will involve pitchforks and torches and a return flight to anywhere-but-here, courtesy of the DNC, remote-control wielding Texans, and/or the bulk of my friends and family.

Special Delivery

2006-06-16T11:38:00.000-04:00

I have a terrible inkling that the last dear old woman who asked me to mail her a photograph went and died before I ever got around to it. (The horrendously overdue package made it to Ukraine but was sent back). So in this woman's request for the photo of her and her granddaughter to be mailed, I find a chance of redemption. It should not take the fathomless wheels of karma to teach me to mail old ladies who endured the Great Patriotic War and the mother-loving purges a photograph to make them happy before they die, but I am not what you call a real woman of the people.

Paradox of Choice

2006-06-16T10:43:00.000-04:00

Tonight, I'm going to Mtskheta for khinkali. The former being a town 20 minutes outside of Tbilisi and the ancient capital of Georgia (Tbilisi is the johnny-come-lately capital, popping up in the 5th century); the latter a delicious meat-dumpling type concoction that has the curious property of becoming increasingly addictive the more you eat of it, such that Georgians of my acquaintance have been known to non-ironically equate the khinkali dumpling to life itself. Last Sunday my friend took me with her to her mother's house and we all rolled our sleeves up and slapped on our aprons and the ladies taught me how to make a proper khinkali, so watch out America!

There's khinkali in Tbilisi, of course, but it's better in Mtskheta, although not as good as up in Pasanauri. Something about the water, they say. The lobio, the beans, are really primo in Mtskheta, but if you want smoked pork you will simply have to spend the 8 hours to get yourself up to Racha. And if you crave the sweet, challah-like nazuki bread, then I suppose you could grab a pale imitation at the roadside stand before Gori, but you really should stop at the town just north of Khashuri where the road is just thick with old ladies flapping nazuki in the air at your passing car, as if hailing a fleet of cabs with steaming bread.

Some enterprising entrepreneur will one day start a real distribution business and then you'll be able to get fresh nazuki and smoked pork and the best khinkali without leaving the capital. But meantime, food is an excuse for traveling, and one of the few, along with wedding parties and funerals, that will really get the Georgians off their duffs.

America is simply too big for this kind of nonsense. You can't force us all to drive to Manhattan for a bagel or to Texas for a fajita (although certainly the best stuff is still worth the trip). In the civic religion of America, the idea that unavailability can be pleasurable is very near apostasy. Sure it's pretty nice to have, at any point in the year, raspberries and avocadoes and grapes and squash whenever you need them. But I never before knew the joy of rounding a corner and seeing, for the first time of the season, the sidewalk fruit and veg stands just blushing with strawberries. Strawberries! And cherries, now, too. Just wait for the peaches, they tell me. You'll simply die. Instead of staring down groaning cornucopias of vegetables bins and trying to snatch from the million recipes floating my head and just ordering a pizza in despair, in a complicated world it is some small relief to look down and say, "Snap peas are looking fresh. Stir fry!"

The meat situation, is decidedly less idyllic, although I've thus far avoided patronizing the shopkeeps what hoist the carcasses on a stick on the roadside. Buying bread out of the trunk of a parked Niva is about as roughing it as I care to get, grocery-shopping-wise.

Thumbs not Bombs

2006-06-14T08:36:00.000-04:00

In the spirit of the 1971 visit by the U.S. Table Tennis team to China, we here in Tbilisi are commited, within our humble means, to trailblazing peaceful and creative avenues of international diplomacy. Or, we're wargaming the coming apocalypse, depending on your take.

It was a quiet Monday night, an unseasonable chill in the air, a mood too lighthearted to portend the world-historical event that would unfold within mere minutes at the charming little pseudo-Moroccan sidewalk cafe in the heart of Tbilisi. Two great enemies faced off across a table, but for one brief and shining moment, all talk of nuclear weapons and evil axes and satans great and small was abandoned and our patriotic fervor was pinned instead to the dextrous digits of our national champions in the first-ever America v. Iran Thumb War.

As you can see, the conduct of our offensive
suffered from insufficient pre-war planning: specifically U.S. troop levels were limited to the size of one (1) waifish little stick of a girl lacking the proper thumb armor to combat the burly and great-thumbed Perisan enemy.

The mission was not, as they say, accomplished. But for what it's worth, our team was awfully cute. Go USA!

Dog Days

2006-06-05T01:48:00.000-04:00

May 26 was Georgian Independence Day, which I celebrated, while the entire Georgian army paraded down Rustaveli Avenue, by inviting three Georgian friends over for enchiladas and pecan pie and George Strait wailing about Amarillo behind it all. The enchiladas went over pretty well, but the PEEkinpie, as it was dubbed, was the real star of the show. And no small coup for me, seeing how there aren't pie pans and I'm all thumbs with crust-making and actually, don't own an oven. But what's Georgian independence day without pecan pie? Great lengths were called for.

