november 6th

There is a concrete flower box downtown with a graffiti saying ‘Pointless, stupid inscription. Will remove it if 20 citizens complain to xxxx@xxxx.xx’ — it’s been there for a while now. It’s sad to think there were not 20 people kind enough to email someone this desperate in almost a year. To be honest, I am one of the heartless people who has replaced the address with xxx’s not out of tact, but rather because it has slipped my mind.

Where was I going with this? Between schoolwork, workwork, studiously avoiding any housework, and worrying, I seem to have misplaced my memory.

fears

There are several websites listing all the names of existing phobias. They make for remarkable reading. Of course, I couldn’t help but make a list of the titles corresponding with things I fear or dislike. Here it is.

Acrophobia. Fear of heights (since a nasty fall; still hoping it’ll pass)
Anthrophobia. Fear of people (including on the phone)
Arachnophobia. Fear of spiders (ew)
Ataxiophobia. Fear of disorder (in other words, obsessiveness)
Atelophobia. Fear of imperfection (in myself and everything I do)
Bathophobia. Fear of depth (think of the ocean)
Chaetophobia. Fear of hair (ew)
Climacophobia. Fear of falling down stairs (that one’s from experience)
Demophobia. Fear or dislike of crowds (and crowded situations)
Emetophobia. Fear of vomiting (too much information, I know, but this is an honest list)
Entomophobia. Fear of insects (and consequently, nature)
Eremophobia. Fear of being by oneself (I am not good company)
Gerascophobia. Fear of growing old (23 is old)
Harpaxophobia. Fear of robbers (every unfamiliar sound at home is made by a robber)
Helminthophobia. Fear of becoming infested with worms (since that horrible biology class in fifth grade)
Iatrophobia. Fear of going to the doctor (so I just don’t go)
Kakorhaphiophobia. Fear of failure or defeat (see imperfection)
Lygophobia. Fear of darkness or dark places (monsters live in the dark, and so do robbers)
Merinthophobia. Fear of being bound (there always needs to be an exit)
Ophidiophobia. Fear of snakes (it recently hit me that they are disgusting)
Poinephobia. Fear of many things (self-evident from this list)
Scopophobia. Fear of being looked at (and listened to, and noticed)
Spheksophobia. Fear of wasps (haven’t been stung; hope never to be)
Thaasophobia. Fear of boredom (I get bored much too easily)
Thanatophobia. Fear of death (mine and everyone else’s)

Good thing these are not all full-fledged phobias, because trying to bend my life around each and every one of those things would probably be quite time-consuming to say the least. What are yours?

november 4th*

*One good thing about NaBloPoMo is that when times are tough, there is no need to exert myself coming up with post titles.

Just wanted to post something warm for today.

joanne harris

Someone just told me that Joanne Harris will be doing a promo tour of Lithuania in February. My first reaction was to squeal with joy, but come to think about it, I’m not sure I know what to do when one meets a favourite author. Perhaps something like today’s Questionable Content. Or maybe just come for the first fifteen minutes and then sneak out, like it happened for me with Tomas Venclova this spring.

Lately, every book I pick up just seems to drag; I’ve been reading the same pocket-sized paperback since September. Maybe, as the world shudders at the threat of swine flu and excess dustiness, this is just no time for leisurely escapes into the world of letters, or maybe it is my thesis-in-(lack of)-progress that has killed the last philological spark in me for the rest of the year. Either way, Harris’ website says she is about to release a new novel (due April), and that love of reading better come back till then.

look who almost blew the game on day two

Today was my first day at work. Ever. I’ve never had a day job before. Nobody’s canceled my night job or school, but that is beside the point. It was an experience. To quote my own email (yay for unoriginal texts), they gave me some instructions to read, masterpieces in their own right. For example, there was a section entitled ‘Factors which may endanger a librarian’, featuring such horrors as ‘trauma caused by an untidy workspace’ and ‘excess dustiness’. One is also instructed to wash one’s hands with soap before eating and before leaving work. In case of a fire, one is, among other things, ‘not to be frightened’. Useful. (End quote.)

