Not OK, Cupid.

At a certain point in time, I created a profile on an online dating site. I had no particular use for it, but I was curious enough to see what was out there. I filled out the questionnaire honestly enough, downplaying the special relationship I had with my cat and my particular love for singing Luc Plamondon in the shower (really, really poorly), and I answered something like 200 questions about my values, political beliefs, lifestyle, sexual preferences, what have you. I will confess to having put too much thought into my answer to the “body type” question – “curvy” is code for “fat”, “athletic” I may be, but not in the way you think, and “average” is a shitty word altogether, while leaving it blank means I’m morbidly obese OR one of those people who believe beauty is on the inside, yadda yadda. I was honest about my income in a way few people are, but only because I wanted to weed out the “I’m really passionate about social justice, so I’m making $30,000 at 35 to prove a point” people. I was in part curious to see how the algorithm worked and in part interested to see who would contact me.

The algorithm works. It really does. But I really don’t, and here’s why.

I am fundamentally not a normal person. I don’t say this to sound cool, funny, smart, better than thou, or anything else you probably thought. It’s taken me 25 years of being me and one really profound quarter-life crisis to figure this out, and the realization is somewhat difficult to process. I have a friend who recently posted a picture of her beautiful family on Facebook – her loving husband, adorable child, fluffy dog, sleek couch, well-appointed living room – and I want to want that. Alas.

Back to my online dating adventures… “Adventures” is really a misnomer because I only did some surface research, and my lack of an ability to be a normal person held me back from contacting the one or two people I thought seemed moderately interesting. That’s one of the issues here – few people interest me as friends, even fewer as dating material. With Pity Boyfriend, for instance, I was surprised by how quickly I began considering ways to escape from dates – can I fake a migraine? A stomach virus? A deadly pathogen? Anyway, the algorithm did “match” me with two people whose profiles weren’t immediately discounted – one was an ex-Army linguist with a similar taste in books, a good writer without a stick up his ass, cute, into (European) football. The other was a journalist for a business publication on aerospace, also cute, also well-traveled. So far, so good.

I start imagining how these dates will go. We will meet up for drinks. I will tell them the Cliff Notes version of my life story, they will be amazed, they’ll say that’s really interesting, we’ll talk about families, jobs, whether we’d like to stay in DC. With the former, I’d talk Iraqi reconstruction, how much money was wasted, what constitutes good development, we’d argue the limits of “teach a man to fish”, we’d talk about whether the triumvirate system works in a sectarian context. With the latter, I’d talk the A380, how much I’m emotionally tied to FRA, why I use IATA codes to refer to cities, and why I hate United but always fly it anyway (channel 9 gives you air traffic control feeds – this is my sexual fetish). We’d have a couple more dates, we’d have sex, it would be fine, they’d say they’re really into me, they’d suggest being exclusive, we’d date, holidays would come around, we’d go to Rehoboth Beach for the weekend, post pictures on Facebook, I’d meet their families. My friends would like them and vice versa. Things would be good. Normal. Positive. Stable.

I’d probably keep a deadly pathogen in an ampule in my bag throughout this process, too.

But I’ll never care for them deeply, I’ll never want to marry them, to spend the rest of my life with them, or to have their children. I’ll never want to give them everything I have and everything I am. The only people who could get that are people who are fucked up, broken inside, difficult, complex, insane. Not normal. That’s my issue.

If you think I’m fundamentally fucked in life, you’re right. In a lame aside, I was told by my grandmother from a very early age that men would be very difficult for me to deal with. She was a very wise woman.

So the problem is this – I thrive on complications borne of interactions with fucked up people. This is in stark contrast to the image of me portrayed to the world at large – I’m a good girl, I’ve always done everything by the book, I’ve always gotten into every program I’ve applied to, I’ve always been at the top of my class, I’ve always won. Always. In matters of emotion, however, I need to deal with people who aren’t easy to read, who are closed off, a puzzle, an oxymoron. People of unexpected emotional depth with unexpected demons lurking beneath a perfectly respectable (and I wouldn’t have it any other way) exterior. People who seem normal until you figure out how different they are.

But also, I have complicated boxes to tick. I have boxes within boxes. I can’t really explain what I need from a guy, except to say that I need to be taught something, and that is actually very difficult to achieve – not because I’m that smart, but because I’m typically not really interested in what they can teach me. As a child, when I was asked what I wanted for dinner, I’d say that they should cook whatever they want and then I’ll decide if I want to eat it – true story! Same with guys. This is why I’m fucked, but I’m comfortable enough with this notion to know that I’ll never settle… that dating profile is never actually going to be used by me.

I did get some messages from sincere, earnest people – people who tried to cater to my “languages spoken” section with an honest attempt at an intellectual conversation in linguistics, or people who were interested by my hint at a European background, or people who sought common ground with someone who was also a Midwestern transplant. People said I seem interesting, pretty, fun, a good match. I almost feel like responding with an apology – you’re just not fucked up enough for me, sorry.

twenty eleven

If there’s one day I blog in 2012, it’ll be January 1st. Don’t expect too much thereafter.

