Lingua Frank

Davy Jones' Locker

2008-02-06T20:11:00.000-05:00

Apparently, "tomorrow" is a subjective term...but onward and upward, I suppose.
I recently hosted my parents and two younger brothers for a week and a half. Our visits are extremely infrequent, as it is ludicrously expensive and soul-crushingly frustrating to drag my increasingly huge brood onto cross-country flights. It's the best of all worlds, then, when I can bring bits of my life in Utah to me. It was especially great to spend some time with my dad, who has always been (not to wax too corny) my hero.
Of course, there was one time in particular when my father actually, physically sprung into action to rescue me from certain doom. Allow me to regale...
I was sixteen, awkwardly straddling the hellish divide between adolescence and adulthood, yet still thoroughly convinced of my own invincibility. The Flanafamily had congregated at Payson Lakes on a cloudless summer afternoon and I sat on the shore, gorging my (then fit and svelte) self on six-foot hoagie and a bulk bag of Ruffles while my younger brother and cousin exhausted their lungs inflating the gargantuan "Fun Island" that my parents had purchased at Costco on the way out of town. When all four concentric circles of yellow vinyl were adequately taut, I abandoned gluttony for the call of an afternoon of sloth lounging on the Fun Island in the center of Payson Lake.
My brother, cousin and I piled on and slowly paddled out with no particular destination. After mere minutes, however, the outer ring of the "Island" spontaneously deflated, instantly rendering it considerably less fun. I got off on the side and started to swim with it back to shore, when a sudden bout of hubris overcame me. I stared at the far-off shore and decided that my ridiculously weak swimming skills had suddenly assumed powerful, olympic proportions.
Leaving the rapidly diminishing Marginally Entertaining Islet, I set off at a confident breaststroke. About halfway to dry land, I became acutely aware of my own idiocy as my recently consumed smorgasbord wreaked unholy vengeance on my middle.
Convulsing in waves of crippling cramps, I vainly attempt to half dog-paddle my way out of certain death. No use. I begin bobbing just above and below the surface of the lake, and realize that I have to call for help. At first timidly and then with panicky gusto, I cry out for aid. Arching my back into a half-float, I realize that I am facing my mortality and begin to lament, among slightly more spiritual and philosophical regrets, not having ever made out with a furiously hot foreign chick. Still screaming for help, I look to the shore to see that my portly, determined father had noticed my deathly predicament and had sprung into action...running to the restrooms to change into his swimming trunks to come save me. My thoughts of imminent demise in a watery grave subside for just a moment as my soul groans out an exasperated, disbelieving "daaa-ad!".
In the meantime, a passing canoe fishes me out of the water and I live to tell the tale.
Thanks, pop.

Resurrect Sean

2008-01-22T21:14:00.000-05:00

Three long, eventful, postless years are drawing to a close...Linguafrank is now poised to return in all of its glory. Starting tomorrow, I'll be making weekly posts, so begin being delighted.

Thanksgiving on Ice

2005-11-27T19:41:00.000-05:00

I am back from a long weekend of unmitigated gluttony and sloth at my in-laws, and I find myself lounging behind my desk, my blithely pleasant mood contrasting far too much with Trent Reznor's overanguished wailing. Hang on a minute.
There...Bing Crosby is now radiating out of my tinny speakers, effulgent and sublime, gliding from Adeste Fidelis to Silent Night with impassioned pleas to support our boys fighting in Europe by purchasing war bonds. I think I'll take a few myself.
Sometime in the late afternoon on Thursday, after the tryptophan had already blessed me with hazy euphoria and I was languishing dopily on the divan in the sunroom of my in-law's log cabin/palace, my thoughts drifted back to Thanksgiving nine years ago...a story that begins, like so many others that I've found myself telling of late, on a train in the icy depths of a Russian winter night.
There were four of us. Blazer, Gunn, and Smith were all packed in a tiny train cabin filled with all our earthly belongings, pamphlets, Books of Mormon, water filters, and fifteen thousand dollars' worth of cash (a sum that would have fit in just a few hefty bundles in American Dollars, but which took up considerably more room when changed, as they had been, into multicolor mountains of an unfathomable number of roubles). We were to be the first Mormon missionaries in the city of Petrozavodsk, an island of civilization in the morose Russian wasteland that becomes more utopian in my memory with every year that passes. The closest missionaries, and any sort of support, was three hundred miles to the southwest, in St. Petersburg. As we vainly tried to make out the dark landscape rushing past our frosted cabin window, none of us could muster our powers of speech, so consumed we were with our own haze of jumbled thoughts.
For myself, I was just happy to leave downtown St. Petersburg, the gaudy majesty of which had been sullied for me at the time by the constant companionship of a different Elder Smith, whose desire to wade out each day into the murky tedium of life in Russia had long since been extinguished. I had spent most mornings playing amateur psychologist to a gloomy, blanket-covered lump whose constant refrain was a mixture of grunting sighs and sniffling. My powers of empathy taxed to their limits, I leapt with ecstatic relief the morning that the Mission President had called to tell me that I would be taking the Petersburg-Petrozavodsk express the following evening. I smiled at the snowbound blur outside the train...I would miss the pancakes though...that clinically depressed doughboy did make damn fine pancakes.
The feeling of giddy anticipation when we finally disembarked onto the ice-glazed Petrozavodsk platform was unrivaled by anything I had experienced since stepping off the plane in St. Petersburg seven months previously. The early-morning midnight-blue sky stood in contrast against the unnaturally bluish glow of the deep-frozen snow that clung to the trees lining Lenin Prospect...a huge fir adorned with a red, eerily Soviet star towered over the square directly in front of the station- the people of Petrozavodsk had started their holiday preparations early. I smiled, wrapped my scarf more tightly around my face to shield it from the sting of the frost, and turned to Smith. "Happy Thanksgiving, man."
We all loaded up with the ungodly amount of supplies and luggage that we had brought with us on the train, and set off to find a hotel where we could stay until we could negotiate the lease of a couple of apartments. After checking in to the ludicrously overpriced Hotel Petrozavodsk (where the shower in our suite was a tiled closet with a drain and a garden hose), we opened our bank account, and set out to find the lone member of our church in the city. When we found Andrej, he was overjoyed. He had been in Petrozavodsk for two years since being baptized in St. Petersburg, and he had spent much of that time contacting the Mission President, imploring for missionaries to be sent to his city. In a sense, he had been profoundly lonely, and the gratitude he showed us just for being there left an indelible impression on me.
Afterward, as we were strolling through the city, chatting and taking in the lakeside splendor of the Karelian capitol, we rounded a corner and beheld a site as inspiring and beautiful as any natural vista. I breathed in sharp, unbelieving gasps as I beheld it, a tiny hint of a tear freezing at the corner of my eye. There, in the tundra of Northern Russia, desperately far from all things familiar and comforting to us, was a Ben and Jerry's ice cream parlor, shining like a fatty beacon in the culinary wilderness of Russia, a land of gustatory masochism. Apparently, Petrozavodsk is the sister city to the Vermont town where first the hippie compatriots set their hands to an ice cream churn...and the fruits of that blessed connection glimmered in unspeakable glory before us.
Breathless moments later, we emerged from the parlor clutching our individual pints. I eyed my container of Chubby Hubby lustily as we set out to find a bar/restaurant where we could feast and make our deepest Thanksgiving. Eventually, we got a table in a cozy, wood-paneled cafe, where we dined on Pel'meny (fried Russian ravioli) and ice cream. Every one of us downed our 80 grams of glorious fat and joy, and we spent the rest of the evening resplendent in the dawning of what we sure was to be our bright new day in the thick black of the Arctic winter.

