war in ukraine :: do what you can

i've been thinking a lot about my russian friends and how they must be feeling. i wonder what they're thinking? what news they have access to? what they believe? whether they have children who might be sent to putin's folly of a war. i'm friends with one on facebook, but she hasn't answered my message. she might not be able to now, if putin turned it off. so terrible what he's doing and how those who will suffer from his actions are the ordinary people in both ukraine and russia. such an amazing culture, with so much of the world's best literature and music and art.  

since i wrote this a couple of days ago, my friend in russia has answered. she's ok and though she's vague in her posts, she actually still has access. and she said we must all hope for peace. what else can we do?

i'll tell you what i did today - i bought some prints from a ukrainian artist. it's a small gesture and probably only significant to the artist who i bought them from, but it made me feel like i was doing something. and i don't want it to be in some fortunate western kind of way, but maybe it is. but still, i hope it made a difference. please support yulia if you can. her illustrations are lovely and she has a cat. you may have to print yourself at the moment, but honestly, isn't that the least you can do?

studying russian at the wrong time

on the train from moscow to kazan with my dad in 1994

the past week or so of russia's agression against ukraine has me pondering my past. i studied russian, mostly literature and quite a lot of russian history. of course i studied the language as well, but i was never a great talent. i could always read it better than i could speak it. but i did ok, and most importantly, i loved it. 

i studied russian at precisely the wrong time to actually get to do anything with it. i began studying in 1989, just as the berlin wall fell. it took a couple more years for the soviet union to dissolve, but dissolve it did. and by the time i finished my bachelor's degree in 1993 and my master's in 1994, academia didn't really know what to do with us russian majors. 

looking back, so many of my professors were former military, harry had been to the defense language institute in monterey and then princeton (possibly not in that order). the head of our department at iowa, ray, was also former military, as was kit, whose last name i don't remember, though polish was his specialty. later, at asu, the head of the russian department was also former military. they were surely all tapping people on the shoulder to join the cia or fbi or nsa. but that tap never came for me. perhaps because of the aforementioned not being a language talent, but i think it had even more to do with timing. i simply studied russian at the wrong time. fellowships dried up. slavic departments shrank and merged with other "minor" languages. i met a nice danish boy and followed him home and love sent me in another direction.

and i believe that today, we're seeing the result of that. putin and his cronies felt humiliated at the dissolution of the soviet union and now he's taking the first steps towards getting it back. and because no one kept studying russian and slavic culture, it seems like the world is rather blindsided by it all. maybe they should have tapped some of us on the shoulder after all, even if we weren't brilliant at russian, but just had a deep and abiding interest in it and the culture. 

as usual, at moments like this, i wish i could still sit across from my dad and ask him what he thinks about it all. 

throwback thursday: me & lenin

me, on red square in 1994.
taking a photo of my sister, who was obviously taking a photo of me.
she was standing in front of st. basil's
so her photo is more picturesque.
here, all we've got is some melting snow, bits of the kremlin
and lenin's tomb.
tho' i did quite enjoy that. in a creepy cool kinda way.

* * *

you know i am against the use of LOL, 

as i believe that god kills a kitten every time someone (over)uses it. 

but still, this made me laugh out loud.

good thing my parents don't have smart phones.

* * *

how cool is the packaging in this post?

sometimes you have to call a spade a spade

that pipe says "danger zone"

imagine this scenario: you're coming down with a cold and feeling a bit achy and under the weather, so you're making yourself a nice warm cup of elderberry cordial. your phone rings and you answer, stating your name in lieu of hello, as you've been forced into coerced taught by the culture of the country in which you live. the person on the other end doesn't identify himself, but instead sarcastically asks who he has gotten hold of. you repeat your name, mentally kicking yourself for not asking who the hell he was first. then he finally reveals that he's the rhino from the ungdomsskole (remember the one that's supposed to be taking sabin to st. petersburg in 10 days?) and you've filled out the visa application totally incorrectly (despite filling it out exactly as he advised you on the phone last saturday) and you need to turn some password over to him immediately, as he's sitting at the russian embassy in copenhagen. you say that rather than turn over a password (who does that to someone on the phone?), you would gladly log into the application and make the requested changes (tho' he hadn't said what they were yet at that point), since it should probably be you anyway as the child's parent. and despite not having said what the changes should be, but just condescendingly accusing you of filling it out wrongly, he gets very snippy and demands your password again.

you're standing outside, since the reception is rubbish in the house, but you can't for the life of you remember any password on the visa application site. and if you did set a password, it's one you commonly use (you bad) and you don't want to just hand it out to some condescending asshole on the phone. so again, you try to calmly state that you would be glad to log into the russian embassy system and make the changes (provided you are told what they are, since, again, you filled it out per the rhino's instructions while on the phone with him last saturday). since he was at the actual embassy, they would surely be able to access the updated form on their end and use the correct information.

