Bringing the chicken curry back

Note: The bulk of the narrative and subsequent speculations of the current and following posts were partially written in Yerevan and have been inspired by the following:

I was only weeks away from moving in with the boy,

I had been thinking quite a lot about the Golden Notebook and the relationship of Anna with Michael and her fictitious characters Ella and Paul,

An event that is soon to become a focal point here – I was proposed to by a certain diplomatic servant of the United States to Armenia.

Yeah, you heard me right – a diplomatic servant of relative importance (neither his post nor his identity should be revealed for apparent reasons) proposed marriage over a meal of chicken curry and a couple of mango lasses (of course there has to be chicken curry involved somewhere in here, doesn’t it?) at a lovely Indian restaurant in downtown Yerevan.

The horror of horrors – what an ungodly act! Even the fact that I have really pretty eyes (?) does not serve as grounds for an excuse for such … (I can’t even find words to describe such atrocity). And yet, as serious as he made the whole thing sound (I’m not sure if you can ever take the State Department seriously), I certainly do hope that he was joking, otherwise the said State Department should be gravely concerned with the state of mental health of its employees. So to keep the same humorous air, I told him that I would marry him if he took me to Beirut for the honeymoon. He said that there was not even a slight chance of that happening and that Cairo was the farthest that he would go to draw that line of compromise (compromise? Before marriage? Come on!). I shrugged my shoulders and calmly rejected his offer, as I cold heartedly broke his heart (not really). The end of story, you would think? Not quite.

The thing is, crazy and ridiculous shit always happens to me when I am in Yerevan. That’s a known fact that can be taken for granted. But the usual suspects of such ridiculousness used to involve any or all combinations of the following: the fat bastard, peace corps, strippers and the marines… Diplomatic staff? I am not sure whether I should consider this as an upgrade or a downgrade from the above listed bunch.

The scary thing is that had I been younger and under different circumstances, I would have said “yes” to the guy just out of the sheer absurdity of the whole situation. And who knows, maybe I would have made it out of Cairo alive, we would have had a couple of embassy brats and life would become nothing but one drunken hash after another, since at that point I would have to start drinking and drinking heavily…

So the story itself is remarkable enough to be worth holding on to so that I can tell it to my grandkids. And yet, as hysterical and absurd as it may sound, it evoked a series of quite uncomfortable and distressing emotions, both directed towards myself, the poor diplomatic servant (who was quite adorable, I would have to admit) and another, completely innocent party that became the only casualty of this whole situation that I will unfold shortly. But before I take a breath to sort through my frantic notes as I struggle to organize my thoughts, I have to warn you that what follows next is nothing but what you may see as the bloody aftermath of feminism, and it, indeed, is not going to be pretty…Loaded stuff coming right up. So hang on tightly.

P.S. I think the fat bastards owes me at least two Cricket lighters.