Am drunk. Whoo!!!

(sorry. :)

(no,m really. am very drunk. not going to work tomorrow, see. working from home. writing, writing, writing. i'm going to blind by thirty aren't i? staring at bloody computers every bloody hour of every bloody day...)

Next season: locusts?

Does anyone want to explain this weather to me?

Not feeling up to a long post yet. You will have to excuse my terseness, but I am laid quite low by a fever I strongly suspect of glandularity.

Nevertheless, here's our Blogger keyword of the day: thwlwhzd

Tilt-a-Whirl coming to a screeching halt?..

DDT still rocks. Don't feel up to details yet, though I am grateful that the hum and ringing in my ears are finally beginning to subside.

DDT rocks. Details tomorrow.

View from my window

Temperature now: -2 ºF (-18.8ºC)
With windchill: -20ºF (-28.8ºC)

Just woke up in an odd state of good humor and relative absence of any aches. This is so unusual that I'm compelled to test my mood with a healthy dose of Soviet emo. If I begin howling along with it in earnest, then I really am disgustingly chipper this morning.

Yep, I feel a good howl coming on.

View from my window right now.

Today's blogger keyword: exjqo.

... minumemtim qere oeremnuis?...

------------------------------------

Overheard at work: lady in charge of merchandising on the phone with a supplier.

"Hey, crazy lady! Why is your price for this package so high? Eighteen-ninety-five? Whachyou putting in them, gold?!"

Today's bloggery keyword: dxtelgzc.

Sorry, the only words I know in Black Speech are "Ash nazg durbatulûk..."

---------------------------------------------------------

Today, wrote copy for the first time in my life. Am resisting a strong urge to begin re-reading "Generation P.'"

Firstly, the blogger keyword of the day, given to me on Richard Madeley's blog: phpup.

Well, it'll vary, of course, but to my knowledge the arterial pH of a dog should hover around 7.4, provided it's not panting. (The dog, not the pH.)

----------------------------

There are times when I just Don't Get It.

Browsing amazon.com, I click on a book with the ponderous title Changes in Cardiovascular Risk Factors During a Two-year Intervention Programme among 13-to 15-Year Old Children and Adolescents (The North Karelia Youth Project) (Paperback). Authored by Erkki Vartialnen, published 1983 by the Research Institute of Public Health. Nothing odd so far.

Don't ask me why a Chicago resident equally far removed from Karelia, cardiology and social work would want to own this publication. It's for my novel. Everything I want to read but can't justify buying is for my novel. At least that's what I'll be telling the IRS when I write it off my taxes.

Anyway, I scroll down to the section called "Tags customers associate with similar products," and... well, how about I just show you, okay? Here is the full list of tags Amazon customers associate with products similar to this book.

(Just a reminder, the title is "Changes in Cardiovascular Risk Factors During a Two-year Intervention Programme among 13-to 15-Year Old Children and Adolescents (The North Karelia Youth Project).")

Tags:

vampire romance (230)
spirituality (184)
vampire (169)
travel (152)
romance (147)
circus (140)
memoir (136)
digital photography (130)
afghanistan (127)
xmen (2)

o_0

View from my window right now.

Note the frozen lake. It's 4 degrees Fahrenheit in Chicago right now, and minus 16 of the same Fahrenheit with windchill. For the record, it's currently 32°F in Reykjavik, Iceland, 37°F in Helsinki, Finland, and 30°F in Arkhangelsk, Russia.

I think I'll start a new regular section: fortune-telling on Blogger visual keywords. You know, the ones that the system makes you untwist and copy to prove you have a soul.

My last comment brought me this word: aeaqenxm.

A - E - A - Q - E - N - X - M

Not sure what to make of this... a pair of Aces with a Queen kicker?

Ok, perhaps this isn't going to be a regular section after all.

