On Women Blogging (II)

As I mentioned earlier, this blog isn’t particularly intimate. Yet it has symbolic representations of far too many intimate moments scattered here and there, but cloaked in puzzles, riddles and clichés of all sorts to an extent that an outside, uninvolved reader won’t really know what it is that I was writing about when I was writing it.

The habit, or rather, the act of concealing the true emotion, the true source of frustration by something like “Jesus is the fat lady,” “Just leave…” or “A woman alone in a downtown apartment” is perhaps a pathological phenomenon of hiding true emotions, of the fear of speaking one’s own mind to others, especially to those who are close. Pathological because I believe it to be one of the biggest pre-requisites of all my issues and of course, the damn eating disorder.

For example: I spent a great deal of time today rereading the entries of Life In Slow Motion – an alternate blog that I had dedicated to the early stages of a relationship that at the time was full of all kinds of uncertainties and ambivalence. This particular post especially spoke to me. It is nothing but culmination of the great deal of frustration that I was feeling at that time. But instead of coming clean and asking straight out “Where is this relationship going? What is going to happen to us?” I simply sat down and wrote “A lukewarm, ambivalent, equivocal relationship, with no definitions, too many unspoken words, etc.” Instead of asking from that person for definitions and certainty, I simply named the relationship as “polite, familiar, comforting…”As if by writing it that way, by “pinning it down” and “naming” it, I would somehow come to terms with the fact that the relationship was lacking in certain aspects that were important to me. For I couldn’t just straight come out and ask that kind of question, could I? I could not be that girl, could I? I couldn’t possibly put myself in that kind of vulnerable situation, etc… And this is just one of the many examples.

***

Sometime in 2007 this blog shifted gears and became a lighter, more upbeat affair. Partly because I was happier, partly because at the point it was more important to me to make lists of things that were making me happy than write about things that were bothering me. I was reading the Encyclopedia of Everyday Life – perhaps a shallow, somewhat superficial book to many, but at that point of my life I saw some great existential meaning in that – in everydayness (to an extent I still do – I think that’s what I owe my sanity to). So in that light, at that particular point I would rather write about strawberries than the size of my ass. The former was much less problematic, of course. So the loaded, emotionally charged yet carefully cloaked entries disappeared. Perhaps a sign of a healthier mind…

***
There are several reasons why my writing lacks the kind of intimacy that Ptitsa speaks about. First of all, there’s culture. Where I am from there are things that people don’t ever talk about – a kind of Twin Peaks of sorts, actually. Sex, sexuality, one’s questioning of it, all those issues that come with it – these things are a taboo, of course. Then there are other things: Petty gossip aside, women don’t really express the kind of feelings that real women feel – they retreat to their kitchens and start washing the dishes, in silence. One doesn’t talk about one’s own flaws – personal fears and insecurities are usually hidden behind the harsh criticism of everybody else’s flaws, or else compensated by other materialistic means. For example, it’s rare to hear someone say “I was a loving, caring, understanding parent… ” or “I may have done something wrong as a parent…” Instead: “I saw my kids through school, I bought them a car, a house, jewelry, etc…” And even though both me and my family have always felt alien to this culture, some of it, or at least the habit of keeping my mouth shut for the fear of breaking those unspoken taboos, sticking out like a sore thumb, attracting unnecessary attention to myself – I cannot say that these sort of things haven’t affected me at all.

Second, there’s upbringing. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s the fact that my family belonged to the Soviet intelligentsia or there was some other sense of “elitism” surrounding me since early childhood, but somehow this has been engraved in my head that unless what I did or thought had some aesthetic value or some higher meaning, it wasn’t worth talking about at all. At school we were taught to write beautifully constructed, lofty sentences. We spoke about “ideas” – everyday existence, everyday thoughts and experiences were trivial. Even my music teacher would often interrupt her class to let me know that I was playing the piano like a бaзаpнaя бaбa (a woman trading in a marketplace- the lowest derogatory comment one could ever expect to receive from intelligentsia). There was hardly any meaning, let alone aesthetic value in my everyday Soviet/post Soviet experiences (or so I thought). The greatest part of my life I considered my thoughts, my deepest intimate fears, etc. trivial. Hell, at moments of utmost despair I would read physics and cosmology just to make myself feel trivial – a therapeutic means of distracting myself from what was bothering me. For what was bothering me, I thought, was something that only бaзаpнaя бaбa would allow herself to express openly, without giving it some aesthetic and refined form –airbrushing it, in short.

