No title to tie all these together. I'm not *that* good.

Happy Thanksgiving! Of course I am sick today (this seems to be a Thanksgiving tradition for me).

I don't have much to write about. My teaching hours were reduced when I was promoted, with the consequence that this year has been depressingly devoid of horrifying student conversations, just a couple of mildly amusing ones:

This isn't technically a student conversation, but I'm counting it because I was in character for some reason, and because it was totally wasted on its audience:
Vladimir Petrovich*: You never do anything stupid?
Me: No, never.
V: I think it is okay to do mistakes sometimes.
M: Well, evidently.

Funny student:
Fyodor Pavlovich: Have you found a new boyfriend yet?
Me: It's been two weeks!
F: So, more than one.


I got tagged for a meme, but I don't know seven bloggers to re-tag (and, for the record, it really is bothering me that there aren't seven rules), so I'm just going to tell you seven weird things about myself:

1. I'm allergic to all fruit except citruses. I'm not allergic to cooked fruit at all, and salad dressing makes me less allergic to tomatoes. I haven't tried it on other fruits (and, honestly, have no intention of doing so). I'm less allergic to unripe fruit.

2. When I first came here, I was so self-conscious about my accent that I just wrote notes for everything I wanted at stores and restaurants. I was also self-conscious about my handwriting, so I often asked my boss to write notes for me.

3. I dressed up as a boy for the last Halloween party. I didn't condition my hair for a week, studied the way that guys move, borrowed clothes from a coworker (who was dressing up as me), padded my shoulders and waistline like crazy, gave myself a dreadful moustache using some mascara, and resolved to only drink beer all night. I was very proud of this costume. My coworker told me I looked like Hilary Swank in "Boys Don't Cry." "Is that a compliment?" I asked. "I...guess."

4. I haven't dyed my hair since 2006. I wanted to dye it gray for a while, but exactly nobody thought this was a good idea, and the amount of bleaching it would require made me give up entirely.

5. I eventually learned how to use chopsticks at age 17 because I was at a restaurant where they didn't give me a fork and I was too embarrassed to ask for one. Years later, I was in China and every time I walked into a restaurant people would watch me just to see whether I could eat with chopsticks. It would have been kind of embarrassing if I hadn't been able to.

6. I really really miss swiss orange and mint chocolate chip ice cream. Not together.

7. I think I remember conversations better than most people, to the point that I find myself pretending not to remember stories that I've been told before because it just makes the conversation easier.


* No, these are not real names, just really pretentious aliases. Please do not stalk my students.

How the world can change

Life since my last update has been interesting (Dmitry and I broke up. I do not want to talk about it), but that's not what I'm going to write about. What I'm going to write about is:

1. Obama won the election!!! I kind of wish I had been home for it. But people here are happy, too. A McCain win would have destroyed our credibility, at least here in Russia (and, yes, I do know how that sounds). Some of them are worried that I'm going to go back now. What I was really waiting for was health care, so...maybe?

2. Proposition 8. I...have no words for this. But look here. Second picture, middle sign, awesome. It kind of made me wish that my parents were fundamentalist nutjobs so that I could marry that guy just to prove a point.

And I understand that lots of otherwise good people are opposed to gay marriage, I assume because their churches say so (like mine, though I manage to form my own opinions on this issue despite that) or because they are just uncomfortable with it (that would be the entire population of the country that I choose to live in). It's the voting against it that I have a problem with. That's basically going to the polls and saying "I do not want people who I will never meet and who have no effect on my life to be able to visit each other in the hospital when one of them is seriously ill." Who DOES that?!?

It turns out that I do have some words for this.

3. Talking to my friend, an Evangelical Christian, about Sarah Palin (this was before the election when it was relevant):
O: See, she's one of those scary Christians.
M: Ye...what, what?! You have to explain that because as far as I'm concerned YOU'RE one of those scary Christians!
O: [uses the one issue that I actually, KIND OF, agree with Palin on to illustrate her point]
M: Oh...my. This means that someone out there thinks I'm a scary Christian, too.
O: Yeah, they're called Episcopalians.
M: Ooh...I bet they do.
O: But who thinks Episcopalians are scary?
M: Unitarians!

And then you come full-circle because I imagine that the Sarah Palins of the world find Unitarians scary. Or...it might be more of a line than a circle.

4. I am currently scraping the money together to go visit my brother in Berlin. His blog is updated more often than mine. His post about contractors reminds me of some of the people I work with, except we make a lot less money. But the lifestyle is similar.

5. Points if you know where I got that title from (it ties the whole post together, though 3 is kind of a stretch).