In other news, I'm now working two jobs. Can someone explain to me why one either has *no* job offers or too many to take on? For a week, I sat on my ass waiting for my editors to get back to me with some news of either my recent submissions or a new project. After a while, it started to seem like their radio silence was a way of taking the French leave from my services, so I trolled craigslist for more gigs and applied for a part-time position as an editor and proofreader at the creative department of a business travel agency. An hour after I sent in the resume, their HR called me and conducted a brief interview. My next call was from the head of the creative team, who told me to sit tight for now, because they've got someone else to shoot down first. Finally, they called back another hour later to tell me I'm hired.

Wh00t, thought I, weeding the rattiest of my 'business casual' shirts from my wardrobe.

When I got there on Friday - they insisted I start immediately, - I was introduced to a team of four copyrighters with lean and hungry looks, all brandishing unfinished spreadsheets, unproofed copies of brochures, and unrevised drafts of program guidelines for business cruises around Puerto Rico. Even the accounting lady peeked out of her receipt-wallpapered cubicle, and the glint in her eyes promised paper cuts. Lots and lots of paper cuts.

In short, it became abundantly clear that they needed a serf, not a temp. At what they're paying, I wouldn't necessarily mind, but yesterday my editors got back to me with apologies, five articles in need of minor but urgent corrections, and an offer to work on another book.

Goodbye, sleep.

Spent the evening behind closed doors, reading out loud Finnish words and phrases while the boy watched the parade of poshlost' known as "American Idol" try-outs in the living room.

Can now produce several complete and coherent sentences in Finnish. This is big news.

Hyvää paivää! Minä olen Ax. Olen venäläinen. Puhun venäjää, englantia ja saksaa.

Christ, am I really going to undertake Finnish? No classes, no teacher, just whatever I can scavenge off the internet? Well.. why not? The internet has so far yielded some neat starter materials, both in Russian and in English. What is more difficult to grasp through Russian instruction (helping verbs) poses no problem through the English and vice versa - it's probably a tough going explaining fifteen noun cases to a monoglot anglophone... There are audios and videos aplenty. Certainly there are texts aplenty. The only thing that's missing is someone to interact with - and even that can potentially be got on a chatboard somewhere.

Good then, it'd decided. I shall soldier bravely on, armed with my trusty workhorse "Anteeksi, en ymmärrä."

(Any hardcore linguaphiles in attendance? Say it out loud: "Anteeksi, en ymmärrä." Consult the IPA for proper Finnish phonology if necessary. "Sorry, I don't understand" - but for Heaven's sake, please, keep talking!)

Drunken reflections.

Holy hell. I found a website made by crazies like myself, devoted to the Russian North; specifically, to Karelia.

I'm in Heaven. I'm keeping all my fingers crossed that they have audio recordings of old Karelian spells. I will not quit this site until I have read it in its entirety.

I admit it; I'm... odd. This isn't entirely an idle pursuit; I need Karelian materials for my book - one of my protagonists is Karelian. But even if I didn't need it... God, I love all this. I love Finnish. I love all things Finny. Karelian counts. It's proto-Finnish, with some sprinkled-in Russian.

It's really very much like addiction. Speak Finnish at me and watch me perk up. Sing Finnish at me, and I'm defeated, helpless, enraptured. I know what caused it - this bloody thing - but I don't know why it persists. Others have heard it and gotten over it; I remain completely enthralled.

I want to learn Finnish. I want to speak it. I want to howl in it. No wonder Tolkien modeled high ELvish on it. It's fucking divine. It's like every sound of the northern forest arrayed into words.

If you've never heard Finnish singing, find a recording and give it a shot. It's otherworldly.

Sensitive junk mail

Despite the industrial-sized recycle bin that dominates our building's mailroom, I prefer to take all my personalized junk mail upstairs, to terminate it with extreme prejudice in the privacy of my own flat.

