The sky is high. The Czar is far.
I don’t know how or why exactly. Maybe it has something to do with working up a healthy glow after arguing politics for four hours straight in one sitting.
Or maybe it’s because the country is poorer, and people’s perception of beauty is a tad more diversified and realistic.
Was walking home one evening, when she saw a girl and a boy standing outside a dorm (we live next to a small college).
The boy was yelling and swearing and pushing at the girl, and she was standing there shaking, and my mother, seeing and hearing all this, couldn’t help herself. So as she was passing by, she said, “you know, young woman, he doesn’t love you.”
The boy started shouting at my mother’s retreating back, but she kept walking.
The next night, my mother was outside, getting fresh water at the nearby drinking fountain, when she saw the boy from the other night, with a friend, both of them drunk.
“This is the woman who made my girlfriend leave me,” the first guy said.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” my mother said.
“Shut up and get your water,” said the other one. “Let’s hope you don’t choke on it.”
So my mother took her water bottle, and, instead of walking back to our house down an empty alley, with the two of them watching, she took a longer route, on the street, where there was light and people. She was being careful then, avoiding an attack.
But the girlfriend left, and maybe she’ll stay that way.
Kiev is grey, but great.
Here are some easy steps you can take to prevent the shelter staff from ripping your throat out and ruining your holiday:
1. Don’t stand by with a “awww-isn’t-this-cute” look on your face while your two-year old attempts to climb into the raging, bite-quarantined Pit Bull’s cage.
2. Don’t tell the front desk staff that your prospective pet is actually a present for your geriatric mother who “don’t know a German Shepherd from a gerbil ‘nymore, haw haw.”
3. Don’t start a screaming match with your spouse – particularly if it begins with “I think a little kitten is better than a little puppy” and culminates in “you never listen and I never should have married you.”
4. Don’t let your kids dribble snot all over the front counter.
5. Don’t ask the shelter staff if a kitten “comes in a different color.”
6. Don’t complain loudly when you realize that keeping puppies outside in freezing temperature is frowned upon.
7. Don’t talk about how you’d rather go to a “top breeder,” and proceed to qualify this with a resigned “Christmas is a time for giving, though!”
8. Don’t ask whether or not you can “out-bid” someone on an already adopted animal.
9. Don’t. Put. Your. Fingers. In. The. Fucking. Cages.
10. And finally, please, for all that is holy, don’t ask a thousand questions, especially if all of them are along the lines of “how do I get this thing to stop if it suddenly decides to start licking my ass?”
Holidy films are inevitably cheesy. Perhaps Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” is a kind of exception, but still.
What I like about holiday films is that they, also inevitably, show people coming home. I have been obsessed with the idea of home ever since I realized that I was no longer sure where that is anymore.
Home, to me, is warm food. Sharing a bathroom. Spending half an hour wiping off the great aunt’s acidy-pink lipstick.
It’s Kiev and Charlotte, South Kensigton and Shmeisani, Durham and the places that I have yet to go. It rises up like a mirage, shines like the Northern Star, plays like half-remembered music from another room.
And holiday movies seem to be the only thing that seem to satisfy this terrible cracing just a little bit – I coo and cringe at them just like I do at the people I love.
Well, except for Anna and MK – because we’re always too busy making “sexytime.”
Natalia A. 