Days 176-182 - NY, NY - Week 2 - "When in Rome" busy-ness

The rhythm of Manhattan is contagious. Immediately upon entering the island you are sucked into its busy-ness, and without further ado you start running around like a headless chicken in a futile attempt to fit a thousand very important activities into a standard day, somehow always forgetting in your scheduling frenzy that it cannot be stretched beyond the allotted 24 hours.

I have been in the city for only two weeks, but I'm already exhausted. Not in a bad way, don't get me wrong. But completely spent, nevertheless. Why? Well...

Monday - Alphabet Jamming

Dima has recently moved to a new place in the Alphabet City, and he asked some friends to help him with decorating advice (I'm flattered by the way). So the objective of our Monday hang-out was inspection of his new apartment followed by making some executive decisions as to what the said apartment is lacking (if anything).

I love this neighborhood - the parks, the willow trees, the funky bars, the oh-so-different from mid-town people, the cute houses, the cheap restaurants. Why didn't I buy an apartment here, again? Aha, I remember that one! Because I wanted to be able to walk to work. Of course, at that time I had no idea that I could ever enjoy living without any job. Oh well, you live, you learn... The good news is that I can walk to the Alphabet City from my home.

Dima and I took a very pleasant stroll from my house to Avenue C and 11th Street, where we met Sasha and Luke for an extremely cheap and disproportionately-to-price delicious dinner at a Cuban restaurant called Cafecito. After multiple mojitos and beers we finally made it to his apartment. It is absolutely lovely. And doesn't really miss anything, except maybe a coffee or a little dining table, but nowadays that is easily solvable with www.craigslist.com. He even has a little fire escape balcony with an awesome unobstructed view of Manhattan. In short, the place is very welcoming and homey, so it took Dima some serious effort to finally get us out of his apartment and into a nearby Banjo Jim's bar for an hour of a pretty good jazz session (the place is very homey, actually, I highly recommend).

I love Manhattan!

Tuesday - Baby Aliza

I went to visit Marina and Dima again today. Baby Aliza is soooo cute. She has this constant look of desperate boredom on her face, it's hilarious. At the risk of sounding outrageously stupid, I confess that I do wonder if babies ARE, in fact, bored. Holding Aliza for a pretty long time gave me a chance to observe her quite carefully, and I'm convinced that the look in her eyes can be translated as, "Dear God, this whole thing is unbelievably boring and, quite frankly, tiresome. I cannot hold my head. I cannot talk. I cannot crawl. What CAN I do around here? This is really NOT fun... (sigh)"

Then Misha and I went to pick Liang up at JFK. She made it from Cancun to NYC safe and sound - although, apparently, she had almost missed her plane, because the ferry schedule in Cozumel had been recently changed without any prior warning to commuters (what a huge surprise, really).

Wednesday - An Example of Tax-payers Money Well Spent on a Kafka Case Set in New Jersey

My friends in New Jersey have two sons - the older is almost 4 years old and the baby was born this past November. Recently, they have gotten into an incredibly absurd horror story by the name of the Child Services Investigation. A little over a month ago they noticed some behavior changes in the baby - he was more cranky than normal, not eating well, not sleeping well. One night the situation aggravated and he had to be taken to the ER, where it turned out that he had some internal hematoma. A seven-month old baby! What a terrible case. Without a doubt, this is one of the most difficult situations for any parents, but as if this was not scary enough, the ER doctor informed them that she had to report them to the Child Services. What? Why? Apparently, this hematoma looked suspiciously like a result of some trauma. My friend says that the doctor's priorities were strangely skewed: instead of focusing on taking the baby out of danger, she was preoccupied more with the necessity of reporting them to the Child Services immediately... This scene was followed by a month of pure torture: the endless brain scans, the two surgeries, the hospital stay... and theater of the absurd. Regardless of the fact that the original trauma theory was competely ruled out by the scans and it turned out to be something called hydrocephalus, the Child Services couldn't stop the investigation. The older son is taken to the police for interrogation aimed at unveiling potential child abuse in the family. The babysitter is under investigation for the possibility of having dropped the baby and she is not allowed to come back to their house any longer. And a real Kafka cherry on top - a bunch of social workers staying in shifts at their apartment. Observing. Day and night. Just sitting on the chair in the corner of the room. Always there. For over a month. Of course, there's a doctor's report that this hematoma has nothing to do with a trauma, but the Child Services Division has not had a chance to properly process this information yet, so until then the investigation and observation continues...