Biloxi Blues

2005-09-12T19:54:00.000-04:00

We were somewhere in Alabama. My head, shoulders, behind and legs were all bent at unseemly angles as I rewedged myself into the unforgiving contours of the bus seat, my left foot dangling out into the ether as blood stubbornly refused to pay it a visit, leaving it a tingling lump in the middle of the aisle. About twenty dark, sleepy shadows stumbled over and around the foot for a quick jaunt into the truck stop to slump onto sticky toilets or buy a Coke. Neither my bowels nor my thirst could rouse me from my hideously uncomfortable position, as it was the best one that I had managed for many hours, and I was afraid of forfeiting my half-assed sleep to an even less accommodating contortion. I slithered my hand out from under my pillow and down to my backpack to illuminate my cellphone. Two-thirty. We'd be in Biloxi at five, leaving us only two hours of actual rest before leaving to the work sites.
There were around two hundred of us in a caravan of three tour busses followed by plodding pickups lashed to heavy equipment trailers. They had asked for volunteers at Church to help with the cleanup from Hurricane Katrina, and the response was enormous. Thousands were coming to the devastated areas from all over the United States and Canada...
I looked, disengaged, at the darkness. I've never been all that much of a joiner, especially when it comes to handyman type work (of which I have little experience and less skill), but I couldn't not go this time. The shadows trudged back past my deadened foot, and the diesel engine growled as we pulled away. I loudly cracked my neck, and pretended again to sleep.
After a quick orgazational meeting at the church, we were split into work teams and shuttled to various areas around the city. My team would be clearing fallen trees and debris in a formerly middle-upper class neighborhood. As we snaked along short stretches of highway, the horrible force of the hurricane was apparent...the Golden Arches of a McDonald's sign had buckled and twisted into some archaic character of an obscene tongue, boats were overturned in trees miles from any water, entire sections of town were obliterated.
When we got to the worksite, I remember thinking that the houses didn't look that bad...until I got to the back, where half of the house had been torn away by floodwaters and a section of pier that had been torn from its mooring and sent careening into the house. Rich or poor, Katrina had forced an ugly equality of squalor on all in her path. Engines roared and chains bit into hundred-year old trees that tangled into each other and crashed into the earth. Slowly, log by heavy log, we hauled them away. After ten hours, a van picked up our aching, despondent crew, and took us back to the church, where I greedily inhaled a helping of gommed-together spaghetti, crawled into my tent, and fell fast asleep in my jeans at seven thirty.
The next day, Sunday, we got up at five o'clock, hastily ate whatever we happened to bring along for breakfast, and eased past the mountains of cases of food, water, and diapers sent for humanitarian relief into the chapel for a quick sacrament service. I was dressed in a t-shirt and my dirty jeans from the day before. I still smelled of swamp and decay. Even the leaders conducting the meeting were filthy, yet infinitely dignified. Simple words of thanks and determination, the passing of the sacrament, a prayer, and we headed right back to work.
We were bussed to a subdivision beside the river, where floodwaters had risen to the rooftops of most of the houses. One guy told us how he and his family had taken refuge in their attic, but as the water started to seep up through the scuttle entrance, he was forced to break out a window and swim his family over a hundred yards to a taller house across the street. His six-year old girl clung to his leg as he told us. He had carried her.
Our task was to clear out the houses. As I walked inside the first house, I saw what I knew must have been very old wedding pictures, the veil and tuxedo now just vaguely recognizable blobs inside the dripping frame. The smell was indescribable. I took a shovel, fought off my gag reflex, and began shovelling the sludge of rotting food, excrement, and filth that had festered in the fetid Mississippi heat for a week. Breathing through my nose only worked for short spurts...eventually I could taste the smell.
We tore out everything...I shovelled entire lives coated in mud and grime into wheelbarrows and dumped them unceremoniously onto the mounting heap in the street. We tore out molded wallboard and insulation, trying not to notice the gigantic insects that had newly made themselves homes in the rotted walls. We left skeleton houses...gutted and soulless, devastated by forces that make us all puny. The fact that our service in the aftermath of destruction was just a more necessary destruction was a bitter irony that didn't sit altogether well in my already churning stomach. There was no doubt that what we had done was needed...but as I toted my gear back to the waiting bus that afternoon, I felt insignificant in the face of the desolation of the storm. All I had managed to do was finish its grim work in a tiny speck of its path.
Almost to the bus, one of the neighbors caught up to me and thanked me for what we all had done, even though his house wasn't one that we had been able to clear. He told me that he doesn't believe that God sent the hurricane...he leaves that to meteorological chance...but he said that he knew that God had sent us.
Now, writing that in my usually ultra-cynical blog, his comment seems pithy. But then and there, as he clasped my hand in his work gloves, there was no room for cynicism...only regret that we couldn't stay longer.