I had a really, really great year. It started off fairly average, actually – in a generally stable lull, albeit one in which I wasn’t happy with any particular aspect of my life. I quickly grew to dislike my job, realized that my relationship was going nowhere fast, and didn’t like what I saw in the mirror.

The turning point, honestly, was the breakup. I moved out in May. I thought I would be crushed by the weight of loneliness, but I wasn’t – I finally saw how amazing my friends were, and that was a huge factor in avoiding expected depression. A week later, as I was posting an ad on Craigslist for someone to rid us of a couch, I came upon this:

… which soon became this:

… which was absolutely and definitely my best purchase of 2011. Except he was free.

I went on a bit of a bender in late May, made some regrettable decisions that were supposed to make me feel better about myself but didn’t, and made the mistake of pity dating. It was terrible.

After being told by Pity Boyfriend that we must break up if I couldn’t promise that we’d get married (…?), I went to Italy with one of my best friends. She and I had an incredible two weeks of eating, drinking, partying, asking each other for poison the following morning, and auditioning for the roles of sea lions at the beach. I loved Rome, spent way too much money, and didn’t make any regrettable decisions with boys! Score!

I came back to work and realized that I really, really hated my job. Several weeks later, I was in talks regarding a new one. I pushed myself to skate again, which was the best decision I’d made all year, and lost 11% of myself as a result. I was in a car accident with some of my closest friends, lost faith in law enforcement, regained faith in American doctors, and accrued a stunning gross total of $2,300 in medical bills for a 2-minute CT scan and a Vicodin prescription. Between three insurance companies and medical payments coverage, I’m still sorting out $1,900 of this for no other reason than pure incompetence on their part.

I went to Russia in a neck brace, had a perfectly uneventful time as per, came back, and began devising creative ways to jab icepicks into my cheeks to dull the pain of my job.

This is where 2011 really gets interesting. Some earlier networking paid off, I got a fantastic offer for a new position, and all of a sudden things just took off. I was booking business class airfare to Algeria and Spain, meeting with UN officials and mayors of significant foreign capitals, and receiving discretionary bonuses greater than I would have earned had I stayed at my previous place of torture  employment until the end of the year. I was trusted to do important, meaningful work. I was neither micromanaged nor overloaded. I could learn from my superiors and trusted their judgment fully. It was a brave new world.

I met someone. This changed me in a way I can’t explain because I’ve never felt that way before. I went to Algeria, spent a week in a refugee camp, failed to properly party in Paris, unexpectedly ended up in a geothermal lagoon in Iceland, and rounded the year off with some really extensive shopping. Ouch.

I have amazing plans for 2012, and I can’t wait to see them come to life. Happy New Year!

Left to right, in order: an Algerian camel; Algerian desert; fields of France; morning Paris; my favorite place in all of Paris; and Grindavik, Iceland.

         

Russia exacerbates my drinking problem

Let me quickly recap the types of opportunities/perks women in Russia have:

1. Free tertiary education. This applies to men as well, of course. It’s not Harvard, but it’s something.
2. Free health”care” (I added quotes to denote that it’s sometimes more likely to kill you, but as it stands, it’s free), including maternity “care”. If given the choice between a free maternity ward in Russia and the slums of Nairobi, I’d still probably pick the latter, but nevertheless, it’s free.
3. Some kind of ridiculous maternity leave system in which they get 3 years off with a state-backed job guarantee at the end and a “stimulus payment” for each child following their first, which currently clocks in at a respectable $12,000-ish. I’m not a taxpayer in Russia, though, so I can’t very well question why state funds are being channeled into promoting an inability to use contraception in a country that can’t even provide for the citizens it already has. Oh wait, I just did. Oh well.
4. Formally equal access to employment opportunities (with the exception of military service and becoming a subway driver; the reasons for the latter remain shrouded in mystery).
5. A well-documented system of getting things for being pretty/having tits. This includes grades, jobs, promotions, etc.

So, given the above, why is it that I’m still reading conversations containing the following quotes on Russian Facebook?

Of course, ideally all women would like to stay home and be housewives, but, sadly, in our day and age, this isn’t always possible…

My wife is a speech therapist and earns a decent salary for a woman…

So women should probably find some kind of female job where they won’t have to work all day, but where they also won’t be making pennies…

[As a housewife] you can prepare a nice meal for your husband, set the table nicely so that it’s pleasant for him to sit down for dinner…

I had to actually step away from the computer at this point because I was developing an increasingly noticeable eye twitch coupled with an unbearable desire to shoot tequila. And I no longer shoot tequila. Ever. There was this one time in Greece and… yeah. Anyway.

