hmmm. i've been home for a whole five days and no update on the trip yet... sorry. you're not getting it now, either. ;-)

this blog will be disappearing soon, and i'll be moving on to greener pastures full-time on another server. if you're dying to find out where i'll be, pop me an email [kmt4n@alumni.virginia.edu] and i'll let you know what's up, if i like you enough.

last night was a vivid reminder of why i have always avoided bars in college towns: melissa, her roommate brian, sarah and i went up to towson for the evil, evil ladies $5 all-you-can-drink special at this certain place, and it was so horribly painful. all the fake-tanned sororstitutes in their standard summer uniform of tank top/off-the-shoulder boob shirt, cutesy knee-length skirt, and flip-flops, combined with the frat boys in their abercrombie and nursing their bottles of bud light, made me want to either get really drunk and start a catfight or run away screaming. i, however, chose neither of the above, and instead decided to nurse the glory that is the bourbon and coke until closing time. sleep was good, and long; melissa's cat woke me up around 2 pm by plopping himself across my neck and wailing at me to get up and feed him. it didn't work, so he went over to her and did the exact same thing.

so ca-yute.

mmmmmbedtime.
posted by kat thompson at 12:08 AM

whoa... blogger completely rehauled their... well, everything. sure, wait until i leave to make things better. pbbbllltt!

last day in st petersburg: i didn't get home until 430 this morning, because jess and justin and i were too busy drinking and talking and drinking and talking and watching the sun set and then rise three hours later for me to go home any earlier. i picked up the last real shaverma ever on the way home, and crashed right at 5.

i was not pleased when my body decided at 830 am that i'd had enough sleep and it was time to get up, but i was unable to fall back into hungover bliss, so the rehydration process began. i had some yummy lemon cake and a banana for breakfast, and then set about packing. hmmm... well, it all fits, but any souvenirs i buy in london and ireland are going to have to be very, very small. oh well.

to avoid thinking about a possible repacking, i then went downtown and had a lovely time watching the gypsies rob unknowing tourists, eating ice cream, strolling up and down and all around, and sitting in a garden watching the world go by. today was one of those perfect cloudless days with a slight breeze that simply makes you forget that there's a world outside of what you can see around you, and one that makes you never want to leave where you are.

after this post, i'm sending some emails and then going home to eat, shower, and gather up the last of my stuff. leaving seems surreal, but then, the past ten months in general have been surreal.

i'll be home july 13, and will be back online shortly thereafter. until then, happy july 4th, happy birthday to kim, and pray that mom and i get home in one piece without having started any international incidents.

i'm gonna miss this place. well, um, da svidanya, i guess.

current mood: mellow again
current music: moby/'why does my heart feel so bad?'
posted by kat thompson at 9:48 AM

alas, myishka is no longer in heat and has taken to swatting at my ankles again. which would be fine if i hadn't already torn them up scratching myself. i think she likes hearing someone else howl for a change.

monday i ate at my favorite cafe for the last time; i was alone, and was able to enjoy fully a hot plate of khachapuri (cheesy bread, but better) and a glass of georgian red wine. yesterday was a beautiful day so i spent most of it outside, laughing at the tourists, as well as waiting in line to get into the hermitage - something i've never had to do before. i actually spent more time waiting to get in than i did inside the musuem, since i'd only wanted to see this one exhibit that opened on saturday. as i was waiting, a very obnoxious kid from milwaukee made my acquaintance and bitched at length about the reasons he hates russia. so, i asked, why did you come here if you don't like it? oh, he said, it's one of those things i just thought i should do, you know, how everyone just has to go to europe or some other far-off place at least once in their lives, as he rolled his eyes and gave me that you-know? smile. i shook my head, no, i don't know, i came here to study and learn and drink a little. (heh heh) it's people like him that give american tourists a bad name - why can't they really just stay home?

last night i saw moby at the ice palace. it was almost as cathartic and seminal as seeing pearl jam for the first time, except moby only played for ninety minutes, which left me feeling cheated somehow. it was a good vibe, though, since everyone in the room had been waiting years to see him - i assume this was his first ever show in st petersburg. according to his website, he was duly impressed by the city. yay. his two best songs were 'porcelain' and 'bring back my happiness', although '18' was a close third.

today i got all my certificates and passport and visa stuff picked up and done with, so now all i have to do is buy some vodka, drink some beer with the boys tonight, pack, and clean my room. my last post from the frozen tundra will be tomorrow afternoon, after three out of those four things are done.

current mood: mellow
posted by kat thompson at 7:51 AM

too funny!

dima's kitten, myishka, is now a cat, as she's been in heat since thursday. this is the first time either dima or tanya has been around a cat in heat, and it's rather amusing since they have no idea what to do with her. the following is an approximate transcript of the conversation tanya and i had on thursday evening at dinner:

tanya: you've got cats at home, right?
me: yeah, two, and they both went through heat before we spayed them.
t: how long does this last?
m: depending on the cat, five days to a week, every month or so, sometimes every other month.
t: [jaw drops] a week?! good lord... (yes, she actually did say 'gospodi' here)
m: maybe. this is her first time, so it might be shorter than that...

[a little later on]
tanya: ok, so when your cats were spayed, did they wrap a bandage around their stomachs to help the stitches heal?
me: yeah, when my sister's cat got spayed she got the bandage, but when my cat got spayed she had to wear this collar that looked like a lampshade -
t: a what?
m: a lampshade, so she couldn't turn her head and get to the stitches. do they do that here?
t: i don't know. i hope not. i don't want myishka to wear a lampshade around her neck!
m: but it looks really funny. you could videotape it for later...
[at this point myishka, as if eavesdropping, began a fresh round of caterwauling]

i think my favorite thing she does is stretch herself out in front of the front door with her hind legs splayed out into the air, as if she's saying "come on in, i'm ready!" the poor thing has no idea what's happening to her, and she goes nuts every time dima comes home. sniffing his shoes, curling herself around his legs, etc. etc.

the best part of this, though, is that on friday tanya came back from the store with these pills that they sell for cats and dogs going through heat. she showed them to me, and i was amusingly horrified to see that they were called, literally, anti-sex pills. i know more than a few humans who would benefit from the use of such pills, if they existed for us...

yesterday's summer solstice sunshine total: nineteen hours and fifty-one minutes. thank god the days now get shorter!

current mood: extremely itchy (stupid mosquitoes)
posted by kat thompson at 10:26 AM

i spent my afternoon shopping with a friend and sitting in an outdoor cafe on nevsky prospect, sipping tea and giggling at the tourists. they're so cute. i don't want to go home yet....

as promised, the list of things i will miss about st petersburg:

ice cream - real shaverma - people driving on sidewalks - crazy babushkas - crazy people in general, for that matter - bliny from teremok, the best bliny stand in the world - the low standard of living (ie everything is cheap... beer, CDs, etc) - "ostorozhno, dvyeri zakruvayutsa" ("careful, doors closing") - metro service every 1-2 minutes - taking private taxis - the boys at the computer center - the rumble trams make on the road when they pass - drinking tea at least twice a day - the awful tv show "okna" and its host, dimitry nagiev - sitting in my balcony with my flowers and the window open, watching people pass by below - well-behaved stray dogs - hearing garbage go tumbling down the trash chute - being able to eat and drink on public transportation - the complete and utter lack of open-container laws - the neva, its canals, and all the bridges - extremely slack views towards working more than is absolutely necessary - extraordinarily obvious product placement on tv shows - people with gold teeth - the police - "mozhno poznakomitsa?" ("can we get acquainted?") - yummy soups of all sorts - being called "dyevushka" (literally "girl") - dorm parties - hearing the word "gospodi!" (depending on your source, "good heavens" or "good lord!") - seeing nudity on tv - the sounds of neighbors' "remont" ("repairs") (this word is now permanently a part of my english vocabulary) - walking everywhere - flowers everywhere - people starting conversations... everywhere - old ladies with purple hair - my purple plaid bedsheets - watching people run for buses and trams and such - the babushka mafia (tm) - the ever-changing penciled-in eyebrows of my korean classmate, hee-chung - the weather music on channel one - having no knowledge of cnn and the idiotic news from the west - the blind-person traffic signal sound at the crosswalk near the metro - my daily two-word quota with dima, usually 'good afternoon' or 'good evening' - hanging clothes on the hot pipe

...and the list of things i will not miss: (you may notice some similarities with the former)

eating meat twice a day - crappy sidewalks and roads (yay crumbling infrastructure!) - people driving on sidewalks - people with body odor and/or halitosis - washing clothes in the bathtub - not having a dryer! - being hit on by sleazy russian guys - being stared down by russian women - the pointy witch shoes that seemingly all russian women wear - and, womankind's refusal to cut her collective bangs - garlic, garlic everywhere - it being windy all the time - awful pop and rock music - crazy homeless people - dirt flying everywhere - that smell of fish and stale cabbage - expensive tampons - unhelpful staff - street artists/etc who bark at me unsolicitedly in english - completely arbitrary means of getting things done - extremely slack views towards working more than is absolutely necessary - lack of constant water temperature - dirty looks when trying to break 500- and 1000-ruble notes - paying over a dollar an hour for the internet - rotary telephones - "kak mozhno interpretirovat?" ("how can this be interpreted?", my grammar teacher's favorite saying) - places being closed for lunch - pillow feathers stabbing me in the head - being cold all the time - gypsies - walking on ice and through four-inch-deep puddles - people starting conversations... everywhere - people smelling like meat and/or alcohol, especially at nine o'clock in the morning - old people who stand over you and breathe on you/clear their throats at you on buses/etc - the babushka mafia (tm) - having to check my coat everywhere i go - people smacking their lips constantly - metro molesters - not being able to drink the tap water

yesterday was my last day of class. my time here is running away from me like a horse who's just torn the lead rope out of my hand and has taken off down the hill.

