Stories We Tell

I'd like to digress a bit, this post, if I may.  The approach of the American JulyFourth holiday, my second since being back in the U.S., brings back memories of, well, the last JulyFourth holiday I was forced to endure in this country.  The staccato bursts of fireworks, unevenly spaced and like to burn down a building, thrown up furtively by amateurs who snuck over the border to Pennsylvania to buy them, have started to come more often, the interval between them shortening, like the beeping countdown of an imminently exploding bomb in a bad action movie.

As I wrote last year, I am not particular to fireworks, to the slack-jawed stares on the upturned faces of spectators, illuminated in red and blue and green by the exploding bursts above.  I am a bit alone, I have found, in my aversion to the common U.S. pastime of celebrating the war that freed a small proportion of the population by recreating the destructive forces of black powder cannons in colorful facsimile.  But it reminds me of a story.  The story of a lonely traveler far from home, another JulyFourth, another celebration of Independence.  Have I told you this one before?  No I don't think so.  I'd have remembered.

We all live by our stories, after all.  That's what this blog has been about, really.  For two years I've been making up stories, never mind the stories that have actually been happening.  Is the journey over now, I wonder?  Should I pack it in and call myself abroad no more, for real this time?  The truth, after all, is stranger than all the fictions I could come up with.  Living in this country, more and more, is like living in a foreign place, a place I don't know anymore.  A place, perhaps, I never knew.  What matter whether I am home or not?

Well.

Shall we flashback two years?

I'd been in Astana less than a month, and suddenly our boss—the American one—was talking about the party at the embassy, asking if we were going.  We responded with the customary "What?" that we'd learned was the proper response to anything our boss said to us.  He was nice enough to forward us the invitation from the embassy to all U.S. citizens in the city, and we RSVPd our way in.  In proper American fashion, it was a picnic, and we were expected to bring a dish to pass.  It seemed an odd condition, but we were excited to have a half day at work on a non-local holiday, so we took it.

Upon arriving at the embassy, I of course had forgotten my passport.  Speaking right good American, though, I smoothly talked my way in just by showing my driver's license.  Then it was on to the American-style socializing.  Which of course meant sitting apart in our own groups, pointedly ignoring all the other small groups around us.  It was just that predicament that encouraged us to move on and talk to some strangers.  We'd forgotten how stultifying it could be, talking to our boss, a middle-aged many who enjoyed chatting up younger women.  Luckily for us he began to move on to the local women after a few months.

By luck—strange, strange luck—we ended up talking to a group of construction workers—men, of course.  Without properly considering what we were doing, we entered into conversation, answering ill-advised questions like where were we from, and why did we come to Astana.  The funny part was, much as we'd been explained to about how sexist the culture was there, those construction workers were the first overtly sexist experience I had in Astana.  They couldn't believe that a group of young women would move, singly, to a foreign country, and just to be librarians.  Weren't we worried?  Where were our men?  How had they let us come?  This coming from men who probably never left their apartment complex, except to work, and if they did only went to places where they knew the workers spoke English, and only in groups.

There were other people there, interesting people.  Many of them were military, or former military.  We met the U.S. Ambassador and his wife (who was a librarian).

There were no veggie burgers.

We didn't have fireworks that day.  But the Kazakhstani were big fans of fireworks, so we had many to look forward to, and had just had a few back in June for a patriotic holiday, probably related to the president's birthday or something.

I'd never been one for patriotism, and though I played at it a bit, surrounded by U.S. citizens in a land far from it, I still didn't feel terribly inclined toward it.  Patriotism is a story we tell ourselves too, whether to hide our ignorance or warm our souls, cold from the knowledge that our allegiance is fraught at best.  Innocent, was the word Twain used; we all hold the story of our innocence close, lonely travelers in a strange land, hapless wanderers.

Even Twain's story had to end.  Even the Innocents returned home, finally.  Even Twain, king of irony, could not keep up the facade forever.  Setting out, I didn't intend for this to be my final blog post, but I find it is time to retire the facade.  Irony requires distance; I no longer have the desire or ability to distance myself from my world.  For better or for worse, it's time to go home.

You can still catch me on my tumblr, at iambooking.tumblr.com where I review and write about fiction by women, and generally talk about feminist things.  Or catch me on twitter as eaking_vb_toeak.

And hopefully someday soon find me in print, as I retell the year of my life abroad—the truth and nothing but, of course—tentatively titled My Tapestry: Reflections of a Year Abroad. 

Thanks to all who have been faithful readers, those who have shared those stories with me, and those who have just dropped by occasionally to keep tabs.

To Shift, or Not To Shift

As I'm sure you'll recall, my last post was about buying a new car.  I'm very happy with the new car, make no mistake.  However it's necessitated a bit of relearning on my part.  I've had to relearn how to shift.  Why, yes, it is a manual transmission.  I have, in fact, been, as they say, "driving standard" for the past seven years.  But as anyone else who "has a stick" knows, there's a bit more involved in driving a manual transmission car than just putting it in drive and hoping for the best (honestly, I had to drive a loaner car recently that was an automatic, and it felt like it had a mind of its own.  It was decidedly disconcerting).  With a manual you have to be, as they say, "one with the car."  You have to feel what it feels.  You have to remember to put the clutch in when you stop or risk stalling out and looking like an idiot in front of everyone else at the intersection.  You have to remember at what point the clutch is no longer engaged, or risk looking like a bigger idiot as your car stalls out starting from first gear.  You have to remember to put the car in first gear in the first place.

Of course I knew how to do all this with my old car.  Driving that, for me, was as easy and automatic as falling up the stairs.  But the new car.  For people who drive standard, who really enjoy it, the car becomes practically an extension of oneself (for those who don't enjoy it, you rather find yourself making a mental note never to be in a car with them again, ever).  The old car was broken in, it was easy going, it didn't complain much.  The new car, oh the new car.  All it takes is one wrong move.  Don't get me wrong, I love how it growls and purrs (diesel), how it kicks in with a bit of unexpected acceleration (turbo), but it's been difficult, learning to play by a new set of rules.  Going from a 5-speed 4-cylinder gas engine to a 6-speed 4-cylinder diesel is like going from a mountain bike to a road bike.  It does not like being in the wrong gear, and it even tells you when you're doing it wrong!  Ah, how technology has advanced in the past 13 years.

Adapting to change, as a grownup person, having been in the habit of doing a thing a certain way, for a very long time, is difficult.  It's demoralizing.  Every jerk and shudder, every less than smooth transition from gear to gear, leaves you feeling like an idiot.  And then the kinder chimes in from the back seat and asks why you keep doing that.

Kids have a way of pointing an incredibly strong magnifying lens at everything we, as adults, take for granted.  Adults are capable, dependable, good at things.  Until they have to do something in front of a child.  Children, in their innocent, blank-slate outlook on things, can make even the most confident adult person question everything they know about a situation.  So what if you're a world-class mechanical engineer, it's been five minutes since I unwrapped my new bike for Christmas, why haven't you put it together yet?  Are the little screws too tiny for your old, experienced eyes to see?  What's a war?  Why do people fight in wars?  You tell me all the time to be nice to people, why do they get to fight in a war?

Having been step-keeper of a 6-year-old for almost a year now, I often find myself trying to imagine what kind of person could ever think they were ready to be a parent.  What person could ever have their life so in order that they feel confident performing in front of a new human for 18 or so years?  We tell these little life forms all about how they must be polite, and not do destructive things to the furniture, and talk about their feelings instead of screaming and throwing things across the room, and various other things we, as adults, imagine that we never ever do anymore.

We picture growing up as an act of increasing self-awareness, the ability to measure our actions against a growing yardstick of social approval, and that we, as the grownups, have achieved such great heights of maturity.  Some of us, I suppose, truly have.  Most of us, I suspect, have got close enough that we can occasionally reach the summit with enough effort and a good enough leap.  And usually that's good enough to be getting on with.

Until we're put in front of a child.  Until we have to turn a psychopath into a human being.  Until we have to watch that little human-in-training go out into the world and perform in front of other adults, judgey adults with the kind of selective outlook on their own adultness that we used to have before we became guardian to this little person's moral and emotional growth.  Now every time we tell a child to do or not to do something, that magnifying lens immediately points straight at us, judging us for all the things for which we judge our children.  Use please and thank-you?  How many times a day do we omit please or thank-you?  Talk about our feelings instead of turning into passive-agressive monsters?  Do we always pick up our things and put them in the right place, or just when it's convenient?  Name-calling and other uncharitable speech?

