Red Tide

I don't know why some women won't let you fuck it when it's bleeding. I was thinking of this and I thought "maybe it's because of the red blood our lord and saviour spilt while hanging on the cross on Calvary!" and I had a cataplexy attack, laughing to myself on the inside. I think some Catholics probably really think that way though.

Slavery

I think that the original black slaves were extremely docile, and that violence was reintroduced through interbreeding with whites.  If you look at other kinds of livestock, the number of males is kept at a minimum in the herd so that it can be controlled - this is true of cattle, sheep and chickens.  You don't herd rams and bulls unless you want to run into major trouble.  Men are more murderous than either of these animals, and yet we were able to enslave them (we couldn't do so to the Indians).  Logic would dictate that you would kill or at the very least castrate all of the men - actually castration would make much more sense given the males' value at auction. 

Perverts

I don't think women really understand what the word 'pervert' means, as they tend to apply this term to all men that like pornography and fantasize about 19 year old girls (read: all men).  My friend Sasha Oleskin likes the smell of unwashed pussy - he prefers it if a woman doesn't take a shower for about three days.  Now that's a pervert for you!  Of course, homosexuals are perverts, but you wouldn't call them perverts - you'd be more specific and say they were homosexual.  I'd say that perverts give themselves away by their bizarre fetishes.  The more bizarre, the more perverted.  If I were to go around looking at 17 year old girls and biting my finger, wanting to rip into their flesh (most assuredly officer, I don't) I guess that would make me a pervert.  Wanking doesn't make anyone a pervert.  Designing chastity belts might.

I can't get rid of these eye floaters.  If I believed in God, I'd consider them evidence of his cruelty or apathy.  Luckily I don't.  If I did, though, apathy would seem more likely than cruelty.  I mean - the extinction of the dinosaurs might have been a subject of more than a moment's deliberation in this universe of billions and billions of stars.  Whether or not your dumb ass catches a taxi in time to make it home to watch Boardwalk Empire probably isn't.  

The Walking Dead

Sex with old people (in my case, a 35 year old woman) is fucking disgusting.  At best, 35-year old pussy is like an old, broken-in pair of shoes that you feel comfortable wearing.  Woman that age have a certain stench to them.  Whereas sometimes I just want to wrap 19-year old girls' legs around my face, I have to be extremely drunk to eat an older woman out.  They have a grandmotherly quality to their skin - if you'd never seen a woman in her mid-thirties and was told that she was 18, you would assume that she had a skin disease.  The strangest thing is that they don't KNOW they're sexually irrelevant.  They still demand attention, like a an unwanted stepchild.  They seem unable to recognize that your original feigned physical interest in them was inspired by boredom and pity.  It's such an oddity that it's actually easier to obtain an orgasm by masturbating than by having sex.  This must be what gay people feel like when they see women.  I'm lucky I have a 22-year old backup girlfriend - it's just too bad that she's out of town and is afraid of Moscow. 

American TV

American television seems to reflect a value system that is more or less alien to mine.  For example, there are always token blacks on American TV, and they're never inner-city blacks - when some racist character (who is invariably a white trailer trash southerner with a twangy accent) confronts a black guy about being a dumb nigger, the guy invariably says something like 'well actually I'm an endocrinologist at John's Hopkins' or something to that effect.  Then again, you'll never see main characters that are black in a show designed for a white audience (or at least not in the sci-fi crap that I watch).  You quite often see men marry women with children, like in Dexter.  I'd really have to be desperate to marry a woman with two children - not only desperate but financially capable of supporting a family of four.  If you have that kind of cash, you can probably land yourself an Asian or Latin American university student unless you're hideous, and people on television in America never are hideous, are they? (maybe some of the black ones are - I can't really tell with black people)  You never see gays that are total perverts - they're either campy or what the Presbyterian Church likes to think gays are like - nice, well dressed fellows that are cheerful, good neighbors who duck into their bedrooms with their equally charming friends, out of sight, to have man-on-man anal sex.  They never portray guys that are into 15-17 year old girls that way, and I'm sure they're far more common than gays.  I've been watching Falling Skies - it's exactly like Walking Dead except with aliens instead of zombies.

