That crappy landlady has died.
I can’t say she was particularly nice to us – but she wasn’t an alcoholic or a thief either, and sometimes, that’s the best you can hope for.
Rest in peace.
Archive for the ‘Friends & Neighbours’ Category
Have I told you guys that I became a sad playwright recently?
November 23, 2011As did Slava and Natasha.
You know why “call-out culture” sucks?
October 19, 2011It sucks because it’s largely derivative.
Someone writes a critique of, say, a TV show. Then someone else critiques the critique. Then a legion of ANGREE PEOPLE shows up in the comments section of the critique that’s critiquing the critique, furious about some WORD that the critic used, a word that is OFFENSIVE in some contexts, though perhaps not in others. The outrage spreads to Twitter, and causes exasperated status updates on Facebook, which then prompt philosophical debates in the comments to said updates – debates that are Godwinned within 24 hours, because that’s just how some people roll.
I don’t know about you – but I’ve got, like, real life white pride marches and violence against journalists in Moscow getting most of my attention these days. If someone pisses me off on Twitter, I might flame them for a second, then get on with my freaking day.
Call-out culture seemed meaningful when I was younger, richer and stupider. I have a child now, for God’s sake. I have a husband. We’re adults. We go to IKEA and stuff. I’ve got the receipts to prove it!… I seriously have better things to do.
Dear Scott Adams, it’s mostly FEMALE lions who hunt. And so on.
June 16, 2011So Scott Adams, the man behind Dilbert (oh the humanity!), showed his ass again. I read about it on Feministe. I’m not going to link to his original post – because screw it.
Still, I’d like to address it. Because oddly enough, I do agree with Scott Adams on one important point – there certainly IS a crisis of masculinity going on in countries like the United States. Though I don’t believe that said crisis hinges on the whole notion of “ZOMG men are not allowed to rape! Their natural instincts are being suppressed by hairy-legged feminist-types!”
First of all, let’s get real about rape – it happens, and most of the perpetrators get away with it. Every once in a while, you’ll have a terrible story like the Duke lacrosse fake rape thing – but the majority of sexual assaults are real, and nobody presses charges afterwards. There is usually too much shock, denial, and, hey, most women are raped by guys they know. It’s hard for them to reconcile such a breach of trust with the image they have in their heads – the image of the guy as just a normal fella.
Most rapists, I believe, don’t even refer to their actions as “rape.” Some are sick individuals who get off on the violation, but the majority, I think, don’t really get the concept of consent, and have been brought up to believe that certain women and girls are “asking for it,” etc.
There are also frequent cases of men raping other men, or boys. And I’m not just talking about prison. Hardly any of that ever gets reported.
And sometimes, women will rape men too. And most of these situations revolve around someone being drugged. And how many of those do you think are ever reported?
So the way I see it, we do, in fact, allow rape. Even though, as a society, we believe that it’s wrong – we don’t exactly deal with the issue. We merely pay lip-service to it.
Now, for some reason, Scott Adams seems to believe that rape is the most natural thing in the world. Which is odd, because how exactly does one define “natural”? Even in some of the most patriarchal societies to date – rape was framed as kinda a problem, whether for property reasons (“You violated my woman! But she BELONGS to me!”) or otherwise. Even societies that think of marital rape as no big deal, for example, tend to think of it as a violation – if not one that anyone needs to worry their pretty heads over it.
Scott Adams believes that men are basically born into a world in which their “natural instincts” are framed as “shameful and criminal.” It’s not that surprising to me that an American man, even a highly successful, even famous, American man should feel this way. Actually, fame and success are sort of part of the issue here, are they not? Being famous and successful, you have farther to fall. You are way more scrutinized. And as such, you being to scrutinize yourself more. And you realize that there are gaps in your self-knowledge. And you can’t address those gaps in a meaningful manner, because you have, indeed, had your sexuality pathologized for most of your life. Just not in the way that you think.
Americans are not big on sexual honesty. We’re not encouraged to make sense of our desires. The best most people can do is learning socially acceptable catchphrases, such as “no means no” – and hardly ever address the issue of why we need such catchphrases to begin with.
Scott Adams writes:
The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose.
