Omigosh, I was reading the kefir page at Wikipedia and it turns out: The milk is incubated at room temperature for a day or more, during which the lactose is fermented. The resulting beverage is a sour, carbonated, slightly alcoholic drink.

It's got alcohol!

No wonder I was so out of it!

So my sleep schedule is now thoroughly fucked up. I blame society. And my uterus.

Russia Reckoning Part V

I spent my last four weeks in Russia enveloped in a fog. According to this page, the initial phase of tick-borne encephalitis is "non-specific with symptoms that may include fever, malaise, anorexia, muscle aches, headache, nausea, and/or vomiting." That's pretty much how I felt, minus the vomiting, although it sure as hell lasted longer than two to four days. And don't let the "anorexia" fool you - the only things I had an appetite for happened to be sausage, cheese, cashews, and kefir - the ideal diet for anybody with a brain disease.

Tver remained as dull and dusty as ever, and aside from the four glorious days Erica and I spent in Moscow, I was bored and lonely and obsessed with time passing, which of course made it creep by all the more slowly. Meanwhile, one of my best friends had decided he didn't like me much after all, and ended the friendship over e-mail - which is what I was referring to when I mentioned "the shittiest week of [my life]" in this post, in case anyone has been wondering about that all this time.

Of course, I was on a dream vacation compared to Anna, the Tver pariah. She continued to feign obliviousness to being ostracized - I say "feign" because how could she not have known, at least on some level? She continued to try and start conversations with people, including me, and I would force myself listen. There was a part of me that would think, "Get a clue, Anna! Nobody wants to hear your inane stories!" but I'd try to quash it.

Once I went down to the bank of the Volga river with a notebook and tried to write it all down, as a fiction story. I wrote:

"Margaret is of medium height, with long, orange-colored hair that crimps half-heartedly down her back, a face splattered with orange freckles, glasses, yellow teeth. She has large masculine hands with short, stubby fingers, pillowy arms covered in mosquito bites and moles, and a gait that rocks from side to side, slowly. The inside thighs of her jeans are probably worn out from the friction. When she wears shirts with a collar that droops down her back, huge red acne blotches peek out over it. She talks slowly but is quick to laugh loudly. She's 21, a third-year at Bryn Mawr.
For the first two weeks that I knew Margaret, I did not realize she was annoying."

That was as far as I got. So you see, I was and am just as superficial and vicious in my thoughts as they were. I was just more willing to try to suppress them, or release them under the guise of a story, something literary and hence justifiable.

I remember one more specific anecdote. Erica left two weeks before I did, and the day before, Chris threw her a going-away party at his apartment. I went only because Erica was my friend. Anna arrived after I did. There was one woman, a Russian language teacher at a midwestern university, mid-thirties and married, who was sitting down next to an empty seat. As soon as Anna entered the room, this woman grabbed a passerby and hissed, "Sit down here! I don't want Big Red sitting next to me!"

Anna left a few days before I did, and I can't remember if I said goodbye. Writing down my thoughts on her thoughts and reactions and memories would be speculation at best and cruel at worst. As for myself, of course I was struggling with the triangle of identifying with her, identifying with the others, and rejecting both of them. And I guess a fourth option would be not exactly identifying with her, but still rejecting the others and trying to befriend her. But I couldn't do that.

I've never been able to befriend people I dislike. I can't bring myself to even speak to them most of the time - I absolutely freeze them out. Unfortunately this is pretty much indistinguishable from my usual shyness, but anyway, my social issues aside, my point is that I think that if Anna hadn't been so completely ostracized, I probably would have disliked her from her words to Masha and ignored her the whole trip and not given it another thought. The only reason I spent and spend time puzzling her out was because she was shunned by everyone else.