but he goes on in the most condescending tone, as if you are a small, dull child, saying the equivalent of "listen here missy" (høre nu her) that you must immediately turn over the password to him or you can just go to copenhagen yourself next week and secure the visa. and that point, you completely see red, switch to english and end up calling him, and i quote, a fucking asshole, among a rather lot of other things, which may also have included swear words. bearing in mind that danes use the word fuck freely and it doesn't have the same impact to them that it does to you, you mean it with every fiber of your being in that moment and you mean it in the strong american sense of the words, even as you realize you probably shouldn't have gone there. but seriously, this asshole, who has been abominably disorganized and has still, tho' the trip is due to leave in 11 days, not provided an itinerary, flight details or any other information about the trip, has the nerve to be a condescending prat to you on the phone because you filled out a form as he instructed. unbelievable.

as you might guess, all of this happened to me this afternoon. and after i hung up and went inside to make changes to the visa, i learned that there isn't a password - all you needed was the visa application number (which he had on a physically-printed piece of paper) and the first five letters of sabin's last name, which was clearly stated in the blank beside it. there wasn't a password. so he was a complete ass for absolutely no reason.

there is a worrying thread running through all of the encounters i've had thus far with the ungdomsskole. it started already at our parents meeting when the leader of our local outpost told a highly sardonic and condescending (not to mention sexist) story about how sometimes young people's mothers call him to sign their kids up for things that he thought the kids should sign themselves up for. i suppose i'm being put in this box as well, as i am a mother who, funnily enough, is involved in preparing her 12-year-old daughter's visa application for a trip to russia. apparently, these kids should just do these things for themselves. and if, as a mother, i want to know something more about what my child will experience, is that seriously too much to ask? an itinerary, possibly some flight details, for a school trip to russia? isn't that just a given? these disorganized clowns haven't even managed that. on the other hand, it's likely that the trip will fall through, as they've gone to hand in the visa applications far too late. from what i can read on the russian website, it will take at least ten working days, maybe 7 if we're lucky, and there are only 6 working days left before their departure.

i truly hate to find myself becoming one of those sort of righteous danish women, but there you have it. i've been pressed into it by a condescending, misogynist ass of a danish man. and while i will admit i shouldn't have called him a fucking asshole. he really was a fucking asshole.

* * *

and to take our minds off all of this, some interesting photos.

or have you read sinead's open letter to miley cyrus?

magical early color photography

tolstoy

apropos yesterday's post on russian literature, i came across (thanks to melissa of tiny happy) this marvelous collection of color photos taken by sergei prokudin-gorskii in the decade before the russian revolution. yes, you read that correctly, color photos taken at the beginning of the last century.

jaroslavl

prokudin-gorskii used a special camera that took 3 images at once and he used blue, green and red filters, then projected the images together to make the composite color image. you can read more about the process here. aside: i do realize the first two images are not color, but i wanted to share them anyway (you'll see why below).

peasant woman

the library of congress has digitized some of the collection and you can peruse it online here. but do go look at the spread that boston.com did of them - it's breathtaking. i have left the edges here, as they are when you download them from the library of congress site, as i think the process by which the negatives are put together is fascinating.

in the urals

these images simply take my breath away. it's revolutionary photography from a pre-revolutionary time. i'm completely blown away by them.

along the volga

i think the fact that they're in color makes them so much more alive and says something about a basic human need for color. i relate to them so much more because they're in color.

along the volga

the color also gives them a kind of timelessness that black and white photos of the same subjects simply don't have (see the top two).  many of them, i feel as if they could have been taken yesterday.

monastery

i realized also when i stumbled across them that i had been positively LONGING for some truly breathtaking photography. i'm really tired of that over-exposed, false-vintage look that's so prevalent everywhere in the blogosphere and on flickr.

windmill houses

and these magical little windmill houses provoke me so much more than all of the slick architecture magazine photography that abounds on pinterest.  and they're about as far as you can get from the "achingly poetic" shots of toast crumbs and empty coffee cups that are so in vogue.

peasant girls

and these girls? yes, they're posing for the camera in a way that's most decidedly not in fashion at the moment, but aren't they marvelous?

peasant woman

these photos (and the many more i perused on the library of congress site) fed my soul and irrigated my joy today and i hope they do yours as well.

happy weekend one and all!

secret 5 - honeymoon(s)

i've been on three honeymoons. two were my own and one was a friend's. (and i'm going to present them out of order.) EDITED: i'm highlighting the friend's honeymoon. because it's really unusual for someone to go on their friend's honeymoon (there have been misunderstandings on this point so i felt i had to explain, tho' one would have thought that was rather obvious).

