New year, new home

At the end of the year, I sit in a wide and pale-lit room, tracing the dark designs of the carpet on my wall. Valentina clangs in the kitchen. Last night I found a row of xholodets – meat jelly – in trays keeping cold by the door.

Two weeks ago I came to live in Valentina’s house, in Bogdanivka. She looks as if she were carved from rock, like a wise and solemn god in a garden. Her fingertips once brushed me and they were like rock.

She is kind, but like most babusyas I would imagine, she doesn’t take no for an answer. The night of my arrival, she prepared me a bath by heating water on the stove. In the bathroom she showed me how to mix it with cold water in the tub. At this point I thanked her and waited for her to leave. Instead, she took off my clothes and put me (horrified, stunned) into a bucket and poured water on me. She then instructed me to scrub my lady parts, and watched, repeating, “Molodetz! Molodetz!” (Good job). Since that night, I wash myself as quickly as possible – sometimes when I dally, Valentina bursts in and scrubs my back with a bristly, wooly rag.

I came here at a strange time – the winter holiday began on Monday, and so I haven’t been doing much actual work yet. My first day I met with the principal, and I had barely sat down when he asked if I could sing “Yesterday.” He grabbed his guitar from the wall and strummed, and everyone watched me eagerly as I sang the lyrics. Every time a verse ended, I thought I could stop singing – but no, I had to sing the whole song, the principal eagerly trying to sing along even though he doesn’t know the words, nor English.

This meeting excited everyone so much that I somehow got roped into singing “Yesterday” at the party for the entire school. This was mortifying, but luckily the entire school is only about 100 people. And then again, at the party for teachers, about 5 toasts of vodka later, my colleagues made me sing.

After this, the teachers began to dance. They formed a ring and swayed from side to side, clapping off-time. The mathematics teacher jumped into the center, heels splayed, and let out whoops and guttural laughter. She grabbed another teacher’s arm and they whirled – both short and round, like merry gnomes. Then they began taking down decorations – streamers, paper snowflakes, plastic tinsel – and draping their shoulders.

I even made a toast – wobbly and mispronounced, the only toast I know: “Za drooz-boo!” (To friendship.) 

Insert melancholic Eastern European violin music here

Typing like mad in the school computer lab, my first taste of internet in a while. Not enough time to tell you about my new life in Bogdanivka - so for now let my just share my new address:

182 Lenina St., village of Bogdanivka, Znamenka region, Kirovohrad oblast. Ukraine, 27431

Please write me a letter if you have time. I hope everyone had a magical winter solstice, and much love from the village.

Scary dog

This a story I wrote for class. It's called, "CAUTION!" 

"In Kaharlyk, we have a big problem. What is the name, you want to know? It's name is - scary dog. It's not a joke! I saw the dog and it yelled and ran at me. Why? Because the dog - is very scary dog. Maybe it doesn't have food, and it wants to eat Peace Corps volunteers. I do not know why, but I know - I am a person, I am not food. Finally, I think that the dog has scary friends. It needs to have good friends and later the dog will be good."

Thank you, Medill school of journalism.

Last few days in Kaharlyk

Snowed-over streets throw your own sounds back to you. Last night there was a party for the host families. My feet dragged to go in. Outside are night fields with skeletal grasses. Rooms inside are yellow-lit and smell warm but I am antsy in them, always moving my hands and leaning against things trying to look casual. 

But I like my hands when they go orange and black-nailed from peeling carrots. Nadja and I have been cooking together. We even made eclairs, so delicate, and squeezed them full of cream. She fears I will starve when I live alone.

No one thinks Americans have life skills. Once a teacher asked us what we can cook, and scoffed dismissively when we said, “Pasta, stir fry…” Then she held up her baby at us – “And when will you have this?” Probably around the same time I start loving these mayonnaise-saturated salads that are only one color.

