Yesterday, Mr. B and I saw Ajami but the review might have to wait until next week because today we are getting typhoid shots for India and possibly might die, and this weekend we are hopefully spending outside as much as possible in sunny DC.

From le blogs:

1. Emily brings it at a Greek restaurant
2. Chaviva asks, Which hand do you wear your wedding ring on, and more broadly, which hands do you wear rings on in general and what does it mean?
3. Shira writes about her house tour of Michal Negrin, the famous and eclectic Israeli designer
4. I just discovered a new blog about what Afghanistan is really like with tons of pics
5. And, the portrait of a young Darth Vader.
6. Allie’s Hair Cut.

From la interwebs:

1. Divorced at age 12
2. Why people believe what they believe politically
3. What a cool series about international road signs
4. About the Turkish language (for extreme language nerds)
5. Politically incorrect chess sets, including Jews vs. Hellenists (hat tip: Marginal Revolution)

What triggered this post was that today on Facebook, I saw a friend who is a mom-to-be discuss the benefits of  cloth diapers in an excruciating wall post that at least three moms responded to enthusiastically.  And seeing people on the Metro with their trendy non-bag shopping totes.   And watching people walk to work with a glow of pride.

Here’s what makes me angry.  My mom and pretty much all the women of her generation going back to Cyrill and Methodius’s moms also used cloth wash-diapers.  Except they were called pelyonki and essentially made out of sheets, because there were no real disposable diapers in the Soviet Union.  I know this because every week or so I am regaled with tales of how my mom washed the pelyonki in the bathtub (no washing machine until 1989, also due to the Miracle of Communism) and, as soon as she had, she had to wash them again, because, well, duh, I was a baby with as much bladder control as Fergie.  Now that’s environmentally friendly.

Thousands of hours of her life spent washing and boiling these cursed peloynki when she could have been doing other valuable things with her time, like watching Real Housewives of Sevastopol.  And now these environmentalist moms are all like, “Oh, I want to wash the diapers!  It’s so cool! It’s friendly for the baby!” No. There is a reason God invented Pampers, and it is not having to hear stories about how I had no bladder control at 8 months and my mother cursing the day I was born.

Another thing.  The recyclable shopping bags.  Yes, yes, the Earth is dying with a slow wheeze and you personally can save it by buying a trendy grocery store bag from Whole Foods for $17.99.  Look how cool and earth-conscious you look with your cool graphic design bag on the Metro.    We had even cooler ones back in the day, and they looked like this:

The even cooler part was when you had to drag about nine of ten of these bad boys back to your house from 2 miles away after a day of standing in line for products that didn’t exist because…

you didn’t have a car!  Just like the dream of all Americans, most Soviet citizens (with the exception of Mr. B’s suspiciously bougeoisie family) did NOT have cars. The waiting line to get one was about 10 years.  I remember when I was four, it was about a seven year wait for our family and I discussed excitedly with my dad what color car we would have when I was 10.  Hence walking everywhere.  It was ridiculously clean and environmentally friendly, but also felt like the Death March of Bataan, probably even more so to my mom who had to lug around not only all of the shopping, but fatty me. (That bow alone probably weighed 2 kilo.)

People of America and the United People’s Repulic of Bethesda: stop the environmentalist hipsterism.  It can only lead us right back to communism.  And if you want to know what that was like, ask my mom and Mr. B’s mom, ten times a week.

I just got Steppe Magazine yesterday at Borders, along with the latest copy of Glamour, because sometimes you just need to know Ten Lazy Ways to Lose Weight and how to become sexy in sixty seconds at the same time that you need to know what happened to Anna Akhmatova when she was in exile in Uzbekistan during World War II. I think I confused the cashier.

As part of our continuing world travel plans, Mr. B and I are planning to go to India this spring because we’re bored of Europe (see: Prague) and ready for a little bit of third-world excitement. Little did we know that the excitement would start before we even bought our tickets.

This weekend, we were in Philadelphia with my parents and my mother-in-law and the conversation came around to our travel plans.