Of course, it is wonderful that this country provides such type of protection for children, but seriously, Child Services workers are now wasting their time and tax-payers money for over a month in a perfectly normal and loving family's home, while thousands of real abuse cases are getting screwed up.

Thankfully, the baby is getting better by the minute. Soon he will be absolutely fine. But has this ridiculous story taken right out of Kafka unabridged left a scar in the older child's memory? Has it forever affected the whole family? I really hope that they will be able to get over this and completely forget this absurd nightmare.

Thursday - One Ton of Sushi

We had a sushi night with Liang, Michael, Alex, and Ellen today at my place. After I placed our order on the phone, the girl on the receiving end asked, "How many people is this order for?" - "Five" - a long moment of complete silence - "Ma'am, this is A LOT of food" - "Thank you for your concern, but we are fully aware of the quantity and are prepared to consume it."

Of course, we ate all of it. It was delicious. And the evening was a success in every other possible way, as well.

Friday - Finally, Cooking! ...and a Toy Accident

I couldn't bring myself to cook in that beautiful, huge, fully-equipped kitchen in our apartment in Cozumel. I believe it was the fact that the kitchen was an open one. For me, cooking is a very private affair. I need to feel the presence of all the four walls around me at all times and I prefer being alone throughout the entire cooking process, accepting help only at the very last stage - cutting through the ribs of a roast, tossing a salad, serving. I feel so comfortable in my tiny Manhattan kitchen, the size of which doesn't prevent me from cooking elaborate dinners for 12 people. It is really hard to imagine that only a couple of years ago the only thing I was able to make for dinner was reservations.

The Story of How I Started Cooking -
It Is No Coincidence That I Love Food

Ever since I can remember myself as a little girl, I recall my father cooking extravagant foods at most extravagant hours. He was a chief engineer of some military plant. Of course, as some of you growing up in the Soviet block may know from your text books, every man in the USSR had to be an engineer and every woman – a doctor. Every single family I knew in my childhood, including my own, was set up exactly this same way professionally. I don’t know how other things got done in that country, but surely health care and engineering fields were well taken care of. Who knows, maybe the lack of other occupations is the sole reason for the collapse of this great empire, but that is a topic for a completely different story, although I have to shelve this thought as I may be onto something here… So holding this chief position, my father used to work extremely odd hours, and sometimes would come home in the middle of the night, and I mean, literally in the middle, like 2 or 3 AM, and all of a sudden would get inspired to cook something elaborate. And then… He needed grateful company to share his meal with. Oddly enough, for this he chose not my mother, but me. Maybe because my mother would talk too much and he just wanted some quiet appreciation of his masterpieces, which I was always so good at providing. Only years later I would become as, if not more talkative than my mother, but yet again it is a subject for a different story. Several times a week I would be woken up to bortsch, zrazy – those yummy beef cutlets with potato in the middle, veal osso buco, broiled pork loin, beef stroganoff, etc. etc. And so it went for me for many many years, from when I was 4, the age my father deemed appropriate to start waking me up for food feasts in the middle of the night, until I was 19 and moved out of my parents’ apartment.

My first boyfriend who I moved in with upon leaving my parents’ house was a wonderful cook. His specialty was blueberry pancakes for breakfast in bed. He was very progressive and thought women should work as hard as men do instead of focusing on the household chores, so he did all the cooking himself. I didn’t mind. All my boyfriends and husbands after that had to deal with my emancipated attitude instilled by this guy, but hey – I’m a great catch and luckily for me somehow they were all great cooks – so I continued to be fed wonderful foods without as much as raising my finger to prepare it. Everything was great. Although in the back of my mind I was always a little worried that I couldn’t cook myself, but since there was no indication that I would ever be single in my life, I felt more or less safe…

My last boyfriend cooked very well too, but on top of this he also was a big fan of the Food Network channel. We watched it together all the time. And then he would cook something delicious from their recipes. And then we broke up. And I stopped watching Food Network. But I still needed to eat. And I tried… My first try was filet mignon by Rachel Ray. It came out delicious. Then I tried pulled pork by Paula Deen, followed by lemon scented meatballs by Mario Batali… And harissa-crusted crown roast pork… and tomato been salad with tarragon dressing… and apple-glazed pork… and beet salad with tangerine sauce… As Joel would put it – What? Wow! Turns out I am a great cook!!!