So I guess my writing is airbrushed. Because instead of writing “I hate getting my period – I hate it, hate it, hate it!” I would write this. And instead of writing “I ate a pint of ice-cream” I would say “I feel like a bottomless pit…”. Instead of saying “My pants don’t fit anymore – I’ve gotten fat” I would write “I feel heavy and shapeless. I feel like my body is failing me…” I would rather die than say “I’m fat.” Hell, even now I rather write ”I had an affair” than “I’m fat,” even if there are a whole lot of people who would frown at me in moral disagreement for the former statement and a whole lot more people who would relate to the latter. But I’d rather write about the former, because the former usually has a reason or a meaning behind it, whereas the latter is just that – an exasperation of a бaзаpнaя бaбa. Actually, when I read those kind of expressions elsewhere – be it on someone else’s blog or a book, for that matter, I don’t think of it as бaзаpнaя бaбa at all. I admire it, actually, because I know that whoever wrote it had mastered up the courage, the audacity of saying it as is – something that I don’t often allow myself to do.

And lastly – “Literature is analysis after the event…” Even though I never thought of my writing as literature, I always treated it as such. Both in terms of form and content. The form had to be aesthetically pleasing, of course. And content – it had to be in retrospect – sifted and filtered through first. Small details tend to disappear in retrospect. When looking back, one tries to describe the bigger picture. Everyday details, the ordinary fears get swallowed by a sweeping “… but I was unhappy then…” because in retrospect writing “I was unhappy” seems much more accurate, or rather, appropriate then “I hated myself, I hated my marriage, I never felt good enough, strong enough, pretty enough, etc…” Because in retrospect I can see that it wasn’t the fact that I didn’t feel good enough, smart enough or pretty enough that ended my marriage. It was something much bigger, much more fundamental than that. Writing that I was unhappy would simply put an end to those other, trivial details.

Then there is the whole issue of fiction – or writing about one’s own experiences as if one were writing a work of fiction. Consider an entry from way back (1999 I guess?). “I went to see Dina. She is a wreck. I think the source of her problem is... Etc.”. The whole entry then turns into some kind of a story about her. A short story. The actual event behind the entry is: I went to see a friend. We had an unpleasant talk that ended up in an argument. I found it very disturbing. Yet I chose to omit the details of the argument and my own discomfort and instead wrote about what I thought the source of her problems were in form of a story.

There really is that moment in the process of writing, at least for me, when, as Ms. Lessing says, I cease being me. In order to write about something, anything, I have to first separate myself from what it is that I’m writing about – I don’t know how to do it in any other way. In the process something personal and intimate is lost. I end up with the story that doesn’t directly communicate its main idea, but you can feel the undertones. My whole idea of writing – that is, if I were a writer, is to create those undertones.
All I care are these undertones – my reader can do with them whatever she pleases.

***

My writing does lack intimacy. I tried to explain the possible reasons for it – I am not sure how successfully. Maybe I didn’t address the key issue at all and instead gave something that was not asked from me or worse - hid myself even more. But this is the only way I know how to write and all I can ask my readers is to fill in the blanks that I leave out, intentionally or not. I am human, just like everyone else. My feelings, worries, my experiences, my flaws and shortcomings – they are all common – something we all share. Some do a better job at directly expressing them, others, like me, choose to speak of them covertly or bottle them up entirely. Both are altogether human. Thank you for filling the blanks for me.

On Women Blogging (I)

This is a response to something Ptitsa wrote. I love the fact that for the second time, perhaps unintentionally, she’s gotten a kind of reaction out of me that requires a much deeper insight that I have been having on things lately. A kind of insight that even my shrink couldn’t get out of me (maybe that’s why I stopped seeing her, after all). You know, the funny thing is that I wrote “I love her for the fact...” and had to go back and rephrase it for the fear of sounding inappropriate, since I do not know her… or rather, my knowledge of her is in the form of second degree subjectivity (and yes, I just made that one up – I don’t think there’s a term “second degree subjectivity” although I’ll be as elusive as some of my math textbooks and assume that the meaning of this term of mine is somewhat obvious and self-explanatory). And yet, the riddle she has left me with is not of a kind that can be figured out by consulting the aforementioned textbooks and working it through the steps of some known algorithm (I wish there were a lot more things in life that could be solved through algorithms).