Society is not organized this way “at the moment.” It has always had rules. Rules have shifted over time, but rules are also the general reason why the “lion and the zebra at the watering hole” is not a valid comparison to men and women and rape. Even if you cast notions of morality aside, our brains are more complex than the brains of lions and zebras. Such complexity demands order – and justification for said order. Order is a fluid concept – but it’s also what has allowed the human species to become dominant on planet Earth.
If a man is just an unrestrained horny animal – then the entirety of human history fails to make sense. Look at Einstein. He was really into ladies…
… In fact, he was a cheater, some people even claim he was a rapist – or just a creep of sorts. He was also, um, Einstein. All jokes aside, I somehow doubt that Einstein developed the theory of relativity simply as a way to avoid dealing with “natural” sexual frustration. Rather, Einstein was a complicated human being, like everyone else, and he had his sexual urges and possibly even his violent urges – and he had his urge to do complex theoretical work. He had an oulet for his ideas – he probably had way less of an outlet for his issues with women. Was his excellence in physics unnatural? Whereas his troubled personal relationships were just dandy?
“We have no choice but to blame men for bad behaviour” – oh no! So if Einstein decided he was just going to run around and hump everything in sight, and he had never become a great physicist, this would be, like, a good thing? A natural thing? I’m fairly certain that Einstein’s brain was bigger than his dick – and I’m also fairly certain that nature, the Holy Grail of guys like Scott Adams, planned it that way – but using one and not the other would be, like, OK? And in the best interests of the human race? Wow, who knew?
I think the real problem with guys like Scott Adams is this whole fact that most American guys are brought up with the idea that they are undesirable (in fact, Einstein may have had the same problem growing up in Munich!). Just like women, when you think about it, but this insecurity is taught in a different way. The average American guy internalizes a lot of bullshit about “alpha males”, and judges himself accordingly. The lucky few are natural-born pussy magnets, the rest have to scramble and compensate somehow – that’s the game. It’s really messed up, and I think it screws up boys big-time. These boys are not taught to value themselves – at best, they’re taught how to be cocky as a means of covering up a bunch of self-esteem issues. They’re taught that their sexuality is totally separate from the rest of their identity – like an atrophied muscle. And women, they’re taught, don’t really like them. And they should pay women back in kind – should they get steamrolled or otherwise humiliated. So hating women and desiring women physically is framed as normal.
It’s a crappy situation and it affects more people than Scott Adams could shake a “round peg” at.
Yes, a fighter and NOT a mage
June 1, 2011I have walked into D&D games and had some snarky asshole male gamer ask me where my chainmail bikini was, or give me shit for wanting to play a fighter rather than a cleric or a mage…
Ren, Sexism in Gaming series
I like drawn out, single-player RPGs with a bunch of side quests – games I come back to for months on end, which are an entirely private experience (private, in the sense that I’ll have an amused member of my household stand over my shoulder and say things like, “Just give up on the Deathclaws* already”). I don’t really want to interact with other gamers most of the time; hell, I don’t even connect much to the “Little Big Planet” network. I’m a lone wolf, goddamit, and I just don’t want to deal with douchebags. And even if you don’t have voice chat, the douchebags will pick you out if you happen to have a female-sounding nickname in particular.
Still, because I invest so much time and energy in my characters, I do, occasionally, want to share them in some way or another. When I was playing “Elder Scrolls”, I was particularly proud of my character – a female Dark Elf I named Mido (I named her after my then-boyfriend’s brother, because I bought the game around the time of his high school graduation, as corny as it sounds). Mido was a warrior character, specializing in swords and heavy armour. Some of that heavy armour made her look a little bit ridiculous, but I still give props to the game designers - no stupid chainmail bikinis for my Dark Elf.
Now, there are plenty of cool spells and the like in “Elder Scrolls,” but I always felt more confident with a sword. And what I found is that many people viewed the mage-type characters as having been designed exclusively “for girls.” Why? A whack of the sword indulges my inner bloodthirsty savage, dammit. In “New Vegas,” I similarly enjoy blowing the heads off various people and creatures. I can’t wait for the inevitable bloodshed and doom of “Skyrim.”
