All my friends in high school were wrong.

This is the Red Army and the Leningrad Cowboys singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Which means that the Leningrad Cowboys actually exist. They are not a delusion of my adolescence.

And apparently The Leningrad Cowboys Go America is one of the top 100 world films of all time. It is superlatively weird... I mean, they have a dude chasing them for the entire movie, carrying a fish. The band manager keeps an endless supply of beer in the ice-filled coffin on the roof of the car.

The mystery of how said film made it to the local Video Village remains.

Sea Change

People ask if being married is different. It is! I swear! There are lots of ways, most of them depressing. For instance, more people treat you like your romantic attachments have value!

But at the moment, I'm more interested in my transition from non-toucher to toucher.

I think it was the wedding that desensitized me. The wedding photographs show me hugging an unending succession of people- including a woman who wandered in, took a plate of food, and left. Hugs! And there were Chileans- months after my last visit to Chile, people would hold out a hand and I'd reflexively kiss their cheeks. Now, I just assume I'm supposed to dole out a little arm pat, a comforting hand squeeze. It's like writing thank you notes: significantly easier after the first hundred.

I didn't realize that I'd become a... toucher until last night. We were at a party typical of my hometown- first there was a potluck and lawn games, then there was a drum circle, a bonfire, and a small ceremony honoring everyone who had died this year. You know, Samhain. I gave a reflexive shoulder squeeze to a sobbing neighbor, and realized that I had crossed over to the physical affection side.

Hello, people back on the sane, WASPy side of the divide! I salute you! Please do not sue me for sexual harassment!

I should have seen this coming. This summer, my supervisor and I were standing in a jungle, trying to decipher 35 year old notes on plants about the size of a throw cushion. I had just handed off the map so that I could decamate the mosquito population- and one of them landed on his cheek. So yes, I reflexively slapped my boss- and he has not yet done anything to deserve it.

But Y'all Should Vote.

Y'all have probably not read an entire cookbook by Alice Waters, doyenne of California Cuisine. I have, because I have issues. When you read her cookbooks, it seems really easy to cook the best, healthiest food all of the time- as long as you structure your entire life around living like Alice Waters. Two farmer's markets a week, spending 1/4th your income on food, learning to haraunge the butcher and the baker- I do some of these things, and my mother and law does more- but Ms. Waters presents it as the simplest possible thing, because that is what her life is.

So- there's a giant freaking election Tuesday, with light and justice directly opposed to evil and also evil. I have just discovered that once again, C will manage not to vote. It is not hard, and if you don't care about local issues, there's no reason your absentee ballot can't follow you from city to city forever. It's just- civil duty is not something he builds his life around. Feh.

Quotes from C

"I don't have enough Skinner's boxes."

The 's is important, because it means he's short on the thin cardboard from his cereal boxes instead of experiencing a lack of operant conditioning chambers.

Boo.

My office is all in a fluffle, because the lady who decorated for each holiday doesn't work there anymore. Halloween is coming, and there are no decorations!

Well, OK, the produce exchange table is overrun with pumpkins from the Michelle Obama fire garden.

And there are orb weaver spiderwebs on all of the balconies.

And one of the biologists has an office full of skulls.

And the entryway has a bookcase with jars of salamanders, frogs, and newts.

The same bookcase has a stack of dried turtles.*

So it's not that we aren't decorating for Halloween, it's that we're always decorated for Halloween. They'll have to wait for Thanksgiving to complain. (Though probably the pumpkins will still be there, possibly some Indian corn, and maybe the turkey specimen will return from the taxidermist.)

* I mentioned this to C.
"Sack of turtles?" he asked.
"No, stack." I replied
"Why does your office have a stack of turtle shells?" He said
"You know, I never asked. But's not just shells- their feet, tails, and heads stick out, and their little mouths are slightly agape."
"You work in a strange place."
"You should talk. Your office has that really old couch. That's pretty creepy."
"Yes. An unsanitary couch is just as unsettling as haphazardly stacked preserved animals. Good call."

Not as Conscientious as I make myself out to be.

So I was reading a back issue of a Wildlife Periodical and found the region by region reports from Game Wardens. It paints rural Northern California as a places where people smoke meth, hook some makeshift spotlights up to their truck, and then cruise slowly through orchards and fields, looking to shoot pigs. It describes people who hand dug the 600 pounds of razor clams in the back of their pickup. There's more than one story with someone who is real ashamed about shooting a doe- he never wouldna done it normally, but he was high.

One suspect attempted to bribe the game warden into issuing a citation with an equal fine and jail time that wouldn't make it so he was mocked for the rest of his life. Shooting a doe. My word.

We Googled "Neruda" and "crying"

I'm spending a week in the city thing near my hometown, housesitting. I'm also working in the office here, doing what I think of as "The sort of mind-flattening nitpicking that makes C so crabby". And unlike the office back home, I can't show up super early, blitzkrieg work until everyone shows up, work a little longer, go buy some sushi, work, take a long walk, wait until everyone's gone and do a little more blitzing. I work best when there's no one else there- even if they're quiet, I can hear them breathing. Instead, I'm stranded in the middle of mini-mall without an office key. I start working when someone unlocks the door and keep working until the last person leaves. I spend a half hour in the mornings sitting in the car, waiting for other people to arrive in the parking lot.

We share our little chunk of strip mall with a lawyer who works mostly on domestic violence cases/drug charges and a dentist. Since our parking lot is poorly lighted, near the freeway, and full of trucks themselves filled with electronics, we are a hotbed of property crime. Yesterday I asserted that the dentist attracted the wrong crowd and was gently set right.

The last note is that our wedding went really well. I mean, uncannily well. I talked to 120 people- many of them Chilean!- and screamed only once. At C. For breathing. I figure someone out there might see a last minute change in ceremony venue as bad, or be upset about potatoes or something, but I'm honestly just thrilled to bits about being hitched. Also, we met our primary goals: we're married, we're not in debt, and no one hates us. Also, we made the Conquistador Lord or the Undead tear up.

So yeah, things have been freaking blissful here, so much that I felt the Chaos Gods would soon demand their due. They currently seem to be satisfied with carrying off the rooster that I was supposed to be taking care of- I pray they leave the dog.