I never thought I would like cooking… I never thought I would be single either… But here I was, single, cooking, and loving it… Oh, and another thing I am loving is going to therapy, exploring myself and my life. And therapy actually teaches us to make connections… And now I think it is no coincidence that all my life I acted as appreciative consumer of my boyfriends’ culinary masterpieces, and it is no coincidence that being single and left to my own devices, I immediately learnt how to cook well. Because I love food…

So for the past couple of years I've been having gourmet dinner parties for 10-12 people at least once a month. I like standing in the kitchen for hours, all by myself, listening to music, drinking wine, chopping, grating, marinating, zesting... I always cook something I have never tried before. I never repeat a dish. This makes my every cooking experience slightly nerve-racking*. So far - knock on wood - all my dinners have been successful, but I'm always concerned that, statistically speaking, this only means that a disaster is yet to happen... I am usually able to calm myself down by remembering that if worse comes to worst, mid-town Manhattan provides ample number of delicious take-out options.

And tonight I'm having one of these dinner parties. As always, I'm freaked out that today might be the failure day, and I will be able to really calm down only after trying a bite of the final product.

Today's menu:

• White-bean soup shooters with goat cheese croutons.
• Grilled peach, radicchio and tomato salad with feta cheese.
• Fruit and gorgonzola cheese green salad.
• Scalloped potato with porcini mushrooms.
• Citrus-marinated pork rib roast.

Today I actually came very close to my statistically inevitable failure. Usually, I am done with all the food preparations before the guests show up, but this time I somehow mis-planned (I blame my new too-relaxed self for this timing miscalculation) and - none of the salads were ready!!! I mean, all the ingredients were dispersed around the kitchen, but they were not put together yet at all, and what's worse, I absolutely couldn't concentrate on the content of the recipes and was panicking that I would mix up the two salads and come up with something disastrous in the end. I was very close to giving up on the salads altogether and just make do with the scalloped potato, but luckily Marcela - with her usual unbelievably poised demeanor - volunteered to help. The quick and sober precision of her moves and the quiet and melodic sound of her voice calmed me down almost immediately. Thanks to Marcela, the original menu remained intact and yet another time the dinner was a huge success. That means that the next time could be the time... statistically speaking...

The Toy Accident

I brought a little funny toy from Argentina - it's (or rather, "it was") a kind of a play-doh yellow ball with eyes and hair that can be molded into any facial expression. Except it is not made of play-doh. In fact, I was always wondering what WAS it made of. As usual, be careful what you wish for. Tonight, my question was answered, in full, with a convincing visual presentation. Sofia, Tauheed's daughter, must have twisted it too hard and it EXPLODED with a puff sound and a floury powder all over their side of the table! The quantity of this powder was VERY impressive. We had to unite in a massive team effort to clean up. Of course, we were also constantly distracted by our own laughter. Because the interesting part of the explosion setting was the fact that Ronit had finally decided to try pork (she is Jewish and pescatarian), and - I am not exaggerating - ONE SECOND after she savored a piece of a pork chop and was overwhelmed by its deliciousness - BAM! The toy exploded! Coincidence? Or a message? :)

Saturday - A Pleasant Pheasant Dinner

At a friend's dinner party today I gained a totally new perspective of the Astor Place. It was offered through 180-degree floor-to-ceiling windows opening up to the North of the city. And it was spectacular! So was the never-ending wine accompaniment to the rosemary baked pheasants featured at dinner. Life is good.

Sunday - What Would You Do If A Friend Gave You The Key To His House?

Tanya and I, for example, would sneak into his new apartment while he was visiting with his sister in Boston and hang the posters purchased a week prior to the hanging event in a great Manhattan poster store called Philip Williams Posters (it's more of a poster museum, really). Happy early birthday, Dima!

Then, we would roam around the East Village and have a drink at Ten Degrees followed by a delicious dinner at a newly opened French-Vietnamese restaurant D.O.B. on St.Mark's Street.

