What else?
That's me drinking juice (облепиховый сок, оттечественный!) at work today -- yes, juice, silly kids, even though it's a wine glass. The picture is by my coworker, who carries around an awesome camera and takes amazing photographs of everyday situations.
An incredible Russian supermarket opened right across the street from my office. It's like Trader Joe's, but Russian and stocked with every delicacy, making it even better than TJ: because this store has a hot bar with kotlety and kartoshka and caviar and pel'meni and everything else that you can imagine your grandmother making. For $5 a pound. I go there every day for lunch now and run into all the project managers from my office, who have been "converted" to the other side and ask me to read the juice labels. Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha. Ha!
I'm not even a "foodie" or a person who pays attention to food very much at all (it all ends up as bile anyway!) but this store is exciting. We don't even have this at home, yo: for lunch the other day I had duck and fried apples, Russian style; I also bought "korovki" and sent an email for everyone to try the "little cow candy" in the kitchen. The store is so good that I braved the torrential downpour this week to go there for lunch instead of the closer Boston Soup Kitchen (that I used to visit daily before this slice of Motherland appeared). I was wet, nice shoes dirty, hair messed up, and one more umbrella nearly sacrificed to the gods -- but I got my sosiska!
We went camping somewhere in the middle of Vermont this past weekend. After a lengthy email chain of over 100 spamming messages, 11 of us headed on what seems to be the yearly trek to get dirrrrty, get it on with mosquitoes, and catch few ZzZzZzs beneath a thunderstorm or two in a forest. Where NO ONE can hear you scream... except the park rangers and the bears. And skunks. Just kidding.
Miss Venezuela won Miss Universe last night in Vietnam. The top top runners up consisted of Colombia, Dominican Republic, my personal favorite -- Mexico, and, oddly, Russia, in a dress that made her look pregnant when clearly, she wasn't yet. Miss USA fell on her butt in front of billions, for the second year in a row. 19- and 20-year-old contestants answered mundane 30-second questions about whether discrimination towards women still exists. And I wasted two hours watching this. And, crime of all crimes, it was hosted by Jerry Springer (why!? why!?)
Besides the fact that the choice of the winner was not suprising (Venezuela's production of deserving beauty queens is a national sport, much like protesting and striking is for the French), I was more concerned for the further repercussions on Columbian/Venezuelan relations. You see, Colombia was the second runner-up. [My dad just soothed my fears by telling me that Chavez recently called Uribe "hermano", but I'm not too convinced.]
Few people know this (or, for that matter, would associate such a crazy fact with my straightforward nature) but I actually love watching beauty pageants. Like soccer matches, I tend to watch them more for the nationalism than the beauty itself. Well, fine, unlike soccer matches, with beauty pageants there's also evening gowns, which I also really like, and a duty to the unwavering, masochistic desire that all women have to visually compare their [naturally bigger] behinds with perfectly-shaped, exotic international bottoms on television. It's sick, really. But come on ladies! Don't you get a coy satisfaction thinking Damn, I am totally prettier than Turks and Caicos Islands?
But the bigger satisfaction (or sadness, depends on your personality) you'll feel when listening to these beauties answer a question. Then you know you really haven't lost all that much -- is there really such a thing as an impressive combination of beauty and brains?
But kidding aside, and knowing how stereotypical and not genuine those pageants are (and how Miss Universe, the cream of the crop, is by Donald Trump -- clearly a deserving magnet for the world's most beautiful women), I still like to watch them.
On the one hand, they remind me, ironically, of being a kid. Around the time I moved to the States when I was 8 or 9, my biggest desire was to be a singer. My second-biggest desire -- that episodically became the biggest when Miss Universe was on TV -- was to participate in an international beauty pageant. Thankfully, very soon my desire to be a singer became second to my desire to be a writer and then went away altogether when I realized that real talent was a requirement. Even more fortunate was my prompt subsequent realization that beauty pageants weren't for me -- but not before I tried to enter Miss Teen Massachusetts and was rejected, because I was -- of all things -- too short. There was a height requirement. You had to be tall to participate in one of these things.
Back in the days when I wanted to be a supermodel, here is my best bathing suit pose in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
Somehow, oh, somehow, I got over the beauty pageant desire very quickly. Maybe I'd watched enough of them to understand how cringe-worthy this whole business is.
But when I got older I continued to watch them. Perhaps it was for their comedic value... Yet it makes me a bit sad for the world when these women, especially the Latin American ones who are more gorgeous than anything I could ever imagine, open their mouths and kill all the sunshine instantly. My personal favorite is doubtlessly from our own Miss Teen South Carolina, quite a beautiful girl, by the way. This is from 2007 and a moment of unscripted genius so great, it heaved terror on the beauty queens henceforth: don't be like Miss South Carolina or you will become an unfortunate YouTube star! I ask: what is it that happens when they open their mouths? Are beauty and brains really that mutually exclusive? Do you think that brain cells aren't beautiful by nature or they've killed theirs with too much hair products?
I remember seeing that live -- and of course, I did watch it -- cringing for her on behalf of all us womenfolk. It's all bizarre.