She writes:

I've been thinking about what we do and do not say to each other. I have no agenda with my blog. It's just a release. It's a way to talk when I haven't got an interlocutor. Thus, I'm as candid and stupid as I feel the need to be; what I censor is what could get me in trouble and what I haven't got the time, courage, or ambition to try to write out. But I'm wondering about a different class of revelations. We write about dissatisfaction with our lives and our bodies. But we really don't give enough details. […] Yet I feel that my voyeurism is not motivated by competition or Schadenfreude; rather, the lack of detail in so many of our posts is a barrier to real intimacy.

For the past week I’ve been thinking about writing and my own writing in particular, both in terms of form and content. In fact, I’ve done little else during this week and yet, for some reason, despite the face that I left a world of other things that needed to be done neglected; I don’t consider this time wasted at all. Because the fact that I started writing again is an indicative of sorts that I am not quite ready to give it up yet, even though I have no expectations or any delusions that what I (may) write has any value whatsoever.

When I started this blog back in 2004, I did not know where I was going with this (not that I have a clue now either). I was very unhappy then and yet my posts of that time reflect only a tiny fraction of how desperate I was. Since then, my life has undergone a number of drastic changes, which although documented in some shape or form, lack many details as far as this particular blog is concerned. I was married, but I hardly wrote about what it was like. I left my husband but I never really went at lengths in explaining the true reasons of my leaving. I went back home and spent a year there in recovery and “self-discovery” and yet nothing in this blog truly describes what that year was like. I had an affair with a married man – an event that was never mentioned anywhere in here yet the details of which were carefully documented in a private journal. I spent months in what I call “sober debauchery”; I had a long, difficult, painful and ugly process of recovering from a decade-long eating disorder; I moved to Richmond; I started a new relationship, etc…

And yet, this blog doesn’t really reflect any of that, let alone daily details of my personal life, the long history of my constant dissatisfaction with myself, the different worries, frustrations and whatnots – in short, my writing here is not really intimate, so to speak. My own personal journals - and I have long stopped writing in a journal altogether, aren't any better at all. And yet, when I go over those earlier posts, when I read those short paragraphs, those little snippets that look kind of like Polaroid shots that actually did find a place in this blog, I remember, very distinctly, what it was like then, what I, Nika, was like. I don’t feel the kind of dissatisfaction that Anna does when she reads over her journal entries. What I was recording then, what I was looking for was a documentation of emotional and at times mental states with some kind of symbols, like a photograph or song lyrics, that would be there, like punctuation marks, to remind me what it felt like and not what it actually was.

If I were a writer (and I am not), I would be one of those difficult ones who would expect too much from their reader. Actually, the biggest criticism that I have received to one of the very few stories that I wrote and actually gave to an uninvolved party to read was just that – I expect my reader to do too much work – most of it, actually, I leave too many blanks, omit too many details. Despite the fact that I do see a certain kind of appeal in it and in the past have sought out that sort writing, this lack of detail, lack of intimacy isn’t entirely a matter of literary style.

The riddle I am facing here is a much more complex – maybe I would even go as far as describing it as psychological, linguistic and even philosophical to an extent. I know that I’m not adequately equipped to give any kind of professional explanation to the issue of how we see ourselves and how, as a result of this, we express and portray ourselves through our writing; and one thing I hate more than anything is self-righteous dilettantism. So I will leave the intellectual pursuits aside. I could, however, at least try to look into myself and seek out answers from within, especially since, as I mentioned in the beginning, I’ve been preoccupied with my own writing for this whole week. But I should make it an entirely new post, for this one is getting too long, plus the boy is awake – I have to go and tend to him.

One more...

Since this may somehow have some relevance in the near future...


The trouble with [the] story is that it is written in terms of analysis of laws of dissolution fo the relationship between Paul and Ella. I don't see any other way to write it. As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a pattern. and the pattern of an affair, even one that has lasted five years [...] is seen in terms of what ends it. This is why all this is untrue. Because while living through something one doesn't think like that at all.

[...]

Literature is analysis after the event.

[...]

To show a woman loving a man one should show her cooking a meal for him or opening a bottle of wine for the meal, while she waits for his ring at the door. Or waking in the morning before he does to see his face change from the calm of sleep into a smile of welcome. Yes. To be repeated a thousand times. But that isn't literature. Probably better as a film. Yes, the physical quality of life, that's living, and not hte analysis afterwards, or the moments of discrod or premonition. A shot in a fim: Ella slowly peeling an orange, handing Paul yellow segments of the fruit, which he takes, one after another, thoughtfully, frowning: he is thinking of something else.

