The Orgastic Future

Easter in Moldova

2007-04-11T03:15:00.000-07:00

Buffalo and the Sabres

2007-03-29T02:35:00.000-07:00

Besides the careless summers of the college student, and home for every Christmas besides one hellish season spent in the throes of holiday hell, I’ve spent the last 8 years of my life outside of Western New York. Still I read the Buffalo News almost everyday, at least when the internet is cooperating. For national news I’m addicted to the Times so mainly I just scam the local sections, editorials, and sports page of our dear local paper. The News’ blogs on their website are also interesting from time to time, which brings me to my point; what’s the deal with these Sabres medallions? I couldn’t believe some of the comments I read about the supply shortage of these medallions- which are being offered in local stores for $2.99 as part of a promotional effort between The News and the Sabres. Buffalonians are some of the most unpretentious, flexible, and humble people anywhere but give us a hockey team with half a decent chance of winning a championship and we lose our senses.

Here are some examples of the editorial outrage behind the medallion shortage, followed, of course, by my comments:

“I feel so sorry for the poor person behind the counter. The news should make amends to all. The only paper in town should know the size of their community. What a shame. I just keep shaking my head with everything that goes on in my home town.”

I’m ashamed of a lot of things about Buffalo too: the new peace bridge hasn't been built yet, they want the taxpayers to pay to put a giant fish store in the old Aud, there’s that stupid skyway that hugs the water front, etc. I am not so sure, however, that I agree with you that a shortage of $2.99 plastic medallions with pictures of hockey players on them makes me ashamed of my hometown. Consequently, It’s a good thing you don’t live Moldova. Can you imagine that stores here routinely run out of flour, milk and eggs? You’d probably kill someone.

“Running this promotion during the upcoming Easter break was a mistake. I had hoped to collect all the medallions, but will be away for 2 weeks on a previously scheduled Easter trip. I guess this is a moot point now that there are none available!”

Why don’t you just cancel your vacation so you can buy all of them then? Oh wait, you’ve already thought of that and then realized it’s a “previously scheduled trip.” Damn, no going back on that one huh? You know, I’m not so sure that I believe that you believe that it’s a “moot point” you can’t buy the medallions.

“First of all, this program should have started in the beginning of the season and sold 1 medallion per week...not 1 per day. A family with 2-3 boys who want to collect these could not afford it. Not to mention the fact that you have to go to the store daily to buy them.”

Wait a second, you have to go to the store to buy these medallions? I smell a rat.

“Of the several different locations I visited, each store has given a different number available. Can a store manager or clerk decide to sell only a fraction of the alloted number to the general public and keep the rest for themselves or preferred people who are not waited in line at 6am. There should be some rule in regards to this, and someone that makes sure the rules are being followed.”

You mean the Buffalo News hasn’t already assigned a “medallion czar” to prevent the trafficking in medallions? I can’t believe that. Nobody is that stupid to put the fate of $2.99 plastic medallions with pictures of hockey players on them in the hands of grocery store clerks.

Wow. Call me a casual fan that the extent of my Sabres mania is signing onto dial-up every morning over my cup of instant coffee to check last night’s scores (I’m currently waiting for the damn page to load so I can see who won the devils game last night) but what the hell are you people complaining about? They’re not running out of Tim Horton’s Coffee over there are they?

Picasso and Moldova

2007-03-29T02:32:00.000-07:00

If you’re a fan of Piccaso perhaps you’re familiar with the allusions to African folk art that pervade many of his cubist works. Some background for those of you who actually have real jobs and don’t have time to read “Cubism;” Cubism originated during the fermenting years of the early 20th century as artists, to express their anxiety with an increasing impalpable world (Einstein was brooding on relativity, Freud was probing the unconscious), began to utilize the subjective and geometrically exaggerated forms of art works from what were considered primitive cultures. The point Picasso and the modernists wanted to make was that a mask painted by tribesman 4,000 years ago was just as expressive (and more genuine) of the human condition than the academic styles being taught in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

