Natalia A.

Your daily dose of WTF: of crayfish, curlers and impudent teenagers

Just a typical photo session in my household in Ukraine:

stabbing my brother in the face with a make-up brush...

I’m not really sure why I’m in curlers. I’m not even going out. We do have live crayfish at the house, and the cat broke a crystal honeypot trying to escape from them. So maybe the curlers are there for the sense of solemn occasion. Or maybe to commemorate the fact that I ZOMG have new hair again! Back to blond, it would seem. They understand blond here, in Ukraine. In fact, they start screaming and flapping their arms at you if you try to go darker.

mom decides to provide ambiance with sandwiches — mom decides to provide ambiance with mini-sandwiches

Right now, there is drama because my brother refused to consume the sandwiches pictured. I’m not really sure how to defuse the situation, to be honest. Walking around looking ridiculous doesn’t seem to be helping.

I feel bad for the live crayfish because they are, apparently, fated to become cooked crayfish once the resident crayfish expert, Uncle Vasya, is due to arrive. I console myself with thinking that once I am dead, many creatures will feast on my body. My brother, to go by this picture, looks perfectly capable, for example.

let's try looking like normal siblings just this once

And we succeed for a second. Well, aside from the curlers.

Uncle Vasya almost here. Getting rid of curlers and trying to function as family unit in 3…2…1…

… Aw, what the hell. Here are the crayfish with a suspiciously Ukrainian-themed plastic bag:

i could bust out the fancy Olympus for these guys, but somehow i don't think they'd care

Isn’t this like a great little mini-horror film going on in our kitchen sink?

Man with 86 kids going for 100… and he gets applauded? Really?

Remember the outrage over the Octo-Mom – Nadya Suleman? How come I am hearing nothing of the sort directed at Hot 100-Dad? Could it be because of… *gasp* sexism?

Because Islam only allows 4 wives at a time, I’m assuming he marries and then gets divorced to make room for the next crop of broodma…sorry, women. How nice. While it’s no doubt that being married to this dude bumps up your status as well, I would feel genuinely sorry for any woman who became attached to him on an emotional level. And God forbid you should marry him and then discover that you can’t have kids. What value would you present to him then? For all my criticism of religion, I somehow fail to remember any passage in the Quran that women are animals that a man selects for purposes of breeding and celebrity before discarding them.

“Abdulrahman said he supports his family through a military pension and donations of hundreds of thousands of dirhams from sheikhs who want him to make his century.”

While it’s good to know that at least these people appear to have enough to eat – all of the men who are attempting to vicariously live through this dude make me giggle. The “prize sire at a barn” mentality is demeaning to both men and women, but in a world where masculinity continues to be grotesquely distorted, it’s no wonder that other men’s insecurities would continue fanning the flames of this spectacle.

The UAE has the worst per capita carbon footprint in the world, and something tells me that Hot 100-Dad isn’t going to improve that situation. This is consumption at its most cynical, and no amount of platitudes about the joys of family can quite cover that up. If children are a gift from God, so are natural resources. Guess what’s going to happen to them if this mentality is encouraged further?

This is all beside the fact that assuming that one person is even remotely capable of loving one hundred separate children is beyond naive. This entire set-up ceased to be a family a long time ago.

And please don’t give me any noble savage crap about how “it’s their culture.” The average Emirati family has 2.3 children. Considering the environmental catastrophe we humans have already set into motion, that is a very good thing.

Tuesday Music: the kappamaki/Kappa Mikey edition

I had a teacher in high school, an old-school Chinese dissident, who used to say “why are you so tired? It’s only Tuesday,” upon encountering our miserable faces in miserable little rows on Tuesday mornings. I think he had a point.

It was a lovely, hot Tuesday, anyway. My new hairdresser convinced me to go blonder. My aunt essentially told me that I’m an old hag past her sell-by date and that I will end up destitute and alone and deservedly so (not her fault, really, she’s been zombified by a religious guru for years – the same guru who once told me I should join a harem). I bought some articles of clothing I’ve been coveting, after realizing they had miraculously gone on sale. I had drinks with someone I really like. A falling yellow leaf swooped down from a tree and straight down my dress. I saw a man tilt a woman’s chin and kiss her as teenagers danced down a sidewalk and an old woman in a scarf argued with a street-vendor, and missed being kissed like that. *wink*

Because of the awesome Kanon Wakeshima interview we just published, this one probably ought to start out with a cool Japanese band, no?:

Continue reading “Tuesday Music: the kappamaki/Kappa Mikey edition”

So… about Otty Sanchez…

If you haven’t heard the grim news, this somewhat maligned Salon headline speaks for itself: “How could a mother eat her own baby?”

Well, then.

When something as horrific and tragic as this happens – a new mother, a schizophrenic, splits with the baby’s father, who is also schizophrenic, goes into a tailspin that may or may not be related to the break-up, begins hearing voices, murders her baby and consumes some of his body parts before trying to kill herself – it’s only natural to say that all of this could have been prevented. Where were social services as she was breaking down? Why was she off her meds? Where was her doctor? Why couldn’t the dad step in and take an active role? Why was she released from the ER within 24 hours after trying to get help? Why was her sister apparently lulled into believing that Otty was OK to care for the baby? Why why WHY?

There is legitimate debate to be had about the entire incident – it goes to the heart of how society treats both new mothers and the mentally ill. It raises questions about the horrific state of the U.S. healthcare system. It reminds us about the oft-ignored importance of fatherhood alongside motherhood. And so on. And so forth.

But I also firmly believe that yes, sometimes horrible things simply happen. Some people get sick, and then they get sicker, and then they get so sick that they walk into some dark and unknown territory for which there is no map. The lights in their brains flicker. They look for help, and find none. In one crucial moment, there is nobody to hold them back from something monstrous.

Continue reading “So… about Otty Sanchez…”

A moment of marshrutka goodness

I was coming home late from the center today, riding in a marshrutka (a small bus where you can request stops). I wasn’t really paying any attention to the people around me, engrossed as I was with the latest playlist on my iPod and the wind on my face, but I did notice a couple of guys sitting on the opposite side of the marshrutka. They looked to be about my age. They were laughing, but not too loudly, and one was drinking a beer. Just a couple of average guys in jeans and t-shirts. Long noses. Clean-shaven, jutting chins. Going to a party, maybe.

When they got off at their stop, the marshrutka lingered as more passengers boarded at the back. The streetlight caught their figures – their trim waists. A gust of wind shattered a cluster of leaves on a branch and they rained down onto the boys’ long, wavy hair, and both shook their heads from side to side, like horses shaking their manes.

And it struck me, how beautiful they are. And how beautiful it is to be this young, and to be headed off somewhere with beer on your breath and street lamps lighting your way.