On Doris Lessing

I have talked about her before. I’ve quoted and re-quoted her throughout this blog. I was delighted when she won the prize. She is one of the greatest writers of our time.

A couple of days ago, during a comment-conversation with Ptitsa, I brought her up again. She asked me to elaborate. I made a clumsy attempt, as much as posting a comment would allow. And yet I know that even in a million years, no matter how hard I try, I won’t be able to truthfully describe everything that her writing stands for. Partly because I’m no literary critic, partly because in “describing” something, one inevitably ends up caught in the process of “naming” – making whatever it is recognizable, familiar, safe. Ms. Lessing wasn’t quite fond of that and her writing is anything but “safe.”

No writer has influenced me as she did. No woman (except for my mother, perhaps) has taught me as much as she has. To me, she is the quintessential Mother Sugar (one of her own characters) – the witch-doctor, that voice of wisdom, painfully and blatantly honest and yet comforting at the same time. “My dear Anna, it is possible after all that in order to keep ourselves sane we will have to learn to rely on those blades of grass springing in a million years?”

So as promised, I am posting a few of my favorite passages from The Golden Notebook to let you be the judge.

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future […]. I don’t think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It’s only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

…

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It’s full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being “objective.” Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the “Anna” of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.

…
Sometimes, when I, Anna, look back, I want to laugh out loud. It is the appalled, envious laughter of knowledge at innocence. I would be incapable now of such trust. I, Anna, would never begin an affair with Paul. Or Michael. Or rather, I would begin an affair, just that, knowing exactly what would happen; I would begin a deliberately barren, limited relationship…

…
I put myself back into the state of mind I was in when I sent to Mother Sugar. I can’t feel, I said. […] When I left her I said: You’ve taught me to cry, thank you for nothing, you’ve given me back feeling, and it’s too painful.

In a world as terrible as this, limit emotion. How odd I didn’t see it before.

And against this instructive retreat into no-feeling, as a protection against pain, Mother Sugar – I remember saying to her in exasperation: “If I said to you that the H bomb has fallen and obliterated half of Europe, you’d click your tongue, tck, tck, and then, if I was weeping and wailing, you’d invite me, with an admonitory frown or a gesture, to remember, or take into account some emotion I was willfully excluding. What emotion? Why, joy, of course. Consider, my child, you’d say, or imply, the creative aspect of destruction! Consider the creative implications of the power locked in the atom! Allow your mind to rest on those first blades of tentative green grass that will poke into the light out of the lava in a million years time!” She smiled, of course. […] She said: “My dear Anna, it is possible after all that in order to keep ourselves sane we will have to learn to rely on those blades of grass springing in a million years?”

[…]
It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only… or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything that the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences…

…

I see Ella, walking slowly about a big empty room, thinking, waiting. I, Anna, see Ella. Who is, of course, Anna. But that is the point, for she is not. The moment I, Anna, write: Ella rings up Julia to announce, etc., then Ella floats away from me and becomes someone else. I don’t understand what happens at the moment Ella separates herself from me and becomes Ella. No one does. It’s enough to call her Ella, instead of Anna. Why did I choose the name Ella? Once I met a girl at a party called Ella. […] She was small, think dark – the same physical type as myself. […] People were drinking heavily. The host came over to fill our glasses. She put out her hand – a thin, white delicate hand, at just that moment when he put an inch of liquor in her glass, to cover it. She gave a cool nod: “That’s enough.” […] She picked up the glass with just an inch of red wine in it, and said: “That’s the exact amount I need for the right degree of intoxication.” I laughed. But no, she was serious. She drank the inch of red wine, and then remarked: “Yes, that’s right.“ Assessing how the alcohol was affecting her – she gave another small, cool nod. “Yes, that was just right.”

Well, I would never do that. That’s not Anna at all.

….

I came upstairs from the scene between Tommy and Molly and instantly began to turn it into a short story. It struck me that my doing this – turning everything into fiction – must be an evasion. […] Why do I never write down, simply, what happens? Why don’t I keep a diary? Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself. […] I shall keep a diary.