I think most people must have a story of being social pariahs. When I was in fifth grade, I remember stepping onto the blacktop during recess and realizing I had absolutely nobody who I felt comfortable approaching and playing with. I had been at this school since the second grade, and there were people I thought were friends, but I slowly grew to realize that they didn't like me as much as I thought they did, or as much as I liked them. I realized I must be annoying to them. I didn't know why or how. Even now I remember my stomach dropping, the pain and fear and frantic desire to escape.

I switched schools in sixth grade, slowly made friends after a period of standing alone on the blacktop with my arms crossed. That summer I went to a three-week program called CTY, for kids who'd done well on an aptitude test, to take a course on dramatic literature. I wanted so badly to be cool. I made a list of the clothes I wanted and my mom took me shopping and I bought little baby tees and jean shorts and cheap makeup and then I went and joined a sort of cool clique, but within five days they had completely kicked me out. I joined another group and within three days they kicked me out too. Passive-aggressively, but I knew how to take a hint. So I joined another group and thankfully, they let me stay with them. I remember all the girls there were wealthier than I was, and talked about the Gap and Banana Republic and brand names and stores I'd never heard of, much less shopped at. I looked at the Payless shoes lined up on my dresser, at my Pic n Save lipgloss, and felt ashamed and disgusted at myself. Growing up in Oxnard I'd never felt poor. Poor was migrant workers. Poor was Colonia. But next to these girls I realized that anything that's not rich is poor. But it wasn't just that - again, I was annoying. Somehow, I'd annoyed them, and I didn't know how or why.

It's been over ten years since then and, I hope, my thoughts and perceptions of the world have matured. I'm still wary of other people, though. I learned the coping mechanism of shutting out the world, of relying on nobody but myself. That was the difference between me and Anna: neither of us fit in, but she tried to latch on to people, while I just went off by myself. Who was better? Who was and will be happier in the long run?

When I got home from Russia, I stayed at Burcu's apartment until my subletter moved out. She let me sleep in her bed while she slept on the couch. She cooked me a huge welcome home dinner - a whole chicken, cucumber slices and grape tomatoes, brown rice. We sat down at her kitchen table and I told her all about Anna, and for the first time, felt vindicated - that I wasn't insane for thinking it was horrible. When I was in Russia, sometimes I'd say to Erica, "How would you feel if you found out that everyone, everyone, secretly hated you?" and she'd respond, "It would destroy me. I would be destroyed." But it didn't change her behavior towards Anna. But Burcu listened and empathized, like I knew she would. It was good to be around someone who understood. I've retained a few people like that over the years.

I've decided to be uncharacteristically thoughtful and forgo posting my planned description of the menstrual-related horrors I've been suffering all day, and my lengthy treatise on the uncaring cruelty of my uterus and its lining. Just know it hurts, way down deep inside.

Today is my monthly day of feeling very, very sorry for myself. And my cruel uterus is responsible for it all.

And on that happy note, here's:

Russia Reckoning Part IV

Four weeks in, we took a weekend-long trip to Saint Petersburg. That trip was the turning point for me; afterwards, I was so thoroughly disgusted with most of the other students that I quit interacting with them beyond necessity.

We were to take a nighttime train for the eight-hour trip, and beforehand, one of the language assistants from the institute, Dasha, held a get-together at her house. I was a little late getting there, and by the time I arrived, everyone else was halfway to plastered. Including Anna.

I usually feel awkward in social situations when I'm around people I don't know, but put me in a strange environment full of drunk people I don't really like and I end up in a corner wishing I had a jagged piece of glass to stab into my throat. I'm pretty sure I hid in the coat closet most of the time, although I do remember sitting with a circle of people involved in half-coherent discussions about whatever. Anna was there, too, and she would not. shut. up. I remember her babbling about wanting to name her future son Alexei specifically so she could give him the nickname Alyosha (after the Brothers Karamazov character), but her friend wanted to name her son Alexei too, but she'd thought of it first, and it wasn't that she liked the name Alexei that much, she just really liked the name Alyosha, although if she got a dog first she might name him Alyosha. She kept saying things like, "Oh my god, I am soooo drunk. I am so drunk, you guys!"

