Back in the USSR (second verse, same as the first)

Several years ago, I was preoccupied, in a probably unhealthy way, with the Soviet Union and specifically, Stalin's purges. I'd taken a class on 20th Century Europe, and from there, I read Martin Amis' Koba the Dread, Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin, Anne Applebaum's Gulag, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; and then, just for contrast, Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary.

The biotech company where I used to work employed a number of Russian scientists, engineers, and technicians. Although they were a socially mixed group, which included Ph.D.-level senior scientists and considerably less-educated manufacturing technicians, the group ate lunch together nearly every day, drinking steaming tea from styrofoam cups, and eating cafeteria food supplemented with homemade Russian dishes brought by one or the other of the group's members, and then shared among them.

The Russians, true to stereotypical form, seldom smiled, and when they laughed, it was with  a touch of bitterness.  It was easy to make fun of them, and we did sometimes, calling them "the Politburo" or "the Supreme Soviet."  Individually, the Russians were all quite nice, though reserved.  I'm a friendly person, and I became friendly with several of the Russians, although I sometimes wondered if they felt secret, Russian disdain for my smiling American bonhomie.  "Americans," I imagined them sneering after I passed with a cheerful wave or hello, "why are they always smiling? Like eediot children."  At that point, I had only the vaguest understanding of Russian history, and I probably thought that Stalin, while not a particularly good guy, was at least not as bad as Hitler.

In Koba the Dread, which is subtitled Laughter and the 20 Million, Amis asks a simple question: why do we laugh at the gulags and the KGB but not at Auschwitz or the Gestapo? The book is very personal, part of what was apparently a long-running argument with his friend and antagonist Christopher Hitchens, who, like a lot of writers and artists and intellectuals from the early 20th century on, were willing to ignore or excuse the worst excesses of the Soviet political system because they believed that Russian communism was the best hope for a socially just world.  Some writers and artists continued to cling to that belief long after evidence to the contrary had become too overwhelming to ignore.

It was probably five years or so ago when I first read Koba the Dread, and my Stalin preoccupation eventually gave way to other, more immediate worries, but the idea of the purges has never stopped haunting me. Because I don't have enough trouble in life, I like to borrow it at high rates of interest, so I'm reading The Gulag Archipelago now.  I bought a hardcover copy of it for one dollar at the Friends of the Library book sale, and it had been waiting on my shelf since November.

First of all, it's very good reading.  I'm 80 or so pages in, and although most of it, at this point, simply recounts details of arrests and sentences, each account is compelling and individual.  Stalin is supposed to have said something like "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."  He lost, though.  I can't help but imagine the individual people, each unique, whom these short accounts represent.  I don't know their names, but I know that they had names.  I imagine them, and think about them, especially the ones who vanished and whose exact fates don't seem to be known.  I guess they can't be statistics if I'm still thinking about them 80 years later.

*****

My sons and I were watching a rerun of "The King's Speech" last Saturday, which was the same day that I started on the book.  As the movie version of George V asked who, if not for the English, would stand between the "Nazi hordes and the proletarian abyss," I wondered how we would answer that question.  Was Charlie Hebdo the best we could do? Are blasphemy and obscenity the only reasonable responses to savagery?   I've seen the cartoons, and I'm not in any rush to claim shared identity with that publication or its creators, God rest their souls.  Je ne suis pas Charlie.  

*****

As I tell my friends and my children, I completely understand now why old people move to Florida. My tolerance for winter diminishes with each passing year, and every November, a week or so before Thanksgiving, I realize that I won't really be warm again until Memorial Day. Every night, I think, just for a minute, that maybe tonight I'll just sleep in my clothes.  It's that hard for me to face the thought of undressing in the cold. But I live in Maryland, in a house with central heat, and not in a wooden shack in Kolyma.

The chekists and the KGB always came at night.  I usually wake up sometime around 3 AM, and just before I fall back to sleep, I think about the nest of warmth that my body heat and the blankets have created, and how little I want to move from that spot at that moment.  When I think about it (almost every time), I pray for the people who were yanked from the warmth by the 3 AM pounding on the door, which led to the holding cell in the Lubyanka, and then to the freight rail car to the gold mines at Kolyma or the gypsum mines in Siberia.  God help them, and all of us.

Filofax vs. the World

I don't really have a desk.  I have a cabinet, wherein I keep
office supplies, papers, and trinkets.  I share the cabinet with my
10yo son, who has the 2 bottom drawers.  My computer charges here. 

