Jack Frost and Robert Frost

“My Milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like, “its better than yours”,
damn right, its better than yours,
I could teach you, but I’d have to charge.”

This song is stuck in my head, so I thought I would share it with all of you, because then it will be stuck in your head too, and you will think of me every single time you hear it! Consider it a holiday gift from me to you…

It’s snowing in my freezer. Let me clarify this statement. My refrigerator has broken. I went to Astana for Thanksgiving and while I was gone there was a power surge (I am figuring, I am not sure) and when I came back, the refrigerator was broken and all the food in it bad bad bad. So I called my landlady, who asked me, “Are you gonna call me every time something breaks? What, am I supposed to fix it?” Well, yes, I thought. You’re the landlady! That’s why I pay you twice what the average Kazakhstani gets paid in a month for rent on this dump. But I guess not. Not in Kazakhstan.
So my food is now sitting on my balcony. Now, I know the word balcony brings to mind sitting in deck chairs watching the sunset. Don’t get any posh ideas. This is basically a piece of wood jutting out of the side of my building that has an enclosed space. The “windows” are covered with old advertisements (as was much of my apartment after my landlady’s “remodeling” before I moved in. I took down the ads for meat covering the dresser top and the ads for shampoo covering the shelf, but left the huge yogurt ad on the floor of the wardrobe because no one sees it.) Anyway the balcony “windows” are covered with advertisements and one of the “windows” is actually a piece of linoleum nailed in place - probably stolen from somebody’s car floor. So needless to say, it’s a very cold place in winter, perfect for me to keep my food until I have the money the fix the refrigerator. I am in no hurry. It’s cold out now, and set to be this way until at least the beginning of May. I remember it snowed for the last time in May this last winter. So my food should be safe for now, on the balcony. Except that now I don’t have a refrigerator and a freezer. At the moment I have just a freezer, which requires a lot of planning if you want to eat yogurt for breakfast, and not, say, frozen yogurt…

Except the laws of physics don’t actually hold true in Kazakhstan. This is no joke. For weeks, people kept telling me, “I can’t wait until it snows, it will be so much warmer!” And I was thinking, “What? Doesn’t it have to be cold for the water to turn to snow? Otherwise wouldn’t it be rain?” But no. Yesterday, it got unseasonably (I thought) warm, and in my head, I said, scornfully, “ha, maybe it will snow tomorrow!” Well, guess what. It is snowing in my refrigerator! Now, when someone tells me I shouldn’t sit on concrete because it will make me infertile, or I shouldn’t lick the chocolate off the knife because I will get mad, or I shouldn’t drink cold beverages (even in the hot hot summer) because I will catch a cold, maybe I will listen. Maybe infertility rates in the U.S. have gone up so much because of all those girls sitting on curbs, hanging out with friends when they are teenagers. Maybe the increase in violence is due to knife licking. Those things may in fact be true. But I am not buying the cold beverage thing. I have had scientific confirmation (from the Peace Corps doctor) and he says, no, unless you are already sick, drinking cold beverages will not make you sicker. This is much like the “wet head” thing in America. (IF you go outside with a wet head you will get sick, which if it had actually been true, I would have been dead by now, not actually being a fan of hair dryers, and until recently, say, oh, nine months ago, I was a once a day shower-er. Lots of wet-head-leaving-the-house happening in my life.)
Everything sure does look pretty in the snow. Except the day after it snows, much of the snow is actually brown. Not brown as in “doggie pooped here” brown, but brown as in, “there’s so much smog in this city the snow turns brown”. After living in L.A. for about a decade, smog shouldn’t bother me. But it never snowed in L.A. that I am aware of, so I never came face to face with brown snow and the heavy smogginess when the smog sits in the valley below the mountains, heavier than air. The smog is hot, so it rises, but as it cools, it just sits over the city like a blanket. Just like in L.A., though, the smog does make for fabulous sunsets! Sometimes when I am walking home from the bus stop, the sky has the cold, soft, impressionist orange color that puts me in a poetic mood. Not that I write poetry. Well, when I was younger I did. I am embarrassed to remember some of my poetry. I think when I was in third grade I wrote, “I cry when I think of rain/gently dripping down the pane/dark grey clouds fill the sky/as misty tears fill my eyes.” Now that is pure brilliance, I know. Watch out Robert Frost. But I must say, I had forgotten the beauty of winter. Don’t get me wrong. It is cold here. Cold enough that I have to leave about ten minutes early for everything because that is how long it takes me to get into all of my clothes for outside. But when I am walking in the snow, warm, my boots making that noise I love so much (crunch crunch crunch) as I walk, and I see the dogs of Almaty, going about their lives as if they were independent beings with little balls of snow gathering on their mangy hair, no leashes and no owners near by, and see all the people wearing huge fur coats and big furry hats that make me think of the “iron curtain” of the 80’s movies I watched when I was a kid, and black icicles hanging from old construction trucks, I have to admit, life is sometimes poetry. You just have to know how to look at it.