* * *

The city is wearing me down, and I haven't slept properly for weeks. It's getting so hot at nights, and opening the window admits some air but also the roar of my busy street and that of the drunk sentinels that keep their nightly vigil on my stoop.

Saturday, after another sleepless night and a morning too bright and loud for snoozing, I finally reached my limit. I hadn't slept for eons, and I was behaving badly. Snapping at people, glaring at strangers, adding droppersful of anxiety to the growing pit of unease at my core. It seemed a bit of a cliche to escape the city as a solution; I've never really believed in the old-fashioned idea of traveling somewhere for your health, taking the waters, though I find it a convenient sort of fallacy to buy into.

Nevertheless, I cinematically packed my bags and fled to the lot on the edge of town where you can catch a minivan east. Sighnaghi, that hilltop town towering over the Alazani valley with its grapevines that have spidered across the land for millenia, seemed a worthy endpoint. And anyway, my friend John lives there and if I could find him, I could stay in his house.

It was a golden afternoon ride and as the marshrutka climbed up the hill to reach Sighnaghi, the air was cooler and fresher and the skin of grime I'd been sporting around Tbilisi was finally airing off. We rounded the bend and the high Caucasus came into view and, cliche or no, I clinically noted a definite and measurable relaxation in my muscles; starting with my jaw and ending with the slow unraveling of that knot of unease coiling in my gut.

Well, tough luck for me, my unwitting host had just left for Tbilisi an hour before my arrival, and I was a little homeless for the evening. The old Soviet Intourist hotel unattractively crowning the top of a little rise, and watched over by two old souls who haunt the place like characters in a curse (eternal life is theirs until that day when they pass through the doorways of the old concrete husk and into the outside world)—anyway, the hotel wasn't an option as schoolbus loads of kids were hoarding the anyway unappealing rooms.

Feeling absolutely no anxiety about this turn of events, I sat on a bench, kicking around a rock, waiting for something to happen. Metaphorically, this is more-or-less my battle plan in life and I guess it's worked out for me pretty well so far. So I wasn't surprised when, a few minutes into my meditation, I spotted Shalva, a friend of John's who I had met on prior sojourns to Sighnaghi. I flagged him down, bounded over, and explained my circumstances. And within 30 minutes, I was happily ensconced in the hillside home of an absent American, whose house is watched over by Shalva. Like all good Georgian homes, it's more of a treehouse than a proper structure meant to guard against the elements, and there's no clear line dividing inside from out. There was a long, bright veranda ending with a swinging chair and wide windows revealing the mountains. It was hot enough to wear skimpy shorts and read while the freshest little breezes curled through, and the loudest sounds were the rhythmic squeaking of the swinging chair and bird calls. Somehow I'd stumbled into a vacation brochure fantasy of a peaceful getaway, and I just curled my toes with the pure pleasure of it all.

It's what I did all day on Sunday: happily squeaking and reading and listening to roosters. But Saturday night I went to a Sighnaghi wedding party of an ethnic Kurdish Georgian who had just returned from fighting with coalition forces in Iraq. In the fine tradition of homecoming heroes he'd got right down to business: married his love of many years and readied himself for the business of making a houseful of babies. I don't know what he thought of the war or Georgia's involvement or the prospects for a stable peace in Iraq. I don't know if he identified strongly enough with his Kurdish heritage to feel a special stake in the hostilities, or if he fought against his better judgment. But I know that the money from his service allowed him to buy a house for his pretty young Georgian bride and for himself, and there's room for little ones if they can get the money for some basic repairs, and there's a fig tree and a quince tree and space for a garden besides.

Here's to wringing out what goodness we can from this old world.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

2006-05-21T16:48:00.000-04:00

If one takes a great leap of faith in the Georgians' ability to stay out of another war for the next decade or so, and thereby afford themselves the opportunity to settle into some stability and comfort, then one must ponder the following depressing scenario: can the Georgian cult of hospitality—which has thrived through invasions and conquest and occupation—survive the Americans?

It's a question on the flipside of my mind, everytime a taxi driver or doorstoop vegetable vendor trills in delight upon hearing that I'm from America. And it was on my mind last weekend, when I was one of three American girls driving through the high Caucasus mountains just shy of the Russian border, who, for lack of anything else to do, followed a sign pointing up the side of the mountain to a village called Tsdo.

Tsdo turned out to be a little cloud village clinging to the side of the mountain and so muffled in fog we couldn't see the Darial gorge gaping below us or, except for rare gaps in the cloud cover, the craggy mountains encircling us. It's impossible to cruise into a village that has (we later learned) a wintertime population of four families and not be noticed. Feeling a bit dumb and self-conscious we got out of the car and feigned a monstrous preoccupation with the carpet of fog over the mountain edge, as if anyone would drive up all that way to stare at the fuzz. But we'd been spotted, and so began Act I of the timeless Georgian performance of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

No truer thing has been so succinctly said about Georgia than what Neal Ascherson managed in a 2004 essay:

Georgia may be Orthodox, but its true religion is hospitality. A friend described driving through a Georgian village and seeing, in the rear mirror, men running out into the street and vainly waving bottles at the departing car. All that's best in Georgia is done on the spur of the moment, using the stranger as a pretext to give and to rejoice. Hours of drinking, feasting and toasting can follow, ending heaven knows when or where.

