Of Mice and M. Night Shyamalan

Not much new with me, but if anyone out there knows how to mouse-proof an apartment without causing any harm to the little rodent in question, let me know. I saw a mouse last Saturday morning when I first woke up, and it's about the last thing I want to greet me at the start of weekend... or any other time, for that matter. Anyway, my landlord, in his infinite wisdom and cruelty, chose not to repair my heating unit (the source--I'm convinced--of the mouse's break-in) and chose instead to leave glue traps throughout my apartment. Rather than have the burden of an innocent animal's suffering on my conscience, I threw out the traps and covered my heater with blankets. Yes, I know this is ineffective, but I don't care. Besides, I haven't seen the mouse since, so maybe it did work, or perhaps he simply continued on his way to some other apartment.

Still, the little critter did cost me several nights' worth of sleep, so I did also purchase some flexible metal netting with which to cover the heater. It's far easier to do it myself than to pick a fight with my landlord.

An aside: the mouse wasn't the only thing to cost me sleep last week: I had the misfortune of going to see the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie last weekend, and it haunted me for days after. Even the image of my Marky Mark couldn't keep me from being scarred from the sights of all of the death scenes, especially when enough of them occur in my old stomping grounds in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. Then again, it might have been the lack of plot and the wooden dialogue more than the suicides that kept me tossing and turning in the middle of the night. It's tough to say.

Mini Getaway

Once again I'm blogging from my blackberry, which is about as slow and tedious as it sounds, but it's the best I can do while on vacation and away from my computer. it's been a nice couple of days: mom wanted to visit her sister in Florida, so I volunteered to take her for a long (four-day) weekend. The weather has been dodgy, with some rain yesterday and clouds today, so beach time has been compromised. This morning, however, I was reminded that a morning on vacation in West Palm Beach is still better than a morning spent preparing for work. Check out this photo:


That, dear reader, was the road I took on my inline skating excursion. It was smooth as glass and lined with palm trees, and I was in skater heaven. I know it's not that exciting, but this little thing brought me such joy! It has, however, meant the final nail in the coffin for any pleasure I derived from skating through that rude-cyclist-infested and leaf-clogged Beach Drive in DC's Rock Creek Park. Alas.

The Big Easy

I was back in DC for only 36 hours before I had to hop on a flight to New Orleans for a conference. This is the first time I've been back since Katrina, and it feels... strange. Returning to New Orleans felt like returning to the scene of a violent crime, as if the air was thick with ghosts. Even though the French Quarter was mostly spared the worst damage (I'm staying just on the edge, on Canal St), it still feels like there's a sense of unease about the city. Maybe I'm the one who's ill at ease, though, or maybe I'm looking for something that's just not there. I doubt it.

Even sitting here at Cafe du Monde, as I am--eating beignets and drinking cafe au lait--feels somehow artificial and forced. Or maybe life just goes on. I don't know, and I'm not about to ponder it now, because it's a real pain to blog on a BlackBerry. That, and I'm getting powdered sugar everywhere.

Georgia on my mind

After enough khachapuri to satiate me for the rest of my life, I’m back from Georgia. What a mission! I can’t imagine how lucky I was—everything was seamless. Tbilisi was lovely, the election observation itself went off without a hitch (for an evaluation of the election itself, though, you'll have to read the OSCE report), and I won the partner lottery. Really, I wouldn’t have changed a thing (except, perhaps, the daredevil driving skills of the bus driver that took us to and from our area of observation—I was convinced that he would kill us all). I’ll try not to bore you to death, but we saw what happened when I tried that with my Kazakhstan impressions, so I promise nothing. Anyway, here goes….

I left work at 2pm on Thursday the 15^th and arrived in Tbilisi at 3am on Saturday the 17^th. If you do the math and account for the time difference, I ended up spending a good 27 hours in transit. Bad, bad scene. Except, in a way, it wasn’t. Much of that time involved crashing in a hotel room at the Munich airport, where many of the observers were paired up with others to sleep and otherwise kill time before the flight to Tbilisi left later on that night. My roommate, from Denver, was awesome! (In the interest of protecting the innocent, I’ll just call her Denver from now on.) Here’s how our first meeting went: PSK checks in, is informed by hotel staff that her roommate is already checked in herself. PSK grabs key and walks up the stairs to the room. PSK walks into the room and sees Denver crashed on one of the beds. Denver sits up, says, “Hi, I’m Denver!” PSK greets her, they both wish each other nice naps, and PSK herself crashes on the second bed. I tell you, these trips are not for the close-minded or the divas among us—you really have to expect and make do with random situations such as this. You have to be willing to be flexible and adaptable. Long story short: Denver and I became fast friends and, post nap, ended up hanging out together a lot while in Tbilisi prior to our deployment to our respective areas of observation.

