Bragging rights/I am so tired

I made this:

Cream of butternut squash soup

Broccoli-rabe cornbread casserole with ricotta-Gruyere topping

Caramelized Brussels sprouts

Mashed sweet potatoes

Oven-roasted leg of lamb

Buttermilk biscuits

Cranberry sauce

Chocolate and pear stuffed crepes

Lemon meringue pie

Pumpkin pie

I win at Thanksgiving.

Conceit

The morning after the election, I woke up with head pounding from beer and champagne, and stomach churning from pizza and chocolate.  When I stepped outside into an unseasonably balmy, misty morning, it struck me that this felt exactly like Mardi Gras day: damp, swampy air mingling with a sickeningly sugary hangover, a slate-gray sky that eliminated the horizon and merged invisibly with the slate-gray city, and the people walking the streets all looking especially haggard but illuminated from within by some secret energy.  What was most similar was that it felt like the culmination of a frenetic, stressful, and ultimately drunken few days, and that the final and official holy day to which all those minor precursors were leading seemed too ghostly and surreal by comparison.  

Like any good Mardi Gras, scenes from the previous night kept flashing through my mind in detached fragments.  Me watching Fox News all afternoon, while the presentation I needed to be typing languished on a dimmed laptop screen.  A bug-eyed woman screaming something about Black Panthers and race riots into the smug face of Shepherd Smith.  Then, suddenly, sitting in a roomful of lawyers and one Sarah Palin cardboard cut-out, festooned with the Mardi Gras beads I'd brought to liven her up and baring waxy, laminated teeth at us from the corner.  States being called, and the collective cheer when Katie Couric dubbed Massachusetts "the bluest state."  The jaw-dropping moment that was Pennsylvania.  Flipping to Comedy Central and hearing it first not from CNN holograms or MSNBC ticker, but Jon Stewart that Barack Obama is president of the United States of America.  Champagne toasts and muffled sobs.

It didn't seem real that morning, and it still doesn't.  In New Orleans, the weeks leading up to Mardi Gras are about suspending your everyday reality and replacing it with something ecstatic, surreal, and fundamentally unsustainable, so that by the time you get to Mardi Gras day, you've wallowed for so long in the anarchic whims of the flesh that you've finally succumbed to them.  By sheer inertia, I've dragged myself out of bed on that perpetually misty Tuesday for four years in a row and hauled my tired, protesting body to the last parades, Zulu and Rex.  Except I've never made it to Rex -- that's the big one you can always catch on TV and looks just like the glossy postcards sold in every souvenir shop in the French Quarter: all fancy feathers, sumptuous masks, and the snowy white King of Mardi Gras presiding amid his KKK-esque horse guards, hoods and all.  

Zulu for me has always been the real grand finale, the black travesty of the official white carnival.  It comes off badly in frozen stills, which only capture the burnt cork blackface and grass skirts like a flat caricature, some kitschy parade of Little Black Sambos.  In reality, it feels much more menacing, especially when venturing too far into the territory of the Magnolia projects to find parking and a good spot to stand.  Every year, there's a moment when you can look around and spot small coteries of hipsters, progressive college professors, and students from Tulane and Loyola sticking out like awkward blemishes on all-black family barbecues and raucous sidewalk celebrations.  Every year, it was a reminder of how white and non-Southern I am, despite all the years I'd spent living in this culture and thinking of myself as hip and with it.  And now that I'm back up North in "the bluest state," I can't help both liking and resenting those American Apparel-clad kids who biked through the streets of Boston with Obama emblazoned in red, white and blue on their backpacks; or even the waspy lawyers who teared up when he was giving his acceptance speech.  It feels like they can never get the significance of what happened on November 4th if they've never set foot below the Mason-Dixie line, never stood at a Zulu parade, or never even been in a crowd like the one in Hyde Park unless it was a Janet Jackson concert.

But that's just the elitist in me, the part that uses the "foreigner" label to clamor for a special, objective understanding of this country.  The sharp self-righteousness has been gradually sloughed off of me every time I realize that most of the people I meet have an equally valid claim to outsider status, and that this willingness to see oneself in opposition to, rather than the essentialist product of a society is something uniquely American and undeniably appealing.  It started with the Puritans and continues to this day in fundamentalist Christianity, animal rights activism, environmentalism, radical feminism, LGBT, and BDSM.  They're all working off one model: if it's broke, we can fix it, even if it means redefining the definition of "it."  Or, as it was perhaps a bit more eloquently put: we'll never stop trying to make a more perfect union.  And, to wit, those skinny white kids in DNC swag have just put Barack Hussein Obama into the highest office of the great U.S. of A.

I wasn't thinking all of this on the morning after election day.  I was leaning against a cold concrete wall to stifle some queasy hangover shakes, waiting for my bus and barely noticing when it pulled up to the stop.  Hurriedly, I scrambled to pull out my wallet, but when I reached into the front pocket of my backpack, what I pulled out was a handful of Mardi Gras beads.  Laissez les bon temps roulez.  

Revelations

Walking through Midtown Manhattan on an unseasonably warm October Saturday afternoon, there is a moment where the sun is still up a few dozen miles in any direction, but it's already dusk inside the walls of the high-rise fortress, and the sky is a weary post-apocalyptic pink, and the glass and gold storefront windows cast vermillion reflections on the flushed faces of tourists with backpacks, and Eastern European teenagers with Macy's bags, and black-clad businesspeople shouting into their headsets...

"You went to New York this weekend?  What did you do there?"

"Well, it was only a day trip.  Just a lot of walking around."  

... and the sewers emanate a humid fog that reeks of feces, which gets caught in the oily yellow glow of the food carts that illuminate the treasures of the street vendors' wares -- gleaming bronze pretzels with diamond-chip salt flakes, obsidian leather purses, the cheap glass beads that Manhattan was bought with, copper shawarma nuggets studded with pockets of raw garnet...

"How nice!  Did you go to any museums?"  

... and gradually, gradually the sky darkens and we hit Central Park, and the only light is the paltry stream from the street-lamps and the brighter feverish neon glint on people's skin that obscures their features, sharpening only their waxy, vampiric pallor and the hungry hollows of their cheeks, and it is in these moments that I know how the ruddy peasant of the pre-industrial world felt as she took her first timid steps onto this concrete Babylon and shuddered with horror and delight.

"No, unfortunately.  I wanted to go to MoMA to see the Kirchner exhibit.  But by the time we'd walked from Chinatown to Times Square..."