It was the first time in the four-week trip that Anna had touched alcohol. I know because when she saw how uncomfortable I was, the lone nondrinker in a cloud of vodka fumes, she began to try and console me. "I don't really drink either. I've never really gotten drunk before. I don't know why I did it this time. I just thought it would be fun. But usually, I never, never drink. I've never really wanted to get drunk. Really, it's just not who I am. I don't know why I decided to drink tonight."

Why bother to reflect on this? I don't even need to say that whatever she thought getting drunk with everyone else would fix, it just made things worse. Even I, as I stood there listening to her rambling justifications and half-comforts, felt something like contempt. Who the hell are you to identify with me, Anna? I'm nothing like you. Don't patronize me - you're the last person I want to talk to, want to hear this from.

But I also felt overwhelmingly sad. I felt pity. Pity and contempt, two of the most vile emotions there are. She didn't deserve either, and I knew that, but I could not harness them in.

We went to the train station, four or five in a taxi. There was one guy, Michael, in his mid-twenties. One of the most conventionally handsome men I've ever seen - tall, blond, muscular. While waiting for the train, he drunkenly put his arm around me and dragged me along and said, "Danielle, you've got to save me from Big Red!!" (Big Red was the name they had given her). "Get me away from her, I can't stand it!" Repulsed yet flattered, I walked a few steps with him and then sort of laughed and slipped away.

We boarded the train. Of the trip, I remember fragments, and all the fragments I remember have to do with Anna. One girl, Sam, a tiny chain-smoker, loudly ridiculed Anna in the hallway. "Shhh!" I whispered as I noticed Anna approaching. "I don't care!" Sam replied. "I hope she hears!"

A small group of us - me, Erica, Michael, Chris, maybe a couple others - sat in a sleeper chatting. Michael had to use the bathroom, but when he heard that Anna was currently in it, said, "I don't want to go after Big Red! What if she drops a stinker??"

When it got too bad, I would say something, but it didn't make any difference, and I never said enough, never said all I could have said. And I never did what I should have done, which was befriend her myself.

She stayed in a sleeper with me, Erica, and Chris. She was babbling about something, and Erica and I, in a moment of mutual annoyance, squeezed each other's hands in the dark. Anna noticed. She abruptly stopped talking and said, "I'm being annoying, I know."

In Saint Petersburg, I was sick - really sick. I didn't want to hold anyone up, so I ended up meandering around the city by myself, lonely and tired, stopping frequently for breaks. I saw three rooms of the Hermitage before having to leave because I was close to collapse. I sat on a bench on the lawn and watched two girls and their trained bear cub. But that's another story for another time.

On my way back to the hostel, I passed three girls - including Sam - whom Anna had latched on to.

"How are you feeling?" they asked.
"Pretty shitty," I replied.
Anna spoke up. "One day, you'll come back, and you'll be feeling great, and you'll have a wonderful time."
"That's the plan," I said, and waved goodbye. My whole life, I will never forget her saying that to me.

I have only a little bit left to write - I guess I'll finish later tonight or tomorrow.

I'll only show you this if you promise to click on the link and watch it. Do you promise? Seriously? Okay, are you sure? Because you can't just say you will and then not do it. Are you absolutely sure? Okay, okay, okay, I believe you, don't get all mad.

LAUGHING BABIES FROM HELL!!!

Russia Reckoning Part III

All right, so, where was I?

Oh yes, bitchtalking about my fellow students at the institute.

It wasn't that they were unkind to me. It wasn't that they weren't funny or interesting. If I were a different person who had made different decisions in my life; if I weren't so socially stilted; if I weren't a cards-and-conversation person rather than a drunken-debauchery person...maybe I could have gotten to know them.

