I can always count on Jason to pick somewhere a meme that I find hard to pass by (especially, when I lack inspiration to come up with a gripping narrative). Below the cut, then, is the two-part new compendium of facts about yours truly. (If anyone is so inclined, the old compendium is here.)
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One of the most important dates in my life is the day I met Natasha. We were really young then, yet somehow managed to recognize that we were meant for each other, if not at first sight, then definitely at the second one.
We actually saw one another for the first time a couple of days earlier. Our student theater was looking to launch a freshman troupe, and I drew the short straw for the privilege of being its “artistic director”. Of course, I appraised all of the girls who came to the initial meeting, and not just on their performing talents. Then, a couple of days later, I saw one of them standing in the lobby of our university building waiting for someone, approached her, struck a conversation, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I remember that day as if it were yesterday. The date was 18th of October.
Which, if you’ve become familiar with us by now, you know is also Becky’s birthday.
Because Becky chose to enter the world on the anniversary of the day that Natasha and I met, and because our tying-the-knot anniversary occurs less than two weeks later, we tend to overlook celebrating that fateful meeting. Even though I consider it a more important occasion. Because it feels as if I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her even then.
My love for my wife is easily summed up by the title of this song. I just can’t smile without her. One of my best friends once remarked that I did not actually live during the year-plus that I spent in America before she joined me. Found it very hard to do anything, indeed. And have been smiling ever since we were together again, for all these years.
(This is one of the goofier performances, but I could not find a YouTube clip that wasn’t flawed one way or another.)
By the way, the other day, Natasha suddenly tells me, “You know which song has been stuck in my head recently? Can’t Smile Without You”. And I respond, “No way, I was just thinking that it would be my next YouTube’d memory!”
This thinking same thoughts business is getting spookier with time.
Jeri was the only person to accept my solicitation for questions thus far, and because customer service is what we take great pride in here at Burlaki.com, I am addressing it right away. See what the rest of you all are missing?
Of course, Jeri posed three questions at once and I’d have to be out of my mind if I did not use that as a pretext for three separate posts on three separate dates. So, here is one of them, and the rest will follow soon. Thank you, Jeri!
Have you mingled a great deal with your British colleagues and neighbors, or has your primary interaction been within the expat community?
The short answer is neither, really.
In the first few months, I went out a lot with my British co-workers, participated in events such as quizzes and golf charity days, and become close enough with a couple of people to actually make visits to their houses. With one of the people who used to work for me, we even went to the classical music program at Royal Albert Hall two years in a row.
But I am not really spending much time with my colleagues outside of office - and after-office drinking - hours. And I never really did even in the States.
We tried getting to know our neighbors, but that quickly fizzled out for reasons that I cannot pinpoint. Natasha has occasional outings with other Moms from Becky’s school. The parents of one of Becky’s best friends once stayed at our place for tea, when picking up their daughter after a play-date. And that’s the extent of our interaction with the natives. (The kids, of course, are a totally different matter).
Of course, I am not counting the “service industry” interactions; after all, we shop at English stores, ride English public transport, go to English doctors, etc.
I keep online correspondence with a number of American expats, and most of our closest friends here share our background. But due to quirks of geography and pressures of schedules, we don’t get to interact even with our closest friends as much as we want. I am certainly looking to the American expat community for new friends, not to my local community. Maybe, that’s the best answer to your question, Jeri.
You realize that you truly became a cosmopolitan individual when you sit in your house in London, and your lunch consists of gazpacho accompanied by garlic naan and then spaghetti ai pollo con funghi. With a glass of chardonnay.
Just saying.
I count myself firmly amongst owls when it comes to sleeping habits. I am not exactly a nocturnal creature - I value having eight hours of sleep every night too much for that. But I can stay up late into the night fairly effortlessly. And I am so not a morning person!
Yet, a few years ago, I started noticing that I can no longer sleep beyond 7:30 or so in the morning, even on weekends. I theorized that forcing my unwilling organism to get up around 7 every weekday “trained” it to get awake around that time no matter how late I went to bed the previous night.