Desperation

2005-08-14T21:14:00.000-04:00

My 3 (almost 4) year old has a massive flair for the dramatic. She's never just hungry...she gets huuunnn-greeee, daddy! I want a POPSICLE!
Likewise, she likes to hold off on the potty until the moment when her bladder is on the very verge of blasting through like a urinary Vesuvius. Her eyes dilate with a look of excitement/horror as she announces with unnatural volume that she has to go RIGHT NOW. This happens regardless of what we are doing or on what god-forsaken stretch of highway we are driving. Countless times, she has proclaimed her imminent explosion in the middle of NASCARville, forcing me to hustle her into those convenience store "restrooms", which offer anything but rest, and are actually just pee-coated closets with a toilet and a machine on the wall that dispenses strawberry-banana flavored glowing prophylactics. I stow a huge canister of bleach wipes under the passenger's seat in order to fight off the hamster-sized bacteria that fester in those cesspools.
Of course, I can understand how she feels. I recall a train ride between Petrozavodsk (a stone's throw from the Arctic Circle) and St. Petersburg when I was forced to make what can only be characterized as a horrible decision. Let me explain.
It was January, when the icy dark of Russia consumes all but two or three hours of every day and oppresses an already generally cranky country. It was weighing my shoulders down as I half stooped inside my lightless, chilly cabin. The train lurched along its 300-mile path at a crawl, carrying me away from the missionary Valhalla, Petrozavodsk...the land of milk and honey...my sweet home Karelia.
It was a 10 hour ride through the deep of night...from 9 to 7. I was sharing the cabin with a member of the Mission Presidency, a quirky 50-ish Russian with a rumbling, Russian-accented snore. I wasn't sleeping well at all, and every time I began to fade off into a sleep-like daze, the train would creak to a halt at yet another nameless forest platform, and I would be shaken back into something resembling consciousness. At 3:40, though, I was jolted violently awake by the call of nature. My bladder was slapping me with its white leather glove, barking in a Kentucky drawl that it demanded satisfaction. I quickly glanced through the creeping frost on the cabin window...the train was at a standstill, but not at any real station. I leapt from by bunk, unlocked the multiple latches on the door and shuffled down the tiny hallway in a potty panic. I finally got to the end of the car, and entered the little antechamber with the bathroom door. I pulled on the handle...the bathroom was locked. Horrified, I shot down the car to the extreme opposite end where the little attendant sits watching Santa Barbara dubbed into Russian...badly. Unmoved by the terror blazing in my eyes, she informs me that the bathrooms are locked while the train isn't moving, and that we would be heading out in 15 minutes. In a dazzling feat of illogic, I convince myself that I can hold out that long, and leave to loiter intensely in the hall.
Three minutes later all that stood between me and the defouling of my jammies was my thumb and forefinger clenched tightly around my business as my urethra puckered and unpuckered, singing a little tragic opera about unfulfilled dreams.
A peek into the attendants chamber...empty...where could she have gone? Wasn't she just there? Was she really just the ghost of a long dead train attendant, doomed forever to deny young passengers access to the urinal? The potty opera reaches a crescendo, with Valkeries circling on flaming horses, great armies clashing in an apocalyptic bloodbath and giant ominous clouds gathering, threatening to unleash a torrential downpour...
Whimpering slightly, I slouch into the antechamber, hoping against hope that the bathroom will have mystically unlocked itself. No such luck. As I prepare to soak myself for the first time since grade school, I glance over to a flap in the wall with the word "Mycop" written on it. Trash. No. I couldn't. I'm a civilized human being. But Brunhilde is inside me with her giant metal brassiere, poking me in my unmentionable with her spear. Almost without realizing it, I slouch down past the windows in the antechamber where nobody milling about at the platform across the way could spy my descent out of dignity. I open the little flap, pull down my pajamas just far enough and let loose the fury of biology scorned. It keeps going and going...I'm afraid I will overflow the garbage pail with my...byproduct...I think with regret about the poor underpaid railroad employee that would find a very unwelcome gift the next morning...but mostly I am relieved. Ever so effing relieved.
Not nearly as much ashamed as peaceful, I pull up my pajama pants and go back to my cabin. The fat lady had sung, and it was glorious.

Stern Rebukes

2005-08-09T20:24:00.000-04:00

I've received some complaints lately about my stubbornly unupdated blog. Please have patience and keep checking back, as I'll have some more fun narrative morsels coming soon.

911derful

2005-07-28T06:56:00.000-04:00

Sorry it's been so long since my last post, but maybe this will help a bit... Here is the recording of the 911 call that goes along with the insane story of my baby's birth (below). Bon appetit!

Alexandra's Wild Ride

2005-07-13T18:35:00.000-04:00

My dear friend Beck just this weekend gave birth to her second child, which was a huge relief for her considering that she had been carrying little Robin in such a way that it looked like she had a bowling ball bag attached to her unmentionable region...even a casual glance let passersby know to give her wide berth (yes, my friends, that is a delicious double entendre). Horrendous discomfort mixed with pregnant fury can vaporize the unwary in a sliver of a second.
I wanted to extend my congratulations as well as reminisce a bit about the whole wonder of the dawning of new life, or, as the less tactful might be wont to say, pooing out babies.
Oh, don't be so horrified by the indelicate phrasing, that is precisely what the physical process looks like...I somehow never saw the "Miracle of Birth" or any of its hideous minions until I (foolishly) agreed to take a birthing class with my wife before Victoria's grand entrance into the world. About halfway through the class, we were subjected to twenty minutes of videos of, well, slimy aliens being heaved out of we all know what. The primal lack of glamour and constant staring at parts that just plain aren't for looking did anything but get me excited to "participate" in the birth of my own little extraterrestrial. With eyes and forehead veins clenched to fight back the dry heaves, I whispered to my dear wife that if it was all the same with her, I would like to remain up with her head than down with her woo-woo while trained medical professionals ushered our child into the world...if for no other reason than to pretend that it didn't really look like that. Even cutting the umbilical cord was too much for me: our birth plan declared that I would forego that privelege because "Sean is participating in the birth of his daughter, not opening a strip mall". With the exceptions of my wife using the nurse's boob as a handle and greeting our baby with a scream of "f***!", all went beautifully...unmedicated and all.
It had gone so well, in fact, that when our second child was fixing to spring forth from our loins, I thought I already had the script down. I knew my entrance cues, my lines "you're doing amazingly, sweetheart", and even a few rudimentary massage techniques. Shawna, too, had her part down pat, and she wasn't showing even the slightest jitters as her water broke at one in the morning and she prepared to perform. (You know the old actor's good luck wish...break a membrane).
Unfortunately, our cast had a prima donna who just couldn't wait for the proper cue to debut. Little diva shot the whole production down the (birthing) tube. (All right...I'm done now).
Suddenly, after only forty minutes of infrequent contractions that Shawna says paled in comparison to even the most benign heartburn, the gaping maw of HELL opened up and released its unmitigated fury on Shawna's uterus. We gave up on packing for the hospital and hustled into our Montero Sport, with Shawna in panic and myself on autopilot. The g-forces snuggled me into the door as I whipped through the roundabout around the Chatham County courthouse at 80 miles and hour and then I shot at ludicrous speeds through the North Carolina countryside. "We're OK," I kept thinking, "we've only got 18 miles to the hospital. We'll make it." My friends, the power of positive thinking amounts to monkey doo when it comes to warding off a very determined baby from entering the world fifteen minutes too early.
Shawna: "Sean, pull over."
Sean: (determined) "We're fine, we'll make it"
Shawna (turns with a look of disbelief at Sean's pathetic ignorance): No we won't...because
she's CROWNING!
Sean: (Pretends not to foul his jeans)
Fumbling in the darkness, I grab Shawna's cellphone and for the first time in my life I dial the combination of desperation- 9...1...1. The line rings once and clicks over, and I start to describe our situation and our vehicle as I pull off beside the sign for Durham-Eubanks road.
I try to balance the little pink cellphone on my shoulder, run around to the other side of the car, and be remotely coherent with the emergency dispatcher all at the same time. Ms. 911 asks if I can get Shawna to the backseat...a proposition so laughably insane by this point that I don't even grace it with an answer, because I can see a ooze-coated human emerging from my wife. We try to gently coax our daughter from getting out before the parametics arrive by, well, pushing the top of her head back to where it came...but she is really damn insistent that she is through waiting in the wings. A car approaches from behind, and I gesticulate wildly to flag it down in case I need some kind of assistance. I glance at the gaggle of young drunk gangstas who are staring in horror at the scene. Sasha's head had popped out (literally...there was a *pop* when she entered the world up to her chin). There was an audible gasp behind me...apparently no number of repeated viewings of Aliens could have prepared my audience of miscreants for the terror of a gooey baby head sprouting out of my wife's nether regions.
I am quickly whisked from this thought back to the task at hand. As I kink my neck to keep hold of the phone, I see by the barely perceptible glow of the car's dome light that Sasha has the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Working in tandem with my amazing Shawna, we deftly fix our fingers between the baby and the cord, and quickly slip it off of her head. Sasha surges forward a bit. It is clear that this is it, and so I stupidly hand the phone to Shawna so as to afford myself the full use of my hands. She promptly throws it back at me, and cuts the connection to 911 in the process. Frantically redialing, I reach the dispatcher again just in time to deliver my child. Of course, she came so fast that "deliver" here should be read "catch and try not to drop". I am at once terrified and exhilirated, until I realize that she isn't breathing. The 911 operator guides me through infant resuscitation. Each time I seal my mouth around the afterbirth coated mouth and nose of my baby, I pray for the inspiration to manage not to screw up...I am at once determined and desperate. With my heart buzzing and my hands trembling, I breathe into her tiny body time and time again for the longest five minutes that I hope I will ever have to endure. Just as she begins to finally wheeze out regular breaths, I hear the scream of sirens and welcome them with rapturous relief. Within minutes, the paramedics completely clear her airways, cut her cord, and restore her to a proper baby-pink from the sickly bluish-white that she had worn for the first minutes of her life.
Driving behind the ambulance on the way to the hospital, I clutch the wheel with my afterbirth-soaked arms, glance at the gallons of goo soaking the passenger seat and floor, and laugh a manically shaky, joyous laugh. The miracle of birth is right.

