Inarticulate musings from Russia.
I am not around old people very often, so everything about my grandma is new and interesting and kind of amazing (this woman lived in a country at war--not the kind of war I usually think of, where the U.S. government spends money to fly somewhere and drop bombs, but the kind where enemy soldiers straight up invade. We'll be walking around outside the apartment and she'll point to some statue or memorial of some sort and say, "The Germans were here. This is how close they were to the city."). I want to photograph her all the time but I don't know how. How do you photograph someone who doesn't want to be photographed? I would not have the charisma to be a great portrait artist or a photojournalist.
The language barrier is fun. Sometimes she'll be telling a long story and I will miss some key detail or change of direction and find myself totally lost, not knowing if the subject from the beginning of the story is the current one or if we're onto something else now, midway through a tangent.
Some things about this place feel like coming home. I love the smell of the Metro. It is dry and warm and dirty and stuffy. Fresh dill is always in stock in the refrigerator. I feel like my particular brand of sarcasm and bluntness fits in well here. I know the impoliteness of the street manner will get me in trouble in situations where I have to be more polite than I am used to in the States, but for now I'm enjoying it. A man in the metro asked me the other day how to get to such-and-such a station. My instantaneous thought was one of suspicion. My grandparents would be proud. Because my main method of avoiding pickpocketing and other such street crime is to try to blend in with the Russians I was not about to actually try to figure out where he was trying to go and how to get there. This man was Russian, for crissake, he could read the maps. "I don't know," I said hastily in Russian. It's a good sentence. Easy. Everything's in nominative case, no strange endings, words are short, and I think the verb fits the situation. Russian is so fucking complicated. There is incredibly little I can say before giving myself away as a foreigner. Pitfalls are everywhere. If a sentence is too complex the cases get confusing and I screw up an ending somewhere. If the words are too long I mispronounce. Sometimes a carefully thought-out sentence is met with, "...Yeeaaah that makes sense, but people just don't say it that way," from my grandmother. I'm straying from the point, which is that it felt (while a little rude) also like a perfectly natural and Russian thing to do, to just say, "I don't know" and walk away. No one here is entitled to a second of your time. Perhaps it is this way in all big cities. I have never lived in one so I don't know. But it's cool. No need to dwell. That is my favorite part. No need to dwell.
Sometimes I slip up. I smiled and waved at a child that was twisted around and staring at me from atop his mother's shoulders. I heard him telling his parents about it and, while not all the Russian was understood, I think they told him to not smile at strangers. Ah. Right. Okay. Note to self: don't smile at children. Check.
Sometimes I recognize that my grandmother and I are cut from the same cloth. This woman's moments of wry sarcasm are excellent. Even when she's not making me chuckle fondly she still speaks wisely. Yesterday she said, face puckered from a spoonful of sour red berries, "Oi, why is everything that is healthy so bad tasting?" Spot on, Grandma, spot on. Today, following a story about a doctor's visit that apparently went similarly to the one from the Louis CK standup except that she's got more than 40 years on him she said, "I want to keep living. Everything in the world is changing so fast and it is so interesting to see where it goes. I never would have thought twenty years ago that you could call all the way across the globe on a cell phone. And then all the youth these days are using the internet, too..." I myself sometimes feel behind and overwhelmed by everything on the internet (I can't go very far past the first page of Twitter before getting irritated at the time waste and leaving) so I can't imagine how my grandmother feels. In one of my first weeks here she asked, "How do you know how to use a computer? With a book it is clear; there are pages, and you just turn the page. But with a computer I just don't know. I would be lost." I didn't know how to answer. I was left pondering the expanse of the 60-year gap between our lives.
I am not around old people very often, so everything about my grandma is new and interesting and kind of amazing (this woman lived in a country at war--not the kind of war I usually think of, where the U.S. government spends money to fly somewhere and drop bombs, but the kind where enemy soldiers straight up invade. We'll be walking around outside the apartment and she'll point to some statue or memorial of some sort and say, "The Germans were here. This is how close they were to the city."). I want to photograph her all the time but I don't know how. How do you photograph someone who doesn't want to be photographed? I would not have the charisma to be a great portrait artist or a photojournalist.
The language barrier is fun. Sometimes she'll be telling a long story and I will miss some key detail or change of direction and find myself totally lost, not knowing if the subject from the beginning of the story is the current one or if we're onto something else now, midway through a tangent.
Some things about this place feel like coming home. I love the smell of the Metro. It is dry and warm and dirty and stuffy. Fresh dill is always in stock in the refrigerator. I feel like my particular brand of sarcasm and bluntness fits in well here. I know the impoliteness of the street manner will get me in trouble in situations where I have to be more polite than I am used to in the States, but for now I'm enjoying it. A man in the metro asked me the other day how to get to such-and-such a station. My instantaneous thought was one of suspicion. My grandparents would be proud. Because my main method of avoiding pickpocketing and other such street crime is to try to blend in with the Russians I was not about to actually try to figure out where he was trying to go and how to get there. This man was Russian, for crissake, he could read the maps. "I don't know," I said hastily in Russian. It's a good sentence. Easy. Everything's in nominative case, no strange endings, words are short, and I think the verb fits the situation. Russian is so fucking complicated. There is incredibly little I can say before giving myself away as a foreigner. Pitfalls are everywhere. If a sentence is too complex the cases get confusing and I screw up an ending somewhere. If the words are too long I mispronounce. Sometimes a carefully thought-out sentence is met with, "...Yeeaaah that makes sense, but people just don't say it that way," from my grandmother. I'm straying from the point, which is that it felt (while a little rude) also like a perfectly natural and Russian thing to do, to just say, "I don't know" and walk away. No one here is entitled to a second of your time. Perhaps it is this way in all big cities. I have never lived in one so I don't know. But it's cool. No need to dwell. That is my favorite part. No need to dwell.
Sometimes I slip up. I smiled and waved at a child that was twisted around and staring at me from atop his mother's shoulders. I heard him telling his parents about it and, while not all the Russian was understood, I think they told him to not smile at strangers. Ah. Right. Okay. Note to self: don't smile at children. Check.
Sometimes I recognize that my grandmother and I are cut from the same cloth. This woman's moments of wry sarcasm are excellent. Even when she's not making me chuckle fondly she still speaks wisely. Yesterday she said, face puckered from a spoonful of sour red berries, "Oi, why is everything that is healthy so bad tasting?" Spot on, Grandma, spot on. Today, following a story about a doctor's visit that apparently went similarly to the one from the Louis CK standup except that she's got more than 40 years on him she said, "I want to keep living. Everything in the world is changing so fast and it is so interesting to see where it goes. I never would have thought twenty years ago that you could call all the way across the globe on a cell phone. And then all the youth these days are using the internet, too..." I myself sometimes feel behind and overwhelmed by everything on the internet (I can't go very far past the first page of Twitter before getting irritated at the time waste and leaving) so I can't imagine how my grandmother feels. In one of my first weeks here she asked, "How do you know how to use a computer? With a book it is clear; there are pages, and you just turn the page. But with a computer I just don't know. I would be lost." I didn't know how to answer. I was left pondering the expanse of the 60-year gap between our lives.
