A Strange Dream

I had a dream that I was a volunteer for Noah, who was building his ark. He made up a list of about 100 people to invite onto the ark, and I didn't like how arbitrary it was. He had picked his friends, relatives, and people with political connections instead of the kind of people you'd want to start a new world with. For instance, he had about twenty people who were invited only because they were well-connected government officials of France and Britain (Which were, in my dream, major colonial powers). I was arguing with him, saying that that we should have some sort of appeal process for deserving people who wanted to be on the ark, both to select the most qualified people and to preserve the appearance of justice among common people who wanted to have their lives saved. I also said that France and Britain wouldn't exist at all after the flood, and including their government officials suggested that he was completely missing the idea of what was going to happen. Noah wanted nothing of my suggestions, and then I woke up.

I Just Work Here.

I want to mail my family some cds with pictures on them. But when I went to the post office, the lady told me that I needed special permission to send digital media through the mail. Where do I get permission? I asked. How should I know, she answered. I just work at the post office.

On a parallel note, my school has two printers and a copy machine that don't work because there's no money for toner. At the same time, the school has bought over $300 worth of one hundred percent useless English-English technical dictionaries, against my objections (and despite a promise NOT to buy them) but ostensibly for my math program. Moreover, these books were paid for not by the school but by the students' families to the tune of about $15 apiece. Even worse, the students who bought them aren't allowed to take the books home - they're sitting in my classroom. Not that they would be able to use them if they could take them. What can I do about this? I can talk to people about it. Whether this will do anything besides make important people angry at me isn't clear yet.

But we cannot have just bad news. It so happens that a restaurant called "Venice", which I had previously only noted for the irony of the combination of its name and appearance, serves the second best pizza I've come across in Kazakhstan. The pizza's name is the "American Hote", which I think it an botched attempt at "American Home", since the Russian cursive "t" looks like a latin "m". I have to admit that I didn't miss pizza too badly when all the "pizza" around was more like tuna melts, but now I crave it every now and then. If that living allowance increase comes through, some of it's going to pizza, like it or not.

Vladimir Vysotski

I first liked the music because of the singer’s over-the-top gravel-gargling Russian bear voice. Though he looks, on his album covers, like the kind of guy who might have sung songs about galoshes and the alphabet on some USSR version of Sesame Street, Vladimir Vysotski was one of the powerful voices of opposition to the USSR, and he had a real-lifepowerful voice to match. He was an immensely popular actor, but now his legacy lives on in his music on poetry, the publication of which was officially prohibited by the Soviet government until the 1980s, after his death.

Once you know this name, you start to hear it everywhere well-read Russians go. “Have you ever heard of Vysotski’s ‘Plucked Nerve’ poem?” asked one Kokshetau literature professor, explaining to her English class the meaning of a similar phrase found in All the King’s Men. At a winter meeting of the Kokshetau poets’ society, shots of vodka alternated with group sing-alongs of old Vysotski songs until four in the morning. A student of mine proudly showed me her old “samizdat” of Vysotski poetry, which she acquired and read illegally back when Vysotski was still alive. And when I was introduced to a novelist the same friend, by way of introduction, said first that I liked Vysotski, and only second that I was an American. To the Vysotski part, the novelist gave me a thumbs-up and a wink.

So here’s one of his songs. I don’t know if it’s particularly well-known or not – I picked it out of my songbook because of the word “steppe”, thinking it might be apropos of our Peace Corps KZ life. And if I can learn the guitar part too, I'll have something to entertain my poet friends with next time in between shots.


Лежит Камень в Степи

Лежит камень в степи, а под него вода течет,
А на камене написано слово:
Кто направо пойет – ничено не найдет,
А кто прямо пойдет – никуда не придет,
Кто налево пойдет – ничего не поймет
И ни за грош пропадет.

Перед каменем стоят без коней и без мечей
И решают: идти иль не надо.
Вот один из них – зол, он направо пошел,
В одиночку пошел, ничего не нашел –
Ни деревни, ни сел, и обратно пришел.

