With Your Hands

I discovered that they sell burek, the local meat-filled pie, at the cake shop up the street, and so have taken to eating a burek and a piece of cake for lunch most days. The woman at the shop knows me now and knows that I only like burek--not the cheese or potato filled versions--but still waits for me to ask for it every time. Some days they have it and some days they don't, depending, I guess, on whether this woman decides she feels like baking meat that day.

This whole transaction could be cumbersome, but it struck me the other day that I actually like it, that asking for something and, one time out of ten, being told they don't have it, makes it a little tastier each time they do. Probably there's some psychological phenomenon that describes this.

This is also psychologically interesting: if she doesn't have burek, I don't buy cake. I leave empty-handed. Mose thinks I'm punishing the woman for not cooking my lunch. I hope not. She's pretty and shy and nice.

His Middle Game

We're studying chess. We play with men of all different ages and have yet to win a match. In his heart of hearts, Mose would like to spend at least an afternoon in the central plaza, moving the waist-high pieces around the pensioneers, ignoring the strategy advice, coming out on top. Of course, Mose will never admit to this. He'll say, "I'm not good enough." And he'd be right.

Les Poules Couvent

Mose and I spent the day with a vigorous sixty-five year old Bosnian man who likes to refer to himself as a "sportsman" and makes a soft cooing sound whenever he sees an overweight girl between the ages of eighteen and twenty nine. He likes overweight girls and apparently always has, which strikes me as interesting since he's 5'3 in hiking boots.

I asked Mose if he thought that it might be common for short men to favor obese women. He said he didn't know. I asked him if he would rather be a short man or an overweight woman. "A short man," he said. "Because then you get to have sleep with obese women." I thought that was an interesting response. I didn't know what to make of it.

At the споривная

Mose and I went to the park today with a two-year-old who only speaks Russian.

At one point, she pissed on the slide, a little puddle at the top, which I threw sand on, the way I'd seen old stable managers do. I thought that was pretty clever until, later, I had to come back and sweep it off the backside of her fleece pants after she'd sat in it.

At another point, a woman arrived with her two-year-old son. She asked me how old my daughter was, and I said, "Two," since that's all I knew how to say in Russian. Only later did it occur to me that this was probably the first time in my life that I'd ever lied and said I had a child.

"Do you think there'll ever be a time when I lie about having a child and it matters?" I said to Mose.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe."

"Do you think I'll lie about having a child and not have one, or do you think I'll lie about not having a child and have one?"

Mose didn't answer right away. Then he said, "I really don't know what you're talking about."

Nonplussed

For the last two days, I've tried in vain to make conversation with the Russian girl that lives next door.

She's three years old.

"Do I need a partner?"

I enrolled in Salsa classes, and so am part of the burgeoning Latin dance movement in central Russia. Now, I'm getting e-mails that include lines like this one:

В городах всего мира обычные люди сталкиваются с тайной, со сладкой меланхолией, с чувственным удовольствием и удовлетворением от общения через танго.

Roughly translated:

"In cities around the world normal people collide in the mystery, the sweet melancholy, the sensuous pleasure, and the satisfactory contact/intercourse of the tango."

I asked Mose if he wanted to come with me. He wouldn't look at me.

At first you think it's...

In the Circus of the Charge of the Light Brigade, Michael Conley will be third. Before the lions. After this guy.