“I don’t like this idea at all,” said my dad surlily as we sat eating breakfast. My dad doesn’t like the idea of most things that are not Russian or American, and this makes him surly in general.

“Why not,” I prepared for a debate which wouldn’t even be a debate since, no matter what my parents think, we are going to India. Ah, the pleasures of balling on one’s own budget.

“You’ll catch a million diseases,” my dad said. My dad is a hypochondriac, a germophobe, and a neat freak, who has hated New York City since 1989 with a vile aversion because the streets are not clean and orderly enough for him. He has also refused to eat at a restaurant once because he thought the color of their plates was unsanitary. I have no idea how he lived the first 30 years of his life in Russia, and the first 10 without real toilet paper.

Oddly enough, I inherited this hypochondria from him, because two weeks ago, I felt a bump on the back of my head that wouldn’t go away, and I was having some issues swallowing. Immediately, I pictured Mr. B at my funeral, solemn but strong, all the Russian ladies around him whispering about what a great wife I had been and bringing him borscht in cans. “So young,” they would say, “They could have had children together, just like their mothers wanted them to,” and I teared up. I would be ok with death. I pictured Mr. B returning to live at home and watching anime in  his basement, a shattered wreck of a man.   But then I went to the doctor and it turned out that I did not have throat cancer or even strep throat, and I was ok again.

“We’re getting shots and malaria pills,” I told my dad merrily.

“That’s not going to be enough,” he said, concerned. “And besides, who knows what you could get in India.  You could become infertile.”   My mom nodded worryingly.

“Are you serious,” I asked.

“I was talking to your aunt and she stopped dead in her tracks when she found out you were going to India,” my dad said.  “She was right to point out that you haven’t given birth yet.”

This medical analysis of Southeast Asia would be all well and good if my aunt were a doctor or experienced in Southeast Asia epidemiology.  However, my aunt lives in Yaroslavl, Russia, has never been further than Moscow up until five years ago when she came to visit America, and has no more knowledge of the medical profession than I have of neck ailments.  Additionally, last I checked, my uterus was not communal property.

Wolf Blitzer, live with the update from my uterus

“Another real Medicin sans frontieres,” Mr. B said caustically from the corner, where my  parents couldn’t hear him.

My parents, more specifically my dad, spurred by this sage advice from my aunt, finally had a solid objection to me going to India as opposed to the general discontent they had been channeling over the past couple of weeks.  It was their rook to my pawn.  Or whatever.

“You really believe that I can catch something that will make me infertile?”  I asked them logically, which is not the best way to approach my parents.

“Yes.”

“Do you want us to be like Grandpa?” I asked.   My Grandpa’s been through some crazy stuff in his life, but currently he doesn’t go further than his local grocery store.  He complains every time he has to go to a restaurant for birthdays or other special occasions.  Last time he ordered butternut squash soup at a restaurant, he told my mom, for half an hour, that it felt like someone was plastering on wallpaper in his kidney.

That ended the current round of arguments. Checkmate for now.

My mother-in-law wisely said nothing during this whole debate.  She’s very tactful and never butts in the way my parents do.   Although, a couple weeks ago when I told her about our Boykis World Tour, she said quietly, “You know, there are lots of countries you can take little kids to.  My parents always traveled with me when I was little without problems.”

My parents throw all their pawns and rooks at us.   She brings just the queen.

If it’s one thing the Soviets were good at, it was celebrating International Women’s Day, which is on March 8th every year.  Unlike Mother’s Day in Western Europe and America, March 8th is a celebration of all women regardless of whether they are mothers, and of their contribution to society.  Here’s a cool piece Mr. B and I heard today about the contribution of women to America’s space program in the 1960s.  And here’s a story about the first Russian woman in space. Here is one of my favorite Soviet posters for March 8.

Here are some previous posts I wrote on all things women:

Superbowl Commercials
What Can Men Expect of Women Now That We’re Not in the 1950s?
Is it feminism to pose naked with challah?
The first Nobel Prize in economics for a woman
On being Batman as a girl