America: Only the Interesting

Since I mostly write for an American audience, it was easy to blog while in Ukraine: anything that was unique or interesting for me was likely to be unique or interesting for them.

Since I've gotten home, though, I've become the quintesential American and feel I have nothing much to write about. The job hunt has not been going too well. I've got some apps out and may have landed a writing gig, but things are taking their sweet time in that department. I've got some ideas on the burner but I'll talk about them only if they start to boil. Mostly, though, I sit around and watch DVDs and read. Seriously, I barely leave the house. It's is a complete 180 from the life I was living in Ukraine and in Ukraine I used to think how sad it was that most of America sits around mindlessly entertaining themselves. Ah, sweet irony.

In the meantime, though, I'll condense the past two weeks down into the most interesting tidbits:

1) Drama between my sister and her baby daddy meant she came back to live at home. This meant that, for the first time in a decade, my immediete family is now all living under one roof. It's been chaotic, but also really nice. On several occasions all of us have ended up lying on my mom's bed in the evening, forming a sort of circle with our bodies with Isabell running around in the middle and trying to surprise us with flying tackles. We sing children's songs to her and she does the movements to "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and falls down on cue to "Ring Around the Rosie" and it's just the way things should be.

2) Christmas. Christmas has been very noisy this year because Isabell is an 18 month-old, and she's an 18 month-old that's not happy unless an Elmo DVD is playing all day every day (and will begin yelling "Elmo! Elmo!" as soon as the credits roll, which is her uncle's cue to restart it). In addition to the constant singing of said furry red muppet, she loves, loves, LOVES these little Christmas dolls that, like many of her dolls, will play a song whenever you squeeze its right hand. Her favorite game is to overlay the Elmo singing with the singing of three to four of these dolls at the same time. Other than my inability to concentrate on anything when this is going on and my occasional desire to bury these dolls in the backyard, it led to one funny incident: Isabell opened one of her Christmas gifts from me, which was a handmade doll from Ukraine. Not handmade as in really valuable, handmade as in this nice, soft little doll meant for babies to play with. The problem was as soon as she opened it, she started squeezing its right hand. When she realized it wasn't going to play any music, she immedietely lost interest. My present from my mother was a remote controlled car. I didn't realize how perfect a gift this was for me until I got it. I now chase Isabell around the house with it and get yelled at a lot.

3) I have no plans for New Years because after attending only one meeting of the group of Russian speakers I was supposed to spend New Year's Eve with, I was kicked out. Specifically, I was kicked out because I said some things I shouldn't have in a blog about the meeting. On the whole the blog was positive, but I gave some negative observations of some of the members (actually, it was just a blow-by-blow account about two of the older guys who were not-so-subtly trying to chat up the women, including a married woman and a 17 year-old). The group organizer read it and emailed me to tell me I had no right to judge people I just met (this is true) and was no longer in the group. This bummed me out because I really liked the people I met, just didn't like the two older guys. And now I have nothing to do on New Year's.

America: Birthday Pig Roast (Pics)

So this was most of my birthday: a Cuban pig roast. Ironically, there weren't many Cubans at it. It was hosted by Bret, a friend of my mother's who learned the art from her and my grandfather. They had planned the roast thinking I would be in Ukraine on my birthday, which had been the original intention. But here I was back, and it's not like the roast could have been cancelled because about 30 of Bret's friends had been invited. My sister and Isabell couldn't come because of problems between her and Bret and there it was: it was my birthday and I was going to a party where I knew almost no one and my sister and Isabell couldn't even be there.

As things go it wasn't bad, I was just in a funk about everything, this in-between transition state where I am back home and miss Ukraine and my friends and certainly the fun I'd be having if I was there, but I didn't really want to go back and if I was able to teleport there I still probably wouldn't want to be there, I wanted to be here, with my family. It was just, well, strange.

In the end, I asked myself what I'd rather be doing and the answer quite quickly came back: climbing. So Jerry and I left, got my gear and went to the gym. I got to break in my birthday present to myself, my new rope, and led four new routes. After that, I was still in a mood, so I just climbed one route over and over until I got an adrenaline high and felt a whole lot better in the world. In Ukraine, at least, it would be to cold to climb...