Then, to honor the finally pleasant weather we would walk by the East River all the way to the 34th Street, where our ways would part as it would already be 11PM on a Sunday night...

But that's just us. And what would you do if a friend gave you the key to his house?

*Nerve-racking OR Nerve-wracking

I am usually very good with spelling, but in this case I choked for a second, "Is it nerve-racking or nerve-wracking?" Apparently, many people have the same issue. In fact, turns out that both versions are correct, and you can always defend your spelling of choice:

• Nerve-racking: "to rack" means to torture or oppress (from "rack" - a medieval torture device). This spelling of the word is considered "more correct".
• Nerve-wracking: "to wrack" means to wreck and destroy utterly. So technically, there's nothing wrong in using this spelling, just be prepared to claim that the situation you are describing is smashing your nerves beyond repair.

Days 169-175 - NY, NY - Week 1 - Friendship? Yes please!

This week has been filled with friends. I love it. I really have the best friends in the whole entire world! I cannot thank my lucky stars enough for making me so-so fortunate in being surrounded by kind, warm, loyal, fun, intelligent, and in every which way amazing people!

Trip to Brooklyn on Monday, Yama on Tuesday, a SURPRISE PARTY!!! at the Frying Pan (an awesome place by the way) on Wednesday, ex-office on Thursday, intimate hang-out with Tatyana on my couch on Friday, and a weekend on Long Island at Erica's - my life in NYC is a moveable feast.

"One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives."

- Euripides, Greek playwrite

Random Notes

Culture Shock

I would not impress anybody by saying, “Oh boy, Manhattan is expensive!” But right now I’m thoroughly impressed by it myself. Went to Duane Reade to buy toilet paper and paper towels and ended up spending a hundred and forty dollars on nothing in particular. Granted, Duane Reade has always been my soft spot; but on the other hand I have never been that shocked by the receipt. In Argentina, an enormous BBQ for 14 people was seventy dollars with drinks. And I never spent more than a hundred dollars on the groceries at La Mega in Cozumel, no matter how hard I tried to fit the entire store into my shopping cart.

In all seriousness though, I am a little confused by how UN-weird New York seems. After almost half a year away, I expected the city to feel at least somewhat strange and alien. But I feel as if I have never left.

Like Riding a Bicycle

I have not used my cell phone or watched TV for the past 5.5 months. But it turns out that it is like riding a bicycle. Except I cannot ride a bicycle, but it's a technicality. I text as fast as ever and I can still do it with my eyes closed. TV was a tad more difficult as I couldn’t really remember how to use DVR, but after I successfully shut my brain and just let my fingers run through the remote without any actual thinking on my part, it was all fixed and now I can record as many of my favorite shows as always.

A Beauty Parlor Riddle

Saw a puzzling picture at a manicure place: a guy with 3 blackberries and a pen. No notepad. Question: what does he do with the pen? An answer from Tom: “He is an effeminate drug dealer. He stabs people with the pen.” I have to admit, sounds very plausible to me. A side note: the guy displayed an annoyed disbelief every time one of his blackberries rang while he was getting his manicure. Another question, does he actually want them to keep silent?

Day 168 - On the menu today

• Breakfast: French toast and coffee.
  Location - Cozumel, Mexico
• Lunch: Auntie Anne's pretzel-dog and lemonade.
  Location - Charlotte, USA
• Dinner: Salad with some unidentifiable ingredients and sparkling water.
  Location - Somewhere between Charlotte and New York, USA
• Supper: Left-over grapes from my tenant and a cup of tea.
  Location - Home sweet home, New York, NY

Day 167 - Human spirit

Today was my last diving day of this trip. As if this was not sad enough, we had a guy in our group who came to Cozumel as part of his "bucket list". The sight of this helpless man dying of cancer made me cry underwater. He was absolutely oblivious to his surroundings, couldn't read his pressure gauge, didn't have enough strength to inflate or deflate his BCD. But this is not what I found the most moving. In fact, I cried for his wife. A woman in her mid-40's, she got married (for the first time) to this guy only 3 years ago. They spent their honeymoon diving in Cozumel. One month later he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Right after getting married this poor woman had become a nurse to a terminally ill. What terrible fate. But she is with him, for better or for worse, wearing a kind smile and an unbelievably patient attitude.