sigh. ::staples hand to back of forehead::

current mood: mischievous
current music: red hot chili peppers/"californication"
posted by kat thompson at 9:52 AM

bit by bit, blow by blow...

weekend: tanya and dima and i went to see babushka at her apartment in a town called siverskiy, about an hour and a half south of the city by train. we got there late saturday afternoon and spent the evening making shashlyk - a sort of equivalent to shish kebabs - and drinking vodka in the forest. and in keeping with the food chain, we served as dinner to more than a few mosquitoes. i've never seen skeeters this freakishly huge, which was the one thing that helped me swat them away before they sunk in for a bite. normal skeeters i don't see until it's too late, but these were huge and therefore shoo-away-able. on sunday the family went out to the town cemetery to lay flowers on dead relatives' graves for trinity sunday, and i was left with a key to the front doors and the address of the apartment, and was told 'don't get lost'. in order to not get lost, i made a grand total of one turn, and that was left out of the apartment complex and down the road. i wanted to see how far i could get in ninety minutes, and then i was going to simply turn around and come back home. twenty minutes into enjoying the greenery, fresh air, and colorful little houses with laundry hanging in the yard, the skies opened up mercilessly, and down came rain and hail. yes, hail. i was without umbrella and in non-waterproof sneakers, so within five minutes i'd been soaked to the bone. looking around during the downpour, i felt like i was in florida, what with all the rain and the wet trees and the water running down the road and the old people... but without the palmetto bugs and the humidity. i turned around and ran back home, and of course half an hour after i'd stripped and changed back into my pajamas, the blasted sun came back out to taunt me. 'you only brought one pair of pants, silly!' it said. 'they're wet now, and you can't come out and play! ha ha ha ha!'

grrrr.

on monday i got a very pleasant surprise in class, as my normal teacher was absent and she arranged for our group to study with the group of one of her teacher friends. the group was about three levels below ours, which was a bit boring, but i opened the door to the room and there was sitting my old republican army pal jess, from last semester's group. yay, someone else to go drinking with this weekend! he's back here for the summer before he goes to study for a year in volgograd - he might finally get his degree at the end of next school year. good for him. but better for me, since his return was totally unexpected and i'm glad he's back. however, hearing him talk about how much he missed st pete really made me think for a long moment how much i don't want to leave. so begins the cycle: i'm ready to get out of here, but i don't want to go just yet. it's just now starting to hit me, that i'm leaving next freaking friday.

last night i went to see dave gahan, who was awesome and amazing and thank the lords lost his shirt only three songs into the show. ;-) he played the entire new album, plus a good mix of old stuff. i was kinda surprised when he played 'personal jesus', and thrilled when he ended the show with an acoustic version of 'enjoy the silence'. it made the waiting through the two absolutely awful opening bands worth it. good times.

i'm presently compiling my list of things i will and will not miss about st petersburg. that post, coming soon, film to follow.

current mood: dirty (only from walking around all day, thank you)
current music: splean - 'moyo serdtse'

posted by kat thompson at 10:44 AM

happy birthday, blog!

born out of boredom, will probably die from consumption... you've seen a lot in your first year. i can tell you right now you're not going to make it to a second, at least not in this incarnation. you've got a facelift coming soon. a present from mommy. :-)

[my god, am i really talking to my blog? sure sign i must get more fresh air. good lord.]

i wish i had a vcr - ntv (as independent a tv station as one can find in this country) is doing a fascinating miniseries on boris yeltsin. we haven't gotten to the drunken speeches yet; i fear they're saving those for tomorrow and friday, when i'm not home... oh well. i can only imagine, i guess.

current mood: celebratorily indifferent
current music: violent femmes/"american music"
posted by kat thompson at 5:39 AM

pssst.... (grandpa, this one was for you)

i passed my test. hee hee! ::continues the happy dance::

i don't know exactly what this means, but i'll soon have a shiny certificate saying that i've successfully completed the TORFL at the second level. resume padding, i suppose.

::more happy dance::

yay!

current mood: happy
current music: some r&b crap that the goons in the internet hall have on endless loop
posted by kat thompson at 6:28 AM

I'M DONE!!!!

pardon me while i do the happy dance ("doin' the happy dance, doin' the happy dance" - 'baseketball') a little while longer. now i can go back to living my fun, lazy, why-is-it-40-degrees-in-june? life. woohoo!

[btw, the test was awful; i think i only passed two of the five sections. i'll find out on monday, so we'll see]

so... what have i been up to for the past two weeks?

friday the 23rd: i'd read somewhere that there was going to be a laser show that night, so christine and i went down the strelka (the tip of the island i live on, which faces the hermitage and the peter and paul fortress - basically the focal point of most of the 300th-anniversary celebrations) to see what was going on. apparently, several hundred other people thought there was going to be a laser show too, but we were all mistaken, since the cops rode by around 11:30 pm and told us all to go home. christine and i decided against this since we wanted to watch the bridges go up, so we got some beer and stuck around. tip #1: there's a reason no sane person would ever consume more than one can of 9% beer. don't do it. tip #2: deciding amidst this 9%-beer-haze that being on the wrong side of the bridge when it goes up is a good idea is, in fact, not a good idea, because you have no way of getting home since the metro is closed and all nearby bridges have also been raised. tip #3: stay away from young people with guitars. bad people hang around them. anyways, after staying out all night i was dead tired, so i slept most of saturday the 24th, before heading off to christine's farewell party, which happened to double as edward's sauna party. see, edward is this british kid we both know, and his apartment has a sauna in it which he'd never used, so we decided to 'open' it for him. the only problem was that the shower was in the kitchen, far away from said sauna, so the floors were very slippery and we were quite drunk, so... yeah.

[i know, i'm scratching my head too as to why the shower was built in the kitchen. i think the place was only built with one person in mind, but two people live there so edward strung a curtain across the front of the shower for modesty's sake]

[if you've never been to a real sauna, it's quite refreshing to jump out of the heat and into some cold water, and then jump back into the heat. we got it as high as 70 degrees celsius, which was nice and toasty warm]

nothing much really happened after the sauna party. i spent most of monday and tuesday (the 26th and 27th) running around trying to get stuff for my visa processed, but i didn't get everything turned in until three days ago, through no fault of my own because closing times during the birthday celebrations were arcane and generally not posted anywhere. typical russian bureaucracy, but what can you do? [shrug] tuesday the 27th was city day; there actually was a laser show on the strelka that night, so justin and i had dinner and got some beer and headed down there to check it out.

along with, i'm not kidding, 500,000 like-minded people with beer. whoops.

anyways, in such a crowd practically nothing was visible, so about ten minutes into the laser show - which wasn't very well organized, from what i saw on tv the second time they showed it - we decided to head home. we ended up walking, since the traffic was backed up to god knows where. it was a pleasant half-hour stroll, since the weather was nice.

[the weather was nice all week, but it was a sham because the government ordered these 'cloudbusting' airplanes to fly around the region in order to keep rainclouds away from the city during the celebrations. which is why i found it amusing that on saturday the 31st, the day all the heads of state were in town, the skies opened up during the parade down the river neva]

where was i... oh yes. from wednesday the 28th through the weekend to the 1st, the building where my classes are held was closed because it sits on the embankment of the neva, directly across the river from where the ship 'silver whisper' was moored, where the russia/CIS summit was held, among other official hoity-toity events. they closed every building on and parts of most of the streets leading up to the embankment for security reasons, so we had to have class elsewhere. wednesday we went to the russian museum, which was admittedly a bit boring for me as i'd only been there a week before for about the seventh or eighth time, and i've seen basically everything there is to see in there. thursday we took a walk around two islands north of the city, the krestovskiy and yelagin islands, which are favorite places for residents to frolic and picnic and relax when the weather's nice. it wasn't hard to see why, as the islands are full of trees and rowboats for rent and there are even stables on one of them. thanks to my teacher, i finally found the island of the thieving monkeys - i'd read in a guidebook that one of the smaller islands inside the yelagin island was inhabited by monkeys who steal wallets and money from drunken tourists who rent rowboats, end up there, and pass out. apparently it's all some experiment being run by scientists, but i wasn't able to find out anymore about this from my teacher.

saturday the 31st brought the visit from bush and the running-around of all the heads of state around the city, which meant that many streets were closed. i went downtown to watch a military parade, but because i got there late (not my fault, i got bad information) and because of the thousands of people yet again, i saw nothing. i ended up standing behind some french tourists and for some reason i found it cute when they bumped into me and said 'pardon' - it must have been the novelty of someone actually apologizing for having done so. anyways, after that i ended up back on the embankment in front of the university to watch the parade down the neva - the strelka was closed off for 'security reasons' because all the heads of state were sitting directly across the river in front of the hermitage, watching the festivities - which actually really sucked, because apparently all the cool stuff was only visible if you were a head of state or family member of said head sitting across the river. the parade consisted of a reconstructed model of peter the great's old boat, the shtandardt, a bunch of boats decorated in colours and coats-of-arms of local families of yore, and 45 rowboats representing the 45 countries whose heads of state were present for the party. [and even though the press would have you believe otherwise, turkmenistan's dictator was indeed present in all of his benevolence] there were fountains timed to colors and music from speakers nearby, and fireworks, and a laser show - but none of this was visible from where we were, so i went home and decided to catch the rest on tv, which was a fine idea since i was able to see everything and it wasn't raining.

on june 1 everyone left for france, and the party was considered officially over. and all the residents living within a five-kilometer radius of the center breathed a huge sigh of relief.