... and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast full of blasphemous names, having ten heads and seven horns, and the woman was clothed in purple and scarlet and adorned in precious ornaments and pearls and precious stones having in her hand a gold cup full of abominations and unclean things of her immorality. Upon her forehead was written a name, a mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the earth, and I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints of the earth and the blood of the witnesses of Jesus, and when I saw her I wondered greatly.

Vanitas vanitatum

The other day, I found out that the infamous 16th century ascetic monk Ivan Vyshenskij -- the Girolamo Savonarola of Ukraine, who spewed bile at Renaissance learning, vainglorious Catholics, and other worldly vanities  -- lived in the town where I was born.  In his honor, here is a short poem:  

Chasing tongue with vodka,

cognac and Akon at a disco called Versailles....

Rubber tubing cramps as the nurse administers the glucose,

useless, and days later my stained clothes sprout moldy tumors --

Lutsk.

Something to declare

I've been in Ukraine for the past two and a half weeks and haven't had a single urge to sit down and write, probably because I've long ago figured out that I can only have one set of feelers fired up to twitch at the world, absorptive or regurgitative, and this trip was definitely about sucking it all in.  But now that I'm back in Boston and have stacks of cardboard boxes and academic red tape to tackle, the best distraction from beginning-of-the-semester stress is sitting down at a keyboard and methodically rehashing.  So, without further ado, and in reverse chronological order:

By the time Ryan and I touched down in Amsterdam, I think we were both ready to leave the Eastern Bloc.  About three-fourths of the way into the trip, I already found myself shamelessly hankering for a bar that served french fries instead of ten kinds of soggy salad swimming in mayonnaise, as well as a proper stand-up shower and cushy white toilet paper.  But most of all, I was excited about returning to a world where everyday service industry encounters wouldn't make me feel like I'd reached out my hand to gently pet a dog and received a gory flesh wound for my troubles.  After the unsmilingly grim Eastern Europeans, the Dutch were like blue-eyed, apple-cheeked cherubs, lilting away in their peculiarly cheerful Germanic English and punctuating every other phrase with an upbeat "yep."  Maybe that's why I was so blithely optimistic in the passport control line, assuring myself that there'd be no problem with leaving the airport to spend our night-long layover in a hotel.  I'd done it before with my family, and I figured this time could only be more clear-cut, seeing as I would be in the company of my American citizen husband.  Tired but chipper, Ryan and I scooted ourselves up to the counter and presented our passports to the smiling young Dutchman.  The smiling young Dutchman took our papers, thumbed through Ryan's American passport like a flip-book, and handed it back with the all-clear stamp.  Then he picked up my passport, and his smile faded a little.  He looked up at me with a slight frisson of pain clouding his aquamarine eyes.  "You cannot go out without a visa," he said.  Then he flagged down another smiling female coworker, who took us to a small room, let us wait for five minutes, then smilingly repeated the same short, sweet sentence.  Non-EU or non-North American passport, no dice.

I'd like to blame exhaustion and the stress of traveling for the waterworks of hot, childish tears that tumbled out of me as I dug around futilely in my purse for my discharged cell phone and the number of the hotel I'd reserved, so that I could call and cancel in time to get our money back.  Ryan, trying his best to comfort me, took control and called from a pay phone, then laughed and joked as we wandered the airport in search of somewhere to crash.  Tucked away on the upper tier of our terminal was a so-called "comfort seat" section, full of backward-reclined chairs populated by a veritable internat of stranded undesirables.  Two Southeast Asian women were curled up in impossible-to-sleep positions under complimentary Northwest Airlines blankets, eyes shut tight and limbs immobile.  A gaggle of Georgians ignored the sleepers and talked boisterously, made friends with an itinerant Singaporean, then set up a laptop to stream a YouTube video of some loud, whacky Eastern European variety show.  A Muslim woman and her husband took turns nursing their sick child, one wheeling him around in a stroller around the "comfort chairs," while the other got onto a small rug laid out toward Mecca and silently prayed to Allah.  This was where we spent the night, bathed in the glow of the overhead florescent lights and a steady stream of never-ending muzak.  

Instead of all the Western European comforts I'd been dreaming of, I ended up eating potato chips for dinner, brushing my teeth in an airport bathroom sink, and getting no more than an hour or two of stiff, aching sleep.  When two of the Georgians came into the bathroom as I was washing up and asked if I minded that they smoke, I wanted to tell them I didn't mind if they set the whole damn airport ablaze.  I began to understand the grim visages of my compatriots in Ukraine, the way they shifted their gaze downward and refused pleasantries.  Even if they'd never been out of the country, I'm sure they're well aware of the label placed upon them by the rest of Europe: poor, backward, helpless, and ready to flood the borders at the drop of a hat.  Unlike spoiled little me with my flashy green card and effortless Americanness, they're made to feel that kind of subtle humiliation every single day.  Doesn't matter if you're a checkout girl in a Kiev supermarket or a PhD student at Harvard.  It's a simple Pavlovian response: if you're treated like a dog, your canines start to itch for some soft, coddled flesh.

Yesterday, I had the quasi-surreal experience of helping move my brother-in-law into his freshman dorm. The kid's a good one -- thoughtful, kind, and a hell of a lot more independent and mature than I'd expect the second-youngest in a family of five to be. But he's been living with my husband semi-permanently and me intermittently for the past six months, making it all too easy for us to forget that he's still just an eighteen-year-old boy reared in a provincial Texas town and his mother's doting arms. All things considered, he acclimated himself quite spectacularly to the boring post-grad married environment of Ryan and I: got himself a job and a PlayStation 3 and spent many a quiet night with us, drinking lots of beer and watching trashy scary movies. That's why I was so surprised to hear him say he was nervous about the whole college thing. I couldn't imagine this suave, svelte six-something stud being nervous in an environment full of awkward, sheltered teens fresh out of high school. But I quickly realized that hanging out with us was not exactly the same as forging a path through the complex social circles of American Higher Learning Institution. There will most likely be much alcohol-fueled devilry, not a small amount of futile eleventh-hour cramming, and girl drama like nobody's business. And as hopelessly permissive as we were with the kid, it's still a world of difference for him to really live on his own and really be expected to make his own decisions full-time. So different that I'll split infinitives about it. It'll be good for him; he needs some young blood. Because if there's one thing that moving somebody else into a freshman dorm can accomplish, it's making you feel hopelessly old.