This was also my first opportunity to live out the cliché of walking to work on a freezing day carrying a paper cup full of coffee. Well, it is sure nice to have a maple syrup latte by the computer for those moments of bibliographic frustration. Yes, what you heard, I am, as of today, a bibliographer. Which is a fancy way of saying that I spent seven hours modifying my new Firefox with all the add-ons I use on the old one, and cataloging a couple of books in the spare time. At the end, there was another pleasure of the grown-up world to experience: the trolleybus ride home in rush-hour traffic, followed by some frantic cleaning.

Expect more updates as I go through rigorous biblio-training and perform miracles of catalog work with my bare hands.

national blo po mo

National Blowfish Poisoning Mortality. Narcissistic Blockheads Pose Modestly. Navy Blobs Poetically Moaning. In short, NaBloPoMo has begun and I am playing. This might be a useful exercise in keeping something up for a month. Kind of like a yearly cleanse.

fictitious

Ugh, the stupid computer restarted, erasing my entire post. You will have to believe that the wit in the original draft was as sharp as it was elegant, and that you would have loved it. This edition will never measure up.

A while ago, A. applied to have his residence permit renewed. This has to be done yearly, and each time the amount of required papers, fees, and trips to the migration department grows exponentially, so the entire journey is really a quest for Permission to Stay With Your Actual Wife. However, this time the department was especially resourceful.

‘Hello, we would like you and your wife to come by our office this week,’ a clerk chirped to A. on the phone. And because the department apparently always gets what it wants, we schlepped through simultaneous rain and snow (no kidding, although hello? it is October? global cooling!) until we were at the door. As we squelched in, ‘Hello,’ she chirped again, ‘This is not the first time you’ve applied for a residence permit, so we have decided it is time to make sure your marriage is not fictitious!’ Her exact words. Nu, translated into English, don’t go ruining my dramatic presentation.

We were sat at two tables with our backs to each other and given a five-page questionnaire each to fill out in as much detail and precision as possible. The questionnaire featured such questions as:

- What language do you speak at home? How and where did you learn it? (Arabic. He learned it while training with the Al Qaeda, whereas I miraculously found myself speaking it fluently after narrowly surviving a plane crash organized by the same Al Qaeda. That’s how we met, actually.)

- What cultural differences do you expect to arise when you and your spouse start living together? (Gee, I don’t know, the same ones we’ve been having for the past five years? That he prays to God Almighty, while I — to the God of American Television?)

- Do you have any shared friends or acquaintances? If yes, please list them. If not, why is that? (Well, if you’re going to ask me to list seven hundred people, at least provide adequate space.)

- How many times had you met before you registered your marriage? (Three. The first time we could barely communicate through the thick layer of cultural misconceptions, the second time we really connected over our shared love of fifteenth-century Chinese stationery, the third time he proposed.)

Questions that for some reason were not on the questionnaire, even though they might have offered considerable insight into the fictitiousness of our union:

- Where and when did you consummate your marriage? And in what way exactly?

- Which of you gets to decide on the restaurant for lunch?

- How would you feel were your spouse to grow a huge beard? (On both of our copies.)

- If and when you are divorced, will you try and snatch the kids and the apartment and drive your spouse out to live with your in-laws? Will you then celebrate by getting drunk and yelling ‘We are not related anymore, you creeps!’ to said in-laws over the phone? Do you dream of the day that happens?

Because those questions were not there, we had to contend with ‘describing the apartment our spouse and us were living in’ and trying hard to ‘remember and list all the guests at our wedding’. This should bring about some conclusions on the part of the migration department, who is not intending to let us know whether or not we’re really married until the day A.’s permit expires and they either make him a new one or kick him out of the country. The upside is, it won’t be a boring wait, what with all those entertaining quirks A.’s exotic native culture has left him with.

one benefit of growing old – the memories

A couple of days ago I realized that I remember the very beginning of the Spice Girls.

I was eleven at the time, and going to school in a village half an hour’s drive away from Oxford, UK. The school had beautiful grounds and an recess-outside policy. So every time the teacher would announce a break, the following would happen: 1) spontaneous fission of girls into groups of five; 2) yelled-out bench auctions; 3) frantic running about – and then the show would begin.

