MOSCOW, March 1, 2007 -- Moscow has had its spell of winter, and now spring – Russian style -- is in the air.
I can never get used to the Russian predilection for assigning seasons to months, instead of following the astronomical calendar, like the civilized world. So spring here begins March 1, while the rest of us will herald its arrival at the spring equinox – March 23 or something like that.
It was actually a global warming kind of winter. January was the warmest on record. Only in the last couple of weeks have we had temperatures consistently around zero (F) and down to -20, -25.
We’ve also had a lot of snow and some intermittent melting and re-freezing, in the last couple of weeks, which turned the sidewalks into ice rinks. I actually fell a couple of times on my way to the Institute of Diplomacy. One time it could have been quite serious: I slipped on a sloping curb and fell feet first into the street directly in front of a car. Fortunately, said car was stopped at the red light. Otherwise, I might have discovered first hand how little the City of Moscow has done for the physically handicapped.
I didn’t smash anything but my composure, but it did leave a huge black and blue bruise on my left thigh, which I didn’t realize until Sergei noticed it in the bathroom a couple of nights ago.
He and I haven’t had many chances to have sex. Our plans to have regular sex once Tanya and Ivan went to work have fallen through because Ivan hasn’t started to work yet. But I did walk in while he was taking a bath a few nights ago. He was fingering his gigantic boner, so I joined in the game and sucked him off – first time for a long time.
Ivan expects to go to work when we get back from Moldova in the middle of March, so maybe Sergei’s plans for a steady sex diet will finally materialize.
Icy, slick sidewalks aren’t all bad. They do give me the excuse I need to walk arm-in-arm with beautiful students under the guise of keeping me from falling.
My new favorite is Maxim, a tall, dark-haired, strikingly beautiful 18-year-old Inst. of Diplomacy student from Tatarstan.
He’s not only handsome, but intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful, and kind.
And he likes me!
My new fantasy, 18-year-old Maxim from Tatarstan, helps me navigate the icy sidewalks from the Inst. of Diplomacy to Metro Kropotkinskaya.
After the last three lessons, we’ve walked back to the metro together -- arm-in-arm to keep me from slipping on the icy sidewalks – chatting all the way. He’s careful to see that he’s near me when we start to descend the first icy steps, and extends his bent elbow so I can easily grasp it with me left hand.
I never turn it loose till we’re safe in the metro.
He seems to enjoy it, and we chat non-stop.
He e-mailed me last week.
”Hello Dane, it's me Maxim! I have some message which came to my email adress! I can't understand what does it mean. It's the original text of message. It also can be a joke, but I deside to ask your opinion!”
It was one of these “Congratulations, you’ve won the Canadian lottery” scams. All you have to do is contact “our African booklet representative office in Nigeria.”
I told him it was a hoax, not to answer it, and to get rid of it immediately.
“Thunk you very much! I will destroy it!” he wrote back.
Why am I so excited about this very mundane exchange? Because I think he was just looking for an excuse to contact me, and this happened to be it. After our class Saturday, as we were arm-in-arming it back to the metro, I told him anytime he had an English question to feel free to contact me.
“And if I have a Russian question, I’ll contact you.”
I gave them an assignment to write what they think are the common stereotypes of Russia and Russians.
“Somebody says that Russians are very polite,” he wrote; somebody says that they are very rude. But I say that it all depends on your breeding.
“When I lived in England my host mother cried when I went back home. And she told me that I was one of the best her students. I want to say that she had students from different countries and I was the best one. It means that nothing lost for Russia to become non-war and friendshipful country.”
It was a charming way of noting that “Russia has nothing to lose by becoming a peaceful and friendly country.” What a thoughtful, gentle peaceable young man he is.
He had a new expensive Nokia mobile phone in class, so I used it to take a picture of him and asked him to send it to my e-mail address (see photo).
While I would like to establish the same kind of relationship that Peter and I did when he was an Inst. of Diplomacy student, I have no illusions that I will ever get to seduce Maxim. He will remain, I’m afraid, just a beautiful dream.
But beautiful fantasies are good for my mental health, and I am certain we will at least establish a good and lasting friendship.
I invited Peter for dinner Saturday night. I served him sole – the first he had ever eaten – and rice with green beans, onions, and mushrooms. Then we polished off the bottle of Belarussian vodka he had given me for New Year’s.
He continues to stoke my fantasies by expressing the depth of his friendship and telling me how much he enjoys our meetings, and our plans to travel somewhere together. We tentatively agreed Saturday night to go to Belarus and to Kiev, Ukraine, during the May holidays, during which time we will of course have to room together in a hotel.
He told about New Year’s parties in which many people spent the night together, sleeping sometimes four in a bed. He also said, “sometimes you don’t want to sleep alone.” So I’ll see that he doesn’t have to on our trip.
Ivan, it turns our, has epilepsy. When his Moldovan friend Seryozh announced that he was returning home for a visit, Ivan asked me for $ 100 to send to his mother. He was very appreciative and affectionate. “I’d like to ‘play’ tonight,” figuring he could hardly say no at a time like that.
And I was right: “If you want to,” he readily agreed.
But when he came to bed, he was clearly not feeling well. He said he had a severe headache. I gave him some aspirin and put my seduction plans on hold.
“Do you have these headaches often?” I asked. He shrugged. “I had one on New Year’s. Ask Sergei about it.”
I later asked Sergei if Ivan had been ill at New Year’s. I didn’t understand his answer completely, but yes, he had been.
Ivan still didn’t feel well the next day, but he and Sergei went to a friend’s apartment that night for an impromptu party. They didn’t get back till the next day.
