the meteor you saw in the sky was my traipsing manteau
Harry doesn’t know how long it will take to wash the sticky cake off his face. For a civilized young man, it is disgusting to have dirt on any part of his body. He lies in the elegant bathtub, keeps wiping his face, and thinks about Dudley’s face, which is as fat as Aunt Petunia’s bottom.
This article presents eight nuggets of Harry Potter fakery, made in China. I only wish I had more to read of each.
In parts of Central Asia, you can find the (no kidding) Tanya Grotter series about a little girl magician. Or witch, wicca-chickie, whatever. It’s not available in translation because of a copyright infringement case pending against the author.
If it were to become available, I would suggest that it first be translated into Chinese and then into English. I would probably make it past book 1 then.
I’m high on the food chain because I’m high on the food chain!
OBF has been a faithful vegetarian for more than 10 years. Since we’ve been together, it’s been easy to keep to a vegetarian diet with him, in restaurants and at home. Mostly because we replace meat with its weight in cheese.
Once in a while though, some backup happens in me, and usually vents itself when he’s not around (such as now). A few days ago I was having lunch with a friend when she shared a piece of shashlyk with me; marinated, yummy shashlyk. Then that evening I decided to feed the cats some fish, so I bought a little tin of herring. I hooked my finger in the pull tab, peeled the lid back, and when I saw the little herring fillets and knew I had to eat some, urgently. Which I did, straight from the tin with a fork, while Misu cried frantically for me to stop.
That didn’t satisfy me though. For the first time ever, I bought half a rotisserie chicken from the stand in front of my grocery store. Took it home, and started eating it straight from the bag, with my hands. Wow. I felt like the chicken was binding with something in me that had been waving its little fingers around, ignored, for a fair while.
The gross/fascinating thing about eating chicken is that you really have a full sense of consuming a body, which you don’t get when eating shashlyk or a steak. Or even a fish, which comes in that little slab, sometimes with a funny head on but since fish don’t have arms it doesn’t feel so terrible.
Ronnie
Ronnie Coleman apparently is so big he can not be contained by these puny blog parameters!
I want you all to appreciate the dude I stare at when I run, so here is a link to his glamour shot.
This is my gym
When we first moved here we went to this upscale gym called Karven Club a few times, but grew tired of paying heftily for what was a small room with no running machine. Although it did have this contraption that I’m pretty sure someone must have bought from an infomercial in 1977: it consisted of this wide belt connected to a stand, and you’re supposed to position yourself so the belt is wrapped around your midregion of choice, torso-buttocks-thighs. You flip a switch and the wide band jiggles and vibrates your flesh aggressively, I guess the idea being that you can just shake (?) weight off and tone up, if a machine is doing the work for you.
I also didn’t like that gym because there was this thick-necked meathead gymmaster who would sit in a chair and watch everyone work out, sometimes making the rounds to give (unsolicited) advice on form and technique. I tried to spray myself with invisible meathead repellent but he broke right through it one day when he’d had enough of leaving me in peace, and he came over and directed me as to which weights to lift. I tried to be all I CAN DO IT MYSELF, but still ignorant of the true nature of kilograms, chose ones that were too heavy. I felt kind of dumb when I had to concede and take the ones he selected for me.
Our gym now is no fancy outfit, much more YMCA. It reminds me of this rec center we used to work out at in New York, although there are no roaches at this one or standing pools of water on the floor. It is staffed by three women whom I have named Thousand Watt, Grumplepants, and Care Bear.
Thousand Watt is named for her superdazzling smile; a rarity for here, where people just don’t smile as much since nobody raised them to think they might end up on TV like in America. Thousand Watt must break the boys’ hearts, her smile is so sincere and radiant and genuine, it would be easy to think it was powered by something you in particular did. She is waiting to move to Italy and hasn’t been around in some time. I hope she is okay.
Grumplepants reminds me of a caricature of a stern, meanish school principle who gets all buttery and flirty with the rich single dads or with the handsome superintendent. I’m sure she’s a totally fine person, although it irks me that every time I come to the gym by myself she asks “You’re alone today? Where is your husband?”
Care Bear has the kind of eyes that are drawn on cartoon characters to signal deep-seated trust and eternal desire to not displease. I named her Care Bear since she is the only one kind enough to warn me when the women’s locker room is about to be overtaken by men from the aikido class, who all change in the women’s room since, WTF, it’s right there. I’m no prude, but I like to choose whom I flash.
The gym is decorated with absolutely nothing, except for three bodybuilder pinups:
Jay Cutler, Mr. Olympia.
Dexter Jackson. I don’t know what his title is. Mr. Thousand Watt?
Gaaaa! How’d he get so big? I guess I should learn about scaling down images.
This last one is Ronnie Coleman. He is EXCITED FOR THE PARTY!
To me, the dudes on these posters are like a PSA for staying home and eating a drum of pork rinds while watching marathon TV. I would cry if I ever turned into them, much the same as if I woke up to find pubic hair growing out my nose, or that there was an extra arm coming out my thigh.