Imagine your typical 1997 eleven-year-old British girl. Now imagine five of them. Imagine them standing on a bench in the school yard and screaming ‘SO TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT WHAT YOU REALLY REALLY WANT’ on the top of their relatively spacious lungs. They had this whole routine worked out: there was an elaborate sequence of jumps on and off the bench, exclamations and shout-outs as each ‘Spice’ presented herself, and ultimately – heaps of glee.

They took this very seriously, those girls. They took it seriously every single recess for the three months I was there. Seriously enough to have fights over the unlawful use of benches and to have memorized all the lyrics and all the steps from all the videos the Spice Girls were popping out. Actually, I tell a lie; there probably weren’t so many. At least, my pop-conscious classmates only had two or three routines.

So when it was time to leave, I, the reserved child who had only listened to music my parents had picked out prior to that, knew the phrase ‘I really really really wanna zig-a-zig-AHHH’ so well that it has stayed with me to this day. And then soon after we returned to Lithuania, there appeared Britney Spears. If pushed, I may still remember the dance we created to ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’.

in jerusalem

The airport smells of palm trees. A Filipino cleaning lady is sitting in the empty corridor, rocking back and forth with a note and a cellphone in her hand. Are you beseder, okay?, I ask in Hebrew. She looks up uncertainly. Hebrew no, sorry, she says. English? Russian?, I ask. Ruski, she lights up. Is everything horosho, okay? Do you need help? She sighs and gets up to point at something for me. No no, I protest, I help you, yes? You need? She rocks her head slowly, turns to her supplies cart, hangs about for a while then pushes it off down a passage.

Jerusalem smells of spicy meat, hot asphalt, something sweet. At night it smells of flowers fluttering in the light wind from the hills. It does not smell of figs, though when I come out into the courtyard they are sticky under my bare feet. Sadeh?, asks the postman. No, I reply. Water bill in their name, he says. I shrug – okay. Sign here, he says, giving me the bill in an envelope, smaller than the one already on the mirror, in someone else’s name, placed there by somebody other than me.

I like the way time works here (night is just day with the lights switched off, it comes so early and everything takes so little notice of it), the smells and the tastes. Israel tastes to me like breakfast dairy, like freshly baked pita bread of which I eat entirely too much, like the salt of the sea in which I bathe entirely too little, like the curried meats I don’t eat anymore, but their taste lingers, like bottled water, like fresh fruit of so many names and colours.

relocated

Day one. Us cleaning the room the bed will go in, talking to each other in serious adult voices; me mopping and you crawling about wiping the floor with paper towels. Us eating feta sandwiches in our underwear because our clothes are too dirty to sit on the mattress, using a paper-covered stool for a table; you cutting up the tomatoes with a blunt knife, kneeling because the mattress is too low for you to sit on; me transferring my teabag into your cup, because it’s larger and because you take stronger tea. Me showering for the first time, uneasy, bringing the mop rag and some laundry with me into the booth, washing the walls first, then myself; you writing in the dust on the other side of the glass ‘LOVE YOU’, messing up only the last letter of the mirrored words. You showering next, with splashing and weird noises; me writing this, worrying that the glass needs to be wiped afterwards, calling myself silly, still worrying, not feeling at home. Us settling down to sleep, surrounded by shadows of old belongings and by dust.

Day two. Me waking up the moment you close the door and leave, wandering restlessly about the place, noticing the floor is still as dirty as before. You telling me to go out, find something to eat, stop worrying; me buying a bucket, riding the bus back with it. Me coming home from a day of meetings, self-conscious about wearing the same t-shirt; you standing inside the bedframe, almost done building it, letting me screw in the last bit. Us watching the kitchen being built, listening to endless accounts of other kitchens, other clients, other problems. Us playing hosts to my parents, our first guests, you stretched on the new bed, a sheet protecting the linen from the dirt on your back; me pointing out little details, the way the drawers slide back and forth, the paint. You cutting up our only pear for me, eating using only the knife. Us falling asleep on the bed, with the overhead light dimmed to a glow, close above us.