Post - posting guilt...

This is just a brief note to say that after I re-read my first posting, I felt I should make a comment. I am having a great time in Kazakhstan. Honestly. So please don't think you have to mount a big, "bring Lulu home from the Peace Corps" campaign. I have spent some time reading other Kazakhstan volunteers blogs, and they are hilarious. My friend Andy in particular, has a way with writing about life here that is hilarious. Andy actually is one of the funniest guys I know, though, so it's not surprising. And I am sure, if I expended the effort, I could come up with some witty anecdotes about living here, and my ignorance of the culture and language, and just how funny everything is. But the truth is, everything, although not bad, is not always funny. And the gender situation here bothers me. I am not saying that I am trying to change the world, or even one person here. They have their culture, and I have mine. Let's be honest, though, even in my culture, my beliefs often cause me trouble. How many of my friends now avoid saying certain words, not because my brillant oratory skills have changed their perception of why certain words are bad, but simply because they don't want to hear me go on about it? And if you are reading my blog and don't know me, you may possibly think that I am anti-Muslim because I go on about this guy threatening death to people like me should someone be stupid enough to give him a gun. I respect so many things about Kazakh culture, and so many things about Muslim culture, but the way women are treated is not one of them. Culture is not static, it changes, and it should not therefore be used as a tool for the continuing oppression of 51% of the population. Don't get me started on statistics on domestic violence, rape, or child sexual assault. Or the connections between the growing number of women living in poverty and violence against women and the increaseing rate of HIV infection for women worldwide. So I make no excuses for being a feminist, and loud about it. But please don't think I am unhappy. I just needed to vent after a particulary bizaare and threatening moment in my life. As a weird post-script, this guy keeps popping up at places with my friend (another PCV Criss) so I am constantly having to speak with him, which I find weird and annoying. How do you do that? Should I look at it as an opportunity to try and continue a dialogue with someone and possibly get them to see another point of view, or do I just ignore him and hope he goes away? I don't know.
I have figured out how to get pictures on my posts, now I need to figure out how some of you have stuff on the side of your blog, like links to other sights, etc....

Am I a Dreamer?

Am I a dreamer? I think sometimes I am a dreamer, but its only to avoid something unpleasant. Most of the time I am right there, living in reality. What is my reality now? Where do I feel that I fit in to the crazy world? It's something that I know changes all the time. Right now, I am in Kazakhstan. I am volunteering for an NGO that provides training and information to Women's Crisis Centers in Kazakhstan. It's not the work I thought I would be doing when I came here, but its what I am doing. Apparently the Peace Corps does not do direct service anymore. So my program is NGO development, something I have no experience in and something my organization does not want. Go figure. Instead, I have been developing trainings for social workers and psychologists.
Here's a side note, relating to nothing, but which I take the chance to say every chance I get: I have fallen madly in love with someone here, and she is making my life so much better. It is interesting to be with someone who is interested in me, for a change. Who cares about me. She makes me feel so loved, in the most beautiful sense of the word. It makes me happy ;0)