i think overall everything went well - i didn't hear of any major incidents or of anyone dying, although that could be because negative press was probably sternly warned against before everything. it seems that most stuff went off without a hitch, although a whole lotta people were disgruntled - at the streets being closed at random times, at not being allowed to go certain places, about the anniversary celebrations being only for the heads of state and not for the people of the city itself... it's hard to agree with that last bit, but it's also hard to disagree. what it comes down to in the end was that a whole lot of good was done, but most of it seems to be on the surface - major stuff like fixing the metro and building the ring road hasn't received any attention or really progressed, but the outsides of the buildings sure do look nice!

so... yeah. that's my past two weeks, in a sort of big nutshell. i've got three weeks left here to run around and see stuff - it's happening pretty fast. kinda unbelievable. but, kinda cool. i think i'm ready to come home.

current mood: content
current music: live/"lakini's juice"
posted by kat thompson at 11:44 AM

argh. i've been duped!

last night i was served my favorite rice salad for dinner, after a really yummy mushroom soup. about halfway through the salad - which has garlic, eggs, onions, rice, and corn in it (it's better than it might sound, trust me) - i bit into something soft and chewy that didn't quite taste like egg, nor quite like garlic, but kind of like... fish. i looked at my salad a little more closely and felt a sudden, gnawing horror upon realizing that it looked a darn lot like the crab salad that christine made at edward's sauna party two weekends ago. (that itself will be explained later this week) i fished out another soft and chewy piece that was colored red at one end, put it in my mouth, and then the connection was made clear. i've been eating crab salad for the past six months without any clue whatsoever. i had no idea that the soft and chewy pieces of food were crab - i can hear this now, "what did you think they were?!" - but i had no reason to think that they were crab, since a) i hate it and i never eat it, ergo i don't know what it looks like when it's in processed form and b) i told tanya from the start that i don't like seafood...

oh, but wait. no. i only told her i don't eat fish. crab, apparently, was fair game.

this [blooorrrrrgh] is the sound of me retroactively trying to purge six months' worth of rice/crab salad out of my system and memory. note: this episode does not mean that i will now eat crab. if anything, i hate it even more than i did before for sneaking up on me like that and infiltrating my tummy thusly.

anyone giving me crab-related things as gifts from now on - i especially have in mind that stupid shirt on sale at all maryland rest stops that says "leave me alone, i'm crabby" - will be hurt. i mean it. i've probably just given certain people some ideas, but this is no joking matter. this stuff scars people for life.

shudder. twitch. shudder.
posted by kat thompson at 7:18 AM

update: i am alive. i'm just knee-deep in vocabulary right now. i will spill all the beans about the anniversary celebrations and the madness of being here right now, but not until after next thursday.

best study break i've had in a long time: eastern standard time. there are few things that can lift my spirits like a fantastic ska show. the last one i saw comparable to last night's show was the toasters back in '98, the weekend before high school graduation. i feel old. especially since i recognize the names of maybe four bands that played at this year's hfstival. urf.

current music: rancid/"junkie man"
posted by kat thompson at 8:39 AM

i'm throwing out most rules of grammar and syntax for this post. i'm sorry if a lack of subjects/predicates/prepositions frightens you.

past week in a nutshell: free outdoor concert last friday behind the hotel around the corner from my apartment. good bands, good and cheap beer, but lines were way too fucking long. i will never wait an hour for two beers again in my life. witnessed what happens when you supply teenagers with said cheap beer and send them all back to the metro together - fights abundant left and right. saw two kids get beaten to death. it was weird - felt like i was standing outside of myself, watching myself watch my other self watch what was going on. [actually, that's a pretty good way to describe how i've been feeling all week] after all that, drank some more beer and watched the sunset from the banks of the river in front of the apartment. full darkness doesn't descend upon us now until almost midnight. freaky. but cool.

saturday: cut my hair again, drank some more beer. sunday: went book-shopping, picked up my pleasure reading through the end of the summer, was bummed that i couldn't find a decent copy of bulgakov's 'heart of a dog'. monday: bought myself some tapochki for home. they're almost a little too girly-girl for me, but i was sucked in by the color - deep cobalt, almost purple if you look at it in the right light. also bought a new camera battery and some film, to capture the insanity that is going to be this city over the next week. there's this sense bubbling around like something's going to happen - the excitement is very much palpable. this is cool. yesterday: saw the exhibit 'russian paris' in the russian museum. makes me want to hop on the first flight to paris. [a lot of things do, actually, which is a bit scary] exhibit was comprised of art from 1910-1950 done by russian artists who emigrated to paris. only two works from kandinsky, but enough by chagall to keep me happy. i am in love with his 'blue landscape'. today: ran around taking photos of stuff that had been under scaffolding, also got my own picture taken by this guy working for kodak, who's doing this thing where they go around taking pictures of st. pete residents for free as a present to the city. i get to pick up my photo tomorrow; if i can, i'll scan it in here. but i fear i look like a sillybones, since i'm sitting on this wall with my hair blowing all over the place. [oh hey, you can see my new haircut in this picture]

tourists are everywhere. the weather's nice, progress in studying for this test is going well, although i'm wobbling back and forth far too often between 'idiot, you'll be fine' to 'idiot, you know nothing'. as i do before every test i've ever taken in my life. i saw this poor kid on rollerblades faceplant into the pavement yesterday - when he got up, half his face was covered in blood; he must've broken a nose or some teeth, but he didn't want any help. the store at the end of my street makes the best chocolate ice cream i've ever had, and i am not exaggerating. rice salad is good, but not when you overload it with garlic. i painted my toenails the other day for the first time in a long time. summer is coming soon. i am going to have to work hard to not punch in the face the next street artist who offers to either draw my picture or show me their collection, but does this in english. i wrote bob levey (columnist for the washington post) an email yesterday, and to my great surprise he wrote back. he writes in small letters too, which is somewhat comforting. job searching is damned depressing - i'm coming to terms with the idea of waitressing at long last. that doesn't please me, but it'll pay the bills.

i still can't believe i have a nephew named xander.

well, back to studying, i suppose.

golubchik moy, yesli tyi chitayesh eto - tebya lyublyu i ochen skuchayu po tebe. nadyeyus, shto vsyo khorosho s toboy. obnimayu i tseluyu.

current music: pearl jam/"black"
posted by kat thompson at 10:38 AM

1) if you're a ska fan and are going to be around d.c. on june 28, i strongly advise you to head down to the state theater in falls church to see the best ever russian ska band, leningrad. it doesn't matter if you don't get the russian - they're a great band nonetheless. and if you do get the russian, you can pick up an entirely new vocabulary from them. go see them. i command you. :-)
1a) when dave gahan's solo album 'paper monsters' comes out in the states, run, do not walk, out to buy it. i read an interview with him where he compared it to 'violator', and while i don't quite think it's that seminally important, it's a far better album than i would have expected. take heart: the first single is not the best song on the album. it only gets better.

2) twice in the past four days i've been stopped by women asking me about my religious beliefs. i fall for it every time, since they approach me like they're gonig to ask me what time it is or where does this bus go, and then they say 'can we talk to you for a minute?' and it doesn't occur to me until i've already asked 'about what?' that they're going to ask me if i believe in god. since this is exactly the type of thing i don't want to talk about with someone on the street even in my native language, i've been using the 'i'm sorry, i don't speak russian' excuse to get away from them. but i know they know somehow that i'm lying and that i'm just trying to get away from them, and i hope they're not going home and cursing my name to whatever god they pray to. although one of these days i might just tell them i'm catholic and see if they try to convert me to whatever it is they believe in. or an atheist. or a pagan. or a jedi knight. ::looks at kim::

3) last night we had our first thunderstorm since, i think, i've been here - it was awesome! i haven't seen one in, what, nine months? since i was in an eleventh-floor apartment, we had quite the vantage point from which to watch the storm roll in - seemingly out of nowhere the rain and the wind galloped in and bent the trees halfway over, and this poor spider outside the window had to cling onto his web for dear life. [i think he got blown away, but i can't feel too bad for him because he's a spider and all spiders are evil] after the wind calmed down, the lightning began. it was all over the horizon and at least one tree got knocked over. and then the wind kicked back in, and the rain picked back up, and our power almost went out. ok, so it doesn't sound so exciting, but after six months of winter [btw, our heat was just turned off on monday] it's cool to finally see weather that's more summerlike in nature.

4) ...which is why i was less than charmed when it went back down into the low 50s today and i left my umbrella at home, and on my way to lunch it started pouring. however, the cool rain felt really good on my sunburned scalp, and it seemed to also bring out the smell of my shampoo somehow, neither of which i really minded.

5) someday i'm going to publish my treatise on relationships in russia and how astoundingly different they are from the circus we call dating back home. justin is inadvertently providing me with some rather interesting information towards this end - he's dating our former grammar teacher - and it's almost too bad i'm not pursuing a thesis on this sort of thing. some of the stuff that's considered normal here is mind-bending... but i'll let that sit and brew for a bit. besides, i should start studying for this whole TORFL thing at some point - i did buy the book for it on tuesday, so i might as well use it. (TORFL = test of russian as a foreign language. i'm not allowed to leave without taking it)

6) if i'm not blogging as much as before, it means i'm either working (i got a job offer freelancing for a translation company) or studying for this test. the weather's nice at home, so what are you doing inside on the computer anyways? ;-)

current music: dave gahan/"stay"
posted by kat thompson at 10:32 AM

i'm back from moscow, and my feet are sore and swollen and blistered, and my face is the reddest it's ever been this early in the season. oh, but what fun! here goes:

-if you're under the impression that russians don't live a little in the past, you need only to see what they do on victory day, which was friday. my jaw hit the ground around 1:30 in the afternoon and stayed there until about 4 - unfreakingbelievable. christine and i wasted most of the morning running around various metro stations near red square trying to find an exit to the city that was open, and by the time we finally found one and got close enough to red square (after zig-zagging through various side streets that had been blocked off) it was close to 1:00. we ended up across the street from the state duma, which ended up being a pretty good place to see the parade. my lord - i've never seen so much red in one place in my life. the parade seemed dominated by the communist party supporters, although there were two or three other parties represented, but not in the sheer numbers of the communists. somewhat alarming was the youth antichrist movement, followed almost immediately by the anti-antichrist movement, all clad in black with huge flags of jesus. less alarming but more amusing were some anti-american and anti-british banners and a paper-maiche shark covered in red, white, and blue that the communists were carrying; both amusing and alarming were the nearby babushkas screaming at little kids carrying the russian tricolors and denouncing them as fascists. somewhat more alarming was the sheer amount of banners and placards proclaiming glory to the veterans and the hero city of moscow, especially those praising stalin and lenin as the protectors of the soviet union. now: i understand honouring those who died in the second world war and i know that i'll never have the same appreciation for the end of that war as a russian would - more russians died in that war than brits and americans combined - and i understand that the soviet union as an instrument of the state ceased to exist a mere 12 years ago, but frankly it scared me to see how alive and well soviet sentiment still is today. this is probably because i'm from a country that went from thirteen colonies to world superpower in a little over 200 years, so i'm used to a fast-moving history. oh, but i'll save that rant for another day.

