twenty-something years of "what have you been up to?"

Month: October 2010

  • it’s all about atmosphere

    Half of me can't WAIT to find out where our next post is, and the other half of me is happy to mentally live in all six potential posts at once. I'll be sad no matter where we are assigned because we can't go to all of them. The other six-eighteenths of me is nostalgic about Moscow. Is there a word for the sweet nostalgia of knowing you are going to miss something while you are still doing it?

    This summer in the car Stefan and I heard John Mayer's Half of My Heart for the first time. Stefan recognized John Mayer's voice but thought he was singing about Heffalump. I misheard the words as "I can't stop loving you with half of my arms." I sort of wish I didn't know about Jennifer Aniston so I didn't have to picture John Mayer hugging her with stumps.

    Anyhoo. Where was I? Brussels? Bucharest? Oh, still in Moscow.

    I'm reading A Life in Letters, a collection of Anton Chekov's letters. He's so broke he's pawning his shoes. He's in medical school and he's writing to support his parents and his sister. He sends scathing letters to his brother in which he swears his head off. Then he drinks champagne and goes for a walk around the Kremlin. He's writing and writing and writing — he writes something like three stories a week. He goes on and on about how crucial simplicity is. Then he has to have two teeth pulled and the extraction is so painful he has a headache for four days. He writes about his hemorrhoids. It's all so immediate it's like I'm following him on Twitter. Except, of course, it's 1886.

    Today, looking for items to put in the embassy newsletter I read a review of an exhibit opening of a landscape painter and I recognized the name from the A Life in Letters. Half the letters Chekov writes are to this guy, maybe his best friend, Issak Levitan. They were both obsessed with depicting atmosphere. I have to go see this show of more than 200 of his paintings at the Tretykov Gallery.

    That kind of happenstance is what I will miss about Moscow with half of my arms.

    V_zvonMoscow News article I was reading today about Levitan and the exhibition–wish I'd written it.

  • american yoga it’s not

    Zhenya
    Zhenya, the yoga teacher, left to have a baby and I begged the gym to bring her back. I finally showed up today, more than a week later. Then, I had to borrow a mat, and then I walked out of today's class to go look for a hair tie, but I'm totally into it.

    The classes I went to this summer, in Davis and in Santa Cruz, shocked me. The teachers are so nice. In Santa Cruz, I walked in on a class during the quiet rest at the end, and no one yelled at me. I came to class late and the teacher ran over asking "Are there any positions you don't like to do?" and "I like your ring!" At the end of class, she sang us awake. I was disappointed that after class she didn't pass out cookies. It felt like pre-school for grown-ups.

    Zhenya has a different approach. She was obviously previously a professional dancer or maybe a juniors champion gymnast. She lifts her chest so beautifully, she turns on her hands as easily as her feet. She positions her little arms like a ballerina. She does things with her hips and joints that I can't even describe, but it's worth going to class just for the sexy and athletic show she puts on. She's sort a one-woman no-frills cirque de soliel. But mean.

    Her warm up excercises are fast, turning your arms inside out, outside in, or slapping your knees on the ground, one two, one two. People at tennis lessons here and those working out at the track stretch to a similar fast cadence, boing, boing, boinging their arms, an unfamiliar rigor for my "let's do a long, easy stretch" American body.

    Zhenya moves us through the familiar poses, but not in the familiar order. And she's talking, talking, talking in Russian, and all I understand is sabaka "dog." I have to look to see if it's downward or upward facing. But it doesn't matter because I can never do a sabaka like she can. Her form, post-partem, is more beautiful than any other teacher I've ever had. She comes over and tells me to stop trying to straighten my leg so much. I'm American. I should hold my leg at the knee and leave the leg-straightening to the Russians.

    She tells us to breathe. "Do you feel a stretch here?" She asks in English, "I feel a pain in my thigh," someone says. "Yes! Isn't it great?" she says with a rare smile. She speeds up motions that are slow at home, and makes us hold poses we would, in California, slide through. A warrior balance drops into a pigeon pose. Never in the US would someone do those back to back. It would be a sacrilige. And isn't it great?

    I can't wait to go back on Tuesday. Unless I forget to go.

    My wow-can-she-write friend Erica blogged about the class here: http://bit.ly/bed8Sg

  • bid list 2010

    In alphabetical order:

    Brussels
    Bucharest
    Colombo
    Hong Kong
    Prague
    Sofia 

    Thoughts?

  • go moscow!

    Camille and bea soccer

    Camille is playing soccer this weekend in Bucharest. She initially didn't make the team, then kept going to practices "just for fun." Eventually they needed her on the team and now she's one of eleven players at the season tournament! Such a sweet lesson in preserverence, and an example of Camille's softly stubborn way when she makes up her mind about something. She facebooked that the high school is very cool and today they are at a mall with the host family. Since it's Camille approved, I secretly want to put Bucharest first on the bid list. Well, maybe second after Brussels.

  • ginger

    Ginger_lemonade
    Carrot ginger soup, gingerbread–which I will perfect soon–and ginger-mint-lemonade. We are on a ginger kick.