A pivotal attraction to Moldova for volunteers like me seems to be analogous to Picasso’s fascination with African art. I recently had a conversation with a Moldovan friend during which I heard myself telling her, after complaining about the way I was treated at the bank, how I find refuge in being able to readily identify the sources of my moods here. Remember Philadelphia when we first met and the answers we gave each other about why we were going to Moldova? “I just want to meet different people and laugh with them,” “I think it’d be a great experience to live in a village without running water,” and “I heard that Eastern European woman rock the casbah!” Last weekend I walked 30 minutes out of my way for one of the few vending machines in this country that dispenses coffee. Two years ago buying coffee from a vending machine wouldn’t exactly have been one of the notable events of my day.

Picasso’s attraction to primitive art, likewise, was based on its power to convey, in the framework of western art, how voluptuous and haughty western culture had become. In today’s politically correct culture, however, and its obsession with cultural relativism, Picasso can be accused of oversimplifying and romanticizing the “primitive” cultures he sought to invoke in his art.

I’ve certainly let my bias’ taint my experience here. For example, my penchant for downsizing all problems into their economics has allowed me to regulate the vexing problems of Moldova to a case of unfortunate geography because, after all, that’s the most culturally appropriate answer economics gives for why some countries are rich and some are poor. Why geography? Read, “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” The problem is I’ve let this bias swell to a general perfidy in international development-if this mess is indebted to Moldova’s geography spending thousands of tax payer dollars on, oh I don’t know, some 96 hour assiduously detailed business course for 17 year old girls who come just because the instructor is foreign, and has blue eyes, isn't really going to help the cause is it? I suppose, however, that it’s helping something.

This occurred to me after reading “Cubism:” What happens when you put this highly institutionalized and somewhat whacky cultural exchange, which occasionally refers to itself as international development, in the hands of the sloppy, barely out of college, and rather unpaticular American middle class? It’s as if Uncle Sam is giving us this whole poor country as our open canvass and, for the low price of two years, we can drip and splat everywhere our bureaucratic and results obsessed culture.

Can we avoid painting Moldova into a sloppy and farcical caricature of itself?

A free trip to China?

2007-03-20T14:21:00.000-07:00

I was minding my own business at work yesterday when someone appeared out of nowhere, quickly sat down in the chair in front of my desk, and began to explain to me the intricacies of a business he has in a nearby village. After failing to slow him down on several occasions in order that I could figure out what the hell he was saying, I finally succeeded in asking him what exactly I could do for him. “I want you to go to China for me for 10 days, as a translator,” he answered matter of factly. “They speak English there.” I recalled that a few weeks ago my counterpart had me whisk off some e-mails to a wholesale supplier of construction materials in China. I wondered if there was a connection.

“Well what do you think?” the stranger asked. “I’ll pay for you. We’ll leave from Moscow.” For some reason I didn’t want to say no. I just looked around pensively. “Think about it,” he said, getting up to leave. "You have my contact information."

Sir mix-a-lot

2007-02-27T02:02:00.000-08:00

“Baby ain’t got no back:” Sir Mix a-lot Shuns Moldova

Hip Hop star Sir Mix a-lot, most famous for his 1991 smash hit “Baby got Back,” declined an invitation from the Ministry of Culture to perform in Moldova over what his manager called “weighty cultural differences.”
While his representative didn't elaborate further, one can speculate that Sir Mix A-lot's well known bias for large bottomed woman, as well as his harsh critiques of Eastern European diets, factored into the declination. “When a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a flat butt in your face you don't get sprung,” Sir Mix lamented in an interview for this magazine last year during which he also characterized Moldovan culture as “rearcist.”
Sir Mix's condemnations of Moldovan eating habits have been no less severe. When asked about the vegetable rich diet preferred by Moldovans at a charity event last fall the rapper replied that, “I wouldn't feed my ladies borsh for the same reason I wouldn't pour it into the gas tank of my Hummer.”
Sir Mix's manager, well not exactly specifying what it would take to entice Sir Mix-a-lot to come to Moldova, did say that a nationwide ban on exercise, as well as the construction of more Mexican fast food restaurants, could help ease tensions between Moldova and the famous rapper.