Day three. You remembering to lock the front door and leave the bedroom door open; my fears abate, respected. Me washing the shower, enjoying the newness and the music streaming out of our hi-fi sitting cosily on the bedroom floor; it’s Bob Dylan. Me getting worked up about the tile job; you speaking in your adult voice to me on phone. Me making plans to escape; you making plans to come home from work. My fingers red and raw from the washing solution; you forbidding me to clean. Us meeting in town for a bit, you calm, me hysterical. The kitchen finished, us washing the dishes; you rinsing, me toweling. Talking about the place, always; what to buy, to finish, to paint, to bring over from my parents’ house. Me feeling homeless, my sense of home no longer (or not yet) attached to anything.

– I kept this diary for a while, and then we went away for two weeks, returning here, our natural habitat from there on. There is no more point in keeping a log of what goes on, because the place is no longer sacred. For Pete’s sake, we hardly ever mop the floor anymore, or wash dishes together, or care. There’s still a whole room to furnish, and in the bathroom, the tiles are covered in so much residue you pretty much can’t see they’re originally black; our sink is still in its box. Yet somehow, I am no longer in a constant state of shock at us living here now. I can even sleep when A. is not here, which, mark you, is no simple feat for Miss Neurosis 2009.

people-shopping

There is a confession on my mind. You are probably aware of those many forums scattered over the www, where aggravated shop assistants and annoyed waiters complain to each other of the insufferable clients, the insolence, the sheer bother of it all. Well. I wonder if they ever talk about the customers who waste their time.

Sometimes, there’s no helping or denying it, I feel compelled to have these strange interactions with people who don’t know me, can’t possibly catch me lying. I write this from a cafe in a shopping mall; in twelve minutes I will have to go; it’s been two hours since I arrived. There is nothing I need. I spent all this time in shops.

‘Hello,’ I smile politely, ‘Would you mind explaining something?’ ‘Sure,’ says the tall blonde girl hospitably. ‘Well, I was trying on those shirts – true – and they crease in the back. Would you say I need a larger size or a smaller one? Maybe a different cut?’ The girl launches into an explanation about shirt cuts, creases, and sizes, and finally suggests I try the shirt on again for her. When it doesn’t fit, she reassures me that they have other similar shirts in different cuts and takes me on a tour. Finally I thank her profusely, promising to come back with my husband or a friend, thinking I probably won’t. ‘You’ll find the one that’s good for you,’ the girl says warmly. I feel uplifted.

‘Hi, I am going on a trip, there’ll be lots of walking, do you think these shoes are up for it?’ – in the next shop. ‘Oh yes,’ this girl is curvy and a brunette, the type I like. ‘Everything on this shelf is very comfortable and durable. You can also try these… – hideous white ones - or these… – old ladies would love them – or any of them, really.’ ‘Thank you,’ I grin, try a pair on, then wander away from the shop. My next stop has nothing for me to try on; it is a baby store. ‘Could you please explain the sizing? Is it in centimeters? A boy of six months, on the small side… Thank you so much, I will ask his mother.’ Then, ‘Could you recommend a cold coffee drink which would not be sweet?’ – cue long-winded explanation by the barista on syrups and their sweetness ratio. ‘Thank you so much, I think I’ll just have a cold latte. Thanks.’

And then I sit down to type some words. There is a calm feeling in my stomach from talking to people and being very very nice to them, smiling and having them smile back. It is a rare moment for me when unfamiliar people do not make me feel uneasy. It is something to cherish, even though I realize I’ve kept these people from working, distracted each of them for several valuable minutes. It’s just that sometimes I get so lonely when I’m on my own. And then – I do always offer thanks and am always sincere. And I do regret it somewhat.

i am tired of being jovial

I wonder what the life of someone who works carrying a sandwich board ad in Moscow is like.

He (let him be a man, though women seem to be just as many in the job) lives in a dinky flat on the very edge of the huge metropolis: twenty minutes by bus from the last tube station. The flat is small and gets quite chilly, but it is all he can afford with the rent so high these days – he was not one of the few people actually born in the city and is forced to settle for what little is available.

The owner is a lady in her fifties who wears brown cardigans, paints her nails red a tad too infrequently, and hardly ever shows up at the place, preferring instead to pick the money up every month somewhere on the metro. All the furniture reeks of a mixture of heavy perfume, cat piss, and age. Most of it is brown, the rest – of an indeterminate colour. Nothing matches, not even things that supposedly once came in a set. This may be for the best.