Прямо нету пути, никуда не прийти.
Но один, не поверв в заклатье,
И, подобравши подол, напрямую пошел,
Сколько он ни бродил, никуда не добрел,
Он вернулся и пил, и обратно пришел.

Ну, а третий был дурак, ничего не знал и так,
И пошел без опаски налево.
Долго ль, которко ль шагал, и совсем не страдал,
Пил, гулял и отдыхал, ничего не понимал,
Ничего не понимал, так всю жизнь и прошагал –
И не ступил, и не продал.


A Stone Lay in the Steppe

A stone lay in the Steppe, and water was flowing beneath it. And on the stone a word was written: “Who goes to the right, will find nothing. Who goes straight, will go nowhere. And who goes to the left, will understand nothing, and wastefully perish.”

They stood in front of the stone, without sword or a stallion, and decided, should they go or not? So one of them was evil, and he went to the right. He went alone and found nothing, no countryside and no villages, and came back.

There was no way forward, nowhere to go. But one of them, not having believed the verse, hiked up his trousers and went forward. No matter how much he wandered, he never got anywhere. He returned, drank, and came back.

Well, the last one was an idiot who didn’t know anything, and so he went without fear to the left. Whether his stride was long or short, he never suffered. He drank, partied, relaxed, and didn’t understand anything. He didn’t understand anything, and in this way passed his entire life. And he did not vanish, and he did not perish.

(I translated this, so if you find mistakes, please post a comment and improve my Russian.)

Things That Are Not True, and a Card Game That Revealed What Is Wrong With Me.

The Red Cross in Kokshetau is getting a volunteer, and they held an informational session for its staff to which I was invited. They played a game that was supposed to illustrate how people can communicate effectively without words to resolve a problem, but which ended up instead revealing a less ideal side of me, the post-Soviet culture here, and how we relate to each other.

The game was this - the people were divided up into four groups, sitting at four separate tables. Each table was given a set of instructions for a card game which they were to read. I recognized the game as spades except without partners - whoever took the most tricks won. Once everyone had read the instructions, the game began, and no one was allowed to speak. We played a couple hands at our tables, ironing out misundertandings in the rules with hand gestures and facial expressions, and then two winners from each table moved to the next table to play a couple more hands.

The trick was that each table's instructions had a different trump suit. When you switch tables, there's supposed to be a wordless argument about which suit is trump, which results in everyone realizing that they had "come to the table" with different assumptions. When the game was over, and we could talk again, this is what happened at every table except mine. We hadn't had any problems or misunderstandings, we said. Everything went fine.

What happend was this - on the first deal at my new table, the dealer dealt out three extra cards that should have been left out so that everyone had the same hand. When I saw her do this, I very assertively took the extra cards out of the people's dealt hands and set them aside. Although nobody indicated it, this intimidated all the other players (who were all Kazakhstani) at my table, and from then on, I was in charge. After every hand, both out of card-playing habit and everyone else's timid hesitancy to declare a winner, I indicated who had won the hand, and they took the tricks unquestioningly although my instructions were contrary to the rules they had been given. We played three or four games like this, and everyone was satisfied enough to declare that we had had no communication problems.

This is a good lesson for me.

On an unrelated note, here are eleven things I find myself mistakenly believing are true:

11) If you leave dirty socks sitting out long enough, they become clean again.

10) If it has tomatoes in the sauce, it's an awesome pizza.

9) My clothes don't begin to smell bad until I have worn them three to four days in a row.

8) A Wal-Mart wouldn't be so bad.

7) I don't begin to smell bad until I have gone without bathing for three to four days in a row.

6) You can use a hollowed out bread roll instead of a tortilla and it is still a taco.

5) "I finished university" is an acceptable English phrase meaning "I graduated".

4) Cutting in line at the post office is acceptable as long as whatever you need is quick.

3) Personally paying for a cartridge for the school printer and then hiding it so no one else could use it would not make me a jerk.

2) Elbowing a grandma who's trying to cut in line at the post office does not make me a jerk.

1) We don't have problems like this in America.