Tonight, my haul included several fee-free pre-paid super-exclusive credit card offers. One of them made me pause as I fed its paperwork to my shredder. It was a credit card offer from (Big_Firm) - the first in my experience. Besides ad booklet and the card application, the envelope contained an insert which was folded in half and labeled on the outside:

"PLEASE DO NOT OPEN THIS UNLESS YOU'VE ALREADY DECIDED TO SAY NO."

What on Earth is there left to talk to me about if I've already said no? thought I and opened the insert.

Inside was the following text:

"Frankly, I'm surprised at you. The (Big_Firm) card offer is ever so wonderful! It's free, and you can use it at thousands of (Big_Firm) gas stations and affiliated grocery stores! I sincerely hope you reconsider, or else my opinion of your good character will suffer horribly. Signed, Chief Vice Cunt of (Big_Firm)."

As you may have noticed, the bit towards the end was paraphrased, but otherwise, the text is quoted near verbatim. How do you like that, now? My junk mail is scolding me for not complying with it.

I'm now awaiting the next set of offers from this company. I expect they'll have the following text appended to them:

"If you persist in your refusal to sign up for our service, special (Big_Firm)-licensed vivisectors will procure in your name and sodomize a litter of fluffy kittens."

Personal deficiencies.

I have a selectively terrible memory. The only things I can consistently recall are texts - even learn by heart and retain for years. In school plays, I was the annoying bastard who memorized *everyone's* lines and died a little inside whenever anyone stumbled over them.

For everything non-literary, however, my memory not a tarpit but quicksand. I can't recall what year anything important happened: trips abroad, meeting people for the first time, deaths in the family. I can no longer recall how I met any of my childhood friends. Frankly, I've forgotten most of my childhood. This has been brought in especially sharp focus by a flurry of emails from my god-sister from Moscow, whom I last saw in 1995. She poured out recollections of youthful shenanigans, and all I could contribute were smileys and the occasional placeholder like 'boy, what were we thinking?'

In truth, I have no idea what we were thinking. If someone were to ask me to list five episodes from my entire history of knowing this person, whom I grew up with and played with daily from about 1985 until 1995, I couldn't do it. I can maybe give you three. And even those won't be episodes, but snapshots; at 24 frames per second, I doubt I could top 100 frames. A decade of friendship and four seconds of memories. What on earth is wrong with me?

My boy comments on this incessantly and with vigor. I can't recall restorants we've been to, the vacations we took, our early dates - nothing. An occasional image will percolate: there we are, me and him and my best friend, on a bus heading... somewhere... and I am holding a 5 gallon plastic jar full of lychee jelly candies. I know they came from Chinatown; I know this was our first time out "zu dritt," when it was still uncertain who was hooking up with whom; I know it was close to Halloween. That is all I know.

When people advise each other to live in the now, I don't think they quite understand what that entails. I'm thinking of ordering from CafePress a T-shirt that says "'Memento' was a documentary"; however, the odds are very slim that I'll still be able to explain to anyone what I meant by that a couple of months from buying it. (How's that for ironic? Eat your heart out, Alanis Morisette.)

So much for my murine memory. Now let's talk about gustation.

I had many upper respiratory infections as a child, and the Soviet method for dealing with them involved the quartz lamp. You sit into am armchair and stick into your nostril a sort of conical end of a tube that glows a bright pretty violet and irradiates your membranes with bactericidal UV rays. I can't be certain, but I think it was this treatment that dulled my sense of smell to the point where I need to have something practically under my nose to be able to say if it's a turd, a rose, or a bottle of anise liquor. And, as any gourmand or oenophile will tell you, without smell, there is no flavour. My boy is an excellent cook, and he doesn't quite understand that we experience food in entirely different ways. My lack of sensitivity towards his creations hurts him deeply. I am free with praise, of course, but as soon as he begins grilling me with regards to what *precisely* I tasted in that pomegranate-walnut chicken, I begin to flounder.

"Pomegranates?" I offer sheepishly. "Walnuts?"
"And what else?" he drawls half-threateningly.
"Ummm..."