Few things anger me more than comments such as the above, and I’m sitting here trying to figure out why. They clash with my entire belief system, everything I stand for, on an absolutely fundamental level, but it can’t just be that. Deconstructing my rage, it may have something to do with the fact that they presume that I’m somehow less woman/human because sentiments such as these make my skin crawl. Maybe it’s that I recognize that my career track will always be questioned, as it is already. “Don’t you just want to find a nice man to settle down with like everyone else?” “That biological clock of yours will keep ticking, you know…” “But don’t you want a man to help you out?” Whether or not I get married, there will always be people who will either speculate as to the fundamental flaws that make me a frigid spinster or, alternatively, question why I couldn’t have found a “rich enough” man to “support” me. “So unfortunate that she still has to work…” Whether or not I have children, I will be criticized either for neglecting my children or for neglecting some presupposed biological need to have them in the first place. Then again, why do I care whether these people question my life choices? Their position in life clearly invalidates their opinion for me, rendering the entire thing moot.

Why am I angry? I don’t know. Reading this shit, however, does appear to be affecting me in unexpected ways – while rationally understanding that any hope I have of skating tomorrow morning depends entirely on me going to bed before 2 am, I am now all of a sudden tempted to finish my satellite imagery analysis of my refugee camps – what with it being 1:49 am and all, which is the perfect time to do this – because that will somehow make me feel accomplished, professional, smart, and capable.

That said, my need to reach through the screen and poke these people in the eyes with sharp pointy objects has not yet diminished.

Mars – Venus, Closet Version

If you’re female, you’ve probably had guys ask you why you have so much crap in your closet, half of which you never wear. I wondered the same thing as I prepared an entire – I shit you not – IKEA bag of clothes to donate, some of which I’ve worn once. This afternoon, however, I finally felt like I had come closer to solving this great mystery of female “overshopping”.

What I was looking for online was simple enough: a three-quarter sleeve, A-line hem, empire waist, V-neck jersey dress. Preferably in black, no sequins or beading, full back cover. I mean, this is fairly standard fare as far as I’m concerned. Three weeks of offline shopping turned into three weeks of absolute despair, and I turned to the interwebs to try to make this happen.

Let me specify that I had no budget. I mean, I had a “budget”, but it was fluid and I was happy to do anything from Forever21 to Net-a-porter, really. Sixteen (16) sites later, I was able to piece together the following trends this season:

1. Everything has to be covered in sequins.

2. You are not allowed to wear a dress during Fall/Winter 2011 unless you have absolutely no curves and are a size 00. Throughout. With legs resembling those of a baby giraffe. This shift sheath dress shit is driving me mad. (Try saying that five times fast.)

3. Unless you are a size 00 baby giraffe, your only other options are a) wedding dresses and b) prom dresses. If you happen to be a single non-baby-giraffe woman over the age of 16, you need to realize that you will not be able to purchase a dress this season. Such is life.

And here’s the conclusion I’ve come to: the reason we have so much crap in our closets is because it’s a trillion times harder to conform to the standards of occasion-specific attire that we as a gender have absorbed subconsciously. Because if you’re a guy, you can wear the same suit to work that you do for poker and cigars with the boys later that night. If you’re a woman and you’re wearing your work suit to happy hour without any additional bling/higher heels/etc., you’re clearly a frigid workaholic bitch with 17 cats and a bit of an S&M fetish.

Let me take this one step further. Let’s picture date night involving a nice restaurant. Let’s say it’s sometime in the fall or spring, because summer is somewhat easier to deal with in this regard.

Guy: trousers, shirt, tie (optional), jacket, loafers. You people already own all of this.

Girl: What kind of a restaurant is it? What’s the median price for a cocktail? Is it blingy? Is it more relaxed? Is the crowd older? Is it more conservative? Is the maitre d’ really French? Would pearls be too much or not enough? Is this dress too short? Is there such a thing as too much cleavage? Is jersey too casual of a fabric? Do I need a structured sheath? Is a chunky heel too much? What if they’re Prada? Is it going to be cold? Do I need a throw? How do I wear a throw without looking matronly? Do I need a new coat to go with this dress? Is it a bolero type of restaurant or a cardigan type of restaurant? The most puzzling piece of this logistical nightmare: how the fuck do you deal with wearing tights and subsequently shedding them gracefully?! Is there a way to gracefully shed tights? WHO INVENTED TIGHTS AND ARE THEY STILL ALIVE SO I CAN KILL THEM?

Most importantly… *ahem* can this dress be taken off with relative ease? Because that scene in The Thomas Crown Affair where Rene Russo drops her gown – yeah, they lied, shit doesn’t go down that way.

And that, my friends, is why we have closets packed full of crap we’ve worn once and you boys have all your identical trousers hung nicely in a row like Johnny fucking Cash.

Noteworthy: Week 1

In an attempt to actually justify my use of this space, I will make myself compile a list of things I like every week. I fully expect this to last one whole week, maybe two if you’re really lucky.