So then, what do I dream of? Having an impact on the world, this much is true. Sometimes here I feel that I could not possibly have an impact on the world. Kazakhstan, where women are told that in order to be women, real women, they must be married and have children, does not seem to want real change in gender relations. They have the terminology down. The talk about equality, and better paid jobs. But I don't see equality in relationships, or in life in general here. I had a 16 year old girl ask me if I went home every night and cried and thought about suicide because I was alone (this was before I fell in love). I said that I did not look to someone else to make me happy, I was happy with myself, and did not define myself based on being with someone. She didn't understand. There is nothing more annoying than being pitied by a 16 year old girl. I wanted to say, in four years you will working, cooking, cleaning, doing your husband's laundry, taking care of your children, and feeding everyone while your husband plays cards on the corner eating sunflower seeds. But I didn't. She should live in her dreamworld as long as she can.

This, however, was not nearly as disturbing as talking to someone who I thought was becoming a friend, and having him tell me that if he had a gun he would kill all suspected gay men. I said, why? He said because he was Muslim. I said, I know many Muslims and not all of them believe that it is ok to kill someone at all, let alone because they love men. He said, predictably, "because it is unnatural". I said, ok, you are allowed to believe that, but why do they have to die? Why can't you just not love men, and leave it at that? No, he said, they must die. It was chilling. I had no response, except to ask the question, but what about women? And he said, no, they can live. They are not unnatural, they are just not using all of their brains. They have been treated badly by men, so it is actually a man's fault when a woman is a lesbian. I was speechless. It was so patronizing. Oddly, its the same thing my grandmother believes. She told me once that my 70 something year old aunt wasn't a lesbian, that she had just been treated badly by men. This was kind of shocking to me, because my Aunt had been out and about for probably close to 50 years at the time, and the only man I had ever heard of her dating had been my grandfather. That is an interesting story, but one for another time. So I had no response for my "friend". The most chilling aspect of this was that I had just come out to him, a decision that I did not take lightly because of the fact that I am in a foreign country whose rules I did not grow up knowing. So to have someone calmly tell me that they would kill gay men if they had a gun, and oh, yeah, I forgot about this part, that he had in the past actually beat up men he thought were gay, just as if he were talking about eating dinner with someone, "Oh, I ate dinner last night with my brother at this great new cafe, and, by the way, if I had a gun I would kill gay men." I was very angry and quiet and when he left my house (yes, he said this to me at my house, at a dinner party I was having. Nice guest, huh?) as he left my house he said, "Sorry if I offended you." I said, "What do you mean you are sorry? Of course you offended me. Violence offends me. Ignorance offends me. Fear masking as religious belief offends me." We also had a discussion about women's rights, and he said that he believed, as a Muslim man, that women should cover themselves. I asked why? He said because men cannot control their sexual urges. I said, "So because men have no self-control, women have to walk around covered from head to toe? Why don't men just learn to take responsibility for their actions?" He said, predictably once again, "It's our culture." (He's Kazakh.) I said, "Well, it is also your culture to live in yurts and ride a horse, but that BMW out there doesn't look like a horse to me." He had no response that time. I must take the time to say that this is not a tirade against Muslims. I think there are many beautiful things about Islamic culture. Islamic scholars discovered science and political thought when the west was still living in the dark ages. Islamic architecture is breathtaking in its simplicity and grace. My favorite poet is Rumi. (Actually, I don't really like poetry at all except for Rumi. Usually I can't get into it. But Rumi is so immediate to me, so personal.) Islamic art is elegant, glorifying God through abstracted calligraphy. In fact, I have a huge tattoo on my back, from neck to waist, that is inspired by Islamic art. The bottom of the tattoo says, "Peace" in Farsii, and a flower grows from the word peace, along my spine, ending on my neck. It is very beautiful. I got it in response to the war in Iraq, which I have always been against, just like I was against the war in Afghanistan. I believe in Peace above all else, and on many levels. But I hate it anytime someone uses religion to justify violence. I am not religious, but it seems to me that violence is the direct opposite of religion.

Anyway, maybe I am living in a dream, grown from the seeds of my first true hearing of John Lennon's imagine, because when I was little, and I heard that song, I believed. I thought, hey, if we can imagine all the people living in peace, than it can happen. Maybe I am a dreamer. But I know, for sure, that I am not the only one.