I chew another piece. It's warm, chewy, stringy, soft, slightly sweet, and a bit crunchy - the walnuts, I suspect.

"You didn't like it at all, did you?"
"No, no - I loved it, honestly!"
"How can you say that when you can't tell me how it tastes?!"

And so on. Reruns every other evening. What sort of worlds do other people inhabit, I often wonder - strange worlds where memories and tastes linger?

Got a new job to supplement freelancing - the editors have been slow to come up with new assignments for me lately. So now I'm going to do some proofreading and copyrighting for eight or so hours a week. It'll get me out of the house if nothing else.

In other news, my favorite Viktor Pelevin has released an audiobook of several of his short stories read by his own self.

Have already downloaded part one. Pelevin has an odd voice. Or rather, not so much odd as unexpected. For one thing, it's hard to believe that the man is really 45 and not half that. In general, he sounds a lot like his earlier texts: dreamy, melancholy, very intelligent, and not at all "real," which means exactly the same thing in colloquial Russian as it does in African-American dialect. All this in full contradiction to what he looks like.

Also, while waiting for the files to download, I've located an old interview where Pelevin proclaims his hatred of tomatoes, saying that "in them slumbers ancient Toltec horror." I'm in love all over again. Tomatoes have been the bane of my existence since early childhood.

View from my window a few months ago

I don't know how many of you are prone to sleep paralysis and hypnopompia. I am, to an annoying extent.

As with everything in life, there are good and bad things to be derived from mornings spent tripping balls in a state of total helplessness. On one hand, it's an odd and unsettling experience which, if you're working on a novel, like myself, can be used to torment your favorite character in entertaining ways. On the other hand, it can be highly inconvenient, and not just because it can make you late getting up.

For instance, consider false awakenings. Among other things, Wikipedia has the following to say on their subject:

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A false awakening may occur either following an ordinary dream or following a lucid dream (one in which the dreamer has been aware that he or she is dreaming). Particularly if the false awakening follows a lucid dream, the false awakening may turn into a ‘pre-lucid dream' (Green, 1968), that is, one in which the dreamer may start to wonder if he or she is really awake and may or may not come to the correct conclusion. More commonly, dreamers will believe they are awake.

---------------------

That pretty much nails it for me, except I don't have lucid dreams as a rule - or maybe I do. To be honest, I'm not completely sure what precisely a lucid dream entails. I don't often end up both asleep and aware of being asleep is what I mean.

Sleeping usually plays out one of four ways for me. Sometimes, I sleep without any dreams, or I can't recall having dreamt, which amounts to the same thing. Alternatively, I might recall having dreamt but the actual dreams elude recollection. But most often, I dream, and it sticks: I will wake up with the whole sequence of dreams partially or entirely preserved for repeat perusal, which can be good for a chuckle or a cringe over my morning oatmeal. On the occasions when the dream leaves an impression and involves nothing obscene or too compromising - and I don't have anything better to do that morning - I record it.

Option four is my least favorite of all: I end up caught in a loop of false awakenings. I usually go through at least four of five before I manage to wake up for real.

Today, I wake up with a headache from hell - entirely undeserved, since I'd had no alcohol that night. My alarm clock glows at me in silent accusation from the dresser. I remember that I've already been awakened fourty minutes ago, when my boy called me from work to say good morning, as is his custom.

(I work from home and almost always sleep in late. In general, I can and will sleep as long as I'm allowed. My record is eighteen consecutive uninterrupted hours. I'll readily admit to being horrendously lazy, but it isn't just that - I really do have a difficult time attaining wakefulness.)

I have only the vaguest recollection of speaking with him. No matter; the phone call may have failed to rouse me, but I'm here now. I'm ready to start the day. Upsy daisy.

...

I said, upsy daisy!

...