Paid vacations

There's a job waiting out there for a second-rate travel agent that wants to try his hand at pimpin'.  There are hundreds or thousands of women looking for someone to take them on vacation that are willing to throw sex in if the other party is paying, and they're all listed at http://love.mail.ru/travel/ .  I'd do it myself, but I'm not very good at exploiting women - they always end up exploiting me.  I think this girl I know named Olga has managed to find enough men in different places to allow her to go on what she's calling a 'world tour' with her horse.  I mean, assuming she's not lying, HOW IN GOD'S NAME DID SHE MANAGE TO TAKE HER HORSE?  She claims to be in Sao Paulo right now.  Again, maybe she's lying.  I know women that have had random guys pay to take them to, say, Thailand, for example.  Here's one that wants to go to Cyprus or Thailand.  I highly doubt that she has a horse.  Normally you would say, 'maybe it's better to make your money as a hooker, and then travel alone.'  It doesn't work that way - these girls think that sex-for-vacations is more honest/respectable than sex-for-money.  It wouldn't even be all that expensive if you use the discount cruise site http://www.vacationstogo.com/ticker.cfm?t=y.  So 10 days with some girl that's eager to escape from it all would cost about $3000, including flights.  Not bad.

I wouldn't be saving myself much money by living in St. Petersburg.  Flats in the center there cost maybe 2/3 the price of my flat or more.  In Lviv, on the other hand, I'd be paying 1/3 to live right in the center of the city.
I guess the pay in St. Petersburg (which sucks) is better than it is in Lviv (which totally, utterly sucks).  Since I work from home, Lviv makes the most sense.  Besides which, it's close to Europe proper and I have friends living there.  If I can pick up an additional $1,000 from a long-term work-from home editing contract (and after I sell my car), I'm moving.

Time wasters

I have no greater pet peeve than women that agree to go out on a date with me that have no interest in having sex with me.  Usually they want English conversation practice or something - they bore me to tears.  I think they all have the same personality.  They all go to the same dreary places on vacation and eat sushi and drink green tea.  Most of them majored in economics, marketing or linguistics, and haven't visited any city in Russia other than St. Petersburg and where granny lives.  I was at some sad little OGI-crowd-5-years-on place called Masterskaya where they wanted 150 rubles for .5 liters of swill (Jiguli beer) and 350 for mojitos.  I'm sorry, but I'm never going to buy anyone a $12 drink in a city where sex costs the equivalent of seven drinks.  I understand that it's your tradition for the man to pay, even if the woman makes the same amount of money.  It just doesn't make any sense, in light of the pricing model.  Obviously I'm not going to buy a woman seven drinks, but I also have to drink, and when you're pretending to be happy despite having to shell out so much cash, you can't enjoy drinking.  And then there are taxis; I hate cab drivers, but they're a necessity for women, who usually wear heels.  And guess who has to pay?  I'd rather get a hobag and then sate myself with a Coke and a Snickers - it's cheaper and I end the evening with a smile on my face.  Women always drag you to places that reflect that they don't have any concept of how much things cost, like rent.  I'm sure it's fine for some girl that lives in a two-room shithole with her parents, whose mother cooks for her, to spend $10 each on drinks - she doesn't have any expenses.  My revenge will come in the end - once these women hit 30 (quite possibly with fatherless children in tow), nobody will ever want to spend money on them ever again.