Pig, Cuban style, roasted on a barbeque built of cinder blocks. When I was a kid, I'd help my Uncle Rene hang up the freshly slaughtered pig on the side of the house and spray it out with a hose before it was marinated and put over the coals.


Jerry, my grandfather and my mom


My grandparents, cutting apart the pig


Roast pork, black beans and rice and fried plantains...you can't get this in Ukraine


Splitting open the pig's head to get to the brain.


At pig roasts in Miami, my second-cousin Lazaro and his brothers would fight over who got to eat the brains. Since they weren't around, Bret got the honors

America: Russian Meetup (Pics)

I typed "Russian" and "Orlando" into Google and up came www.orlandorussians.com. Whuda thunk? It's a group of Russian speakers that meet once a month to, well, speak Russian. And their next meeting happened to be a week away.

I RSVPed the meeting and met the group (about 25 showed up to the meeting but there's more) spread out over three tables in a Chinese restaurant. I had been worried about my Russian having already rusted off: I hadn't spoken a word of it in near two weeks. But as I sat down at an offered seat and started chatting, I found it hadn't really left.

Talking with those around me confirmed what I had guessed from the member pictures: a lot of Slavic women and their American husbands. Surpringly, many of the women were from Ukraine although, ironically, few spoke Ukrainian. The two near me were from Crimea and Odessa, respectively, where Ukrainian is rarer. So when I broke out a few phrases of Ukrainian, the Kazakstanian to my left and the Russian from near Vladivostok across from her encouraged a conversation because they wanted to hear it. Before I had a chance to confess I wasn't very good at it, the Ukrainians begged off first, giving the same excuse. So on we went in Russian, with everyone thinking I was some sort of polyglot.

Other than the bevy of Slavic brides, there was one couple nearby that were both American and had gotten as far as learning the alphabet. They had joined an Eastern Orthodox church had had been encouraged to do mission work in Russia by their Russian priest, hence their joining the group. But while they were to learn, two guys there in their 40s were there for a bit more (I'm keeping out names to protect everyone's privacy).

The Ukrainian from Odessa and her Vladivostokian friend came to the restaurant late and sat across from me. Both were older, late 30s to early 40s, and both, particularly the Odessan, had low levels of English. I asked them in Russian how they had come to America and got the usual answer that I got from every woman I met that night save the Orthodox one: got married. The Odessan met her husband literally on the street and while he didn't speak Russian nor her English, the courtship moved on through his interpreter and here she was. The husband was in Chicago on business, she said, but one of those two guys must not have understood it because he got up to go to the bathroom and then hung back upon return, saying making everyone get up to get back to his seat on the other side of the table wasn't worth it. "You know what, it might be easier if I just sat there," he said, pointing beside the Odessan, which meant just as many people had to get up for him to get seated, but now he was seated beside her. This put him square across from me and we talked a bit. He had visted both Ukraine and Russia, he said, but he didn't speak Russian. He was looking to learn, but he seemed to me his was more just learning to look because not one word of Russian came out of his lips the entire dinner.

The Russian from Vladistovok and I talked quite a bit before she said her daughter should come to the dinner. She called her daughter on her cell phone and it seemed the daughter didn't want to come, but mom put forth and order and that was that. "She'll sit there," said mom, waving at the empty seat beside mine. Huh. This could go any number of ways.

The daughter arrived a little later, in a bit of a huff, but she was pretty. And pretty young. This did not stop the guy across from me to calling the name of his American friend down the table, pointing two fingers at his own eyes and then pointing at the daughter, who was now making her way between the tables. The other guy flashed him a thumb's up.

The daughter sat down beside me, purse in her lap, not looking at anyone. She ordered iced tea in English, but then only spoke in Russian, which froze out the guy across from her. The mom started admonishing her to be social and started singing my praises from what little she knew of me and I just wanted to put my head in my hands. The daughter and I did get to talking, but mostly it was her complaining about America. I asked her if there was anything she did like. "The money," she said. "And the stores." Yeah, this wasn't going to work, further cemented a few minutes later when I asked her where she studied and found out she was still in high school. And 17. I went back to talking to mom.