1. Damir Sagolj’s Reuters feature on hunger in North Korea. No matter how politically correct one may aspire to be, there’s only really one way to put it – natural disasters and rising commodity prices do not create poverty. Bad governance creates poverty (compare Chile and Haiti). The cycle of poverty can only be broken by good governance (see Botswana). Totalitarianism is a fundamental evil and a crime against humanity, and any means to end it will be justified.
2. Samuel Culbert’s anti-performance review tirade in The Wall Street Journal. I read it this morning just before finishing up my own annual review (or self-assessment, or whatever it’s actually called), and I can’t argue with a single one of his points. Of particular note was the idea that team performance, as opposed to individual performance, should be the ultimate goal. A good manager should recognize that a subordinate’s failure is a result of his or her shortcomings, too, yet this notion is strangely absent from most work environments.
3. Here’s a video of an Australian pet crocodile. While the concept itself is not new, the fact that this crocodile watches TV and goes for walks in a little pink harness kills me.
4. I finished My Father’s Keeper this week and crossed the third title off my immeasurably long to-read list for the fall. This book was part of an eclectic collection of, oh, let’s see, approximately 16,542 titles I received from my mother’s house during her transatlantic relocation. These included everything from coffee table books of the Borneo rainforest to things like Gauguin by Himself. I inherited my mother’s obsession with bookstore bargain bins, and I will eventually be discovered dead under what would have once been my teetering towers of books. My seventeen cats will nibble on my limbs in the meantime. Anyway, this was actually a great read – a compilation of interviews with the children of prominent Nazis by a father-son duo done forty years apart. Some sought atonement for their parents’ sins, while others maintained defiance. The obvious question for anyone, of course, would be whether they would have stood by their father in such an event, and, if so, what reasons would have been behind this decision? Would it even be a conscious decision? Would anyone be able to separate their parents as parents from their parents as murderers, or as ideologues of mass murder? How would the severity of a parent’s crime affect their children’s perception of their parents?
5. Titles like the above, of course, are natural attractions for me, because I am seemingly physically incapable of processing fiction. I did, however, briefly break with this tradition for Super Sad True Love Story (but only because it’s a politicized dystopia, really). It was fantastic – everyone wears apparati, those too poor to afford flying China Southern Airlines take UnitedContinentalDeltamerican, the most desirable sexual partners work in Media or Credit, images are preferable to text, and everything of value is measured in yuan-pegged dollars. When I cleared customs at Dulles several hours after finishing the book, I half-expected to be asked whether I had had intimate relationships with any non-Americans during my absence, as well as what my credit score looked like. Highly recommended if you’re weird like me.

Smrt.

“Pfffffft…” I thought last night, standing by the side of the rink, stretching and watching the end of a freestyle session. “I bet I can totally still do jumps. Nevermind that I haven’t done one in ten years! I used to be able to jump, right? Shouldn’t be a problem!”

Today I need a new hip, tailbone, and several vertebrae. And a power scooter. And a LifeAlert pendant. Or we could just go straight for the barbiturates.

Halp.

Loss of self

I have been a closet fan of Cézanne’s blog for a while, and I was absolutely delighted to read her recent post on healthy people. She and I appear to share a sense of bewilderment in this regard, because I cannot wrap my mind around the concept of getting up at 5 in the morning to run. I run in the following situations:

1. when late for some mode of transportation, especially flights

2. when being chased by ferocious things that crawl, including – no, especially – snails

That’s it. I have friends who will willingly go to the gym before sunrise on a Sunday morning because it makes them “feel good” – I don’t know how I could possibly feel good while at the gym after an average Saturday night, when all I really want the next morning is a heavy dose of rat poison. This attitude, however, has wiped away my teenage level of physical fitness and has replaced it with a, one might say, rather large derriere. This is a problem, and it’s one I’m finally determined to do something about.

I won’t reveal any numbers just yet, mostly because they’re scary to type, but I am on a mission to lose 13% of myself. I have lost 2% of myself in a week and a half by, well, mostly just no longer stuffing my face with all the things that make life beautiful. That and tracking what I eat on Livestrong, which just makes me sad. However, I’ve learned that figure skating – the one form of physical activity I never have to force myself into – apparently burns close to 500 calories an hour, which is excellent news. There’s a catch, though, because now that I’m skating more and more (8-10 hours a week), I have to come to terms with the realization that I need to spend $900 I don’t have on new skates. This is a problem.

The other problem is that my nutrition regimen as prescribed by Livestrong has me hungry ALL. the TIME. I caved today and went to town on… oh god, I don’t even know, I think it started with chocolate and by the end of it I’d consumed about half of my fridge. I think I may have gained those 2% back in the process as well, so I’m going to pretend today never happened. It’s much easier than confronting that bright red bar on the Livestrong website that shames you for having gone over your calorie goal.

Wish me luck? I wish I had a tenth of the motivation some people have to take classes or whatever. Also, I’m disappointed that Livestrong doesn’t have “crawling around on the floor looking for your cat’s toy mouse under the fridge” as a legitimate form of physical activity, because that’s what I just spent 20 minutes doing. Unsuccessfully, mind you. The mouse is under the damn fridge, and there it will stay. Cat, don’t pretend you really care about it now, given that you’ve spent the past three months eating my feet instead.

Take all your big plans and break ‘em

(I’m resurrecting this thing after a prolonged absence. Wait, haven’t I already said that before?)

So I was walking down the beach in Italy a couple of weeks ago (wow, this is the start of The Whitest Post Ever), mostly thinking about how much I don’t want to go back to work once my vacation came to its logical conclusion, when I realized that I’m turning 25 next month and I’ve always done everything right. And something about that just seemed so wrong.