I don’t think there’s anything inherently “girly” about a mage character either. In “Elder Scrolls,” I found magic trickier to pull off, truth be told. I could never aim my spells right, for example – and I was often pretty lax about acquiring the more complicated ones (until I got to the Mages Guild storyline, I suppose). I always felt that battle magic in “Elder Scrolls” required more work, and as such, was more challenging.
Same goes for sneaking and archery skills in “Elder Scrolls” in particular. The former I eventually mastered, the latter I pretty much consistently sucked at. In analyzing why, I’ve come to the conclusion that these activities weren’t nearly as useful to me in channeling my own aggression. Like Ren points out in her series – gaming is often about being able to be someone you’re not, someone you want to be. I’m not good when it comes to anger issues – wiping out a nest of vampires in a cave somewhere does actually help, even if all of the action occurs on a television screen.
Snobs dismiss gaming as mindless escapism, but the act of escaping is never particularly mindless. It tells you a lot about yourself – as you get busy lovingly putting down a bunch of frag mines in order to appropriately welcome an approaching Deathclaw or get ready to finally say goodbye to Umaril the Unfeathered, the Liberace to Dagon’s Rob Zombie. I have found the escapism especially useful while pregnant, because it’s not as if I can run a few kilometers right now in order to deal with rage. Angry pregnant ladies, take note: gaming can be good for you.
hey bitch
As a writer, I pay special attention to plot arcs in RPGs, and I find the whole structure of games to be very useful when it comes to writing fiction, though that’s a whole other story. For now, I’m just grateful that the medium exists in one way or another – and I’m glad that it’s evolving. And being an asshole to women because more and more of them are also claiming it as their own will, hopefully, get old eventually. I mean, look at it that way – my husband likes me way more after I’ve just killed a bunch of zombies. I become a more pleasant person. Everyone wins.
* – For those who aren’t familiar with the Fallout series, Deathclaws are bad motherfuckers, and not in an endearing, Samuel L. Jackson way either. They look like Satan on dinosaur legs, and repeatedly hand your ass to you.
I write about naked grandmas… I mean, naturism – for Feministe
May 25, 2011Yay.
The one thing I really didn’t mention in that post is how naturism has been a big part in helping me deal with chronic pain – most likely because so much of it centers on the idea of self-acceptance. You don’t go strolling naked into the waves without a sense of acceptance, I don’t believe. Not in this day and age, anyway.
On chronic pain: love your body, or it will smack you down
May 15, 2011Thank you for your donations that are helping see me through what’s been a really difficult time and are helping me buy more time as the result. Although I’ve managed to carve out a fairly decent life for myself in Moscow, medical bills have been an absolute nightmare – even though I have managed them in such a way that I would have never managed them back home in the States. The good thing about life in Moscow is that you are still able to afford decent doctors if you are middle-class and don’t have comprehensive insurance coverage – but even so, the expenses can add up when you’re in my situation, and then add up some more, and more.
In addition to taking care of my eyes and other parts of my body is the amount of physical therapy I have needed, just to manage pain. I’ve been living with chronic back pain and stomach for a while – the direct result of not taking care of myself, not loving myself, really, not allowing myself a break. The pain was bad before, but pregnancy can make it unbearable – entire sections of the physical matter which I occupy can light up in agony so great that it feels as though my nerve endings are being fried. And then I wish that they were being fried. I wish that someone could take a blowtorch to them. The hatred I feel for my own physical weakness in that moment makes the pain that much worse.
When I get treatment – which I can afford right now because of your donations – I’m often told that I shouldn’t be in so much pain. That there is more going on here than a physical problem with my spine or a problem with the lining of my stomach. The tests, the pre-pregnancy x-rays, the medical history – all tell one story, but there’s another story running parallel to that, one that my physical therapist was able to pin down after many other medical professionals just shrugged, because he’s seen it all before.
And the story is of how much I have hated myself and hated my body, down to the point where me now asking it “hey, could you please carry this child” results in a resounding “I suppose I can – but YOU CAN GO TO HELL.”
Psychosomatic pain is not a phenomenon that’s well-understood, but when you have doctors telling you, for years, “Look, you’ve got some physical problems, but you shouldn’t be screaming in agony right now, Jay-sus,” it becomes something worth looking into. “Do you just have an adverse relationship with your body?” My physical therapist finally asked me. “Do you even know how to relax it? Do you realize that you could be making yourself worse?”