At the party, all the mothers asked us women, “Maybe you’ll marry Ukrainian boys?” Uncomfortable mumbling. But then one woman said she sees me walking down the street every day, very fast, and I whip around all the men without seeing them. She can’t realize – that made me feel so capable, for once, like Kathryn Hepburn.

Still, I will wear my long underwear. If I don’t, I won’t be able to have babies, says Nadja, and don’t I want to have a little Nastia of my own? (Can ovaries freeze over?) As I’m writing this, the baby is hiding under my bed and whispering, “How-how, how-how,” like a puppy. I lean my face on the bed and so does she. We blow raspberries at each other for a long time. I don’t even care that her spit gets in my eyes. 

Sad bag

Thanksgiving was long, and spent in the hospital, hooked to an IV, and the next morning long. I’ll tell you right away not to worry. Communist Grandpa has not been poisoning my food. Yet. Instead, it’s something like Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, which is probably a little too pelvic of a disease for me to want to talk about much on the internet.

But I’ll tell you about the hospital. There is not a lot of light there. Long and bare is the hallway, where a woman with gold teeth took hedging, ghostly steps, curling and uncurling fingers. I was cold. The hard tables where they laid me out were cold, and cold instruments on my skin. These nurses kept moving in and out of rooms and talking at me, taking my blood and sticking needles in my ass. But they were kind. I looked at their hands as they tied up my arm for the IV – pale, fleshy, capable.

My family called me as I was hooked up to the IV, and I started weeping and shivering. The doctor told me to calm down and I yelled at him in broken Ukrainian. Nadja put spoonfuls of mashed potatoes in my mouth. It gummed on my dry tongue. Moya malenka, she called me – my little one. And I was at once so grateful to her, not to be alone there, and at once furious at with the nauseous need to which I’d been reduced. Tear-streaked gob of a body, infantile.

I thought about last Thanksgiving, when Christopher and I drove singing around the Chicago suburbs. Wearing Western hats. I imagined all the rooms my friends move through now. But there are rooms a mind can’t move through, and I am scared of forgetting and being forgotten.

I've been confusing the words for "sad" and "bag" lately. And indeed, at that moment, I was a sad bag of bones.

Morning was better, though full of more waiting, IVs and tests. Lace curtains cut in shapes of shells imprinted themselves on the walls. I watched them slide across the room as the morning spun out and grew gray.

Two other women lay on cots in the room. One was slowly waking up when I arrived, curled to her side, face in a wan light. The face was pocked and white and moon-wide, her robe of a chintzy material but its color jewel green. There was something girlish in her black stockinged feet nested under her.

The other woman sprawled heavily in her nightdress, picking at borscht and black bread and reading romance novels. She rose at times to move slowly, to rearrange her matted curls in the mirror or take pills. Nadja chatted to her in the tone she can somehow affect with everyone, friends or strangers, so loud and easy and familiar. I read Bridget Pegeen Kelly poems and thought about apple-eyed deer, in and out of sleep.

And then a couple days later, I was myself again. Ilya and I built a “snow grandmother.” The snow was dirty from the garden, and too soft for packing. Ilya kept apologizing to the snow grandmother – “I’m sorry, snee babusya, that the snow is terrible, I’m sorry.” Then Igor came out, big lug, and threw hunks of our snow babusya at us. WHAT A JERK. So we had a snowball fight. And then it was sunset, at 4 p.m., and I went inside, and there was hot vareneky, and everything was all right for once.

Ivan

I would like to introduce you to my future husband. His name is Ivan. Ivan is 80 years old. Do not be alarmed – Ivan is also very adorable. He wears a tweed jacket that is too big and angular on his little shriveled body, along with a bright orange tie.

You may remember that last month I freaked out and hid when I thought that Communist Grandpa was in the living room. Well, it turns out that the fake-Communist was actually –  Ivan! I can’t wait to put our “how we met” story on our wedding website. He’d find it hilarious if he understood the Internet. Or English.