I didn't light it but I tried to fight it

2007-02-27T01:59:00.001-08:00

My Odyssey of the Mind team, pictured below during our skit, was a heavy favorite to win the competition in Chisinau and then enter the European finals in Berlin this spring. I hand selected the smartest kids I could find for the competition during an assiduous 4 week tryout but as it turns out it was all in vain. The chosen few spent a lot of time on the play, as you can see from their costumes, but a fire during our performance sparked, amongst other things, a debate between the judges over rather or not it violated competition rules. Before our presentation one judge told us that the contained fire, an important part of our plot, fell within the guidelines. Other judges, however, didn’t agree. As it turns out we came in second place, or second last, depending on which judge you ask. As I told me kids after the scores were in; they’re damn lucky I was just in Berlin.

Odyseey of the Mind

2007-02-27T01:57:00.000-08:00

February

2007-02-13T03:43:00.001-08:00

My host Mom, a good cook and eager to please, has been pestering me for recipe suggestions lately. One morning I told her about corn flake chicken before rushing off to work. She didn’t seem to understand and, consequently, I didn’t expect her to try it.

Upon my return from work that day host Mom brought a frying pan into my room with the dreaded “see what I did” look on her face. Peeking sheepishly inside the simmering pan, for something didn’t quite smell right, I saw fried chicken patties next to a overflowing pile of oily corn flakes. “Usually we fry the corn flakes on the chicken but lets give it a try.”

After diner I went outside to find the cat because it was cold and I still felt bad about the corn flakes, and was welcomed by curds of snow pelting the muddy ground. I’m don’t think I’ve ever had to wait until February to see my first snow.

That night I started reading, “The Emperor’s Children.” I had heard something about this book being a post-September 11th “end of irony” type of novel. I’ve also made an effort to read notable contemporary writers. It turns out that the book reminds me of this reoccurring nightmare I have.

The thing is that being constantly surrounded by other Peace Corps volunteers has me kind of freaked out about my generation. I think that having our coming of age party during the information revolution must have really screwed us up. It’s as if being turned loose at the same time the world really was shrinking knocked everything out of whack for us: expectations disproportionate to opportunities, trophies disproportionate to accomplishments. We’re like a band of maverick explorers oblivious to the million other ships flanking our search.

The two main characters in “The Emperor’s Children” are confined with the same egotistical brand of wanderlust that’s identifiable in almost everyone I know. At first the characters seem like a modern incarnation of the dangerous nihilist, you know the dudes Turgenov and Dostoyevski wrote about, but in “Emperor’s” they’re rendered harmless by the fact that everyone else in the book is just as faithless as they are. September 11th happens, suddenly, but seems to only slightly magnify their atrophying.

As my flight flew over the Atlantic and approached JFK airport outside of New York last month on my way back here I was shocked to hear the lady in front of me mistakenly tell her daughter that the foam from the waves was debris left over from September 11th. Does that girl realize how dumb her mother is?

It seems that September 11th could have been the moment my wandering cohort came to grips with reality. After growing up during a winning streak, maybe the longest in our history (cold war, world wide web, gulf war, record economic expansion, dot-com), that was the day when we should have felt that invisible tide of human muck pulling us down.

My reoccurring nightmare starts with me waiting for a job interview. While staring blankly at some toothless Rockwell girl on wall I overhear snippits: “Well, I helped facilitate victory in cold war by participating in air-raid drills” and “As you can see from my travels I have a lot of experience teaching people how to smile.” My competitors in the waiting room are busy shining their faces with some kind of polish. “So what if that guy helped win the cold war?” I snide to no one in particular, “I fell in love once.” Now that I've gotten their attention I keep going...“she looked good in green. She loved Martinis if you added enough Sprite. I mean it’s all I could afford that she would drink. So what are you in for?”

Finally they call me in. The perturbed interviewer is already gazing at my blank resume, “are you sure you’ve never done anything?” he starts to probe as I sit down. An awkward clock ticks five or ten times. “Nothing?” he tries again.

“Nope. Not a god damn thing.”