As it was, every Monday I'd come in to class, and I'd be regaled with stories about three-day-long vodka benders; late nights at Zebra (pronounced Zay-bra), the only nightclub in town; hookups and fights and craaaazy mishaps. Let me qualify here real quickly that if I come across as sounding snooty and disdainful when talking about these things, it's not because I sincerely feel that way. It's just the loneliness talking. Sometimes I think I was born into the wrong world.

Right, so, this story was about Anna. I don't think she really participated in the drunken debauchery either. She might have hung out with the others but I found out later that she didn't drink at all. And because I didn't really socialize with anyone else, it was two or three weeks in when I found out what everybody thought of Anna.

They hated her. HATED. With a zealousness I didn't know existed outside the schoolbus.

I suppose it started with one person finding that they were annoyed with her, and then confiding in someone else, who agreed with and thus validated the first person's feelings. Their irritation with her mutually exacerabted, they told others, who told others, until it was sort of this...web.

I can't remember how I found out. Maybe an offhand comment or something. The truth was, I was annoyed by her, too. She was just an annoying person. Overly eager yet somewhat unsure of herself and her opinions; obnoxious and somewhat rude (though out of social ineptitude more than malicious intent); and...I'm not really sure. Because she wasn't...I don't know. What makes someone annoying? Maybe just intrusive social obliviousness?

Erica told me that once, three of the guys - all in their mid-twenties - participated in an hour-long rant marathon about Anna and how gross and annoying she was. To her face, of course, they weren't so overt - it was more passive-aggressive viciousness. Anna would make an innocent comment, and everyone would pretend like she'd said nothing, or maybe two of the girls would exchange an eye-roll. Or they'd talk in code about her right in front of her. Or she'd come up to a group of people talking and everyone would stop abruptly, or sometimes disperse altogether.

How aware was she? She had to know on some level, but at the same time, I think she must have filtered most of it out, for her own psychological wellbeing. One time, while we were sitting next to each other in the computer room, she turned to me and said, "Aww! My dad just sent me pictures of all my friends from home!" I glanced at her screen and saw an enormous, upside-down picture of a girl in a tanktop (obviously sent by someone who didn't know how to size down scanned photographs). So she did have friends, she was assuring me.

She'd react in small ways to being ignored or scoffed at, so in the moment, at least, she knew something was going on. But what went through her mind when she went home each day? Did she suspect, and did she then admonish herself for being paranoid?

Time to do laundry - I will probably continue this tonight. I have to say, I'm glad I got rid of the sitemeter if only because I can post these multi-part navelgazers without having any idea of who's reading.

Russia Reckoning Part II

The first thing to say about Anna is that she was really, really unattractive. Basically, she was cursed with everything that could possibly be physically unpleasant in a person. She was at least fifty pounds overweight, and had colorless skin with thousands of brown speckles; she had long, frizzy orange hair; whenever she spoke, spit bubbles would froth around her yellow teeth.

When I first met her, she seemed nice enough - most people do when you first meet them. Then, on my second or third day of classes, a girl from the institute named Masha took a small group of us on a tour of the city. Masha was lovely. Her English was stilted - she'd been studying it only three years - and when she pointed out the gypsies who loitered around the kiosks on Trekhsviatskaya street, she haltingly explained that if you looked directly at them, they could curse you if you didn't give them money.

Anna said condescendingly, "Now, is that actually true, or is that just something your mom told you when you were a kid and you still believe it?"

Masha just smiled awkwardly - her English wasn't good enough for her to comprehend that she was being insulted. I was taken aback but didn't say anything, although the moment stuck with me. I wonder if Anna remembers it at all, if she berated herself for it afterwards.

For the next couple weeks, I became acquainted with the others studying at the institute that summer. There weren't very many of us. Four graduate students from the University of Toronto; several people in their late twenties and early thirties, some married, some not; and Anna and another girl, Erica, who were a year older than me. I was the youngest. Erica and I were in the third-highest level together and we became friends. At first I was wary of Erica because she...I think I once described her as "every annoying girly quality personified." But I eventually grew to really like her, although I doubt under different circumstances we would have been friends at all.

