A Few Moments in the Life of a Temporary Muscovite

Last Tuesday at this time, I was standing in a centuries old church watching old babushkas cross themselves while a priest walked back and forth across the floor. He swung an incense ball to the melodic chanting of robed men in a far corner.


Now, I'm in the new Millhopper library (which is quite nice by the way). I'm trying to get back on my own schedule, for what might be the last time in awhile I have a schedule that’s purely my own.

After our heartache in November, we left for this trip with a cautious hope in our hearts, a hope that's now grown so big I barely have enough room for it in my chest. Here are a few of my favorite moments from the last week...


Sunday--Somewhere over the Atlantic, I discover the woman in the seat next to me was adopted at the age of eight months (the same age as the little boy we're going to see).


Tuesday--We go to the ministry of education to get our referral. We park in front of a cell phone kiosk and make our way down the street. As we walk, Natasha, our translator, turns to me and says, "We have a few minutes before our appointment. Would you like to go across the street and see the church where Peter the Great was Baptized?" The church looks like a big colorful wedding cake with piped white icing and golden domes perched on top. Tsars and tsarinas were married inside. I smile thinking that a centuries old historical landmark is sandwiched between a cell phone kiosk and a Kwik-E-Mart.



Wednesday--Andre is asleep in my arms. He's tightly clutching the little elephant blanket we brought. His little fingers are wrapped into the folds and the elephant's ear is in his mouth. I brought the blanket so we could bring something back for Kiddo to get the baby's scent. But when the caretaker comes to take him back to his room, I can't bear to take the little elephant away. The caretaker smiles at me and keeps repeating, "Zaftra, Zaftra". When she leaves I look it up and learn that it means, tomorrow.



Thursday--Danny and I are watching an episode of Friends in the back of Pasha's car. The traffic is worse than usual today and Pasha has cleverly wedged a portable DVD player in between the two front seats so that we can watch Joey and Chandler banter about their overly large entertainment unit. Though he can't see the screen, Pasha laughs at all the funny parts.


Friday--I'm topless. A strange man is feeling my boobs. It's the third time in an hour I've had to remove my shirt for a doctor. It's starting to feel a bit like Mardi Gras. First there was the pulmonologist, then the dermatologist. I didn't have to take my shirt off for the psychiatrist, just give him travel tips about visiting Florida. Now there is an oncologist looking at my nipples and calling questions over his shoulder so Natasha can translate from behind the screen.


Saturday--Our last day with Andre. His head is tucked in the crook of Danny's arm, he reaches a hand up to Danny's face and babbles a string of syllables. When they come to take him away he smiles at us. I do not cry, because I know we'll be back in the blink of an eye.

I've Got Big Problems

I was working at Starbucks today. Naturally, after sucking down a large latte in ten minutes, I had to use the bathroom.

I can't believe I'm about to type this but, if you read this blog you may be familiar with the Starbucks bathroom since I've written about it before. (Really, with everything going on in my life you'd think there'd be more to write about than the Starbuck's bathroom, but I guess not.)

Anyway, it's a single bathroom and to get into it you have to go up to the bar and get a key. So I did, as I have on many other days.

Except today when I went in the bathroom it was, well, kind of apocalyptic. The toilet was stuffed with toilet paper, poo and all manner of bloody horror. So I pivoted on my heel and walked right back out. But here's the kicker. I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING TO ANYONE. I put the key back on the bar and walked back to my seat. I have no idea why. Maybe I didn't want them to think it was me. Maybe I was still in shock. Maybe I wanted someone else to bear the bad news to those nice boys who have to clean it up. Who knows.

The worst part is, a few minutes later another woman went in there and, being the upstanding and responsible citizen that she is, she promptly alerted the staff. So I sat in my chair and realized now they DEFINATELY think I was the one responsible for all that horror.

It's a really big problem right? I know, my problems aren't as big as whoever had to clean that horror show. That person deserves an extra day off. But I'm not sure I can ever show my face in there again. Which cements my guilt even further (non-guilty people don't run).

Maybe I'll write a letter:

Dear Baristas of Downtown Starbucks,

A) It wasn't me. (I swear!) I have a strict "no pooping in public" rule. And even if it had been me, I would have taken up residence in that bathroom forever rather than have one of you clean it.

B) I'm heartily sorry I'm a freak and left that nastiness for another innocent pair of eyes to discover.

Sincerely,

Steph (aka "grande non-fat latte with two Splendas")

At any rate, any hope of getting work done was shot, so I started gathering my things up to go.

As I packed up, a homeless man came up to me and said, "People watching is my favorite hobby, and you. . .are a very special person."

Special. Yes. That's the word to describe me.

The Decade According to Steph

So we're already a month and change into 2010 and I'm still trying to figure out what will culturally standout about the last decade. Some people are saying the last decade isn't over yet. I think those people need to form a math club for purists and just keep to themselves.

Event wise a lot happened: 9/11, devasating hurricanes, the first black president. But culturally? What will be our bellbottoms? Our Beatles? Our neon leg warmers and Madonnas? I still haven't quite figured out what we took out of the nineties. People keep saying grunge, but I think it's just because they don't know either. Kurt Cobain just cannot be the cultural lynchpin of an entire decade.