I did well in high school. Instead of taking a gap year, or convincing my parents to let me go to college in a, you know, real education system, I went to the university I was supposed to go to on a full scholarship. I graduated summa cum laude. I moved back to the States, I got a job, I got into a great graduate program. I got a 4.0. I got a better job. And then an even better one. I have my own apartment, a cat that’s well cared for, I pay all my bills on time, I have no debt. If I stay at my job, I will eventually be promoted, and then promoted again, and I will be making six figures, and I’ll get a better apartment, and then I’ll eventually buy a condo, start a relationship with a nice man from the DC area, and maybe we’ll eventually get married because that’s what people do. We’ll visit his family for Thanksgiving and play touch football with his cousins. We may have children somewhere in the middle of it all, and they will ride yellow school buses down lush suburban streets lined with all shades of red and ochre every fall. And eventually, many years down the road, we will die, because that’s what happens. And that will be the end of it.

The ultimate irony is that now that I’ve finally started feeling at home here, something I thought I wanted for so long, I want to go somewhere else. Do something else. Shake it up. I don’t want any of the above. I don’t want to do the proper, expected, responsible thing and build a nice predictable boring life, all the while surrounded by Ethan Allen furniture and a yellow lab.

Thinking back on it, I don’t think I’ve ever made a bad life decision. In fact, all of my life decisions have been predictably good, save for that one time I decided to write a love letter in my freshman year of college, but we’ll just forget that ever happened. The problem with that is… I’ve never taken a big risk. Ever. I think maybe the reason I let my big plans for business school slide was because I knew I wouldn’t get into HEC or LBS, and I didn’t want to have to deal with taking a risk and failing. So I just didn’t, content with the fact that I have always gotten into every school I ever applied to.

So here’s the problem – I’m going to be 25 and I’ve always done everything right. I’ve always, with the exception of my graduate program (which I did love), settled. It was the cautious thing to do, and the results were always predictably good. And I’m sick of it. I need to do something crazy, hear imaginary violins in the background as I step off a plane in some new undiscovered land, spend money I don’t have, etc, etc.  Just take a risk and see how it plays out for once in my life. And if I fail, well, I’ll at least be able to say I tried.

For several weeks during the month of June, I was dating this guy. I’d known him a while, and when he made a move, I thought eh, why not – it’s not like I had anything else going on. It was alright the first couple of times we hung out, passably entertaining, then I got bored really quickly when my initial tepid enthusiasm wore off, then I just got pissy because he clearly thought he was a much better catch than he really was, and then he broke up with me because, in a hypothetical scenario, I would not agree to marry him within a year. I shit you not. At this point I just kind of sat there, staring incredulously into space – who the hell are YOU to break up with ME, and who the hell starts talking about marriage three weeks into a relationship? But beyond that, I thought about what he was offering for all of, I don’t know, three seconds – a guaranteed boring life that would offer me a modicum of emotional comfort and stability while I slowly gouged my eyes out with a fork – and I realized I’d rather throw myself off a cliff.

The only great thing about this experience was my absolute and final determination that no matter how lonely I might one day be, I will never settle. That, and I’ll never again date a man who wears bad shoes. So it wasn’t a total waste of time, and yet it kind of was. The shoes were really terrible.

My last actual relationship was problematic in many ways, and we wouldn’t have ever worked in the long term, but we are – amazingly – on really good terms now. He taught me a lot about myself and what I want, and I will always love him as a friend. That’s a huge first for me, and it’s very important for me to keep this going.

What I’ve learned is that I want crazy, absurd, ridiculous, movie scene magic. I want life and love to explode all over the place and cover everything in fairy dust. It sounds insane because I want it to be insane. I’m 25 years old, god damn it, I deserve some insanity in my life, right? To at least try to have some sort of adventure that will make me feel like I’m not just going through the motions? Right? And if I fall flat on my face or have some sort of similarly embarrassing moment whilst wearing my heart on my sleeve, well, so be it. At least I will have tried to make it interesting. I don’t want to regret never having tried.

Multiculti

My recent posts on Russia unexpectedly spurred some interesting discussion, and I thank the participants of that discussion for their participation, but I would like to address something that I don’t think I’ve even been able to entirely deconstruct quite yet.

I’ll start by saying that I don’t hate Russia – hate is a very strong word reserved for war criminals and the Westboro Baptist Church. I do, however, find certain social elements exceptionally unappealing in the worst possible form – see here and here for examples. It’s really the xenophobia and racism I’m most concerned with, coupled with a blind, distorted “patriotism” of the worst possible kind. A college classmate of mine, a pacifist and a vegan who handed out hot meals to the homeless, was stabbed to death in the center of St. Petersburg six years ago for participating in an “antifa” (anti-fascist) rally – it didn’t help that he was half-Georgian. One of my closest friends is Abkhaz and has beautiful long hair that she often wears in a ponytail – on one such occasion, as she was about to go through a turnstile in the subway, she was grabbed by her ponytail and almost got her face smashed in, and the only thing that saved her was a very tall friend she had with her, who tackled her attacker to the ground. I made the mistake of participating in some youth political forum thing one time in college, and there was a member of the youth wing of the Slavic Union (a far-right racist organization) who (politely, in all fairness) told me that he really didn’t think I should be allowed to live in Russia, given that I’m half-Jewish. That’s what I hate, and what frightens me is how widespread it’s becoming and how many otherwise potentially capable young minds are getting involved in this absolutely sickening ordeal. If they’re the ones that are supposed to be leading the country in 10-15 years time, that’s not a country I want to live in. But again, we’ve already established that I don’t want to live there, so that’s beside the point.