But apart from the not-so-subtle age difference between me and the pimply-faced youngsters gearing up to start their journey through the American academic conveyor belt, what's even more surreal about yesterday's experience is this whole "brother-sister" relationship I've come to acquire with three random boys over the span of two years. Having spent my whole life dividing young eligible males into the subclasses of "...I can have sex with," "alcoholic second-cousins I see once in three years," and "pink Polo shirt wearers," it feels odd to develop a strong but sexless emotional bond with an attractive male. My brothers-in-law are all great guys, and it's a refreshing change of pace to want to dig around in their brains and hearts, not their pants, to find out what makes them tick. Perhaps this gives hope to the proverbial male-female "friend" myth? ....Or, perhaps, simply reestablishes the female only-child as the quintessential man-eating succubus.

Edit: And, in the grand tradition of the American sibling relationship, I've just been asked to make a beer run for the bro and his new little college friends. This is too cute; I might just shed a tear at the checkout line.

A Moveable Feast

Habitually, I monitor the trajectory of my life through meals, because days when dinner is potato chips and candy are markedly different from days when dinner is frozen lasagna; or midnight diner delivery; or half a loaf of Tuscan bread and a brick of Gruyere.

For example, yesterday started off with an ill-omened brunch at a Boston taco place. To be perfectly clear, Boston, aside from maybe some rut in Cowboy Spurs, North Dakota, is the worst possible US city for Mexican food. This is not some essentialist claim to "authenticity" for the cheese-logged concoctions of Texas or the lettuce-y salad bowls of California, but rather a sober statement of quantitative comparison. In Boston, "Mexican" means one of three things: a large burrito, a taco, or, if you're very lucky, a quesadilla. The end. In Texas, the menu of Mexican foodstuffs can stretch for pages and pages, ranging from traditional Tex-Mex to offbeat nouveau fusion to pure exercises in gluttony and death by cheese. Knowing all this, however, makes me no less desperate for some sort of meat in a cornmeal filling, and even though I'd actually be in Texas later in the day, I gave in and went to the cheap Taqueria down the street. Standing in line, I noticed a small sign that advertised lengua, and my hopes for a decent Boston Mexican experience began to grow. The guy behind the counter gave me a skeptical look when I blithely ordered my boiled beef tongue, and the cashiers whispered something to one another in Spanish, probably to the tune of "silly white people," but I got my tongue tacos and sailed out the door. Not surprisingly, Boston Mexican let me down once more, as the meat was pretty rubbery and bland. But it still had enough of that velvety tongue essence to do the trick. Tongue: the meat so good it tastes you back.

My second meal experience of the day was no less of a cultural collision. I was in the airport in Charlotte, North Carolina and had an hour layover before my flight to Dallas. Walking through the terminal, I mentally checked off one terrible airport dinner option after another ("NASCAR Cafe? Ex. Manchu Wok? Ex. Chili's Too? ...seriously?") before finally hitting gold. I skirted past the crowd of soccer moms clamoring around some bagel place and slid into the lengthy, all-black line at Bojangles Chicken and Biscuits. Alright, so it's no Popeyes, but I'll take what I can get. As I was waiting, middle-aged white woman saddled up to me and, with a desperate look in her eyes, said, "I'll pay for your meal if you'll let me cut in front of you." Being the pushover that I am, I just laughed and waved her through. Turns out she was also a Southern transplant living in Boston, and, even more heroically, had come from a totally different terminal, paying off one of those beeping motorized buggy drivers just to get some real Southern food.

Unfortunately, Airport Bojangles was experiencing a severe chicken shortage, meaning I had to wait twenty minutes for my damn breast-and-wing dinner. I was coming off a months-long fried chicken fast, so I waited stoically, ticket in hand, gritting my teeth. The others in line were not so patient. The poor manager ran around trying to placate the hungry masses and ended up handing out dozens of free drinks. Finally, I leaned over and politely asked the kid working the soda fountain if I could please get a cup of water. "Don't be shy, get more than that, honey!" murmured an attractive young black woman waiting next to me, who'd handled the situation far more adroitly and already pumped the manager for free sides and biscuits. But it looks like I've officially been spoiled by Northern self-sufficiency and accountability. I waited in silence, got my chicken just as my plane started boarding, and had to eat in the cramped middle seat between two people shooting me looks of rancorous envy for my styrofoam container of grease. Their biscuits are but a pale Popeye shadow, but I might have to seditiously admit that the chicken is about on par.

And, finally, to round out the day: a late evening second dinner of chips, salsa, mojitos, and flan, capped off with what's quickly becoming my preferred trashy redneck beverage of choice: the indomitable Bud Lite Lime. You know you've done a day right when you start off with tongue and end in a twist top. Success.

Levels of addiction

As expected, last night was a prototypical exercise in childish sulking.  I trudged through the rain to the corner liquor-and-grocery, picked out my dinner of a) peanut butter M&Ms (delicious) and b) sweet potato chips (... nutritious?), then had to angle awkwardly around a couple of what I can only assume were young resident physicians, standing in the middle of the cramped booze section and talking loudly about how so-and-so was "totally septic!" -- they're way more charming on Scrubs.  Since I at least had the foresight to avoid a whole bottle of wine on the shaky foundation of aforementioned "dinner," it took me awhile to decide on which pint-sized single would make me look the least like a lonely alcoholic.  I finally picked out some crappy hard cider that tasted like apple-flavored Mad Dog, but for a night of commanding undead armies in a dark, empty apartment, there could probably be no better choice to drink straight out of the bottle.  Basically, I'm twelve, but with a liquor ID.

It's supposed to storm again today, to which I can only say: OMFG NO.  If I miss another flight, I may not be so innocent in my choice of sulking.  I wonder if you can get kicked out of an airport for purchasing a bottle of duty-free liquor and consuming it inside the terminal?  Only one way to find out.

Missed connections

There's something inconsolably pathetic about a cancelled evening flight.  On the long bus and subway trip back from the airport, I felt like the straps of my bags were the leashes of dogs eager to burst forth into the unknown, but instead I had to reign them in wearily and drag them, whimpering, back home.  The rain didn't exactly improve my mood; neither did the snot-gargler and crotch-grabber sitting next to me, who spent the twenty-minute airport shuttle ride contemplating something very fascinating inside my right ear.  And now I'm back in the apartment it took me three hours to clean and put in order this afternoon, packing everything away and destroying all traces of my two-week life there so that the movers could do their job more easily.  It's almost funny, really.  Toiletries trapped inside taped-up cardboard, towels and linens smashed together with dirty clothes in the hamper, all the leftover food in the cupboards thrown away.  Nothing but boxes and a bare mattress for the next sixteen-some hours.  

