2009 Summary
In 2009, life gave me mostly lemons. But:
So I have made plenty of lemonade out of them. Hope you’ve enjoyed it, but for me, it was actually too much soda.
I’d like to switch to the healthy Jasmine tee this year.
Archive for the ‘personal-life’ Category.
Chinese Characters for Image Frame
I’ve got an electronic image frame on this Xmas.
What photos should I put on it? It looks like this typical frame people usually have on their tables in the office. But I have neither children nor wife, and I see my parents almost every day in person anyway. For some reason, I don’t have a lot of photos of my friends, nor I have my own pictures I’d like to see constantly rotating on my table.
Presenting Luck
I don’t like to receive good wishes, and I wish them myself only when no other present is possible or appropriate. It is because I feel how empty the wishes are. Can a good wish change the reality?
What I need is a way to present luck in a more realistic, material way.
Money don’t buy you luck, as we all know. And a long-awaited present can only make you happy for some time, but not bring the other things we normally wish (health, love, good job, etc). So it must be something different.
I was looking to amulets, but they always seeming to be a big scam. Today I’ve realized why. If they worked, they would break the conservation law. Just like in physics, energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but only changed from one form into another — similarly, I believe, luck cannot be created or destroyed, it just goes from one person to another.
So what I need is a way to give away little controlled pieces of my own luck. You know, 24 hours of “looking competent and professional”, a six-smiles-pack, or a three months subscription to “warm feet and hands”. And I’d put some really-good-mornings, heartthrobs, and look-mom-I’m-on-TVs onto my wish-list 
Simple Girl from USSR
Once upon a time, in a small Russian village with a Tatar name, a baby-girl Natasha was born to a family of farmers. For her parents, Maria and Pyotr, she was the fourth child, and not the last one. They were quite prosperous; they had a good house, and their land was so large and the livestock so numerous that they had to hire several other villagers on full-time.
These were the late 1920-ies, the time of NEP in then young USSR, the New Economic Policy — that strange mixture of economic freedom and communism that also the modern China exhibits.
When Natasha turned eight, communists decided to end NEP in that village. One day, armed people came to their house and declared all their property nationalized, and themselves exiled to Siberia. They weren’t given any time to prepare to the exile, and they were only allowed to take so much each person could bear.
Millions if not ten millions of other prosperous farmers everywhere in USSR were affected by this nationalization. Typically, they were gathered together (concentrated) in concentration camps, and then pushed into railroad waggons not intended to transport people, to be transported without food and water for days and weeks. Nazis repeated that communist trick with Jews twenty years later. What they couldn’t repeat is what happened, when the minority of the railroad transport survivors actually arrived to Siberia.
Heart, ripped
Do you know this feeling, when a tooth aches for a such long time that you want to rip it out of your mouth? Because you’re already OK with living without a tooth instead of enduring the pain…
I have this very feeling in the last time, and it is not a tooth but my heart I want to rip out of my chest. And this reminds me of two stories I’ve read as a child.
Contrast people
Who are you: Human-Machine, Human-Symbol, Human-Nature or Human-Human?
1980
USSR in 1980 was a funny place. By this time, only a minority had really believed in communism, but many ”simple” people had nevertheless thought that their life was still better than life standard of the most other nations.
After all, soviet people had a guaranteed job (in fact, everyone has been even REQUIRED to have a job; those who hadn’t could be prosecuted), all kinds of education and health care were free for everyone, it was peace, and by doing some well-known (albeit corrupted) actions you could even be allowed to make a trip into a foreign country and bring back a fashionable jeans and a dream of many soviet boys and girls – a buble gum.
Err… Well, yeah, “they” could make better jeans and bubble gums, but “we” were still better. No only because we didn’t lynched blacks and didn’t have greedy capitalists, but because socialism had future. And capitalism didn’t. Many were adamant of it. I think, my parents supported that too.
Fireworks
A little more impressions from the Pyronale in Berlin.
This was my first time I saw fireworks live. Well, of course I saw and even did myself the ordinary New Year fireworks. And I’ve also seen some professional fireworks, but from a greater distance.