And then last night, we were reminded of the sleazyness of the old creeps who plan these things in the first place. "Tell me," one of the old geezer judges asked Miss Mexico, "when is a woman truly satisfied? Hmm?" *Wink, wink* in front of billions of people.
Miss Mexico did an okay job of blathering about how a woman can only be clearly satisfied by finding "a balance" between "job, family, and community", and it was a conventional, respectable and good enough answer -- at least it made more cognitive sense than the answers of the other condendents. There was enough thought process there for me to seek her the crown, but she only got fourth runner-up.
I guess that judge didn't like her answer.
Still, I gotta see what country gets crowned in '09.
Check out the new design. Yay or nay? Any good sites for templates are appreciated, because although I like the color scheme, the constricted layout leaves some to be desired...
Dear Friends,
Vals Boston will soon be undergoing a cosmetic (and content) makeover.
Starting now, however, you may leave comments freely without awaiting moderation. Don't be mean, now.
Go to it!
(photo from Boston.com)I had a "Matrix moment" today. I never liked that movie to begin with, nor any science fiction/machines-take-over type of flicks, but I must admit they do have a point. At some moment in time, machines stop being our slaves; instead, we will become theirs.
Maybe humanity hasn't reached that point quite yet, but we're getting there.
At 1:30 p.m. today, right at the end of lunch, the power went out in my office. Power grid down in half the town; computers, Internet, lights went off in a split second. I lost a 7-page translation I had been editing and the work I had to do for that afternoon was suddenly... unreachable, as the network went down with the office lights.
Usually, I like power outages. They (like sudden lightening storms or elevators that get stuck mid-floor) tend to bring people together unexpectedly -- because misery loves company and because nobody sees it coming. I bonded with some of my coworkers for a while, until human resources told us to do "soft work" or go home, because the power was not likely to go back up before the end of the day.
"Soft work," I said to myself. Just like the once-strange term "hard copy" (how can a piece of paper be "hard"?), "soft work" is apparently a new word in contemporary life. It means "work that can be done without a computer", which is apparently, um, malleable. Unsubstantiated "work".
I thought about everything I have to do in the next few weeks and everything I had wanted to accomplish at least before the end of today (because Friday, the 4th of July, is a holiday). There wasn't a single "soft" task among it all. Without my computer -- without any computer, I thought -- the majority of us become mere bodies unable to produce a marketable product. We can produce something beautiful, like a painting or a photo or a song, but nothing for the workplace unless we're CEOs. Isn't that strange, after all the years of education and being told that "you can do anything", once our computer crashes we feel helpless and useless?
So, we sat there, listened to someone's iPod and discussed random things, until HR repeated that all those who don't have meetings should go home, and I stayed for some more conversation and then left at 3:30, feeling guilty for not being able to produce something. The power will be back tomorrow, and all will be at peace.
But it did make me wonder about the dawn of the day when computers will control us without any pretenses at all. Could it happen? Maybe.
I haven't been good about writing here, but I guess my excuse is that I'm not traveling anymore. With today's appearance of yet another friend's travel blog (to Southeast Asia), I'm filled with nostalgia for my days in Europe; nostalgia for my unlikely adventures, the things I saw, my victory over shyness, originality amidst banality, and my then-newfound romanticism. It wasn't always a happy thing; traveling, at times, can be inherently lonely. But the complex of the loneliness and the happiness and the differences, for me at least, merged into a greater understanding of who I am -- rather, who I was -- at that time.
It was the end of a short but beautiful era, it seems, and all that seems long ago despite having been so recent. I came back from Spain a year ago -- that is, exactly a year ago I was spending the night at London's Heathrow Airport after the bomb threat. It's probably been nearly a year, then, since I've started this blog. [Edit: yep, almost... Check Wednesday, July 4, 2007, my first entry was me missing Independence Day and complaining about the London Airport's "refugee management" skills. Gosh, I was angry.
What is it about going away that makes us come out of our shells? Why the constant desire to go away, albeit wishing to go back once you are "there", wherever "there" may be?
It's all stuff I have theories on, theories for my eventual "next great American novel", about which I keep being reminded by high school acquaintances and which will -- someday -- be written.
I wish I could be more observant, as I was there, and write down the stories that I saw, and hoped for, and imagined. I can't really write about my daily life anymore, because I am working, and because I am dealing with copious "adult" things that everyone deals with and doesn't want to read about. (My whining about the apartment search in Madrid, for instance, was probably more interesting than my whining about my current apartment search in Boston.)
I am noticing a trend, though: writing less and less as my routine becomes prominent and unchangeable. I have a lot to accomplish at work in the new couple of months, I have stuff to do at home, bla bla bla bla bla, but the point is, I've stopped writing. Whether that be here or in a personal journal or poetry or whatever, I haven't done it for months. I guess I am afraid to start on the so-called "next great American novel" for fear it won't be so great after all, or not as I would have expected at my high school graduation when I got that prize and the name stuck. Like most things -- whether it be travel, or an anticipated book or movie, or, for many people -- careers, love... expectations that are too high often breed inadequacy, contempt, and ultimately disappointment.