Upon rereading her notebooks:

…I didn’t recognize myself. Matching what I had written with what I remembered it all seemed false. And this – the untruthfulness of what I had written was because of something I had not thought of before – my sterility. The deepening note of criticism, of defensiveness, of dislike…

It was then I decided to use the blue notebook… as nothing but a record of facts. Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing Anna to the page. Every day I shaped Anna, said: Today I got up at seven, cooked breakfast for Janet, sent her to school, etc., etc., and it felt as if I had saved that day from chaos. Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing…

[…]

I expected a terse record of fact to present some sort of pattern when I read it over, but this sort of record is as false as the account of what happened on 15th September, 1954, which I read now embarrassed because of its emotionalism and because of its assumption that if I wrote “at nine-thirty I went to the lavatory to shit and at two to pee and at four I sweated,” this would be more real than if I simply wrote what I thought. And yet I still don’t understand why. Because although in life things like going to the lavatory or changing a tampon when one has one’s period are dealt with on an almost unconscious level, I can recall every detail of a day two years ago because I remember that Molly had blood on her skirt and I had to warn her to go upstairs and change before her son came in.

…
I think many people have a sense of shape, of unfolding , in their lives. This sense makes it possible for them to say: Yes, this new person is important to me: he, or she, is beginning of something I must live through. Or: This emotion, which I have not felt before, is not the alien I believed it to be. It will not be part of me and I must deal with it.

It is easy now, looking back over my life, to say: that Anna, in that time, was such and such a person. And then, five years later, she was such and such. A year, two years, five years of a certain kind of being can be rolled up and tucked away, or “named” – yes, during that time I was like that. Well now I am in the middle of such a period, and when it is over I shall glance back at it casually and say: yes, that’s what I was. I was a woman terribly vulnerable, critical, using femaleness as a sort of standard or yardstick to measure and discard men without even being conscious of it. (But I am conscious of it. And being conscious of it means I shall leave it all behind me and become – but what?)

When you walk through the garden, you got to watch your back...

I am watching The Wire – HBO series on inner city Baltimore. The depiction of the crime scene and the amount of violence in the show is painful and disturbing. I ask Rick if the same is true about Richmond. “Probably,” he says. “So you think there are Avons, Stringers and Prop Joes and wars over street corners in this town as well?” “Of course.” “Where are there?” I ask. “I don’t know… Maybe Churchhill, the alphabet streets, or the number streets. I don’t know.”

It sends a shiver down my spine. I am not quite exactly concerned about my own safety – my existence in this town goes parallel to the drug scene. I live in a relatively safe part of the town. I’ve only seen the dark side of Richmond – the alphabet streets – once, and that was by mere accident. The street corners of my own neighborhood resemble nothing like what I see on the show. I am living in a different reality without as much as noticing this other world that exists not only in my town but in every major city… The violence that I see merely on the screen is so primal, so basic, driven by an animalistic instinct of survival and self-preservation… That’s what I find so disturbing – the amount of despair, lack of any kind of hope that perpetuates a kind of violence that I will never be able to fully comprehend.

My advisor at Brandeis – a wise man and once the co-chair of the Socialist Party, had a theory that says that violence in everyday lives, the kind of violence that’s driven out of that bottomless sense of hopelessness is nothing but reaction against injustice. And it will continue to perpetuate itself until the roots of its cause are completely eradicated. Sadly enough though, he did not believe that socialism, as we know it, would be the cure.

I am not sure if there is a cure, but accepting it as a part of reality, or, as it is in my case, a retreat to a different, safer reality doesn’t sit quite right with me either.

Your dose of math nonsense of the day.

• A system of linear equations has either one, infinitely many or no solution(s).

• The link between rank and linear independence is one of the most amazing aspects of linear algebra. The rank shows how many linearly independent column/row vectors a matrix has.

• Two vectors are linearly independent iff they do not lie on the same line.

• All real numbers are linearly dependent – they can be expressed as linear combination of each other; scalar multiples of each other and/or multiples of one (the latter being the case of primes).

• Imaginary numbers are of general form α + βi where i is the square root of negative one. Imaginary numbers come in conjugate pairs.

Some woes on my upcoming trip...

In about a week I’ll be going to Armenia – Yerevan to be more exact. And as it happens before every trip, I can already feel that gut-wrenching feeling of anxiety that I experience every time I am about to visit my own homeland.

My previous trips there were either returning home after a temporary stay the length of which was always predetermined; business, if you one can consider a research fellowship as such; or an escape of sorts and what one might call an act of self-liberation. This time the sole purpose of my trip is to see my family who I only see every year or every other year, depending on how lucky I am.

I am, of course, excited. My mother and my brother are the dearest, my most favorite people in the world. Words cannot describe how much I miss them when I am away. Words cannot describe how happy I am to be seeing them again.