When running on the treadmill, the natural focal point is the poster of Ronnie Coleman. I run to you Ronnie Coleman!
While studying the Ronnie Coleman pin-up poster a few days ago, I got so absorbed in wondering how he gets his pants on that I fell off the treadmill. With all the squeaks of rubber shoes scrabbling to stabilize on the rubber tread, a quick limb-fling and then a thwump onto the floor. Oops.
It’s not so embarrassing when you’re a foreigner, really.
I seem to be the only chick who breaks a sweat at the gym, and wonder if it’s health-cultural. I remember a Russian once telling me a saying, something to the effect that, when you run for fitness, you run away from a heart attack and into the arms of a brain aneurysm.
Headed home
Today I bought plane tickets, to the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Say it with me: YEAH!!
I am very excited to take this trip come August and have already been making lists of things to do-see-get-eat. It will be a trip crammed with transitive verbiage and conspicuous consumption, American style.
I have this tiny worry that in the past 10 months since moving here I have developed a smell. Like, I dunno, a weird smell. That I’m incapable of detecting, since I radiate it, and which OBF is incapable of distinguishing since he would be smelling it all the time.
Dear friends, will you tell me if I smell? Or if I now remind you of that cousin from Perfect Strangers? Only break it gently, like after the fourth beer, or maybe stick a note in my purse while I’m craning my head back to look at the tall skyscrapers.
Let me describe my Juicyfruit commercial
Two weekends ago we went white water rafting. I had never been before, and I guess up until that point I thought the “white water” part was just some extra blah blah blah – it’s all stuff in the “rafting” file folder, no? One end of the spectrum is being 8 years old lying in the stomach portion of some inflatable plastic dragon while it nudges a few inches across the lake during the course of an afternoon, and the other end of the spectrum is people strapped into those tippy boats zinging a double-ended paddle the same way the boys in my high school who wanted to emigrate to a Tolkien novel would wing homemade weaponry around while waiting for the bus to take them back to a split level with aluminum siding.
For this first rafting trip, we were doing what turned out to be level 4 rapids, with patches of 5. (Or maybe it’s called “category” 4 rapids.) (Or maybe we could make up a new classification system based on icons of bleeding canine teeth. This was 4 bleeding glinting canines.) We were on the Chui river, and when we arrived, so did rain.
Let me describe a nasty feeling for you: Taking off all your clothes except for a tank top and shorts, since it never occurred to you to wear a bathing suit. Then standing in the rain, and tugging on a cold, thick, heavy, clinging, WET wetsuit. Topped off with a plastic helmet and a soviet life vest circa 1952 that had to be manually inflated by blowing into the red tubes (just like the ladies show you in the inflight movie, on the off chance that your vest does not inflate you have a list of problems a mile long so you just go right ahead and blow into those little red tubes because we all like distractions when the world’s coming to an end).
I was strapped into a catamaran with 11 other people, since I was assured it was safer than the raft that the rest of our party was piling into. A catamaran (gratuitous showing off of new outdoor sports words!) is an inflatable rectangle hugging two bananas to its chest as it moves on its belly down a river.
Things started well enough, although I had a bit of rafting dyslexia. When the rafting guide would instruct us to go right or left, I would blank on which way I should move my paddle to execute that order. I kept using as a mnemonic device based on a story a friend told me in high school about his hamster with a broken front leg; all it could do was scoot in a little circle, moving around that little dud leg. To turn in rafting, sometimes you have to be the strong leg, paddling forward, and sometimes you have to be the broken leg, pushing back.
My seat in the boat was directly in front of the raft captain. As we started in on the more serious rapids, all churn and roil and sudden walls of water collapsing on the boat, the delivery of his instructions went from a merely audible shout to Captain Ahab ragged screaming, largely in my ear. VPERED! LEVO, LEVO! VPERED, BLYAD*! PRAVO, SILNO PRAVO! NAZAD BLYAD*! NAZAD!! In the panic of the extended 2 hour moment, I assumed he was yelling at everyone, but I had to wonder when afterwards he said to me “Sorry I was scolding so much.” Hmm.
*word you don’t call a lady.
There were certain moments I just stopped paddling, since I’d go to stick it in the water and suddenly the water would have dropped out from underneath and we were about to climb vertically up a big liquid snarl. During the worst parts I stopped looking ahead, and just looked down at the end of my paddle, ready to move it one of two ways depending on what the great Oz told me to do.
We camped that night next to a river, underneath a large apricot tree. Apricots periodically fell on our roof throughout the night. From the inside, sleepy-drunk and disoriented, it sounded like hooligan boys were lobbing tiny fleshy baseballs at our tent. I woke up at one point freaked out about the monster truck that was shining its headlights threateningly through our tentflap. OBF tried to tell me this was the “sun”, which did little to damp down the kind of conviction that only comes from serious disorientation.
There’s been a padded black bra, sitting on the stairs next to a bank of mailboxes in our building, for the past week.
