all things new

Yesterday I bought a new camera. Today I was trying it out the way my self-centered and self-adoring generation prefers – taking some egoshots in the bathroom – and thought I ended up looking a little too fine [see photograph above]. After a while of figuring out my new camera, I realized that I had been using the ‘beautifying’ function as it was the default…

That’s more like it – more like me.

Yesterday I returned from Budapest and today I went to work for the first time in 2012. I spent several hours writing my article for for Sweden’s publication for Slavic scholars Östbulletin at the library and ended up staying until it closed at 8 pm. For the last three hours – I made a break and had a disappointing Swedish chai latte in the middle – this guy was sitting across the table from me. I didn’t really pay much attention to him because my deadline for this text is January 7^th and also I was told a few days ago by Göteborgs-Posten that my next article for them will be published on the 14^th of January and that’s a text I haven’t written yet and thus I was sort of doing my own thing and minding my own business and trying to keep the stress to a minimum. As we were both packing up our computers to leave at the last minute, he looked at me and said: “I think you’re really pretty and I wanted to ask if you’d like to go out with me sometime?” I was confused because I hadn’t even registered what he looked like during the three hours we had sat in front of each other. Back when I was a teenager and I lived in Gothenburg full-time, I would often go to the same library to study and write and this kind of thing happened all the time there. When I was a teenager I thought these kind of chance – and possibly romantic – encounters were interesting. Sometimes I needed to ration my time carefully but surprisingly often I would say “sure” or “why not?” when this particular question was posed by a man. But I was a teenager back then and I didn’t know too much about life and people and I hadn’t realized that it’s not about quantity but quality and I think I’ve mentioned before how easily bored I was – and still am at times – so I would take up on opportunities like that sometimes just to pass the time. Tonight I experienced a deep sensation of tiredness when I heard him ask me the same old question I’ve been asked so many times before. Tonight all I wanted to do was to shove my laptop into my backpack and run away so fast he wouldn’t see what tram I got on. But I know that would have been bad behavior – and karma’s a bitch – so instead I said: “Thank you but no thanks because I’m seeing someone.” The only way to convince a man that you’re not interested in them is by telling them you already have another man in your life; you can of course fight me on this one, comrades, but out of all the reasons I’ve tried over the years this is the one which has yielded the most substantial results.

During 2012 I have promised myself not to go on any dates with any men. This way I will save time and emotions and perhaps finally become academically productive again. It will be difficult to stay away from men as they ask me out in public libraries [which Mother called ‘dagens i-landsproblem’ when I complained about today’s situation] or pop up in public saunas. When I was concentrating on the sauna process in Budapest, this tall and rough-looking man with broad shoulders walked in and asked if he could throw some sauna oil on the stones and I suggested we switch to Russian because his nationality was obvious. He thought I was from Latvia [rookie mistake] and when I heard him speak with his beautifully soft Russian man-voice and thought that he probably had excelled at some kind of masculine sport in his youth – that’s when I understood that I will never be a happy woman as long as I lack such a big and strong Russian man with a native tongue flowing gently and glittering delicately like golden honey. “What did he speak about?” K. asked me afterwards but I couldn’t say. “It wasn’t what he said, it was how he said it,” I argued. But a year without dating men doesn’t mean that if such opportunities as the one above present themselves I shall not be allowed to grasp them. But no more candle light dinners at expensive restaurants, no more spontaneous trips to watch the sun set from the Berkeley hills, no more lunch with red wine on the beach, no more planning and thinking and texting and mailing and wondering where things are going and if maybe he’s just not that into me? Either I want encounters of pure lust like the opportunity missed above [after all, when visiting a girlfriend in a foreign country it is not customary to sleep with random men] or simple, wholesome, healthy friendship with members of the opposite sex. No more making an effort with strangers.

I’m not really into New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps I should eat more healthy food and exercise more regurarly but I also know that everything in life works in stages and healthy as well as unhealthy behaviors come and go over time and that your own body is best at telling you what it needs and thus a long time ago I decided that from now on I will only obey my body and its signals and see where it takes me from here. Now it’s taken me to eat meat. I have a feeling that it will soon take me on a journey almost entirely lacking alcohol. Instead of directing my body, I let my body direct me. So far that’s been working for me.

Probably I should write something about having changed the name of my blog today. My blog became A Russia of My Own sometime during 2006, but my lovely comrades are mistaken if they think it was always called A Russia of My Own. During the first year it had also other names. Thus, to change its name is not as much of a revolution as you might think – it just feels somewhat weird because it has not been done for over five years. Maybe I’ll change my mind and regret what I’ve done and go back to the previous title. Who knows? I decided on the super-humble new title for my blog – Notes of a Beautiful Woman – already in June 2011 and this is also the title for a book that I’ve been writing ever since.

Notes of a Beautiful Woman is shaping into a book about my six years in Russia and it is not going to be a memoir and not a novel and not a short story collection and not selections from my diary and not an autobiography but merely notes of a beautiful woman.