2007-02-13T03:38:00.000-08:00

Pub Quiz Win in Berlin Highlights Month Long Vacation

2007-01-16T02:28:00.000-08:00

“Camaraderie,” a team consisting of Bryan and 3 other Americans, won the pub quiz competition at an expat bar in Berlin last Thursday, a victory an alcohol induced Bryan characterized as “the crowning moment” of his month long vacation. Besides a night of bar trivia Bryan’s trip also included a visit home to New York where he met with relatives and friends, many of whom he hadn’t seen in years, a weekend in Istanbul, and day trips throughout Germany.

After being stumped on the first question of the night(what is the fastest insect in the world anyway) Camaraderie, and its vast knowledge pool, correctly answered such erudite questions as what species of bird Dick Cheney was trying to kill when he accidentally sprayed his friend with bullets.

The easy path to victory was briefly threatened in round 4 when a question popped up regarding what color smoke denotes that a new Pope has been chosen. Just when it appeared that “black” would be the outcome of a tense deliberation Stephan suggested changing the answer to “white” at the last second. “It’s a high risk high reward on that one,” Stephan explained, ““but fortunately Verity did a great job of writing it down before the buzzard. Once we got that answer it was like we pressed a gun to the fat lady’s head and said, “you know any songs bitch?””

Besides a round of Schnapps, the team shared a prize of 26 euros and free drinks.

The victory did not come without its costs. Josh spent most of the post game celebration in the men’s room nursing a gastronomic condition apparently brought on by a Bleu Cheese Burger he ordered in the first round. Josh, giving his teammates an emotional thumbs up from underneath the stall, wasn’t able to finish the quiz, though he managed to contribute a critical answer regarding the Yiddish language before carting himself off to the bathroom.

Bryan’s victory euphoria was almost tarnished by grim death during on the subway home after Steph wagered him that 10 seconds wasn’t enough time to dodge an approaching train if unexpectedly shoved onto the tracks. Fortunately Stephan decided not to push his inebriated friend after noticing that one of Bryan’s shoes was untied.

The Baroque splender of Zwinger castle in Dresden

2007-01-16T02:27:00.000-08:00

Steph and I wait for fish sandwiches on the Baltic

2007-01-16T02:25:00.000-08:00

The Jewish Memorial in Berlin

2007-01-16T02:24:00.000-08:00

In Potsdam, seat of Prussian Kings

2007-01-16T02:21:00.000-08:00

Almost Home

2006-12-06T02:24:00.001-08:00

I put my Christmas tree up the other night. It looks more like something you’d decorate a fish tank with. I used dental floss to attach the five or six ordaments I salvaged from last year. I was going to make some new ones but what the heck. I’m going home soon.

The thing I miss most about America is probably the never ending cup of coffee. When I think about going home I picture sitting at some shiny table drinking coffee and eating doughnuts.

Does anyone know why, generally speaking, doughnuts have holes in the middle? In this case form certainly does not follow function. Probably there is an official myth about it.

We had a PYSK at my site in Comrat last weekend teaching 19 girls and 1 boy the fundementals of business and entreprenuerism. The business plans our wonderful students presented to us on Sunday included an embrodiary shop, a school bus service, a swimming pool, and I can’t remember the last one. This week I’m trying to put together a project to start student run newspapers with some local partners. It gives me something to do besides dream about eating chicken wings.

I really don’t like Charles Dickens. Besides “A Christmas Carol” and “Hard Times,” both of which I was forced to read, I could never get passed the first few pages of any of his novels. I really tried to read “Tale of Two Cities” because I like historical fiction but the guy is more windy than the top floor of the Empire State Building. Did you know that, by the way, the top of the EPS was designed to load and unload zepplins?

Here is the first paragraph of my blog as if Charles Dickens had written it...