honeymoon #1: the starter husband and i went to vancouver for our honeymoon. that trip is when i had the only good white asparagus i've ever had--in a restaurant called the hermitage, where the chef was the former chef of the king of belgium. other than that, all i really remember is a trip to a japanese garden that was so peaceful and beautiful the memory of the atmosphere stays with me very clearly even today.

honeymoon #3: what i think of as my real honeymoon, when husband and i went to london for a quick weekend getaway after we got married on his birthday in 1999. he was at the military academy and could only take one day off, so we got married in a very small, very private ceremony then shared a glass of champagne with his solder friends who had shown up to make an arch of swords for us and ran off to the airport. we had a wonderful weekend wandering around london and being madly in love.

honeymoon #2: my friend gabi's honeymoon. in truth, i wrote about this a long time ago before anyone was reading my blog, but it's such a good secret, i had to use it anyway. i also previously told the story of getting my visa for the trip in this post if you're interested.

it sounds a bit strange to say i went on someone else's honeymoon, but in all fairness, gabi and i had planned the trip to visit our friends in kazan together and then she suddenly decided to marry her longtime boyfriend. since she already had the trip planned and the friends were expecting us, they turned it into their honeymoon. however, i already had tickets and my visa, so i went along too.

it was a wonderful trip. we flew to moscow and took the 13-hour train ride to kazan. you can see us drinking tea on the train above. i completely adore russian trains and some of my fondest memories are from journeys on trains in russia. i can highly recommend them.

we met up with our friends in kazan and i went off with my pals and left the honeymooners to themselves. i vaguely recall that we bought some vodka in a kiosk (big mistake) and proceeded to have an evening full of toasts and laughter. the next day, some other friends came to pick me up and take me to their dacha, but i couldn't really stop throwing up after all that really bad vodka. i meekly took some truly awful black substance that i think contained a lot of coal which was handed to me to try to help me stop throwing up (i was weak and defenseless) and then spent the rest of the day recovering at the dacha, which was beautiful and idyllic.

a few days later, i rejoined gabi and her husband and we boarded a beautiful old 1950s steamer for a cruise up the volga river to moscow. that was a truly wonderful trip. long, beautiful summer days, interesting stops along the way. i still have a handmade basket that i bought from an elderly woman all clad in black who was selling baskets and mushrooms she had found in the forest.

we were the only foreigners onboard the cruise and i remember a long conversation with an elderly gentleman who informed me that all americans are black, tall and played basketball, because that was the impression he'd gotten from the NBA. he was surprised and a little disappointed that i was none of those things and i think he may not really have believed me that i was american. he kept asking if i wasn't from the baltic states.  that probably had more to do with him not expecting an american to speak russian and my strange accent, which was always being called prebaltika by various russians. i don't know why i'd have a baltic accent in russian, but apparently i do.

time slowed down there on the volga. it stretched out in a very good way. there was time for writing in my journal, sketching, reading, exploring long-abandoned old manor houses and churches along the banks of the volga. lots of time for talking to people, hearing their stories. drinking countless cups of tea and the occasional glass of vodka. the locks were fascinating, as were beaches where people swam next to signs saying "danger zone." all of the contrasts and beauty and vastness of russia were there. i loved every minute of it.

in some ways, it was actually my friend's honeymoon that was the best of the three i've been on. that's a little bit funny, isn't it? maybe because there were far less expectations attached to it than to the "real" ones. and maybe there's a lesson for all of us in that. tag along on your friend's honeymoon. you'll have a great time.

#2 - not what i thought it was going to be

this week i'm writing each day about a person, place or thing that has had a big effect on my life. i'm going to be leaving aside parents, sister, husband and daughter because those are a given for having had a big effect and writing about that effect would be way more typing than i should do with the angry nerve in my left hand.

when i was in junior high, at the height of ronald reagan's cold war escalation rhetoric, there was a made for t.v. movie starring jason robards called the day after. (leave it to a B movie actor to use a B movie as a medium for his propaganda.) it was, looking back, prototypical cold war propaganda, and basically showed kansas being nuked off the map by the evil russians. i'd been to kansas and while it wasn't my favorite place in the world, it was a little too much like the flat prairie, amber waves of grain of my home state for comfort. and the movie called attention to the fact that where i was growing up was probably in some danger...within fallout range of strategic air command near omaha, nebraska.

the movie made a big impression on me and for years afterwards, i imagined that somewhere in russia was a girl who looked a whole lot like me and if we could just talk to each other and get to know one another, then all that cold war mumbo jumbo wouldn't really be necessary.

so, years later, when i got the chance to take an evening class in russian at a community college, i jumped at it. i was still idealistically picturing my "sister" in russia as i slaved over the cyrillic alphabet and all those cases...accusative, genitive, dative...i still shudder a bit thinking of those. by then, reagan was in the last stages of his presidency...the bits he didn't really remember anyway, and nancy was running the country together with her astrologer (which in retrospect, wasn't really so bad).

