Don't worry, eat heartily

I went to pick up DS from his playgroup, first time in a long, long time, and first time ever this early. As I was waiting for him to get ready and say his goodbyes, I met one of the teachers' assistants, a fifty something year old Russian woman. She started out conversation with nodding her head in the direction of DS: "Yours?" This reminded me of an old spy movie, so I decided to be true to the genre, looked around so no on could hear us and half-whispered back, "Mine." She didn't dig the genre though and started talking normally. Basically her point was as follows: DS doesn't listen, at all, oy vavoy, but eats well, so I shouldn't worry. I am still cracking up.

Can't we all just get along?

Apparently not.

Warning: I am in a horrible mood. Really, really bad mood. So if you are looking for something cute and bubbly and sunshiny, head over to some other blog. Still here? Thanks, but consider yourself warned.

You know one would think that once a person reaches a certain age, i.e. stops being a teenager, some things become apparent without anyone pointing them out. That, for example, teasing people is not nice. Or that having the latest cell phone doesn't really make you have a cool personality. There's another one: listening loudly to the music causes hearing damage. And is annoying to your neighbors. Especially the ones with little kids. Especially at 1.30 am. On the night when we change the bleeping clock and lose an hour of sleep.

But no, some people just don't get it. Probably because they incurred irreversible brain damage from listening to their Walkmans on max. volume.

Last night since about 9 p.m. our neighbors were playing techno. So loud, my kitchen floor was vibrating. But the kids weren't asleep yet, so I basically ignored it. Now, I am not some sort of a music prude or snob. I love, enjoy and listen to it. And on some level I might understand the allure of turning the volume all the way up, if one is a teenager. Our neighbors, however, are no longer teenagers, they are a middle aged woman with three children in their twenties. Who are otherwise functional or so it seems.

Around 10.30 the music became less loud, and we were enjoying a relatively quiet night. When all of a sudden around 12 it started booming again. Us, being polite folk and all, didn't want to disturb people at 12, even though they were disturbing us. At 1 am our patience wore out, and SubHub went downstairs to explain that sleeping is a necessity for some people and vibrating walls and floors are not particularly conducive to slumber. When SubHub came home, I asked him what he told the bunch of young hoodlums. To my sheer astonishment, he said that he didn't talk to the young ones, he was talking to their mother. One would expect that it would've occurred to at least a 50-something year old woman and a mother of three that some things are just not appropriate. Are extremely rude. And even illegal. Not so...

This wasn't over yet. Today, around 2 p.m., I guess around the time when the young and the restless got up (I know they didn't go to sleep until 3 b/c I heard music coming from their apartment at that hour), they turned their techno on again. And if I thought that what I heard last night was the max volume, I was wrong. I guess these people do possess some basic human decency to not turn music on to the max in the middle of the night. I guess I misjudged them or something. I was in a dire need of a nap, but when I felt the bed beneath me vibrating, I knew that there would be no napping.

At that point I decided that if I were to suffer, it would be on my own terms. And if I had to get a headache, it would be from my own music. From the personal experience I know that nothing annoys non-Russian speaking folk as much as Russian rock. At the high volume. Well, maybe except Karmina Burana, but I am keeping that one for the time I go shopping and no one dear to me is in the vicinity.



So here's little something if you have to annoy your neighbors or just want to enjoy a piece of Russian classic rock.

P.S. Happy Women's Day! Almost forgot!

With assistants like these...

I usually avoid Russian businesses if I can help it. That goes first and foremost for doctors who started practicing back "at home". It is not because I think that Russian doctors are inferior (sometimes they are) in their knowledge and skill. Mostly, it is because of their bedside manner and overall customer service. For a myriad of reasons, political, economical, social and cultural, the concept of customer satisfaction in USSR was pretty much nonexistent and customer service largely depended on the character and upbringing of the service provider. Once these people moved to the US, one would think that wanting their business to succeed would give them enough motivation to change their ways. For many business owners it is so, and for just as many it isn't.