Nevsky Prospekt

2005-07-04T07:28:00.000-04:00

My little brother is packing up to come back to the States after two years of bum-freezing fun in Siberia. As my readers know (both of you), I, too, spent a small chunk of my life in that Slavic wonderland, though I was fortunate enough to spend most of that time in St. Petersburg. Anyway, I thought I would post an essay I wrote in college about leaving Russia, in honor of the occasion. Enjoy!

Nevsky Prospekt

February lay heavy and cold upon Saint Petersburg. The ice on Palace square seemed twice frozen by the arctic frost: the first layer was solidified water; the second, I was convinced, was solidified air…it caused my boots to stick more than slide. My first day in Russia and my last both began with this: a walk through Palace Square, then on to four bristling, rushing, wildly changing miles of city street called Nevsky Prospyekt.

Palace square, at least on this morning, was empty of post-cold-war tourists…twenty-five below was probably a bit much for a stroll to buy some cheap Lenin pins. This lonely morning could have been 1815, the victory column celebrating the dispatch of Napoleon rising into the gray, still sky, and a very relieved Tsar Aleksandr sipping tea in the gargantuan Winter Palace. On the capstone of the column, a marble angel bore a cross, reaching upward, seeking hope in winter. This is a typically melancholy image of Russian victory…an angel free, yet bearing the weight of all the earth, heading to his own Golgotha.

I lowered my gaze, inhaled a gulp of stinging, crisp air, and turned onto Nevsky Prospyekt. This, too, was a victory column—a flat concrete epitaph of the tsars and Lenin. Nevsky’s confused irony—liberty and burden—was not unlike that of the woeful seraph. Here, though, there could be no Napoleonic time-travel fancy. Here, the years of architectural experimentation, of social and political firestorms, of the thundering mortars of world wars and processions of the emperors were all awkwardly juxtaposed into one totally unique moment in time: nineteen-ninety eight.

The light signaled my safe passage, but even after two years I could not help but feel uneasy as the growling motors of automobiles and icy glares of their drivers warned me that if they should so decide, then my next step would certainly be my last. Nevsky Prospekt crawled with an armada of BMW’s. The vessels were chromed, jet-black, impossibly dark-windowed testaments to the arts of smuggling and extortion. At the helms of this fleet were not politicians or CEO’s or lawyers: in the roller-coaster economy of post-communist Russia, those could still scarce afford a lousy ’95 Moskvich. These helmsmen were thugs in silk shirts and bad suits, whose glove compartments were less likely to hold gloves than a SIG .45. They were men who, for the most part, received their training in terror from the former world champions of intimidation: the KGB.

I hurried to Café Minutka, which had formerly been a joint venture with Subway Sandwiches. The American partners, I was told, were convinced to sell their half at discount…it seemed a good deal at the wrong end of a snub-nosed revolver. There the good deals ended: a foot-long meatball with the works would set me back sixty-five thousand rubles, a little over ten dollars. Hogi in hand, I left the exclusive clientele of Americans and the Mafia to continue my final tour of Nevsky.

The street grew fuller with people and traffic, and I descended into the underpass to cross over to the glitzy shopping center of Gostiny Dvor. I could hear the muffled howling and sighing of an accordion through the maze of pedestrians. Making my way through to the source, I saw Sasha, the most accomplished four-year-old accordionist to play the subway tunnel circuit. Street musicians and beggars of all types had multiplied in the two years since my first walk down Nevsky…children most notably so. I tossed a five thousand-ruble bill into his bucket, and smiled. True to form, Sasha didn’t flinch, but stared straight ahead with his glassy eyes, pumping out a forlorn rendition of Katyusha.

Emerging on the other side of the street, I surveyed the newly reconstructed, bright yellow façade of Gostiny Dvor. Much of downtown Nevsky had been spruced up—made more palatable for tourists. Two blocks on either side, to Ulitsa Italyanskaya or Malaya Sadovaya, one would find a crumbling, tired city of soot-dulled pastel buildings, vodka, and cynical despair. But Gostiny Dvor gave no hint of that other city; it was rife with business in furs and arcades and Gucci handbags…completely beyond the reach of the meager subsistence of the tenants of the building next door. When I first visited Gostiny Dvor, there was a small bread shop, a few stands for hats or camera equipment, and vast empty retail space. Under communism, that would have been considered abundant: then were only bare cupboards. Gucci, unfortunately, feeds the masses no better than did Stalin, but at least the stuffy concierge with his fake French accent wasn’t about to send tens of millions of them to their deaths in frozen slave camps.

