As did Slava and Natasha.
Archive for the ‘I make funny’ Category
It still weirds me out to see ‘Lolita’ equated with porn
September 4, 2011Different strokes, I guess…
…Yeah, I’m secretly 12 years old.
Important news of the day
August 2, 2011I find it hard to read Damn You Autocorrect while breastfeeding. The nipple keeps popping out of the kid’s mouth.
Although it’s a good barometer to determine whether or not Lyovka is actually hungry.
Nipple pops out on hungry Lyovka? Screaming, tragedy, scandal, etc.
Nipple pops out on Lyovka who’s not hungry in the slightest, but would like to experience the comfort and safety of mom’s breast (just after she sat down to finish an article, of course)? Contented sleep. Well, until roughly 6 minutes later, anyway – when it dawns on him that the breast has been removed to elsewhere and screaming, tragedy, scandal, etc. all ensue.
BREAKING: Crappy landlady continues being crappy
July 13, 2011The thing about our landlady is that she’s one of those old school people who never evolved past the Soviet Union – and thinks she’s the shit because her husband (who, to be fair, is a nice old man) is a retired army colonel. And because they have a dacha. Or something like that.
She views me as a scary mongrel, because I speak Russian but somehow have American citizenship and because we currently sleep on a mattress on the floor (having blown *a lot* of money on an orthopedic mattress back in the day, we haven’t exactly been keen on getting a proper bed). She’s not shy about expressing those views either, as she stares at me through enormous glasses that make her look like a not-very-adorable chipmunk. You’d think that a woman who has two grown kids of her own would know better than to harass a hugely pregnant chick – but no.
She overcharged us for the water last month, and when I tried to point it out, she told me that I “have issues.” This month, she admitted her error, but went on to insist that it was somehow my fault. Naturally, my husband was away on an audition, which was precisely the time she decided she needed to show up.
“You wouldn’t let me calculate the water bill properly!” She accosted me as soon as she stepped inside.
“Um, with all due respect – I sat there with you for an hour and a half, trying to tell you that there was a problem with it.”
“The problem is with you!”
Talking to the woman is like having a conversation with Mt. Everest, if Mt. Everest smelled bad and came crowned with a weird, bun-like hairdo that looked like a potato were growing on its head.
Today, while batshit landlady was sitting in the kitchen being batshit, my boss called me. We spoke for maybe 2 minutes, but we spoke in English, which was Frowned Upon.
“They think they’re so clever, speaking their foreign languages, but they’re not clever enough to CALCULATE THE WATER BILL!” She spoke to the picture of my great-aunt that I keep tacked up on the fridge.
I pretended as though I didn’t hear her.
Suddenly, she was squinting at the picture.
“Who is this?” She asked.
“My great-aunt.”
“She’s not wearing a shirt!”
“Uh, yeah, as you can tell – she was a very beautiful woman.”
“Was she also foreign?!”
“Actually, she’s the daughter of a famous Soviet general, she worked for the UN, and she was a veteran.”
“The daughter of a general?!”
“We have a lot of generals in our family,” I said grandly. Which is sort of true, if two is a lot for a pretty small family (my mother’s, to be precise) but not something I tend to press on people, unless they happen to be wildly impressed by rank.
This revelation shut her up for a while, but she wasn’t about to leave without a parting shot.
“Is Alexey Nikolayevich [my husband she always refers to with respect, using both his name and patronymic] back in Moscow yet?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I was starting to worry. You have a lot of strange guests around here,” she said in an accusatory tone, implying, I guess, that I’ve been cheating on my husband in the 8th month of pregnancy, or whatever.
The only guest I’ve had over lately has been a colleague of mine. Sometimes, delivery guys drop by with pizzas. One, a friend’s son came to pick up an external hard drive. But I guess I don’t need to do a whole lot to convince this horrible woman I’m a slut – I’m 26 and I wear make-up and little sundresses that look shorter on me now, due to the belly.
I’m much more creeped out by her implication that she tries to keep tabs on who visits us – undoubtedly by talking to the next-door neighbours. Or else she’s just making stuff up, which would be like her.
She left the apartment with overly large wad of cash we pay her every month, complaining loudly about how I “should not be allowed” to insinuate that she had ripped me off on purpose last month. Which is something I’ve never actually insinuated – she’s not a thief, she’s just kinda stupid and can’t count worth a damn and gets rude and defensive when you try to point that she’s multiplying the numbers all wrong.
I have a feeling she’ll try to evict us as soon as the baby is born. I mean, the woman gets horribly insulted when she forgets to give us the telephone bill – but then insists we somehow didn’t pay iton purpose.
“You didn’t pay the telephone bill!”
“You were supposed to give it to us, remember…?”
“You didn’t pay it!”
“How can we pay it if we don’t have the bill?”
“You needed to pay it!”
…
The Mt. Everest comparison is probably way too cool for this woman. I’m thinking of a brick wall in an old Victorian insane asylum just now.
I get it that so many people have it so much worse. Some end up renting from alcoholics who end up stealing their stuff, others end up renting from alcoholics who end up coming around every other day and asking for an “advance” on the rent, yet others end up renting from alcoholics who get them in trouble with the cops… but it’s my blog and I cry if I want to.
So apparently being female and on Facebook is all about seeking validation
February 27, 2011I hope Tracy Clark-Flory was just bored, or something. I hope it was a slow news day.
Because – and I mean this in the spirit of sisterhood and camaraderie – who gives a fuck?! And who sincerely wants to live this way? A Facebook friend gets married and posts a bunch of pictures and you’re “pressured”. A single friend jets off to Brazil for Carnival and posts a bunch of pictures and you’re left “bemoaning your choices” or some crap like that. You know, I never thought I’d get to use this word as an insult, but how… middle-class of you.