Well, we made one exception in the "avoid Russians like a plague" rule when we chose a Russian pediatrician for our kids. We really like her, and she was highly recommended: she is a good doctor, kids like her, our views on antibiotics and vaccinations generally agree, and she is a very, very polite and nice. Obviously, her office is staffed with Russian receptionists because many of her patients' parents tend to be from Russia. I have heard complaints about them from my friends, but never experienced anything truly negative myself. Most of the time, they were nice to me and my kids. Well, until last week.

SubHub had to take DD for a check up, and the doctor had asked to check DD's vision. The assistant put DD in front of a table with letters, and asked her to name them. DD knows alphabet, but gets letters confused. In addition, for unknown to me reasons, yeshivas start teaching kids Hebrew alphabet ahead of English, so even though DD is absorbed in learning the alphabet, it is not English alphabet that she learns. The assistant administering this test remarked to my husband, "Shame on you. The girl is four years old and doesn't know the alphabet!"

What can I say, this assistant was lucky it wasn't me there with my daughter. While generally I try avoiding conflict, some things deserve an immediate response. The comment was definitely completely inappropriate and rude. Multiply that by the fact that a certain percentage of kids have developmental delays, and this receptionist could have offended a parent of a child incapable of recognizing letters for reasons other than parental laziness and neglect. (I am not even going to go into the whole topic of when children should start learning alphabet etc. or whether a 4-year old is developmentally disabled if she cannot memorize letters. )

I was and still am pretty irate about the whole thing and even thought of calling the doctor herself and complaining. But this receptionist has worked there for years, her manners, comments and all. I doubt anything would come out of my complaint. My only decision here is whether this incident requires changing doctors or not. I am thinking not yet, but it's strike one...

УМОМ РОССИЮ НЕ ПОНЯТЬ (One cannot understand Russia using logic)

I have found yet another evidence that Russia will most likely never be a normal country. At least not in my lifetime.

While looking something up on the net, I have come across an interesting piece of info: there is a movement in Russia organized in the late 90s that heavily lobbies for Ivan the Terrible's recognition as a saint. In the past nine years or so, the movement only gathered more and more followers. I will not go into much detail about many saints who are already recognized and who led far from saintly lifestyles. The fact that many of them were murderers, vicious anti-Semites, womanizers and drunks would not surprise most educated people. But Ivan the Terrible? The serial murderer, rapist, and torturer? The man responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths of his fellow Orthodox Christians? That goes beyond anything I have seen before. But honestly, the only thing that truly surprises me is that Ivan is not a saint yet. Russians develop masochistic devotion and attachment to their tzars, especially the ones that kept the country "in control", i.e. engaged in the most amount of terror against Russian citizens.

After reading this info, I mumbled to myself, "The next thing you know, those nuts will ask for Stalin to be recognized a saint too." But I spoke too early. Not long after, I found that there's a movement for that too...

I am not looking at them, they are looking at me

I haven’t been posting or answering emails as promptly as I used to for several reasons. The main reason for my cyber space neglect is SubHub’s vacation. He’s been home for a few weeks and has been hogging computer expressing desire to spend time with his wife. The nerve! And I have so much to write about, I am bursting at the seams (and not because my clothes are too small). I have another week and a half of this to endure, but then we should be back to our original programming.

I wanted to write this entry ever since the beginning of summer, but always put it off. However, after my company had an evacuation drill, I feel that I can no longer keep silent. Have you noticed that if you see a woman in a New York crowd dressed in super skimpy clothes, so skimpy that she stands out among people wearing mostly tank tops and sundresses, nine times out of ten she speaks Russian?

I was thinking exactly that during our evacuation drill. In the crowd of a two hundred people, one could easily spot my some of my former compatriots based solely on the way they dressed. No, those weren’t the raggedy clothes of poor immigrants, for the most part those were expensive duds, but…. One woman was sporting VERY tight pants with three inch heels. How she climbed down twenty something flights of stairs is anybody’s guess. It’s a good thing that Russian women also possess high endurance. She was talking to another woman who was channeling a 12-year-old trapped in a body of someone about three times that age. The second woman looked like she borrowed clothes from the last Children’s Place collections: a tiny polo shirt with a super mini skirt that looked like this (picture taken from Children's Place website):

Something tells me that there was a little girl in Brooklyn, bitterly crying over the loss of her favorite outfit. And just to put it all in context: this is how these women were dressed for work!