I walked to the curb and hailed a taxi—a process that would be called hitchhiking in America. A passing motorist, seizing the opportunity that capitalism had afforded him, pulled his formerly blue ’83 Lada beside me and rolled down the window. After a moment of heated bartering, the driver agrees: 20,000 rubles to Moskovsky Station. The BMW’s didn’t stop because I must not have met their passenger dress code: no high heels and micro mini, no cement shoes.

I unwrapped my now lukewarm sandwich, and we were off. We crossed over Moika canal, then Fontanka canal. Tires and cans were frozen, half submerged in the translucent ice of the pride of Petersburg; the Venice of the north. In summertime, I had seen children and old men fishing in those canals…a risky proposition at best, considering the dizzying array of chemical concoctions that had been liberally poured into them by the Soviet war machine.

Like a darting insect, we wove in and out of the anarchy of speeding metal that is Russian traffic, and arrived safely at Moskovsky station, having narrowly averted death at every turn. I paid my bill, and tipped with the other half of my tepid sub. The driver grinned and accepted both, then sped off to search for more Americans whose pockets stretched at the seams with fat wallets.

Four minutes until my train. Other passengers crowded and pushed by around me, lingering for a moment to buy a snickers bar or pornography—the west’s most prolific imports. I strained for a moment through the morning rush to take my last glance at Nevsky Prospekt. I thought again of the angel on the victory column. Breathing out the words, I bid farewell: “May your cross be light, and your resurrection swift”. I turned, and boarded the 11:35 for Aerodrom.

Blood and Guts

2005-06-30T21:10:00.000-04:00

I was splayed out on the couch on Tuesday afternoon, lazily trying to straddle that glorious state of consciousness between actually sleeping, and the cat-like readiness necessary to spring into action to keep my toddling little girl from injuring herself as she dug out every box of raisins in the snack drawer for the fortieth time. As I sleepily forced my eyes to remain at least partially open, I was constantly reminded of the utter devastation that my increasingly mobile 13 month old could wreak upon herself and everything around her. Sasha's right hand was bandaged to the hilt..Two days earlier, her older sister had tried to help her with safety conscientiousness by "cutting the scissors away from her" and taking a chunk of her tiny fingertip along with it.
I had been trying to pull myself together to prepare for church as the girls were playing (I thought) safely and happily on the other side of the room. Unbeknownst to me (but knownst to them), Victoria had pulled down my wife's sewing kit, Sasha had seized the supernaturally sharp implements of doom known as my wife's sewing scissors, and...well...I've already mentioned where this leads. Suddenly, Victoria shouted out, "Daddy, Sasha's bleeding!"...this was certainly true. Great gushes of blood were gurgling forth from her digit like a zombie ET. I clamped a wash-cloth around the fount of gore as I hustled Shawna out of the shower. My poor baby was coughing out hideous, semi-silent cries as my wet wife threw on whatever clothes were closest at hand, and we rushed to the emergency room....
I was determined to keep Sasha from happening upon, say, a cleaver this time...so I stared, exhausted and intent, as my sweet little destruction magnet made a physically staggering, albeit medically benign little patch of chaos in the hotel kitchenette. Shawna and Victoria had left just minutes before for their "Beauty Day" (a fancy way of saying they were going to get haircuts, but it was guaranteed to keep Victoria sitting still as a stranger came at her with...you guessed it...scissors). I perked up when my phone chimed out its cheesy MIDIfied rendition of "Beautiful Day", indicating that my sexy vixen of a wife was calling. "Sean," she moaned in a wheezing whisper, "I need help...we've been in an accident." She assured me that she and Vika were alright, but that the car was totalled. Ten minutes later, I stood staring at what had been our Montero Sport...honestly feeling nothing but peaceful relief that nobody had been seriously hurt. Still, Shawna's arm was in bad shape, and so after we filled out the police report and exchanged all of the necessary information with the guy that I pray will not sue us, I made the trip to the emergency room for the second time in two days. I'm maxing out my frequent bleeder miles. Her wrist was broken, and so I've taken a few days off to help her with things until I shuffle her and the kids off to Utah for a couple of weeks.
All of this talk about the twisted crunch of burgundy steel formerly known as my car and emergency rooms reminds me of the last time Shawna and Sasha were rushed to the hospital...but that's a story for another post...

Laying Around Sweaty and Lethargic

2005-06-15T21:26:00.000-04:00

We now live in the deep south. The decision to up and relocate a few hundred miles closer to the equator came pretty suddenly, in the middle of April. The timing of it all was essential, because Georgia was lovely then...light spring breezes would cool off a benign, musty heat as we strolled along the banks of the Savannah. Of course it occurred to us that we could stay here for a good long time whilst taking in the sultry southernness of it all. So we got invested, and now, two months later, we wallow inside of our sticky-drenched clothes, unable to tell if we're wet from our own malodorous sweat or from the opressive, sweltering humidity. My wife and I need to shower multiple times in order to overcome our thorough disgust with our own stinky bodies before we allow ourselves to even think of touching each other.
I learned this lesson about my wife just two days before our wedding. We both made it to marriage as virgins only by the grace of God, because He knows full well that there's no way in hell we restrained ourselves by our willpower alone. A twenty-one year old virgin is a particularly potent amorous force, and so we were both very into all the "kosher" touchy-feeliness that is the m.o. for young Mormons in love. So, on that particular night, we were sitting on the side of a hill watching a movie being projected onto the wall of an art museum in North Carolina. It was August, and suffocating heat lay heavy over Raleigh. Undaunted by weather, I tried to snuggle up to my soon-to-be bride and was silently and summarily rejected time and time again. After being shrugged off four or five times, I moped off to my corner of the blanket, thinking, "Not again!". I was whisked back to a painful, formative moment from my adolescence...
I really, really liked Samantha (not her real name). She was endlessly cool in every possible way, from suddenly shouting "He has a thermal detonator!" and hitting the floor, to an impeccable taste in music and movies, and she was funnier than just about anybody I had ever known. Add to that the fact that she was brilliantly pretty, and my 16 year old self was starting to know something beside my usual teenage horniness. I didn't want to just make out with Samantha...I really wanted to date her.
We went out two or three times before I did anything at all. We hiked in Big Cottonwood canyon, we went out for Mongolian Barbeque, all of the usuals except for my 1-base baseball game. I already was hopelessly insecure, especially because I wanted to do this one right. On the third or fourth date, as I sat with her watching a Woody Allen flick, I decided that my moment had come to make some kind of move, so with every passing minute, my hand trembled across the millimeters that separated my knee from hers. This, friends, is the sole tool at the disposal of sixteen-year-olds with a crush...the creep. Oh, we've all done it. As the movie progresses, and you are breathlessly consumed by indecision, you eventually gird up your loins and you ever so slowly move your hand toward hers, with the hope that little sparks of passion will transgress the gap between your pinky finger and hers until it bursts into rampaging flames of rapturous lust for the both of you. Well, at least that's how you imagine it going as you set out to perform the creep. Reality, alas, sometimes falls short of the lofty heights that our imaginations set for it.
No sooner had my pinky made it to the knuckle of Samantha's ring finger before she pursed her lips, briefly flashed me a scornful look, and with an awful finality commanded me: "Sean, don't". I immediately recoiled and stared straight ahead as my wiener detatched itself in disgust and rolled down my pantleg and into my gym sock. I was looking at the screen, but I missed all of Alan Alda's witty reparte. "I am physically repulsive to the opposite sex," I thought, "girls actually retch at the thought that my hand might brush against theirs..." and so on through the rest of the movie, through the hopelessly awkward drive home, and deep into the night until exhaustion finally shut my mopey, furrowed eyes. I got over Samantha, and managed somehow to actually have a relatively happy, well balanced dating life, but those two horrible words that came out of her mouth always lingered ominously in the back of my brain, waiting for a moment to spring on me again to wreak merciless ruin on my ego. They attacked two nights before I was to be married. So there I sat, a more mature 21, feeling like I was 16 again, sitting back in that Salt Lake theater with a girl who felt noxious aversion to my very being. After what seemed like an eternity, my sweetheart finally leaned over to me and said, "Dude, I'm sweaty and gross. Just cool off until I do." Then she winked at me, shot me a scorching, smoldering glance, and sent my masculine self-confidence out of the teenage abyss into the sexual stratosphere.
After all was said and done, I realized that my adolescent self doubt wasn't a curse that needed to plague me forever, and that we have to let go of those ultimately insignificant moments that for a thousand confusing reasons devastated us while we were young.