I found this comment particularly interesting, and I think it’s worth providing a more complex answer to:

As for Decoller, she seems to be a typical émigré, blaming her departure on Russia and compensating it with extra hatred for her former country and extra love for the new-found one. This type is so common and all of them are practically look-alikes, reciting the myth about “one rifle per three soldiers”. Sometimes I’m very glad that they left Russia.

I’d counter this by saying that I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m anything but typical. I don’t mean to say I’m uniquely gifted in any particular domain, far from it, but I only know of one person who absolutely gets what I mean when I say I have no idea who I am or where I’m from, and he’s the one who came up with “multiculti” to try to describe our shared sense of not really entirely belonging to any particular culture or group. Most of the children who came to the States with their parents in the early 1990s, like myself, quickly became absolutely American, but since I kept going back and forth and eventually graduated from high school and college in Russia, I’m American enough to count, but I’m still not entirely American, because after people ask the “where are you from?” question and I ramble for five minutes to incredulous stares, we get to the “where did you go to college?” question, and then I have to explain that it’s the one that’s not in Florida, and then there’s the whole “but you sound like you’re from the Midwest!” song and dance and before I know it, I’ve already laid out my entire life story on the table, everyone knows what my parents do and how my mom’s remarried for the third time and we have a cocker spaniel and two cats and and and… yeah. A lot of the time I just say I’m from Kansas, but then I still get roped into the “K-State or KU?” question, and then I have to go back to the college attendance explanation, so it doesn’t really cut down on the time it takes for me to explain who I am. Because I really have no idea.

My boyfriend & I were watching We Own The Night a few years ago, and during the scene where they go to visit their Russian mafia friends and are greeted with a full smorgasbord, my boyfriend broke out into hysterical laughter – “you do that! All the time!”. I just sat there and couldn’t figure out why he was laughing – isn’t that what everybody does when they have guests over? That’s the Russian side coming through in America. As for the American side coming through in Russia, I’m often told I smile an inordinate amount – I don’t smile any more than the next person, as far as I can tell, but in a country where no one really smiles on a typical day, I stood out enough to be called Britney Spears in high school (and it’s stuck, unfortunately). So what am I?

This is the reason I’ll respectfully object to the characterization of myself as someone with “extra hatred for her former country and extra love for the new-found one” who “blames her departure on Russia”. I don’t “blame” my departure on anyone, except for perhaps a very well-known mathematician who happened to be doing the same type of abstract equation work my father was doing in the late 1980s. There’s no “blame” to be put on anyone – I had a choice, I made my choice, I’m perfectly happy with my choice and I don’t blame anyone for anything. But I would like to address the “hatred/love” thing – I’m not trying to “compensate” for anything, I just feel that in my state of not really belonging anywhere, I somehow fit better into America. It wasn’t a conscious choice, it wasn’t as if I woke up one morning and declared that that day would be the first of my being American. I came back to the States after college on the 4th of July (how patriotic!), and I was flying through Atlanta that time. I’d just gotten off an insane 10-hour Delta flight from Paris, and all I wanted was to board my next flight to Kansas City and have a very large glass of gin. Neat. I waddled over to the immigration & customs stand and handed the guy my documents, and he asked me where I was going next. I said Kansas City, he asked me where my cowboy hat was, I played along and said it was in my checked luggage, he stamped my passport, and then he said something nobody had ever said to me before, and nobody has ever said to me since: “Welcome home.” I wasn’t even a citizen at the time, I just had a green card. I just about melted into a puddle of tears and goo, such was the emotional effect that had on me. Someone recognized where I belong!

That summer, I got offered a job at Abercrombie & Fitch. I didn’t even apply and I didn’t take it, but the offer was out there, the store manager just came up to me and asked me if I wanted a job, signaling that I seemed American enough to sell preppy Americana to preppy Americans in America’s heartland. That was encouraging, but as easy as it would be to fall into the cocoon of absolute Americanness, it still doesn’t answer the questions of who I am and where I’m from, because those answers are much deeper and much more complex. If any such answers exist at all, really.