What kind of humans did we think we were, that we could successfully perform humanness in front of a new one?  How do we expect to guide the next generation of humans if we ourselves don't even have things figured out?  And, being a positive example and all that aside, how do we expect to get on with our lives, get things figured out, if we've got these little monsters running rampant around our ankles, getting into all kinds of trouble?  That's the worst realization I've come to.  Benevolence, when raising kids, doesn't really enter into it.  The best reason to fix your life and act like a decent human being is the simple fact that the more you practice your own shrill orders to wash hands, pick up stuff, use manners, not destroy things, the fewer questions you have to answer about why kids have to do all those things but adults don't, the more likely kids will be to just do the things you want them to.

So you can get back to the business of being an immature adult person.

If You Can Read This Title, Then Read It To Someone Who Can't

April is commemorative for many reasons.  For me, it was Month of the New Car.  The last Month of the New Car was seven years ago.  I think it goes by the lunar calendar.  Or maybe the Julian.  I can never keep track.

The funny thing I learned about buying a new car is that it's much easier to do when you have no money.  The last time (and the time before that, for that matter) I had a finite amount of money, and little prospects of having more money anytime soon.  You take the best you can get for what you have.  I got lucky.  I made a good choice.  I did my research.  And the six-year-old car I bought lasted another seven years, including the year it sat in a barn while I was off having adventures.

This time round was a bit different.  I'm not the only one making use of this car (funny, the things spouses can be useful for), and so I'm not the only one paying for it now.  Meaning there was more money to be spent, potentially, on a car.  I'm not going to say how much more—because, jealousy, and all that—but suffice to say I felt rocketed quite literally into a new world, a new era, in car performance.  Let's be honest, a car with power windows and air conditioning was going to be luxury to me, so I spent most of my time looking for a new car wildly vacillating between ecstasy in choice and the sure knowledge that I was going to buy the worst car for the most money and bankrupt our household for life.  Which touchscreen is better?  Do I want the Bluetooth system that reads text messages to me, or just the one that plays music and lets me talk on the phone?  All digital, or stick with the vintage radial meters?  Color, sunroof, wheels, interior upholstery, manual, automatic, hybrid, diesel, so tiny it doesn't make a difference?  Do we buy the cheap car and pay it off quick (because you know you're going to need a new cheap car pretty soon), or the expensive one and pay it off slow and drive it until the petroleum reserves run out?

And then there's the buying experience.  Being the only driver on the homestead, I did the majority of the test-driving, talking to salespeople, reading the literature.  This wasn't the slick 50s, to be sure, but the gentleman-salespeople who thought they could turn my head with bright LED readouts and vanity mirrors surely didn't have any business selling to me.  Or those who don't believe in knowing actual facts about the vehicles they're selling.

But anyway, that's not the interesting part of the story.

Suffice to say, we bought a car from people who sold cars, for a specified amount of money.

This blog is about me.

For those of you who know, I'm the only driver.  For those of you who don't, ask someone who does.  I don't have time to unpack that right now.

It's a pretty good axiom that the primary driver of a car should be the one for whom the car is bought.  If I didn't like it, it would probably be a bad investment.  But being as the car was bought to transport the family, it's as much ours as it is mine, bought with money from both of us.  But how to do you really get a non-driver excited about something he's never really going to use?  Someone always required to ask others for a ride is going to be much more invested in his own feet than the ins and outs of any car.  Vanity, I guess, to want someone to affirm my choice in an expensive, potentially explosive, purchase.  Or just a different, rarely accounted for, point of view.

Let's take a step back.  The car we had, when we met, was mine.  Found, bought, paid for, driven, maintained, by me.  He enjoyed it for what it was.  But to everyone, not just us, not just the offspring, it was definitely my car.  Let's be honest, when I had to sell the thing it felt like an extension of me.  (But we won't get into that).  Now, depending on point of view, ownership of the car is fluid.  To those for whom money is the be-all, I suppose it goes to the one whose arbitrary market value is higher.  To the offspring, it yet remains my car.  To me, it's our car.  To him, I'd like to say it's also our car.  (I think getting his own key fob [with the cool flip out key] helped in that area).

For some, automobile matters fall squarely in the range of menfolk, irrespective of, well anything else.  I've a feeling this last is true all countries over.  Maybe there's a matrilineal village somewhere in Scandinavia where all the women have grease-stained hands and wear overalls.  I can't be sure.  Some people just want a reason to be proud of, or bask in the collective vanity, of another.  Whether or not it's founded.

But anyway, I got to thinking—as I'm so poetically wont to do—about doing, and ability, and being defined by one's abilities and, yes, disabilities, and the ways in which one deviates from the perceived norm.  Being one of those modern females emancipated on a regular intravenous drip of that feminist drug which we all speak of in hushed tones, I take exception to any suggestion that my car-purchasing prowess is any less than another's.  I of course have been told in no uncertain terms, in many venues, that my ability to buy a car without the significant twisting of any undergarments is out of the norm, and while I firmly believe and state openly that that is just absolute stupidity, I acknowledge that such statements have been made in my direction and that, according to that dubious lore, I can't expect people to make an honest accounting of my abilities based on my accomplishments all the time.

No, I won't go so far as to say being perceived female is a disability.  I of all people know the inanity of that.  But it is known that strangers, and yes, friends, will change their behavior towards you when once they perceive a difference from the accepted norm.  I continuously consulted with my male counterpart about the car we were to buy because—ideas of consulting long-term bonded compatriots over major and/or life-altering decisions aside—though he does not drive, he has fairly lucid thoughts most of the time and is generally one of the few people whose judgment I trust on a regular basis.  In short, I desired his input as an intelligent being.

Some people, upon learning of the disability of another, suddenly find cause to doubt their fitness as a person to go a day without wetting themselves, or walk upright, for that matter.  To be able to consistently tell the difference between a toothbrush and scissors; to comprehend basic English spoken in a reasonable tone.  If anyone else finds the comparison to a drunk all too apt, please raise your hand now.

But where drunks have not lived in this state their entire lives (one is to hope) and will soon pass out and wake up next day without the aforementioned condition, someone with, say, a vision impairment has in all likelihood lived his entire life with it, and is better equipped than all the harassed bartenders in the world to determine where the cutoff point is.  We baby drunks, as they make of themselves children.  We give them special treatment and special passes all the time, and think nothing of it, because they can't help themselves.  But the disabled—oh no, it's almost as though they deserve to be punished—nay, that their disability is their punishment—for being born a certain way, to look at the vast majority of everything we as a society take for granted every day, and be told they can't have that.

Want to get up those steps?  Well, I guess you should've been born with two functioning legs and kept them that way.  I mean, honestly, who do you have to blame but yourself?

Want to know where the hell you're going in an airport?  In a strange city?  In the checkout line at your local grocery store?  Well, why can't you read those signs that are so perfectly sized for my eyes?  It's not my fault you can't see that.

Want to get a decent job that requires more than picking up trash in a parking lot?  Well, you should've been born able to get through school in the usual 13 years like the rest of us.

Ever wonder what people mean when they point at something and say, "look at that!"?  Well too bad.  I don't have time to expend the two words necessary to let you feel as though you're part of the conversation and not just the village idiot who's been let out for the long weekend.

After all, who knows what use you might make of all this special treatment.  If you get ahead of me in life, than I'll have no one to blame buy myself for treating you like a reasonable person asking for reasonable accommodation.  It's not as though I go round getting special treatment all the time, and look where I've got!  You must have bootstraps there somewhere, then start pulling!

Well, that was my story about buying a car.  Remember, it's all about perception.

Oh yeah, April is also Month of the Tax Return.  If you find yourself with an overabundance, please consider donating to something like this:

http://www.aapd.com/

or any one of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_disability_rights_organizations

When We Were (Not so Young as We Used to Be, But Still a Bit Younger than We Are Now)

Oh, Sing! of Galveston.  Jewel of the Texas Coast! That Shining Seashell among Dull, Wave-washed Pebbles. Galveston, where my Heart was, briefly, for a few Days at least, There.

I'd like to think that my short visit to Galveston was a sort of warm-up to the trip I will someday take to Key West, and the other Keys (presumably, North, South, and East).  You know, places connected to actual land by bridges.  Where people go to pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist and all they have to do for the rest of their lives is fish and drink Coronas.  That day is a long way off.

But where was I?

Ah yes, the wedding.  I don't attend many weddings.  Being an introvert, I have little interest in the lives of others, in formal, mandatory fun affairs.  In pursuit of this, I keep my circle of friends small.  But this wedding was different.  Mainly because of the food.  And the fact that I was allowed, nay encouraged, to wear pajamas.  My good friend, who I met in Astana, who shall remain nameless, except to the two people who actually read this story and also know me from Astana, who is from Texas (honestly, getting a Visa to go anywhere from that crazy country must be a nightmare), is also, in a roundabout way, from India.  In that her parents are.  Normally, other than a passing interest in places that are something other than the country backwoods where I grew up, I pay little attention to background, ethnicity, culture, except to studiously avoid situations in which I might have to converse with people.  Any people. (Introvert!).  But.