Delusions of Adequacy

2005-06-09T21:20:00.000-04:00

I suck at most things. This is most especially true in two arenas: 1) on the basketball court, where I trip over my own phosphorescent legs as I elbow everyone else in the face...and that's even before the game starts and 2)anything that requires a trip to Home Depot. I usually propel myself through home improvement projects by the sheer power of muttered profanity and by harnessing the dark, twisted core of hatred for tools that dwells within my little heart. So, naturally, after seeing dozens of brand new beautiful houses that are more than I ever dreamed I would be able to afford, I end up putting out a contract on a 100 year old Victorian farmhouse (no, not to have it murdered). It's the very definition of masochism. But no matter how much I tried to deny it...I've fallen in love with that massive, ancient bastard of a home, and I'm going to subjugate it like a midget in prison.
The house is ginormous. After we take all of our furniture and put it into the rooms, the house will still feel totally empty. While modelling it on the Sims, I could just hear the pathetic echoes of my futon stowed away in a huge, lonely corner of my office as it calls out forlornly, "hello...is anyone there? All of my furniture buddies are clear the hell over THERE....there...there..."
I'm a little daunted by it all, but still excited. All of my nerd endings are aquiver with the conveniently placed closet next to the living room fireplace...you know...the future A/V closet feeding to the plasma screen in the custom-built frame hanging above the mantle...with in-ceiling speakers. Pardon a drool. Best Buy is my strip club. The guy selling mp3 players still looks at me weird after that dollar bills in his polo shirt escapade. Some year I'll actually be able to afford it. In the meantime, at night after my wife is asleep, I'll sneak out my circuit city catalogues or surf those hot amateur electronics websites. I don't have a problem. I can quit anytime. I wouldn't do it if my wife let me spend thousands of dollars on absurd home theater accessories more often. Don't judge me. Plus, I only read them for the articles.

The yogurt maker...OF DOOM!

2005-05-10T21:33:00.000-04:00

I like throwing things away. My wife will tell you that I do this with almost pathological zeal, clearing through rooms (or cars) full of stuff and tossing out anything that I don't have a pressing, personal, IMMEDIATE need for (I also get a sick pleasure out of ending sentences with prepositions). This little obsessive compulsion of mine has caused my wife to roll her eyes in exasperation more than a few times. Honestly, though, it's not my fault. I blame the yogurt maker. Let me explain...

Mormons breed. Thus, there were nine of us and three actual bedrooms in our house when we were kids. These living arrangements, worthy of a clan of Romanian sheepherders, tended to wear a bit thin on the Flanagans. My parents had one room, my sister another, the two youngest boys the third, and the rest of us were relegated to the musky, cavernous depths of our basement, or as the more creatively inclined among us were wont to call it...the catacombs. Down in the cement tomb of the basement, we shared one empty, unframed space with each other, countless arachnids, and approximately 47 million rotting cardboard boxes.
They contained scraps of material, old bits of tupperware, holey mismatched shoes, full sets of encyclopedias from the fifties that smelled strongly of rodent pee, cans of wheat (that's a whole other post) and every other ungodly bit of crap that my parents were somehow unable to part with (I told you I like that preposition thing). After all, my parents never went down into the basement (the lucky bastards).
(Would it be overly cute to mention parenthetically that my parenthetical comments tonight are out of control?)
Whenever asking to go out, I always braced for what inevitably was proposed as the impossible condition for my freedom...I had to find the yogurt maker. It wouldn't matter whether or not we had a bulk tub o'yogurt from Sam's Club in the fridge (which we usually did) or whether or not we really ate all that much yogurt (we didn't)...my request to crawl forth out of the dungeon for any reason called forth from my mother an inexorable NEED to produce dairy. Maybe it was a psychological/lactation thing more than sheer sadism. Either way, the instructions were always explicit, and were always shrieked to me with the same fervor: I was to look ONLY in the basement, because it was down there, dammit! (More than once I was accused of hiding it in some sick sort of power play...but I digress).
Maybe it's my distaste for confrontation that I inherited from my ever gentle father, but I would rarely protest. Instead I would shuffle down the creaky steps to the catacombs, and patiently unpack each box, look at each item, and determine whether or not the thing that I held in my hand was the yogurt maker. My (usually) internal dialogue went something like this: "Is this the yogurt maker? No, this is a water-damaged Spanish-language nursing manual"(seriously...though when I was twelve this was an equally intriguing and nauseating find).
After several hours of this ritual, I would gird up my loins and face the Maternus with empty hands, at which point I was always ordered to make a more serious effort. My protests that either the yogurt maker must not exist or be buried in the trash heaps of our revolting garage fell on deaf ears (deaf, I assume, from all the aforementioned screeching). I went through this literally at least a dozen times a year. I hated that effing basement and I swore that if I ever found the yogurt maker, I would destroy it in a depraved, humiliating way (the challenge being to find what exactly is humiliating and immoral in the inanimate yogurt maker community).
Ironically, years later I found it in the garage. I will have my revenge on that bit of yellowing plastic...though I await only evil inspiration to determine the proper fate. Any suggestions?