And yet, despite the excitement, despite the long anticipation, the gut-wrenching feeling prevails. From what I experienced last time, going back to Armenia no longer feels like going back home. I guess there really is no such a thing as going back home - how true is that sad cliché...

Going back to Armenia has always been a difficult task – it’s an emotionally charged and rather taxing experience. It’s as if one’s entering a completely different world that has an extra dimension – something so subtle and elusive that it can hardly be described. And yet, it is because I have been away for such a long time, because of my familiarity and simultaneous alienation from my own culture that I become aware of that extra dimension. And that is making me afraid.

The source of my fear and discomfort is the fact that the minute I set foot on that land, the minute I immerse myself in that society, I will, immediately and inevitably be judged on every step I make. I will be judged – not because of who I am and what I’ve done, not because of being unconventional in the traditional Armenian sense, but because that’s what seems to be the default state of my people, that’s what gives the place that extra dimension, the feeling that there is always, always, someone’s eyes on one’s back, the feeling of being watched, talked about, disapproved of…

Is she successful enough? Is she well-dressed enough? How much money does she have? And more importantly, how much money does she spend? Did she gain weight? Did she lose weight? Oh, she doesn’t have kids! Why doesn’t she have kids by now? What ever happened to that husband of hers? Divorced? Oh, she shouldn’t have married that American in the first place. Her mother should have never let her. Poor girl, she’s damaged goods now. She’s still a student? She’s almost thirty for god’s sake! Good lord! Eh, her mother should have never let her go to America. Oh, but still, she looks like she’s lost weight. I wonder what diet she’s on. They usually come back from there all blown up like balloons…

I am well aware that social scrutiny of this sort exists probably exists everywhere, including the States. Especially in Richmond. And yet, the social fabric here has been lose enough and I have been trivially unimportant enough to be able to escape the scrutiny that my own close-knit society subjects me though its magnifying glass…

I remember, most of my adult years of living in Yerevan were spent in resentment and constant effort to defy just that. The resentment was what gave me form, the tension and resistance was what contained that form - in a way that tension defined me. I remember how it felt when I relocated to the States – the absence of tension. Suddenly not having that familiar weight, the familiar tension felt as if there was no gravity. It felt as if I was scattered all over the place… It was as if I had to learn, all over again, who the hell I was – or rather, it felt as if I had to redefine and build myself from scratch, this time, without including the resentment into the equation…

The fact that I feel like a stranger in my own home can be understood. The changes that may have taken place in Yerevan, the city that I once knew like the back of my hand, however alien and potentially frustrating, are not the cause of my unease. The absence of one Fat Bastard in any given drinking or declothing establishment, however disappointing and heartbreaking, may be overcome… What’s giving me the pains is that every time I’m back, it feels like I have to constantly and ferociously justify myself, the core of my existence and everything that I stand for. Even if I have long stopped doing that everywhere else, it is still making me nauseous…

On figs and friendships...

This time last year I was in Georgia, on a train to Tbilisi – the final destination of our team assignment. Yulya and I were just cooling off after a huge fight we had in Batumi. We fought viciously throughout the trip. Mostly about work. Sometimes about logistics. And yet, during that month of constant travel, hard work and occasional nights spent sharing a bed, the two of us had grown close. Yulya told me that I snored. She also said that for an Armenian girl, I am rather prissy. When I was sick in Batumi, she woke David up in the middle of the night and the two of them went roaming the streets in search of a drugstore to get me medicine.

In Tbilisi we stayed in the center of the city, off of Chavchavadze, in a four story palace with lacquered parquet, marble staircases, infinite bedrooms, fountains in private courtyard... It only cost us $100 a night ($33.33… each). The luxury was astounding. The comfort of the place was priceless.

We were wrapping up our work – cleaning the data and writing the report. We worked hard – we were a good team. During our breaks we’d take trips to the nearby internet café, walk all over the center of the city, peep into luxurious and ridiculously expensive stores, wondering whether anyone was able to afford buying anything there. Sometimes Yulya asked me to have a cigarette with her on the balcony where we’d hang out, talking about boys, David’s religious views, life in general…We lived on bread, ham, tomatoes, Viola cheese, ice-cream and fruit that we couldn’t seem to get enough of. One day I bought white figs – the first of the season. “What are these?” asked Yulya, frowning at what looked like giant green dumplings. “Oh my god, these are amazing,” she said, as she bit into one. “I’m going to eat them every day. Like every day!” She said that every time she really liked something. We only had three more days left. Yulya and David were going to Ukraine, I was heading home, to Armenia. It was a teary parting.