-outdoor kiosks were not selling beer anywhere near the center of the city on victory day. while this was an extremely good idea based on the high numbers of extremist groups and veterans with probable propensities for getting drunk and telling war stories for hours on end in the vicinity, it was mildly annoying to have to go out past the circle line to find something to drink. (no mom, water wouldn't have done.)

-differences between moscow and st petersburg: the moscow metro is cute. i can't think of any other word to describe it, but i find it endearing that at every stop there's an announcement reminding passengers not to forget their things. in st p, we only get those announcements at the end of a particular line. also, the doors on the moscow trains open before the train has actually come to a stop, such that if you're not careful you can end up flying onto the platform. the ads are hilarious; they've all got the same woman in the metro uniform with the red hat smiling over such messages as 'good weather at any time of year!' and 'there is an exit!', with a little heart in the corner of the ad meaning 'i love the metro'. cute cute cute. also, i know i'm the only person who's a big enough dork to notice this, but the moscow trolleybuses all have chains suspended from their front bumpers, such that they drag along the street and make noise whenever the trolleybus moves. i'm still trying to figure out why this is - they're not big enough to be towing chains, i don't think, but i can't see any other purpose for them. lastly, and this is sensible because it's just a bigger city, but moscow is much more full of crazy people than st pete. this includes the gypsies - i saw more of them in one day there than i have in the last month here. i also learned that there exists a gypsy mafia in moscow, and that beggar children will curse at you in many languages if you refuse to give them money. oh, and that running away from them doesn't necessarily mean they'll leave you alone.

-may/december couples are rife in moscow. i didn't notice them so much until stephanie pointed many of them out, and then it seemed like they were everywhere. i don't think i have to expound on the reasons for this too much - pretty much the same deal as it is back home.

-christine and i were walking across the bridge to gorky park on saturday when it hit me: for years i had no idea what the third word of the scorpions' "wind of change" was. i'd always mumble "follow the musquat down to gorky park", but as we were walking over the bridge it occurred to me that we were crossing the moskva river, and lo and behold, there was gorky park to my right on the embankment! i thought - holy crap, i get it now! and then i felt really, really stupid.

-what did we do? let's see: friday we walked around most of the neighborhoods adjacent to red square and saw lots of stuff in passing - the state duma, the entirety of the kremlin, the lubyanka prison, the bolshoy theater, many statues and residences of famous people - and then we went out to the VVTs, or the all-russia exhibition park northeast of the city. i read somewhere that this was like russian disneyland; it's got pavilions devoted to various exhibitions from different fields of science. however, the main reason to go out there was to see this awesome monument, erected three years after yuri gagarin made his historic flight into space. it's pretty damn cool, but not as cool as mother russia down in volgograd. after that we found dinner at a cafe with stephanie and her friend natalie, and then turned in early to rest up a bit. [ha!] saturday we paid our respects to lenin, walked around most of the alexander gardens and the outside of the kremlin - happening upon a marathon in the process; don't ask me - saw the cathedral of christ the saviour, explored the neighborhoods northwest of the kremlin including the arbat (it was the place to be in bohemian times) and the pushkin museum of art, and then went to an excellent georgian cafe for dinner, followed by the first glass of cider i've had in nine months and more than a few drinks at an unfortunate expat bar called rock vegas. it thinned out around 2:30, so we caught a cab home, but the security guards at the hostel door weren't pleased when we came a-knocking at 3 (it was one of those places where you turn in your key evey time you leave). whoops. on sunday we conquered the hangover monsters and saw much of the south of the city, including a lot of cool churches (i love it when they ring their bells - and it's cool because most pedestrians will stop and listen such that a small crowd is normal. they don't do that in st pete!), the tretyakov gallery of art, and gorky park. we met stephanie again for dinner and cider before our train left at half past midnight, and that was that. the weather was beautiful - we lucked out completely; the only time it rained, we were inside the tretyakov. given the chance, i definitely want to go back and spend more time there; it's a little sad that i won't be spending the next two years there in school, but what can you do. happily, stephanie and her family are coming up here next month, so hopefully i can return the favour of her hospitality and drink-treating.

and i can't not mention the really big news of the weekend: my sister gini gave birth (albeit five days early - what, you couldn't have waited?! ;-) ) to a beautiful baby boy on saturday the 10th! xander james popko is six pounds and four ounces and is eighteen and a half inches long. mom sent me pictures, and he is adorable, and mom, dad, and baby all look like they're doing well. i can't wait to meet this kid when i come home. yay!

that's all i've got for now - i should do my homework at some point, but reading about moscow and all the things we did in retrospect is much more interesting....

current mood: ouch (sunburn, woo!)
current music: beethoven's fifth (stupid cell phones that play it repeatedly...)
current mission: to annoy charlie as much as humanly possible with these 'current' things (this is what you get for opening your mouth, dear...) ;-)
current place i'd rather be: myrtle beach, sc (if not only for the bourbon and the dumb things i suspect heather is doing right now)

posted by kat thompson at 11:53 AM

disturbing things:

1) tomorrow is victory day, which from the ridiculous amount of decoration i've seen being put up in the past day alone makes me think that this is the biggest holiday aside from new year's. while i can't exactly blame the residents of the city for going so all-out in their celebrations, it seems a bit over-the-top to be drenching downtown in red flags and hanging huuuuge murals congratulating the 'hero-city' from as many bare building facades as possible. [leningrad was one of i think eight russian cities designated a hero city after the war was over] i'm almost glad i won't be around for the spectacle, though red square might not be any less insane. oh well.

2) i was witness to the single worst traffic jam in history this afternoon. i stupidly decided to take a bus downtown after class instead of the metro - ok, my reason was actually valid, but in retrospect i should've sucked it up and gone for the metro instead - and what normally takes about five minutes today took almost thirty. the route goes from the main street one block up from my building down three blocks and then turns right onto another main street, and then turns left onto the embankment next to the neva. [in case anyone has a map, i'm talking from the 8th-9th linii down bolshoi prospekt to syezdovskaya liniya, then onto universitetskaya naberezhnaya] on a normal day, even in mild traffic, this will take no more than five minutes, but today, it was pure chaos. i wish i'd had my camera to capture the fun that was at the intersection of the turn onto the embankment - it's normal for people to drive in the wrong lane if it's free of oncoming traffic, but this was simply unlike anything i've ever seen before. the line of vehicles trying to turn left onto the embankment was crisscrossed by vehicles trying to turn both left and right from the embankment, and there were eight trams backed up along this street, even further reducing the available space in which people could drive. basically, no one was going anywhere and a lot of accidents almost happened because at least three people often jockeyed for the same tiny space. (in the end, the SUVs tended to win, grrr) i stuck it out on the bus rather than getting out to walk because i wanted to see the cause of all this stupidity - and you know what it was? one effing cop car parked at another intersection, not even blocking the road, just parked there like someone important was about to pass. of course, no one did pass because we couldn't move, but this beat any and every case of rubbernecking i've ever seen on the beltway. truly amazing.

3) there's a new TV show on that makes me wonder if putin won't have a dark-horse contender in next year's presidential elections. there's a superbly trashy talk show here called 'okna' ('windows') and its host is this greasy guy named dimitri nagiyev, who has quite possibly the most unecessarily sleazy wardrobe i've seen over here. the guy's a walking ad for hair pomade, and he wears the most ridiculous sunglasses - they're trendy, but huge and rather dumb-looking. he's a bit of a cult hero here, not least because he lives in st petersburg. so, he's got a new show whose purpose seems to me to be to boost his rep as some samaritan. it's called 'vremya deneg', literally, 'time for money', and the premise is as follows: each episode, three people appeal to an in-house jury and lay out the reasons why they're the person best suited to receive 30,000 rubles [about $1000] at the end of the show. it could be because their kid is sick and needs a life-saving operation, or they're unemployed and they need money to cover rent, whatever. after each person testifies, two or three of their friends or relatives come out to testify either against them or in favor of them receiving the money, and after comments from the audience (no show here is any good without audience commentary!), the jury votes for whoever deserves the money most. now, obvious questions of whether or not this is a good use of 150,000 rubles a week aside, i find this show disturbing because it seems to be making this nagiyev guy out to be a god. the just, benevolent, omniscient god in a suit, tie, tiny reading glasses to make him look smart, and a snappy new hairdo. the show's music is sappy and slow to tug at your heartstrings, and the show's title graphic has a white dove in the middle, heavenly rays of sun bursting out from behind the letters, and is accompanied by a female soprano's voice impersonating that of an angel singing on high. honestly, the first time i saw it i thought of 'touched by an angel', and almost choked on my soup at the thought.

i don't know. maybe i'm reading too much into this, but the slickness of all this packaging a) reminds me a bit too much of home and b) really makes me wonder if this guy would ever run for president. i bet he'd be elected on the basis of his hair alone.

not-so-disturbing things:

1) well, sort of... megan left for home on monday, which leaves me not entirely alone, but without my strongest base of support here. oh well.

