Woman. Legend. Blog.

The time has come,
The walrus said,
To talk of many things
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax
Of cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings

I love Russia. I say this with mixed patriotism and cynicism. There is nothing that makes me prouder than telling people I’m Russian, which is immediately followed by an apology of what a messed up country we are. Even Israel, I think, is less messed up than Russia on a scale from one to Stalin. The types of stories that come out of that country are amazing. Like the time when I was almost chased by a pack of hungry dogs that were once domesticated, but now organized and roamed in the wild. Or the time I got my tonsils taken out without Novicane (this was still in the Soviet Union days…I’m sure there’s Novicane now for the children of oligarchs.

I’ve really been getting into podcasts lately.  I have the GRE coming up, and God knows I need to brush up on both my logical thinking and my vocabulary (the math is in a whole different circle of Hell for me.)  Podcasts fulfill several purposes for me: A) They get me through the morning commute; B) They help me internalize world news to use for the logic essay on the GRE and C) They catch me up on industry news (economics, international trade, etc) so I can sound semi-reasonable when talking to clients.

It’s not often that I am into the same movie that Dan likes.  So, when he picked to see Taken, I was pretty annoyed.  I definitely do not like action movies.  I am more the weepy foreign film/horrendous comedy type of girl.   So I was surprised that I really ended up liking it.

Mr. T has wisely decided to speak out on the recession and offer some comforting words of wisdom to job seekers:

One of the things I track at work are the movements of  TEUs (twenty-food equivalent units.)  These are the containers that you often see if you drive by ports, and sometimes on trucks.  It’s based on the volume that a box 20 feet long holds.  These boxes can hold anything from cigarettes to sardines to motorcycles and it’s how we track world trade.  The reason they’re called equivalent units is that they often don’t have a standard height, meaning that they’re averaged together and standardized. They are usually tracked by customs agents at each port they enter and these customs reports are what we use for some of our forecasts.

Mr. B and I will have been married for almost five months, so I think at this point, it might be a good time to discuss shlom bayit, or the concept of maintaining peace in the household that is so integral to Jewish marriage, both from a perspective of LOVE and from a perspective of being an econ NERD.

I’ve been all around with clients, caught up in Valetine’s Day, and generally thinking of other good excuses to slack. For today, I have two deep questions to ponder. The first, is shown below:

So, you know how there’s this whole market for trafficking women for sex?  Well, apparently, in a reversal of roles, women are now targeting men for sex and acting as their pimps.

In America, we sing songs to babies to calm them down, to get them to go to sleep, and to make them feel safe and loved.  This is not the case in Russia.  In Russia, women sing songs to their babies to warn them of death, starvation, and wolves. And this is sung in a mildly soothing and pacifying voice, one that has been carried through generations of Russian Suffering. In my mom’s case, it was also Russian Jewish suffering.  

Couldn’t resist.

Ever since I heard about this movie on NPR, I couldn’t wait to see it.