All in all, though, it was a lot of fun. I hardly ate any food I was talking so much, and I ended up being something of a celebrity as I was the only American at my table who could speak Russian (or, at least, the only one who was speaking in Russian) and because I had a lot of common ground with the Slavs because I was familiar with their culture and politics. Many of the women hadn't been back to their home countries in years and I had just gotten back from the region less than two weeks before.

Because we were all spread out on tables, I only got to meet the half-dozen people around me, but there's a New Year's party the group is throwing that I'm excited about. I'm glad the group is mostly older, as well, because I am more into making contacts, making friends and practicing Russian, and meeting a bunch of hot 20-something wives would just spell trouble.

And so do their 17 year-old daughters.


Some of the Russian Meetup Group


The 17 year-old

America: Law-Abiding Nation

So on numerous occasions, I heard from Ukrainians (or read in their texts) that America is "a law-abiding nation". I laughed at first, thinking that we're a "law-bending nation", always trying to scam a deal, cheat on our taxes, etc. Aren't we a nature born of rebellion and have been breaking the rules ever since?

What I didn't realize until after a while of living in Ukraine is that yes, we have a lot of laws and tend to obey them whether we want to or not.

I got the hint that Ukrainians weren't such a law-abiding people (or didn't have the laws in the first place) when recreation included rapelling off condmended bridges in full view of police or climbing up the scaffolding of the largest bridge in Kyiv to see the view from the top. I always thought "won't we get in trouble?" when, actually, no, we wouldn't. I got the hint when we were allowed to climb all over centuries old castles or when Polissya thought it was ridiculous that I wanted to get parental permission forms for the climbing wall and the climbing camp. In Ukraine, your personal saftey is your own and in that way, they have more freedom than the land of the free. Actually, the length America goes to protect its own citizens (or, more accurately, protect itself from litigation) makes Ukrainians laugh. Mostly they don't know about it, because there's no plastering of warning signs and detailed instructions (a Ukrainian warning sign for an open manhole cover is to put some tree branches sticking up out of it so that you see it), but a minor example that drew chuckles was the big "WARNING" label on my American-made climbing harness that shows if you don't double back the strap. "Only in America," said one of my Ukrainian climbing parnters.

The most I ever saw the cops get involved in the lives of the citizens (other than trying to extract bribes) was during Eurovision. I saw a drunk guy hanging off of a bridge over the water eighty feet below him, a sure death if he fell. The cops went out after him, pulled him back, yelled at him and let him go.

But I didn't realize (or rather, had forgotten) how involved the law was in life in America. I got my car back from my sister and the first time I parked it in front of the house (on the grass, off the street), my mom told me I had to repark it so it faced in the direction of traffic. Why? No one knows. Maybe it makes things look prettier. But it's a regulation my sister got a ticket once for not doing, so I went and reparked the car. In Ukraine I could have parked the thing on a sidewalk (which is only slightly more frequent than driving on the sidewalk, which I've seen happen dozens of times) and no one would have cared.

I am currently helping my step-father tear down a small garage that he built on the side of the side of the house at the expense of serveral thousand dollars. Than the county told him that it was against regulations and needed to come down. It wasn't breaking any saftey rules, it was just against housing regulations about the way the houses should look. If he had put a tarp over the top of it instead of a roof (white trash all the way!) it would have been within regs because it wouldn't have been "permanant." But because he put some time and effort into doing it right, it needs to come down. And then to rub salt in the wound, he had to go pay for a demolition permit in order to have the time to take it down, or else they would have started fining him thousands of dollars a day. As soon as I was told this I thought "this would never happen in Ukraine." You could build a banya extention out on your balcony supported by flattened soda cans and stale string cheese and at most the cops would ask to use it.

In Zhytomyr, you could walk down the street with an open beer bottle, hike down your pants and begin pissing against a building while throwing said beer bottle into the street in full view of everyone and while you might get some dirty looks for not pissing in an alley like everyone else, no one, not even the cops, would bother you. Trust me: I've seen it more than once. And maybe that's why Ukraine doesn't look um, as "nice" as America, but believe it or not it's the natural extension of copious amounts of personal freedom.

