it's beginning to get to me that i know more of the stars and sea than i do of what's in your head

I should either be working or sleeping, but instead I've spent the last hour reading about Ukraine. I can't wait to go, but it's simultaneously hard to believe that in a week I will be there, likely eating something disgusting covered in sour cream. Mmm. I think I'm excited because, for me, Ukraine is a blur of hazy memories, spread over a year that would have been confusing enough in the States, given that I was on the cusp of womanhood (isn't that a ridiculously dramatic phrase?).

Last weekend, on the phone with my parents, I was recounting everything that I remembered about our trip to Disneyworld--which turns out to be quite a bit, especially considering that I was only four years old. My memories of Ukraine are a similarly strange mix. I remember eating peanut butter out of a gallon-sized container that we had shipped over; I usually ate one spoonful as a snack. I remember my mom making homemade bread, and we'd always eat a whole loaf as soon as it came out of the oven. I remember teaching myself algebra at the kitchen table, listening to Voice of America radio. I remember playing the original 'Civilization', or getting motion sickness while watching my brother playing 'Wolfenstein 3-D'. I remember the strange benzene/gasoline smell of my comforter, and the time that grease came through the water pipes and ruined a load of clothes in the washing machine. I remember how toilet paper with the consistency of brown paper towels was still worth hoarding, which meant we usually had six weeks' worth on hand. I remember our epic Christmas Eve dinner in this freezing-cold restaurant, where one of the dishes was beef tongue in aspic jelly. I of course also remember the ridiculous Christmas program that my brother and I put on for our parents and aunt, and how the gifts we got the next morning (cash, trapper keepers, pepperoni, and oranges) were some of the best Christmas presents ever. I remember the buckets that my dad used to haul water from two blocks away.

It's no wonder I grew up crazy--I remember watching a funeral out of our apartment window (since funerals start at the dead person's house, and they carry the open casket out into the street before loading it and all the funeral guests into a bus), hearing the sickening sound of someone's skull cracking in the street during a brawl outside our hotel during those first few weeks, paying $3 for a head of lettuce the size of a fist at a hard-currency store, ordering pizza to be delivered to a phone booth (since the pizza delivery company apparently wouldn't deliver to anywhere other than that particular phone booth for safety reasons), buying a piglet and listening to it squeal in the trunk on the way back to town before eating it that night, watching my parents get smashed on vodka at various official and unofficial functions--I really remember quite a bit, but I'm looking forward to seeing it all again with more adult eyes.

Anyway, I should go to bed, so that I can get up early tomorrow and do all the things I should have done tonight. I didn't accomplish much this weekend--I was supposed to make some major decisions about work this weekend, but I haven't come to any definitive conclusions. I managed to do some laundry, sort my closet, have brunch w/Terry, and entertain Claude and Vidya with pizza and the Discovery Channel, but I wasn't as productive as I should have been. Tomorrow's a new day, though--and in three nights, I'll be getting on a plane for Iowa! Yay!