I like Nina Katchadourian’s Sorted Books project, because it reminds me of the tiny poems one encounters throughout the day.  (This one is my favorite.)  Like the one on car mirrors:

OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR
ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

Had a huge culture shock today: my godfather’s family (who are kindly putting me up in Moscow) does not have a microwave.  My godfather, the same man who wears Dolce & Gabbana shorts around the house, whose ultra-contemporary apartment is located in one of Moscow’s nicest areas, has to use a saucepan to heat up leftovers.  The indignity!  When America elects a Mormon in 2008, we can at least cling to our Lean Cuisine.

World War II memorial and the Moscow Government Institute, in the distance:

I got kicked out of a church today!  God was offended – not by my shriveled little atheistic soul or premarital makeouts or occasional blasphemous interjections, but my halter dress.  No exposed shoulders in the Lord’s house!

Yesterday, at the Bulgakov Museum, the tour guide told us the following anecdote:

A tourist accidentally falls into an open sewer in Russia.  He crawls out, unhappy and covered in mud, and complains, “Where I come from, they put red flags around the border so no one can fall in!”

He is asked, “You didn’t see the red flags when you crossed the border?”

(This was more apt during the Soviet era, when there were actually red USSR flags everywhere.)

I installed a Russian phonetic keyboard on my laptop today and felt accomplished! I used this handy set of instructions. My accomplishment is meaningless, however, because I can’t use my beloved laptop for work anyway. Instead, I’ve been using this online keyboard from borrowed computers. If you were wondering, those are your options when typing Cyrillic phonetically! Ritual suicide: also an option.

On the way to the airport, Dad lectured me on the perils I would face in the motherland and the long list of things I shouldn’t do, of varying degrees of unreasonableness.

DO NOT:  (an abridged list) 
1. Ride the metro
2. Take taxis
3. Lose my passport
4. Eat street-vendor food
5. Attract the attention of the authorities
6. Smile

Smiling in Russia, especially in public places, is a cardinal sin.  Dad tells me he has been confronted on the subway twice for smiling too much.  Smiling is the mark of a foolish and deviant person who is up to no good.  My great-aunt, Guar, an extremely worldly and hilarious person, seconds the smiling prohibition.  She also tells me I need to cut down on the “Sorry” and “Excuse me,” since there is nothing to be sorry about, ever.  Guar possesses a certain kind of tenacious cheerfulness I greatly admire.

The view from my balcony:

I’m in Moscow for a month to visit family, intern at a bank, and generally wreak havoc.  Today is my second day and I love it here.  Moscow is cosmopolitan, cynical, wrecked in places and grandiose in others.

The flight over was a comedy of errors.  Delta is taking its reinvention very seriously – the inflight magazine was thinly veiled propaganda, and they’ve even got a website on the subject.  Despite these heroic efforts, Delta and I did not make travel better together.  First, the lady at check-in forgot to give me my boarding pass.  Then the plane was delayed two hours while the crew futilely tried to fix the entertainment system so that we would not have to endure a trans-Atlantic flight without Norbit.

My seatmate was an elderly cybernetics professor in Siberia, which I found fascinating.  We mocked the English-Russian translation of the in-flight menu.  It was a cross-generational bonding moment.

Tomorrow I start work!  I’m nervous.

By September, the Iraq war will have cost $456 billion, or:

• 2,949 expensive high schools
• 536 billion rolls of Mentos Mixed Fruit
• 1,767 Spiderman 3 movies
• Food and education for the world’s poor for 5.5 years

Finally, I seem to be on the mend. Just in time, because I’ve just run out of antibiotics and my doctor, the quack, claims I can’t have any more for four days. I’m on my own!

When I came in for a follow-up, the quack forgot that he’d prescribed me a second drug in addition to the antibiotics. We had a heart-stopping moment when I couldn’t remember what it had been called, and he hadn’t put it in his notes, and he said I couldn’t take two antibiotics at the same time. By the time I found the bottle, I was convinced that I had unwittingly incubated the next super-bacterial plague. The mystery drug turned out to be a cough suppressant, but I can’t imagine the suspense was good for my health.