I was driving yesterday and wanted to make a phone call on my new cell phone but couldn't remember if that was against the law or not. I remember there being a ruckus in the media about it, but didn't know if I'd get pulled over for doing it. It's all put me in a slight state of paranoia every time I leave the house, trying to remember the minutae of the legal realm because I have a hazy memory that there are a lot of laws but I don't remember what they all are. Living in a permanent state of paranoia about getting in trouble with the government? Gee, that reminds me of something...don't they have a word for that...wasn't there another government that was like that...well, I better not think about it because the thought police might give me a fine...

America: Why I Will Not Watch Television Ever Again

For the past decade or so, I have not watched television. I watched a lot all through high school, but at college lived in a dorm without cable and found I didn't miss it all that much. Although a huge fan of movies and any television show created by HBO, these were viewed in a series of Blockbuster rentals that spoiled me and lead me to loathe any commercial break whenever I sat down to watch television at other people's houses. Although those DVDs and videos were watched on a television set, I didn't even have that in Ukraine, instead watching bootlegs on my laptop.

One of my favorite moments in my entire life occured while I was teaching one of my eighth grade classes in Oklahoma City. My kids knew I'd traveled a lot and done many things: they got stories and slide shows and videos, all part of my not-so-hidden effort to make them want to experience as much of the world as possible. I usually got the question: "Mr. Reynolds, where do you get time to do all this?" and my answer was: "I make the time because it's important to me" but that was never completely honest: I never conciously made time; it just always seemed to be there. If I was ever short a few hours, I just slept less.

But here was the moment: I mentioned (in response to a question about a show) that I don't watch TV. Silence descended. Then one of my kids, a screwed up expression on his face, slowly said "imagine all the time you must have." That's when I made the connection that, yeah, I probably have a lot more hours in the day simply because I don't regularly watch TV and that leads me to do a lot of other things. But that moment of precious realization on his part has stuck with me since. So since then my answer to "where do you get the time?" has been "I don't watch TV."

But I do have more free time now, so when I got back to America and my mother's monstrous television set, I turned it on. The first thing that came on was Dr. Phil. I have heard of him the way I have heard of many cultural icons: reading about them. I have read quite a bit about Survivor and American Idol and dozens of other shows even though I have never seen them. Other shows, like Lost and Entourage, I read about and then zealously watched on pirated or purchased media. I like that I don't get sold to when I am entertained.

So I knew who Dr. Phil was, but I was not prepared for what I saw. He was interviewing three people: a man, his wife and the wife's mother. At interest was a lie detector test that the man had just taken about whether he had molested his own daughter. Dr. Phil slowly read each question: "have you at any time put your penis into ...'s vagina?" To every question the man answered "no" and to every question Dr. Phil said "the test says you are deceptive." At which point I wanted to throw up. The mother was just shaking her head and saying vile things to the father, but was not attempting to claw his eyes out, which was the appropriate response, although the far more appropriate response would have been this questioning occuring in a police department because WHO THE FUCK GOES ON NATIONAL TELEVISION IF THEY SUSPECT THEIR DAUGHTER HAS BEEN MOLESTED?

So I was caught on all ends: the revolting disgust at the father, the revolting disgust at the mother for coming on the show, the revolting disgust at Dr. Phil for having the show (furthered by the fact that he probably thought he was doing a civil service) and more and more disgust at the audience, the advertisers and anyone who kept watching for reasons that they probably didn't understand but were all subconciously purient.

I turned it off in mid-sentence and have not turned it on since, nor plan to. There is nothing on television that I want to see. If it is worth seeing, it will be vetted by the public in general, I will hear about it and then I will watch it on DVD or will download it and rationalize that at some point I'll buy the whole season on DVD. There isn't a single piece of information or show that I can't get online and at least I will never have to be sickened in 17 different ways and worry about the dowfall of society all in the space of a second ever again.

You don't need the purient. It's healthier to just watch porn.

America: Family (Pics)

I no longer worry about why I came back. My sister and my niece came up from South Florida today. My niece, who I had been warned tends to hide from strangers (and sometimes throws things at them) ran right up to me coming in the door and gave me a hug. She hasn't seen me in a year. In fact, she was only eight months old when I last saw her. But she remembered me.

This afternoon we sat around, hanging out. My mom, my step-father, my sister, my niece and me. We haven't been together for a year, and even last year it didn't feel like this.