Or as a previous Fulbright scholar in Georgia said: "Hospitality in Georgia sometimes resembles a mild form of hostage-taking."

So within 30 seconds of our fumbling about around the car, an old woman who was washing veggies in the mountain runoff had sussed us out, figured out (to her immense pleasure) that we were American guests, and was dragging us bodily along to her house by the arms yelling all the while "Modi, modi!" Come, come! What to do but lope along and see what happens?

Can you believe all the dumb luck? It was a holiday that day in that little cloud village—and only in that village. Something related to a spot on the high hill that was sacred to them. They'd already slaughtered the sheep, but we were still in time to go and light candles at the shrine and drink wine with the men who were holding court up there.

Now clocking in at five minutes into our sojourn in Tsdo. We've been adopted into an extended family of about 12, we're being bundled up the hill with great fanfare ("our American guests!" they told any onlookers that could be found), and before too long we're on an old stone outcropping swimming in fog, greeted by the wine-guzzling revelers like tardy cousins who'd they'd been expecting to turn up for ages.

They said it was surely God that brought us all the way from America to their little village on this of all days, and as I glanced down at my Target-bought sneakers swimming in fresh, scarlet sheep's blood, I had to concede their explanation was as good as any.

When it began raining too hard we retired back to the family house for a lunchtime supra. They fit us in seamlessly and cheerfully, promising us with each new glass of wine glorious futures and children as beautiful as we were. And when they learned that the third girl of our trio, the one visiting from the U.S., did not speak Russian or Georgian but instead Spanish, the men thought for a minute and then started howling out Besame Mucho with great gusto, which was really a serenade she had not been expecting in the Caucasian highlands.

Before coming to Georgia, and old Russian professor warned me not to buy into the myths that Georgians have about themselves. But what to do when at least one of the myths—that age-old tale of a people so welcoming that a stranger can wander into a remote mountain village and find herself instantly fed and warmed and welcomed—turns out to be true? And how much of it depends on the novelty of the foreign visitor? Will the legendary hospitality slip back into legend when tour buses snake up and down the roads and Rustaveli Avenue throngs with Georgia on My Mind-type souveniers? It's the tourism tug-of-war. I know Georgia needs the crowds desperately, but moments like these I want to hoard all for myself.

Speaking in Tongues

2006-05-21T16:08:00.000-04:00

Says Rebecca West:

"In the valley beyond we [...] came on a tumbledown village, shabby and muddy and paintless and charming, called Vakuf. Vakuf is a Turkish word meaning religious property; I have never heard anything that made me more positively anxious not to study Turkish than the news that the plural of this word is Evkaf."

I feel you, Becky. If someone had told me from the beginning that in order to say, in Georgian, "I will meet you all" I'd have to hack up shegvkhvdebi, I'd probably never have started down this lonesome path.

UPDATE: Upon further reflection, I realized that word up there means "You will meet us." "I will meet you all," naturally, is shegkhvdebit. Either that or we will meet you, of indeterminate number. Oh hell, I give up.

Waging Peace

2006-05-16T10:32:00.000-04:00

Two Saturdays ago, at the invitation of an Orthodox monk friend, I went on a day trip to Kakheti—that's wine country in eastern Georgia—to go visit his vineyards. We spent the afternoon in the usual, easy manner: eating too much and toasting with last fall's wine decanted from the buried clay pots, then wandering through the vineyards and getting the land cruiser hopelessly stuck in epic ruts of mud.

On the way back to Tbilisi, you drive through a hilltop fortress town called Sighnaghi. It's a lovely place—the guidebooks all insist on calling it "Tuscan"—with high clear views to the Greater Caucasus and old fortified walls designed to keep out marauding Chechens and Dagestanis and what-have-you. We stopped in Sighnaghi to pick up my friend John, who has a house there that he's renovating, and give him a lift back to the capital. He told us, if we have time, that we should stop in Sighnaghi for a little while to watch the local dance troupe's rehearsal. They have a performance coming up, so they're pretty good now.

Georgian folk dances are a real kick to watch. The men get all the best parts: there are daggers and swords and backflips and flying leaps and bottles balanced on heads and funny giant woolen hats. The women wear long dresses and flick their wrists around prettily and move their feet under the floor-length skirts in just such a way that it looks as though they are floating; as if their perfect angel feet can't quite be kept anchored to something so base as earth.

