The truth was revealed only in 2002

Oh!  That’s where I left the blog.

Let’s get that in a list:

1.   Not that the internet has been standing outside the restaurant, impatiently checking its watch, wondering where the hell I’d gone to, but there has been illness upon our house.   Specifically the Central Asian kind, with fountains of intestinal distress.  We kept reducing food to its lowest nauseating denominator, until all we were eating were snack-sized portions of various beige things.  I finally tried this antibiotic that costs only 50 cents and made my mouth taste like a melted pipe and I swear produced olfactory hallucinations, specifically my fingernails smelling of onions.  I kept wandering around, sniffing my fingertips deeply, which I know is kind of gross but that’s why I pay for walls to separate me from the rest of the world.

2.   We dropped down to the beginner’s class in aikido.   Things had gotten to the point where we had that Sunday-night feeling when thinking about class, and frankly I didn’t bide my time to reach legal majority, become captain of my ship, etc, just to forfeit the delicious authority of adulthood in which I get to choose my miseries.  The instructor for this beginner class has a refreshingly Soviet way of teaching:  when someone fucks up, he simply calls them to the front of the class, says “show everyone how you’re doing it”, then in a flash has them in a horribly humiliating hold saying SEE HOW I COULD BREAK YOUR ARM WHEN YOU DO IT LIKE THAT?

Last night we learned how to hypothetically decapitate someone.  I think I’m really starting to get the hang of this.

3.   I am normally not a fan of blogs that rely heavily on cross-posts for their content, because that blog already exists and it’s called Google.  So I will try to keep “guess what I found on the internet!” to a minimum.  But I want to note this piece on Laika, the first mammal who went into orbit 50 years ago.  Radio Free Europe has this lovely article about her, with a photo-portrait that can only be described as noble, enhanced by the knowledge that she died within hours of blast-off, all so we humans could someday send our multimillionaires to space.

“[Her trainer] describes Laika as a friendly, endearing dog.

Gazenko says Laika’s six-month training was intense. “She had to be trained to sit still in a small cubicle, to eat gel-like food dispensed by a small machine, to get used to the stress and irritating aspects of space flight,” Gazenko says. “We accustomed her to the sound of rocket engines and spun her in a centrifuge.”….

To this day, the 88-year-old Gazenko says he is regularly gripped by remorse over Laika’s death. But perishing in space, he says, was Laika’s fate.

“Unfortunately, the mission was necessary,” he says. “Before Laika’s flight, we were able study the effects of weightlessness for just a few minutes. Laika’s flight showed that the path to space was open for the Earth’s living beings.””

4.    This weekend we went to see “Swan Lake”. (?er?  Does a ballet name need quotation marks?)  Odette/Odile was danced by a visiting ballerina from Ukraine – a kind of standard issue blonde elastic elf with arms like Twizzlers.  The prince was a virile gent visiting from Kazakhstan’s ballet.  I realized that nothing beats Act III for me in terms of sheer camp and oh-no-she-didn’t high drama: the international flashdancing, the heartcrusher Odile who eats baby pandas for breakfast, her drag queen uncle von Rothbart stage-managing the take down of treacly storybook romance.   But they danced the happy ending, in the Russian fashion, where there are no swan suicides.

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