It's late December, and in late December, I usually spend a week or so (well, not the whole week, but the leftover pieces of it) shopping for Filofax refills, and often, a new binder.  As much as I love my phone (and I LOVE my phone) I remain attached to paper agendas in general, and to Filofax in particular.  I do sometimes use the calendar function on my phone, but not for everyday engagements or for diary entries.  I use it instead to remind me of the most important calls or appointments, and those will also be written in ink in my Filofax.  I'd like to think that my preference for paper over electronic organizers is somehow rooted in my love for the past and my rejection of the dehumanizing tendencies of technology, but it's purely material.  I love paper, I love pens, and I love colorful binders and books.

This is a different cabinet; a small night table, which we actually
use as an end table.  The top two drawers contain old agendas and
Filofaxes. The Whitman's sampler box contains pens and paper
clips, not candy. 

I also love agendas and date books, but Filofaxes are my very favorites.  I first discovered them in the mid 80s, the time during which a luxury version of everyconsumer product became available. Luxury cars, of course, had always existed; and rich people had always worn exquisite clothes.  In the 80s, though, the idea of luxury, of having the best, permeated every possible sector of the consumer economy. Why would you eat Sealtest ice cream when you could have Haagen Dasz? (Made-up word; not even spell-checking it.) Hideously expensive cosmetics and skin creams became mainstream, and every bank teller and secretary had a jar of Estee Lauder or Clinique or (for the really extravagant) Erno Laszlo on her dresser.  The Filofax was the embodiment and exemplar of the luxury ethos of the 80s, and I was taken in the moment I saw one.

This is my work notebook; a canvas
binder cover with a notebook insert.
I love it.  Fred and Carrie are right:
EVERYTHING is cuter when you
put a bird on it.  This picture is
apropos of nothing discussed in
this post.  I just like this notebook.

Inside view.  Pocket and room for
papers and postcards. 

John Wanamaker was my favorite department store, and the flagship store at 13th and Market Streets in Philadelphia was also one of my favorite places in the world.  It had much more than flashy luxury (although it had that, in spades); it had real beauty and elegance.  The floors were marble and walls were frescoed or gilt-trimmed, and an enormous pipe organ filled the aptly named Grand Court with triumphant music. Wanamaker's carried ordinary everyday clothes and household goods, but those were relegated to the upper floors.  The main level was filled with silk scarves and fine jewelry and French perfume and cashmere, and, after 1982 or so, Filofaxes.





According to this Filofax chronology (how I love that this exists), Filofax "gained iconic status" during the 1980s, and this is just as I remember it.  I had always loved stationery of any kind, even five and dime school supplies, and with my nascent longing love for luxury combined with my devotion to stationery products, I was completely susceptible to the lure of the gorgeous display of leather binders, crisp white inserts, slim silver pens, and tiny rulers.  And MAPS! The  glossy, exquisitely colored maps, which you could gaze at as things of beauty on their own, or allow them to be seen poking out of your binder, marking you as a person who might need a map of Europe, or of Moscow.

My love was unfulfilled, though, until 1997, when I finally broke down and bought the first of many Filofaxes.  My first one was a black Personal, made from some sort of inexpensive composite material.  With inserts (including week-on-two-pages calendar, monthly calendar, lined and solid colored paper in blue, yellow, pink, and purple, and of course, several maps), it cost about $65--expensive, but far less than the $200 or so that a similar binder with inserts would have cost ten years earlier.  The early Filofaxes that I had coveted in the 80s were all leather or ostrich; the least expensive among them was $85, and that was just for the binder.  The company finally wisely realized that it had a huge untapped market among lower-middles like me, who loved beautiful things but whose budgets ran to free Hallmark datebooks rather than ostrich leather portfolios.

You know how sometimes, you want something badly; you long for it, and imagine yourself having it, but you resist the urge to buy it, until finally, you give in and splurge, and then, disappointment and remorse set in?  No, that totally didn't happen with the Filofax, which gave me unalloyed pleasure and delight every time I opened it or wrote in it for the entire year.

The black personal gave way to black canvas and then multicolored vinyl Pocket binders, with the usual colored paper, week on two pages, and maps, with clear pockets added.  I finally bought a leather pocket binder (two, in fact; one black and one pink with a Lilly Pulitzer-like fabric lining) and then a pink leather Personal binder, my favorite ever.