My ramblings on this issue are often disparaged by Russian “patriots”, who accuse me of much the same thing as the author of that comment – of trading the Mothershipland for my “new” country I superduperextralove. But unless you’ve experienced it personally, and I know of only one person who has (I’d love to hear from more!), it’s very difficult to understand where I’m coming from on this. My mom always gets upset when I tell her I don’t feel like I’m Russian, that I don’t feel like I belong there – she takes it personally to mean I don’t love her, or my family, or my friends, and of course I do. Absolutely. But belonging is something totally different, and I feel like I really don’t belong in any single place entirely, but I get much closer to it in America than I do in Russia. I don’t see myself ever going back to live there for a multitude of reasons, but mainly because I don’t feel I could ever really belong. A snooty ICE agent took an attitude with me when I last flew into Dulles, U.S. passport in hand, interrogating me over what I was doing in Russia (spying, obviously, durrrr) and so on, and I really took offense to that for no particularly mature reason – I know that that’s his job, but I wanted to stomp my foot and pout, because I don’t want that sense of belonging here to be questioned, since that just makes me go back to trying to unravel the mystery of who I am, and it’s hard.

After my citizenship ceremony last September, which came about 10 years too late, my friends asked me over our celebratory lunch how I felt. And, honestly, I didn’t feel different in any way – I just had a piece of paper that served as some kind of physical proof that I belonged here. The most vivid memory I have of the ceremony was the elderly Iranian couple who stood up as the announcer was going through the list of countries people were from – the woman wasn’t wearing hijab and they were both very well-dressed in that old luxury sort of way, and I could tell that they were probably intellectuals or came from old money under the Shah, and everyone understood how long it had taken them to get to that moment. As for myself, I felt exactly the same way I had the day before, and a month prior, and ten years prior. I felt American, but not entirely American, but closer to American than to anything else, but but but… even having spent an hour trying to put all of this into some sort of comprehensible narrative, I’m really not any closer to explaining it with due clarity, probably because there really isn’t much clarity to be had.

There was a lot of sarcasm directed at Maria Amelie, whose parents took her from Russia to Finland and eventually Norway as a child. The family lived in Norway illegally, and she somehow managed to graduate from a prestigious Norwegian university, write a book detailing her experience of being illegal in the only country she views as home, and be crowned Norwegian of the Year before being deported to Russia earlier this year. Thousands of comments poured into the Russian blogosphere, sarcastically expressing empathy for the “poor girl” who’ll now have to live in “wild Russia”. Of course, these comments also contained unsubstantiated allegations of the nature of her parents’ former business dealings in Russia, with everyone claiming to know someone who knew someone who once knew someone who stated clearly that her parents were crooks and thieves and all kinds of horrible people (there was enough racism in those comments, too, since she ain’t exactly a blonde, blue-eyed Slav). I won’t claim to know what she’s currently going through, but I will say that all of those comments completely missed the point – she’s Norwegian. She feels Norwegian, she feels like she belongs in Norway, and her immigration status doesn’t change any of that – of course she’s absolutely terrified, what do you expect? It’s that kind of belonging that’s really hard to explain or convey properly unless you’ve struggled with it personally, but her book – which I hope to read in full someday, having only read snippets that were translated into Russian – seems to offer an inside look into what that feels like.

On Whataboutism

I always seem to do this on Saturday nights, don’t I? I go read something that gets me all worked up over Russia, and then I can’t sleep as I start involuntarily playing out a debate with a fictional counterpart in my head. This week’s topic, also taken from The Kremlin Stooge, is on Whataboutism, a tactic used (and defended) by russophiles to justify, well, just about anything when it comes to Russia. Of course, the justification is presented in the form of “battling hypocrisy”, but its logic remains fallacious nonetheless.

In short, Whataboutism is when someone says something negative about Russia to a russophile, and the russophile responds with an example of a similarly negative thing about another country (typically America, because there are some inferiority complexes you just can’t get over). At its foundation lie several logical fallacies that Mr. Chapman (a.k.a. The Kremlin Stooge) attempts to defend in his post, which is that pointing out similar flaws in other countries is somehow a valid counterargument against highlighted flaws in Russia.

Firstly, however, I’d like to point out that the term Mr. Chapman was probably looking for was “African American”, because it’s no longer 1960 (no matter how much Russia would like to think otherwise). The use of the objectionable term in a direct citation is still questionable, but the use of the same objectionable term when no longer directly citing a popular Russian argument is simply unacceptable full stop. Sidenote: funny story! Demonstrating how out of touch Russia is with the generally understood issues surrounding racism, Gazprom’s joint venture in Nigeria was colorfully christened Nigaz.

Here’s the thing with Whataboutism – no matter how hard anyone tries, the fact that other countries have problems similar to or greater than Russia’s in any number of given domains does not in any way erase, mitigate, fix, solve, or ameliorate these same problems in Russia. Therefore, Whataboutism is the generally recognized last resort of those who have nowhere else to turn for valid counterarguments. No matter how hypocritical an argument against Russia may seem, it must be judged on its own merits in relation to Russia alone – if you’d like to have a discussion about diploma mills, the legal system or what have you in the United States, by all means, go ahead, but it is entirely unrelated to Russia’s (many) problems. Bringing up America just a) highlights that inferiority complex I mentioned earlier, and b) completely ignores the issue at hand, serving as an implicit recognition and acceptance of these problems, coupled with an obvious inability to solve them. In essence, resorting to Whataboutism is tantamount to saying, “I recognize this to be a problem, otherwise I wouldn’t claim it’s a problem elsewhere, but I have no retort, so I’m going to criticize some other country instead.” Which leads me to my next point – arguing that statements from U.S. government officials concerning Russia are hypocritical is one thing (nowhere near logically valid, but whatever), but what’s the rationale for Whataboutism when it’s directed at other Russians? Russians who, unlike myself, do not hold dual citizenship or other allegiances, but simply question their country’s state of affairs? That question remains unanswered by Mr. Chapman.