that whole zeitgeist fit nicely with the very spiritual, authentic, red-haired russian woman who was teaching my evening course. i loved her. she loved shirley maclaine's spiritual journey, which was so in vogue at the time, and made dramatic declarations about the future of people in the course. hers for me was that she could feel that i should keep studying russian, that it was my destiny. i was 19 and looking for my destiny, so i thought, "why not?" i was a bit romantic on the notion of russian anyway, so it was as good a destiny as any. within a few short years, i found myself with bachelor's and master's degrees in, you guessed it, russian. self-fulfilling destiny?

i even found myself in the middle of russia, standing at a bus stop together with some friends, waiting to go out to their dacha, when an old man came up and asked me and my friend aida if we were indeed sisters, just as i had suspected all along! i really did have a "sister" in russia and if we just knew one another and could talk, we wouldn't need all that cold war mumbo jumbo.

you may think this story ends there, but i'm not really to that influential person yet.

not long after that, i was in a literary theory course (pursuing yet another master's, i just couldn't seem to get enough). we had to write weekly 1-2 page essays on our reading assignments. being a good marxist (since the only ones left by that time were in american universities), i found a way to weave the evils of capitalism and trickle down economic policies into my reactions to the readings week after week. finally, the professor scrawled in the margin of one essay, "you make me feel old. it's clear that ronald reagan is really the defining president for you."

and that's why that as much as i am loathe to admit it, ronald reagan, B movie actor turned president, is one of my 5 big influences. even if it was an influence borne of loathing, it still significantly guided the direction of my life.

epilogue (or is it actually prologue?): i can still remember when he was shot in 1981, it was semester test time at school and we were about to be dismissed for the day when they made an announcement over the loudspeakers that the president had been shot. i asked a tad too hopefully, "is he dead?" and my teacher, clearly a staunch republican, flew into a rage and made the entire class stay after school because of my disrespectful comment regarding the president. already then, he was effecting my life. at that point, i didn't really imagine just how much.

ponderings on a saturday night...make that sunday morning

"Can we change the world without changing the way we describe, structure and view the world?" asks truth cycles.

i set off last evening, after reading truth cycles' lovely post, to write about time and about memory and about changing the world. but, then life intervened, there were bedtime over-tired tears, a toe stubbed to bleeding, drama, a mosquito buzzing in an almost-asleep ear, more crying, then at last an exhausted little girl fell asleep after a very busy day of saturday activity.

sometimes, it seems that you have all the good intentions of wanting to change the world and how you're living in it and the impact you have on it, but then the real nitty gritties of life get in the way and divert your attention and your time. but then, who is to say that reading a story and comforting my daughter wasn't really a more worthy use of my time than sitting in front of the computer, composing a blog entry?

i studied in russia a number of years ago and during that time, i felt that time had slowed down. i had the strange sense that there was always exactly the amount of time in each day that i needed to do the things i had to and wanted to get done. i've often pondered why that was and never really come up with a satisfactory answer. but, perhaps it's because i was expressing time differently...in another language (in this case, russian). perhaps, as i have been provoked to think by the truth cycles posting, it was a matter of having oriented myself differently to time in another language and another setting. i simply lived with another relationship to time. since i assumed and expressed that i always had enough time to get things done, i in fact DID have that time. and in that, i always had enough time to go for a long walk arm in arm with friends, to drink endless cups of tea from the samovar, to go the opera or ballet every other evening, to do my homework, to attend classes, to journal and to stand in the queue outside the milk store, hoping to get some of that creamy chocolate milk, to look at wind-up watches in "watch world." all of that effortlessly fit into my days and months in kazan.

it was something about russia and perhaps russian because when i returned 3 years later for gabi's honeymoon trip on the volga, i had the same sensation...of time elongating, and being exactly as long as i needed it to be. those glorious golden days in the sunshine on the volga stretching out, the hours spent poking around in the little towns along the way, buying a basket from an old black-clad woman who had made it, taking a fantastic picture of a "dead piano" in a long-neglected manor house, wandering among the golden-cupolas of nizhny novgorod. it was a week, but in memory, it stretches into much longer. perhaps because it was such a relaxing time.

maybe that's why time seems to go so quickly in everyday life. because we're never relaxed. we're always rushing on to the next thing, never taking the time to enjoy and savor the moments as we are in them. so, although i perhaps didn't change the world yesterday, the fact that i took the time to comfort a tired little girl, to read to her, tickle her back and just be with her in that moment, maybe that was enough for that day. maybe it's the kind of thing she will remember one day and she will be happy her mom had time for her. and maybe thereby, one small gesture at a time, we actually do change the world.