Sad But True

Ever since my mom visited me in June, she's been periodically ranting about how my apartment is a fire hazard. I'm on the third story and if the building were to burst into flames, I would have to walk down the hall to the balcony to escape; plus, you can't lock or unlock my door on the inside without a key, so I'd probably die from smoke inhalation while scrambling around looking for my purse. Anyway, things like this make moms hyperventilate, so every time we talk she gets on my case to call K&G, the big owner co. (slangily referred to in these parts as "the slumlords"), and get them to change the locks. Since I'm a deadbeat, I haven't done it yet. So, she informed me yesterday that she called K&G herself.

And after getting all freaky-mom-like on the poor guy who answered--who, she assured me, "understood completely about the lock"--she started lecturing him about how there would be no escape for me in case of a fire. "There are two escapes," he countered. "The front door and the back door." "NOT IF SHE CAN'T FIND HER KEY YOU FOOL, PLUS WHAT IF THE FIRE IS IN THE HALL AND SHE CAN'T LEAVE HER ROOM?!?!?" my mom countered. "True," said K&G guy. AND THEN, my mom asked him, in all seriousness, if he would provide me with a rope ladder so I could escape out the window. "Uhhh, we don't provide rope ladders for our residents," he said, and she asked, "Well, if we gave her a rope ladder, would you provide her with something to attach it to??"

OH MY GOD, I'M SO EMBARRASSED.

Thoughts

When I was fourteen, and too shy to talk to anyone, I used to write quotations that I liked on the back of my hands with a black pen. I hoped that people would notice, approach me, and ask me about them, because I was too scared to initiate conversation myself. There was one in particular that I wrote and rewrote over and over again, but I can't remember what it was. Only a theme...something about "black and white." I think I'd gotten it out of Reader's Digest, which I thought was a highly intellectual publication.

The strange thing about me at fourteen was that if you had asked me why I had those quotations written all over my hands, I would have told you directly, "It's because I'm too shy to talk to people, so I want to be asked about them." I think it was around that time that I begin to realize there are two parts to each of us, the part that acts, and the "meta" part--the part with perspective, that understands that your actions (or non-actions) don't necessarily correspond with who you are and what you know and what you want to do. The part that acts is subservient to your neuroses and addictions and emotions. The part that knows can move one step beyond that and watch in a detached manner. I wanted so badly for the two parts to merge and align. But they didn't, and so I thought being dead honest...speaking with the meta part, instead of pretending that I didn't know it existed...was the next-best thing.

I don't know if I ever actually got asked about the quotations. No, I take that back--once, I had a tiny part in a play called The Canterville Ghost, and I carpooled with three other people from my neighborhood. One was a girl named Becky. She was a senior. After the last performance, she invited me over to talk about her drug-dealing past, right in front of my dad, who was driving us, and this other guy, Brent, who was really annoying. Brent started to beg Becky to invite him, too. "Please! Please! I promise I won't be annoying!!" But Becky wouldn't let him come, and my dad dropped the two of us at her house before he dropped Brent off, and I still feel guilty about it...

But I digress. Anyway, it was the middle of the night, and Becky said she was going to get me addicted to coffee, so I got pretty talkative, and she asked me about the quotation on my hand. It was the "black and white" one. I explained why I liked it. She responded that she'd interpreted it in a completely different way, which baffled me, because when I was fourteen I thought I was attuned to all the absolutes of the world and couldn't comprehend a difference in opinion, especially from someone whose opinion I respected. Wish I remembered what that stupid quotation was, and what I thought it meant.

I went to the Howard Dean rally at Navy Pier yesterday. It was about ninety-five degrees, and people had huge wet spots on their backs and sweat dripping down their chins. Despite the stereotype of his base as being aging hippies and tongue-studded college kids, to paraphrase The New York Times, it was a pretty diverse crowd, though overwhelmingly white. Dean's an excellent speaker, very charismatic, and I liked what he had to say. I haven't decided whether I unequivocally support him, but it's hard not to catch the very contagious enthusiasm of his followers. And I never thought I'd be remotely interested in the Democratic primaries nearly six months before they begin, but, well, it's maybe time to funnel my Obsessive Internet Research (OIR) into something somewhat relevant to reality. Also, it was pretty cool that the big thunderstorm waited to begin until immediately after his speech ended.