My life this month was supposed to be on its way to positively domestic.  Finally, I was going to do some of that nesting I'd read about, maybe get my act together and start playing the part of a "wife," whatever the hell that is.  And yet here I am, musing indifferently that the next time I'll be able to shower might be around nine or ten tomorrow night, if I'm lucky, and contemplating a run to the liquor store for a therapeutic evening of solitary beer and video games.  Pretty much like every other night this month, except with even less in the way of creature comforts.  Joy.

The thing about the karmic wheel: I tend to take it all, bank or bust, with the same level of complicity.  And once that bitch starts rolling downhill, I just let it draaaaaag me down.  

Mana from heaven

The reason why I'm never terribly disheartened by serialized misfortune in my life is that, true to the pseudo-peasant belief system instilled in me by my mother and grandmother, I'm very superstitious.  I have no patience for "serious" religions, but my love of ritual and magical thinking rivals that of any incense-burning, Celtic-music-listening, RenFaire-costume-sewing nouveau pagan.  Just ask Husband the Lawyer, whose sober pragmatist influence on me has been tenacious but spotty, continually running into walls of willful idealism when capital-C Concepts are discussed.  So of course, when bad things happen to me in succession, I placate myself with the gooey New Age theory that balance will always be restored in life, and that a string of goodness must be just around the corner.  Not saying I'm proud of it, but it works.

Well, after the draining long-distance love thing and the Great Moving Debacle of Aught-Eight, I've been overdue for this alleged "good" for quite some time, which must be why it all rained down on me in the past few days.  First, there was the alchemic transformation of old acquaintance into new friend over a beautiful Pixar film (WALL-E, holla), sausage 'n' beer, and impromptu drunken Twinkie consumption.  Then, there was a Princess Bride Quote-Along, which dropped me into a sold-out theater full of what can only be described as "all my ex-boyfriends, aged 13-20."  There were inflatable swords involved.  Then, a series of mundane minutiae involving work and money I'll refrain from discussing, being as I am all humble and ladylike, but simply insist in passing that they were awesome.  

And, finally, to crown my goodness glory, I spent the better portion of last night playing a newly-purchased Warcraft III.  Because, while video and computer games have eaten months (if not years) of my life, I've never actually bought one.  Shamefully, I was always that proverbial pretty girl user who mooched off the consoles of others, loitering around boys' apartments and dorms at all hours in cute outfits, just waiting for a chance to get my hit.  But now... now!  Drunk with adult purchasing power, I feel it's high time to atone for my adolescent sins and fully embrace the pixelated world I've only loved in short, illicit bursts.  

Magical thinking is fun, but there's something to be said for clearheaded, goal-oriented action done in good faith.  Something that I fully believe is acquired in part by commanding armies of ghouls and orcs.  Consequentialism, here I come!

Pilgrim's progress

I did a lot of walking this weekend.  Since summer school is over and I have a week of nothing before leaving for Dallas and then Ukraine, the next five days are spread before me like an enormous oil slick, whose edges disintegrate and blur into the shimmering horizon.  It's also been overcast and stormy practically all month in Boston, adding even more fodder for hours-long restless, lonely rambles.  Last night, after a particularly epic thunder session that twice killed the power and made the windows rattle in apocalyptic fashion, the rain finally gave way to a glowing twilit sky covered in the haggard remnants of storm-clouds.  I threw on my husband's old Harvard Law sweatshirt, the one I'd cheerfully defaced with an anarchy A just a short year ago, and set off for a hike around Brookline.  

After living in the graffiti-and-broken-glass neighborhood down the hill, it's still a shock for me to walk down block after block where the only sounds are fountains, wind-chimes, and the plaintive shrieks of spoiled children.  After eight o'clock on a Sunday night, the only people out are men in bermuda shorts being tugged around by the family dog, and women in yoga pants immersed in their power-walk.  The street side of the sidewalk is lined with recycling bins, all neatly sorted into plastic produce containers, flattened cereal boxes, and bottles from expensive booze.  To the house side, tall roses and sunflowers lean out from mulched gardens to graze the shoulders of passing pedestrians.  At the top of the hill, there's even a house that sports a row of tomato vines right on its front lawn, the fruit ripening in blissful self-assurance of never being stolen or trampled.  Dusk settles slowly around the colonial-style houses and puts a soft focus filter over the yellow light in each window.  

It must be quite the pretty sight when you're behind the glass of one of those warmly lit windows and look out onto the blue-black street.  But I was shuffling aimlessly in the dark, hunched over to hide in my hoodie, the hems of my baggy jeans soaked in puddle water.  I realized then that the letter emblazoned on my chest was taking on a very different meaning from the one I'd intended when I shuttled my time between Allston and Cambridge and still thought I should épater le bourgeois.  Who am I kidding with the rebel loner business.  More like: A lone, prowling wolf in a world of happy fatted lambs.  A bedraggled outcast slinking through the safe suburban shadows.

Loss and gain, again

My body is mysterious and erratic.  Every once in awhile, I go through periods where I suddenly lose my appetite.  The sense of hunger remains, but it's about as fruitful as a trapped rodent trying to claw frantically out of a trash can.  If it gets too restless, I shove some colorless, packaged, frozen thing down my gullet to calm the pesky ruckus, but I remain disdainfully distant from its cause.  After a week or so, my pants all hang sadly off the twin peaks of jutting hip-bones.  After a month, the flesh slowly creeps from my shoulders and leaves a deserted playground of nooks and shadows.  Of course, these wasting spells are inevitably followed by some equally sudden internal flip of the switch, wherein, like last night, I find myself getting ice cream and chicken wings for dinner, then standing in the kitchen at ten o'clock at night, smearing herbed goat cheese and ginger-fig jam over the fourth, fifth, and sixth slice of fresh farmer's market bread.  

It's too bad that there's an entire teenage subculture devoted to the former syndrome, while the latter has never found so broad and fetishized a following.  I'm sure there have been times where my xylophone ribs and naked elbow joints have elicited envious fascination from the Hot Topic-wearing set, but I'd much prefer to be somebody's gluttonspiration.