Is this actually an article about some sort of disorder people have? The “if there are people in my social network whose lives do not line up my own experiences and choices 100%, I’m going to get all down and confused about it – because my ultimately destiny is to be a herd animal” illness? Or does it come down to having way too much time on your hands? Do many men also agonize like this – and simply fail to mention it because men are never supposed to let on to anyone that they, well, agonize like this?
I also love this whole notion how one can either be a woman with kids or a woman with a career – at least according to the article. The one woman profiled who does have kids and a career comes to us via a secondhand account – and is to be pitied, because she sends people late-night texts or whatever. I mean, I understand that so many of these Salon stories are filler, but come on.
Social anxiety is an interesting subject. We express it in new ways (via FB, for example) but the basic concept has remained the same. For people who can afford to take time out of their day to worry about crap like this (is my carriage fashionable enough? Are my status updates witty?), it can indeed be a burden (and just for the record – I can be very sensitive to this stuff as well, when I have the time). But the way it comes of here is flat, one-dimensional and annoying – I don’t have sympathy for the women Clark-Flory profiles, I merely experience a twinge of mild horror at their preoccupations.
This is why I have liked some of the comments to this article:
There are actually grown adults who feel affirmed by making judgmental assumptions from a photo or two on someone’s FB page?
Apparently!
I find it incredible that sites like Salon need to make women feel like they are ‘un-affirmed’ because they are living the life they want.
Me too, actually.
Yawn. Your women friends are boring
Boring in a horrifying way that’s hopefully at least partially exaggerated for the sake of the article.
I’m a married woman very much in love with my husband and I post pictures of my baby as my profile pic because she’s cute. I also am a VP at a large entertainment company and I work hard to have a family, a career, and a relationship.
But you’re not affirming Katherine and Kelly’s choices, dammit! Come on, at least admit that you secretly sniff glue and masturbate to mainstream torture porn! It’ll make other women feel better about themselves! …
… In other news, I should probably just stop reading Salon.
So it’s only a “real” pregnancy when your belly is huge. Right.
February 10, 2011I technically live two metro stops away from work right now (hopefully not for long – for reasons I’d rather not get into at the moment), but since the Park Kultury station serving the brown circle line has been closed for renovation until the end of the year (!!!!!!!!!!), I prefer to take the bus these days.
Due to freak car accidents on the Garden Ring road, the bus isn’t always reliable, so I’m always absurdly grateful when it actually comes. I wasn’t feeling so grateful today, though, not after a host of angry older women, or babushkas, got on at the stop immediately after mine. They were all together in a group, and they were all furious with something. In Moscow, that’s not a rare sight.
Here I was, minding my own business, not harming anyone, listening to The Sessions, and otherwise enjoying my morning, when a representative of the Angry Older Women Group accosted me, speaking loud enough to drown out the band:
“Young woman! Why don’t you give up your seat?!”
“Um, I’m 4 months pregnant and my back hurts. I’m sorry, but I’m not giving up my seat.”
“Well! You don’t LOOK very pregnant to me!”
Getting up, I delivered a swift roundhouse kick to her face, proceeding then to…
OK, no, what I actually did I started screaming. I screamed the following, I believe:
“I’m wearing a winter coat! You want me to strip naked? Because I will! I’m so sick of you people! Mind your own business!”
The reason why I screamed this last bit has to do with the fact that I already had a bitchy encounter with a mall security guard recently. He wanted me to push a huge cart loaded with random crap away from the main doors – a cart that wasn’t even mine (he got it in his head that it was mine and then decided I was lying about it. I was hanging around inside the doors, waiting for my husband).
I said:
“It’s not even my cart, I’m not pushing it out of the way even if it was. I’m pregnant and that cart is huge.”
“You’re not noticeably pregnant!”
“Well as it happens, I have a dated note from my ULTRASOUND TECHNICIAN, WANT TO SEE IT?!”
I later told him that he better not complain when someone treats his wife or sister like he treated me. He tried arguing that he hadn’t meant to be rude. Right. At least the representative of the Angry Older Women Cabal just walked away, lips pursed.
The point of all this is – you don’t need to be visibly pregnant to experience physical challenges.
Oh, and people are dicks.
I don’t love this song any less now that I’m knocked up
December 1, 2010In fact, I kinda love it more.
And I’m totally smug. Totally.
Though this doesn’t stop me from making all sorts of jokes about how damn lucky this kid is right now, with it being -22 in Moscow, and him or her all snug in my womb. I mean, it’s so cold that your face hurts every time you go outside, but is that a problem for this kid? Hell no, it is not. Does he or she need to worry about purchasing a warmer pair of gloves or not being able to stand around and wait for the bus without his or her ass freezing off? Hell no, he or she does not.
He or she also has someone else eating for him or her, which is convenient and fascinating, really, because I can’t be five minutes late with my latest meal without feeling as though I am about to diiiiiiiiiiiiie. I’m forced to seek food like a rampaging zombie, interrupting meetings with “I’m sorry, I have to eat,” and reappearing after a few minutes with reheated lasagna in tow.
If anything, this kid ought to be smug as well, if not smugger.
On the Moscow metro. At a “more innocent time.” (lol)
November 28, 2010
Thank you, Random Dude on Escalator. You gave me much to smile about – that evening, and many evenings hence.
It’s an unpleasant, stressful sort of Monday
October 25, 2010So I want to make sure that yours is unpleasant as well…