New contracts

I don't know if the language school I'm working for has a future.  They don't seem to pay on time - I'm lucky that I have other sources of income.  Given that those sources consist of editing/translation work that I can do from home, there's a good argument for me leaving Moscow.  My recent trip has underscored the fact that this city is far too expensive - even compared to St. Petersburg, which has all the same amenities.  People from Moscow will say of SPB "ohhh well the weather there is awful."  I have news for them - the weather here is awful too.  There are few things less enjoyable than a cool fall day in October in Pennsylvania, and we're experiencing that weather here now, in August, while most Americans (and Serbians, mind you) are still in shorts and whatnot.  Living here means dealing with the weather, along with a bunch of other things.  St. Petersburg, however, has a more relaxed, university-centered lifestyle and is much more trendy.  The cafes there are inordinately better.
Brian used to say (in a booming voice, within earshot of plenty of Russians that could understand him), IF IT WEREN'T FOR THE GORGEOUS WOMEN, I'D NEVER FUCKING COME HERE.  There is more than a bit of truth to that for every foreign male living here.  If it isn't true of them, they're robotic corporate careerists working for the banks and consulting firms that would work in Iraq if the pay was right, and I have no more love for them than most people.  It used to be so easy though - I met a pretty 18-year old girl when I first arrived, had sex with her the second day I knew her, and then dated her for 2.5 years.  I should have married her, because that sort of thing just doesn't happen anymore - lifestyles here haven't changed that much but people's egos have gotten bigger.  You used to be able to get a 1-room apartment (in 2003) near a metro station for about $25,000.  Now the same place would cost you $225,000.  Cola and chocolate cost twice as much despite the exchange rate being the same.  When I arrived here, I was freelancing for a US-based company and so I felt that I had more money than most people - now I feel like I'm squarely in the middle, with the exception of renting a nicer apartment.  Kiev seems like Moscow 10 years ago, but usually when I'm in Kiev, I'm waiting for a visa or something, so I associate it with being frustrated.  Lviv is beautiful but sort of conservative and it's Ukrainian-speaking rather than Russian-speaking like Kiev.  Riga is nice but the British have put all the local girls on the defensive with their ridiculous stag parties.  I could move to Denver, but only if I was married.  At 35, I'm not going to have many chances with university-aged girls there, and I have utterly no interest in women my own age, who usually have children already.

More musings about Serbia/Ukraine

I was only in Serbia for a week because I was stuck there.  I was told I'd get a Russian visa there in one day and had to wait until the following Friday.  I had wanted to spend that time in Budapest (which I'd never seen, and only ended up visiting for 35 minutes) and Lviv (which I've spent weeks in and is probably my favorite city in Eastern Europe).  I was actually afraid to talk to anyone.  We bombed them in 1999, for basically no other reason than that President Clinton wanted to play down the heat he was getting for having gotten a blowjob from a fattie.  Notice that Italy is across the Adriatic Sea from Serbia, their President has sex parties every month, and THEY don't feel the need to take out a few prominent refineries and bridges in the Balkans.  Nonetheless, I will grant you that Serbians love fighting, as well as smoking cigarettes and eating pastries.  I read a traveler's review that claimed that he knew two US marines that attempted to chat up a girl in Belgrade only to get the beating of their lives.  The Park Hotel in Belgrade, which my friend claimed was a dive, had a great breakfast and free WiFi, and was cheap at $50/night.
I decided to visit Sremska Mitrovice for the Roman ruins, which ended up resembling a large, buried sub-basement stretching under the entire 1780's era Austrian-built city of 40,000 people and about 5 pizza places featuring outdoor seating and inexpensive Italian-style ice cream (I guess there's some Roman connection there).  The hotel was a crumbling communist eyesore.  They overcharged me (38 euros a night vs the promised 28) but returned my money when I called them on it.  No A/C, no WiFi.  Ice cream was about 60 cents though, and it was the good kind - glace - rather than your average McDonald's soft serve.
I returned to Budapest, spent another day at the Park Inn, and then headed out to a small resort spa called Banja Vrujci and stayed at http://www.villajelena.co.rs/ for 25 euros per night.  Aside from having no water in the bathroom one morning (low water pressure!, the staffer with the broken teeth said), it was nice, the included dinner was good, and it had a nice pool.  I chatted up a Serbian girl there that was a nurse in Belgrade - she also had some broken teeth.  My friend and I surmised that it must be because they are extremely violent people there and like to punch each other in the face.  How else would you break three of your teeth, all next to each other?  When I finally did spend 15 minutes in the Lviv railway station, I literally kissed the ground because I missed the city so much.  With the money I'm making from home now, I could certainly maintain a higher lifestyle there.  I'll consider it when I sell my car.