2) but rather than sit around and mope about that, i'm going to moscow with christine this weekend. mmmm, not doing any homework... :-)

happy mother's day, a few days early!

current mood: just kinda around
current music: moby/"evening rain"
posted by kat thompson at 10:22 AM

ladies: forget whatever cosmo or elle told you was 'in' for spring. i have seen the future of fashion, and it's purple hair. it's not subtle, and if it happens to match your faux fur jacket, so much the better. i figure, three sightings in one day can't be pure coincidence... right?

i'd like to say i've had a fun-filled past few days with my friends from moscow, but stephanie lost my phone number and they're leaving tonight. whoops. guess it's a good thing i'll be heading down there next weekend, so long as the train-ticket gods are nice to me.

dima's gone skinhead, i think: he shaved his head clean on tuesday and has been sporting the leather jacket and the 'i'm-a-playa' necklace consisting of a huge silver cross suspended from an even larger silver chain. he was shaving his friend's head as i left earlier today. maybe he's starting a gang?

here's a note for the more juvenile-minded among you: there are few things as satisfying as dropping a hard-boiled egg twenty-one floors and watching (and hearing!) it go smoosh on the pavement below. here's a note to the person who owns the car now covered in hard-boiled egg: we're sorry that our aim was so bad the first time.

it's kentucky derby day and for the first time in, good lord, seventeen years i'm not watching it? (the first winner i remember was ferdinand in 1986) my completely uneducated pick is scrimshaw. there you have it.

time to get my aching and blistered feet home... today was the first day of decent weather we had all week, so i spent most of the day running around and taking pictures. and being blinded by women with purple hair. it's the little things like that i'll miss about this country so much...

current mood: tired
current music: stone temple pilots/"cracker"
posted by kat thompson at 11:08 AM

i forgot one thing: another way that orthodox easter differentiates from catholic easter: so far as i know, catholic priests don't throw eggs at their congregations. ok, so we were watching live footage of the midnight services on saturday, and one of the channels showed the kazan cathedral downtown, where tanya and lyuda (megan's host mom) had gone to services earlier that afternoon. tanya told me that people usually bring some of their dyed eggs to services and give them to the priests so that the priests can hand out eggs to kids in hospitals and orphanages around the city. so i was a bit surprised to see one of the priests carrying a large box as he made his way through the crowd, reaching into it, removing an egg, and throwing it into the surrounding throng. he did this more than a few times, and everyone was scuffling for the eggs as if they were bridal bouquets or garters. i really hope they were hard-boiled, for the sake of anyone nearby an egg that fell to the ground.

i'm trying to picture father macfarlane - the pastor from church at home - throwing eggs into our congregation. i wonder how much wine he'd have to drink to even contemplate that?

posted by kat thompson at 5:58 AM

weekend update...

friday: i got some interesting photos of downtown landmarks at sunset because it had snowed/rained right around dinnertime and the clouds were black in the east while the sun was setting in the west. kind of an odd juxtaposition, but par for the course around here. megan and christina and i went to bar-o-meter and plowed through more long island iced teas than should probably be healthy on a friday night, but they were much needed and we were later joined by christina's rather amusing friend knute, who is from germany and dresses the part. some guys at the bar kept buying us champagne 'for easter', so they said, not that we were really complaining, but i don't think it mixed with the long islands and the subsequent shaverma very well. had a bit of an 'urf' upon waking up saturday morning.

saturday: i woke up well before noon (!), showered, and sat down to breakfast to see the oddest thing sitting before me: made out of bread, burned at the top by accident, it looked just like a mushroom cloud. it was the traditional easter bread with small grapes in it, and it was accompanied with bliny, which i haven't had in for-ev-er. megan and i then spent all afternoon seeing museums; first we went to the political history museum, which i regret not taking kim to while she was here. it was awesome! it had different sections tracing the history of political parties in russia and how the revolution changed politics, as well as rooms full of the most kitschy soviet propaganda i've ever seen. plates, cups, stained glass windows, posters holding stalin up as god, you name it. i think my favorite tidbit was a 1994 photograph of alexander solzhenitsyn speaking in the state duma with his beard in full, wild growth and his arms extended into the air at his sides - there's a duma deputy sitting right behind him with a classic look of 'do you believe this guy?!' on his face. and in case you were wondering, lenin doesn't look at all himself from the pictures taken near the time of his death. after that, we went to see peter's domik, which is the tiny wood cabin facing the river neva that peter the great built and lived in to oversee the building of the city before the winter palace was finished. it's the smallest house in the city; it's only got three rooms, and the entire house is actually enclosed in another house built to protect it from bad weather sometime in the nineteenth century. and then, after that, we went to see the cruiser aurora, which is the ship that fired the blank shot signaling the storming of the winter palace in the 1917 revolution. i have doubts as to whether or not it's the actual ship that's moored there, but in any case it's pretty cool. then, after going home for a brief nap, i helped tanya make the easter salads, including my favorite potato salad - i must make some of this stuff when i get home - and then waited for a while before we went to church.

orthodox easter is quite unlike anything i've ever experienced. i guess the obvious contrast would be with easter mass in rome with the pope on st. peter's square: easter services here start at midnight and go on until at least sunrise. we left around 11:15 and made our way across the dark, creepy cemetery (thankfully patrolled by police) (you know, that's the first time i've ever been thankful to see the police anywhere) to the church, where there were already tons of people standing outside and waiting. we went in to try and get a glimpse of whatever was going on at the time - i heard a lot of chanting and could smell the incense, but there were so many people crowded in there that seeing anything was impossible. so we bought candles and shoved our way back outside, by which time even more people had gathered. right before midnight the bells started tolling, and the priests and their entourage came out with the easter candle and banners and incense, and led everyone in a procession around the church three times (i can't remember exactly why it is that they walk around three times - it's either to symbolize the trinity or to fortify the church, kind of the reverse of the wall of jerusalem). after the procession the priests got back up on the stairs leading into the church and said a whole slew of unintelligible things - church slavonic is a bit harder to understand than russian since it's only used in the church - and then began the frenzied exchanges of 'khristos voskres' - 'voistine voskres!' among people. ('christ is risen' - 'verily he is risen!') at this point tanya decided that we should go home and start eating, so we did. alas, everyone else had fallen asleep so it was me, her, and megan munching away on salads and buterbrod, but only making it about halfway through the bottle of vodka before us girls called it quits and went to our respective beds to pass out.

sunday: the party continued, but without me, since i woke up superbly late, ate yet more salad for breakfast, and proceeded to really do nothing all day besides some homework. tanya came home really drunk sometime after midnight and there was some business with the removal of an armchair from the den, but i wasn't really paying much attention.

dima and anya have officially broken up, and he's now seeing someone else. i'm kind of curious as to who this girl is, but i suspect i'll find out with time one way or another.

friends from moscow are coming to visit on thursday for the long weekend. good times, good times. that's all i got for now.

current mood: sleepy
current music: my life with the thrill kill kult/"ride the mindway"
posted by kat thompson at 7:53 AM

by the way: i was wrong about the snow. as i was walking to the metro about an hour and a half ago, a storm of flakes came out of nowhere.

yeah, so it was funny to watch people scramble to pull on their hoods and don their hats, but come on. maybe it's a sign of the apocalypse...?
posted by kat thompson at 8:35 AM

good lord, people, i leave charlottesville for a year and you let this and this happen?

i don't really know what to say, other than i'm not entirely surprised and rather disappointed. and, in a way, glad i got my kicks in before things really went the way of the dodo. but sheesh. this isn't cool.

current mood: chagrined
current music: cool for august/"on and on"
posted by kat thompson at 5:39 AM

this is a big thank-you to the internet for peeing all over me today. no, really, i didn't want to get anything necessary done today. i'd pee on you in retaliation, but i'm afraid of electrocuting myself, not to mention tarnishing my image in this place.

it's been a somewhat frustrating week: i've managed to ruin two of my favorite shirts with oil stains - i wish there was some way to tell tanya to cut back on the oil she uses when she cooks, but that would just as likely get me run out of the house - and i'm keeping my fingers crossed that multiple washings will get rid of some of the marks, but i'm not counting on it. i got a new bed yesterday, but all that means is that the futon-like thing on which i was previously sleeping was replaced by the huge pull-out couch from the den. it only pulls out one section at a time - kim slept on one of the sections while she was here, so she at least knows what i mean - and even if two sections are pulled out next to each other, there's still an inordinate number of gaps for a body to fall into during the course of the night. my back was screamingly sore when i woke up for the sixth time at sunrise, so this is going to take some getting used to. but argh. and, it hit me today that i still have seven weeks of school left, although if you subtract days for holidays and testing, it's more like six - but i'm too used to finishing at the end of april to believe that i still have to go to class for that much longer. i know, woe is me, but it's weird.

but enough of my complaining. i know no one comes here to listen to me moan and whine - and isn't that all i ever do anyways? - so i'll move on to the fun stuff.

tuesday: i finally got myself down to the dostoevsky museum. i can't quite express how cool it was, since he's probably my favorite writer and a fairly decent influence on my thinking and writing. the museum is hosted in the apartment he and his family moved to right before he died in 1881, and while it's obviously been cleaned up and repaired since then, it's neat to see the rooms he wrote, slept, ate, and entertained guests in. also scattered around were several personal effects, such as bunches of his books on philosophy, his wife's financial ledger, his kids' toys and notes they used to pass him under the door when he was writing, and the clock that was stopped at 8:38 am when he died (in accordance with russian tradition). there was also an exhibition hall containing manuscripts of his works and some dioramas of scenes from said works. i was in heaven! i couldn't help buying a reproduction of a map of petersburg as it looked in his time, and i've got no idea how this thing is going to get home since it doesn't fit in the tube my diploma was mailed here in, but i'll find a way. i hope.