We sat in the gym in Sighnaghi and watched the rehearsal, the local dancers in track suits and sweat pants instead of dress costume. John pointed out the personalities. That woman, she's a children's doctor from the valley below. That guy, backflipping with a sword in hand, he's a carpenter. I was sitting there satisfied, thinking of my Benedict Anderson and my Ernest Gellner and pondering eggheaded things about local traditions morphing into a stylized and standardized national folk culture, when John leaned over and said, "Wouldn't you want guys like these defending your village?"

I knew what he meant, which wasn't that the lords a'leaping would scare off the Shah. He meant that the dance symbolizes strength and virility and warrior spirit and that in a place like Georgia that has been sacked by alternating empires for as many centuries as you care to count, wouldn't you want men like that, with values like these?

But I didn't feel like fawning over the Spielbergian glory of war and so I sniffed that all this history is well and good, but I think that modern men here are far too eager to fight and die for their country and perhaps a little pacifism, or at least a little less war exaltation, would do the place some good.

Really, it's a wonder how easily, and with what frequency, people here find cause to use words such as enemy, war, conquer, sacrifice; words that for us cobweb in the back of our brains, summoned forth only by Tolkien or maybe Mel Gibson. We don't live with our wars and our history right there on our tongues. When I was renting my skis from Mamuka in the high mountains north of Tbilisi, he offered me a pair of poles and a big slug of homemade wine served in the bottom half of a bisected water bottle. In the mountains, he told me, top half of the bottle inverted and aloft, the first toast is to peace: mshvidobas gaumarjos. Down below in the city they may be toasting to the meeting of friends first, but up in the heights the traditions are rawer and, with ritualistic duty, they remember the times of war with this first toast.

Touring through Georgia is at times like examining the scarred body of battered veteran. Here are wounds the Persians left behind, there's where the Arabs pierced through, the Mongols, the Turks. Nearby the Dukes met their doom, there exiled kings darkly plotted uprising, here there was betrayal, and here martyrs. And everywhere, glory glory halleluia.

Sometimes I fear that modern Georgia could suffocate on all this bloody glory. It's all well enough for the women, whose worth was never based on derring do, but could these men, with their warrior ancestors summoned up at every toast, be content as accountants and bank clerks should the opportunity arise in Georgia? Do the young hotheads careen the wrong way down streets and shoot and stab one another in part because they can't find an enemy more suiting? Will they fling themselves headlong back into more fighting with Abkhazia, South Ossetia, snarling at the Russians?

The most elegant and resigned riposte to this is from Rebecca West. In her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, it so happens that her Serbian friend is telling a legend about a certain Bosnian village. It's a war legend about when the Turks were attacking and how the women and men of the village came up with a plan that involved the women bravely acting as bait so that the men could surprise the Turks and save the village. The Serb tells the story, and then he says something that could be precisely about Georgia:

And so a man can give himself great pleasure in telling himself that story, and he can imagine all sorts of like happenings...with all the loveliest little ones being brave for his sake, and all his enemies lying dead in the marshes, with water over the face; and on that he can build up a philosophy which is very simply but is a real thing; it makes a man's life mean more than it did before he held it. Now, will you tell me what in peace is so easy for a simple man to think about as this scene of war? So do not despise my people when they cannot settle down to freedom, when they are like those people on the road of whom I said to you, 'They think all the time they must die for Yugoslavia, and they cannot understand why we do not ask them to do that but another thing, that they should live and be happy.'

Way, way outside the beltway

2006-05-15T13:52:00.000-04:00

When you've had a blog long enough, there's this fun game you can play called "what was I doing exactly one year ago?" It's a nice distraction for the chronically self-absorbed among us, and really, when one has a website dedicated to, um, oneself, there's no getting around truths about certain unpleasant character traits.

So this post is not written to you, internet, but rather to myself one year in the future. I don't know what you were doing yesterday, future self, but I was standing in sacrificial sheep's blood in the rain on top of a mountain with homemade wine in hand, toasting some untranslatable holiday with a village worth of new friends.

God, it's been a weird year.

Better Dead Than Drink Georgian Red

2006-05-05T10:18:00.000-04:00

This is a few days late, but it's still a hoot.

To promote the ban on Georgian wine, Komsomolskaya Pravda created this poster for distribution. "Respect yourself and your homeland: Don't Drink Georgian wine!" it says. (click the above link for a large version)

For you Soviet propagandaphiles, that image looks familiar for a reason. It's an old 50s poster that's had the vodka glass replaced with a Georgian wine horn. Here's the original image:

Here's hoping the anti-wine campaign proves as successful and long-lasting as the anti-vodka campaigns. Coming between a Russian and his booze is generally not a long-term winning strategy.

O Captain, my Captain

2006-05-02T12:46:00.000-04:00

Last week, my students (not these, but a slightly more advanced bunch) were reading about the Vietnam anti-war protests and I asked them to write their opinions on protesting. Should people have the right to protest in a time of war? Does protesting help the enemy? It was a bit of a stretch for my little angels, but I couldn't resist the temptation to see what in the good lord's name they'd produce.