Last night he put up a Christmas Tree. It was the smallest tree he ever had, it was the biggest tree he ever had. It was the most beautiful, the most ugly, the most sublime, green, sparkly, peacful home for twinkly lights that ever was, or ever would be, in the dusty, sparse, hollow, mill smelling, commie block that bender Bryan (according to trends by 2011 this will be the most popular spelling) called home before the dark, gortesque, jagged shaped factories blew their foul smelling breath inside poor old Bryan’s window causing him to band together with a small group of mistfits (volunteers) who will, before our story is done, in the unlikely event you're still reading, happlessly attempt to overcome the drivel life of dirty livers down in Tinsel Town.

So about going home. Wish me luck. The long road takes me through Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey before I ride the steel turkey across the Atlantic, waiting for the shoreline of West Egg to break the ocean and the lights on the ground to imbue me with visions of the cookie dough snow and lamp post hurricanes that are Christmas at home.

Personalized Merchandise Hawkers Beware: “Bryan” Making Startling Comeback

2006-11-20T01:54:00.000-08:00

My first crush, Adrian Peirce, had these searching brown eyes, and scrunched between an unblemished forehead and fragile little neck, a face like a stuffed animal. She sat in the front corner near the pencil sharpener in Mrs. Sardina’s 3rd grade class. Needless to say my pencil tips were always razor sharp.

I never had the nerve to talk to Adrian but still recall the joy of watching her insouciantly slip a red envelope into my sparkling letter box on Valentine’s Day. My euphoria quickly dissipated, however, after prying it open and reading the short greeting, “Dear Brian, I’m yours...Love Adrian.” Sure, having your name constantly spelled wrong can be belittling, but this is the only time I ever remember being on the brink of tears. I still feel sorry for that little kid who, on that frosty Valentines Day night, sheepishly drew an inversely slopped line in front of the “a” to change the “i” into a “y” before displaying the valentine on his desk.

Well fellow Bryans we can’t forget the past, but according to the US Social Security Administration, hard times are over, for recent data on baby names reports that “Bryan,” the more refined version of the ambiguously spelled name, has been gaining ground on its working class brethren “Brian” during the last 25 years due, among other things, to an increase in adult literacy. In 1981, the year I was born, 80% of “us” were spelled Brian. By 1990 the gap had closed to 54%-36% in favor of the bad guys. Today, out of every 100 Br#ans, 44.6% are “Bryan” according to their birth certificates.

If current trends continue, and you adhere to the i, I suggest you purchase those little BRIAN license plates before the world passes you by.

And in the case of botched Valentines, you might as well buy a few good erasers too.

Wine festivle

2006-10-24T02:08:00.000-07:00

Our seminar logo

2006-10-03T04:41:00.000-07:00

Business

2006-10-03T04:39:00.000-07:00

It was one of those early summer Friday afternoons, the warm light baking the sticky sidewalks, the smell of grilled meat billowing from some happy grill somewhere, that make you want to head to that timeless child inside and gather your books and burn them because school is out for summer!
Continplating a paticular desire to burn my Russian-English Oxford dictionary, and pee on the ashes, I tacitly ordered my favorite coffee, for fair Coffee Beans was where we laid our scene that fine day! Yes, Chisinau’s dear oasis for us addicts, otherwise so terribly jaded by those unspeakable pieces of rat fecies, also called instant coffee mix, that pollute Moldova.
I was so happy to be at Coffee Beans, in fact, that I didn’t even care that my date was 20 minutes late, or 10 minutes early if we’re doing the Moldovan thing. No matter, I just ordered a rich Mexicana blend, nailing the Russian, as usual, for how many times have I chopped up those mystical words, “Я бы хотел заказать мекциканю, как обычно.”
Yes, just as Gastby had the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, I believe in my Coffee Beans. When the bust driver yelled at me that morning because I bought my ticket at the ticket counter of all places, I didn’t let it bother me, for I was distracted by the tiny coffee beans dancing off in the distance. Look at you little arabica in your sunglasses, all right guy, you got it! And now I’m here and everything is perfect. Look, here it comes. So fast, Oh, excellent. Still hot, but I think I’m going to go ahead and take just a little sip here...“$&#%!”, what the “@*#$”!, this is “@*$&#^@” pain oh yea! The mother *$&^@$ mug. I want it to... Ahh skulls, death, and smashed things!