See, that’s the difficulty. We can’t even speak Ukrainian together because Ivan speaks Russian. He does know some German, though. When he came for dinner recently, he asked me in German – here comes the romantic part – my age and if I’m married. When I said I wasn’t, he told me I needed to get married, and then said that he’s unmarried (!!!!) and doesn’t drink or smoke. I really hope he’s still alive in 2 years so I can bring him back to America with me.

In all seriousness, now – returning to the subject of Communist Grandpa – something really scary happened. The communist LEFT HIS ROOM. Luckily I was at school at the time. He made it as far as the kitchen, yelling at Nadja because his pension check hadn’t come yet. No one told me that he could physically walk! I thought that he was forever bedridden and could only dream of ways to kill the American living down the hall. But no, he doubtless wants the money to order new parts for the complicated bomb he’s building that will be specially designed to like, go off when I sneak more apples. A heady mixture of romance and fear here, heady indeed.

More scary things

 If you know me well, you know my weakness for sweets and beets. However, I now realize that the cosmic life-force has a Dantesque sense of humor, and that the sugar factory was designed as an ironic punishment for my various sins.

Inside the heat is stifling. Do you remember in Lord of the Rings, when Saruman the wizard rips up the countryside into an industrial, orc-powered nightmare? Right. Steam belches from machines that tremble the ground. As you walk up ladders and cross narrow walkways, the heat grows ever more unbearable, itself seeming to sweat syrup. There were huge containers of hot amber sludge, and our guide let it drip out from a faucet on her hand, for us to sample. Her hands were very small for her body, and her nails long. I shrank back, having a phobia of tiny hands and of nails in general.

Deeper in, it grew suddenly cold. White fluffy flakes flew in air. It coated the walls and the floors, gushed out from tubes. Sugar filled my mouth and nose, it frosted my hair and greased my skin. At this point I started to worry that one girl with severe diabetes was going to die. Once outside I wanted to rip off my body and bare all my insides to clean air.

Fortunately the girl with diabetes did not die. Even more fortunately, this experience did not spoil my taste for sugary confections nor beets. I suppose it doesn’t matter, though – in this country, there is no day without treats nor beets.

Surprises

Recently I came home and Ilya told me there was a surprise in the bathroom. You know if those two words, surprise and bathroom, are in one sentence, something horrifying is probably about to happen. I’ve also learned to be wary of “strashnee” (scary) surprises around here. Every day brings another strashnee surprise (meaning, Ilya wears plastic vampire teeth and jumps out of corners/ from behind doors/ behind the shower curtain when I am half-naked and about to get in).

So what was the surprise? I will tell you. The surprise was THE BIGGEST FISH I HAVE EVER SEEN. In the bathtub. Alive. If you could call it alive, as it frantically gulped out its last in a cramped pan of water.

Later in the evening, the giant fish was moved to the kitchen, so he was even harder to avoid. I was trying to make tea without looking at his gasping, swollen body when Ilya called out, “Ashley! Tsookerky!” That is Ukrainian for “candy,” so of course I turned around, and Ilya was gripping the wriggling thing by its tail, even though it was half his size, and grinning wickedly.

I believe that’s what is called “getting Ukrained.”

There’s less than a month left of training. Then we go to our respective sites, where we’ll spend the next two years. I can’t believe I’m here and I still won’t know my actual destination until next month.

When I think of how long two years actually is, my heart and guts seize up.

But I am collecting beautiful things. Went to Kiev again and saw and was seen by many old eyes. In the cathedral, on every surface climbing up to the apse, they were Christs’, almond-shaped and mournful. Everything smelling warm of wax from candles. The square outside was unbearably bright, gold domes molten and gold angels trumpeting and terrifying.

Less harsh a beauty was the old bandura player, in fur hat and drooping mustache. He plucked silver sounds into the street. We walked between narrow buildings with their crumbling balconies. I saw a pale young man in black, walking a very small black pony. A little boy with an accordion in front of the city’s medieval portcullis.

I want to press them, all of them, into the hands of my friends, like round stones.