But this time, I was so close. And it was WOW. I’ve realized, I was missing a MUST HAVE experience in my life.
Yeah. Life.
I like the saying of my close friend that goes “Жизнь не удалась, но попытку засчитали”. It is hard for me to translate, but it is something along the lines “I’ve wasted [one more] try to live by spoiling it from the very beginning”.
On the other hand, they say “Жизнь дерьмо, но мы с лопатой”, meaning “Life is full of shit, but we have a big shovel”. A slight shift of the perspective, but with big consequences. In the former sentence, there is no hope any more. In the latter, there is.
So, may be, I’m doing not so bad. May be, some time later I will think about these days and decide I was in fact happy. After all, there is no war and me and the people I love are all alive and relatively healthy. Although, there is another saying “There is no healthy people, but just those, who can postpone the visit to the doctor”.
Oh well. Let’s drink some tea and see what happens next.
In the Church
I’ve recently been in a church – for the first time in my life not as a tourist.
It was build around 900 years ago, and looks really like this from outside. At first, I was confused, which one of the many doors to use and if I am, as a non-christ, supposed to enter the church at all. There was no mass. All doors seemed to be closed, so I’ve tried to open just any door. It opened surprisingly easy, so I’ve entered.
As it turned to be a protestant church, it was pretty simple inside. Just benches, a crucifix and a candle. And silence, unbelievable and deep silence. There was nobody inside I could see. I sat onto a bench in the 3-rd line, and didn’t know what to do next.
My grand-grandmother was a daughter of a russian orthodox priest, and my grandmother was a christ, and my mother is too, and even my little sister has been baptized. Only me is an exception, I don’t know why. My grandmother has baptized me herself, “inofficially”, at home, and she was always very concerned about it. I suppose, they didn’t want to disturb my potentially bright atheistic-communistic future in the USSR.
Then later, in the basic school, when I was probably 8 or 9 years old, we had just a normal lesson, writing or math, something like this. Suddenly, the door opened and one of the school directors came in. She asked, “Does anybody know what God is?”. Because she did that with her strong Ukrainian accent, and we were all children from the deepest Russian province, nobody could understand her. So she took a chalk and wrote БОГ on the blackboard. One or two pupils raised their hands.
My father, a Jew, has always told me, “Average performance leads to average grades, but you’re a Jew, and in this country, you have to have an excellent performance to achieve average grades”. I happened to know what a God is (I could even name a few), so I’ve raised my hand too.
She went to each of us, silently and slowly, and distributed an empty piece of paper. Then, she returned to the blackboard, and commanded: “Write down everything you know about God!”.
Meanwhile, my class teacher walked through the class room, as if she wanted to ensure order and silence, even though there was a silence like on a cemetery. When passing me, she has bent down and whispered: “Is there God?”, looking concerned on to me, as if I had dilusions. I knew the official answer I supposed to give on this question, so I’ve answered, “There is no God!”. – “So what are you going to write?”, HINTED she, looking into my eyes to confirm my understanding; and then she walked away.
Not that she was a fanatical atheist, but she was responsible for 100% atheistic coverage in the class.
So I took my pencil and wrote with my childish handwriting these two words: Бога нет. “There is no God”.
I still remember every little detail. I will never forget it, and I will never forgive myself for doing this.
Thus, when I was sitting on a bench in the 3-rd line, in an empty church, for the first time in my life, I didn’t really know what to do. I’ve only knew that I didn’t want to appear annoying or selfish to Him.
So I’ve just started thinking about things concerning me, carefully avoiding to ask for something. Suddently, a strange idea has come into my mind. It was something like “Kid, consider doing this and that. Wouldn’t it be sooo beautiful?“.
It was a fully unexpected point of view. I mean, I’ve already had this solution as a possible option, but I haven’t thought about its beautifulness.
But it IS beatiful.
And therefore, it IS the right thing to do.
And even though it is also unbelievable painful… I’m doing it, yes, I’m doing it.
