bubble gum

I taught Sima how to blow bubbles with bubble gum. He was so gleeful with his first one, and then right away decided he wanted to blow a bigger one. Are we never satisfied?

Thanksgiving was the usual blur of people and food, different topics spiraling out of control, music in excess, bad poetry with better people. I was told to shut up, and listened as the entire American Black population of the US be called "those fuckers". Watched tiny girls made into superstars while their mothers glowed close by.

Spent a day doing nothing over coffee with Max M. and had margaritas at Sunset grill&tap with Yulka to celebrate my new job, followed by tea and Settlers of Catan, the sleepy settler loosing but I was sober for the ride home and how I wonder about those two girls who died this year at Bard in the hit-and-run. Faces of the past will meld into faces of the future, I want to find an apartment and hope I'll like my new job and arrange my life so that I read and sing and dance and paint and all those other things I consider to be living.
I make it beckon, and then I come.

Thanksgivingukkah

I came home to a house full of family and friends and started frying latkes. I was sick but relived to be home. Eventually I told my body to shut up by taking some pseudoephed and proceeded to go to the annual Thanksgiving celebration in Belmont: the night tapered off with Eloosha on keyboard and singing. I stayed up until 5 am and left the next morning by train, where Yosef met me and walked me home in my last few hours before getting picked up by a fellow Bardian to go back again to Bardland.
On Thursday we had a one-day-late Hannukah-end party. I talked to people I don't know there, and later walked happily home, chipping the solidified wax drips off my chanukiah as I went.

Thanksgiving 2012

I have a lot of writing backlogged, so I guess I’ll go with chronology.

Jack drove me and a boy from Nepal I had never met before home for Thanksgiving on Tuesday night. The boy thought language was the root of all social ills (as in; the origin of language, the fact that language exists). The next day Mama and I spent cooking. The feast day was spent with Inka&co. We played mafia before dessert.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about. When my parents came to the US, they didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving much (if at all).  The reason Thanksgiving was popularized in the U.S. has very little to do with any origin story everyone is told in school. Rather the point was to have an origin story to bring people together; people from all over the world. It works. 

Like any other year, I went over to Eloosha’s house. There was the Evening of Creativity (творческий вечер), that went until one or two in the morning. After that, ten of us (the university students, that’s what they call our generation) went to hang out with some other people our age in another house. We sang.

It’s interesting, from an anthropological perspective, how we act. Everyone sings, that’s true across all ages. But the students, when together, cease to have the concept of personal space. This isn’t just my friends. It’s other people who grew up in the USA but have Russian roots. I have no way of explaining this; it’s not a Russian thing or an American thing, and it happens very quickly.  

We played laser tag. It was my first time, and I think part of what made it wonderful was that everyone went, ages ten to fifty, more or less. At some point, I asked the generation below us what they though of us. Everyone is very opinionated, but I'm not sure the adults realized that they are not the only ones, and decided not to fall into that trap. But Anya and Etya said that they think we are just really cool, so score.
Before I left, Myron and I realized that Kirill didn’t know what coke and mentos could do together, and decided to right this wrong.
 

Thanksgiving 2011

Frank Sinatra by Cake is stuck in my head courtesy of the drive back (Eames driving, Marty, Page and Kalena, same as on the way there. too many people for a two door car with two people who are claustrophobic but it was okay)

http://blackberry-sunset.tumblr.com/post/13391067033

because Yulka and I were in the same place and it was definitely not Bard either.

I came home and soon after Pasha and Sanya arrived then dinner and hugging and all that. It was good to see everyone. Pasha and I were permitted to go to Eloosha's house, under the condition that we return by 2am.

For thanksgiving we went to dinner at a friends house (yet another professor, yet again math, and yes at MIT.) It was good to see a friend that I haven't really seen in a while, though it was too chaotic to talk fully.

and then the next day I went with Mama and Sanya and my brothers to Walden pond. Then to Eloosha's house. Well, first a concert, and then the house and then a sleepover in the basement and going to bed at 5 am.

Eloosha's friend from Yale came too (Daniel), because he lives far far away and after Eloosha said that for thanksgiving about 80 Russian Jews descend on his house, Daniel decided he has to see it. But apparently despite the fact that the teens think they spend most of the time speaking in English, we don't. I didn't even realize it until Daniel responded to "Я скоро вернусь" with a "and was I supposed to understand that?" Also we play way more music than normal thanksgiving (and probably eat way less turkey.)

In the evening people split-a few went to a party, more went to a play at Central, I stayed and babysat Sima. We played pingpong. We played foozball. Kostya Vanya Pasha and I played set while Sima watched (though Sima did find a set himself too.) 

And I spent the last night (last night) at home again.and now I'm back. 

and that is a summery of this weekend. I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving!

Sweet Sounds, Tooth and Brothers

I went to a concert at 3-5 by the Bard Conservatory Orchestra.
They played Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, Martinu's Oboe Concerto and Gershwin's Catfish Row.
The beginning of Firebird literally gave me goosebumps.
The concert was fantastic, especially the first two pieces.
Andres was one of the people who helped with composition.
I'm not sure what that means, actually.
There was also a very minimal amount of snow falling as we left the concert. Not enough to think about sledding, but still, it has hit 0°'s.
(upside-down cranberry muffins from a couple days ago, guess who made them (thank you Margaret and Cat :))
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Thanksgiving was very short. I didn't see as much as I would have liked to of my family or my friends. I arrived at 8, ate, and then went to bed.
First day back I went on the roof (we are getting a new one, the old one was leaking), walked in the forest by my house. In the evening I went to Eloosha's for the beginning of the annual Thanksgiving craziness. Went to bed around 3:30 am, but I fell asleep earlier.
Last year I stayed up until 8:30 am.
Making breakfast in the morning is fun. Eloosha fried queso blanco and toasted massive amounts of bagels.
We went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I had seen the taxidermy before, but had never looked at the glass flower exhibit. The entire museum was packed.
Dried bats are strange. There was one fruit bat with little tubes coming out of its nose. It was smiling. Mouth full of teeth. There were quite a few different kinds, and they made me think of strange faeries. Transparent wings and tiny furry faces, crucified but still staring intently, hung by the sloths and ant-eaters, frozen above the hedgehogs. Not scary, just strange.
Some of us walked around Harvard later. Went to Cafe Pamplona, drank strange latte's and talked about literature that is released postmortem, admired the pink streaked sky, enjoyed each others company.
At night we celebrated Yulka's dad's birthday, serenading him with parodies of songs we have heard a million times.
Bed: 4:30am.
We played volleyball/football (em..soccer) from noon until it started to get a little darker, and Sasha made a black and white silent film of people going down a hill in sleeping bags, moving like worms down the slope, inching over each other and struggling to move without limbs. 'Twas funny :)

It was strange to be back. I forgot that Eloosha has the ability to judge my mood/tiredness level based on how speed/elaborateness of my speech.
But being back was also not as... glory-filled as I imagined. I kept having thoughts of aging, imagining all of us middle-aged. And I felt that I was missing something, probably time. I want to see everybody again in a proper time span.

I got a letter from Osya a couple days ago, which made my day :)
It had a lot of little drawings (one doodle from Sima), a paper airplane, and an origami cup, which contained little bits of paper with descriptor words on it, like "awesome" and "artist".
can you see why I miss them?