For those of you unaware, Indian food is the best food.  And my friend, for all her faults as being a person who is not me, quietly sitting in a room by myself, is a pretty awesome person.  And she told me to wear traditional Indian attire, which is incredibly more fun and pretty and comfortable than the usually expected tiny cocktail dress—because all of us, everywhere, couldn't possibly be going to a wedding with the expectation of fun and eating a lot, instead of seducing everyone who looks at us—that is usually worn to weddings in countries in which (or next to which) I have grown up.

I also got to meet her husband, who stands as one of the tallest people I know.  He also seemed quite nice, and looked at my friend as though he would take those giant tall-man-hands of his and cut a swath through any and all people who ever dared be an ass, or otherwise mean, in any way, to her.  Which is an acceptable quality in a new husband.

These (those?) aforementioned circumstances, though enough to tempt me off to the strange land of Texas, were not the only lure I was chasing.  I also was looking forward—in that theoretical way that introverts do to social interaction, before it actually happens—to once again seeing some of the people I knew in Astana.  I'll admit, nice as it was to know a whole table-full of people at a wedding (who were not my family), contextually it was quite weird.  But I suppose I can grudgingly say that it was also fun to talk to them again, and also the wine helped very much.

My trip to Galveston was defined, in most part, by an excess of something I've not had much of since I returned to ye olde States: free time.  We spent much of our time in and around Galveston just killing time.  Wandering.  Looking for places to eat.  Eating.  Digesting.  Wandering back from where we'd just eaten to mope around wondering where our next meal was going to be.  Sightseeing.  There isn't a lot to see, besides ocean, at a tourist attraction during the off-season.  But we made do.  I took off my shoes and stuck my toes in the sand.  Walked down the beach briefly before cold and a fear of stepping on something rusty and pathogen-covered became too much for me.  Fantasized about what would happen if I stuck a piece of rebar through the spokes of one of those four-person-bike-carriages that annoying and/or drunk people kept driving(?) down the sidewalks at us and by which we were nearly run over countless times.

Toes in the Sand

All in all, it was a leisurely trip.  And it's glad I am to be back up in the Industrious North.  But I still have my pajamas.

(A) Snow Day

Where was I? Ah yes, I was regaling you with stories of old Galveston when I found myself sidetracked by thoughts of future apocalypses and zombie-filled nightmarescapes.  Back to my story.

But first, I'd like to interrupt this little memoir to let you know about a real danger facing those living in snowbelts across the northeast. Specifically New York State.  Specifically Monroe County.  Specifically all those suburbs full of people to moneyed and important to shovel their own damn driveways.  This little Public Service Announcement brought to you by Elite Snowplowing, or Ken's Snowplowing Service, or Residential Snowplowing by Brockman Tree and Lawn Care, or one or all or some of the seemingly hundreds of pickup trucks with oversized plows attached to their front ends, driving willy-nilly all over the normal-width roads of Fairport, menacing all who encounter them.

I heartily apologize to all those who thought I wrote my blog posts in real time, and who feel disillusioned with my obvious departure from warm and sunny Texas back to the gray and snowy skies of Rochester, NY for this little word-storm, as it were. But I just can't keep this to myself!

And besides the danger these contraptions pose to those forced to concede the road to them, there's the immeasurable damage being done to lawns, driveways, sidewalks, and any standing structure against which hundreds of pounds of snow is pushed over and over, every time it snows. I myself know of at least one telephone pole that looks in immediate danger of falling over, simply from the amount of snow that's been rammed against it all winter, every time some suburbanite decides their Audi can't get over the three inches of snow pushed off the road at the end of their driveway.

Listen, you'll say.  It's not the end of the world.  Plenty of more pressing issues going on right now. Well, true as it may be, from a global standpoint, let's find some perspective. I drive, as you'll recall, rather a bit more than the average 9-5 business-hours-only office monkey (yes, I went there).  And there's that fun statistic that likes to remind us all we're most likely to have an accident within twenty miles of home.  Well, all the driving I do is pretty much within twenty miles of home.  Miles and miles of it. In the same not-so-big circle.  So when I have to dodge the erratic reverse, or the overzealous yellow line hugger, or that guy who thinks because he drives a pickup truck he has a right to do whatever he pleases, not limited to driving on the wrong side of the road, well, I'm going to complain.

Because I live in the suburbs now.  It's a pastime. We've so much going for us, we have to invent things to be annoyed about. I'm sorry, I meant outraged. I am just outraged that a thing that is convenient to others is so incredibly inconvenient to me. Not even inconvenient. A minor nuisance. I'll even go so far as to call it, a thing I notice occasionally that I decide to be annoyed about. Honestly, you can't make this stuff up.

Next time on Suburban Social Justice: How green is too green? A memo to those annoying neighbors whose compost pile is more attractive than my landscaping.

Oh yes, and South Texas hellscapes.  Good times.

Abroad Once More

I did not expect to travel again so soon after returning to my point of origin. I wouldn't have, but for circumstances beyond my control. As it was, we almost didn't make it, due to weather beyond our control. It seems I am doomed to uncomfortable airplane rides for the rest of my life (more on that later).

But why, you may ask, were we venturing out, daring international travel, giving up the comforts of our domestic life? Well, it seems my international life was not done with me. I had, while I was abroad, the great misfortune of making friends. Yes even I fell victim to that ploy, so far from home, and for such a long time. I couldn't help myself! And I did it to such a thorough extent that I got myself invited to a wedding. How could I refuse? I could not so disappoint the feelings of one who so obviously adored and needed me there with her at such an important time of her life. And so I bought the plane tickets, booked the hotel room, and bought a new outfit just for the occasion.

The last time I was abroad, I did not dare try to drive, in any of the countries I stayed in, left side or right. This time, though, we really didn't have a choice if we didn't want to spend an arm and a leg getting ferried around. So we rented a car. And I have to say, it wasn't as bad as I expected. The cars weren't terribly different, though they showed a marked propensity for oversized pick-up trucks and ridiculously fast cars that would skid directly off the road at the mere sight of a snowflake. Yes, it seemed we would do alright, down in Texas.

That was, of course, once we arrived. Though the weather was practically tropical in that Texan city of Houston, getting out of Rochester, and making our connection, took some luck. Flying out of the Northeast in the middle of January is never a sure bet. And the weather in this country seems to have undergone some odd "climate change" in the year I was away. Now even the weather in such southern climes as Florida, nay even Georgia, is unpredictable enough to delay a flight.

Rain. We were delayed for rain. Hours and hours we waited. And then we finally boarded the plane and took off, and I began to wish we'd waited even more. Every bump and jump of the plane made me flash back to that day, my last time flying abroad. Returning home from my yearlong adventure, I feared the plane might simply drop out of the sky and into the Atlantic Ocean somewhere.

Obviously it didn't, then and now. And this time, at least, I got to watch the landscape go by as we came in to land. Texas is so flat, so brown. It's a wonder people want to live there at all. Well, maybe they have some odd immigration restrictions, keeping people from leaving the country. Perhaps it's the language barrier, keeping them from entering the U.S. Though their dialect is somewhat similar to ours, there are remarkable differences that make them almost impossible to understand at times.

Be that all as it may we did, finally, get to Houston—they didn't lose our luggage!—and set about getting our rental car. Having only ever rented a car in my own country before, I was unsure about the process here. And so, one false start, a ridiculous amount of waiting, a confusing shuttle ride, and a certain amount of uncomfortable standing in front of an unstaffed rental counter later, and we were knee-deep in unintelligible paperwork. How much insurance did we want to buy? Turns out that in Texas they are tired of determining who is responsible for accidents (are they all overly prone to accidents? maybe it's all those bridges they have signs all over the place about, the ones that freeze before everything else), so they just assume everyone's responsible. Thus we left in our new used rental car feeling either grossly underinsured or ridiculously overinsured, I'm not really sure which. In any case, we had a car and we were on our way.

The speed limit on most roads in that country is higher than I am used to, and everyone there seems to take it as an invitation to simply drive as fast as they can, all the time. Except when there's construction. Or any random slow-down, really, in which case we were suddenly traveling at 30mph, when just moments before we had been going 75. This made our trip down to Galveston—I still haven't worked out whether Galveston is a part of that country, or some kind of commonwealth—somewhat longer than we'd hoped, also a bit exciting from my repeated attempts at manually shifting a car with an automatic transmission. Truly I felt as though I were missing a limb, trying to drive that car.