Or maybe I was crying for me. Because I don't know if I would ever be able to display such immense strength of character and humane kindness toward anybody.

Day 166 - Weird Barracuda

Barracuda had almost no current today, but it was not the weirdest part of the dive. What was strange is our profile: only 30 minutes on the reef and the rest in mid-water for no good reason at all... It's my second time diving with Raoul, and it's the second inexplicably weird profile... Coincidence?

The sunset was the usual perfect though.

Day 165 - Reading

I am reading “The World According to Garp” by John Irving now. It is a really good book, one of those you cannot put down once you’ve started reading. In fact, I read for 7 hours straight today. Just lay in bed and read. This is a well forgotten feeling for me. I used to do it a lot. I used to be a compulsive reader. I read all the time. Any time I had a free moment; at breakfast, after doing homework, before bed, on the subway, in a bus, on a road trip. Once, when I was about 12, I broke my father’s car’s trunk at a gas station because of my reading habits. We had this little ugly car called Zaporozhets – the most counter-intuitive car ever made, in my opinion. You had to open up its trunk to fill it up with gas. And the trunk wouldn’t even stay open on its own: there was a thin supporting “stick” (part of the stupid design, not a homemade fix). This little stick is precisely what I broke. I had the formidable volume of “War and Peace” in my right hand, resting my left hand on the top of the trunk, waiting for my father’s signal to close it after the car would have been filled up. The signal granted, I simply pushed the trunk down, “War and Peace” making me forget about the insignificant flaw in the design of my father’s beloved car (who would blame me, really?). I admit, for a second I thought it was a little too difficult to close, but I had never been a wimp against life’s difficulties, so I pushed some more, and… closed the trunk… over the stick… I realized I was doing something wrong only upon looking up at my father’s face reddening with some kind of speechless emotion. I think it was a mix of blind rage at my absent-mindedness and respectful awe at my strength.

My book addiction was further promoted by my father forbidding TV at home during my school years. He succeeded in his original plan to make me read as much as possible. Now I understand that reading is as good – or as bad – as any entertainment, but back then in the Soviet Union reading was considered a much more intellectual activity than watching the three available TV channels.

I have recently noticed that I don’t read like this anymore. All of a sudden, I can go on without a book for several weeks. To my surprise, I have only read 5 books during the months of my travel (and I am a very fast reader!).

I wonder what other changes I should expect from this time-off…

P.S. It had been a while after I noticed the change in my reading pattern, that I found out that apparently there is also a psychological exercise called “reading deprivation”. Julia Cameron describes the concept of this experiment as follows: “Words are like tranquilizers. We have a daily quota of media chat that we swallow up. Like greasy food, it clogs our system. Too much of it and we feel, yes, fried. It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well. Without distractions, we are once again thrust into the sensory world. With no newspaper to shield us, a train becomes a viewing gallery. With no novel to sink into an evening becomes a vast savannah in which furniture – and other assumptions – get rearranged. Reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence, a space some of us begin to immediately fill with new words – long, gossipy conversations, television bingeing, the radio as a constant, chatty companion. We often cannot hear our own inner voice. Reading deprivation is a very powerful tool – and a very frightening one. For many of us, reading is an addiction. We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own. Try not reading for a week and see what happens to you.”

Days 162-164 - Eat, sleep, dive

I have always been a city girl. Born in a big city, I have always been pulled by even bigger cities: from Saint-Petersburg to Moscow, from Moscow to New York. I fed on the collective energy of streets buzzing with traffic, people running to their appointments, always in a hurry, never on time, huge buildings, taxi drivers yelling at each other and pedestrians, noise, noise, noise... I could not imagine my life without the options that big cities present: restaurants, theaters, concert halls, movies, random events, street fairs, you name it. Never ending noise. Never ending options. Ah, this is life worth living!

And what is happening to me now??? The only question I have to answer these days is, "Do I feel like diving today?" I am quite satisfied with the 5 restaurant options for dinner and another 5 options for lunch. And I am loving the silence of the underwater and the quiet breeze of the above-water.

All I do is eat, sleep, dive. Surprisingly, it is not a bad life. Definitely worth living, too.