In the morning the tenant wakes up in a bed of flowered sheets, walks the cold floor to the cold bathroom, switches on the light, and brushes his teeth while staring at his reflection in the mirrored drug cabinet above the sink. Toothpaste water splashes onto the mirror, and his face looks as though there are white blotches on it. Shaving feels like too much of a hassle more often than not; probably, nobody looks at a walking sandwich board’s face anyway.

After a breakfast of salami sandwiches and tea (yesterday’s cold slimy leaves in a teapot which lacks a lid, a handle, and any sort of high tea glamour) he heads out. Though it is quite early, the bus is packed, and then so is the metro carriage. People knock and shove each other, trying to make way for their bags and paperbacks. It takes a while to get to the office, where the board is waiting, stored somewhere with dozens of its siblings. He works his head through it, then adjusts the straps.

Outside, the tourists have not woken up yet, and the working people only look at the ground they’re treading in case of encountering gum, litter, or someone they know but would rather not notice. The day is spent dragging his feet time and time again around the block, or repeating whatever the sandwich board says in a dull hollow voice, pestering the people who come out of the underground crossing. Every flyer he hands out gets thrown into the nearby bin or to the ground, never read, much like the board he is wearing.

When it is time to get home, he is worn out and angry. On the tube back home, he kicks and shoves with a vengeance, and does not get up to offer his place even to the oldest, most frail of grandmas. He does not call anyone; there is nobody to call. He watches tv for a while, eating something from a can, then makes some tea for there to be something stale to drink the next morning, goes to sleep, and dreams of being tired.

Or maybe it is all entirely different.

schoolhouse rock

I’m gonna sing you a song, oh baby,
Gonna sing you of my school.
I’m gonna sing you a song, honey,
Gonna tell it like it is.

I got one teacher, mama, she ain’t what she wants to be, no.
Got this one teacher, mama, she ain’t what she thinks she is.
She is tuppence short of a shilling, is what I think of her.
Yeah, two sleeves short of a shirt, that is what I think she is.

She says, ‘let us read this poem y’all, let us discover what it sez.
Let us read this good old poem here, let the prosody sink in.
I got a wonderful surprise for y’all, it’s a reading you ain’t heard.
Just read the first word of each line, yeah, there’s a secret meaning there!’

Refrain (from picking my school)

I got this other teacher, mama, well she’s pretty well-disposed.
Oh yes, this other teacher, mama, she just loves me like her own.
She says, ‘you’re real smart, kid, you stand clear out of the bunch.
You know the answers to my questions, so I’ll be stingy with your grade!’

She asks me why I even bother, why I go to this old school.
She tells me I’m too smart for all of this, so why ever go to school.
Quite surprisingly, oh mama, I agree with my whole heart.
Anyone is too smart for this, dunno why it’s me she’s singled out.

Refrain (at least from picking my major)

There is this third teacher, baby, oh she is boring like my shoe.
In fact my shoe is way more fun, yeah, at least it’s got some pretty stripes.
Once when she finished teaching early, she just stood there real still.
I say, she done finished teaching, and she just stood for half an hour.

She gives us papers to present, baby, real big scholarly works.
Yeah, big old articles that sometimes we need to spell out just for her.
And she just sits there like a doll, baby, sits there smiling like a doll.
She just nods her head and smiles, yeah, I bet she doesn’t get a word.

Refrain

Oh come on over to my school, yeah, come on over, be my guest.
Yes, pay a visit to my school, babe, it’s a historic building too.
But all the history there is, babe, does not make it worth the while.
No, all the history they boast of don’t make it less of a joke.

The last news that I heard was, if you drop out they’ll make you pay.
You heard me right baby, if you drop out they make you pay.
Pay back the price of all the years, yeah, all the years you went to school.
Because of everything it gave you, the things you took and won’t return.

So this song’s about my school, honey,
Education’s so much fun.
This is a song about my school, baby,
That’s where they taught me how to rhyme.

hello again, self-hater

This season they’re wearing skinny faded-gray jeans with wide, flowing tops. A very hate-provoking combination, seeing as skinny jeans make me look like a walking ham (nobody likes gray ham), and flowing tops on me either become figure-hugging (healthy full figure it is, huggable indeed) or resemble a sack underneath which things are happening. I am sitting in a cafe downtown and pretending to be working on my term paper on pejorative nouns in Polish dialects. Instead, I find myself applying those nouns to every girl in a dress and leggings that walks past me.

