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