Galveston, like all places worth making the site of a post-apocalyptic science fiction dystopia, is reached by driving across an enormous bridge. I'm not yet aware of any post-apocalyptic science fiction dystopia being set on that island yet, but there's always hope for the future. It was at some point, I'm told, the site of a great storm which caused a large amount of damage. Maybe whoever writes it can work that in somehow. At any rate, we used that storm scenario as the premise for why the city of Galveston seemed so bare, except at a couple of the larger intersections. Walking around the city, looking for things to do, places to eat, one could practically see the zombies dragging their half-rotted limbs down empty streets. Many of the houses are quite old and (no doubt) haunted. Honestly I don't know why someone hasn't written this yet.

Maybe I'll go do that now.

Stay tuned for the (eventual) conclusion of Abroad Once More...

Let Go Your Burdens

A funny thing happened to me some months ago, which precipitated my rather abrupt departure from these parts.  I may have mentioned, in a previous post (oh, I don't know, I think it was sometime near enough Labor Day) that I started a business--being bored after the bustle of city life in Astana, with no job and little enough to do all day while the husband was off to collect the proverbial bacon--after all, what is one to do when no jobs simply walk up and present themselves?  A pet sitting business, to be precise.  And away one afternoon I went to walk some dogs in a nearby wilderness.  We drove, in my car, parked in the lot, and off we walked.  Upon coming back I found my window smashed, and my belongings, which I'd applauded myself so heartily for putting in the trunk, rather than leave them lying about in plain sight, oh so cleverly looted.

And of course I was furious when I discovered the misadventure.  And I performed all those tasks one is obliged to do when one becomes the victim of such dastardly deeds--called the police and made a report, called my banks and cancelled all my cards, called my husband and told him I might be a bit late getting home.  And as I waited there, in the gathering rain, for the police to come, for the full scale of everything I'd lost to sink in (for the dogs' owner to come pick them up as my car was full of shattered window not safe for sensitive dogs' paws), it occurred to me that: for this I came back.  A full year I endured the suspicious looks of security guards, convinced I was out to steal all the soap at the grocery. A full year I dutifully read the emails from the U.S. Embassy about protecting oneself from various forms of theft that local masterminds were out to wreak on all us expats.  A full year I eyed any gathering of strangers, speaking a language I didn't fully understand, more than two people standing together, with a wariness only cooped up chickens facing particularly sly foxes could rival.  And a full year later I returned home only to have all that I'd carried with me, to the other side of the world and back, stolen.

A day after the incident, two days later, a week.  I was astounded at all I'd lost.  All I'd carried with me in that small bag (some would call it a purse [on a good day I might agree, though the word yet feels odd]) added up to so many years, so much responsibility, so much history.  I began to feel lighter, for the lost pieces of plastic, the half-used travel bottles of lotion, the membership cards to shops I'd visited once and never returned to, the keys I'd kept on my keychain in the off-chance I'd use them again--never used.  Perhaps it is true what they say.  That civilization is a burden; that we are held back by what we think we need. And so I conceived the idea of my walkabout.  I'd take this new-found freedom and see where the wind blew me.

For who could argue, having felt the liberty of a life unconstrained by the petty rules society throws upon us, that to take part in this civilization, is a benefit?  To rely upon the belief, shaky at best, that one can participate in an idea greater than oneself, that an idea can protect one from poverty, from wrack, from ruin.  I am come to the belief, espoused by so many self-help gurus and hackers of life, that to throw off one's chains and embrace the island that is man, is to achieve a mode of living quite superior to the everyday cares we all throw upon ourselves.  Truly, the poorest among us are indeed richer for their experience, for their lightness, for they do not partake of that  net, so-called "safety," that society throws down. They do not drag their multitudinous belongings after them, they have no losses to mourn.  Who, given a choice, could do otherwise?  I should, I do, thank those who, by crossing the shoddy boundaries of civilization itself, have shown me the false idea of security that society breaths into my ear.  By transgressing what I held as freedom, they have truly set me free, and so should we all be set free.

And so I have gone on my walkabout, unburdened by all that was taken from me.  Do not ask where I have gone, for I carried no maps, no gadgets, no technology that would record my passing.  I return to you now, for the cold season is upon us and there are no hotels that will give me a reservation without a credit card, I return with evangelical spirit and open heart.

Also empty stomach.  Please send food.  Some lotion would not go amiss.

The Training Wheels Come Off

In Which the Training Wheels do Indeed Come Off

And Other Adventures

The lazy summer days have come and gone, and with them summer vacation, unemployment and, really, free time in any quantity. It never ceases to amaze me how the thing we lament in one period of time we come to long for a few short weeks later. Being a housewife was never for me; I knew that, and expressed it loudly. Yet busy as I tried to make myself over the summer, it suddenly doesn't compare to the hectic pace at which days fly by. Now, bedtimes really matter. Not just for school; a Saturday afternoon lost to a prolonged temper tantrum that requires bedroom confinement is time you can never get back. He's in his room screaming about whatever it is he's found for an excuse to be miserable, meanwhile we're sitting there looking at the other 99 items on our to-do list and mentally reorganizing schedules. Always we're looking forward, trying to reassure ourselves that with the future, and the time that the future brings, we'll somehow manage to get to everything. Oh and maybe fit some sleep in there too.

I was unemployed over the summer. Often I had no reason to be out of bed before noon. Jump to late August when the husband has changed jobs and I drive him to and from work every day. Then add in getting the kiddo on the bus at some ridiculously middle of the morning time, then the fact that I started a business that also involves me being busy during those busy commuting times.  Then I took a part-time job, just to add to the fun. This is where the training wheels come in, I'm afraid. The summer was practice, a warm up for the real challenge. The summer was our training wheels. Did it help? Watching the youngster struggle to learn balance on his newly training wheel-less bike, we debated the merits of the crutch. Did they really provide a helpful step to independent bike riding? Did they just create a false sense of security that was rudely ripped away when we took them off? The summer was bike riding lite. Parenting lite, even (I don't mean we were part-time parents, just that we had a lot more time to fit parenting in with all the other stuff we wanted to get done). With the fall has come the real deal.

Training wheels, unfortunately, teach that success comes instantly. It was easy to do the dishes and run the vacuum when I had ten hours in which to get it done. Now I consider it a personal victory to have no dishes in the sink by the time five pm rolls around. As an adult I realize that the dishes will get done eventually. I can see that process in the future, and can visualize the steps leading up to it. As adults we can break down the complicated problem of managing the school/work schedule by breaking it down to manageable steps. 

Kids have to learn that the hard way, and sometimes we have to learn that little skill with them. For all our ability to see the process in front of the result, we have an uncanny way of forgetting that parenting itself is a process and not a series of end-results. We watch others go at the same problems we deal with, we mentally critique their processes, convince ourselves that we can go right where they went wrong, forgetting that every event is itself a step in a greater event--making a person out of a psychopath. By this time in our adult lives, we've forgotten what it was like learning to ride a bike (though we may convince ourselves we remember exactly what happened), and manage to believe that, hard as it was, and stressful, for every other parent before us, somehow it'll be different. We have just the right way to teach it, it'll be fine. 

As the custodians of burgeoning humanity, we have an urge not to let those small almost-people fail. We believe that somehow we can teach them every thing they need to know, save them the harshness of the world, prevent the bruises and skinned knees. The happy, easy times reinforce that, reinforce our willful blindness; those are our training wheels. We forget the process for the good result we think we've reached. Then we hear the frustration in a small piercing voice, reminding us how close failure is to those who expect instant gratification. We try to remain patient. We try to explain. We try to break it down to easy steps, then hold them up and keep them from falling when they try to skip one step to get to the result they expected to happen instantly. We're complicit in their failure. It becomes our own failure. 

Parenting, work, life in general: failure is not an option when you're an adult. But if you haven't failed at anything, you've never really done something that required effort. We can look forward, and see the possibility for success, plan how to overcome failure, because we've been through all this before. Every failure is training for life. Every scream, every accusation of agonizing pain, was an urgent call to let go, not hold on tighter as we do almost by instinct, trying to save our nerves and his. Probably it wasn't what we were thinking when we just sat down on the ground and let the kiddo go at it himself, relinquished control, watched him fall down over and over. We were tired and frustrated, so we just sat down. We watched him fall, tip, yell, drop the bike, and then we watched him ride. And then, like the silly humans we are, we assumed it would get easier after this.

A Tale of Two Kiddies

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Sometimes at the same time. So it goes when you are six years old, I suppose. And also the parents of a six-year-old.

We went camping in the Finger Lakes for Labor Day weekend. Which was a first for me, as I'd never really been one to "do things" on holiday weekends. Usually I was working, but being unemployed has given me a newfound sense of liberation and adventure, and I now have no problem just taking off for the long weekend, work be damned. I'm a rebel, me.