A month later, Georgia escalated war by invading South Ossetia. Russia retaliated by bombing the hell out of every single strategic military target in Georgia, including Poti and the cities where we had stayed only weeks earlier. Abkhazia, in its turn, got all hot and bothered. “Can you believe this shit?” Yulya would ask me over IM from Lviv. “I know, it’s crazy. We were just there!” I’d write her back from Yerevan. It was hard to imagine what it would be like had we been there then.

Coming back to the States felt like I had just escaped something dark and evil, even though all I saw of that war was from the screen of my mother’s TV. I returned to Richmond. School started. Yulya moved to DC. A couple of months later Yulya and David broke up. I went to see a shrink. Life took over with its everyday routine. I missed Yulya but I hardly thought about Tbilisi…

It is only now that I realize how much I miss it – the month in Georgia, those last few days. It all seems surreal – like one long, kaleidoscopic day. It all seems centuries away. And yet, when I close my eyes, I can see Yulya’s face as she’s biting into a fig... They were, indeed, truly amazing figs.

A glance at my current music world - "...but I only listen to this hundred times a day!"

Леонид Агутин и Владимир Пресняков - Аэропорты

101 Things in 1001 days

Finally! Background details and all have been omitted.

Ambitious as it sounds, lets hope that some of these items will get accomplished.