Determination in the face of Asininity (yes, that's a real word)

2005-04-06T21:01:00.000-04:00

It turns out that I do have (spotty) internet access this week. So my readership which has recently doubled (to 2) can rest easy knowing that I'm here.
Ostensibly intelligent adults often fail to fully think through their ideas before acting on the absurd. I'm guilty of this ALL THE TIME. For instance, I've recently decided I'm fat. Not obese, but definitely pudgy. So yesterday I decide to swim laps in the outdoor pool where I'm staying this week. The water is effing freezing. I'm talking sperm-slayer frostiness. But I can't help myself, because I'm fat and if I don't swim like hell TODAY, I'm going to turn into my father (those who have seen my dad should understand the depth of my fear). I leap (yes, leap) into the pool, and instantly my lungs and other sections of my anatomy constrict into tight, angry little knots. But I trudge on, because I can hear my cellulite multiplying. I flail pathetically back and forth across the pool (did I mention I'm not a particularly fantastic swimmer?) gasping desperately for air as my fertility was forever obliterated (oh, well, I've already spawned offspring twice, so maybe I've met my cosmic quota). I get out a couple of times, but I'm drawn back within a minute each time because once out of the water, I can see my decidedly squishy middle, and am disgusted back into self-torture. I think that having already been in the water, it won't be so bad when I get back in. But it keeps getting colder. Finally, after about 45 minutes of masochistic obsession, I hobble out of the pool, quivering like a great pudding (that's great as in tasty, not big), my desperate breaths jiggling my quasi-rolls, and crawl into the shower where I curl into a standing fetal position and pray for a swift death.
My wife tells me I'm an idiot savant. I tell her to drop the savant part and she'll be warmer. After all, after my time in the giant liquid cryogenic freezer, one of us should be.

Another (much shorter) hiatus

2005-03-31T16:24:00.000-05:00

Although I will still try to get in a post or two tonight or tomorrow, I will be out of commission next week. But please feel free to read and comment on my older posts until I can return and slake your blogging thirst.

Land of Goshen (Nebraska) (All New HOT UNRATED Director's Cut!)

2005-03-28T09:37:00.000-05:00

The cats were howling the forlorn moan of a dying banshee as we crossed the border into Wyoming. Each whimpering mew made me clench my teeth and the steering wheel a bit tighter as I contemplated 3 days of them carrying on in their sandy tongue about what I'm sure they considered to be a feline Bataan Death March. Although I had lived outside of Utah before, moving this time was especially difficult for me. My two years in Russia were so foreign, so bizarre, that they were in a class by themselves. Besides, this time I knew I would never come back.
So, as Shawna can attest, I was not dealing particularly well. As we packed the semi with all of our belongings, I kept trying to make the case to throw everything we owned away except our baby, our cats, and, of course, my computer (as if I could go on with my life without playing The Sims).

"Come on, honey, we don't need couches...Why do we need a crib and a porta-crib?...I'm sure they sell beds in North Carolina, let's just get a new one...Our underwear sure takes up a lot of room...", and so on down my spiral of crazy.

Of course, as we entered into the dry-weed wasteland that is Utah's northeastern neighbor, I was prepared to jettison the kitties, too. The semi had left two days before, and our car was packed to the brim with all of the crap we forgot to put in the truck, our baby, our cats, and a heavy dose of apprehension. I was headed to graduate school (at UNC-Chapel Hill) and a new life. If only it didn't take so effing long to traverse this great country of ours.
I now look back at that crossing into Wyoming with a bit of condescending tongue-clicking...(click, click) how naive I was. My trip didn't suck yet.
However ugly Wyoming may be, it is a tropical paradise compared to the suicide-provoking monotony of Nebraska. We were barely a hundred miles in to that wondrous state when the timing belt in our Neon blew itself apart with a hearty "oh, for fuck's sake", decimating three out of the four cylinders and my last shred of sanity along with it. I'm certain that the torrents of profanity that hissed between my grinding teeth imprinted themselves on the mind of my then ten-month old little girl, and that they will translate into some expensive therapy further on down the line.
So there I was, cursing with wild, frothing passion as my Neon sat inert (pun intended) on the side of a highway in the harrowing emptiness of western Nebraska. I calmed myself down from fury to mere seething, and picked up my cell phone. No reception. As I sat with my brows furrowed in labyrinthine contortions that wound my entire face into a single hideous knot of frustration, my darling wife calmly got the baby out of her seat, wrapped them both in a blanket, and stood by the side of the road attempting to look as utterly pathetic as possible. Being the bastard that I was, I remained in the car, angrily despairing, as Shawna and Victoria stood stoically, the piercing prairie wind whipping through their hair, and in general looking like the pioneer cliche in every other painting at the Church museum.
Eventually, somebody took pity on us long enough to let us use their cell phone to ring up the highway patrol, and then speed away. An hour later, the single highway patrolman assigned to the entire post-apocalyptic western half of Nebraska found us, called up a tow truck, and gave my baby her first (and god willing her last) ride in the back of a police cruiser as we all headed to the nearest outpost of civilization...the sprawling metropolis of Ogallala, Nebraska (nicknamed the Gomorrah of the West...no, really).
(To be continued...)

Where was I? Right. Gomorrah of the West.
Such is proudly proclaimed on many of the city's numerous historical markers, hearkening back to the time where one could stock up on the salacious pleasures of drink, cards, and the clap before heading on through that sin-parched wasteland of Utah on the way to California or Oregon. Of course, we were traveling the other way.
So, the rescue squad of tow-truck man and overworked cop dumped us at what looked to be the "Bates Motel"...only lacking the taxidermic decor and sparkling dinner conversation with the proprietor. If it had not been nigh unto midnight, we would have turned around and handcarted it across the freeway to a more reputable establishment. Even the fact that our ten month old found a new teething toy in the form of a huge former cockroach within thirty seconds of hitting the floor in our "room" (scare quotes are not only descriptive here, but mandatory) couldn't overwhelm our physical and emotional fatigue, and we took turns huddling on the bed with Victoria while the other made faintly pleading calls for help to our parents. Shawna's mother's response, as always was her constant condescending dismissive refrain to just "pray about it", as if 1) we hadn't been praying with varying levels of reverence all afternoon and 2) praying alone was going to miraculously reassemble our engine...for free. Of course, she was unhappy that we were making the trek in the first place. You see, in her estimation, I was defaming my own manhood by allowing Shawna to (gasp!) work, while I would be going to school...real men are not girly-humanities degree holding-intellectuals. Real men weld pipes (presumably by praying really hard about them).
Unfortunately, the only "real men" in Ogallala who could fix our engine claimed to be booked up through the end of the week, so we were going to have to make the most of an extended, miserable detour.
The prayers that we had said (despite the horrible urge to convert to a Kali cult just to spite my mother-in-law) began to be answered by the incredibly open and caring people of that city. One night, after we had recounted a much sunnier rendition of our plight to our waitress at dinner, the man sitting behind us introduced himself as the local veterinarian (because he loves children...sorry, couldn't resist), and told us that he would be happy to give us any help that we might need with our cats and to loan us his extra car for the week. Just like that. For all he knew, we were psychopathic cannibalistic conmen, but he offered all of this to us simply, as if doing so were the natural response to meeting strangers in trouble. All that week, we met people like him... trusting, generous...and our families (for the most part) supported us materially and morally. Our breakdown became one of those freaking Oprah-like reaffirmations. Whatever little bit of jaded bastard in my heart had grown from my natural cynicism was shamed into retreat by people who were just reflexively kind. For those who know me, that is an impressive (if somewhat temporary) feat.
I recall that week now happily...the people, dusk at the shores of Lake McConaughy as a massive blanket of black clouds rolled in across the distant plain, the fudge at the Tonsorial Palace...and I wouldn't trade it for anything at all. And all of this because I was too damn lazy to check my engine before setting off on a 2 thousand mile drive.