Tbilisi was a really lovely city with a lot of character and, obviously, an enormous amount of history. We were housed in the Sheraton (the same one that was taken over by Kalashnikov-wielding men in the ‘90s—a former sign on the hotel actually read: “Handguns are acceptable; semi-automatic weapons must be checked at reception”) across the river from the old town and the main downtown area, but the walk was an easy, scenic one. For the 36 hours we had to explore the city prior to deployment, Denver and I walked all around, popping our heads into churches and shops, snapping photos, and hiking up to a fort that overlooks the city. We saw a wedding, we saw centuries-old buildings, and we saw many of the requisite guy-on-horse statues. The next day, we hopped into a cab and, in broken Russian, had the cabbie take us to the ethnography museum across town. Hilarity ensued as we pulled up to the entrance and the guard, eyeing us, began to close the gate. This was not quite the hospitality for which the Georgian people are known. Turns out, though, that the museum hadn’t opened yet, so the cabbie took Denver and me to Turtle Lake just up the road to bide our time until the museum grounds opened.

The museum was worth the wait. We stumbled into random homes from Georgia’s past, two of which had these lovely women who walked us through them, explaining along the way (in Russian and even in French and broken English) what we were seeing. Both Denver and I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the “Georgian Pampers” (a wooden--yes, wooden--contraption) that one bassinet had hidden underneath the quilt, and even I had to laugh at the spirited pantomime of the woman at the hunting lodge who explained to us how chicken heads would fly across the room when cut off. Yikes.

So, back to the hotel, where we attended the usual briefings on what awaited us on our mission and where we searched anxiously for the people with whom we would be paired for the next five long, intense days. It got to be a bit of a joke: every time someone would ask an insipid question in the briefing, Denver and I would turn to each other and groan, convinced that the offending questioner was my partner. Still, there was no sign of him, even after two whole days in Tbilisi. It wasn’t until I’d gotten a seat on the bus to the Guria region (my area of observation) that we met. I heard him ask of the other passengers, with trepidation, “PSK?” as he walked down the aisle. I waved my hand, and he sat down next to me, both of us relieved that we didn’t get someone out of our worst election nightmares.

In fact, my dear partner (a.k.a. DP) and I soon became good friends. (By the end of the observation, we were even planning a return together, this time arriving in Georgia via his native Turkey.) We arrived in the town of Ozurgeti to spend the duration of the mission with six other teammates in a guesthouse—for a total of eight people sharing one bathroom. Let me tell you, you really get to know people well when you’re sharing one bathroom for that long. Lucky for us we all got along fairly well, because that could have been one ugly week otherwise.

Has anyone else noticed how bloody long this post is already? Holy crap. I’ll try to get to the point faster and keep out of the weeds.

Right. So anyway, the food and the wine were plentiful and delicious. The scenery was lovely, and our team partners—our interpreter and our driver—were wonderful people. Each of them, in fact, invited us into their homes for the huge feasts over lunch on separate days. Our interpreter’s family—her beautiful and utterly charming daughter-in-law and grandchildren—cooked for us, filled our glasses with homemade wine, danced for us, and treated us to an unreal level of hospitality. DP and I were truly humbled and truly thankful for the good fortune that had greeted us at every turn of this mission (with the possible exception of my car sickness on the drive through the mountains). We were situated in these lovely mountains with winding rivers and streams, ancient churches, and the Black Sea (where we had dinner one night) only an hour’s drive away. We couldn’t believe our luck.

Oh, and there were cows everywhere—on the side of the roads, walking in the roads… it was so cool. (A side note to Tiberius: I tried to get a photo of this phenomenon for you, but with no luck, as l felt awkward asking our driver to stop so I could capture the moment).

The hours are long on election day. Typically a team is up and out the door by 6 or 7am at the latest, and rarely gets back to the hotel prior to midnight. Working 24 hours in a row is not at all unusual. So when the clock struck 11pm at the final polling station, DP and I started to get loopy. Everything we saw, we decided, was a violation. Smiling workers? Violation. Outhouse in the back? Violation. And so on. We began to wonder if we had somehow died along the way and were in hell or limbo. As the polling station chair flipped through the rule book in order to follow it verbatim, DP started muttering about how Genghis Khan had burned libraries full of books along his path of conquest. “Now I see why,” he mused. Pausing, he surmised that Khan was himself an observer, stroking his moustache while he scanned for violations in the stations and eventually giving up and just burning the rule book. I, of course, found this all perfectly logical at the time. Then again, I also had my doubts about actually being alive at the time, so anything made sense to me then. An aside: DP is lucky that he actually is alive right now, because I almost killed him when he decided on the polling station where we would watch the final count, for it had as its only bathroom an outhouse. Again. Our final polling station in Ukraine had an outhouse, too, and I had flashbacks to being led there by my beloved interpreter (hello, my dear!) at 3am with nothing but a flashlight and the good fortune to avoid the giant mud puddles and patches of snow. Luckily, there was no need for the outhouse this time, but DP still would have owed me were it not for his announcement after calling our LTO that we were done—done!—with our observing at just after midnight! We had to work a second shift the next day, but we could get back to the guesthouse at a decent hour and even get some sleep! This really was a treat, and DP was only the messenger, but I still let him off the hook as a result.