By the Khaharlyk sign

Here the town ends, as if it has run out of itself: bright-clapboarded houses dribbling sparser into broken fences, a few unused factories gaping. The road we took, knotted and potholed, now straightened out. It cut a black line over the fields, all gray-gold their skeletal stalks. I thought it a good road. “The road to adventure!” I said as a joke. Inside I whirled and wondered.

By the Khaharlyk placard, you can see a small graveyard flapping bows. Lena (my friend’s host mother) led us down, crossing herself and bowing before she entered. The headstones are carved with likenesses of the dead. Most square and solemn, though all fringed in plastic flowers – those fleshy, stoic faces I see on these streets every day.

Beside her father’s grave, which she kissed, Lena handed us candies. Chocolate with strange gelatinous filling. Red trees lining the field, dry corn sounds.

Lena’s dogs attacked a cluster of chickens, the walk back home. There was much squawking and screaming. A man and woman with granite expressions stared from a fence. Their yard was littered in garbage. A sickening clamp of jaws from the bushes – but then the chicken escaped, waddling as fast as it could across the street!

And then somehow we were all gathered in Lena’s mother’s house, being fed (we are always being fed by someone) borscht and bread and tea. The room was full of marigolds. The food hot, thick and good, and I was growing more and more sleepy, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to stay in the bright room forever, or to walk down that dark slick of road until I forgot myself.

Kiev

Cold air in the station hall, and streams of shawled babusyas, thick-faced policemen, teenagers in tight pants and fur trimming. Gold tiles in mosaics overhead. At Cyrillic letters shifting in the train schedules, my eyes began to blur. Budapest, Moscow, Odessa, Lviv. I saw me in iced windows, ice in black trees past the train. Station names give a lurch to the gut: Mornings over ground I’ve never seen, and my flinty bravery and boots on.

And Kiev, finally. Apartment blocks, the paint peeling like a scabbed syphilitic face – these mix with the old city, stone streets, balconies. Red trees and narrow pink buildings trimmed white. Oh to be in 1910, a little wine-buzzed, and smelling like smoke and intrigue.

Instead, all day I felt like a giant baby, swaddled in my down coat. Always toddling behind. Our language teacher Ihra is trying to make us self-sufficient. She had us ask passersby how to navigate the metro, how to find streets and stations. I do all right. At a certain point in my interactions, there are no words I know coming out of mouths, and my heart stalls.

When my face went so raw I wanted to cry, those nights in winter walking home from campus, I’d pretend I was in Prague. I had just read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and it sounded just as good as any other Eastern European city, cold and gold and gritty. By my apartment stood a spindly tree and I’d look up through it when the stars were frozen. I didn’t feel warmer but I liked thinking about accordions.

My thoughts get too selfish and silly for Peace Corps – but I don’t feel fancy enough. And my ideal vision of me is absurd. It involves a long velvet jacket, laced-up boots, lace on my gloves… So what I really want is to go to a ball. Seriously, though, women here war with beauty. The product of their labors is a hacked-out thing, cosmetic layers and boot-polish, clothes tight and sparkly. No fellow lesbian librarians.

Really what I want is to be older. I always want to be older, and I get older, but then I like, go to Ukraine and I have no idea what’s happening and it becomes difficult to maintain a stately air. Romancing travel, how it ends up (like so much else) being romance with the self.

There is a wide avenue in the center of Kiev where you can stand and see a cathedral on one end, a cathedral on the other. All gold domes in a pale light, and the sober figures of medieval Slavs. There is a picture of me in front of St. Sophia’s. I’m pleased with it, because other people will see it, and it will have the worldly authority that here, as I am, I can’t convey.

Notes from the under-ground fantastisch

Last week the first Harry Potter movie was on TV (dubbed in Ukrainian), and I was excited after a long day for the treat. Then Taras said, “Harry Potter – fantastisch. Under-ground fantastisch.” While I was still wondering, heart sinking, whether “under-ground” meant Hell, he asked me, “Do you believe in God?”