Indulgent self

I know I just got done lamenting the oxymoronic permanent transience of my existence yadda yadda etc., but.  Sometimes I change my mind and secretly love it.  

I love waking up as early as I want and padding through an empty, echoing apartment, putting a pot of Turkish coffee on the stove, and watching the pink glow of the dawning sky reach the exact shade of the flowers on the mimosa tree outside the kitchen window.  I love filling up the tub and reading, half-immersed in hot water, until the steam warps the spine of my book.  I love losing track of meal times and grazing on fruit, bread, and beer at odd hours of the day, standing over the sink to catch errant juices and crumbs.  I love spending days in a wife-beater and a pair of torn boy's boxers with the words "Stocking Stuffer" printed on the back, not ever folding my clothes or cleaning up my tea cups, and generally living like a child whose "Home Alone" dream was centered more on the voicing of an elaborate internal monologue than on wild parties or potato chips and ice cream at midnight.  

But the thing that I love probably the most is falling asleep every night to the plaintive metallic hum of the subway train, a sound I instantly associate with childhood summer trips between Lutsk and Kyiv, the rocking rhythm of the top bunk, and staying up as long as my eyes would let me to watch the sleeping Western Ukrainian countryside rush past the grimy train window.  These are all only child things, moments and memories that get collected with the same loving care as delicate sea shells or semi-precious stones, and it's hard to pay the proper reverence to them when you're living with someone else.  No matter how low-key, the presence of others always somehow interferes with my sensory organs, scrambling the signals I spent so much time cultivating.  Ten tons of shit scraped aside, I'm glad I got this chance to fine-tune.

Bourgeois dream; or, Solzhenitsyn R.I.P.

The past week has been a steady series of foiled expectations and dashed hopes, the most glaring of which involved, of course, moving.  After a day of frantic packing and cleaning, the hubs and I loaded up a rental car, circled the new building ten times to find parking, waited for the concierge for half an hour in a stiflingly unventilated lobby, and were finally greeted with the joyous news that the former tenant had decided to stay for two weeks past her lease.  We've been temporarily housed in a similar unit on the sixth floor ("What a view!  Think of it as a honeymoon suite!") and assured that by the time we return from our Eastern European vacation in September, all of our belongings would be hauled back down to our real apartment on the second floor, free of charge.  We're also getting a pass on rent for the month... all of which would be nice, except for the fact that after living alone for two years in a filthy student ghetto, the last thing I want to be doing for the final two weeks of the long-distance relationship between my husband and I is coming home to bare walls and cardboard boxes.  In fact, the only thing that got me through the past month, nay, year, was the giddy daydream of hardcore nesting: elaborate floor-plans, kitchen wizardry, and Martha-Stewart-meets-D.I.Y.-punk crafting projects to make our house a home.

Well, scratch that one.  Stuck settling again, buying plastic cutlery and four-dollar knife sets from CVS because it makes no sense to equip a kitchen that's only temporarily mine.  Temporariness.  Transience.  The kind of feeling that was already familiar when I was eight and already a veteran of no less than three major cross-country moves, not to mention one involving traversing continents.  When I was eight, my mother was the one who got stressed and cried, while I busied myself playing with packaging detritus.  Moving is sad, I'd say to myself, but empty rooms are the best for cartwheels.  Now I'm eight thrice over, and I'm the one who bursts into tears at the prospect of dealing with landlords and electric companies.  And across the twin seas separating us, the Atlantic and my frustration, my mother now spreads her unconvincing over-the-phone balm: "Don't worry!  Don't stress!  It's nothing, nothing!"  I don't buy a word of it.  I remember how much it wore on her, this living out of half-unpacked boxes.  I remember how much it wore on me, quietly and insidiously, and how amazed I was to visit friends' houses and see the stolidness, the weighty reliability and immobility of their furnishings.  

Not surprisingly, I've adapted quite well.  Ran little errands today in between reading, stopped by the local bakery for a fresh loaf and tore into it with my hands when I got home.  Pirated wireless at Panera, drinking coffee for three hours while I worked on a Russian essay.  Now pirating wireless at "home," cheap cereal box fan rigged up to keep me cool and drinking tea from an ancient plastic Mardi Gras cup.  The same kind of life I've been living for the past year, but in a bigger place and nicer zip code.  All the tears of frustration have been squeezed out.  At least there's Imperial Stout in the fridge and the neighborhood is great.  Time, again, always and once more, for a little antici...pation. 

Humility

Not yet August, but already the temperature has crossed into "unbearable" territory -- especially from nine in the evening until one in the morning, when it seems that all of the heat absorbed during the day by the sun-baked skin of this apartment building seeps into my room and forms thick, brackish puddles around my bed until sunrise.  For the past three nights, this has made sleep pretty much impossible.  I finally broke down and moved my sole fan, cheap white plastic the size and shape of a cereal box, to the foot of my bed, securing it in back with the giant plush Snoopy doll I'd found on the street two years ago.  The strategically-placed stream of cool air helped cut the heat, but within minutes it began to gnaw at my ears, which have always been sensitive to drafts.  I grabbed an old orange bandana and tied it around my head, Amy-Winehouse-cum-Slavic-Grandmother-style, and flopped back into bed.  Dirty feet hanging off the rickety second-hand bed, single sheet twisted and tossed to the side, boys' soccer shorts and a ragged T-shirt from high school, face full of bandana and glistening night cream.  Just another night watching the waning glow of the computer screen attract a cloud of spontaneously-generated summer fruit flies.  

O hai, I go to Harvard and am married to a lawyer.

Twins

Yesterday, I spoke briefly on the phone to my cousin.  In her usual rapid-fire, giggle-punctuated Ukrainian, she wished me a happy birthday and expressed her excitement to see me and my husband in August.  "Husband -- it's so hard to believe I'm even saying that!" she blurted out, then handed the phone back to my mom.

For someone I see all of once in two or three years, I have a very conflicted relationship with my cousin.  We grew up together and were close enough in age to be sibling-like competitors.  She was always a prettier child: cornsilk blond hair, enormous hazel eyes, and the pillowy lips of a Lolita in training.  I was taller and darker-haired, wore glasses, and had a tightly-pressed cupid's bow mouth destined to brush against more pencil ends than boys' lips.  She did gymnastics, which held back her puberty until well after mine, but the minute she quit, voluptuous breasts and hips sprouted from her tiny, taut frame, giving her the proportions of a Barbie doll.  She was also a good artist, more mischievous and imaginative than safe, good girl me.  The only advantage I had was one of familial consensus: my grandmother hated my uncle, my cousin's father, and adored mine.  In her eyes, I was always the favorite granddaughter -- the first, the smartest, the serious and studious one.