When I've come home before, I didn't spend time with my family, I spent hyper-time, time lived intensely because all involved knew it was brief (save for my niece, whose mental cognition didn't go past eating, pooping and configuring her face into an infinite aray of endearingly cute expressions). Even sitting around and watching a movie was a cost/benefit analysis of two hours spent out of a few hundred available before I left yet again.

But sitting around today was different, relaxed, all together and as it should be. I can't remember when it last felt that way and in some ways it never had: my niece and step-father are recent additions to the configuration. So this is what I came back for: a warm afternoon of all of us watching my niece run around and just being with each other without us feeling like "time's-short-we-need-to-be-with-each-other!"

Family. It's why this is home and why I am here. Screw the "somebody/anybody" comment of my last blog. I am home.

P.S. I have the cutest niece in the world.


Me and my niece


My step father and my niece playing with my guitar

America: Back

I am back in America. For three days I have seen family and friends, surfed way too much on the internet and mulled my future. It's good to be back, but I miss Ukraine. I had a purpose there and don't have one here. There I was somebody, now I am anybody. I know this will change and within a few months I'll have a laundry list of projects but for now I feel adrift. This is partly pleasant and partly sad.

On the flight over I met a couple of interesting people, one of whom worked on a yacht that Rod Stewart had been a passenger on. She says he's an asshole, if any one is wondering, but apparently is kid is adorable.

Things I immedietly noticed upon arrival in America:

1) Minorities
2) Lots of English being spoken
3) Overweight people
4) Space: I ate in a restaurant in the airport with plenty of space between the tables and plenty of empty tables. In a public transit area in Ukraine I'd be sharing a table with someone I didn't know.
5) Actual help from airport employees

I'm trying to figure out what to do with this blog. I likely won't be teaching or travelling for some time. Maybe I'll do a "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" thing: America through the eyes of someone coming back to it.

It's funny, because I really had forgotten. I haven't been in the country in a year, and I did a huge adjust this year. Last year I came back twice: for the birth of my niece and Christmas, but was back for short times and mostly spent whirlwind time with family and friends before getting back on the plane. And in those times I still felt very seperate from Ukraine. In the past year I adjusted wholesale. The majority of my time was spent with Ukrainian friends and the majority of my interactions were in Russian. I never adjusted in the clothing department (although it must be said that, even as I type this, I am wearing a pair of tapuchki: Ukrainian house slippers) but a lot of Ukrainian cultural beliefs became my own, even if they didn't make sense (looking in the mirror to ward of bad luck if you forget something in your apartment and have to return). I don't think you can live somewhere for more than two years and not adjust: if I have learned anything, it is that the human psyche is designed to adapt, and subconciously so.

So this might be a lesson in American values as I adjust to them and maybe I'll just ramble my observations here, all the strange dichotimies of life. For example: I went to a restaurant with a friend. The waiter was uber-friendly (annoyingly so) and was refilling our drinks when they were still more than half-full. A) There are no free-refills in Ukraine and B) You'd have to hunt down a server to get one even if you wanted to pay for it. So take this amped-friendly service (which I had missed) and contrast it with this: I was driving yesterday and discovered I was in the wrong lane to turn at the light. I rolled down my window, smiled and motioned to the SUV beside me, inquiring the older woman driver if I could pull ahead of her when the light went green. Her expression turned to one of anger and she squinted her eyes and forcefully mouthed the word "NO!" It shocked the hell out of me. There isn't a Ukrainian in the world world who wouldn't have let me get there. Ukrainians are really rude in some senses, but they'll get off a packed bus so you can get out, give you detailed directions (if they don't take you there themselves) and generally try to help each other out (Communism did breed communalism). So while they'll generally always work as little as they have to (hence the service), they wouldn't make someone have to drive off and make a later U-turn (as I did) just because they didn't want you pulling in front of them.

I tried to figure out why she reacted that way and the best I could come up with is that it affronted her that I would make her wait for my own gain, or that she had earned that spot and I was trying to selfishly take it (like line-jumping). And then I remembered that a few years ago I wouldn't have asked: I would have put my car nose in front of her's (telling myself that she owned an SUV and deserved it) and muscle my way into the spot.

I guess Peace Corps does change you.