It was either that or creeping old age…
Having relocated to London, for most of the first two years, I had a wake up call at around 6:50 to drive Becky to school. Coupled with rarely getting to bed before midnight, as every week progressed, I kept falling more and more back on my required minimal amount of sleep. And catching up on weekends did not work - my eyes would pop open on a Saturday around 7:15 to the serene sounds of the rest of the family still floating inside their dreams. Which would quickly turn to scorn at being rudely awakened as I tried - that’s the key word here, tried - to quietly transport myself into the study and plop down in front of the PC.
And then a few things happened. Becky concluded that she had enough of dealing with her gruff parent in the mornings and decisively changed to taking public transportation to school - which shaved an hour off my effective morning commute. A change in responsibilities at work meant that I’d have to regularly stay in office a couple of extra hours a day to accommodate my US-based staff - but, conversely, that there was little-to-none requiring my presence in office in the early hours of the day. And, let’s not forget, a great leisurely vacation left me intoxicated with large quantities of fresh air.
The first two of those events combined to allow me to sleep until around 8:15 every weekday morning; with my short morning routine and a 40-minute commute, I now get to office around 9:20 - still much too early to attend to any of my job functions beyond catching up on email and perusing various spreadsheets and presentations, but not too late to maintain a pretense of “regular” business hours. But it must be the recent big holiday that infused me with what I thought was a long-lost ability.
Which is, to sleep in late on a weekend day. I do not physically need it at present. But, boy, do I enjoy being able to sleep until 10 am on Saturday, especially when we have no specific plans for the day. And then, repeating that on Sunday!
Becky, when you don’t wake her up, can sleep literally through noon and beyond, no matter how early she goes to bed. My newfound ability to compete with her in this makes me feel positively young again!
Er… yeah, I seem to find a lot of joy in small places lately…
Reading through the backlog of my blog aggregator, I came across a meme that I could not pass by, courtesy of Jason.
The instructions:
When it comes to food, I am reasonably adventurous in trying almost anything once. However, there are food components and whole groups that I intensely dislike; knowing in advance that the food item contains one of those will keep me from trying it. My commentary to the items on the list reflect that.
The list - and some commentary - is below the fold.
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Back in my twenties, I used to like coffee. Drank it quite regularly. Natasha and I even joined one of those mail-order coffee clubs. Several times, as a matter of fact, so that we could keep getting their free-if-you-join stuff. A couple of coffeemakers and several cup-and-saucer sets, if my memory serves me right.
I was always partial to tea, though. One day - or, possibly, it happened gradually - I lost my taste for coffee. Simply stopped liking it, without much of a reason. And for the last dozen of years or so, I exclusively drank tea, both as a pick-me-up-in-the-morning brew and an end-of-dinner beverage. American colleagues remained perpetually bewildered, French waiters contorted their faces into expressions of utter disdain, but I carried on.
Natasha occasionally still had a cappuccino or an espresso at restaurants, but our house reserves of coffee eventually dwindled to a single jar of some instant blend, largely waiting for a guest professing his addiction to the product.
When an explanation of my no-coffee attitude was required, I would say that I believe coffee to be an acquired taste. And whatever you may acquire, you may lose just as well. Ergo, my taste for coffee was lost.
On our first night on Costa Brava, when our friends Arthur and Anya suggested that we sit down at a cafe for some cava and coffee, I suddenly decided to try what everybody else was having. We ordered cortadas, an espresso with a dash of hot milk. And I suddenly thought to myself: Damn, that’s one exquisite drink!
I tried it several times in the ensuing couple of days and was pleasantly surprised every time that I continued to like the drink. Next thing you know, Natasha and I are discussing buying one of those latest high-tech espresso machines for the house…
And that was a short story about how I recovered my taste for coffee products.
A fun meme that I ganked from SamuraiFrog (as always, Jason was ahead of me in terms of ganking).
1. Go to photobucket.com
2. Type in your answer for each question into the PhotoBucket search bar.
3. Choose your favorite photo to represent your answer.
4. Copy the html and paste it here.
5. Answer only in picture form.
Let’s see.