I've been doing quite a bit of traveling this past month. The weekend before Labor Day involved a trip up to Maine, sadly for a funeral, though it's still a toss-up whether that or the camping trip was more stressful in the end. Most of us have now forgotten—having been adults for so long—the special power a kid has for taking even the most straightforward of situations and turning them into the end of the world. I think that just happens to be our kid's superpower, actually.

Anyway, my recent travels back and forth across New York state have revealed to me that sometimes a staycation, when undertaken in the right way, can take you to more places than even traveling half-way round the world. Just a few hours down Route 90 brings you to exotic locales like Rome, Syracuse, Ithaca, Amsterdam, Troy, Geneva, Liverpool, and Berne, just to name a few. You can also, it turns out, get to a fun little place called De Nial, and return to it again and again and again. But you have to take a kid with you; apparently only they know the way. In this wonderful land the real world is kept at bay by a careful rejection of reality for a version only you understand and can envision, a refusal to admit that your way is not the only way, and an adamant belief that if you just scream loud enough everyone will give up and do exactly as you expect.

As I said, a couple weeks ago I had to go to a funeral. It was for a distantly related family-member, though as a lot of people probably know, the length of the branch doesn't always indicate actual distance on the family tree. Although we'd only seen this branch of our family for a week a year, I'd known them since I was born, and spent some of the best times of my life with our Maine Family. The past handful of years had seen fewer trips up to Maine—there was something about a year abroad, or some such nonsense—and I'd forgotten all the exotic places we used to pass on the way up to old New England. It's funny how sometimes it takes a funeral to get all the right people back in the right place again. Perhaps it even brings back that special childhood ability to have the best and the worst time at the same time that we all seem to lose as adults. I enjoyed spending time with all the people I'd been closest to as a child. It was also quite miserable at times, for obvious reasons.

The past few weeks, with all its trials and tribulations and tripping up and down the state have shown me how much we, as adults, have evolved to simply put up with things. Much as many of us would call ourselves perfectionists, we've moved far beyond the point where anything in life must be perfect. We've learned to tolerate imperfection for the sake of practicality—and yes, survival, when it comes down to it but let's face it, kids live in a world in which they already have most of the necessities of survival handed to them as if they're naturally occurring so really they don't see a problem in seeking perfection over survival—and rarely choose to fight when it comes to getting something just right. And when we do we're usually labeled childish.

Kids have an amazing capacity for dreaming life. At times it's incredibly unintelligible to the rest of us, to the point where it seems like there are two kids living inside the one we can see right there in front of us. There's the happy one, for whom the tiniest things evoke wonder and enjoyment. Then there's the unhappy one, for whom the tiniest things evoke fear and impending doom. And we really never know which one to expect, even to the point where a treat like going to get ice cream turns into a situation worthy of an emergency emotional meltdown. And with all these swings, a kid can still end the weekend by pronouncing that, "It was a pretty good camping trip, Dad."

Now back to that first "I'm home, oh my god a whole new foreign world called parenting" post. Yes, you can often find whole new crazy worlds, exotic places, imaginary lands without even leaving familiar ground. But if anything, all the new kid-mergencies have taught me that life is rarely an emergency, that just like getting to the other side of the world may seem scary and stressful and never-ending, getting to the other side of a crazy weekend doing a new thing with a six-year-old is stressful and can seem never-ending, but one happy wrap-up is all it takes to make things worthwhile.

I think. Tomorrow is the first day of first grade, after all. Things may change. Unexpectedly.

Nerds and Non-parents

Realizing I’d promised to write about family-hood and other domestic pursuits since returning from my year of imposed solitude, I’d like to natter on a bit about step-mother-hood if I might.  Well, if you’re still reading, I suppose that answers that. If not, well, I already have a five-year-old, so I've learned not to cater to toddlers.

I do find myself bombarde by mom-ness these days.  It's not what you think though. Actually, it started before I even got back to 'Merica. All over the social medias I'm seeing mom-ness. Everyone who can is making babies, and throwing up pictures. All the time the talk is about the babies. For the most part I'm still pretty well conditioned to turn and run the other way when I see stuff like this. Anyone who knows me knows my feelings about having actual babies, and while I don't believe I've ever come right out and said it, my earlier post, Mountains to Climb, is a pretty good introduction to my ambivalence about the joys of parenthood. Nevertheless, I tried to use the baby frenzy as a sort of jumping off point for my imminent leap into step-parenthood.  This, along with a decided bias on the part of most of my female colleagues at work back in Astana towards The Awesomeness-and-Necessity-of-Being-a-Mom even had me looking forward, at times, to coming back to a ready-made family.

I find I’m feeling a bit left out since coming back, though.  The truth is, I’d envisioned being a step-mother as something quite rewarding—trying, at times, to say the least, but the ability to shape a young mind, to share some of the things I’d loved as a kid, to watch as a child made newer and bigger discoveries—however I’ve found it to be rather, well, not.   I suppose I imagined that in coming back to a country so much more forward thinking in terms of women and children and families, I’d feel this great influx of solidarity and warm fuzzies and feelings over my choice to be a parent. Yes, just a stepmom, but still, it was a choice I could’ve said no to.  Could’ve happily gone my own way, not got married, moved on in my happily kid-free state. So many parentless kids in the world, so many progenitors-but-not-parents, and I chose to be a parent to a kid I didn’t even make!

Let me go back just a little bit. In Kazakhstan—on a side note, I’ve also often come to wonder if I’ll still be using that phrase 50 years from now, and if people will still be asking where that is and if it’s actually a country—all women are mothers, even if they don’t know it yet. I’m not making it up! I have friends, actual real friends, being reminded every day that having kids is the thing they should and will be doing.  Doctors. Loan agents. Bosses. Relatives. Having kids is just a thing women do over there. It’s not glorified; there is no cult of motherhood there. Women just get to a certain age, have a few kids, move on.

Thus my sense of being left out—cue flashbacks to middle school and being shunned by the popular kids because I didn’t have the right color backpack (or whatever it is I was being shunned for at any given moment [I was usually reading something so didn’t really stop to find out what it is I was being shunned about])—when I came back to the land of free choice and freedom to not reproduce and all those other things women have come to take for granted back here in ‘Merica.  Now that women are so free, all the time, to do and not do things, motherhood has become this cult, and only the great sacrifice will get you in.  No buying membership to this club, no, if you didn't push it out, they will be pushing you out, and don't let the door hit you.

Every once in a while someone who doesn’t know me sees me with the husband and stepkiddo and makes the mistake of referring to me as his mother, and I immediately find myself looking around, waiting to be found out, revealed for the fake mom I really am. For someone who already has social anxiety, it’s really a stressful situation. Doesn’t matter how many meals I cook, how many lifeskills I impart, how many tantrums I successfully ignore—because every good fake mother knows that giving in and giving the attention said tantrum-creator wants is just bad fake parenting—I’m still not a real mom. I don’t get to have the real mom feelings. Don’t get to have the real mom credit.

Well, yes of course he has a real mom (this is hypothetical me, answering the totally real and next question of hypothetical you), because of course you’re going to ask that the minute I start talking about wanting to take real mom credit for any feelings or doings I do while being the fake mom. And that’s what I’m saying. I was sold a lemon. Got talked into this great scheme called parenthood, only to find out I’m not qualified anyway. People keep asking when I’m going to have one of my own. I say I’ve already got one (usually at this point I’m walking away because I don’t want to get rejected from the mom club again), when I stick around to hear the answer it usually revolves around the strange notion that I need to have a baby, will want it even; raising a kid, apparently, is not the same thing as being a parent.

But at least I’ve had one question answered. I’d always tried to fathom why it is that the nuclear family is such an important things in good old OOSA, why everyone’s always scrambling to determine paternity, why women always have to have the kid, and don’t get to opt out through crazy things like abortions or birth control or whatever. Because anything but a birth parent isn’t really a parent here. Must be one of those laws they never talk about. You’re not a card-carrying parent unless you made it, then decided to take care of it. For all you librarians and sundry computer nerds, the Boolean operator you’re looking for is AND. No ORs need apply. Have we any NOTS? Don’t worry, just like the kids, you’ll be left out. Probably forgotten.

Oh yeah, you're probably wondering about the "Nerds" in the title. Nerds, being left out, literal definitions of things. You figure it out.

Questions and Answers

I've gotten plenty of questions about my trip since I got back.  My favorite, or course, has been, "You left the country?" But the most often-asked is not one you might expect.  No, it wasn't "You went where?", "How long were you gone?", or even "What was it like in... what was that place called again, Russia?" No, the question people ask me the most since I returned to the U.S. has been, "Glad to be back?"

Now, I am by no means a psychologist, but I know a loaded question when I hear one. You've gotta know that when a person asks a question like that, they expect a certain answer. And I'm happy to oblige, as it happens. Why yes, I certainly am glad to be back in a place where things make sense, where the traditional order of things I've known since birth is still in place, and where I can take advantage of all those, well, advantages I've been taught belong to me. Yes, I enjoy knowing my place in the world.