Eek—I have a flight to catch to New Orleans, and I haven’t even finished packing. Long story short: a good time was had by all, DP is just about the best partner ever, and our whole regional team—from the observers to the drivers and interpreters—was top-notch. As before, if you have any interest in photos, visit http://picasaweb.google.com/myfirstname.mylastname. Again, substitute accordingly. And now back to packing—one hour to go before my ride to the airport gets here! Bye again for now.

P.S. Two more things that I found entertaining/amusing:

1) One of the political parties--I forget which one--lifted their party logo straight from the helmet of the Houston Texans. I, of course, found this hilarious, but it was tough to explain the entertainment value to the other members of my team, but at least I was amused. I still regret not getting photographic evidence of this.

2) At one of the polling stations, I was queried on whom I preferred in the election. I explained that I had no favorite and was there as a neutral observer. Someone then asked me what I thought of the American election. Again I explained that I couldn't say. I don't know Georgian, but I definitely heard the word "diplomatic" being exchanged in between chuckles. One man, however, exclaimed, "You need a new president more than we do.". I did everything in my power to refrain from joining them in their laughter. DP and I agreed that was the best line of the election.

Back in a week or so

I owe a couple of you emails--one in particular, who was so sweet to email me on my birthday (you know who you are!), only for me to be too much of a mess to reply in a reasonable time--but I can't catch up tonight, because I am so, so very tired. That, and I have to finish packing for Georgia (as in the Republic of, and not as in the home of R.E.M., peaches, and the Atlanta Braves) tomorrow to observe next week's election. I'll be back in about 9-10 days, at which time I hope to be in touch and even to have some pics to show you (probably not as funky as those from Kazakhstan, but one can always hope). More later! Keep an eye on my apartment while I'm gone, will you? There's some leftover soy milk in the fridge, if you're thirsty.

Slurp

I really have nothing to say here; I just thought that Oscar looked especially charming in the pic below.

Intermission hijinks

I've been in something of a tizzy over the NHL playoffs, mostly because my beloved Flyers have been playing Washington in the first round, so I've had the chance to actually see the games televised on channels here in DC. A rare treat, to be sure, as DC is typically not a hockey lovin', hockey watchin' kind of town.

Anyway, last night, while watching one of the most exciting games I've seen in recent memory (you gotta love when a series--nay, an entire season--is decided by whichever team scores first in game 7 in overtime), I needed to find something to entertain myself during the first and second intermissions. Normally I'd listen to the commentary, but I hate the voice of one of the local sportscasters. And, with nothing else really worth watching, I popped in a DVD of a concert I attended last year--the Who in DC.

And what a concert! I never, ever thought I'd get to see my favorite band in the world--they've held that title since I was six years old--from the vantage point of a front row seat, but the concert gods were smiling on me when I won a pair of tickets from a local radio station. I had seen the Who twice on last year's tour, and I just couldn't justify spending the cash on what would undoubtedly be a bad seat in an arena--DC's Verizon Center--notorious for horrible acoustics. But it costs nothing to sign up online for the mailing list of a newly-created local rock station. "What's your favorite band?" the questionnaire inquired. I typed in "the Who" and the rest of my vital stats... and several days later I received a call from the promotions guy, telling me that I had tix waiting for me for the DC show if I wanted them. The next thing I knew (well, this was a couple of days later), my friend Leslie and I were being escorted down down down the stairs to the floor of the arena and up up up to the first row of seats. At that point, I'm quite convinced my soul left my body for at least a few seconds. I also remember thinking--seriously--that I was now comfortable with dying, for having this ticket, this vantage point, meant that I had Truly Lived. Yes, I am a jackass, but I do love my little band just that much.

Right, so long story short, I was able to see myself on the concert footage! I have proof I was there! Here are some framegrabs:


This one is much better:

It's plain as day, I tell ya! But one thing this show did for me is spoil pretty much any other Who concert I ever attend. Whatever. It was worth it. (Incidentally, the acoustics in the front row were just fine. Either that, or they stunk, and I was too delirious to care.)

Oh, and go Flyers! Beat Montreal! Woo!!!