After my parents and I had already moved to the States, on our first trip back to Ukraine, I remember lying on my belly next to her and watching her sketch color pencil pictures of beautiful girls performing elaborate gymnastic maneuvers.  She made a game out of it, deeming me the "judge" that had to rate each picture on a one to ten scale, with decimals.  I played along at first, but her standards were much higher than mine.  If she accidentally drew a girl's leg too long, or if a neck came out a centimeter thicker than a toothpick arm, she'd savage the performance: "Oh, look at that cow trying to do the splits!" she'd laugh, scribbling 4.7 at the top of the page in bright red pencil.  I was jealous of her drawing skill and of the astonishing contortions she could perform, right out of those drawings, jutting out her full lips as she kicked one leg back towards her head and pulled the ankle over her shoulder.   But when we came back home and developed our Ukraine photos, I realized that in every single picture with me and her standing together, she was on her tip-toes, craning her neck so she could appear to be my height.  

The last time I was in Ukraine, we went out to a nightclub together, and she tried for the first time in years to have a serious talk with me.  She sat chain-smoking and downing the cheap mix of vodka and fruit juice popularly referred to, in suitably utilitarian Soviet fashion, simply as "drink."  She wasn't doing sports or art anymore, or much of anything, for that matter.  She'd just graduated from the Ukrainian equivalent of undergrad with a degree in pedagogy but lamented that she hated teaching.  Every now and then, she'd take an occasional job as an English tutor, which is where she said she got the money for clothes and makeup and going out.  That, or a "boyfriend" whom no one in the family had ever seen, and to whom she'd mysteriously disappear for hours at a time, returning drunk and flushed and giggling manically.  When we were on our way to the nightclub, given a ride by nameless middle-aged "friends" who owned a car and matching track suits, I caught a glimpse of a wad of dollars in her purse.  But even under the pancake of foundation and tiny sequined top, drunk from cheap liquor bought with dirty money, she was still just as touchingly beautiful, beautiful in all the ways I could never imagine myself being.  Slurring, but still shooting out her nervous staccato, she told me how glad she was that I was there, how much she wished we could have grown up together, how she wished we could talk more about everything....  And then the sparkle in her hazel eyes dimmed, she turned away to light another cigarette, and that was that.  I wanted to tell her I knew and understood everything, that I wasn't judging her.  But I was.  She'd been harsher at it as a kid, knowing well before I did how these kinds of things were measured up, but if my judgment developed later, it also ran deeper, much deeper than hers.  I went home that night and had a quiet, somber conversation with my mom in the kitchen so my grandmother couldn't hear. 

My parents are there now, and the last I heard from my mom over the phone was, "She looks good.  Normal."  Most of me was contented with that description -- the part of me married to a terrific man, attending the best school in the world, and on the fast track to happiness and success.  But there's a secret part of me that still sees sketches of gymnasts marked with red ratings, and that part knows that it's largely a matter of circumstance.  If the situation were reversed, it knows I'd be the one straining every muscle, craning and clawing desperately, and pulling every dirty trick in the book just to gain an extra inch.

The mirror and the lamp -- The crate and the barrel

In the past few weeks, I'd been trying to think up some devil-may-care adventure to have on this birthday, as some sort of last hurrah to youthful indiscretion.  But the other day in Russian, we were examining the subtle difference between the verbs "настроиться," "расстроиться," and "перестроиться."  The elegantly cropped-haired, dame d'un certain âge professor scribbled the root, which relates literally to tuning a stringed instrument, on the board.  Then she waved a hand covered in chalk dust and egg-sized gemstones and purred in her deep, throaty Russian: "You know, it's like with children.  They'll get worked up [настроятся] about something and then when it doesn't happen, they'll be disappointed [расстроятся].  Adults are different; we just shrug and say, I'll get over it [перестроюсь]."  In my mind, a little melody played out: cheerful whistling at first, then discordant piano keys clashing, and finally mellowing into the velvety, imperious sound of a champagne glass struck with a fork.  I blushed and reconsidered my birthday options.

So today, instead of taking the cheap Chinatown bus to New York City and spending the day trying to look purposeful as I wandered the length of Manhattan, I went out and bought three thousand dollars worth of furniture for my new apartment.  Not only have I never paid that much money for furniture, I've never paid that much money for anything, ever, in my entire life.  The experience was surreal and vaguely numbing, making me understand why it becomes so easy for the rich (or not-so-rich and thus hopelessly in debt) to spend increasingly absurd amounts of cash on increasingly useless things.  There gets to be a point -- I'd put mine at the 500 dollar mark -- where you feel a giddy watershed effect and the digits lose all meaning.  All that becomes important is the fact that things are attainable, that you can point to them and say "yes" and "I'll take it," and suddenly a piece of the world gets carved off the slab and handed to you, gutted and gift-wrapped.

Probably my favorite fairy tale character ever has always been Aladdin, and not just because of the feature film and subsequent, spun-off Saturday morning cartoon.  Even before I watched the Disney version, I'd had an illustrated Ukrainian children's book that contained, among other stories, Aladdin and Ali Baba.  Much like every deprived Soviet child, I was a secret aesthete at heart, yearning for beauty in a world of gray Stalin-era cinderblock housing, and my nascent orientalism instantly made me latch onto these characters and fuse them together into one.  The "Persian" stories offered immense luxury and ornamentation; instead of reading the text, I'd stare at the pictures of Aladdin reaching up to pick the scintillating forbidden fruit from a magical ruby-encrusted pomegranate tree, or the one of Ali Baba opening the treasure chest and raking his long, sinewy fingers across a heap of ducats and countless tangled ropes of pearls.  Only one thing really troubled me: why was Aladdin "The Diamond in the Rough?"  The story never said, and Disney certainly didn't make it any more clear.  I never bought the flimsy "pure of heart and gentle of spirit" veneer that Walt & Co. tacked on and still couldn't figure out why Aladdin was special, why he could get the lamp when no one else could.  It was only recently, reading Kierkegaard, that I thought about it again.