After several minutes of continuous fail, I sag back into the mattress. I can't move a muscle. The sun is shining cheerily into my pupils, and someone invisible and infinitely cruel is crushing my head in a vise. I give up and close my eyes for a second to regroup in the soothing dark.

When I open them again, I've lost half an hour.

I try to move again. Success! My legs swing over the edge of the bed and I am up and about. Oddly enough, I don't feel sleepy or heavy, and all my muscles are obeying me perfectly.

Uh oh.

The world dissolves.

...

When I open my eyes, I'm still in bed. The alarm clock informs me spitefully that it's been another fifteen minutes. Irritated and now in need of the watercloset, I tear away my blanket, roll out of bed... and plunge hundreds of feet to the ground from the thirty-fourth floor.

I land back into my bed and open my eyes. It's been another ten minutes or so. Herds of drunk mountain trolls are holding a clog-dance in my skull. I am in desperate need of either cyanide or paracetamol - whichever one I can get to first.

It turns out to be paracetamol. Three capsules down the hatch - then back to bed and screw getting up. It'll happen when it happens.

When I wake up for the last time, my head is relatively clear; I can move all my limbs; and when I get out of bed, I feel the shag of the carpet under my feet. All good signs. However, my headache is still in full force. Did I take that paracetamol or was it just another dream? I taste bitterness. Did I or didn't I?

It's a moot point. I probably didn't, but I can't risk taking more - my liver and I are not on best terms. By mid-afternoon or so, the headache goes away on its own, and the day can finally begin in earnest.

On Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"

Another cultural milestone now bears my chalkmark: I've just finished reading Samuel Beckett's "Waiting For Godot."

Frankly, I'm not a fan of Beckett. I'd read some play of his a few years ago in college and can't recall squat about it today save that its title was vaguely Germanic and the play itself involved an old clown, a tape recorder and some bananas. Not exactly a recollection to inspire one with fervid lust after more of the same.

With regards to "Waiting for Godot," Vivian Mercier put it very well: "Nothing happens, twice." Most of the lines sound as though they've been pulled randomly out of a hat. There are brief flurries of activity - Pozzo's entry; the odd little exchanges vis-a-vis his pipe and the chicken bones; Lucky's insane monologue; Pozzo's second entry; the boy - but they never last more than a line or two.

I'm not really sure what Beckett wanted the spectators to take home with them beyond a strengthened sense that life's a bitch and then you die. I guess this was an iconoclastic statement to make on British stage at the time, and the Brits needed to hear it, but even so I'm not really convinced that there's staying power in the piece. All that verbiage and puttering around for the sake of some gags about suicide, vague insinuations about God and a single memorable quip about giving birth astride a grave. Hmph.

No, I understand the *importance* and what-not, the *influence* it had - hell, if there hadn't been "Waiting for Godot," there wouldn't have been "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"! So whether or not the play seems relevant or interesting today, Beckett deserves every respect and honour for writing it when he did, since it was "Waiting for Godot," if memory does not deceive me, that galvanized the young Tom Stoppard into activity by showing him that plays can be daring and minimalist, striped down to bare essentials and raw nerves. Of course, no sooner did Stoppard learn the craft properly than he abandoned all pretense of provocation and settled for simply being the best damn British playwright since Shaw, but that's quite beside the point. The point is, sine Beckett nullum Stoppard. And that is a sobering thought. As I've said, I've only read two plays of Beckett's so far, - 'Waiting for Godot' and the one with all the bananas, - but I've read just about everything Stoppard's ever published except "Hapgood" and the theatre critiques he wrote in his youth for the local papers.

In short: my advice is, if you haven't read "Waiting for Godot," don't bother. Read a Stoppard play instead. Why ride a velocipede when you can have a 24-speed mountain bike?

The Hopes for 2008 meme

It appears I've been tagged by Richard Madeley - or at least "AxyxZ" was, but I must regrettably inform Dick that AxyxZ was pissed on vodka and apple cider at the time of his request and in no condition to comply with it. I therefore humbly offer my own poor candidacy as substitute and uptaker of slack.