Oh, if anyone in the immediate Hyde Park area has a stepladder available, my messily-purple ceiling will give you a big kiss if you let me borrow it. THANX ALOT!!!11!

What would have been a nice outing to Ace Hardware to buy paint for my apartment abruptly turned doomwards when the guy who was mixing the paint asked me if Burcu was my daughter.

Then, when I was waiting outside for Burcu to purchase more of the badass hardware she likes, he came over to me and said, (Mexican accent) "You know I was just joking about her being your daughter. You both look very young, and very pretty!" I'm not sure if that made it better or worse.

Diary of an Encephalite

Life for the past four days has consisted of the following:

Wake up, take painkiller, eat a little, play Snood and listen to music, watch movie, go to Co-Op and buy cherry tomatoes, play Snood and listen to music, sit outside with Burcu and play gin, play Snood and listen to music, field worried phone call from parents warning me to "take it easy," read, sleep.

So far, I've watched 'White Oleander,' 'Punch-Drunk Love,' 'Shall We Dance,' 'Bowling for Columbine,' and 'Fargo.' 'Punch-Drunk Love' was my favorite, but I liked all of them. I think Burcu and will be singlehandedly keeping Hollywood Video in business this summer.

I've been very tired, achey, and fuzzy-minded, but my energy level is slowly increasing, and I expect to be feeling normal in a few days. Yesterday, though, I forgot to take painkiller in the afternoon and the headache came back. It's really strange knowing that my brain is inflamed right now, and the only reason I can't feel it is that I've taken a pill. The current theory is that I drank some unpasteurized milk from an encephalitis-ridden cow. But if that's the case, I don't understand why I'm the only one who got sick. I guess I'll never know.

Yeah, so this was a boring post. Cut me some slack, I have a life-threatening disease. You have my word, in a few days, you will once again have the witty anecdotes, piercing social commentary, and general brilliance that you have come to expect from Hubbard's Cupboard--i.e., yet another story of me tripping in a room full of people I want to impress.

I Went All The Way to Russia And All I Brought Back Was Encephalitis

Three days ago, after shuffling through the vegetable bin in my refrigerator, I stood up abruptly and whacked my head against the freezer door. It was quite painful. I was already feeling sorta shitty that day, and to top it off, I now had a splitting headache (noted in the previous post) that was due to the latest episode in the eternal sitcom of my klutziness.

At about six am on Wednesday morning, the headache was so bad that it woke me up. Gobbling ibuprofen didn't help. It just got worse and worse, to the point that I couldn't look to the left or right, or even move my eyes, without feeling like butcher knives were slashing at my temples. I was like, Danielle, you're an idiot. You've given yourself a concussion on a fucking refrigerator door. So I went down to the Student Care Center, explained the situation to them, and they checked for cranial bleeding or skull cracks (shudder). Nothing. The doctor just sort of smirked at me as she told me in so many words to take two aspirin and not call her in the morning. "Post-trauma headaches are very, very common," she said. Meanwhile I felt like I was going to vomit. But I nodded, biked to Osco, bought some Bayer, and fell asleep on Burcu's couch.

Headache did not improve. I decided to force myself to go to sleep. Didn't work. I tried laying down with a cold washcloth, a sopping-wet towel, a heating pad. My head was still a red-hot poker. And then the vomiting started. I think I threw up my eighth-grade graduation dinner. Literally, it was so forceful it took my stomach back in time. I had broken blood capillaries all over my cheeks. And when everything was gone, I just kept heaving and gagging and crying. It was AWFUL. I couldn't keep anything down, even the tiniest sip of water, and my head hurt so bad I couldn't even walk, and I was dying of thirst, and it was 2 AM, and I decided to take a cab to the ER.