I worried that I had already somehow broadcast what I believed to be the correct answer, and they'd all just play to what I wanted to hear. But clearly I was ascribing far too much subtlety to a bunch that had turned in their last quizzes with the exact same responses on each question, as if I'd chalk it up to a cosmic coincidence of the monkeys-typing-Hamlet variety. My dears, said I, if you're going to cheat at least be clever about it.

But today the topic was protesting. Salome spoke up first. No, she said. Americans should not have the right to protest because it helps the enemy by sparking the situation and the president cannot concentrate on the war when people are protesting.

Sopo, what do you think about that? "I agree with Salome." Of course you do, pet.

Thanks, Salome, I said. Now tell me this. What would you think if Georgia started a war with Russia tomorrow? Would you support this war? "No." No? Do you think you should have the right to protest and tell the government what you think? "Yes, I should." Will that help the Russians, though, if you do that? Do you know, one can actually see the lightbulb when it goes on. Salome smiled knowingly. It seems she caught on to my sneaky little trick. Why do you have the right to protest, and the Americans do not?

She thought and thought. "Because there are too many americans and the situation will be complicated. There aren't so many Georgians so they can't make so much trouble." Leave aside the logic problems, leave aside the fact that all you need is half a Georgian to make trouble. This answer pleased me more than if she'd just caved and changed her mind. Because it's a reason, and she thought of it on her own. My classroom standards are high and lofty.

In other news, this nearly made me weep for joy:

Hell No, More Merlot

2006-04-30T14:58:00.000-04:00

I used to get the feeling that students at my old alma mater, UT-Austin, had an inferiority complex when it came to protesting. This was in those days after Clinton but before Iraq, when everyone was pretty sure there would be something to rage about, but until then, the labor practices of our dining hall caterers would have to suffice for exercising the ol' dissenting muscle. Hey hey, Chick-fil-a, how many health insurance benefits did you cut today? These students knew what a hotbed of radicalism UT had been during Vietnam, and you got the idea, as you tip-toed over the prone black-clad bodies at the Die-In protesting the absence of an Asian American Studies program, that these kids would have given their last hackey sack for a good, morally repugnant war to go berzerk over. Hope they're enjoying themselves nowadays.

Am I too young for misty university nostalgia? I hope not. I met a few travelers last night that were passing through Georgia. They were university students riding bikes from Turkey to Mongolia, and they had long scraggly beards and I bet they didn't care much for authority structures, and they said that America was set up from the beginning to serve the interests of a bunch of fuckin' rich white dudes. Honestly: fuckin' rich white dudes. I was exactly back at the 21st street co-op, and it made me want to hug them. I also kind of wanted to check out their calf muscles (Turkey to Mongolia??) but I refrained.

I'm being glib, but there's a point here. I've learned a lot since those days, and one thing is that we went about protesting all wrong.

The thing to do, see, is to just have dinner and drink a lot. As previously mentioned, that was the nature of our "protest" across from the Russian Embassy, and I can assure you it was far more pleasant than, say, Kent State.

I guess we didn't really have permission, so to speak, to set up a dinner party on the sidewalk across from the Russian Embassy. (Underplayed hilarious aspect of this: the sidewalk across the street from the Russian Embassy is the sidewalk of the Iranian Embassy. Where they, you know, really love the wine.) So when a local cop sidled up to our table, it was sort of like college again. Jesus, the fuzz is here, party's over. (At least now I don't have to chuck the booze and crawl under a fence to get off the property and avoid the dreaded M.I.P.)

But here's why I love this country. The cop just said, "No, no, there's no problem. I don't care. I'm just curious what you guys are doing out here." When we explained that we were showing our disagreement with the Russian ban on Georgian wine by partaking under their diplomatic noses, well, what else could he do? He grabbed a glass of wine and offered a toast; he thanked us for what we were doing and said that it was very important for Georgia. And then, most amazing of all, he handed the wine back to us because he was working and could not be drinking. It really is a new Georgia.

UPDATE: Not to beat a dead horse, but another fine photo collection from the event can be found here.

Whine and Cheese

2006-04-27T17:24:00.000-04:00

On slow news days, rather than cat-in-a-tree stories, local journalists here rely on foreigners doing something funny. So that's why we were all pretty sure that today's event, in which we held a traditional Georgian supra outside the Russian embassy to protest the Russians' ban on Georgian wine, would probably get us some good media coverage. Sure enough, right there on the nightly news following Nino Burjanadze's speech before the Duma, but preceding coverage of floods in Western Georgia, were a bunch of goofy foreigners having a dinner party on the street and getting sloshed on homemade wine in the middle of the day to support Georgia's wine industry.

Got some fun photos of my own, but thought I'd share the local news coverage before the link goes stale and the video clip is taken down.

Verboten

2006-04-23T07:51:00.000-04:00

Eszter at Crooked Timber has a post up about bathroom signs, which reminded me of my favorite recent sighting, in the bathroom of a local bookstore/cafe:

Glad they're finally cracking down. If I see one more cowboy throwing his TV into the toilet...