Of eating and vegetables

2005-03-27T09:13:00.000-05:00

Apparently, the two most common words in any language on earth are "Terry Schiavo". Nobody who has any access whatsoever to any media outlet in the known universe has the capacity to speak of anything but that woman who is surrounded by psychos on all sides either allowing her to starve to death or proclaiming that doing so will bring down the eternal wrath of an angry god and decimate all known existence forever.
I have told anybody who will listen to PLEASE LET ME STARVE TO DEATH if I'm ever in a persistant vegetative state, just so there's no freaking doubt about my wishes. Being really damn hungry for a couple of weeks is better than fifteen years of half-life in my book. But then again, that's just me. What did she want?
Is this lady's husband lying about a conversation they supposedly had watching TV a few years back? Possibly. If he's telling the truth, though, how could we do anything but respect her wishes? As a matter of law, there is no doubt whatsoever that things have proceeded in an orderly way. I sure as hell want Shawna to be able to make those decisions if I'm ever in that situation. In either case, every reputable neurologist that has personally examined her (Terry Schiavo, not Shawna) has concluded that her cerebral cortex is pretty much soup and that there is no hope for recovery. I'm not as enthusiastic about starving her as some seem to be, but after everything else this lady has been through, after fifteen years as a vegetable, unless somebody can show me compelling evidence that these were not her wishes, then I can only greet her passing with somber acceptance.

Re-Emerging from the Swamp

2005-03-27T08:56:00.000-05:00

All of my good intentions to keep this thing going (did I say keep? I meant get), were thwarted by an extended stay in a hotel with the incompetent old malcontent of a janitor at the head of the hi-tech wifi access team. Daily, as I enjoyed my Shirley Temple in the hotel lobby during happy hour, I would pester the snuggly curmudgeon with wistful smiles and hopeful pleadings. I hope to hell he doesn't think I was flirting.
In any case, I'm back. My one reader (Beck, that's you) can look forward to a new posting later in the day. I'll make it fun, I promise.

The Glories of Language through Crotch Humour

2005-02-24T08:32:00.000-05:00

There's a blizzard out, at least by wussy east coast standards. Whenever my co-workers/friends/random people at gas stations wail on and on about the hellish weather in our nation's capitol, I snicker condescendingly. My ass has done time in that gargantuan freezer known as Northern Russia in January, so unless you actually have ice forming on your nose hair underneath two scarves, maybe you should just gird up your loins and deal.
Speaking of Russia and loins...
Although my mild profanities may suggest otherwise, I spent two years of my life as a Mormon missionary in the former-Soviet wonderland. Missionaries come in twos or threes, because who can eat just one? (People always figured we were queer...a misconception not at all helped by the term "companionship" for a set of missionaries. Hi, I'm a strangely dressed American who doesn't date...and this is my companion.)
So one fateful evening, I'm with a fairly new missionary who isn't exactly up to scratch on his Russian, and we're teaching this fun little family the second or third in a set of lessons about the church. Anyway, the greenie is feeling it, and wants to tell them how grateful he is for his membership in the Church. The only problem is, he knows neither the word for "membership" (chlenstvo) nor the fact that you abso-f'ing-lutely HAVE to have the complete phrase "membership in the Church" (chlenstvo v tserkvi).
So, with tears welling in his eyes from his utter conviction on this point, the kid waltzes irretrievably into the annals of linguistic faux-pas history:

"Ya tak blagodaren za moj chlen."
(I'm so grateful for my member)
"on mne prinosil stol'ko schast'ja"
(it's brought me so much joy...)
"...i ja znaju, chto esli ja budu ego pravil'no ispol'zovat, on prinesjot i drugim ljudjam radost'!"
(...and I know that if I use it correctly, it will bring other people joy, too!)

At this point, the tears are welling up in all of our eyes as the family and I all struggle to keep our pants dry from laughter.

"Dude, you're telling them that you're grateful for your wong."

It was, without a doubt, one of those spiritual experiences from my ministry that I will cherish forever.

An Ambitious Fruit Fly

2005-02-23T20:00:00.000-05:00

I have a very distinct memory from my fifth-grade year. Every time I hear the rousing fanfare from Europe's immortal The Final Countdown (which is every couple of years or so), I'm plunged back into the moment...the crowd of kids backing off in a mighty ripple, gaping, dumbfounded, jealous as I descended into the schoolyard, beckoning for Amanda to join me in my gyrocopter that I had constructed out of an old lawnmower and particle-board and then glide off over the Great Salt Lake, free of brine stench and glistening with the fire of the western sun, all to the tune of that masterful power-ballad.
This is, of course, a heap of bullshit. Beyond the obvious fact that the laws of physics and the engineering prowess of ten-year-old boys do not generally combine to produce even decent pinewood derby cars, much less fully functional aircraft, there are the giveaways of the stinkless Salt Lake, the implication that I was at school until sundown, and the fact that Europe, well, sucks. Come to think of it, I was such a hopeless dork that Amanda, I'm sure, would have never gotten into that gyrocopter, and not just because it was a deathtrap that smelled strongly of the ragweed from my backyard.
But to me, it was real in that I was going to do it, just like at one point I was going to build a vacuum-cleaner hovercraft propelled by bottle rockets and construct an underground spy fortress in my buddy Taylor's backyard. Just who we were going to spy on is a bit hazy, now, but I know that I could sit down and reproduce the plans for the fortress, complete with periscope and IT nerve center consisting of Taylor's Commodore 64...playin' Mappy and Spy Hunter all night long was sure to drive a stake through the heart of the Evil Empire.
Nineteen years later, apparently, I haven't changed a whole lot. You see, I'm going to keep up this blog. I'm going to turn it into a clearing house for linguistics, politics, and super funny satire. And while my wife wouldn't necessarily appreciate Amanda jumping into this gyrocopter with me and taking off over the valley o'Zion, I swear I can hear those dulcet tones of the cock-rock gods cooing that I'm heading to Venus....doodle-oo doo, doodle-oo doo doo...