By 9:30 the next morning, I'd given blood and urine samples, gotten a CAT scan and a spinal tap, and had been given an anti-nausea agent, a shot of morphine, and about three IV bags of saline solution. I'd described my symptoms to about five different doctors, and they all asked me, "So...you would say this is the worst headache you've ever had?" And I'd say, "Yes. By FAR." And they'd say, "By far?" And I'd say, "YES!!!" One of them returned about half an hour later, gave me a side glance, and asked slowly, "And...you would say that this is the worst headache you've ever had??" And I said, "YES YOU FUCKER, DO YOU THINK I WAS LYING BEFORE, DO YOU THINK I MAKE A PASTIME OF GOING TO THE ER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT GETTING POKED WITH NEEDLES SWAPPING MY NORMAL BODILY FLUIDS WITH STRANGE POSSIBLY ADDICTIVE ONES AND HAVING THEM EXAMINED BY A TEAM OF JADED DOCTORS??? EVEN IF I HAD HAD A HEADACHE LIKE THIS BEFORE IT WOULD STILL BE THE WORST BECAUSE THEY DON'T GET ANY WORSE THAN THIS UNLESS HALF YOUR HEAD HAS BEEN BLOWN OFF BY A SHOTGUN SHELL YOU IDIOT, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER ANYWAY," (cue sobbing). Actually, I just said, "YES" and he left. He was kinda girly, with a long blond ponytail.

So, at about 11:30, a grizzled, kindly-lookin' doctor came in. "Well," he said. "There was an interesting finding in your spinal tap fluids. Are there any...mosquitoes in Russia?" My first thought was, "OH GOD, I have malaria." But he said no...I have encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain tissue. Its most famous form being the West Nile virus, which I probably don't have. And he said, "But the good news is, you're young. You're healthy. You'll get over this." And they gave me a prescription for Vicodin and sent me on my way.

So, last night, doped up on Vicodin (which really, really works!), I begin obsessively researching encephalitis. It's pretty freakin' scary. For example, this is a page for survivors of encephalitis, who have suffered permanent brain damage because of it. Sheesh!! And this is a page with a lot of good information about it, and using it I deduced that I probably have tick-borne encephalitis, which is common in Russia. Maybe I got bitten during one of the "green stops" on the way to Sergiev Posad, when we'd go far, far into the woods to pee without being seen by driversby. And this page clinched my conviction, because my symptoms correspond almost exactly with those described. Oh, and only about a fourth of people who've gotten bitten get the second stage, which is what I had on Wednesday night (my first stage was the weird, flu-like sickness I had while in St. Petersburg). Of those...a percentage I don't want to think about get brain damaged. But since I haven't been seizuring or blacking out, I think I'll be okay. And I suppose it's sorta vindicating to know that all this wasn't actually caused by hitting my head against a freezer.

There's a huge gap in this story, and I want to fill it right now. Her name is Burcu, and she is a goddess, even though she hates it when I call her that. When I woke her up at two am and with an incoherent, "burcu....ithinkimagotohospital," phone call, she said, "I'm going with you. I'll be right over." Then she let me puke into her sweater when the cab driver wouldn't pull over. Then she filled out the patient form for me, sat with me in the waiting room and gave me an hourlong head, neck, and back massage, and explained to me the plot twists of "Boys on the Side," which was playing on the waiting room TV, because I couldn't turn my head to look at the screen. Then she went home, biked back at five am, sat with me while doctors asked me the same stupid questions over and over, went back to my apartment, and returned with all the food I asked for. Then she read to me from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and sang a duet of Disney songs with me. Then she went over to Walgreens to get my vicodin prescription and bought me cherry tomatoes, peanut butter, and sirloin steak. This girl deserves a medal. Oh, speaking of Burcu, my room is still littered with the birthday balloons she kicked into my room at seven am on Monday, when she carried in a "cake" made of rice cakes, peanut butter, cucumbers and brown rice with candles stuck in. She's a true friend, and I hope that I can someday make all this up to her.