Not that everything and everyone didn't have a place in Astana. It was just an equally, shall we say allotted, place for all. Take for example any business larger than a basement-level mini-mart. They all have lockers. Not for the convenience of shoppers, especially in malls where you might have many bags by the time you're done, but for the convenience of the ever-present security. Everyone who walks into a business—for some reason in grocery stores more than any other place I've seen—is under suspicion, without exception. Ok, maybe grandmothers, but everyone is afraid of them, so I can see cause for dispensation. And everyone who walks into these places just knows and accepts it. People aren't to be trusted, no matter how they're dressed, or whether they follow the unwritten no-smiling-in-any-place-there's-a-chance-someone-might-see-you-do-it rule.

Now, I suppose I might have come under more suspicion in the "everyone's a criminal" initiative. It's not what you think though. Well, not directly. Security didn't profile me because I was a foreigner, but because, being a foreigner, I looked differently. Being a female who wore clothes that were actually comfortable, roomy even, naturally brought me under suspicion for intent to steal everything in the store. Wearing a sweatshirt into Gal-Mart, the upscale grocery store in one of Astana's many malls, is just an open invitation for a security guard to follow you around and stare at you the entire time you're in the store.

Also, I had a silly proclivity for carrying things—a messenger bag, a backpack, a purse that could hold more than a tube of lipstick—that immediately made me stand out as an obvious shoplifter. Women in this city, as I'm sure I've mentioned, don't carry things, often not even a purse. Probably it has to do with the fact that even a clutch is enough to upset the balance and tip those tiny women right off their four-inch heels. Luckily, there are men willing to display their masculinity at every opportunity and carry the purses of their women.

Now, I suppose it was a bit easier for security people to pick me out, being that I was recognizably not Kazakh. I could've passed for Russian, I suppose, if I'd dressed differently, but clothes were so expensive I just never bothered to try. So yes, I'm also be glad to be back in a place where I'm so recognizably not the person meant to be profiled. I can wear what I like, carry what I like, do incredibly suspicious things in places of terribly expensive commerce, and I don't even get a look. You can't be that, can you?

Fair Weather and Fireworks

You'll forgive the lack of a July 4th post, I hope, as I've only now come out from under the bed.  You'll say I'm not used to fireworks yet, just being back and right in the middle of fireworks season no less, and probably you'll be right, but mostly you'll be wrong.  Fireworks we had, in Astana, and quite spectacular they were.  The problem, and my reason for hiding, runs a bit deeper than that.

The weather has been fair these past few weeks, bordering on and running smack into foul. When it hasn't been sunny and warm, it's been not just rainy but downright tempestuous, with thunder, lightning, winds, hail and more. Soothsayers are calling for the apocalypse (again), and though I haven't expected to see ghastly men on horses and ghostly souls floating up to heaven with their worm-eaten corpses along for the ride, I have been waiting to turn on the news one of these days and find that California has finally fallen into the ocean, or that New York's been flooded for good (I don't watch the news, but if I did I'd decide not to just in order to avoid the risk).

And there are the days that the weather does cooperate.  And it's fireworks season. It wouldn't be so bad if it was only the professional fireworks shows that are sponsored by the local communities, businesses and whatnot.  But in America, of course, we're free to do anything we want up to and including buying illegal fireworks, lighting them off in our backyards, and unexpectedly taking out an eye, a hand, a tree, even our neighbor's garage. It's the unexpectedness of the fireworks that's had me hiding under the bed, and not just during the 4th. We're so patriotic around these parts that the fireworks started even before July did, with the last weekend in June leading up to the actual holiday and on into the next weekend. And then there are the leftover fireworks, the ones we frantically threw into a box and stashed in the garage because the police sirens that sounded far away at first suddenly seemed a hell of a lot closer and was that a flashing light I saw the next street over? So now it's the week after the 4th and we've all these fireworks just sitting around that'll never keep till next year so why not just light them up on a Wednesday night? It's been a gorgeous day, finally no rain, and I'm sure the neighbors won't mind.  And if anyone asks, it was just a drone.

So on the one day I finally come out from under my doorway (on an inner wall, far away from any gas lines, electrical outlets, and spontaneously combusting rhubarb chutney [no really, it's an actual news story, read it]) to enjoy the non-purgatorial weather the next thing I know a bottle rocket comes flying at my head from three houses over. And I thought I had enough trust issues with this weather! You see, it all started, well, about a year ago when I moved to Kazakhstan. The weather began as the typical springs I knew: blustery, rainy, sometimes cold, sometimes not. But when it started to get warm it just kept going and didn't seem as if it would ever stop. Fall came, or at least made an appearance before winter pushed it aside. I'm pretty sure winter was still there when I left, end of May. It sort of cohabitated with spring for a month or so, each vying to take control of the general weather pattern. And that was when my distrust of the weather began. And it hasn't gone away.

In those carefree days before I knew there could be any climate but Great Lakes-mediated temperate with a healthy dose of Western New York irascibility I went outside of a time without thinking about what I should wear. Except in the most dogged days of August the weather was rarely so warm that a minor wardrobe miscalculation could be a fatal mistake, and winter was, well, winter. You wore boots and a coat and made your mittens with you and knew as long as you didn't decide to take a nap in a snowdrift you were generally not going to become an icicle. Astana changed all that. Besides unbearably hot summers and murderously cold winters, the in-between-climes had one constantly scrambling for the right clothes, never knowing if the temperature in the morning would in any way resemble that of the same evening.

I began taking a sweater with me, even when the weather was predicted to be summery (summer, for home). I would sit in the sun waiting for the bus, sweating in my light jacket, and fear taking it off lest a late season squall would blow in and take half my fingers with it. I began not just to understand my local colleagues who always wore a sweater, even in summer, but to identify with them and to agree with them. I looked forward to returning to New York as an opportunity to enjoy the summer I missed last year. But I've found I can no longer trust the weather. Even a sunny morning has me looking for rain, and wondering whether I ought not bring a sweatshirt for a quick outing to the grocery store. No, I don't walk to the store anymore, or have to wait for the bus. But I'd hate to catch a chill between the car and the door.

So I think for now I'll just stay in my handy doorway, and wait out the worst of it. I've got a cardigan. Hopefully it doesn't flood. 

My Civic Duty

Well, it's officially over.  I can stop running.  Most people who skip the country do so for financial reasons.  Unfortunately, mine were not so lucrative.  Nor did I leave in order to escape from a dismal climate to a more tropical abode.  Not even to get away from a clingy family friend who just can never take a hint in social situations.  I tried not to bring it up, whenever possible.  A stigma like that can only lead to awkward conversations, averted gazes, whispers.  But it's over now.  I suppose I can talk about it.

For all of my adult life I'd avoided that most tedious of necessary duties, that most thankless of thankless appointments, that longest of remedial sitting activities, by which I mean Jury Duty.  Yes, somehow for eleven blissful years I had moved often enough among the counties of New York State that I never got pinned down to serve in a municipal or country court trial.

And then my summons came.  Twas almost a year ago now but I can still remember, with the haziness of something fairly uninteresting and not really worth remembering, the day my mother said to me over Skype that my jury summons had arrived.  Her exact words were (not really), "you'd better email them that you're out of the country or you're going to get arrested!"  (She likes to exaggerate [I'm nothing like her]).  At the time I was happy, even optimistic at the fact that I'd get at least a year's reprieve (surely it would take them a while before they realized I was back in the U.S. again).  All I needed to do was email a copy of my work visa to the court, and I was off scot free.

Or so I thought.

In a move I did not see coming at all, the court sent me a jury summons two weeks before I even left Astana!  And in even worse news, it was for a week when I'd already planned to be out of town for an author signing (you remember those; no? well, there are these people who write what are referred to as novels, and then these people write a fair number of novels and then readers [the ones who read the novels] like them, and the novel-writers [novelists, if you will] become famous and then when they publish a new book they go all over the country and read from their book, and talk about their book, and you can buy their book and they will sign their book.  delightful, truly), which was to last from Thursday of my jury week until the weekend.  Wonderful.

Despite what I'd heard about jury duty being tedious and taxing and all that, it turned out actually to be quite tedious and taxing and, well, just plain annoying.  For starters, it was repetitive.  Every day for a week?  Just wonderful.  Taxing, as well.  All those cell phone minutes spent on local calls!  And the way that it was run, why, you'd get the impression they had no idea how it was going to turn out from one day to another.  No wonder people with good, steady, well-paying jobs dread this sort of thing.  The time commitment is just dreadful.  All the time, I was watching the clock.  One week began to feel longer than the entire year I'd just spent larking off.  It really was as bad as everyone said.