When he returned, Ivan was feeling very bad and again had a severe headache. Sergei told me that he had had an epileptic seizure at the party. He had also had one over New Year’s, he said.
Ivan said his mother also has epilepsy, and he had had his first seizure a couple of years ago after he had been hit in the head during a fistfight.
The seizures are grand mal. He is unconscious and has no knowledge or recollection of them when they’re over. According to the Mayo Clinic Family Health Book which I brought with me from America, epilepsy can be controlled with medication.
So the plan is to -- after our return from Moldova -- take him to my Dr. Anna for diagnosis and prescriptions.
Two agents that are linked to seizures, according to Mayo, are alcohol and inadequate rest. He really doesn’t drink much, but on both Thursday night and New Year’s he had been drinking heavily, and one of my ongoing sources of frustration is his staying up half or all of the night and not coming to bed until anywhere from 2 a.m. to 7 a.m.
I have told him he must keep regular hours, but it hasn’t done much good. Sergei thinks we should tell him if he doesn’t change his sleeping habits, I’ll kick him out and send him back to Moldova. I told Sergei maybe he should mention that to Ivan as a veiled warning, but I don’t think he has yet. And I don’t want to make a threat I can’t – or won’t – carry out. And right now I’m enjoying his living here.
If he takes care of himself and is on prescribed medication, I don’t think his epilepsy will pose a problem for work, etc. But he is very taciturn and uncommunicative about his feelings, and very stubborn, even bull-headed about doing his own thing – staying up till all hours of the night, e.g. -- even though both Sergei and I have forbade his using the computer or watching TV after midnight.
In the meantime, the seizure put off our sex session for three nights – the night before, the night of the seizure, of course, and the night after. But finally, Friday evening, I told him, “I want to play tonight.”
“If you want to.”
So as soon as he came to bed, I started fondling his cock through his shorts, then stripped them off and went to work in earnest. It was lovely.
But I didn’t come myself, so Sunday morning while he was sawing logs I played with his and prevented another case of prostate cancer. My blood pressure after salivating over Peter the night before and jerking off that morning, was 110/67. It seems to be a good formula.
But it gets even better. Sunday was Denis’s 22nd birthday, so Ivan fixed a Moldovan dish for supper and we bought a bottle of vodka. Denis and Sergei decided to go somewhere about 10 p.m., but Ivan opted to stay and talk with me.
As usual when he gets a little smashed, he became very loving and chatty. He said he had never had a relationship in his life with anybody like he has with me. His father, like my own, abandoned him and Denis for Moscow when Ivan was very small. He returned when Ivan was about nine.
“I was so glad to see him,” he recalled. “I told him, ‘Daddy, I missed you. I’m so happy to see you,’ but he told me to fuck off,”
His father is an alcoholic and one step away from being a bum, and now calls Denis and Ivan when he wants their help with something to borrow some money. But they won’t get any rubles for the despicable asshole from me.
I went to bed, and Ivan went to take a bath. When I got up to take a pee he was lying in the bathtub. I sat down on the toilet and talked with him and started playing with his dick. He didn’t object and seemed perfectly comfortable. I let my hands stroke his cock, the inside of his thighs, and the luscious, sexy, long black curls streaming from the lower crack in his ass.
The next day, Monday, he was even more affectionate and attentive than usual, and insisted on taking two pictures of us with our arms around each other (see photo).
Ivan insisted on taking pictures of the two of us as best buddies. Far be it from me to discourage it.
It looks like our jaunt to Moldova is going to actually happen. Women’s day is the 8th of March. My Potemkin U. classes end the 7th. I got an OK from the director of the Inst. of Diplomacy to take the following Wednesday off and to get paid for my February classes before I leave, so we’ll have plenty of money.
I plan to get my visa from the Moldavan Embassy on Wednesday, after which we will immediately buy our tickets, and it will hopefully be all systems go.
We will return on the 15th.
Goose fights? Suzdal, one of the charming historic cities in the “golden ring” of ancient cities surrounding Moscow, had its 4th annual goose fight last Sunday .
Slava and I went to Suzdal three years ago to see the ancient wooden architecture and drink the honey-based beer.
Geese between one and four years of age compete in the no-holds-barred bouts.
“This traditional Russian entertainment both attracts tourists and is entirely safe for the birds,’ insisted a Suzdal spokesman. “No blood is spilled in the fights, and the birds are not hurt.”
One other advantage: It doesn’t attract the mafia.
Half of America’s young workers are dissatisfied with their jobs, reported one of my Institute of Diplomacy students in the “news report” portion of our class last night.
She went ahead to say that the dissatisfaction was rife among young people making $ 15,000 a year or less, which – considering the fact that this is scarcely above the poverty line – is hardly surprising.
So, increasingly in the U.S., college and university students have no dream job to go to, since most of these jobs are now being farmed out to developing countries are part of the grand scheme of globalization.
At the same time, the U.S. is experiencing the longest negative savings rate since 1933, the height of the Great Depression and the year I was born.
And now comes the news that the U.S. economy is leaving record numbers of its citizens in severe poverty, according to a McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16760690.htm
The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen, the newspapers report.
Nearly 16 million Americans are now living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $ 9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $ 5,080 a year.
The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005 -- 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period.
Something serious is happening in your country, and other people are beginning to notice – whether you are or not!
See also related pages:
Chapt. #236 - Prostitution supplements Russian soldiers’ $ 10 wage!
This day years ago:
2004-3-1: Chapt. #46 - First day of spring in Russia