I used Filofaxes almost every year.  One year, I tried a Letts of London pocket-sized agenda, red, with a ribbon marker and a little pen loop.  I liked it a lot (and unlike the Pocket Filofax, the pocket-sized Letts actually fit into a pocket), but I missed Filofax.  The Letts agenda had cream-colored paper, thin and lovely, but not white.  Filofax white paper is unlike any other; snowy white, crisp, almost translucent, with the clean white made even whiter by the sharp black printing on the calendar pages.

The cross-section view: It's the
best part!

When I worked for Nordstrom, I was lured away from Filofax once again.  Nordstrom managers received a generous discount on Franklin Planner products (now called Franklin-Covey), and I bought a very pretty brown distressed leather ziparound binder.  At first, I liked the idea of the full-zip binder, and it did look very neat and tidy and could securely hold loose items and papers .  But the cross-section view is one of the most appealing things about the Filofax, and when the binder was zipped, I couldn't see the neat stack of solid and lined, white and colored sheets, separated by alphabetical and tabbed dividers, with (of course) pale blue map pages.  I returned to Filofax, and for the next five years or so (years during which I had a full-time job and no children), I bought a new binder every year; hence the collection pictured above.

So this is my new 2015 agenda. It

has most of the things I like,

including a ribbon marker, maps,

and note pages.  It could use a pocket,

and the paper should be white rather than

cream, but I like it.  

My husband asked me a few weeks ago to pick up a new datebook for him when I was at Barnes and Noble.  He uses a pocket week-on-two-pages leather datebook, the same kind every year.  I bought one for him at Barnes and Noble last year and he liked it so much that he wanted another just like it.  As always,  I lingered in front of the datebook display, looking at agendas and datebooks and wondering if another Filofax break might be in order.  When I saw the pocket-sized leather datebook pictured here, I was sold.  Although the picture shows the color very well, it can't convey the tactile appeal, which is considerable.  The cover is leather, very soft, and I know that it wears well, since my husband's 2014 version, which he carries everywhere, still looks great.  His is black, of course, but he also subjects it to considerable abuse.  The paper is very nice, too.  Not quite Filofax paper (because nothing is), but it's thin and creamy and feels very nice under a pen...smooth, but with just enough texture that you can feel the pen scratching a tiny bit.  Although the paper is cream and not white, it's a very light cream.  The true pocket size of this one is nice; I can't always carry my Filofax, and sometimes I'm sorry not to have it with me.

This is temporary, of course.  I'm sure I'll like this new agenda (I've had it for over a week now and have already started to use the 2015 monthly calendar pages--the weekly pages start with December 22), but it's not a Filofax, and I'm sure that I'll miss my Filofax enough that I'll want another one.  Check back with me in a year.

LOL People

The Internet is capable of doing strange things, isn't it? I want a cat now.  My feelings re cats used to be just north of dislike, just south of indifference.  Now, I can't stop taking imaginary pictures of my imaginary cats, and captioning them with hilarious lolcat-speak captions.  My Google search history is filled with cat breeds, how to train a cat, how to bathe a cat, and of course, cat videos.  And hypoallergenic cats--because I'm fully allergic to cats, but that apparently isn't any reason at all not to run out and adopt a cat.  I can haz Benadryl.  Whatever.

Bon Appetit

I like Curtis Sittenfeld's novels.  Prep is probably the best of them but I also really liked American Wife and Sisterland.  (Here's what I don't like: Book titles in italics.  Why, MLA?  Why? Did you think that underlined titles would look too much like hyperlinks?  Well, maybe that's a legitimate concern, actually.  I keep lightly swiping my index finger across the paper page of the actual, real, hardcover book that I'm reading now, and expecting a new page to load.)  In Sisterland, 12-year-old twin sisters take over the family cooking after their chronically depressed mother takes permanently to her bed.  The girls find three recipes, and they rotate among them, never varying the recipes, cooking and serving one of the three dishes every day until they leave for college years later.  Hard up for dinner ideas one night, I actually tried one of the recipes (pork chops in orange juice.)  I'm sure that Curtis Sittenfeld didn't intend to write a cookbook, but there you are.  Give me a cautionary tale, and I'll take it as a helpful hint.  I usually prefer the before picture.