And they just heaped one indignity on top of another.  It wasn't just the complete disregard for people's valuable time.  They also treated everyone like just a number, referring only to designated juror numbers for all announcements, as though we're no more different than cattle.  Cattle!  Every day I called into the number listed on my jury summons, and was subjected to the same pre-recorded voice, spewing out orders as though we were all just products on an assembly line that needed to be added in the correct order.  "These numbers go here.  These numbers be prepared to go here on no notice at all.  These numbers call tomorrow."  I really wanted to quit, after the second day.  It was interfering with my family life, causing stress around the interruption of my personal time, and had the possibility of derailing a trip that had already been paid for.  What a nightmare.  It really is a wonder that anyone calls in the second day, though I'd be willing to bet call completion goes down quite a bit after the first.

But I didn't give up.  I made the call every day until the announcement was that we were all dismissed.  I made a quick cheer (I couldn't help myself), and decided since I'd already gone ahead and gone on my trip I might as well enjoy it.  I feel, to this day, still a bit exploited by the whole experience, and may yet write a strongly-worded letter about making jury duty a more humane process.  I just may.  But for now, I will put my trepidations away, until the next time I have to do my civic duty.

Land of the Free

Even after nearly a month since I got back to the old ancestral abode, it's nice to know my consciousness that any minute could be my last, if not my heart, is still in Kazakhstan.  Culture shock is a funny thing, not least reverse culture shock.  From the realization that the light doesn't actually have to say walk for me not to get killed while crossing the road—I literally had to have my husband teach me how to cross the street again—to the sudden giddy knowledge that in this country you can literally pay someone to do just about anything.  And not only will they do it, but they'll be pleasant and happy and actually act like they want to do it.  Whether or not they actually do is, of course, irrelevant.

The best part about being back though?  The freedom.  You can do anything here! Be anything.  Say anything.  Only in America can you not only pay anyone to do just about anything, but you can have a job or not have a job.  You can choose to blame yourself for lack or surplus of said job, or blame someone else.  You can expect to go out and find a job, or expect someone else to find you a job.  Only in America, do citizens have the freedom to go jobless.  Entire families have the freedom to go hungry, live out of cars, and ask other people for the money to get by.  It's that easy!

The post-Communist world, for all its progress, certainly can't boast that.  In Kazakhstan, you're still forced to feed your family, even if you can't get a job.  The government will literally use its own money to feed you.  And if you're extra oppressed, the government might even go out of its way to get you a job.  True, you can still choose to have a ridiculous number of kids, but be aware that if you get pregnant, the government will force you to let it pay for your doctor visits up to and after the baby is born.  

Surely, it can't be all that bad, you ask?  Well, no, not entirely.  You still have the freedom to smoke all the cheap cigarettes (and they are cheap, thanks to lack of taxes and, I'm gonna assume, also regulations) you want and no one says a word.  Exercise is also relatively frowned upon, unless you're an Olympic athlete, so you shouldn't feel an inordinate amount of pressure to be fit.  But be aware, no matter how long you live, unless you die before you retire from your government-provided job, you will be forced to live off the government mandated pension fund that was put away for your future benefit.  So don't get too damn cocky.

Ah, to breathe the free air again. 

Mountains to Climb

Or, stepping out of the steppe (and into a wholly unfamiliar existence)

The other day, less than a week after my exciting 24-hour voyage back to good old Fairport, I did something totally new and, to be honest quite terrifying for me.  I attended a 5-year-old's birthday party with my husband and his son.  Apparently, this is a thing among the kids these days.  But rather than 10 screaming kindergartners running around some poor parent's backyard, with bursts of games, cake, and gift-opening mixed in, this particular instrument of parental torture was hosted at a place called Bounce-It-Out, which, as the name implies, is a warehouse full of various bounce houses and other climbing/jumping paraphernalia.  Waterboarding has nothing on the shrill ferocity of 15 kids who suddenly realize they're allowed to run around indoors.

But of course before we could actually attend said party, we first had to go buy a gift, which involved soliciting the dubious advice of our own little attendee.  Upon hearing of the fateful party and gift, I couldn't help but think of the musings of McSweeney's own Dr. Amy Fusselman on the subject of child gift-giving in her column, Birthday Parties Are Different Now.  Generosity, thy name is not kindergartner.  The boy was more concerned that his friend not receive something he himself did not already own, or that didn't fit some other arbitrary criteria he made up on the spot ("No, I don't want Christian to have a monster truck").  There is nothing children don't already have that they really want.  Or that doesn't cost more than what their parents have already spent on the party.

And of course, while the children run around and play games as though they've known each other forever (which, in their conception of time, they have) the parents who actually decided to stick around for the party mill about, each in their own little bubble of free space, rarely crossing orbits or making eye contact.  If they're anything like me—which is unlikely—they're all wondering what is going to go so wrong in the next 10-15 years that will turn these little social, semi-sociopathic, butterflies into the constrained social unicorns we all have become, and if it's really worth it.  Somehow I doubt that's what everyone else was actually thinking though.  As far as I can tell, alcohol was the popular subject parents broached when they did manage to utter a social word or two to each other.  Don't get me wrong, I agree wholeheartedly with them, but is a three-story-high, 170,000 square foot room full of air-inflated dirigibles really the venue for that kind of talk?

Possibly the biggest hit among party-goers was what they called an "indoor playground," but which for some reason reminded me of Rambo 4.  Maybe it was the dark, jungle-esque atmosphere of the bottom levels, and all the mesh netting everywhere.  And the screaming.  At least there were no flame throwers.  The other big attraction was the giant inflatable slide.  Over and over kids went up then down, up then down, up then down.  But ask them to take their clean laundry upstairs to their bedroom and suddenly they have lead feet.

I also got back just in time to catch the tail end of the school year.  Having grown up living out the "the country," I never got to experience that kind of school's out feeling you see on movies and tv shows where children, dismissed from class,  pack up their stuff and proceed to have all kinds of adventures walking home from school every day.  Where I come from, if you missed the bus, then you'd better home you run into someone going your way who has a car, because mom's working til 6 and otherwise you get to hang out in the school lobby til she comes to get you.  Here, the young one takes the bus in the morning but, living 1/4 mile from the school we have have the option of walking him in if we want, and we walk up to get him after school (except in the case of the kind of rainstorms that wash small animals down the streets).  And I say up because the school somehow manages to be built upon the only hill in the entire village, and yet still only 1/4 mile away.  I feel like an astronaut just returned to earth every time I try to climb that hill and realize that my steppe-atrophied legs an barely get me there.

I guess I've got a long way to go before I feel comfortable doing this kind of thing.  How far to Astana?

My Final Tour

Picture Merlin, from Disney's animated The Sword in the Stone, just back from Bermuda, coming to a screeching full stop, still in his Bermuda shorts and sunglasses, surfboard in hand, right in front of a bemused child-Arthur.  That is me.  And you are child-Arthur.  You'll forgive me, of course, for disappearing this past month, but I, too, was off on a whim.

I've been in serious training, you see, for something I'd been wanting to do for a long time, and finally, my moment arrived.  Just what was this whimsical and serious adventure?  I was training to participate in the national sport of Kazakhstan, which is of course competitive bus surfing.  How do I know this?  Just look around; it's happening everywhere, everyday (as with most sports, it gets better promotion and funding in the cities).  Like American youths watching and waiting in the wings, and then bingeing beneath their blankets at night in hopes of someday becoming the competitive eating stars they idolize, so the youth of Kazakhstan hone their skills on city streets  all over the country.

So I knew, with one month left before I leave this great country, possibly forever, that I had to get in on the Olympic-sized action.  I set off on a whirlwind tour, seeking out every opportunity I could find, every secret trick and technique, every great guru to emulate.  And then I returned to Astana, capital city and home of the great practitioners of the sport, to train.  It was intense.  It was grueling.  But it was worth it.

Competitive bus surfing is, as it sounds, a sport that takes place on public buses.  It is not, as you might be tempted to assume, performed on top of buses, but in the buses themselves, in the public standing areas, and it measures not just one's physical prowess and balancing skills, but also artistic interpretation and performance.  It combines the physical beauty of figure skating or gymnastics with the real proximity of danger you see in auto racing or American football.  A tumble in competitive bus surfing can cost  you more than style points; it could put you out of the action for months.

Bus conductors are generally recognized as the best at the sport, being required to stand on and navigate often crowded buses without the benefit of a handhold, all while counting change for fares.  These people sometimes perform their job sometimes with a kilo or more of change in pockets and purses on their persons, and you rarely see one miss a beat.  Conductors, being professional athletes are of course barred from competing on the national circuit in keeping with the old Olympic spirit.  Making the jump from paid athlete to amateur national sports icon (if you make it big) is tough, and few can succeed in this cut-throat sport.  Most aren't bitter about it, and can be great role models for training, but it's best to be circumspect if you decide to emulate a conductor's style.