The Triumphant Return!

I think this is about the fifth time I've used that title. Anyway, I'm back in Chicago, still jetlagged, with a stalagmite behind my right eye that pierces it painfully whenever I turn my head. Although the homesick vision I had of laying on my bed watching The Little Mermaid and all my Triumph the Insult Comic Dog mpegs with my cat curled up next to me has not quite borne itself out yet, I anticipate it coming into fruition tomorrow, just as soon as I finish an already-overly-long article for the O-issue of the Maroon.

Yesterday, my friend Burcu and I went to Target and, for my birthday, I bought a grey Schwinn bicycle that says "Ranger" on the side. I hadn't ridden (?) a bike in nine years, but you know what they say; after fishtailing a bit and crashing into a brick apartment building, it all came back to me. I think I've found my ideal outdoor activity. I'm too impatient to walk places, and I don't have a car. Maybe this'll actually get me out into the town as soon as I have the stamina to go farther than thirty blocks.

Finally, one comment about the blackout. It was pretty fun, especially when you have a ten-hour flight from Moscow to New York scheduled on its date of occurence. Actually, "fun" may not be exactly the word I'm looking for. Here is a chart.
Planned Journey: Moscow to New York, New York to Chicago. 14 hours.
Actual Journey: Four hours delay, Moscow to New York...oh, wait, Atlanta, two hours delay because Atlanta is "not equipped to handle" the four international flights that have unexpectedly arrived in the last hour, and because there is a shortage of flight attendants for trip to Chicago. Finally, Atlanta to Chicago. 22 hours.
Total Journey Time: 30 hours.
Total Sleep During Journey: 45 minutes.
Time Difference Between Russia and Chicago: 9 hours.

Hmm. I don't know. My vocabulary is failing me.

I think I may go outside with Burcu, play gin, and make snarky comments about the people who walk by. Again. It's good to be home!

Last Post About Titanic

There's a huge Russian guy at the computer next to mine, typing away on some essay. Suddenly his cell phone rings. The ringer is "My Heart Will Go On."

See ya on the other side of Saturday!

Another Funny Foreign Language Mishap

I've been meeting in independent sessions to discuss The Brothers Karamazov with a teacher here named Svetlana and a translator named Dasha. Svetlana is chubby and jolly with a big smile, and she does things like throw a crumpled up tea-bag wrapper at me when we're sitting in the lounge, or flick water at me after she's just washed her hands. In her Russian phraseology class, she'd call Erica and me, "hooliganki!" when we'd talk too much and "kotki!" (kittens) when we were good.

She's studying English, and last Thursday, she told me that I had "miracle eyes," which is one of the nicest compliments I've ever gotten. And then yesterday, Dasha and I were sitting at the desk waiting for her to begin her lecture on tha bruthas, when she pointed to Dasha and said something, and then me and said something, and then gave us a big smile. I looked at Dasha, confused, hoping she would translate. Dasha laughed nervously and said, "Oh, she's just practicing her English." I looked at Svetlana again, and she repeated herself, and suddenly I understood: she'd called Dasha "pussy," and me, "puppy."

I'm sitting here laughing as I type this. I told Svetlana in halting Russian that in America, "pussy" means...something bad. I didn't even bother trying to explain that "puppy" isn't really used as a term of affection in English. Then Svetlana said something, and Dasha translated: "but they use 'pussy' in English children's literature."

That's true. What a depraved language we've turned our English into.

Imponderable

The hot water is on the outs again in our building. Do I...

a) Heat up some water on the stove, pour it into a bucket, and then stand in the bathtub as I dump it onto my shivering body?
b) Go to the apartment of my host babushka (grandmother) and use her shower? Downside: she may drag me to the kitchen and make me shell caterpillar-infested peas with her. It has happened once already.
c) Feign cleanliness by using moist towelettes, body spray, and a handkerchief around my head until I leave on Friday, making my reunion with my Chicago shower all the sweeter?