Land of the $12 mojito

I have such a love/hate relationship with Moscow.  It's overpriced, and that's the main reason I hate it.  When I arrived here from New York or thereabouts in 2003, it was quite cheap in comparison, and then prices went up.  And up.  Every year.  So did salaries, but now I mostly work from home, so why don't I get the hell out?  I could go somewhere like Denver - I slobber over ads for apartments there because they're so much cheaper and seem so much nicer than they do here.  Then again, who would I be in Denver?  I edit translations into English and teach English to non-native speakers, which sort of implies that I could be an ESL teacher there if I got a master's degree. Then I would spend the rest of my life teaching bored Mexican kids the glories of English.  Then again, I love my apartment.  I live in the center of the city and can enjoy the glory of being somewhat interesting to many, many people, some of which are cute girls.  That's always a plus.

Still, I intend to sell my car and weigh my options.  It has a dent in the roof from where some idiot shoveled ice onto it from the roof of the building.  I was trying to find a standard strong magnet to pull the dent out, and they cost about 10x here what they would in the US.  WTF?  I could probably make good money here charging them $100 to pull the dents out of their cars.  Either that or I'd go Robin Hood style around the city, pulling the dents out of cars whose owners couldn't afford to repair them.  Maybe I'll use a bathroom plunger.  The dent is in the roof, so it's not like I can just bang it out with a hammer.  Then I can get the thing repainted and sell it for $13k.  Nobody needs a car in this city - traffic crawls at about 10 mph for most of the day, thank you Soviet civil engineering.  People just get cars as status symbols, and owning a modest car actually makes some of them feel like they have bragging rights.  Nicol from Yaroslavl recently said "when I lived in Moscow, I had enough money to buy a brand new Honda Civic!!!"  Wow - you'd think she was talking about an Acura or a Lexus.  

Trainspotting

This past week, I returned to Moscow by train from Serbia.  This pretty much isn't meant to be done, at least not in one go.  Serbia is simply too far from Moscow to go directly - you're pretty much better off flying.  But, seeing as a one way ticket would have cost me $400, I figured that I'd be a cheapskate and take the train.  It actually wasn't that bad, after the first two hours.  The first train, to Budapest, didn't have reserved seats.  This means that if you didn't grab a seat early because you were busy fending off a gypsy holding a dirty gypsybaby and trying to buy cigarettes, that you would wind up sitting next to the restroom on the floor and not have a seat until the train arrived at Serbia's second biggest city (and America's biggest target in Serbia during the 1999 war) - Novi Sad.  Maybe the gypsy cursed me.  In any event, I was happy to see Novi Sad, because it meant that I got a seat for the remaining 6 hours to Budapest.  Whereas the Serbian terrain was beautiful and included a lot of red-tile-roofed houses on hills overlooking the Danube, Hungary mostly consisted of sunflowers.  Lots and lots of sunflowers.  I guess that's where the sunflower seed oil in European kitchens must come from.  I spent a whopping 35 minutes in Budapest, one of Europe's greatest cities, in the railway station before boarding another train that would take me to Kiev.  I had a second-class sitting ticket to the border, and then a bed in a 3-room compartment once I was in Ukraine.  Ukrainian trains are insanely cheap to travel in - I paid 13 euros or so for the third leg of my journey.
   Kiev is an amazing city if you're not desperately trying to get back to Moscow.  The girl in my compartment had decided to leave Budapest a day earlier than expected.  Why??  Too expensive!  I didn't mention to her that Ukraine's Chernobylicious capital is dirt cheap by most people's standards.  All in all, I was on trains for almost 4 days.  I had to wait for an available train ticket, which I got on Sunday.

Facebook is limited to 420 characters

As much as 420 is one of my favorite numbers they DON'T sing about on Sesame Street, 420 characters is not enough for a proper post.  That's how many characters Facebook gives you for a profile update.  There were lots of things I may have loved to say about my recent sojourn in Serbia (like about how a lot of early-20-somethings seem to have broken teeth) and couldn't.  I'm the type of person that likes to babble all the time, but I only have a few English-speaking friends in town and they're either sick of me or I don't want to make them uncomfortable with my NSFW outlook on life.