Well, apparently J. K. Rowling doesn’t. However, she does believe in Satan, and worships him I expect. It’s a good thing I left behind my tarot deck and Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner – I can just imagine baby Nastya dragging them into the kitchen, like she did with my bras yesterday.

My host family are Seventh-Day Adventists. Last night I went with them to a Bible study group in a nearby apartment. All gathered around a wide bed spread in sateen and a small table. I sat next to Olga, a very small Russian woman who always greets me on the street and clasps my hands (very rare – most people do not even make eye contact). She gave me a card with a Bible verse and a rosy-cheeked watercolor of a little girl praying, framed in roses. There was some argument going on that I would have liked to understand, but it was half in Russian.

Some of the conversation was about me. They wanted to know if I had a Bible, which I don’t. I am grateful for the spirit of all their intentions. It just frustrates me, it makes me feel inauthentic to myself, to go along with their assumption that I’m Christian. I wish I didn’t have to appear religious to be considered “good.”

Luckily I am only just now speaking and understanding complete sentences – explanations of my own particular spiritual communication are just too far beyond me. So while I have the chance to say it – happy Samhain, everybody!

HELLO MY PRECIOUS FRIENDS, IT IS I

NOT DEAD! Brain-bruised and confused but on the whole well, and making some sense of this beginning.

Three weeks now I’ve been living in Khaharlyk, a small town south of Kiev. Here I stay with a host family that a fellow volunteer compared to the Weasleys – constantly moving and making noise, and probably could benefit from a clock with a hand for each person’s whereabouts.

If my clock-hand didn’t read “Mortal Peril” it would probably point to “Ukrainian language lessons” for 99% of my waking hours. More about all that later – for now I’d like to tell you about this motley crew who’s putting me up.

Oh, speaking of “Mortal Peril”: My favorite Wealey is the two-year-old, Nastya. Apparently a lot of documentaries about feral children have been filmed in Ukraine. I am unsurprised. Nastya may be adorable, but she also was weaned by the wild dogs that congregate around the noseless Lenin statue. She climbs on everything, especially my body. Last evening she led me into her child-size tent, sat in my lap, kissed me, and blissfully peed all over me.

The other kids are more manageable: Ilya, 11, and Ihor, 14. Ilya is this tiny Oliver Twist-esque child with the eager, slightly frightened look of a kicked dog. He brings me pears, stickers, and fallen leaves. The eldest is quiet and gentle, if a little too cool for school (his favorite music, “Crime rap”).

Even though I’m in Peace Corps, I needn’t fear any lack of nourishment here – Mama Nadja yells, “Eat! Eat!” at every meal. She and her husband Taras are extremely warm and kind. Their garden is huge, overflowing with fruit and vegetables, cabbage and potatoes, and there are chickens and a cat. Yesterday Nadja gave me a misshapen sweater that looks like the Grinch. I think it will grow until I BECOME THE SWEATER. She also tried to give me her old pants, which sport many sparkle-encrusted flowers and strips of sheer fabric.

One small source of terror. Taras’ bedridden father is somewhere in the house. In a back room somewhere. I have never met him. This is because Taras’ father loves Communism and hates Americans. To illustrate his hatred of Americans, Nadja mimed THROWING A GRENADE. Last week a cute old Bilbo-Baggins-esque man was sitting at the table when I came home, and I was terrified it was the commie grandpa. No one understood why I wouldn’t leave my room until Taras said, “No danger! It is not my father! No danger!”

So I don’t know when I’m going to meet this character. Probably not until some Soviet parody of Jane Eyre in which he sets fire to the curtains.

A lot more to write about, but what with fending off wildly peeing children and violent grandfathers AND trying to learn their country’s language and teach its children – I barely have time to remember my own name. I will try, though, to rustle up some internet more often.

Please, please, PLEASE write to me. You won’t get an immediate response, but it helps to remind me I am a human being with loved ones and not just a hapless Peace Corps trainee. Much love from Mother Ukraine and do pobachennya.