Visitors

2006-04-21T08:32:00.000-04:00

Wasting no time, my latest guests were on the ground about 12 hours before finding themselves at a supra and on the business end of a wine horn. The pictured gentleman, I should say, fared much better at his first supra than my last hapless guest.

A Friend In Deed

2006-04-16T17:28:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the long absence. My family had been here visiting and Georgia isn't a place to let your guests fend for themselves. But more on that later. I've got a long story that's been festering in my brain for too long.

I wanted to explain something about friendship here, how there’s a different timbre to it. People like to toast to friendship a lot, and I do too, but when Georgians speak of it, it is shaded with some intensity that sounds dire to our ears. I wanted to talk about how a promise of friendship is not so much a pleasantry as an implicit vow of action. At home, I don’t need friends offering to die for me, I can just call the cops, see. But nothing in Georgia’s history has instructed people to rely on government agencies, institutions, the benevolent sorting justice of the law. So there’s friends and family, and where government and law shrink back, these others grow in to fill the space. I've got a story about all that. It's a little long and too earnest by half, but it's been a while, no?

Felix is this orphan kid who’s had just one lucky thing in his whole rotten lot in life and that’s his friends. They also happen to be my friends, and they know Felix from years of volunteering at a local orphanage. But he’s turned 18 and is too old for the orphanage. They found a property for him in an outlying village, a piece of land and a beat-up old shell of a house that once belonged to his grandmother.

A roof over his head is good news for Felix, but the vultures didn’t stay long at bay. The new neighbors took one look at this 18 year old kid, this orphan who has nobody, and they saw a soft target and had aims on his house and his piece of land. They started giving him a little trouble. And this place, awful as it was, was the only thing between Felix and the streets.

So Felix told my friends, and here’s what friends will do.

They loaded up two cars full of supplies. The kid had heartbreakingly nothing. They got cooking supplies and staple foods, dishes and silverware, bedding, tools, an axe so he can chop some wood for warmth and cooking. We all piled in and went to his village to show the neighbors (and the whole village, really, because if anything can give the speed of light a run for it, it’s the speed of gossip traveling through a village) that Felix wasn’t alone and that he had friends that weren’t to be messed with. My job was to stand around and be American, one task I can reliably perform reasonably well here.

We came clanging into the village like the circus coming to town. Honking horns, yelling out the windows asking for unnecessary directions to our friend Felix’s house, driving slowly, turning as many eyes our direction as possible.

At Felix’s house, the neighbors were leaning over railings to get a peek at this production. Lasha, normally reticent and a bit mumbly, transformed himself into a circus barker for the occasion. While the rest of us were preparing things inside, he raised his arms high towards the neighbors, and shouted greetings, begging them over for just two drinks, please, we’d love to meet you.

This act was repeated around the property until Felix’s dirt-floored hovel was flush with bewildered neighbors, who’d gingerly peeked around the doorway only to be yanked inside by one of us and had a glass of wine pressed into their hands. Lasha was a whirlwind; it was exhausting just watching him. He was springing into things as if two carloads of city slickers out in the sticks to fete a bashful orphan boy and his new neighbors was regular as clockwork.

So I guess that rather than fix things with unfriendly letters or legal action or neighborhood associations, here, this sort of thing is fixed by wine. When Lasha began his first toast, I could understand only bits of what he was saying and so I watched the effect on the gathering instead. It was satisfying, in the way it is to watch a craftsman practice a honed art, seeing him work this room, with mounting feeling. He was talking about Felix, and what kind of guy he was, and how we wanted to meet these neighbors, and how important these community ties are, how like family, how special for our friend here, what family means for someone who doesn't have one.

The neighbors were noticeably thawing. The older women looked pleased at this young man who knew all the right, proper things to say. The young guys responded in turn, trying to best one another for eloquence. The old guys, they just beamed and nodded their heads strenuously. They were eating it up.

By the time Lasha finished his first long toast, the room was his. You could just feel it. One woman raised her glass in return and said that she had a son herself, just Felix’s age, and she would make sure that Felix was taken care of just as if he were her own. One of the young guys turned to Felix with a raised glass and told him, “you’re not our neighbor, Felix, but our friend.” The old man raised a glass and told Felix that he’d help him plant a potato crop and teach him how to grow and harvest on his land. What great friends you have, they told Felix who was so shy from the attention he could barely lift his lashes. And so it went on: more toasts from us, more from the neighbors until we'd all exhausted ourselves entirely with good wishes and parted with smiles and handshakes, which is a lot better than the subterfuge and harassment greeting Felix before.