I'm leaning towards C. I hope I don't have a seatmate on the flight back to Chicago.

Still Thinking About Titanic

When Titanic came out back in '97, I remember reading a blurb in Entertainment Weekly that listed all the funny little similarities between it and Say Anything. I think it alleged that they were actually the same movie, in disguise. It's true!! Think about it!! They're exactly the same movie!

Except Titanic is better. GO ON, ADMINISTER THE BEAT-DOWN!

I watched Titanic in Russian last night. It was great. I think it's okay for me to admit that now; hopefully, we've completed the progression from loving Titanic, to being sick of Titanic, to clawing all over each other claiming to be the first to realize that Titanic was never a good movie in the first place, past the backlash against said backlash, to not really giving a shit. Anyway, I think we can agree that although the love story was dumb, the film itself is pretty incredible. And don't even act like you didn't cry when you first saw it. Remember the mom whispering the poem to her children to make them fall asleep? Remember the old couple clutching each other on their bed? Remember the captain locking himself in the room? Remember when Rose gets in the boat, and it's being lowered down, and then she jumps out and runs back to Jack? That part was stupid.

Well, I didn't watch any of that. I stopped the movie right after the iceberg. All I cared about was the dumb love story. And I think I might watch it again tonight. TAKE THAT, PRETENTIOUS INDIE-FILMERS!!!

Somewhat Related
I have less than two weeks left of being a teenager.

Completely Unrelated
I enabled comments, but if no one posts any, they're history. C'mon, don't make me look like a loser.

Subject: CATS

Love your blog.
The only way I get letters from you.
Be careful of stray cats. They could have rabies, plus other dread diseases.
Love your mom
P. S. Being a mom, I have to tell you that the rabies shots can be horrendous. Then you might get HIV from the injections. Are you going to post this e mail on your blog? omigod


Can't Stop Laughing

From CNN.com:

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- After dropping hints about his political ambitions, movie action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger announced Wednesday that he will run for California governor in October's recall election.

The announcement came amid a flurry of such news in what has become a race among an increasingly odd mix of candidates. The filing deadline is Saturday and so far the Secretary of State has recorded 356 official notices of candidacy. There are another 155 notices the office has received that are unofficial.

Gary Coleman, who played Arnold Drummond in the 1980s sitcom "Diff'rent Strokes," entered the race Wednesday.

Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt has announced his bid for the governor's office.

Flynt suggested as his slogan "Vote for a Smut-Peddler Who Cares" and said he would expand gaming regulations to allow private casinos to have slot machines, which could be taxed by the state at 30 percent.

Gary Coleman??? See what happens when I leave you for too long, California?! I think it's about time I hired a babysitter.

The Russian Bum

Granted, I have only been in three countries in my entire conscious life, and one of the three was Canada, which doesn't really count. But I'm willing to bet that Russian bums are the greatest bums in the world. They have perfected the art of decrepitude.

They're so dirty it's as if grime has literally been baked into their skin, which is the color and consistency of leather, and the same color as their hair. Their hands are incredible--hairy and brown, with thick, stubby fingers and black fingernails. They smell like a windowless room crowded with a thousand unwashed humans. And they sleep anywhere, at anytime: sprawled out on a bench in the middle of a busy sidewalk at one p.m., on the cement floor of the train station in the middle of the night, or under the skeletal bushes outside of my apartment building in the early evening.

Every time I see them, I go through the whole privileged-American thought process, like, "Oh my God, what must be going through their minds? How do they see themselves? What are their stories? How did they get to be this way?" etc, etc, etc. I know these questions are unavoidably patronizing, to a certain degree, but I genuinely would like them to be answered. What happened to them? Being an alcoholic in Russia is a fate I would not wish on my worst enemy.

Cat Withdrawal

I miss my cat so much that for the past week I've been stalking stray cats on the street until they stop running away in fear and let me pet them. I followed this one cat for like three blocks while it trotted down the street, trying to act like it didn't know there was a strange girl right behind it, even though every few moments it would glance over its shoulder, see me, and pick up its pace.