So right now, I'm waiting for frozen meat and cheese ravioli to defrost. My 10-year-old has been collecting recipes from a series of books about the states, and the Missouri book's recipe was something called "St. Louis Toasted Ravioli."  Never mind my surprise that any sort of ravioli dish is a St. Louis local favorite.  I'm once again all out of dinner ideas, and a fried ravioli recipe copied onto an index card from a dusty school library book seems like just as good an idea as anything I'd dig up on Cooks.com.  None of us are particularly hungry today, anyway. 

*****

The hardcover book is a used copy of Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies. I like it.  I like the wisecracking snappy mid-century humor, and I love the utter lack of introspection or gritty honesty.  I'm sure that Jean Kerr's life as the wife of a famous and probably demanding drama critic and the mother of his six children was probably harder than she makes it seem, and I'm sure that she had moments of frustration and anger and resentment, but I'm glad that she kept that part to herself.  I'm glad that she occasionally mentions feeding her children, but that she offers no insight whatsoever regarding what exactly she fed them, and why.  Jean Kerr makes me a little nostalgic for a time that I just missed.  

*****

My ravioli are probably thawed now.  I'm going to follow my 10-year-old's instructions, and we'll see what happens.  Maybe I have some pork chops in the freezer.  I always have orange juice. 

Illuminate the main streets and the cinema aisles

Isn't it so much easier and more pleasant to clean your kitchen when you have music to listen to?  I forget this sometimes, but I remembered it tonight, and the nightly dishes and counters routine was much more pleasant as a result.

I skipped around a bit on my husband's old iPod, landing first on The Brothers Johnson's "Strawberry Letter 23", followed by Al Stewart's "Time Passages". Then I found Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha", and listened to it three times.

So many reasons to love "Brimful of Asha". I'm an Indio-Anglophile, if such a thing exists.  Years of working with Indian scientists and software engineers left me with great affection for Indians, who seem to combine razor-sharp wit with kindness like few other cultures can.  Even better than Indian Americans are Indian Brits (or British Indians?)  Because they're BRITISH AND INDIAN.

I like to think that "Brimful of Asha" probably gave at least one record company executive heartburn when he first heard it.  It's a longer-than-five-minutes song about a Bollywood star, and Indian sociopolitics, and life in late-20th-century England, with vaguely Indian melody and instrumentation.  Who would have expected it to be a huge hit? I fell in love with this song the first time I heard it in 1996, and it's held up beautifully.

I'm listening now to Toad the Wet Sprocket's "Nanci".  If only I could bend my words like Uri Geller's spoons.

Or maybe not...

Would the first 1,000 words of 50 different novels work just as well as one 50,000-word novel? By the way, all of the words would be dialogue.

What was I Thinking? (Part 10 Million)

So I sat and stewed over a title for this post for at least 5 minutes, but that's no reason to think that I shouldn't be able to write a 50,000-word novel in a month, right? National Novel Writing Month starts tomorrow, and I'm in.

I'm Egg-sellent

That's a mixed metaphor, I suppose, because I refer to MS Excel, and not to the scrambled, fried, or poached product of a chicken.  So sue me.

I start my new job on November 3. Who else can say that she got the first job in her field that she applied to after graduating? Yes, I graduated at age 48, but my advanced age only slightly diminishes the magnitude of this accomplishment. Write that down. 

I'm actually 49 now.  This is when people start to worry about their minds (having long despaired of their bodies, I suppose) and I'm not immune to those worries.  If you have ever worked as a government contractor, then you know that the upside is that you can always find a job if you need to.  The downside (wait for it) is that you almost always need to.  Now, though, I have to worry about more than just finding a new job.  I have to worry about my brain's ability to keep up with brains half its age.  Cloud computing!  New forms of social media every damn day!  Windows 8.1! Sometimes, I'm pugnaciously upbeat, like one of those aggressively active seniors in a Medicare supplement commercial.  Sometimes, though, I descend into Luddite crotchetiness.  That's a word, because I say it is.  

Today, I'm an active senior, adjusting my fanny pack and mall-walking circles around these damn kids. I remembered how to create formulas in Excel, and I...

...am bitch-slapped by irony, once again.  That last paragraph, abandoned mid-sentence, was supposed to be a boast about how I mastered Windows 8.1 in less than 24 hours, and then, my keyboard abruptly refused to produce output to match my input. I'm sure that I must have hit something by accident.  I had to resort to the help desk first line of defense. Now that the computer has been turned off and back on again, it appears to be fine. My nerves are a little frayed, but you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. 