It’s hard to say how much the neighbors meant of what they said. A lot of fine empty words are spilled over wine. And even with their help Felix will have a hard go of it in this life. I hope he'll be more secure and more respected as a result of this social intervention, but there’s really no telling. Still, he's got people in this world that will come in like that and stand by his side and spend their day making sure his home will not be under threat. I've been known to begrudge my friends a lift to the airport. To some degree, I suppose we've evolved beyond needing friends for elemental needs. Crisis and catastrophe sometimes forge valuable things, things that can be lost in comfort. The loyalty I've seen among friends here was born of necessity; I hope that it can outlast it.

[below: a neighbor (left) toasting Felix (right)]

Sisyphus University

2006-04-04T09:10:00.000-04:00

Questions posed by me in class today that were met with blank stares and silence unbroken until I answered them myself:

What is the name of the war we are studying?
(correct answer: Vietnam)

What was the name of the black civil rights leader whose "I have a dream" speech you were just tested on?

What was the type of government of North Vietnam?
...Okay, they were friends with the Soviet Union, so what do you think?
Okay, what type of government was the Soviet Union?
Not democratic, but....? Not democratic or fascist, but...?

Can you name a holiday for me that people celebrate in Georgia?

How are you?

And, the single most successful question in my teaching career to date for provoking lively discussions:
"Did ya'll know Britney Spears is pregnant again?"

Brighter Later

2006-04-03T13:22:00.000-04:00

Today, Misha told me a story about Svaneti.

He was working for a polling firm, conducting a survey up in wild Svan territory with a carload of young girls. This was during Shevardnadze's time, before the revolution, and since that time the anarchy has dulled somewhat, or so they say. A local Svan, who happened to also be with the criminal police, suggested to Misha in that gentle mountain way that smacks of a direct order, that he leave the young ladies behind.

"In return for the girls," said Misha, "he offered to us some marijuana and cows. Well, what could I say?"

"How about 'NO'?" I suggested, mentally calculating just how many cows I'd be worth.

"If I said no," Misha reasoned, "they would kill me for sure. They didn't care back then. So I said okay. I said, meet me at the road at the end of the village and I will bring the girls there."

Then Misha and the girls piled into the car and raced out of town. The Svan man and his cronies chased them all the way to Lentekhi, in lower Svaneti, where a local lawyer friend took in the runaways and fended them off from the pursuing suitors.

My Spring Break in Svaneti, to be perfectly frank, was not quite as dangerous as originally billed. I might have gotten a wee carried away with myself in a Lonely Planet-induced bacchanalia of traveler's lust. See, we didn't go all the way up to Crazytown Svaneti. We lingered down in sedate, Lentekhi-area, administrative Svaneti. Yes, technically I have been to Svaneti but it's sort of like claiming you've been to Vienna when really you just had a quick layover in the airport.

But I really have seen a total eclipse now, and I've seen it in the company of a local Svan man and his son who, when we pulled up next to them, couldn't have looked more gobsmacked if a carload of martians had unloaded in front of him.

We had wondered, in our rather smug Western way, if everyone in these remote villages would even know that the eclipse was coming. Would there be hysteria, animal sacrifices, wailing and rending of garments? We were hopeful.

But although we had, as one of our party noted, more electronic equipment in the Niva than Apollo 11, in the end we were less prepared for the eclipse than the Svan boy who stood with a shard of glass that he'd blackened over a fire. Looking through the dusky end of the glass, you could safely and clearly see the shadow swallow the sun while the light grew long all over lower Svaneti. In the darkness, the air chilled and we turned giddy. Driving there, I hadn't been entirely convinced that it was going to happen at all. My faith in the calculations of scientists is firm, but when you're in Georgia long enough, and especially in Svaneti, you can be forgiven for thinking yourself in a place that defies the sanitary logic of equations.

For me, the eclipse was something to remember. But for our co-spectators, the Svan man and his son, memories of that day may be a toss-up between the sun going out and the crazy foreigners who showed up and hopped about gasping for a few minutes and taking photos of everything. After the light started slowly seeping back and the cows who'd thought it was their lucky day tottered grumbling back to their feet again, G swiveled his camera around to the locals and said "Bring us your women or we will make the sun go away again." Wonder how many cows we could have tried for instead.

Turn Around, Bright Eyes

2006-03-26T16:15:00.000-05:00

Of all the fab Spring Breaks I've had over the years, this year's might just top them all. Or at least, is the most likely to result in bridal kidnapping.

Figure A: Svaneti

Quoth the Lonely Planet: "Svaneti: Impossibly beautiful, wild and mysterious, Svaneti is an ancient land locked in the Great Caucasus, so remote that despite being ethnically Georgian, modern Svans speak a language (Svan) that broke away from Georgian some four millennia ago [!!!] and is now unintelligible to Georgians elsewhere. This land of deep tradition violent justice and banditry is the ultimate destination for any traveller to Georgia. ...Banditry is rife and the only protection comes through blood ties and local honor codes."

Figure B: Outer Space
"On Wednesday, 2006 March 29, a total eclipse of the Sun will be visible from within a narrow corridor which traverses half the Earth. The path of the Moon's umbral shadow begins in Brazil and extends across the Atlantic, northern Africa, and central Asia where it ends at sunset in western Mongolia."