Eight Hopes, Dreams, and Aspirations for 2008:

1. To hope and dream but not to aspirate.
2. To have someone besides my best friend read my short story and laugh.
3. This space for rent.
4. To send mother some money every month.
5. To determine once and for all whether or not my novel's first protagonist is a Neandertal.
6. To determine once and for all whether or not my novel's second protagonist is a single person.
7. To stalk Gary Shteyngart in New York and get him to refer me to that Italian baronessa.
8. More freelancing! More publications! More money! Anti-greed pills and lots of them!!

And now for the sad part: I've got absolutely no one to tag. I'd tag Pim, but he is long gone from these Palestines. And I don't wish to awaken the readers of my primary blog to the existence of this one, else the whole point of it will be lost. I suppose it might make sense for me to wish for more readers in the year 2008, but frankly, I can't be arsed.

Conan O'Brien has grown a 'strike beard.' It's brilliant. It's orange. However, he doesn't look as Finnish with it, so I'm not sure I approve.

Vici!

Finished "A Maggot". I suppose a review is in order - don't want to keep my readers disappointed.

(Sidenote: according to my stealth StatCounter, the only three people who read my blog as of now are my best friend, myself, and Richard Madeley. LOLz.)

Before saying anything about the book itself, I must state that I am of two minds about Fowles in general. As a reader, I find his prose enthralling; as a writer, depressing.

(Sidenote two: I use the term 'writer' broadly to mean someone who gets paid for some form of creative non-technical writing. Which I do - at least until the last check owed to me by the publisher clears. Of course, it might well then turn out that I've also been turned out, but that's beside the point, that point being: I may be, broadly speaking, a writer, but I ain't no auteur.)

Anyway, back to our depressing muttons. Fowles always does this to me. He and James Joyce and that infuriatingly brilliant EFL super-duo, Conrad and Nabokov. Basically, I read a page of any one of these blokes, and it becomes instantly and painfully clear to me that I'll never get there. Never, ever. I'm sure this is a feeling common to young whipper-snappers who are just starting out in the language arts, but that doesn't make it any less dispiriting.

That aside, "A Maggot" is an excellent thing, and everyone currently holding a book ought to drop it - if it's by Dan Brown, into the nearest trashcan - and partake of "A Maggot," for it is juicy and delicious.

(Sidenote three: you might have noticed that I spent far more time talking about myself in this 'book review' than I did about the actual book. Welcome to the world of literary criticism.)

I keep wanting to write a proper intrоductory post, but each time I raise my hands above the keyboard, I get sidetracked. Right now, for instance, it's my best friend's old blog that's doing it. Not the most heartening thing one could read before posting, since it tends to inspire deep feelings of broad inferiority. (No disrespect meant to sundry broads.)

Speaking of birdies, as Russians like to say, consider this symbol:



What do you suppose it stands for? Looks rather like every blogger's best friend, the mouse, doesn't it? (Mac's unibuttoned mutants aside.) Well, this is actually one of the old alchemical symbols representing vitriol. Truly, visita interiora terrae rectificando invenies occultum lapidem veram medicinam. Rectify the bowels of the earth and obtain the secreted stone of true medicine. Push button, receive bacon.

Goal for today: to finish Fowles' "A Maggot" while doing laundry.

EDIT: Laundry didn't play out. At some point in the afternoon, I managed to pinch a nerve in my hipbone or do something of the sort. What the hell was I thinking yesterday? I haven't run 4.5 consecutive miles since... hell, since my days in cross-country in 10th grade! Now it hurts to stand and walk. Not all the time, just every fifth step or so. Lugging laundry downstairs was a... variable experience. And then when I got to the laundry basement, it turned out I'd forgotten my wallet. *headdesk*

A muscle relaxant is in order. BRB.

...