1. Learn to manage free time more productively. The fulfillment of the rest of this list is highly contingent upon it.
2. Start blogging again and update the blog regularly.
3. Learn how to talk Southern.
4. Run a 10k under 50 minutes. Run more consistently in general.
5. Start stretching again. Regain the flexibility I had five years ago.
6. Make a bead curtain.
7. Go on a first date with the boy.
8. Celebrate my birthday more - have five mini-birthday this year alone as a symbol of celebrating being 28 and not merely turning 28. It is my birthday, damnit, I can have it whenever the hell I want. Plus there are many other good days worthy of celebration besides December 18.
9. Celebrate five mini-birthdays of the boy for the same reason as in #8.
10. Get a goldfish. Name him Ludovik.
11. Apply for US citizenship.
12. Get into a habit of speaking and writing in Russian again.
13. Reread the Golden Notebook and write a letter to Doris Lessing.
14. Reread Nabokov’s Ada.
15. Prove that damn theorem on matrix rank and eigenvalues. That is, prove that the rank of a matrix shows how many non-zero eigenvalues it has.
16. Learn fundamentals of Analysis. This includes infinite series – Taylor Series, McLaurin Series, so on and so forth. Venture into Real Analysis.
17. Learn Difference and Differential equations. Learn them well.
18. Get closer to being able to understand non-linear dynamics (otherwise known as chaos theory).
19. Read the infamous Strogatz book on chaos.
20. Master the art of writing formal mathematical proofs (my current proofs are messy and somewhat clumsy).
21. Get my Economics Master’s from VCU.
22. Get a job that will serve as a viable internship for my SID Master’s from Brandeis.
23. Get the aforementioned (and somewhat useless at this point) degree from Brandeis.
24. Make a level-headed, well researched decision whether to do a PhD in Economics or Mathematics.
25. Apply and (hopefully) get accepted to a PhD program of my choice.
26. Learn more about applications of non-linear dynamics in economics and develop a feasible topic for a potential PhD dissertation.
27. Get in touch with Dr. LeBaron in hopes of getting some insight regarding accomplishment of #18 and #26.
28. Befriend Oleg Korenok.
29. Befriend Wes Cain.
30. Start and finish and really excel in Time Series course.
31. Regardless of the field of research, become a kick-ass econometrician.
32. Learn to work with SAS and/or SPSS. Prefect my STATA skills.
33. Learn to run simulations.
34. Start and finish a research project on foreign aid and growth.
35. Attend a lecture given by Bill Easterly.
36. Learn about mathematical modeling of heart arrhythmia.
37. Teach a class.
38. Explore the concept of freedom from mathematical point of view.
39. Learn to better cope with the limitations that each choice entails.
40. Learn a thing or two about Jungian psychology.
41. Spend two weeks in complete solitude.
42. Finish writing the Perfect Vacuum.
43. Reread the Brief History of Time.
44. Go on road trips with the boy.
45. Visit Charleston.
46. Visit Philadelphia.
47. Visit San Francisco.
48. Visit that Bed and Breakfast place in Baltimore again.
49. Take the boy to Armenia to meet the family and to really see where it is that I am from.
50. Visit my brother in Italy or Sweden, depending on where he chooses to go to grad school. Most like Italy, though.
51. Visit Istanbul.
52. Visit Beirut (honeymoon or not).
53. Go to St. Petersburg (Leningrad) with my mother again.
54. Eat at least two servings of vegetables and one serving of fruit each day. (I was going to write “eat more fruit and vegetables” but the boy objected by saying that it’s not “measurable” enough).
55. Try a new dish every month. Educate my palate.
56. Quit smoking (hopefully).
57. Perfect my cooking skills. Learn to cook a few new dishes.
58. Learn to make those perfect cupcakes.
59. Update my iPod song list. Preferably with more Russian/Soviet music.
60. Learn to drive already!!!!
61. Get a Virginia State ID and a tacky “Virginia is for Lovers” tee. Wear it everywhere.
62. Buy a new camera and take more pictures.
63. Print and frame a few of my favorite photos.
64. Learn how to use Photoshop.
65. Relearn to play the piano.
66. Update my Playboy subscription.
67. Go to a North Carolina beach.
68. Start using anti-aging potions of sorts, take calcium supplements and work on resistance training after I hit 30 (which will happen within those 1001 days). Boring as this may sound, I won’t be getting any younger from there on…
69. Go to more concerts.
70. Give a hug to Ryan Montebleau. At times he looks like he could use one.
71. Spend a night here and there at hotels that have hot tubs.
72. Make an effort to visit my friends in DC. Make a better effort in staying in touch with friends in general.
73. Host out of town guests (Lisa and Yulya, this one is especially for you).
74. Visit Mother Sugar regularly.
75. See the Fat Bastard.
76. Befriend a female.
77. Make an effort to wear (costume) jewelry. Actually buy a few pieces of jewelry instead of just admiring them from afar.
78. Buy a new computer. Preferably Mac.
79. Undergo hypnosis.
80. Draw a perfect butterfly.
81. Buy a few nice coffee cups and stop drinking coffee from that hideous dollar store mug.
82. Invest in a new black leather jacket.
83. Get an orchid and learn to keep it alive.
84. Buy a few sets of silk bed sheets.
85. Finish this fucking list!
86. Go to a spa. Preferably at the boy’s expense.
87. Get rid of the clothes that I no longer wear.
88. Get rid of clutter in general. Fuck the laws of entropy. (No, the last statement is not part of the things to be accomplished).
89. Buy new furniture. Without having an existential breakdown.
90. Learn to wake up early in the morning which means learn to go to bed early.
91. Make an effort not to look like a complete bum on my days off.
92. Stop biting my fingernails so that I can have pretty polished nails again.
93. Save a dollar a day. (That’s, like, $1,001 dollars, people!). Donate it.
94. Host several dinner parties.
95. Plant and grow tomatoes on our deck.
96. Figure out a way to pay off my student loans.
97. Frown less.
98. Learn to be happy at Christmastime.
99. Kick Rick’s ass every now and then as a prophylactic means.
100. Have a threesome.
101. Prepare to have an offspring. Preferably of quiet, hard working and intelligent variety. Hopefully after all of the above items have been crossed off the list.

My list of 101 Things is slowly progressing. In the meantime - I found this little "gem" in some dark corner of the interwebs - 101 Things Not to Say During Sex. Even though I could think of a couple of my own numbers that I had pulled back in my day ("Come on, be a marine!" being one of them), I will simply leave you with a few of my favorites.

- Do you accept Visa?
- Hope you're as good looking when I'm sober...
- Did you know the ceiling needs painting?
- You're good enough to do this for a living!
- Did I tell you my Aunt Martha died in this bed?
- Do you know the definition of statutory rape?
- You look younger than you feel.
- I was so horny tonight I would have taken a duck home!
- Have you seen "Fatal Attraction"?
- You mean you're NOT my blind date?

Obviously, whoever decided to write this had much better luck in completing it.

Your dose of math nonsense of the day.

I was solving a somewhat messy, yet straightforward problem of some sort and couldn't get my answer match the one given in the book. Knowing how prone to error I can be (my mind is known for occasional jerks such as 3 x 2 = 5, I kid you not), I checked and rechecked my solution to no avail. Before I would start looking for a different approach to problem at hand, I looked at my answer, looked at the answer in the book and realized that the two were, indeed, identical, the proof of which would involve nothing more but eighth-grade trigonometry and use of two basic trigonometric identities.



Happy holiday weekend, everyone.