Figure C: The shadow! (courtesy of NASA)

Yes sir, we're going to give it a shot, up to the impassable mountains of Svaneti: the holy grail of Georgia travel, to see the lights go out. And we don't even have an iPod car stereo transmitter, so it's really Lewis-and-Clark the whole way up. I knew one Svan, once. He ate glass and tried to drink wine from my shoe. So, you know, it's sort of like touring Arkansas at a much higher altitude.

Oh, take your Cancun and your South Padre and your rohypnol. Svaneti '06!

(8 days of silence = mayday, people)

Briefly

2006-03-26T15:51:00.000-05:00

I've been in Georgia long enough to believe that every incriminating thing I hear about Russia must be true. This strikes me as a bigg-ish deal. Aren't people talking about it?

2) Matty informs me that I am one of 3 or 4 people in our NCAA hoops bracket with a shot at winning it all. This is the awesomest thing I've learned about myself since finding out I was a natural boxer. UCLA v. UConn is my call. (Apparently)

UPDATE: Oh hell, George Mason seriously?? Pfffft.

Humorous things that are funny

2006-03-26T09:02:00.000-05:00

According to Wikipedia,

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines tautology as "the saying of the same thing twice over in different words."

Bed Bath and Bazaar

2006-03-18T09:40:00.000-05:00

Bazroba, as we call the metastasizing tumor of a market squaloring all over the area by the central train station in Tbilisi, is no place to dip your toe in and test the water. This is a full-on, no-holds, plug-your-nose and squint-your-eyes and cannonball off the high-dive kind of a joint.

See, in Georgia, there’s a real getting-things problem. Not many goods are manufactured here, and sophisticated importing and retailing operations have not taken root. So it’s a bit ad-hoc, a bit mish-mash, it’s individuals who have a lead on plastic tubs from Turkey, or electronics from Dubai. As a rule, the retailing model is not so much corner hardware store or WalMart, it's just Bazroba, for everything. And what Bazroba is, is acres upon lost acres of tables piled up with miscellaneous crap, under tarpaulin.

If you're a claustrophobic, if sensory overload makes you batty, if you find peace and succour in antiseptic shopping malls with piped, hidden music, price tags, and a language you speak, it's not really going to be your scene. And until recently, it's definitely not been mine.

But now I've got friends.

After promptly exploding the power supply to my brand-new wireless router, I seized the chance to test just how native I've gone. I mean, going to bazroba for a light bulb or a kettle is one thing, but a somewhat specialized piece of electronic equipment was ambition of an entirely higher order. Could I, or could I not, plunge into bazroba, pantomime my way into an operational power converter, and make it out intact? I was feeling confident.

Inside the market, I skated past the women shuffling along the dirt floor selling hot cheese pastries, the village men pushing wheelbarrows full of beer cans, I ducked and weaved through the tangles of pans and blankets and scarves and basketballs, utterly lost but looking purposeful.

Eventually, after Hansel-and-Greteling my way into the heart of the place, I paused at a table that seemed to offer a variety of electronic goods: light sockets and bulbs, electrical switches, fuse-looking thingies. The merchant approached me, and I took out of my bag the non-operational power plug.

"This," I said in Russian. "Does not work. I need a new one. Do you have something?"
"Yes, I am sure we will find something! Let's see!" He took it and checked the size and the voltage and started rummaging through his piles. While he pulled out various half-damaged models and examined them, he started asking me questions.
"Where are you from?"
"I am from the USA."
"The USA?" He dropped whatever he had been holding and turned his attention to me. "The USA?! Really? Where in the USA?"
"I'm from Texas."
I think I could hardly have uttered anything that would cause more joy. He threw his hands in the air, shouted "Texas!", and then pantomimed holding a rifle. "Pow, Pow! Texas! Pow!" he shouted.
"Yes, that's it exactly," I confirmed.
I have a theory that Georgia and Texas would get along really well if they met at a party. Both proud of being friendly, both fond of their guns, and both perfectly happy to chuck one for the other at a moment's notice.
"Dallas?" he asked hesitantly.
"I am from Dallas," I said. "My family still lives there."
He shook his head sadly and clucked his tongue. "Kennedy..."
"Ah yes. We're all very sorry about that."

By now he'd found me a suitable model and thought I should give it a try. "If it doesn't work, just bring it back," he said. "I never say that, but..." he clasped his hands in the air and shook them above his head. "United States! Texas!!"

Well, sorry to say, it didn't work. But I think it was worth every tetri. I had to go back to Bazroba today with a friend, and as we rounded a corner in that messy maze, what should I hear but a voice calling out "Suzie!" There was my pal, and he told me that any friend of mine would get a discount on any of his products. So listen up, any of ya'll have cause for some lamps or power cords or switchy-things, I'm all hooked up in Bazroba. Yeeha!