Am back, full of vodka and regrets of a day wasted. However! Fowles can still be read. Prefereably in a reclining position.

Ow.

Bonzai New Year's Spruce

I don't celebrate Christmas, mostly on account of being atheist but also out of principle. Birthdays are a family festivity, and not public holidays, unless you're a Queen - and as far as I know, Jesus isn't historically held to have been one, the enticing iconography of St. John Evangelist notwithstanding.

However, I am Russian; Christmas trees may leave me cool, but a New Year's spruce is an absolute must for a proper New Year's orgy.

For the past n number of years, my boy and I flew back to Texas every winter to spend the winter holidays with out respective families. This year, we decided to stay put in Illinois, mostly due to impending depletion of our energies, bank accounts and reserves of tolerance for family drama. Christmas came and went without a tree, and neither one of us minded. However, as New Year's Eve began to glimmer on the horizon, something primordially Russian stirred within my breast and squawked indignantly at the lack of pine needles and ornament glass crushed into the living room carpet.


On the 31st, the boy brought home a tiny live pine in a plastic bucket. The trick now was to decorate the undersized bugger without any lights or ornaments. And then my gaze alighted on my jewelry box.


Et voila:



Details of the decor:

1. Bead stuff.

When I was about nine or ten, my best friend took some courses in making bead jewely. She then taught me some of the tricks, and in time I started making serviceable necklaces and bracelets of my own. All the bead stuff on this tree has been made either by her, a very long time ago, or by me, more recently. (Except for the long string of tiny flowers - I bought that in Mexico for a quarter.)

2. Fat white ribbon with gold somethings.

That came from a huge box of assorted chocolatey nosh.

2. The string of skulls.

A Buddhist wrist mala, purchased in 1999 from a curious little Moscow store called "PUKS," which unacronymizes and translates into "The Way to Oneself." It would have been a simple artifact of New Age-y kitsch if not for the cameo made by "PUKS" in one of Viktor Pelevin's best novels, "Generation 'P'."

3. Orchids.

The coup de grâce. The boy's family had sent us a bouquet of orchids a few days ago - a sweet but misguided gesture, since orchids may travel safely enough across Texas this time of the year but they don't keep very well in Illinois. They arrived slightly frost-bitten and shed most of their blooms half-unfurled, so I decided to grab the bull by the horns while he still had them and twisted several of the livelier-looking flowers to the pine branches with thread.

All in all, not a bad effort, I should say.

New Year's. Wh00t.

Lots of time spent on the phone with family in Texas; also some quality time spent on the phone with BFF, who is in New York. Forget ball-dropping: the best part of the New Year's evening, for me, is watching my favorite Russian New Year's cartoon: "Padal Proshlogodnij Sneg" - something like "Once, by yesteryear's snowfall..." It's a claymation about a middle-aged rural Russian fellow with rheumatism and a hilarious lisp being sent out by his wife on the 31st for a New Year's spruce. He then proceeds to get into various fantastical scrapes. Right now, for instance, he's holding a magic wand in one hand, and his other hand is up a tiger's butt. And now he's a cactus, shaving himself with an electric razor. And now he's a Cornucopia, except an empty one, and a parade of crows and tiny men is marching out of him, all carring miniature New Year's spruces. All this is being commented on by a very sarcastic narrator, who has long given up telling the story and now just bickers with the main character.

...

There. It's over. And on a rather melancholic note at that: the main character failed at his quest - the narrator says that when he went to get the spruce for the third time, it was already springtime, so he had to bring it back. The final shots have him sit on an iced-over bridge - his wife has kicked him out of the house for being a loser - and play a sad, wistful tune on a flute: the same nine-note phrase, over and over, which is gradually joined by other instruments, until it becomes a motif in a piece played by an orchestra during the closing credits.

Bedtime, I think. Happy New Year, everyone! Can you freaking believe it's 2008 already? In my mind's innermost, Reagan, Thatcher and Gorby are still in office...