Besides working with the physical manifestations of the problem, we talk about the psychological aspect. “You need to let go of this,” he says as we work on trying to get my collarbone to stop acting like a huge needle that’s been inserted by some sadistic god into my skeleton for the sheer fun o fit. I’ve been learning to exhale it – this feeling of agony and desperation. Spinal problems are problems of flesh and bone, but the if the flesh and bone are constantly being told to go screw themselves, you may never get better.
When we first met, my husband began asking me questions about my relationship with my body. “You do realize, that we have the chance to talk right now and interact, because we’re occupying physical bodies?” He would ask me. “Look what I can do,” he’d say, and run his fingers up and down my arm. “I can do that because you have a body and I have a body.” It was the mere fact of the existence of our bodies that allowed for the creation of The Globe, who always sits very patiently when mummy is getting help for her ailments, and only begins to cautiously tap out his Morse code when mummy gets to the point of shrieking from how much it hurts. No bodies = no Globe. It’s as simple as that, but something buried deep inside me has yet to accept that.
But I’m trying. I really am. And if there’s anything useful I can take from this experience so far and share it with the readers of this post it’s the following – Don’t despise yourself. It’s totally not worth it.
And Tara agrees, love-hate relationships are not healthy:
One for Japan
March 17, 2011One of my favourite bands of all time are the Beat Crusaders, and one of my favourite covers of all time is their cover of “Dancing Queen”:
Enjoy – and let’s all keep our fingers crossed.
The New Year in Kiev, by Sasha Andrusyk
January 5, 2011
© Sasha Andrusyk. Kiev, Ukraine.
My blood pressure fell suddenly, like it sometimes does these days. I came alive maybe half an hour later after Sasha took this picture, when medicine was found.
The baby started moving just two days before. It woke me up on the train. It’s too early for me to actually feel kicks, but I feel it float to the surface from somewhere deep inside me, like a bobber, up to meet my hand or the Man’s hand, when we place it on my just slightly rounded stomach. The Man felt it move for the first time on New Year’s Eve, in a cafe on a central street in clean, sparkling, snowy Kiev. “Feel that?” I asked in between sips of hot chocolate. He did.
On the train to Ukraine, I had felt three gentle taps when I used my hand to trace the movement. It was like someone knocking on a door in the middle of the night. The train had been standing still in the snow, under the sudden stars, the snow clouds having parted briefly. I had been looking at the sky when I felt it. There was no motion, the only motion was inside me. “I’m taking you to visit the place where I was born,” I told the baby in case it didn’t realize, and then the train started again.
Expats! In Moscow! Drinking! Banyas! Girls! And wishing daddy could see how naughty you’re being!
December 22, 2010Disclaimer: Deirdre Clark, who uses the pen name Deirdre Dare, used to write a column for The Moscow News. MN is also the place where I work. Just putting that out there.
The best part to this piece by Anna Blundy, on the life of Western expats in Moscow, can be found in the comments.
This is what someone named “sence” wrote in:
Dear ladies,
If you managed to live in a city and a country of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chechov, Pushkin, Chajkovskij, Rackmaninov etc. etc. and all you could see was nights clubs and saunas – it is certainly not Moscow’s problem!
I may not agree with some of that spelling, but I certainly agree with the sentiment. Moscow is what you make it.
It’s easy to veer off into slut-shaming when discussing the writing and individual experience of the likes of Deirdre (whom I’ve never met, unfortunately) or Anna Blundy, or, for that matter, Western dudes and the local women who go out with them. I condemn sex-tourism because it is rife with exploitation and the violation of the basic rights of sex-workers, but when it comes to people’s dating habits, who the hell am I to judge? What irks me is not promiscuity, or drinking, or whatever – what irks me is the idea that “all of Moscow” is essentially like this.
Like Anna Blundy, I used to feel threatened by women who compete for the attention of rich foreign men. But I felt this way before I moved to Moscow, because I could afford to entertain all sorts of cliches about the place. Now that I’ve actually been here for a while, I’ve settled into a certain “scene” (or else several overlapping scenes) and am quietly going about my business, despite the occasional scandal. Or race riot (hardy har har…).