Pure grit

It's Yetta! 

Been paging through a lot of old photographs lately, not only admiring fashion (above, clearly a candidate for Advanced Style), but trying to just conceive of my past, my family's past. Not least, trying to understand what it means to travel to my great-grandmother Yetta's birth country.

This is becoming an exercise in necessary fictions - photos, other people's memories, all the stories we tell ourselves in order to live (quoth Joan Didion). I've found my own past, for example, involved a sailor suit straight off the Good Ship Lollypop:

Mostly, I am curious about the relation between past and place. Between memory and place - if our bodies "remember" places we've never seen.  What would such a connection to a country feel like?

Only in rare moments here can I feel truly connected to environment. Suburban Illinois does afford the odd swatch of prairie or wood, or baby deer sightings, but everything basically looks like everything else. The never-seen-yet-familiar becomes impossible as the actual earth's chewed up, raped by strip mall and subdivision. Familiar, but sterile and bland familiarity. Think Eliot's The Waste Land. 

Is it too grandiose a desire, for felt recognition in Ukraine, as in "this has always been in me"? I don't expect anything like Yetta ghosting my steps around Kyev. Nothing so simple or sentimental.

Perhaps it will come in language. As I begin to learn Ukrainian, I wonder what threads might bind the hard, involving-one's-entire-mouth consonants of Cyrillic languages, and the farmland and forests of Eastern Europe. 

Right now I'm reading a terrific book by Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. He connects the English language's development with its environment - wintry, wind-swept, difficult. Read a line of Old English and you know these were a sturdy folk: My favorite thus far, by Cynewulf, is "ic wordcraeftum waef," meaning "I wove my word-craft." 

The point of this digression (besides my new ambition to learn the grittiest of Anglo-Saxon poetry) is that place, and deep-felt connection to place, bears out a like lexicon. Myself a lover of gnarled Germanic words, I already feel a growing bond with Ukrainian - I mean, one of its letters is pronounced "shch"!! Can't wait to see how being there, walking the land, and growing in fluency will all relate, and how they'll influence my weaving of word-craft.

Oh, and T-minus 2 days until I leave for staging. Terror and excitement go without saying.  

Dust, lilac, and warm stone

"The easiest of Kiev's pasts to re-create in the imagination is the raucous commercial city of the pre-revolutionary sugar boom. The novelist Aleksandr Kuprin, writing in the 1910s, described a town full of stevedores and pilgrims, Jewish hawkers, German madams, down-at-heel Russian officers, students, card-players, cigar smoke and cheap champagne. Most of Kiev's surviving historic centre — ponderous opera house, cobbled boulevards and the extraordinary Chimera House, barnacled with frogs, deer and rhinoceroses, that advertised the city's first cement factory -- dates from then, and on summer evenings the streets still smell,as in Kuprin's day, of 'dust, lilac and warm stone'; riverboats whistle on the Dnieper and men drink kvass out of jam jars at little booths under the chestnut trees. A museum on Andriyivsky Uzviz, the helter-skelter lane that plunges down from Catherine II's rococo St Andrew's Church to Contract Square, once the site of a great annual fair, houses an atmospheric rag-bag of period ephemera: sepia photographs of uniformed cadets lounging against a studio balustrade, a pair of white suede gloves, a painted umbrella, ivory elephants, a stereoscope, a curlicued shop-till, a velvet opera cloak trimmed with ostrich feathers."

From Anna Reid's Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine. Photo, detail from Chimera House in Kyev.

Baaaaaa.

Let me sheepishly (yet very, very excitedly) sound the news: Luddite and booklover I ... am getting a Kindle.

In many ways I think e-readers are terrifying. I gather they distort much poetry, altering line lengths and all-around removing one from the tangible pleasures of reading (and by extension, the awareness of physicality, of being a body in the actual world made of live things, etc. etc.).

Practically speaking, however, I can pack no more than two pieces of luggage, up to 50 pounds each. That pretty much rules out my Norton anthology of poetry.