So in the absence of any insight on what was culturally important to the world in the last decade, I'm going to focus on a more important analysis. The decade according to Steph. Here are some random moments from my last ten years.

2000: 12:02 am, January 1st, Madrid. I am nearly crushed in a crowd of rowdy Spaniards shouting Ole! My feet leave the ground momentarily. My life passses before my eyes, and inexplicably, it's in Spanish, so I don't understand any of it.

2001: My boss calls me in the morning before I go in to work, asks if I've seen the news. I turn on the TV to silent journalists and two crumbling towers in New York. I start to cry uncontrollably.

2002: Danny reminds me to put on my "poker face" before we go look at houses, so we'll be able to negotiate a better price. It turns out I don't exactly have a poker face. The third house we walk into I gush, "Oh my god I love it!" The following month we're living in it.

2003: It is four days before my wedding and my mother-in-law has come up to visit. I've left my to-do list on the kitchen table. She takes one look at it and says, "If I had a to-do list that long I'd shoot myself."

2004: I am in a hospital room. Every surface is covered in paper and plastic. A nurse in gloves and a surgical mask takes a pill out of a lead box. The pill will fill me with a radioactive substance that will eat my cancer away. She watches me swallow it. Three days later she measures me with a Geiger counter and tells me I can go home.

2005: I'm sitting on freezing concrete with eight other women, blocking the entrance to the FDA headquarters. Officers from the Deparment of Homeland Security are standing behind us. Reporters in front of us. I've worn my favorite low-rise jeans. As the officers get ready to drag me to the armored truck, I can't stop wondering if my butt crack is showing.

2006: It is the sixth month in a row I think I am pregnant and the sixth month in a row I am not. I have memorized all the signs and symptoms of early pregancy, and I have all of them, every month. I take the little plastic EPT test and smash it under the heel of my shoe like the irritating vermin that it is.

2007: Danny and I are sitting on a sidewalk in Chelsea, sharing a burrito. We're waiting with a hundred other people to get into a tiny improv theater underneath Gristede's grocery store. When we get inside we see that the surprise special guests are Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers. We decide that having dinner on a surface that was likely peed on recently--was totally worth it.

2008: Alisa and I are in an apartment decorated by old superman sheets and cartoon character lunchboxes. We've responded to an ad that said, "Puppet Band needs members: Will train." We sit on a couch watching two men introduce us to various alien puppets. An IV bag filled with red liquid hangs on the wall behind us.

2009: I'm eating quesadillas in a Moscow restaurant, sitting underneath a large wagon wheel. The only words the server and I have in common are, "hello" and "thank you." My heart is broken into a thousand tiny pieces that sit uncomfortably in my chest. I am numb with loss, but I look up on the wall and see a framed picture of Donald Duck, and it makes me laugh.

All in all, it's been a good decade. Sure, I've had some radiation, some heartache, and been sliced open two or three times, but all that pales in comparison to the amount of living, loving and laughing I did in the past ten years.

Some predictions for the next decade. At some point I will:
-Have poop on my hands and not care
-Paint a room red
-Buy a strobe light
-love someone so much I can't see straight
-meet a C-list celebrity
-eat a kiwi
-star in an infomercial

Laming out

I've been ignoring you all. Sorry. All my creative energies are sinking into fashioning a new ending to my book, a new facisination with watercolors and trying to think of things to do that will distract me from wondering every second of every day when we'll be going back to Moscow.



So I'm laming out, and posting one of those MEME surveys I do on Facebook when I'm searching for anything to do other than write dialouge. (Thanks Whitney)



Enjoy:



Things come in threes!
Here's what you're supposed to do...and please do not spoil the fun. Copy, paste in your notes, delete my answers and type in your answers. Then tag a few good friends! The theory is that you will learn a lot of little known things about each other.


(Steph's comment: Over use of exclamation points aside, I have to wonder about the author of this survey. Firstly, I get inappropriately annoyed when people instruct me not to 'spoil the fun.' I highly doubt my failure to pass on this survey would greatly disappoint masses of more fun-loving people. Secondly, I'm pretty sure most people understand the "theory" of this excersize, but I suppose it was nice of them to lay it out for the slow folks in the back.)




Three Names I go by
1. Stephanie
2. Oxcart
3. Bob "The Buttcrack" Jones



Three Jobs I have had in my life
1. Hotel Maid
2. Giant Penguin
3. Crazy Bitch



Three Places I have lived
1. Crete, Illinois (1987-1995)
2. Avignon, France (Summer 1999)
3. Sister Lucille's Psychiatric Institute for the Deeply Disturbed (2005-Present)



Three TV Shows that I watch
1. Dexter
2. Mad Men
3. Local Access channel. (This channel has very important information. For instance, a few years ago I saw an ad put out by Alachua County Animal Control looking for the two women who brought in an injured bat they'd nursed back to health. Turned out the bat had rabies. Since then I'm wary of strange women with foam on their face.)