Umberto Eco had a reason to write his On Ugliness to go with his earlier work, On Beauty. These two do indeed always go together. Just look at more or less any group of girls in the street. I always feel like the one who is there to reflect the others’ beauty. The gargoyle against the breathtaking Gothic spire. The one who dressed in what was on the floor in the morning in a surge of what’s-the-use-trying self-pity.  To be honest, self-pity is a big part of my day. It has its own drawer in the office, so to speak.

The only people who have ever thought me beautiful were either married or directly related to me. My first love used to tell me I was pretty, but feigned surprise when a belt he’d pick up would fit around my waist. ‘Why, you are slender enough! Why do you look so chubby then?’ Those were the days when I was actually much slimmer than today for virtue of being sixteen. In the two following years, during our difficult long-distance relationship, I grew many a protective layer. When we met again in person, ‘You did gain weight’ were his greeting words. Of course, it’s not just the weight, rather, weight is the vanguard of all the things that are wrong, easiest to pick on.

The rest of the world’s population usually pick their words more carefully, all said with love, with the political correctness of today’s world, so full of deformity that it is becoming the new form, and everyone avoids speaking up on pretty much any topic. ‘This shirt looks lovely on you!’, ‘New haircut?’, or even, ‘You look so cute with that puppy fat!’ — a very recent addition to my collection of things that stopped being funny when I reached the age of 20. Or, to circumvent the topic of beauty altogether, ‘How clever!’, ‘What nice photos you take!’ –

I do try to take nice photos, craving beauty like the monster who lives in a dark pit craves light and warmth, devouring soft creatures who wander into its trap in the hope of absorbing some of their vitality and having it reflect on its own hideous scales. (Beauty as a priority is only superficial in those who possess it in plenty, much like food and money.) I also like to write greatly exaggerated self-deprecating blog posts which to read later, when the wave of hopelessness is on the decline, chuckling. ‘It’s not that bad. It’s not what others say, it’s what you feel. Don’t you feel good about your nose? Your ears? Prime stuff, those.’

flying notes

The airport in our city is a tiny one, consisting of two halls: pre-check-in and post-check-in (with a duty free kiosk with alcohol and chocolate). The lavatories have a storey to themselves, glorious expanses with numerous stalls and mirrors on every wall, so that one can watch oneself from every angle and see in reality how one becomes a crowd in and outside oneself.  There are echoes and soap in every dispenser.

There are no people downstairs. That is because there are not so many people generally in the airport. For instance, there is never a shortage of power outlets, despite their rather limited quantity. This might be a sign of outstanding human flow management; they do seem to be able to fill the planes, at least to a certain extent.

Miraculously, however, there are always familiar faces at the airport. Those faces usually have certain distinctive features, placing them in a certain, evidently almost nomadic, ethnic group. ‘Hi,’ says High Ranking Community Executive. ‘Have you seen Notorious Religious Figure? I’m sort of hiding from him.’ ‘Hi,’ you say. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen him. Good thing he doesn’t recognize me.’

‘Hi,’ says Notorious Religious Figure. ‘What is your name? Where did you spend Important Traditional Holiday?’ ‘Hello,’ you say. ‘We went to Religious Organization #2.’ ‘Ohh,’ a resounding groan. ‘Why did you go there? Did you not know I had a beautiful celebration which was entirely free?’ By this time Religious Figure is already towering imposingly over your seat on the plane. You feel somewhat responsible for calming him down so that he does not scare the other passengers. ‘We found out too late,’ you say. The plane takes off.

In the transit airport you try to keep an eye on the Figure, but the next plane is flying to the Holy Land, so he is lost in the throng of his likes, engaged in Vigorous Religious Activity against the darkening window looking out on the departure field, full of lights planes flickering cars workers luggage trucks things. You are halfway there, at least you’ve already caught up with the holylandish laid-back attitude towards time. Your flight is being delayed, there’s time to read. The Religious Activity ought to have been performed several hours ago, but Providence must not disregard time zones. There’s time to read.