tomorrow: tanya and i are coloring easter eggs. i suspect she might be going to services on saturday night or sunday, and if i'm not too drunk (not that that's stopped me before from going to church [whistles innocently]) i'll probably tag along just to see what the fuss is all about.

saturday: i'm predicting that it's going to snow. just because it can.

urf.

current mood: annoyed
current music: mazzy star/"fade into you"
posted by kat thompson at 11:32 AM

not-so-superfast post, while i'm procrastinating: although i really should go back outside and get my butt home, since it's so damned nice out. in fact, it's the first day in many months where i've left the house minus hat, scarf, and gloves. now if only the trees would bloom already - then it might be spring.

so, tomorrow's catholic easter, and i made the mistake last night of telling tanya that i know how to make ukrainian easter eggs. she now wants me to teach her how to do this - i think it would be really cool to sit down and kill an afternoon doing this, but i simply don't know where to even begin looking for a good deal of the supplies one needs. namely, the special dye and the kistka. tanya does have some easter egg dye at home, but it's not the kind you can use to make these eggs. hmmm. we'll see. in any event, we've got eggs, vinegar, and dye, so at least that's a start.

i haven't done a whole lot this week; justin cooked me a wonderful vegetarian dinner on wednesday and i was so pleased when he unveiled dessert: fruit drenched in yogurt. perhaps i'm just too easily pleased, but fresh fruit was soooo good for a change. speaking of fruit and yogurt, i had some apple cinnamon yogurt this week, and it was surprisingly good. an odd flavor, but tasty nonetheless. last night i went to an evening of one-act ballets at the mariinsky with megan and her mom; the last ballet was a premiere and it was fan-tas-tic. i wonder, though, if the male dancers wear jockstraps. i think - and i hope - that they do, since (yeah, so what if i was looking? but, you know, when they're wearing tights that tight, how can you not?) i didn't notice any unusual bouncing. i dunno.

oh, so i guess my big news (although at this point it's more of a headache than anything else): i'm coming home for longer than expected when i do get back in july. as in, up to a year longer than expected. suffice to say that staying on for school in moscow isn't panning out right now for a variety of reasons; if you really want to know, pop me an email and i'll explain at more length. right now i'm trying to stay sane in figuring out how i'm going to get all my stuff home and in finding a job. welcome to my life for the next two months. urf.

current mood: bleargh
current music: fatboy slim/"ya mama"
posted by kat thompson at 9:24 AM

oh, superfast post before i run out of here....

1) i can't get into my email right now. if brian's parents are reading this, i got your box yesterday and i was pleasantly surprised by its contents. perfect! i love what you sent. thank you many many times. :-)

2) to the three people i ever used instant messenger to communicate with: the computer center here has a firewall up against many things AOL right now, so you're probably going to have to wait until, um, july when i get back home to chat with me. sorry.

more sort of big news coming up, when i feel like reporting it... :-)

current mood: craving chocolate
current music: chaikovsky/"swan lake" (pick a movement)
posted by kat thompson at 12:09 PM

the drought has been broken: i had steak for the first time in almost eight months this weekend! done to medium rare perfection, marinated in red wine, accompanied by some crispy fried vegetables and a glass of cabernet sauvignon... oh, heaven. had the portion not been so small for its high price, i might be eating at the restaurant that offered it every day. oh, yum.

by the way: when a restaurant calls itself 'fusion', it's just a fancy way of saying that the chef picks the ingredients of a given dish out of a hat before he makes it. the food was good, but the atmosphere was a bit too yuppie for me - lingerie show aside. see, here it's common for restaurants to have themed dinner shows along with their food, which in some places can mean folk dances, or singers, or strippers, or whatever - and on friday night, this certain restaurant was having a lingerie show from the spring and summer collections of local designers. it can be a bit hard to eat when you've got butt floss prowling around your table, but it certainly was interesting.

saturday i was a) hungover b) exhausted and c) without keys, so i stayed in and watched movies and read most of the night. a) and b) came from the ridiculous amount of drinking and then clubbing that justin and his friends and i did after dinner, and c) came from the fact that justin left with my keys around 4 am, leaving me to crash at his friend's apartment, which i would rather have not done for a myriad of reasons. but oh well. i got my keys back last night, though, so all is well.

yesterday i had an odd experience: i got to see a one-man show of dostoevsky's short story 'the dream of a ridiculous man'. it's a good thing i read the story before seeing the performance, otherwise i might have been lost. but imagine this: i was in a group of twenty people, and our 'theater' was a cramped room in an apartment, in which all the action took place. it was just this one guy playing the role of the ridiculous man, but he was really, really good - damned if i can remember his name, but i was told he won an academy award for his portrayal of lenin some years back. it was pretty interesting to see how uncomfortable some people were when he had to do things like find props that were under their chairs or look them in the eye as he was delivering a key part of monologue. ah, wacky theater. i can't argue with the quality, though.

plans for this week are slim: i'm hoping to catch a film tonight, have dinner with justin at some point, and see some ballet at the mariinsky with megan and her visiting mother on friday. oh, and definitely stay as far away as i can from this stuff as i can. [twitch]

current mood: a bit overwhelmed
current music: cornershop/"brimful of asha"
posted by kat thompson at 6:48 AM

hah! i win without having lifted barely a finger.

today was day one of my battle with the passport and visa registration office (PVS), as alluded to at the end of yesterday's post. see, my friend stephanie in moscow was planning on doing a tour of the baltic states by train at the end of this month, and late last week it occurred to me that if i'm to join her, i need to get myself an exit-reentry visa so as to be legally allowed out of and back into the country. it also occurred to me that i'd need to get one of those shiny little migration cards in order to be let out without deportation. [in brief, the migration card system is a new headache implemented back in february; all foreigners entering the country after february 14 are required to obtain one of these cards upon entering and present it upon leaving. every time someone leaves and returns, they have to get a new card. this does not even begin to explain the stupidity of all these proceedings, trust me] so, i decided to venture down to the not-exactly-centrally-located migration services office, and see what i could do about getting myself said card.

let me first point out that it was looking a lot like we'd have a score of PVS one, me zero, as when i arrived at the address (#14) i was confronted with four buildings, all claiming to be #14. this is actually fairly common in russia; some buildings can have up to eight entrances, all under the same house number. i had to circumvent all four before arriving at the correct door. upon reading every sign posted in the stairway directing me to the correct floor, i took a deep breath, climbed the stairs, and said a short prayer for patience as i opened the door to the department.

not thirty seconds later i was quite literally chased out by an old man flailing his arms at me screaming 'come back tomorrow! the person in charge of that isn't here today!'
ok.... so. PVS one, me - a resounding zero. after glaring cursorily and swearing under my breath at the old man, i shuffled back to the metro and went to class, where i spent ninety minutes being distracted by my teacher's eyebrows. she shapes them so that they look like upside-down V's, and in the process she looks pretty evil. she's actually not all that evil, but i found myself wondering this morning how long she spends every day forcing her eyebrows into that shape and exactly why she does so.

but anyways. after class i ran into a friend of mine who recently switched to another group, to whom i don't often talk, so i took the chance to stop and chat. i mentioned my episode with flailing-arm-old-man above, and he looked at me curiously. 'were you at the office here, or at the filfak?' [the filfak is the nickname of the philological faculty, which is what us foreigners all belong to] i told him where i went, and he helpfully pointed out that there was an office of 'international matters' at the filfak, hiding in a deep dark corner, that could get me my migration card to the tune of about two dollars. [i hate to admit this, but i've completely fallen under the spell of the idea of 'why do something myself when i can get someone else to do it for me?'] heartened, i dashed over there, only to find that they were closed for lunch.

but no matter. after lunch i marched in and told them what i needed, and they gave me all the necessary stuff to fill out. however, as i was filling all this stuff out, another guy who'd also been studying here since september came in and asked for the same card. i overheard their conversation, and not two minutes later the secretary was on the phone with the main PVS office in town, asking them if we actually needed to get these cards right now since neither one of us was leaving until june. [i found out earlier today that the planned trip to the baltics has been turned into an excursion for the moscow kids to come here. woohoo!] they most emphatically said no, so i was told to stop filling out my forms and come back in june when i'm leaving, so that i can get my exit visa and migration card all at the same time.

therefore, i present to you today's final score: PVS one, me two. one because i don't need to ever come back to your stupid office and deal with flailing-arms man, and one because i've beaten your system. ...for now.

the postal system has set a new record for sloth. mom mailed me a st. patrick's day card that was postmarked on march 1. it arrived here april 5. i wish i was kidding.

current mood: foolishly optimistic
current music: diskoteka avaria/"disco superstar"
posted by kat thompson at 10:36 AM

you know... i really didn't want to believe it was true. but when i saw it on the news here i knew it had to be: i am appalled to report (probably belatedly) that our defense secretary has been moonlighting as an awful poet. i think my favorite one has to be the first one, 'the unknown'. i'd swear if i didn't know better that he'd been taking cues from russian short stories on that one. but... gads. it makes the mind twitch.

i lied about spring, once again. they say the wind chill is only 19F, but i don't think they've been out near the water. i almost got knocked over waiting for the light to change so i could cross the street earlier. i take that as my hint to make a beeline for home, fix myself some hot chocolate, and curse the fact that tanya and i completely jumped the gun on taking down my cold-weather-proofing from my balcony. argh!

more news of the ridiculous, in case you think that the american government is the only one losing its mind right now.