Three Places I have been
1. Louis the XIVth's bedroom
2. The final resting place of President McKinley
3. A Pornographic video store in France (I didn't buy anything. There was a lot of horse porn though if you're into that. In French, but that might not make a difference because they're horses.)



Three People/Sites that e-mail me regularly
1. Adoptive families magazine
2. My mom
3. Discount Witchcraft Supplies



Three of my favorite Foods
1. Anything with cheese and tomato sauce
2. Anything chocolate
3. Soylent Green


Three things I am Looking Forward to
1. Going back to Russia
2. The 3D Piranha movie I saw a trailer for last night. Spring Break. Blood Thirsty Fish. Concernced Scientists. It's got something for the whole family.
3. My plan for World Domination coming to fruition.



Three of my all-time favorite Songs:
1. King of Carrot Flowers, Neutral Milk Hotel
2. Stinging Velvet, Neko Case
3. Mr. Plow, Homer Simpson


Three top Concert experiences:
1. Camping out for tickets to Dave Matthews (back in the days when people actually physically had to go somewhere to buy tickets to things. I also walked uphill in the snow barefoot for those tickets.)
2. Eighth grade concert band, Calumet Mall Christmas show. We rocked the pants off those jingle jangle holiday tunes!! (Sadly the band broke up shortly thereafter to go to highschool.)
3. Esthero, NYC (Where Candi and I got so drunk I danced with a janitor and rode home on the floor of a cab.)


Three Places you want to see or visit in this lifetime (places you haven't seen or visited):
1. The Grand Canyon
2. London, England
3. I'm using this slot to just wonder what the difference is between "seen" and "visited." Do we really need the distinction here? Does anyone ever say, "You know, I saw Paris, but I wish I would have visited it instead."


Three Things that make your SKIN CRAWL:
1. Spiders of all shapes and sizes, but especially the pregnant ones who throw their overflowing fertility in my face by giving birth to thousands on my kitchen floor.
2. Possums. These nasty creatures are the devil's minions, I promise you.
3. My dog getting her anal glands squeezed at the vet. If I had known anal gland care was part of dog ownership, I might have just gotten a goldfish.




Three Things that calm me down when I am stressed:
1. Narcotics
2. Green Tea
3. A nice walk around the block.



Three Most Dangerous things I have ever done:
1. Skydiving (no wait, Ferris Wheels)
2. Hitchhiked rides from strange men as a teenager (seriously, how am I not chopped up in the trunk of a Toyota Camry somewhere?)
3. Called my mom a bitch when she had a hot curling iron in her hand.



Now, Don't spoil the fun!!!! Keep the survey going!!!
Yay!
It's fun!
really!
Come on!
DO IT!
What's wrong with you?
Don't you like fun?

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Last night I watched A Christmas Carol, the good one, from the eighties when everything was real quality like Munchichis and My Little Ponies.

Anyway, as is the case for most of you I'm sure, Christmas has a special nostalgic quality for me. As a kid, there is no better time than Christmas time. There's like a month-long build-up where you get a piece of chocolate everyday from the advent calendar, school tapers off to making contruction paper chains and practicing songs for the Annual Christmas "show," and you get to scour the Sears catalog picking out everything you could possibly want (and know there's a good chance you're going to get at least some of it.) Throw in Christmas cookies and no school for two weeks and boom, the most wonderful time of the year.

In honor of A Christmas Carol, I took a little tour through my own Christmases of yore.


















Baby smirk. At the tender age of two, I am already skeptical of this whole Santa Claus business with a look that says, "Whatever lady, let's wrap this up so I can crap my pants and hit the KayBee toys to let "Santa" know what I will expect under the tree come Christmas morning.



















Ahhh, lederhosen and black knee socks, Christmas sure ain't what it used to be, I tell you what.




















I have several Santa pictures with me in this pose. I have no idea what that's about, possibly my attempt at being girly. Also, I'm pretty sure my shell-shocked little brother is attempting to flip off the camera. We're very pious, my family.













Christmas: The Teen Years. Decked out in prison stripes and my attempt at a New Wave haircut, I announce to everyone that Christmas is so, like, totally lame. (Please note: Steph and Steve's matching gray stonewash jeans.)














Okay I'm not in this shot, but felt I must include what we lovingly referred to for years as our Charlie Brown Christmas tree. As you can see, my mom (who probably caps off at 5'2'' wearing a top hat) is kneeling, and yet still manages to clear half the tree's height.



















This one has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas, yet still, it begs to be included. This is me paying a visit to McGruff the Crime dog. I have no idea why he was taking visitors or why they chose a large wicker chair (seriously, try being a serious crimefighter in wicker), but I'm forced to wonder what costume designer interpreted McGruff as a shady canine druglord wearing too-short pants and orthopedic shoes. (Special thanks to mom and grandma for the constant vigilance in keeping my knee socks pulled all the way up.)

I can't wait to look back on Christmas pictures years from now and laugh, What the hell? When did I have pink hair? Is that a hoodie? And slouchy boots? My god, what were we thinking?

Happy Holidays everyone!