Brain Bits

* No matter how loyal, patriotic or enthusiastic about the farm, the sheep will end up as mutton.

* In his memoirs, Lao She recalled that when he lived in England, he nevertheless worked on his Chinese novels and published them. At a reception one day somebody asked him what he wrote about, and Lao She said, ‘I write about China’. The other person was sincerely amazed, ‘Is there anything one can write about China?’ China was less than backwaters in 1920s, even though it had the same culture and history as today. An irrelevant fact, perhaps, but still lives in my memory. BTW, I wonder if there is still anybody anywhere except in China and my generation of Russians who ever read Lao She's books. 

* Each time I buy a faucet or some other plumbing equipment (I have been buying this stuff as regularly as bread and milk since we built this new house and moved in), I think of the consumer explosion.  If I remember right, I never even thought about faucets and compact flushers some twenty years ago. All this plumbing equipment was at the background of our life, like a sapling you plant in your backyard once and then forget, and it stands there for decades, a sturdy tree that you don't ever care to water, not even during droughts.

One of my inlaws bought a Moskvich car in 1971. He still uses the million mile monster, but the government act recently outlawed such vehicles, and it will be scrapped, though it is still road-worthy. They want us to buy new shit. Disposable shit this time, because they have become wiser. Disposable pens, kitchenware, plumbing, boilers, cars, housing… We seem to be hellbent of using up the resources as fast as we can, with the Chinese leading as locust on the green fields of Mother Earth.

God should make all kinds of plastic package and wrappings illegal. Perhaps he will soon enough.

Addressing Controversies

I really have no time for the universally accepted addressing system.

The Western system goes from small to big. It names the individual first, then the house number, estate, street name, city name, and finally the country. It's a matter of habit of course, it has logic of sorts, although a pretty good illustration of how the navel-gazing western mind proudly sees the world. 

Each of us cares about the number one, but the world is around us, and it is a big world, so you need to find somebody, you have to start on the outside and work towards that point. In our traditional system, shared by most Asian countries, we move from big to small: postal code, country, city, street, estate, building number, then - finally - the individual’s name.

That is, we used to do so.  It makes sense, right? But currently what with all the changes and attempts to westernize Russia, our post service adopted what they believe is the Western addressing system, resulting in a chaos on envelopes. I feel sorry for the not too bright girls who carry mail. There certainly haven't been any manuals about how you are to address your letters when you mail them, and it’s a miracle that mail is still regularly delivered, and small wonder that the parcel my son sent to me last spring got lost.

Occasionally, I still receive letters by snail mail, such as from the tax authority or other agencies, or some advertising shit, and the address part of the envelope is all screwed up. Examples:

Рахмановский пер., 3, г. Москва, ГСП-4, 127994 (street, house, city, district, postal code)

Трехпрудный пер., 9, стр. 2, офис 313  Москва, 123001 (street, estate, building, office, city, postal code)

Try on an alien culture, and you look like a redneck wearing a suit and necktie – confused and ridiculous.