this week's battle: kitty versus the passport and visa registration office! (i've decided to crack and go see what i can do about getting one of those migration-card things... long, long story) film at 11.

current mood: musing
current music: prodigy/"mindfields"
posted by kat thompson at 7:31 AM

sorry it's been so long, but the pinko lesbian (thanks, gini :-) ) is finally re-reporting for duty. i've been in bed sick since tuesday morning and only today felt up to venturing out of the apartment. let me tell you: russian daytime television is pure and utter crap. my brain is probably half mush by now. i've been reading to try and combat this phenomenon, but i don't know how much good it's been doing. i'm sitting here looking at the screen and getting all sleepy-eyed - and i've only been out of bed for 3 hours.the upshot about this cold i caught from marieke is that it's been giving me some really interesting dreams. monday i dreamt that a bunch of banders and i were taken as POWs in baghdad and that we were expressly forbidden to wash our pants - the rule of the camp was that you lived in whatever dirt you created. i spilled ketchup on my pants, and ran off to a secret hose (don't ask) to go wash them off, when this woman came bellowing around the corner: 'why didn't you give back that bible i lent you when you got here?' 'um... i forgot?' 'oh...ok. well, get it back to me as soon as you remember!' um. ok. last night's dream was similarly whacked out, but i don't remember it anymore, which is probably just as well.

kim linked to this on her page, but i'm going to do the same here since it's too amusing to not repeat: a warmonger explains war to a peacenik.

so... let's see. brian arrived early last thursday; i was running late, per usual, and he had to wait for me about a half hour or so. thursday night was a minor disaster - tanya invited us back to the apartment for dinner, by which i mean the three of us downing a liter of good vodka and snacking intermittently. i hadn't eaten that day since breakfast at 10 am, and he was loopy from the plane rides, so by the time we got into it around 8 pm, well... drunkenness was soon achieved. this would've been ok if tanya hadn't seized both the moment and the remote control and turned our attention to the war. now, tanya is a wonderful person and all that, but when you get her going on the war, it can turn into a two- to three-hour treatise, wherein she repeats herself at least four times and doesn't let you get a word in edgewise. brian made the mistake of saying something like 'yes, i'm interested in politics', and she took that as her cue to run with the war rant. for an interminably long time. now, understand that i agree with most of what she says, but on thursday i was in no mood to hear it - at that point i'd already heard it at least three times, and i was drunk and absolutely did not want to talk about war and politics. a brief light would shine at the end of the tunnel when she'd say 'ok, enough about this' and turn her attention elsewhere, but five minutes later she was back at it. i can't say it was really a bad evening, since it was entertaining, but i wish she hadn't harped on the war like she did. brian did get treated to five of her 'gospodi!' exclamations, however.

on friday we got bliny from my favorite bliny stand and spent most of the day at the hermitage, amidst the hordes of children who i'd forgotten were on spring break last week. we did my birthday route of macaroni/mollie's for dinner and drinks, but after one beer at mollie's i felt kind of queasy, so we went home. on saturday we went to pushkin, the suburb where i teach, and squished through the mud around the parks and the catherine palace. i still didn't find 'girl with a water pitcher', though. grrr! we had every intent of going out dancing that night, but by the time we got through with dinner and made our way back to the hotel to change, i was so full that i fell asleep. free advice: eating mexican food after 9 pm might be detrimental to your desire to dance. sunday was the last day of good weather that we had - by 'good' i mean sunny and hovering in the low to mid 40s - and we did quite a bit of walking after a visit to the boys here at the computer center. we closed out the summer garden and had a thoroughly yummy cheese fondue dinner at one of my favorite restaurants. the best part of that was the kids sitting at the table next to us who had little else to do but stare at our fondue and make really stupid comments in english (they heard us speaking it and i guess they thought they were cool or something) while their parents got drunk. this time we were firm in our plans to go out, but by the time we got to the club i'd wanted to go to (sometime around 1 am), they were doing some weird sort of face control, and they wouldn't let us in without talking to 'the administrator' first. i quickly realized that my russian wasn't quite good enough to be able to deal with this administrator person, so we left in search of another club. but when we got there, it was a ghost town - no one was around, and nothing could be heard other than a few people playing pool. which i found odd, since a dj had been advertised as playing there that night. figuring that it was too late (by this time it was close to 2) to go anywhere, we trudged home. monday we woke up to snow and a nasty wind - because of the weather we didn't do a whole lot of walking. we had dinner at my favorite georgian cafe and called it an early night, since his plane left at 6:55 tuesday morning. more free advice: if you don't want to tempt fate, leave earlier than 5:50 for a 6:55 flight. i assume that brian made his scheduled flight since there was no one around and i didn't get a phone call saying otherwise, but i was a little worried when we pulled into the airport at 6:15 knowing that check-in was supposed to close at 6:10. note to self: don't ignore the alarm at 5, or 5:15.

all in all, it was a good visit, although it continues to amaze me how five days can fly by so fast. it's not fair, i say. ;-) and as i indicated before, i've spent almost all of the time between the time i got home tuesday morning and now in bed, reading and watching tellyvision. today is megan's birthday and we're supposed to go out, but i think it's gonna have to wait until the weekend, since i can barely hold myself up before a computer screen. not much is new apartment-wise, except that there's new wallpaper in the foyer and new plants out on the balcony by the kitchen.

if you've mailed me anything in the past, oh, month, and haven't heard anything from me about its reception, chances are very good that it still hasn't arrived. mail has been slow as fuck ever since i got back in january; i don't know why - but please be patient. i'm as annoyed by this as you are, but all one can do is wait.

neither maryland nor duke are in the final four... this pleases me.

oh, and in case you were wondering: it snowed yet again last night. if the stuff sticks around until tomorrow, that'll be six months of snow. i love it...?

current mood: slightly loopy
current music: pearl jam/"thumbing my way"
posted by kat thompson at 8:49 AM

ack! there are three basketball tournaments going on and i have no idea who's doing what, beyond maryland in the sweet sixteen, auburn beating wake forest, uva's men certain to lose to st. john's and uva's women certain to lose to tennessee tonight. (i of course am hoping for the best but expecting the worst) this is almost paralyzing - for the first time in years, i can't even remember how many, it is march and i am not watching basketball for up to twelve hours a day. argh!

i had another amusing weekend: friday i went to a really cool club with justin and christine (the swedish girl who lives across the street) and we danced all night. quite literally - the sun was rising as we were walking back home from the metro. i knew it was a long night when i got in, found buterbrod (slices of bread with meat and/or cheese - like a sandwich, but open-faced and not quite so substantial), and proceeded to devour it, wondering where i could find more. normally i hate the stuff, but it was like manna from heaven on saturday morning. i slept most of saturday, got stood up by a whole bunch of people saturday night, and ended up dragging christine out to another club, where this awesome french band named lo'jo was playing. i'll have to see if i can track down one of their cd's, since they were excellent. after the band came a dj party, and the guy playing downstairs was fantastic - he could've made the particles in a slab of wood go crazy! i could've stayed all night, but a) christine was falling asleep standing up and b) my knees were screaming mercy by 3 am. so, we caught a cab home, got some shaverma, and called it a night. yesterday i washed almost every single piece of clothing i own, with the exception of some socks and unmentionables that will need to be done tonight.

i had lunch with megan and her visiting boyfriend chris today. he's really nice, but he didn't look at all like i expected. thankfully they both liked the place i suggested for lunch, which was good because it was darned cheap.

has anyone seen the video for kelly osbourne's "shut up"? while i'd like to tell her to take her own advice, i did note with pleasure her clever gesture of biting the head off of a chocolate bat-shaped lollipop. well done, dear, but for the sake of the world's ears, stick to whatever it is you're doing outside of pretending to have a musical career.

lastly: can i tell you how incredibly thankful i am that there is no such thing as cnn over here? it's so nice to turn on the tv around dinnertime and see fifteen minutes of war coverage, and that's it. i can hardly even read washingtonpost.com because it's so war-focused. yes, ok, it is the big thing going on in the world right now, but it's overkill. i am perfectly happy to remain largely blissfully unaware of the latest strike of operation shock and awe (who comes up with these names anyways?).

in case anyone was wondering: i am completely against this war. i at some point will clarify exactly why, but i'm so distracted by getting stuff done before thursday (and, admittedly, too happy to think about that rather than anything else) that i can't seem to muster the desire to sit down and spell out my thoughts. that, and i'm afraid it'll turn into some huge and incoherent blabber - well, ok, that usually happens with anything i rant about anyways - but... yeah. i don't know, maybe i'll just link to some other blogs that i happen to agree with, since it seems that most of my friends have done all the work for me already.

and life rolls on...

current mood: hungry
current music: pearl jam/"mfc"; diskoteka avaria/"x.x.x.i.r.n.r."
posted by kat thompson at 10:02 AM

ahhh.... what a week. since there's a [completely unnecessary and utterly stupid] war going on, i've taken to going out repeatedly to distract myself. while this is not helping my wallet any, it is helping my mood improve. how can you be annoyed at the state of affairs in the world when you've got a beer in front of you? st. paddy's day, by the way, was damned amusing - megan and i went to mollie's and the place was packed with russians decked out in green and drinking green beer and dancing to drinking songs i know they didn't know the words to. the bartenders even wore green wigs. it was great!

to anyone i wrote to recently saying that spring has finally sprung here: i am a liar. it snowed another half-inch on wednesday night, and it's been in the low teens ever since. granted, it's nice and sunny outside, but it's cold again. enough, i say, enough! i want to frolic! without my scarf and hat!

here's my big happy news: brian is coming out to visit on march 27 - that's only six days from now. to say that this makes me happy is a tiny understatement. hee hee!

current mood: giddy
current music: jeff buckley/"mojo pin"


posted by kat thompson at 5:59 AM

oh fuck. blogger ate my last post, but i'm not annoyed, since it's st. paddy's day and there is drinking to be done tonight. woo!