Okay, I'm tired, so I'll continue this tomorrow.

My off-kilter sleep schedule has been lending itself to a lot of meandering ruminations and reminiscences lately. Tonight, partly because my mind has been preoccuped with moving abroad in the next year or two, I've been thinking about the eight weeks I spent in Russia in the summer of 2003.

It's funny: I spent more time in Greece, saw more of it, learned more about it, but the memory of my time there doesn't haunt me the way my memory of Russia does. When I got back from Russia I dreamt about it every night; I still dream of it weekly (more often lately, since I've started studying the language again). They're mostly anxiety dreams, not quite nightmares but still tinged with something like terror: returning there and having to stay, twenty-hour plane rides, loneliness, and most of all, dust and dirt covering everything. When I think of Russia my memories are blanketed with the dustiness of the streets and the benches. It wasn't like that in Moscow, and only a little bit like that in St. Petersburg: but everything in Tver was powdery-gray.

Sorry, I'm getting a little melodramatic. Anyway, I think the reason I don't obsess over Greece the way I obsess over Russia is that I was so much happier in Greece, and wasn't preoccupied the whole time with returning under better circumstances. The people I was in Greece with were (and are) lovely, and the program so structured, my days filled with green hills and ancient temples (and Britney Spears), that even when I was unhappy I was happy. The heaviness of what-could-have-been doesn't weigh on me. I was so in the moment that I didn't need to store much for later. In Russia...I was not happy. By the final three weeks, I was skipping class, spending all day on the internet, printing out piles of crosswords at the language institute to take home and finish frantically, trying to make the hours disappear in a haze of word games.

Why was I so unhappy? Well, I did have encephalitis, and I was going through the mindfuck of being really sick but not being able to pinpoint exactly what was the matter, and then suffering the ensuing guilt and self-accusations of laziness and irresponsibility. Also, it was my first time abroad, alone, and Russia's a pretty overwhelming country even under the best of circumstances. Tver, the city I was in, was dull and lifeless - my few happy memories of Russia take place in Moscow. The language barrier was a big factor, and my heavily accented and stilted attempts to communicate were embarrassing and disheartening.

But I think the biggest factor was my fellow students at the language institute. This is not to say that it was all their "fault" - some of them got along well with each other, and, I imagine, had a great time. It was me, too. The way that I am and the way that they were...were discordant. The reason I was unhappy in Russia, I think, had almost nothing to do with Russians and almost everything to do with Americans in Russia. And I believe all this can be conveyed by talking about one girl and how she affected me. I will call her Anna.

I'll continue this tomorrow...

I saw a preview for M. Night Shyamaylamayanamama's newest movie a few months ago, and since I've been awake since six am with nothing to do but search for random things on the internet, this morning I looked up the summary. I dare say, it looks to be his best film yet!

In "Lady in the Water," a story originally conceived by Shyamalan for his children, a modest building manager named Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) rescues a mysterious young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) from danger and discovers she is actually a narf, a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the treacherous journey from our world back to hers. Cleveland and his fellow tenants start to realize that they are also characters in this bedtime story. As Cleveland falls deeper and deeper in love with the woman, he works together with the tenants to protect his new fragile friend from the deadly creatures that reside in this fable and are determined to prevent her from returning home.

Coincidentally, "narf" is the sound my cat makes when he is trying to cough up a hairball.

Sooo...you have to have a livejournal and be a member of the Vagina Pagina community to view the following link, but I think it's worth it.

The Everyday Bodies Project

Members of the livejournal community Vagina Pagina submitted pictures of different body parts to answer the question "Am I normal?" in a way words never could. (Some images obviously NSFW)

As a girl with body issues (is that redundant?), I can't tell you how refreshing it was to look through these pictures and read the kind comments about all of them. Especially after reading my celebrity gossip group ohnotheydidnt, which, don't get me wrong, I love, but the comments are dominated by 16-year-olds who are bewildered and outraged by women's bodies that look like anything other than Jenna Jameson's.