What follows is the place I would show you pictures of different surfing styles as exemplified by the conductors who practice them.  But they wouldn't let me.  Turns out they really can throw you off of public buses.  Instead I will do my best to describe some of them to you.

1. In what is known as the gorilla technique, competitors swing from bar to bar, rarely letting their feet touch the floor.  This technique is more prominent among males, whose longer arms and fingers allow them to reach these bars, which are often out of reach for shorter bus riders.  This method is somewhat less prevalent among competitive bus surfers because, requiring much less balancing upon two feet, there are far fewer opportunities to score points.  When done right, however, this method can be a slam dunk when combined with the technique of the one-handed multi-task.
2. The SoCal boy, a personal favorite of mine, is perhaps most reminiscent of the sport's namesake—actual surfing—and relies on the technique of leaning into the turn.  Buses in Kazakhstan, unlike their more docile counterparts in European countries like the United Kingdom, rarely slow down for turns, and approach bus stops often at alarming rates of speed.  Competitors using this technique must master the concurrent skill of foresight, as one lean in the wrong direction at the wrong time can doom a competitor.  Extra points can be gained for the longest lean, and the bus surfing version of the slalom, completed during long runs in which buses weave in and out of traffic.
3. The moving target relies on constant movement by the competitor, usually in a forwards-backwards orientation to the direction of travel.  This method is considered by some to be the laziest, as mistakes can be covered in many cases simply by keeping your feet moving and not running into anyone.  The jackpot of this move is the dismount, though—the ability to arrive at the door at the exact moment the bus stops without a stumble and can often prove a game changer.

There are many breeds of municipal bus in each city, and none more diverse than in Astana, the new-old capital and ever-expanding dream city.  There are the cadillac lines, whose stateliness is only outdone by the plushness of the almost-new, most-new seats of all the buses (none of them were ever new, it's speculated).  There are the closer-to-microbus lines whose pluckiness and utter lack of shock absorbers make great training grounds, but can also prove hazardous to the the uninitiated.  And then there are the self-assured veteran lines, who will always be guaranteed usefulness and patronage, who go just fast enough to stay on schedule, and feel confident in their ability to get away with the occasional erratic move without too much grumbling by riders.  Whatever the variation, you will see the noble competitors practicing their moves, if you only know what to look for.

There is only one segment of society who scoffs at this great sport, but we also know better than to say anything because if we do it will mean an immediate end to birthday cards filled with money and all the ice cream we want.  I speak, of course, of the babushkis, the grandmothers of Kazakhstan.  These ladies are both wonderful and terrible, and also completely assured of their place in the nation's favorite sport.  Having the natural balancing ability of women, and the toughness only life under Stalin and a subsequent regime change can provide, these grandmothers of the nation are hands-down champions in the sport of bus surfing.  They also know this all too well, and having nothing to prove instead force the younger generation to give up their seats at will and just generally terrorize everyone.  And we love them for it.

Astana is for Lovers

Romeo had his poetry and pointy sword.  That guy from Hi Fidelity had his ridiculously oversized radio.  The prince had Rapunzel's long hair to climb up.  Here in Astana, they do things a little differently.  I've been living in this apartment building for almost nine months (for the amazing story of how I ended up here, see A Room of One's Own, parts 1, 2, and 3), so this is a behavior I've been studying for a while.  At first I was quite baffled by all the commotion, but I believe I've figured it out.

In Astana, as they say, men are men, and women are women.  And there's nothing women like more than being wooed from their 8-story windows on a brisk, -20-degree evening.  From the parking lot.  I say from the parking lot, but really once the sun goes down any reasonably horizontal space becomes fair game as parking in this city.  But the parking is essential to this form of courtship.  Like the brightly colored birds in the Amazon forests who dance around and build elaborate summer homes for their prospective brides, the men here in Astana use their overly elaborate car alarms to attract the attention of their lady-loves.

After all, who has not experienced strong, nay overwhelming, feelings when wakened from a deep sleep by the strident beeps, whoops, sirens, and even computer-generated verbal warnings of a car alarm.  I have to say, I feel especially strongly about the ones that repeat, endlessly, until someone physically comes to the car to turn them off.  The amorous men of this district can't help but attract some attention with these ingenious little devices.  And I have to say, the women in this apartment complex are rather spoiled for choice.  Come evening-time the lot is full of cars, to the point that no more can even drive through, much less actually park.  On any given night you can hear the amorous warbling of not less than five lovers a-wooing and a-waiting.  I can only guess that this complex houses some of the most beautiful women in Astana.

Cars in Astana, like in most cities, are a bit of a status symbol.  And the price of gasoline is exorbitantly low, so cars can reach enormous proportions here.  The bigger the status, the bigger the symbol, so to speak.  And these valuable pieces of pretension are always kept running, warmed up, one would imagine, to provide an inviting egress for the newly-wooed.  Also, as I understand, an already-running car provides a much faster getaway for that playful pastime they refer to here as bride-napping.  Personally I prefer the local term—alyp qashu—so quaint, so un-indicative of its actual meaning in English.  But the women know what they're getting into, I suppose.  One would imagine it's quite easy to judge a man's worth by the size of the car he drives.

And now that the weather is getting warmer, I can only imagine the courting will increase in intensity.  The days are much longer, so the men have more time for driving around and deciding on their targets come nightfall.  Not to mention it's much easier to stand outside and wait for your call to have its desired effect when the temperature is above freezing.  And bride-nappings are much more likely to succeed when one doesn't have to contend with completely iced-over roads and giant piles of snow preventing escape from already impossible-to-escape parking lots.

Nomads Exist!

This morning I decided to undertake a long-overdue task that I'd been avoiding all winter, namely because it was cold outside.  No, cold is an understatement.  It was hellishly cold.  That task was walking across one of the many bridges that criss-cross Astana.  Any tourist worth her salt knows that one's travels are not complete if no bridges have been traversed.  This brings me to the second condition that prevented me from bridge-walking for so long—finding the river.  Really, it's a bit of a charity to call the sluggish ditch meandering through the city a river (I think the reason this city even has a river is so that we can refer to it's two halves by the prosaic "right bank" and "left bank").  As in, "Oh, you live on the right bank?  That's so hipster.  I bet you were living there before the Soviets built Tselinograd, weren't you?"

I'm not ever sure the river is actually visible from the top of Bayterek, which, by the by, is by far not the highest point in the city, but if anything is to be espied from a high place, then it seems only fitting that all height-induced discoveries in this city should be made from the giant symbolic bird's nest.  Nevertheless, we did eventually find the river, and I would say that, while not the most spectacular bridge in the city, this one did have some interesting features.  It was near to the president's palace—ahem, residence— also had a lovely view of the giant glass pyramid that, as far as I can gather, was placed by aliens that the president summoned with his psychic powers.  Oh,  you haven't heard of the president's psychic powers?  I think it's a level-up you earn when you reach 15 years of being in power without any significant uprisings.

I now have reason to be happy that I waited so long to check this box on my Kazakhstan Tourist Travel Card (one more box and I get a free bottle of Kumis!), though, after what we saw on our walk.  I now have irrefutable proof that nomads exist.  Once thought only the stuff of legend, they yet walk (or rather, ride) among us.

At least he was riding against traffic.

It's difficult to say what, exactly, brought him out of the steppe and into the vast metropolis, but he obviously had something important to get to.  I, for one, wouldn't leave the pedestrian area and get anywhere near the driving lanes for any amount of kumis, shashlik, or manti.  But I suppose I take an outsider's view of things.

This brings me to an interesting point of Kazakh culture, though.  At one point while crossing the bridge, we encountered some military personnel, and I thought that perhaps they would stop this solitary nomad, tell him that horses didn't belong out on suspension bridges, especially anywhere near automobiles—how drivers in this city avoid fiery deaths everyday still eludes me—but they simply watched him pass.  Then I remembered that a horse can go nearly anywhere in Kazakhstan.  Why, once I even heard of a man on a horse walking right up to the presidential pal.. , erm, residence, and setting up camp in the presidential dining room.  I think the horse actually slept on the table.

In another account, a Kazakh man decided he wanted to go to the premier of The Dark Knight Rises, and didn't want to leave his horse out in the parking lot (I think it was asthmatic, and at that time of night the idling taxis raise quite a cloud of exhaust), so he took his horse into the theater with him.  There was a bit of a debacle when the horse's tail got caught in the escalator (they're still working out the lawsuit on that one), but no one seemed to mind when the horse—almost systematically—went around and sneezed into everyone's popcorn.  I suppose, given the choice, it's still better than having the teenager working behind the counter sneeze into it.

Yes, nomads exist, and they walk among us.