i went to novgorod yesterday - ruslan, the kid who organizes all these fun tram parties, was excellent enough to get a tour bus and a guide for whomever showed up and paid the ten bucks to tag along. novgorod, despite its name meaning 'new town', is the oldest city in russia - founded by prince rurik sometime between 859 and 862, depending on which guidebook you read. the obvious highlights were the kremlin (which is not much like the one in moscow, in that it's smaller and doesn't have police and militia all over the place waiting to shoot at you for some unknown offense) (ok, so they don't shoot at you, but it makes a better story), inside which was st. sophia's cathedral, which for some reason has a stone pigeon on top of the cross on the top of the only golden onion dome (the rest are silver) - why there's a pigeon there, i don't know, but legend has it that if the pigeon ever falls off, a calamity will befall the city. the pigeon got hit by a stray bullet during world war II, and subsequently ninety-eight percent of the city's buildings were destroyed in the war, so i can't imagine what on earth would happen if the bird went so far as to fall off. goodness. anyways, the coolest part of the city for me was the museum of wooden architecture, which is an outdoor museum showing examples of houses and churches from olden times - pretty neat stuff. living in one of those houses was not for the claustrophobic, though, since the kids had to sleep on benches in an attic-like setting wherein they only had a couple of feet of headroom. oh, and i am ever grateful to the roadside babushkas who were selling their very tasty homemade bliny and pirozhki - you gotta love a twenty-five-cent lunch!

on friday the irish kids in the dorms threw a party in honor of today. tara and ruth were smashed on champagne by the time we got there, and benny wasn't too far behind. i wish i could take benny to ireland when mom and i go - he would be such an amusing person to drink with, not least because he's perfected the art of yelling "ay, fuck off!" in several different connotations when drunk.

i've decided (for now) that i've had enough of school: i need a break. i hopefully should be getting one soon, but i get the feeling i won't find out until its advent is upon me. fnord.

current mood: slightly irritated yet optimistic
current music: rage against the machine/"calm like a bomb"
posted by kat thompson at 6:20 AM

big big news: on tuesday night, the television re-deposited itself into my room! i don't think this means that the kids have finally broken up, but i do suspect that the nail has been put in the coffin of their living together. tanya keeps saying that anya needs to take the kitten home with her, but i honestly think tanya's too attached to the creature to let her go when that time finally comes. although if she sticks around long enough, i might get to see her get spayed. i wonder: do they put the lampshade collars on pets here after such operations?

it is now officially too warm to go skiing. alas. it actually rained twice this week, and it's an indication of how long winter has lasted that it didn't even occur to me to take my umbrella to class with me on wednesday when i looked out the window and saw that it was raining. 'surely it must be sleet!' i thought. well, it wasn't sleet, and i shouldn't have called you shirley. whoops. it's kind of weird to see grass again, too - every time i step on soft ground and hear 'squish!' i think i've stepped on a rat or something. messy, but better than leaving one's fate to the black ice of yore.

it'll be interesting to see how this country celebrates st. patrick's day - the only signs of 'celebration' i've seen so far have been drink specials in bars. while you can't argue with two pints of guinness for the price of one, i'm hoping it'll go a bit further than that. we'll see. in any case, pray for my liver this weekend. or something.

current mood: inexplicably frustrated
current music: they might be giants/"your racist friend"; tatu/"nas ne dogonyat"


posted by kat thompson at 6:06 AM

"you're older than you've ever been and now you're even older, and now you're even older": a happy 25th to my dearly beloved!

damn, and i remember when i used to tease him about turning 22. this 25 business is unfathomable, at least until 30 rolls around. ;-)

i didn't go skiing this weekend, as there were no plans made and no one bothered to tell me that no plans had even been attempted to be made. it's probably for the better, as it was a bit warm for skiing (by warm i mean mid to upper 30s, which i know for some of you might still actually be cold. pbbblllttt). the weather was much better suited for the tram party, which while fun ended up turning into a minor disaster when some drunk kid pulled out a bag of marijuana and loudly declared "who wants some?" um... yeah. and he wondered why the party got broken up immediately thereafter.

oh. on february 21, i posted: "my inherent fatalism tells me not to exult for too long, because sooner or later something's bound to go astray". i'd like to note that 'sooner or later' ended up being about two weeks. (in the words of rob koehl: "y'know, sometimes i scare myself") while nothing technically went astray, i've had the recent displeasure of having seriously misjudged the personality of someone i thought was a close friend. it really sucks when someone turns out to be the polar opposite of what you pegged them as - and while i really do want to believe this person has a few redeeming qualities, the evidence is mounting up otherwise. i'm not sure if this is disconcerting more because of the situation this person is in, or because i was so completely wrong about what type of person i was dealing with. usually i'm pretty good at figuring people out - nine times out of ten i can tell whether or not i'm going to keep a person around as a friend within five minutes of meeting them. the problem here is that even though i know now how base this person is, i'm probably still going to maintain the friendship. please don't ask me to a) explain why or b) explain further. from all of this i am now convinced beyond reason that someone up there is having a grand old time writing this whacked-out, lately farcical script that is my life. since all this went down, i've only aged one week, but i feel like it's about 5 years. ah well... hindsight is 20-20, as they say.

don't get me wrong: while this revelation has been a bit depressing, it's also amusing. in the words of peter tait, "life... is so damn funny". ok, maybe you just had to be there, but i know at least emory knows what i mean.

current mood: nonplussed
current music: morrissey/"disappointed"; pearl jam/"state of love and trust"


posted by kat thompson at 6:12 AM

that [pop] you just heard was the sound of the buttons on my pants flying across the room. see, maslennitsa is coming to its torrid end this week, and i've consumed enough bliny to keep a shetland pony satisfied. however, i'm hoping to go skiing this weekend to work it all off, but depending on how we all come out of tonight's tram party, we might be shortening a two-day skiiing outing to a one-day affair. although we do have monday off, so theoretically we could do two days. we'll see.

and why do we have monday off? since tomorrow's a major uber-holiday, international women's day. apparently it's another excuse to get drunk and give women flowers and freebies and discounts, not that i'm complaining. ;-) i think it's a damn smart holiday to have, as a sort of compensation for all the women who got left behind on valentine's day. i don't exactly want to be home to see what's going to happen, but if it ends up thusly, well... i guess i'll drink whatever's put in front of me.

starting to grate on my nerves: people who don't brush their teeth. you know, i understand if you live in a place with inconsistent hot water, or if you're old and achy and can't always get the body into the bathtub for a shower. but there's no fucking excuse that you can't lift a toothbrush to your mouth and do something to combat your persistent halitosis. i have an extremely acute sense of smell, and i can smell your breath five people away on a crowded bus. and that doesn't in any way mean you should turn to face me and then breathe your nastiness all over me. rinse, gargle, brush, do something i don't mind people smelling like meat or fish or alcohol or dung, since the scent usually dissipates within a few minutes. but breath is one concentrated spray. do i have an invisible message on my forehead in cyrillic that says 'please bestow upon me the gift of your lack of oral hygiene'?

also starting to grate on my nerves: people who don't know how to walk. i know that in a city of five million people there's only so much space for everyone to go, but it seems to me that i have an uncanny knack for getting stuck behind the slowest-moving-possible person in any given crowd. this person is going slow because a) they're too old to go any faster than a turtle - which is fine with me, but not when i'm in uber-hurry-mode! b) they're too busy looking at the zillion things for sale on the sidewalk to be able to walk in a straight line close to that which is being sold, but instead feel the need to look from ten, then five, then fifteen feet away c) they're linking arms with their friends five-wide across a sidewalk such that you can neither pass them on the left nor the right without ending up on a treacherous ice patch. i understand that it's ok to take life at a slower pace here, since it's common knowledge that things get done when they get done (mom's favorite phrase "i get there when i get there" comes to mind), but for god's sake move a little faster, or at least don't start yelling at me when i need to get past you and brush against you by accident.

meh. enough of this, i need a drink. ;-)

current mood: sly
current music: stone temple pilots/"i got you"; nine inch nails/"sin"
posted by kat thompson at 10:36 AM

i am slooooowly emerging from the bender that was my birthday weekend. sloooowly. here's a list of things i'm grateful for on my second full day of being 23:

-everyone who sent me wishes and greetings - i can't really express how much i appreciate it. makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

-vodka and beer, for making me all warm and fuzzy inside and then some on friday, saturday, and sunday.

-the makers of advil; your product has saved me from much pain associated with said vodka and beer the morning after.

-tara and ruth for putting me up in the dorms friday night since i was in no state to be walking home. an anti-thank you goes to the bitchy babushka who confiscated my student ID, made me pay $15 to get it back the next morning, and then told me i had to pay an additional $15 for spending the night there. i want a piano to fall on your head, too.

-tanya, for having a table of food and vodka waiting for me when i got home from the figure skating competition on saturday. which, by the way, was awesome.

-brian, for giving me a really sweet start to my birthday over the phone. i'd write something mushy here, but i don't want anyone to lose their lunches or anything.

-justin, megan, and nate for joining me for dinner and drinking last night. we went to an excellent italian trattoria for dinner - the tiramisu was out of this world! - and then we hit mollie's irish bar across the street afterwards. i've not plowed through that much guinness since roy's guinness party during my first year at uva. needless to say, i didn't go to class today. :-)

-the washbasin in which i was doing laundry earlier, for falling on my foot and (i think) breaking my toe. i suspect that my friend mr. advil might be consulted again when i get home.

i think that's all for now. my head's still swimming a little, so i think i'm gonna duck out, go home, and finish my homework. and call it a day.

current mood: pensive
current music: moby/"everytime you touch me"; robbie williams/"feel"
posted by kat thompson at 6:47 AM