The rest of Vagina Pagina is also highly recommended.

Okay, here's a page with pictures you don't need a livejournal to see:
Breasts of Many Shapes, Sizes, Textures, Colors, and Firmnesses. Obviously NWS

Death to Counter Stalking

Fuck you, sitemeter, and good riddance.

I cannot believe that Curious George has a 69% rating at Rotten Tomatoes!

For Christ's sake, it has the worst tagline in the history of God and all his people!!

I've been meaning to post this for weeks now.

Tom Cruise Has Only One Front Tooth.

Seriously:

Freud Drinking Game

One shot whenever he mentions:

• Cocaine
  
• "Mucous membranes"
  
• "Micturation"
  
• "Inversion"
  
• A strange metaphor for female genitalia, e.g. "reticule" or "the shell of Venus"
  
• Goethe

Two shots whenever he mentions:

• Something Very Bad that happened as a result of recommending cocaine
  
• Childhood masturbation as a harbinger of future neuroses
  
• A completely illogical connection he has made between a patient's symptom and his preconceived opinion of its underlying unconscious cause

Should you choose to play the Freud Drinking Game while reading, say, the 124-page case history of Dora, by the end you should be completely drunk dead.

Sandwiches Are Delicious!

I usually only buy spelt bread when I'm in California, because here in Chicago it's two dollars more and I have to trek all the way to Whole Foods to buy it. But this weekend I decided to splurge.

I just warmed up two slices in the microwave for about twenty seconds, then put some herb-roasted turkey breast on it with sundried tomato pesto as a spread. It was the first time I've had a turkey sandwich in about five years.

IT WAS WORTH THE WAIT.

Crunch

"You might not slumber quite so contentedly if you were aware that your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites, which come out in the wee hours to sup on your sebaceous oils and feast on all those lovely, crunchy flakes of skin that you shed as you doze and toss. Your pillow alone may be home to forty-thousand of them.(To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don't think a clean pillowcase will make a difference. To something on the scale of bed mites, the weave of the tightest human fabric looks like ship's rigging. Indeed, if your pillow is six years old - which is apparently about the average age for a pillow - it has been estimate that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of 'sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites, and mite dung,' to quote the man who did the measuring, Dr. John Maunder of the British Medican Entomology Center.(But at least they are your mites. Think of what you snuggle up with each time you climb into a motel bed.)"

From A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.

Slurrrp

You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds.
Love,
Plutarch

By way of Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee

P.S. I am not a vegetarian, I just like to gross you out.

I'd like to write a lengthy, detailed post about my fascinating life, but I have two midterms to prepare for and two books to read, and thus my energy is being diverted towards less productive modes of procrastination. Tonight I'm reading as much of The Interpretation of Dreams as I can tolerate. If Freud is right about dreams representing wish-fulfillment, then for the past several weeks I've been secretly wishing I've gone back high school but through no fault of my own have missed the first month of classes. I can unequivocally state that I do not wish that.

The aforementioned procrastination involves playing a lot of Text Twist (obviously) and pacing around my room and muttering to myself. Speaking of, I've found myself doing that while I'm walking down the street. Muttering to myself, I mean. When I moved into this studio I told myself that I'd either turn into Amelie (best case scenario) or Raskolnikov (worst-case scenario. well, not worst, but pretty bad). So far, it really hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be (e.g. I've actually been going to class, taking out the trash, and maintaining a standard of personal hygiene). However, if I start staying in my apartment for days on end, submitting Nietzschean-flavored articles to academic journals, and pawning off trinkets to a wizened old lady, it might be time to stage an intervention.

I really do love living by myself, aside from the soul-crushing loneliness part.

Okay, I actually probably will be posting pretty frequently in the next couple of days. Fucking midterms!