And this is me in the central street of Kharkiv back in 1995:

I’m standing in front of the really great Repertory Theater of Kharkiv. They had some really brilliant productions there that I attended. After Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the Ukrainian theater of the great Ukrainian theater director Les’ Kurbas of the 1920s-1930s was revived here. Kurbas had been executed by Stalin back in 1937 together with every Ukrainian artist of note. Stalin did not kill any Russian-language artists except for the rare cases when they insulted him personally (like the Jewish poet Osip Mandelshtam did.) But he exterminated every Ukrainian of note he could find.

What is really funny is that I considered myself to be hugely fat at that time and was massively tortured by my imagined girth. God, it sucks to be young, seriously. Today, I’m both much plumper and much happier.

Adventures with alcoholism started early for your favorite blogger. . .

 

No, actually, they didn’t. I have no idea what we are drinking here and why my nose is so red but I was not a drinking person back in Ukraine.

In this photo, I’m sitting next to one of my students. You might not be able to guess, but she is 6 years younger than me and attended the same grade as my sister. I gave her private English classes.

P.S. Do tell me whenever the narcissistic trip gets too old. I haven’t even seen these pictures in a long time and now I’m understandably nostalgic.

I just found some old photos and thought it would be fun to share them.

This is me back in Ukraine at the age of 21:

I look very serious, in front of my computer where I’d spend night after night, translating specs for fighter airplanes that were being sold to Iran. No, seriously. This is in the big apartment I shared with husband #1. That computer still had the orange-on-black screen. But I also had the newer version that ran Norton and not MS-DOS like this old one. Actually, I still miss Norton. How ancient does this make me?

Israel was born not least because America was brutally indifferent to Britain’s interests in the Middle East; Israel may die not least because America is brutally indifferent to Israel’s interest in its own survival.

Yes, and the sun came up this morning because the United States made it.

No matter how hard I try to prune total idiots off my blogroll, they keep cropping up. The US is probably to blame.

The employees of my university discovered that one of their very few remaining benefits will be cut. Many workers were really counting on the benefit and this development is a disaster for them.

But when people started exchanging emails on the subject, the administration told them they weren’t allowed to discuss politics on university email. No political party or politician was named in the debate. People simply shared personal stories about how the destruction of the benefit will impact them and their children. Yet somehow, this is considered “political.”

I’m disgusted.

I agree completely with this blogger that the increasingly frequent use of the verb “yell” in situations where somebody expressed mild disagreement is extremely obnoxious.

I keep wondering what hothouses people exist in if anything they perceive as not being hugely flattering turns into a wound. How do they manage to go through life in this state of beatific enchantment where the universe is supposed to show them nothing but extreme adoration?

. . . if s/he uses the expression “to validate somebody’s experience.”

A person who is not in health care and who uses the expression is simply not very bright.

Even Dr. Phil makes fun of this meaningless concept of “validating experiences.”

One has to be very careful with one’s reading matter these days. You open a book and it seems perfectly normal. You start reading and it still looks normal. You continue reading and it is still quite normal.

And then, when you are about 25% in, it turns out to be fantasy.

It’s like one has to invest 5 hours into researching every casual read to spare oneself such unfortunate occurrences.

Today is the international Free Nadiya Savchenko Day.

Nadiya is a 33 – year-old fighter pilot from Ukraine who was captured by the Russians in Ukraine, dragged across the border into Russia, charged with crossing the Russian border without a visa (which she obviously did although not of her own will) and a host of other ridiculous things.

To protest against her illegal detention, Nadiya declared a hunger strike. At first, she accepted glucose during the strike but Russia’s media celebrity Doctor Lisa (like our Dr Phil but with homicidal tendencies) came to visit Nadiya in prison and started making fun of her, saying that this wasn’t a real hunger strike. So Nadiya refused the glucose.

In 2004-5 Nadiya served as part of the peacekeeping forces in Iraq at the request of the US. And today the US leadership is pretending not to know that Nadiya is dying a slow death in a Russian jail.

The only reason for the Russians to keep torturing Nadiya is to demonstrate their utter impunity to the world.

Time is running out for this heroic woman. The Russians are torturing her because through Nadiya they can torture all Ukrainians.

And while the impotent Russian opposition is congratulating itself for today’s useless march, Nadiya is dying and fresh Russian troops are pouring across the border into Ukraine. And the Ukrainian woman who was walking next to the dissident Nemtsov when he was killed has been kidnapped by the Russians and is being held in an undisclosed location by them.

Russians are marching right now to honor the memory of the slain dissident Boris Nemtsov. Many are simultaneously protesting their country’s invasion of Ukraine.

It’s all a waste of time, though. They will march, sloganeer, feel good about themselves, and then go home and let everything remain the same. This is what happened during the protests of 2011-2012 when the same people protested against the falsified elections.

Real change can’t be bought by walking down a street and waving a placard. When Ukrainians wanted change, they went out into the Maidan and stayed there even when they were shot at and a hundred of their comrades died. And after winning, they still didn’t disperse and started the patient, difficult work of state building that is still going on.

All the Russians do is argue whether their tsar is a good tsar or a better one might be found. Their infrequent protests are the protests of consumers, not makers. I have zero hope that today’s event in Moscow will achieve anything.