Whoever knows that happy moment, whoever has appreciated its delight, and has not also felt the apprehension lest suddenly something might happen, some trifle perhaps, which yet might be sufficient to disturb all! Whoever has held the lamp of Aladdin in his hand and has not also felt the swooning of pleasure, because one needs but to wish? Whoever has held what is inviting in his hand and has not also learned to keep his wrist limber to let go at once, if need be? ["In Vino Veritas"]

Well, it certainly wasn't Aladdin's ability to let go that garnered him the whole "Diamond in the Rough" moniker, just like Ali Baba couldn't help draping his rough, frail body with the treasures in the Forty Thieves' cave.  But maybe it was precisely this weakness that made the lamp and cave call to them, honing in on vacuums of avarice and luring them to a glut of plenty.  Aladdin could wish and wish and Ali Baba could draw from the well of treasures in the cave forever, and neither would ever slake his rapacious thirst.  I think this is the part that Disney glossed with sunny songs and the comedy stylings of Robin Williams: Aladdin is a hero not because he is good, but because he, like most children, is a greedy despot with the power to wish unflinchingly, unhesitantly, always for more.

I realize now that Aladdin was my hero not because I resembled him in the least, but because I'm absolutely his opposite.  I was never a demanding child, and I'm not even close to a demanding adult.  I never knew what to wish for as a kid, and I haven't gotten any better at it now.  For the past two years, I've lived in a cheap, shitty apartment in a cheap, shitty neighborhood, dragged home free or nearly free furniture and thrift store clothes, and been perfectly content with the garbage, the bums, and even waking up to the sound of rustling late at night, turning on the lights, and being greeted by the cheerfully industrious face of the resident mouse.  I've also been in a long-distance relationship for the past two years, and, aside from a few breakdowns, I've been generally complacent about the fact that I get to see the man I love a maximum of once a month.  Hell, right after we got married, I we lived with his two younger brothers in a one-room loft.  My husband worked, I lay on the couch reading Either/Or and watching the kids play video games, we went to Six Flags once.  It's not that I don't want things; I just never want them to be any certain way.  

But the lamp begs to be rubbed, and I've always wondered what it would be like to be the kind of person that could, Xtina-style, rub it the right way.  Today, for the first time ever, I could feel my fingers tingling the way I imagined Aladdin's did while reaching for that ruby pomegranate, or Ali Baba's for the ropes of pearls.  After dropping nine hundred on bedroom trappings alone, I stole away to the food court of the local Asian grocery and ordered myself a huge platter of Korean fried chicken.  To the palpable horror of the decidedly un-Persian-style "oriental" onlookers, I snatched up a breaded wing, shimmering with grease and scalding-hot sticky-sweet garlic sauce, and tore in.  I polished off the meal in minutes and, with rapaciousness satisfied, stomach leaden, and finger-tips singed, I went back to the furniture store and made the rest of my purchases.  And then I went and got a hot fudge and butterscotch sundae.  This is secretly why I never became an Aladdin: I've always been more into the real, not the ruby, pomegranates. 

So, I guess today I've figured out the Aladdin mystery, as well as a little bit about how and why I'm tuned the way I am.  And now I've popped the cork off a bottle of chilled, carbonated French hard cider and am letting myself live in a blissfully drunk cloud for the rest of the day.  As the Russians say, "перестроюсь" -- I'll get over it, but literally, I'll recalibrate, retune, remake myself from the inside out.  Probably not all the way towards the extreme of enjoying the daily dropping of Benjamins, but far enough to exercise some firm demandingness once in awhile.  Now that's a birthday wish I can get behind.

A Report to the Academy

Summer is an especially irritating time in Cambridge.  Aside from the heat and related sewer stench wafting from the colonial-era gutters, all the walkways on campus are cluttered with enormous groups of Japanese tourist.  Last spring's trip to Tokyo -- where even the most important-looking businessman was ready to come to a dead halt in the middle of a busy city street to help the confused White Devil read his map -- made me much more sympathetic to this demographic.  But when you're late to class and attempting to run across Harvard Yard with ten pounds of books strapped to your shoulders, the last thing you want to see is a group of smiling Asians posing on the stairs of the library.  Because, of course, this signifies that any effort on your part to cross between them and their photographer will inevitably ruin the picture they've traveled thousands of miles to have taken, thus ensuring that you'll have to waste at least three minutes idling in front of the Kodak moment or finding longer alternate paths to reach your destination.  

But the worst are the guided tours, obviously led by drama majors better suited to declaiming incendiary snippets from The Vagina Monologues.  What makes these spectacles so bad is that they happen on a semi-hourly basis, and that their scripted speeches never change, subjecting the innocent bystanders of the Harvard community to an endless loop of anecdotes about the Widener family or juicy tidbits about which famous Hollywood starlet stayed in which dorm.  After just two years, I feel fully qualified to give these kinds of tours.  All I need is a crimson hat, a big red sign, and a dignity lobotomy.  

Today, as I was waiting at a crosswalk, I cringed when I heard the telltale carnival-barker shriek coming up behind me.  "Stick together now!  We're about to begin!"  The crowd was composed of twenty-odd Japanese tourists in matching tan jumpsuits, and they all craned their necks at the sight of the Yard's front gate.  I prayed for a green light.  "Okay!  Now!  As some of you may have noticed..."  The light was still red but the traffic had stopped, so I quickly stepped onto the street and hurried across as fast as heels on cobblestones allow. "... the local Cambridgerians are notoooorious jaywalkers!  That's because local Cambridge driving law is unique, in that pedestrians always have the right of way!"  This is what monkeys must feel like in their cages, I thought, still hurrying to put as much distance between myself and the tour as I possibly could.  I'd always thought being considered a "tourist" was a terrible thing, but never in my life have I been more underwhelmed by the prospect of being taken for a "local."   Even after I'd made it to my department, I still couldn't shake the feeling that if I turned around, I'd be met with a blinding flash from a camera and a jumpsuited little girl's excited grin.  "And this is Harvard Yard.  And this is Widener Library.  And this is a Cambridgerian -- look, she's growling!  Probably just ready for lunchtime."

Flaneur-saboteur

I bought a pint of kumquats at Trader Joe's today, to eat on the twenty-minute walk from leafy Brookline to gritty, grimy Allston.  I perched the plastic box at the top of one canvas shopping bag, on a pedestal of Greek yogurt tubs and bottles of blueberry-pomegranate green tea, and slung the bag over my shoulder for easy access.  At crosswalks, my free right hand could dart into the bag and emerge with a handful of the quail-egg-sized orbs, miniature hand-grenades of tartness that burst between my teeth and saturated my parched tongue.  My weapons to make summertime pedestrian shopping bearable.

