Oh my god...is Russia really in the Crimea? What is happening..

ах, мамочка,
на саночках
каталась я не с тем.

... everyone until you.

how we never, never listen to our parents

it's ironic: they're unlikely to know why i feel such sorrow. whether it's the fact that i identify as russian or not--notwithstanding how complicated that identity is in my case--ukrainians may (rightly) see in me a kind of alien who can't begin to understand it.. any of it.

but despite all this, i feel as if they are my own. i hurt with them. i'm anxious...horrified.. unsettled. i understand the depth of russian hypocrisy, intimidation.. and how deeply that has affected their leadership. perhaps that's what worries me... what frightens me most.

друзья
мы с вами

the distance between our phone calls.. our emails.. is ever-widening.
i can't be the one to fix it. i'm tired

i don't feel worthwhile unless i've written... and i've been horribly, miserably stuck

my time in transit--a time to keep my mind blank; focus on the windows, the street, the people--is totally unproductive

baby steps forward only happen in the bath, in total silence...

on a day like this

 

with piles of this

we received an email to clean the snow off our rooftops as a safety precaution.

having previously neglected to purchase that essential canadian weapon--the shovel--the four of us ran to the roof armed with tiny kitty-litter buckets

where, faced with snow up to our knees and a snowbank at least 3 feet high, we toiled for a good couple of hours until parvaneh saved the day by buying two shovels at the hardware store--the very last ones, in fact, since 30 cm of snow always results in a stampede of desperation equally matched by the swiftness of the shortage.

we discovered, later, that we had outdone ourselves in the usual Rasitsan-Ashrafi fashion. the email, it seemed, had merely asked us to do our "best." but because neither of us had read it carefully--and because we take these instructions much too seriously--the result was something like this:

i really object to the feminine pronoun being automatically applied to all advocates of women's rights--and i come across it all the time

men should be proud to call themselves feminists and women should proudly see men as active members of the movement

in the age of smartphones, apps, and twitter, news of philip seymour hoffman's death reached us all in seconds. i wonder how he would've reacted to this..

probably with a hint of irony and a quiet smile

terribly saddened by his loss
RIP