I just really miss having a cat around--one in particular. He's chubby, warm, and cuddly, runs to my feet when I return home, and as long as I feed him, he seems to like me, and even purrs. With my cat, my bad qualities are irrelevant; bad moods and mistakes I've made and existential sufferings don't matter. He likes me anyway. I hope cats have long-term memories. I hope he hasn't forgotten me.

An embarrassingly short time ago, when I was young and uncynical, I thought that "got milk?" commericals were akin to public service announcements. I had no conception of a dairy industry, or, for that matter, a meat industry or a sugar industry or any sort of commonly-available food industry, and therefore had no idea that they were advertisements just like any other advertisements. I suppose this was due to the fact that most advertisements are trying to get you to buy shit you don't need, and in particular, one specific brand of shit you don't need. Whereas the commercials for milk and beef and cheese and whatever are just for Milk, or Beef, or Cheese, or Whatever, which everyone uses already (at least all normal people). And all of these things obviously just came from the great wide nowhere, or from little farms where young lasses arose at dawn each morning and trotted to the stables with a bucket.

So, now I'm curious about anti-smoking/marijuana/drug commercials. Someone on Metafilter compared them to this stupid MPAA website, which was apparently written by my kindergarten teacher to discourage the learning disabled from downloading movies. But there's an obvious monetary incentive for the MPAA people, which they are very upfront about. Is there some big industry that stands to make a huge profit if you quit smoking or if fewer people ever start, or are they made by a non-profit group that is seriously concerned for our collective health? If the latter is the case, why do people get so annoyed by people who really just don't want them to die? On a related note, why is the government so adamant about the War on Drugs? What's the incentive? Is it monetary? I'm genuinely curious.

Russian Fashion, Take Two

Today, I went to the open-air market with my friends Erica and Ian. The market is enormous--I wandered around for two hours and saw maybe half of it. It's basically a huge field covered with every Russian product imaginable. At each end, you have Russian babushkas apparently selling all their wordly possessions, which are laid out on dirty cloth blankets. In the middle, you have a big lot that's littered with different stands selling clothing, shoes, cosmetics, food, kitchenwares, couches, curtains, puppies, bootlegged computer software, you name it.

I was looking for sandals, but despite combing about fifty different shoe racks, I couldn't find a single pair that wasn't either elfin-toed, shiny-gold colored, seven inches tall, or with a huge gaudy flower parked in the middle. I decided to wander through the clothes stands and look for a tshirt that didn't say "69," "FBI: Fabulous Body Inside," or "Viva Cannabis," but unfortunately there were none. However, I did find a fabulous shirt with a big watermelon slices pictured on the front, and these words, in English:

"I am beautiful.
I am hungry.
I am hapy.
This is red.
I am very, very beautiful."

I totally would have bought it, but it cost like twenty bucks. Erica pointed out that it must be just like when American girls wear shirts with random Japanese characters printed across the front. I love foreign languages. COMEDY GOLD!

One of these days, I am going to draft a treatise on Russian fashion. Here's a preview of the topics I will cover:

• Thong bikinis on fifty-year-old women.
• Easter-colored Speedos.
• White, see-through capris worn with white thongs.
• Women's shoes with long, pointed toes that curl up elfishly.
• Mesh shirts worn by heterosexual men from ages 8 to 80.
• The complete lack of stigma towards--indeed, even veneration for--the mullet.

Great Story

Okay, before I begin, let me familiarize you with the Den of Sin formally known as the Hungry Duck, a nightclub in downtown Moscow. Here's a link to their website. It's a porno website. Its pornographic content consists solely of pictures of the crazy things patrons do while at the Hungry Duck. Here's a link to a Maxim article about the Hungry Duck, which reads like an article from True Confessions magazine for horny eleven-year-old boys. Oh, wait--that is Maxim.