One thing is entirely evident from his posts, though – despite his obvious desire to believe otherwise, Mr. Chapman doesn’t seem to know Russian history very well, nor does he seem to be able to connect the dots in several crucial domains. Whataboutism is directly related to the inferiority complex that’s driving Russia’s insane folie de grandeur, which desperately seeks any opportunity to somehow present Russia in a positive light, regardless of how silly it may seem. Whataboutism is the close relative of the phenomenon portrayed in a satirical Soviet-era song on false patriotic motives, which extolls the virtues of Soviet accomplishments in a number of domains: “but we make rockets, and close off the Yenisei, and we’re also ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to ballet!” In the song, it’s said in response to an African, who complains about cold water and the lack of twist dancing in Russia, and it’s widely used in satirical fashion when one is compelled to *facepalm* over something (e.g., the government of a 4.5 million-strong city can’t figure out how to prevent falling icicles from killing children, but we make rockets! And close off the Yenisei!). This is exactly what Whataboutism tries (and ultimately fails) to accomplish – creating a false sense of security in the notion that it’s just as bad elsewhere, and if it’s not, well, we’ve still done some cool shit! So THERE! Take THAT, you evil Gitmo waterboarders you! At least our government openly wiretaps our phones!

Ultimately, none of these fallacious counterarguments matter, because America/Western Europe/etc remain more prosperous, more advanced, and more developed than Russia.

But what really set me off here was this lovely little tidbit:

You know how much you hate it when opponents say, “Stalin butchered millions, ” and “Stalin did this” and “Stalin did that” – quite apart from the fact that Stalin wasn’t even a Russian, he has been dead a long, long time, and his activities then have little relevance to the way Russia is governed today.

1. Russia is the legal successor of the Soviet Union.

2. So has Hitler, Mobutu, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, the list continues. Your point?

3. Stalin is, and I’m not even going to qualify this with terms like “possibly” or “probably”, the main reason Russia is governed the way it is today. Stalin annihilated the creme de la creme of Russian society in the 1930s, with a lucky few making it out just in the nick of time. Had these top intellectuals, scientists, professors, military brass, etc been allowed to stay, we wouldn’t have gotten a country so fundamentally incapable of realizing the progressive power of meritocracy. Stalin repeatedly ignored intelligence on German’s imminent attack, instead using the war to consolidate both his own power and his schizophrenic vision of Soviet grandeur – we all saw how that ended, right? Stalin used the Red Army as cannon fodder (stories of one hunting rifle per three recruits on the front lines were not uncommon), hung on to control over the country by the skin of his teeth (assisted by the country’s geography, which was simply too vast to conquer), proceeded to exterminate even more of his people, and then handed off the country, which continued trudging along with his horrifically inept policies of central planning and groupthink. Russia’s initial resources, both natural and human, carried the potential for it to be the most prosperous nation on the planet. It has failed, in large part thanks to Stalin, and it will likely never recover, because new generations of intellectual mediocrity have been raised on patriotic visions of iron-fist rule to defeat some mystical external enemy… or something. And Stalin’s legacy carries on with reckless abandon, as Russia continues to be led and governed by standards of absolute mediocrity, if not downright idiocy. The country’s best minds left the second the Iron Curtain fell, and the brightest young things of the latest generations are waiting in line at foreign consulates. Thanks to Stalin, the entire myth of Russian grandeur is still based on a victory in a war that ended 65 years ago, a war whose many victims have not even been properly recognized by the government – again, thanks to Stalin, whose policy of POW=traitor led to my family searching for news of my great-grandfather’s fate for 69 years, despite his POW card having been on file with the Soviet Ministry of Defense since 1947. And because “Russian patriots” in my generation have nothing else to be proud of, they put up pictures of the creep on buses, to drive home the idea that nothing of any actual significance has happened in the country since 1945. The intellectually mediocre leaders that Russia has today still cling to these notions of Stalinist grandeur – I mean, c’mon, they clearly have something to celebrate, they obtained control over a country that won an entire honest-to-god war! In 1945! Never mind that their government doesn’t actually pay the people who helped win that war a livable pension… but hey, who cares, hopefully they’ll all soon die off anyway, and then no one will actually have to follow through on false promises of apartments and Volgas for WWII vets, and since they didn’t win in Afghanistan, no one really owes anything to the vets of  the Afghan war – first you gotta win a war, then you get false promises, that’s the way it works. Run along now, there’s a queue out the door of a government office with your name on it, your $400/month disability pension awaits.