If you go by the articles, Western expats in Moscow are reminiscent of your typical class of incoming Duke freshmen. A whole lot of them were nerds back in school, and now it’s totally important! To prove! That they too can party!
Of course, in most cases, it’s always a little bit more complicated than that. But like any group, expat writers in particular will want to perpetuate a certain myth about themselves. And if they say that they lead soulless or otherwise unsatisfactory lives as part of perpetuating said myth, they’ll also be quick to point out that it’s totally not their fault to begin with. I mean, Moscow is a scary place. You have to deal with the never-ending terror of existing here somehow.
Seriously speaking, the part in Blundy’s article that left me feeling dismayed was the following:
Emma, a 28-year-old lawyer, went to Moscow on a six-month tenure, attracted, she said, by “the offer of an adventure”. She was keen to escape what she describes as “the claustrophobia” of London and the small professional world she lived in. She was not disappointed. “There was a sense that you could get away with bad behaviour in Moscow. No-one whose opinion you really cared about would ever find out,” she explains. [Emphasis mine]
Well dang, Emma, sweetheart. If you’re staying in a huge city, surrounded by all kinds of people, and there’s no one next to you whose opinion you really care about – then I almost feel as though your life in this city… kind of sucks? Forget falling in love – it looks like you’re not even making new friends. Or, you know, even going so far as giving a damn about the casual acquaintances you meet. Forget about Moscow being scary – you’re kind of scary, love.
I lived a very expat-y life in both Dubai and Amman, but at no point did I feel as though there was no one near me whose opinion I really cared about. You’ll say that living with an Arab dude was probably the reason for all that – but it wasn’t just my then-boyfriend who provided me with the emotional ballast that most human beings require. I had friends, acquaintances, colleagues; I took an interest in my neighbours, for God’s sake. I never really understood why, say, the Nigerian woman next door felt the need to beat her husband with an umbrella in the street on a number of occasions that I saw them out together – but these individuals sure as hell interested me as a couple. I was grateful for being invited to weddings and parties, because life did get lonely, and many social barriers came down after a few glasses of champagne or a few dances.
Amman was impossible for me in particular, but I’ll always remember it, and the country surrounding it, as stunningly beautiful. I’m grateful for having experienced life there – even if I couldn’t hang on to it, even though it was too hard. I have no feelings of bitterness and regret. Some of that surely has to do with luck, but some of it also has to do with the fact that I noticed Amman, and the people living in it.
When I read Anna Blundy’s descriptions of poor wee expats being trampled over by life in “chaotic and brutal” Moscow “that fosters a feeling of nothing to lose,” I wonder if these people and I live in the same city after all. I mean, don’t get me wrong – chaos and brutality are things I associate with Moscow as well (I spent 12 years in the good ol’ South, and my native Kiev is, to borrow the words of the playwright and screenwriter Natalia Vorozhbit, “a quiet little swamp”), but I also associate beauty with Moscow. Moscow is lying in the grass in the park until five a.m. in the summer, and snow squeaking underfoot in the winter. It’s a place where your friends are unashamed to quote poetry at the dinner table once the evening begins to wind down. It’s blizzards being suddenly overtaken by an endless blue sky and the setting sun setting ice floes on the Moskva river on fire. In Moscow, people still argue about theater like it matters. Prominent journalists write profanity-laced personal blogs. Dagestani taxi cab drivers hand you mint candy when you like down in the backseat, wailing about how pregnancy makes you car-sick.
I don’t care to classify Moscow as a “good” or “bad” place, but it certainly is a place, and I think that most people I know, expat or local, do, in fact, have a multi-dimensional view of it. I feel that the writing of Deirdre Clark, for example, is much more nuanced than people give her credit for. And it’s an honour to work with someone like Phoebe Taplin, who notices things about Moscow that many people who were born here have so far missed out on. It’s not about being June Cleaver and not going on benders (being pregnant right now, I do miss the benders), it’s about seeing beyond the benders. It’s about visiting a museum every once in a while, or, I don’t know, buying a CD off one of those street artists who’s actually pretty good. Or discovering you really do like Uzbek food.
In the immortal words of Foamy, “Live. Fucking. Life.” – Not because you’ll necessarily spend the rest of it here, but because whatever time on earth you do dedicate to Moscow will matter just as much as anything else, in the end.