We decided to go on Sunday night, one of the infamous "ladies' nights" at the Hungry Duck. If you didn't read the article, here's the gist: three nights a week, hundreds of horny Russian girls flock to the Duck from 7 to 9 PM, where they're basically juiced up with free liquor and gyrating male strippers in sequined thongs. Then, at 9 PM, after the girls are good and ready--they let the guys in.

In case you hadn't inferred this from the fact that we know all this stuff about the Hungry Duck because we researched it on the internet, Erica and I are pretty tame girls. Some may venture to label us--I don't know--nerds. Me moreso. An exciting Saturday night for me is sitting in front of the TV with my roommates and a big pot of borsch, watching Risky Business in our pajamas. But hell, it's the Hungry Duck! Clinton and his staff "made it their nightly home" when they visited Russia! It's not like we necessarily wanted to get pulled up on stage and have our shirts ripped off by Andrei the Stripper, but we figured that viewing the debauchery from a distance would be interesting and enlightening. Also, we're nerds and the idea of seeing naked people five feet away from us makes us giggle nervously and fidget with excitement.

Sunday afternoon was The Day Everything Went Wrong. We wanted to find Anglia, the British-American Bookstore. After combing side streets for an hour, we finally found its abandoned skeleton and a sign saying that it had moved to another random side street on the other side of town. Then we wanted to find Global U.S.A., an imported-foods grocery store. After walking up and down Moscow's main street, we discovered that it apparently had never existed. Finally, we found a regular grocery store, and Erica wanted to buy a banana, but she forgot she had to weigh it first and get a price sticker, and we were holding up the Japanese tourists in line behind us, and she didn't end up getting her banana. Then we found the actual Anglia, but it had closed ten minutes before we arrived. Then we sat in the lobby of the Hotel Marriott, trying to read, but couldn't because there was some guy with a jackhammer right outside the door. Then we decided to walk back to the metro. Right as we walked out the door, it started raining. BRUTALLY. I have never seen rain like this in my life. There were people sitting in a van outside the hotel who refused to get out and run the five feet from the street to the covered sidewalk lest they be pounded into the asphalt by the violent excrement of the Russian sky.

Throughout all this, I kept thinking, "Well, at least the Hungry Duck will be fun and interesting and we'll get to see crazy drunk naked people." It was like the bright light of hellfire at the end of the tunnel of doom that was my Sunday. The rain abruptly stopped about a half hour after it began, and we ran to the metro stop, returned to the hostel, donned our "club clothes," (if I call them "club clothes," does that make me uncool? Hell, I'm already uncool.), and set off for the Kuznetsky Most station.

The Kuznetsky Most station is like the dregs of Las Vegas, with little casino kiosks and bright neon lights and blaring Russian techno music. The Hungry Duck was supposed to be right to the left. We decided to look for a big cluster of anxious Russian guys and huge bouncers. We walked around and around the metro station, and up and down the side streets. In our club clothes and makeup and club hair. We couldn't find the Hungry Duck.

At this point I was beginning to think that the Hungry Duck did not actually exist, but was just a trick played on unsuspecting foreigners who were big enough wads to actually research the Moscow club scene on the internet. We didn't want to ask someone, so we just kept walking around and around the station. Finally, I turned to Erica and said, "You know, maybe it's that sketchy looking grey door with the big neon arrow pointing to it."

"No way!" she said. "It has too many creepy people wandering around in front of it!! That can't be it!"

"Well, what type of people do you expect would have sex with a random stripper onstage?!"

We had nowhere else to turn. Our hopes were deflated. We decided to approach the sketchy looking grey door, which, as you may have guessed, was indeed the Hungry Duck.

The sign said that ladies were one hundred rubles, but the bouncer, a smug looking fucker sitting on a stool, waved us in free of charge. "Thank you!" we said, flattered. Then we went up the stairs, turned round the corner, and....

The Hungry Duck was two guys sitting on bar stools while a sad early-90's song wailed loudly in the background.

We left.

That's my Hungry Duck story.

The evening did get better, though, as it culminated with us using our feminine wiles to convince the night guards to let us into a closed Red Square...but that's another story.