But young women with good bodies baring almost all are only half of the problem. Older women refusing to accept realities of their age, weight and the laws of gravity are much worse. Go to any Russian wedding/birthday/big party if you haven’t yet, and you’ll know exactly what I am talking about. When a woman in her 20s shows too much skin, it’s one thing. When her 50 something year old mother does the same, it’s a whole new ballgame. And I am not talking about grossly overweight ladies; most of these older women are rather fit for their age and would look awesome, if only dressed a bit more…I can’t find a word - well if they were just a bit more dressed, I guess. The things that I have seen would only come in some designer’s nightmare. (From now on I will only be talking about women in 50 plus age bracket.) I have seen them wearing skirts or dresses with slits up to here. It could’ve looked attractive, if only the slit didn’t show spider and varicose veins, cellulite and hanging skin. Not pretty. I have seen low cut dresses and blouses without appropriate support – gravity is a law of nature, you can’t opt out simply because you don’t like it. I have witnessed women squeezed into outfits a few sizes too small for them. That looked funny, both funny ha ha AND funny peculiar. And don’t get me started on makeup. I guess the concept that less is more haven’t reached Brighton Beach and Russian media yet. Let’s hope it catches on in this century.

But the winner of them all almost made my eyes bleed. I have seen her, a woman in her fifties, at a wedding, wearing a laced up corset top, few sizes and twenty years too inappropriate for her, like this one,

only without an extra layer of fabric, with her skin literally popping out from between the criss crossed laces. The saddest part was that this woman was rather attractive, and had she worn something less risqué, she would’ve looked pretty rather than desperate for cash, old and fat.

It all would’ve been just in the realm of aesthetics, and we all know that this one is hard to argue logically. However, this propensity to dress inappropriately often time translates into undesirable treatment. I worked once with a girl who preferred wearing tight T-shirts and short shorts. This was a deli type of establishment, and most people at the counter were teenagers making extra cash while in high school or college. Sooner or later this was bound to happen: one of the guys started making comments about the way this girl looked in shorts. His biggest offense was to tell her that she would’ve looked much better if she exercised her legs a bit. The girl went ballistic and started screaming about sexual harassment. While in no way have I condoned the comment the guy made, I still asked the girl as to why she wouldn’t put more clothes on her body. It only makes sense to me that if you are not comfortable at people looking at your body, then maybe you should cover it up. She said that those were clothes she was comfortable in and she was not going to change the way she dressed because of one jerk. I would’ve seen the logic of it had she not complained to me on a regular basis about people making jokes and commenting on her looks. (When another guy – in my presence - paid her a very sexually explicit compliment only a few months later, she didn’t complain. I guess it didn’t constitute sexual harassment if her looks weren’t mocked or criticized.)

Where am I going with this? I am not sure, but I need to conclude. I am not saying that all Russian women dress like this. Actually, most of them dress just fine and not much different from their current compatriots. But the ones who stand out like a sore thumb make all the rest look bad. Russian girls are often stereotyped as easy and promiscuous, and I suspect that the way some Russian women dress has a lot to do with it. (According to my friend who lives in Austria, it’s the same story there. If you see someone in uber mini there, 95% of the time she’s Russian. And it embarrasses the heck out of all the other Russians because many Austrians also developed stereotypes about Russians.) I am not suggesting that everyone should emulate my old lady frumpy style. But how about some common sense: if you don’t want to be treated like a cheap whore, don’t dress like one?

Ick

Just when I thought that the cult of Putin couldn't get any worse, Russians prove me wrong. They deserve him, they really do.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/02/13/putin.movie.ap/index.html

On the other hand, there's hope for us, perpetually late folks. Unlike all the books on career advancing and becoming organized, which would like us to believe that tardiness will inevitably lead you to poverty, public humiliation and agonizing death, here's the example of the always tardy guy making it to no less than the president of the largest (or second largest?) country in the world. Not bad. Then again, it might only be possible in Russia and probably only acceptable for a man. Nevertheless...