Technological advances

I have a new computer, and it's beautiful.  I might have to start blogging again.  It takes so little.

Quotidian, Part 75

I was supposed to write today, wasn’t I?  I made a commitment to write daily, but “daily” is looking alarmingly frequent now.  What was I thinking?  

Well, there’s a four-word autobiography if I ever saw one, but that’s a story for another day.  Time to make dinner. "Daily" is a harsh and insistent taskmaster. 

Drosophila

What's the life span of a fruit fly again?  A day? 4 days?  Anyway, it's short.  I feel like I should remember this in better detail after months of study for the CLEP exam but everything I ever learned about biology escaped my sieve-like skull the moment I walked out of the testing center.

I could look it up, couldn't I? But I won't.  The point is that they were in my kitchen, just a handful of them, buzzing around some slightly overripe bananas that I moved to the refrigerator, depriving them of what I hope was their sole major food source.  I talked to them about their certain impending death (not likely from starvation; my kitchen is clean but it's not perfect.)  How long does life feel to something that small that lives for such a short time?  Assuming that it's aware of its life at all, do the minutes feel like days?   "You'll be dead by tomorrow anyway; Friday at the latest," I told the little gang's leader as I announced my decision to spare their lives. 

Curiosity and the desire not to look foolish (almost always too late in my case) drove me to look it up anyway.  Turns out that they can live for a month or more.   The stays of execution may have been too hasty.  No one knows the day or hour, right?  The little bastards could outlive me. 

Summertime Weirdness

It’s Friday night. Friday nights have a different rhythm, a different atmosphere, depending on the time of year.  This is summer, so Friday night means pasta dinner at the pool pavilion, followed by pool set-up for tomorrow’s meet, followed by TV time on the couch with the kids.  An early bedtime tonight for an early warm-up tomorrow morning; a pool filled with sleepy swimmers at 7:30 AM.

It’s very green here now.  We had six months of winter, a few weeks of chilly spring, barely warmed by thin pale yellow sunlight, and now lush overripe warmth—things growing on almost every surface, black mottling on the pavement that might be dirt or might be mold.  Nothing in the swampy close-in suburbs of Washington D.C. will be really dry again until October.

Our neighborhood is filled with monster trees, 50 or more years old, 30 or more feet tall.   A sheltering, cooling canopy that could end up crushing your house--thunderstorms here are Old Testament. We belong to one of the mid-20^th century swim and tennis clubs that are hidden in neighborhoods throughout D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.  I picture myself sometimes, old and alone, clinging to dim memories of a distant and happy oasis: smiling neighbors, striped deck chairs, blue water sparkling with sunlight, ceiling fans spinning lazily in the redwood pavilion.  When I’m tired of my slightly down-at-the heels Levitt neighborhood, it’s the pool that keeps me away from the real-estate listings.

Summer just started, really, and I’m already worried about losing it. Fleeting isn’t the word. A blink and it’s over. How not to waste it, how not to lose it, how not to worry about the regret I’ll feel at the end of August, barely two months from now. We should have eaten more popsicles, should have gone to the Air and Space museum, should have chased fireflies. 

I live in the moment. It's just the wrong moment.  

The lane ropes are in place and the backstroke flags are strung across the pool, where we hope they’ll stay (a thunderstorm threatens, as usual.) The sun will be in my eyes tomorrow as I try to look serious in my blue and white stroke-and-turn judge uniform.  The meet will be over, a blink, and I’ll know that there are only a few left, even though the season is just starting.  I miss it already. 

Summa Cum Laude

After 7 years, I am finally finished.  I walked across the stage at Comcast Center on May 17.  I heard "Summa Cum Laude" after my name was called.  I shook Javier Miyares' hand, and a bit later, I moved my tassel from right to left, along with 1,000 or so other graduates of University of Maryland University College.  

I thought that I’d make a bigger deal of graduating.  It still doesn't feel real. I still feel like I face a long struggle toward a distant goal, and I suppose I do.  I just don’t know what the goal is now.   In an entirely predictable instance of careful-what-you-wish-for, I’m actually a little depressed that the whole ordeal is over.  What to do now?  

I hung up my gown and my honor cord and my Phi Kappa Phi medal, and I'll wait for the university to mail my diploma later this summer.  I lost the tassel in the parking lot.