In case you haven’t guessed it, the coffee mug had unprovokingly exploded all over my lap before I even got a sip in. The waitress pretended she didn’t see it, just as she pretended she didn’t look like a dead rat, with all that make-up and stuff. I even had to ask her for napkins. When the bill came she charged me for both the coffee and the glass, as I knew she would. As I looked over the check I told my date, who had just arrived, that I hated her, and then justified a preemptive invasion of Moldova.

The story I have just told is all true, and is one of hundreds of examples of poor business practicies that I have witnessed since arriving in Moldova a year ago.
ПУСК is our plan to do something about it. ПУСК is a 3 day seminar that introduces young Moldovans to the essentials of business and economics. Through classroom instruction, hands-on activities, educational games, simulation of economic models, and computer excersises, students will learn what it takes to start a succsssful business in a free-enterprise economy. At the end of the course each student participates in a presentation for a new business idea he or she developed utilizing the techniques taught during the seminar. ПУСК also seeks to engage the students outside the classroom with such activities as ultimate frisbee, basketball, movies, and more.
Obviously, 3 days is not a long, but, if nothing else, I want the kids to learn that business is a serious discipline that demands to be studied. We also want to kids to realize that, in order to be succsesful in business, they need to create something of value for their customers, or in other words, develop a succsesful business not by scamming people out of their money off but by providing them with a good or a service that improves their lives.
I haven’t been back to Coffee Beans since that faithful day. If they would have known anything about business they would have considered that it’s 9 times more expensive to attract a new customer than to keep one.

Moldova

2006-10-03T04:16:00.000-07:00

Kiev

2006-09-26T05:52:00.000-07:00

Trip to Kiev

2006-09-26T05:48:00.001-07:00

In early September I went to Kiev with Brad to take my GMATs. Kiev, Moscow’s delinquent child, darting off on his own from time to time only to be pulled back by the wimpy threads of his little orange scarf.
On our way to the test center on Tuesday morning Brad and I got seperated on the subway. As I squeezed myself onto the crowded train Brad yelled to wait for him 4 stops down. So where to rendezvous? Lets pretend it’s an amusement park and you’re riding water slides with your friends. Do you wait for them at the bottom, right in front of where the cascading water empties into the pool? Of course not, unless you want to be kicked in the head! You wait for them near where the riders exit the pool, or in our case, at the top of the escalators leading towards the street. Brad did well on the GMAT’s, god knows how, because he miserably failed this test.
After our GMAT’s we celebrated over dinner at a Sushi restaurant near Independence Square. I was excited to see this focal point of the Orange Revolution, where in the Fall of 2004 Ukrainians took to the streets to demand a recount of an apparently fraudulent election won by the Moscow backed Yanukovich. Underneath their pounding feet in a subterranean shopping mall McDonald’s, Hallmark, and Levi’s waited in shinny, glass ensconced supply lines for the revolution to advance.
The next morning, before what would turn out to be a precarious return trip to Chisinau in 3rd class (that’s why the tickets were so cheap), I shrugged off the sagging morning clouds in search fof a greasy breakfast nook. The clouds were rushing over Kiev, like an upsidedown river of floating ice chunks melting overhead.
My early dawn journey took me down Andriyivskys decent in Kiev’s most ancient district, highlighted by a colorful Baroque Cathedral and sparsely populated by souvenir hawkers preparing booths. The winding road eventually deposited me on a fashionable street near the Dnipro River. Seeing only a few snotty looking coffee bars, I took a cable car back up the hill.
The apex of traveling is when I find myself the most incongrous with the magestic city, usually in the golden mornings all alone, before being forced into the tourist vestibule known as the morning rush.
I was standing in a whiny cable car with my disheveled hair and rain jacket amongst suits and tweeds, not being able to place myself agianst them, when I was challenged by someone who had the audacity to try to place me. I told him I was on my way to London to be a Guerilla. Did he know if Guerilla’s had to abide by regular laws there? I was anxious to go without my banana shorts.

St. Sophia in Kiev

2006-09-26T04:13:00.000-07:00