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

I am exhausted.  It has been a grueling week, in many senses of the word.  I think these links feel the same. Happy weekend!

Ed:  Check out how I saved Jodifur’s Shoe Friday

From the blogs

1. Leah writes about farshmak, which I am terrified of
2. Susie has some awesome pictures of Jeddah, Saudi
3. The Bloggess has some choice medals for you
4. Mohamed has a post about a movie where the main character finds out he’s Jewish..but was a Muslim
5. You should not visit MODG if you don’t like pictures of stuff on toilets

From the web

1. Shalom Auslander, one of my favorite authors ever, opines on book clubs
2. Golani apples in Syria
3. The pre-existing conditions of Nicole Kidman

So, this whole weight loss thing is going pretty well, I think, since I am now down to 5 pounds lost.  And, obviously, to celebrate, I made a graphic with broccoli and Lenin and everything. At this point, I no longer make sense.

This weekend, as we often do, Mr. B and I went to see the fam.  The fam is enormous, there are lots of them, and all of them need to be seen every time we go to visit them in Philadelphia, especially the grandparents, of which there are four, each of which needs extra time. On the one hand, I know I should be grateful, but on the other hand,  since Mr. B and I are kind of introverted  (what, you can’t tell by the blog?), lots and lots of time with people makes us exhausted and we need to recharge.  So that’s what I’m doing today and tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, here’s a gratuitous photo of me with my grandpa, one of the people we visited:

One of the people we saw was my grandpa, who is awesome.   He is old, but he never complains about it like many old people tend to do.  He, like Mr. B’s grandparents, has outlived WWII, evacuation in Uzbekistan, going to work at age 12 to support his family, Stalin, Krushchev, Jewish oppression in the Soviet Union, the death of my grandmother, and still somehow has an enormous and healthy sense of humor.  He is also the only other blonde in my entire family (both natural and in-laws), which makes me feel like I wasn’t adopted.

For every occasion, he has either a joke, an anecdote, or a Pushkin poem he memorized in 8th grade.  Sometimes, he jokes in English, which is crazy, since he didn’t know English until he was 65.  He’s lost some of his hearing from working on locomotives his entire life, so he has the phone set to ring high.  When his girlfriend (yes) jumps if the phone rings from the volume, he tells us that she’s jumping because the Malach HaMovet (Angel of Death in Yiddish) is calling her and she doesn’t want to pick up.   Often, he tells us the joke about how the lines for bread were bad in the Soviet Union and a guy complained and said he was going to kill Gorbachev, but when he got there, he found out there was  a line for that, too.   A couple months ago when he twisted his ankle, I went to visit him, concerned,  to see if he needed anything. He pulled me close, and said, in English, “Let me tell you the history of my pain,” then leaned back and laughed.

On Saturday, he told us the usual jokes, a couple more about Obama and Israel, and then he told me the story of how he was little in the 1930s and his grandfather’s brother, who was more like a grandfather to him,  was living with his family in Reichitsa, Belarus.  That would make him my great-great-great-grandfather, born probably in the 1860s or 1870s.  He told me about how, in the 1930s, Jewish culture was just starting to get stamped out by Stalin (and, later, I learned: Yevsektsiya).  But regardless of this, his great uncle would still continue to suurreptitiously have men over to the house, and they would speak to each other only in Hebrew, on a variety of topics.  “Didn’t they speak Yiddish, like, you,” I asked him.  “No, they all spoke Hebrew, because I couldn’t understand them,” said my grandpa.  “Except for a couple of words like basar (beef) and lechem (bread). ”

I didn’t know this before, and it got me to thinking.  It’s crazy how so much can change through many, many generations.  But the fact that my great-great-great grandpa spoke Hebrew, and now I do, too is really interesting and fulfilling in a circle-of-life kind of way.  “What kind of stuff did they talk about in Hebrew?”  I asked my grandpa.  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, “I was too busy running around and asking them annoying questions about why God existed.” Some things never change, because  70 years later, he remains a staunch atheist who went to Rosh Hashana services last year for “anthropological observation,” as he told me.