I meant to take a picture of it, since it seemed to be a permanent fixture and something we could get used to. It also looked funny, and made me wonder how it got there. I would think, how did that get there? Guess it’s here for good! Hello bra.
But then someone removed the bra, because it’s gone now. I didn’t ever take the photo.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
In this case, rosebuds = photo documentation of abandoned underwear in a dimly lit stairwell.
Happy trails
This blogging thing is a snap, especially when you don’t do it!
I returned from a trip to Tajikistan about 10 days ago. From the capital, Dushanbe, I flew north to the city of Khujand. From there, I drove for a full day to the city of Penjikent, tucked in the mountains of the west. Well, I didn’t drive, but the driver of the car did. When I first got into the car at the airport, I went to put my seatbelt on. As often happens, the driver reached out to stop me. “No, no, that’s not necessary.” Putting on a seatbelt is often somewhat offensive to drivers here, sort of like getting invited to a dinner party and showing up with your own stomach pump, you know, just in case.
So I spent the long drive to Penjikent shifting as the car rocked along ruts in the road. Part of the drive winds up through mountains, climbing, climbing, on dirt roads with patchy asphalt cut into the sides of steep hills. The drop offs are so steep that just looking out the window gave me a nauseous-vertigo soupy stomach. I held on tightly to the armrest, as I sometimes do on airplanes, in order to steer them to safety with the power of my brain.
At the top of the mountain pass on the second day’s journey it began to rain, mixing with the dirt road and gravel. I tried to tell myself how lucky I was to be there, in a real-life National Geographic episode. Lucky, lucky! But each time the driver passed on the right to squeeze through an impossibly narrow bit of road with who knows what on the other side, I stopped breathing and made a collect call to God.
The trip went well though. Dushanbe is an endlessly charming city, with lots of big trees, parks with small cafes, and these fantastic almost carnival-like light fixtures posted along the road sometimes shaped to look like large flowers, or bursting fireworks.
On the plane ride back home to Bishkek, I followed my usual protocol: sat next to a young woman (instead of a man), put in my blaze orange earplugs (sorry, what?) right after adjusting my seatbelt, and settled in. About half way through the two hour flight, as happens sometimes, the ceiling started to drip condensation on my seatmate. (Sort of like the plane is actually a sweaty beer plugging away through the sky.) I fished around in my purse and handed her a tissue so she could wipe herself and the ceiling. She thanked me and immediately started a conversation.
This is why I wear earplugs on almost any flight. I don’t like plane conversations, because they invariably turn into not just the normal supermarket line-length chat, but oh, say one or four hours of on-and-on. This lady looked ready to star in the telenovela of her own life: thick, rich black hair in large waves down to her shoulders, and the jazz-hands version of makeup: two-tone iridescent eyeshadow reaching up to the border of her eyebrows, Tammy Faye mascara so thick her eyelashes were like doll-house garden-rakes, a full frosty pink lipstick mouth rimmed in dark brown lipliner, and topped off with a makeup-sundae cherry – a fake beauty mark near her upper lip.
She started in at once. Where was I from? America. Oh, I want to immigrate to Canada. How can I do that? I’m sorry, I just don’t know, the irony being that I was born in North America and so have no idea how to immigrate. She told me how she was Afghan, although born and raised in Bishkek. She was 29 years old, and her husband had been murdered three years before, by jealous business rivals. Oh woah…. that is terrible. Yes, I know. And I have three children, and I want to move to Canada, or China. Or somewhere. I am a millionaire! A millionaire and I can’t find a place to go. And I have three houses, but it is not safe for me in Bishkek; so many of my husband’s rivals want to kill me. And for three years I wanted to kill the man I thought was responsible for my husband’s death: his business partner. I wanted his death, and he wanted my death. For three years. Until eventually we saw each other face to face, and realized: we were in love with each other.
And now they secretly love each other so desperately, but can’t be together, because he has a wife and a child, and she doesn’t want to offend Allah. And is anyone meeting me at the airport? INSERT HINDSIGHT IS 20/20 MOMENT: No, nobody’s meeting me. Oh! My brother is meeting me; we’ll just take you home too. No, no, totally not necessary! I’ll just get a taxi. A taxi where I can be alone and not talking any more to you, TMI lady!
But she seized one of my bags and wouldn’t let me take it until we were in separate passport control lines. Little gnats of worry were flying inside my brain: don’t take a ride from this lady who says people want to kill her, don’t let this lady know where you live, don’t get in her brother’s car, but the cardinal rule: don’t offend her! I cleared passport control first, and she called after me to just wait, she’d meet me at the front. I booked it to the door, with her steps behind me, her yelling for me to wait, me calling back, thanks so much! I really must be going though! Good luck! Whereupon she YELLS for her brother waiting at the exit to stop me and before any brother emerged from the crowd I basically threw myself on the first taxi driver to appear and then once in his car, looking over my shoulder, I literally slunk down in the back seat so nobody could see me until we’d cleared the airport.
Revised air travel protocol: always say that someone is meeting you at the airport. And never remove the earplugs.