So to be as subversive as possible, I vow to download only the mustiest of tomes! LIKE THIS!:

The stairs they strode
streaming redly;
at dark doorways
they dinned and hammered;
into halls of Atli
hewed a pathway;
rushed in roaring,
reeking-handed.

OH EM GEE, J. R. R. Tolkien translated The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun - the Norse myth on which the Germanic Nibelungenlied was based - ??? And I can download it to my Kindle??? So much alliterative verse, blood and darkness and gold, mead halls, and Valkyries - all MINE???

Yes, friends. And then I will feel like this:



(Arthur Rackham, from Der Ring des Nibelungen)

Welcome, friends & fiends; also, FAQs

Hello, hello! - clearing throat - DOBREE DENN - I think this means "hello" in Ukrainian but your guess is as good as mine, because I'm in America for two more weeks and my accent still sounds like Borat's.

For the next 27 months, I'll be checking in here whenever I can (yes, Ukraine does have internet, and probably also houses and roads and food), sharing topics of interest from my Peace Corps service with you. By "you" I mean "my mom and maybe 2 other people," but whoever you may be - welcome!

There's not much to report as of now, of course. My preparation has mostly involved a) feeling every feeling that exists, b) shoving the feelings waaaay down to the pit of my stomach, c) eatings SUNDAES, d) having a stomachache, e) staring at the Ukraine Peace Corps facebook group and rapidly spiraling spiraling spiraling because everyone seems more prepared than I am. In that order.

But now I'd like to take time now to answer a few questions that you, dear reader, might have about my service.

What will you be doing in Ukraine?
I'll teach English as a foreign language to secondary school. The first three months, from late September to mid-December, I train with other PC volunteers, then we're unleashed to our new communities.

Weren't you going to be in Morocco or Jordan or something? Why Ukraine?
The answer to this question usually involves me slapping my forehead and muttering "bureaucracies!" and "medical forms." I lost my spot in the North Africa PC group, but they were able to fit me in to the Ukraine group leaving later the same month.

Coincidentally, my great-grandmother Yetta emigrated from Ukraine in 1912. I don't know how she'd feel about me going there since her family - persecuted as Jews and starving - fled that country. But I don't think there's that much anti-Semitism in Ukraine anymore (probably because there are no Jews left to hate). And I have to think the universe had a hand in this "coincidence," as it always does.

Why? Just... Why? Why are you doing this?
I really never know how to answer that without sounding unbearably earnest. What's more precious than an aspiring poet returning to the country of her ancestry? Correct answers = "calling oneself a poet under any circumstances," or, "any Jonathan Safron Foer book," or "listening to Sufjan Stevens and crying." (OK, so I just did that last one. BIG DEAL. Also, I actually do still like Everything is Illuminated. BIG DEAL. Actually, JSF and Sufjan look very similar - aaaaand I've never seen them both in the same room at once. Think about it.)

Seriously, now: I've planned to join PC since I was 16. My curiosity and desire for experience are ravenous, I am terrified of boredom. Always I'm preoccupied with language - the thorns of its rules and inconsistencies, its elasticity depending on usage and context, its facets of beauty. In teaching English, I want to learn how to better manipulate my own language, and also how to better communicate.

The hardest lesson to learn, I think - how to be a person with other people. How to be authentic to your own personhood - but flexible enough to learn from them, even when we are all so strange and solitary among each other. I am no longer interested in Rilke's ideal of the solitary artist's soul, of lonely pleas to the angel. Now is the time for collisions, border-transgressions, transmutations.

What is this term "bluestocking" you are always bandying & blogging about?
I'm glad you asked! It is a somewhat pejorative term for a woman with literary leanings. The bluestocking is "the most odious character in society ... she sinks wherever she is placed, like the yolk of an egg, to the bottom, and carries the filth with her." - William Hazlitt, who obviously didn't know how to appreciate a female intellectual, nor the charms of colored hosiery.