The last time I'd had kumquats was last spring, in Japan.  Never quite able to figure out the conversion rate from dollars to yen, I remained blissfully unaware of the exorbitant fresh fruit prices there and eagerly traded handfuls of flimsy coins for anything exotic and edible in bulk.  My favorite were roasted chestnuts, which I only figured out how to peel after the second time I bought them, but which still remain a dreamy memory of soft, velvety earthy-sweetness inextricably tied to the neon blur of nighttime Tokyo.  But the kumquats were a close second-favorite: they were sweeter than the ones sold in the States, with a thinner rind and more pulp.  I ate the whole bag in minutes.

Walking down Harvard Avenue with my Trader Joe's groceries, I was reminded of Japan not simply because of the similarity of taste and texture, but for the greedy, furtive way I was gobbling my street snack.  Another thing I didn't realize until it was too late is that the Japanese look down on street-eating, considering it impolite and borderline obscene.  That same sentiment, interestingly, is expressed in a recent report from the President's Council on Bioethics:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view...

Of course, I giggled when I first read this, originally quoted in an essay that tore the concept of "dignity" a new one.  Finding ice cream cones offensive sounds downright cute in this hedonistic day and age.  But I'm compelled to admit a certain admiration for the logic.  Eating is personal and sensual, an activity to be savored; walking is brisk, goal-oriented, utilitarian.  In normal circumstances, the two should never meet.  So, it should come as no surprise that ice cream cones were invented in New York City, and that the whole phenomenon of "eating on the go" is a totally urban one.  Where else but in our modern Babylon would the spheres of life get so dangerously, deviantly mixed up, like wearing lingerie outdoors or jogging pants to work?  The only surprising thing is that Tokyo is resistant to this progressive trend, the last conservative bastion of the world's great and gluttonous cities (who can imagine Rome without its gelato, Moscow morozhyno-less, or L.A. minus the ubiquitous PinkBerry...?).  Well, even in Tokyo, taboos are made to be broken.  The ice cream I had there was divine -- sesame, sweet potato, and taro flavored -- and the way I found the stand was by backtracking from a departing gaggle of schoolgirls, all laughing and happily, publicly licking at their cones.  

Once upon a time there was a little princess who was still too young to wipe herself after she went to the lavatory, and the woman assigned to look after her was too lazy to do it for her, so she used to call the princess's favorite black dog and say, "If you lick her bottom clean, one day she'll be your bride," and in time the princess herself began looking forward to that day...

(...)

To the children listening, who didn't even know the word "incest," all this seemed perfectly natural, and it wasn't long before they'd forgotten all about it, whereas the part about the black dog obeying the lazy woman and licking the princess's bottom clean left a far more vivid impression, as you could tell by the way they lapped at their ice cream cones, barking between licks, or slobbered on the palms of their hands while they did their homework, which mad their mothers sick... [Yoko Tawada, The Bridegroom Was a Dog]

On a related note, I think I'm going to take a day-trip to New York City for my birthday next week and maybe explore Coney Island.  And I'll be sure to get an ice cream cone.

Reading Nabokov on the 66

After sweating under the unsparing New England summer sun, it's always a relief when the 66 finally turns the corner, cuts through a heat shimmer, and lurches to an awkward halt in front of the crowded bus stop.  I file in with the rest of the crowd, smiling when I see my second-favorite driver, the one with the shaved head and enormous Austro-Hungarian imperial mustache, and take a seat on the cold molded plastic.  Then, before any chatty Mormon missionary can corner me in my vulnerable window seat position, I quickly pull out my trusty Imposing Foreign-Language Novel, which, even more effectively than some spindly iPod headgear, definitely plugs me out of the world.

Descriptive opening paragraph, imperfective aspect.  Now, to the particulars.

A heavy body dropped down on the seat next to me and dug something out of a canvas messenger bag.  I continued to stare straight into the middle crease of the book in my lap, Nabokov's The Gift, but in the gray sidebar of my vision I caught sight of my young, dark-haired neighbor and his reading material of choice: a double-spaced manuscript, computer-printed, with the title "The Voyage" puffed up in bold on the front page.  With a world-weary sigh, my neighbor uncapped a black fountain pen and began marking.  An indomitable smirk nipped at the corners of my lips as I envisioned the scenario from a third-person perspective: the self-important, stony look on the face of my neighbor as he read over his magnum opus, diligently adding descriptive adjectives in preparation for its judgment at the hands of a peer workshop, all while Nabokov spread himself out serenely in my lap and looked on with ironic, hawk-eyed glee.

Perfective aspect, which in English is simply the past tense.  Now, onto the essay.

I can't imagine I'm the only one.  For anyone who's ever maintained an inner monologue, taken a creative writing class, or secretly yearned even for ghostwriting and hackwork in the name of professionally stringing together sentences, reading Nabokov must be utterly insufferable.  Part of it is the endless stream of images so mind-numbingly vivid (the creaky old armoire with a door that sporadically swings open, like a second-rate provincial actor stepping onstage out of turn) that you love him for sharing them and hate him for rubbing in your face the fact that their intrepidness can no longer be yours.  If Nabokov had a Twitter feed, it would read like one of his novels parsed into 200 word segments, each as meticulous, symmetrical, and stunning as the most well-crafted 400-page backbreaker.  But even more painful is the logic, the brutal logic so brashly and coldheartedly laid bare: whatever it is, he has it.  The Gift.  And no matter how carefully you chart out your plot points, diagram your characters, and polish your manuscript, you'll always look like my dear neighbor and seat-mate, poring over "The Voyage" and dreaming of accolades.  Never, ever, ever, so don't even dream.

But.  Later, sprawled on my bed, with a chilled beer and a well-aimed fan working overtime to leech the day's heat out of my bones, I feel more optimistic.  And, for the first time, I savor the full meaning of the ancient anecdote handed down like scripture in my department, the one about when good old Roman Jakobson was head of Harvard Slavic and refused to hire Nabokov to teach literature because, loose quote, "we wouldn't hire an elephant to teach zoology."  Gone are the days of the elephants, I think, not without remorse.  But also gone are the days of the elephants in the room and their despotic zookeepers, to be replaced by myriad, twittering butterflies.  Less likely to knock anyone off their feet, I suppose, and certainly nine-tenths frivolousness wing-beating.  But no less likely to produce hair-raising shivers once in awhile with the right, light, innocent little touch.