There is this blog called Stuff White People Like, which some people find funny. The big idea of generalizing the preferences of white folk is as sensible as predicting British weather - any arbitrary guess has a chance of being 50% correct. I am pretty sure that a Harward-educated WASP and a Yeshiva-educated Jew have as much - or, rather, little - in common with one another as they have with every other race and ethnicity in the country. But, hey, whatever makes it worthwhile for people to express themselves online!…
Several days ago, when the count of items on that blog was at 82, some other people with plenty of time on their hands decided to make a meme out of the list. My usual source of things of this kind, Jason, has produced his own take on how well he fits into the definition of the “white person” according to the list. I looked at his result (24 out of 82) and was so convinced that I could beat it - as in “proving that the list ludicrously overgeneralizes” - that I could not stay away from following suit, providing in the process some additional insight into the complex persona that is yours truly.
Highlighted entries are the ones that I am enthusiastic about. Here goes.
Taking a relay baton from Jason, here are a few tidbits about me that you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask.
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A meme that I picked up via my favorite bloggers Brian Greenberg and Jason Bennion asks the author to re-post the first sentence of the first blog entry in each of the previous year’s 12 months.
Similar to Brian’s and Jason’s compilations, mine ended up somewhere between esoteric and nonsensical. The fact that my blog tries to adhere to a basic theme actually worked a bit in my favor here, as a common thread was clearly visible throughout the spring (if only I added “from Switzerland” to the first sentence in January, it would even be more noticeable). And even though the entire collection justifiably looks like a bunch of random thoughts, I read it and can clearly see family- and event-oriented narrative.
See for yourself.
January: “Well, we’re back!”
February: “I am changing my football allegiance.”
March: “Well, it was bound to happen and it finally did happen.”
April: “I will only manage to get in a single blog entry in between two vacation trips, so I better write as much about the first one as possible before going onto the second one.”
May: “The latest disruption in my posts was caused by a long-weekend excursion to Paris, which was immediately preceded by another round of problems with the website, which hopefully have now been resolved once and for all (but claimed as their victim the recent Tuscany gallery album, which I am yet to restore).”
June: “We are back from our trip to Amsterdam, and I am happy to report that it was another resounding success.”
July: “The American School in Central London costs around £20K per child per year.”
August: “My British colleagues are happily exclaiming that the summer is finally here.”
September: “A cousin of mine plays clarinet with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.”
October: “Another day, another momentous anniversary to celebrate!”
November: “Apparently, my Halloween lamentations notwithstanding, there is some fun on the occasion that can still be found in England.”
December: “By popular demand, here are two more numbers from Becky’s performance with her choir.”
Is this year really almost over?
Say my last name out loud in its anglicized pronunciation. Now, transliterate it phonetically into Russian. What do you get? Right - Бёрлак - which is exactly how it appears on the visa issued to Natasha by the Russian embassy in London.
I suppose I can’t imagine a Russian embassy worker in charge of visas not being a Russian national (and, therefore, speaker of the language). And even though the name has Yiddish etymology, it also happens to be a perfectly recognizable word in the Russian language. How in the world can an educated Russian make such a mistake is beyond me!
Natasha’s maiden name has been butchered many times in the past at the hands of Americans; I guess the time of her married name has come as well, at the hands of Russians…
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For my non-Russian-speaking friends, the best way to explain the correct pronunciation of Burlak is to use the somewhat unfortunate association of “poor luck” (Is that why I am fond of saying “With my luck”, normally alluding to Murphy’s Law?) Substitute b for p and make r rolling, and you got my last name in Russian. As you may or may not expect, there are different letters in Russian alphabet to denote sounds made by ‘ur’ and ‘oo’…
One thing I neglected to mention in my brief tribute to married life. After this many years, Natasha and I have progressed from finishing each other sentences to frequently thinking the same thoughts at the same time.
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Unlike my friend Brian, who writes his blog when he really should be sleeping, I tend to value a good night’s sleep well above many other seemingly worthwhile endeavors. Which is why I often find myself unfamiliar with concepts that other bloggers have long mastered.
One of those concepts is Internet Meme. And Brian tagged me with one of those in a recent entry.
Well, a challenge is a challenge, so here goes nothing…
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Do you know the most common form of greeting an acquaintance in England? It’s Are you alright?
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I took a curious personality test at work the other day and figured it’s worth describing in a post.
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For those of you, who know us well, feel free to skip this post.
For the uninitiated, here is the context: My wife and I are relocating to England. We have spent the last 15 years of our life in the great United States of America, became rather assimilated (I am a rare Russian-American who knows and likes baseball, if you catch my drift), borne kids here, built up a comfortable living, achieved the proverbial American Dream…
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