kzm- albeit an incomplete and perhaps misleading depiction
The weekend began promisingly enough. We stopped at the supermarket on our way to the Poconos to pick up the essentials. At the checkout line, while everyone else was behind us or still roaming the vast wilderness of the Stop & Shop, Lana and I presented the cashier with our items: a gallon of Smirnoff and 3 small containers of baby food. Lana convinced me that we should try some baby food. It was a good decision, and I now understand that if you’re serious about satiating hunger, there’s no better way to go about it than to feed yourself watery fruit combinations, presumably by flying the spoon to your mouth and making airplane sounds. To the cashier, however, we were just the epitome of good parenting. Andrei, too, was alarmed, but soon realized it was better to believe that there was no baby tucked into the trunk of his car than to personally check and to thereby risk confirming his suspicions.
It would be tedious to summarize the whole weekend, especially if I were to summarize it accurately, but leaving this discussion with the supermarket situation of the first hour of the trip is certainly not the best way to relay any even vaguely-accurate sense of our kzm experience to the reader. Because the weekend was not all about healthy living. Then again, “the reader” knows this, because all 5 of you were there.
Our room was fine: three large beds as promised, and it was comforting to know that Anya and Dima’s key opened our room but our own key did not. We could only hope that the key given to the several shady men in pickup trucks who shared our taste in fine housing accommodations was also capable of opening our door.
I should have taken more pictures than I did, but it wasn’t meant to be. And the few times I did whip out the camera, absurd misunderstandings ensued. One serious-minded individual we made friends with during the early evening was excited and relieved to finally be able place me in the appropriate mental category, “photo-journalist,” because of the maturity and professionalism with which I laughed hysterically as I took pictures of his two male friends posing in awkwardly homoerotic poses. (The guys may have been awkward. The poses weren’t; they were quite comfortably homoerotic). Everyone in the room took pictures at some point, whether intentionally and of other people/things, or of whatever was caught in the objective during the course of soberly-coordinated movements of camera-holding and button-pressing. Yet my efforts at recording an interaction that, in hindsight, seemed questionably commonplace for this group of friendly guys was, in all seriousness (as I later learned), comparable to that of a NY Times reporter. I would have revealed to him the reason why Sweet’N Lo packets formed a trail from their door to the exit in a Hansel & Gretel- like manner: that his friend, who seemed to be unaware of the difference between two clear liquids (water, vodka, whatever), needed to find his way home… and also because, in his state, he was unable to carry two things in two hands. But I wasn’t ready to discuss my job at the CIA during the slow photo season.
We spent the latter, post-concert part of Saturday night searching. Our capacity for philosophic thought rendered the existence of a tangible object to direct our searching behavior unnecessary. Instead, we continuously moved through various concentrations of singing and dancing- sometimes, by slowly and gradually shifting our interest, other times, by running with unjustified amounts of energy. It was really nice spending time with different groups of performers/observers. And then, with different groups of long hotel corridors, oddly conducive to entertainment via hotel carts. Lana mentioned the visibility of stars -relative to the NYC sky- as soon as we reached our destination on Friday night. Walking up the stairs back to our room on that last night, I stared up. I couldn’t find the Big Dipper and was therefore unable to orient myself in the night sky, to internalize it in any systematic manner other than by avoiding looking in the direction of streetlamps. As previously mentioned, the latter part of Saturday night was spent searching.
It would be tedious to summarize the whole weekend, especially if I were to summarize it accurately, but leaving this discussion with the supermarket situation of the first hour of the trip is certainly not the best way to relay any even vaguely-accurate sense of our kzm experience to the reader. Because the weekend was not all about healthy living. Then again, “the reader” knows this, because all 5 of you were there.
Our room was fine: three large beds as promised, and it was comforting to know that Anya and Dima’s key opened our room but our own key did not. We could only hope that the key given to the several shady men in pickup trucks who shared our taste in fine housing accommodations was also capable of opening our door.
I should have taken more pictures than I did, but it wasn’t meant to be. And the few times I did whip out the camera, absurd misunderstandings ensued. One serious-minded individual we made friends with during the early evening was excited and relieved to finally be able place me in the appropriate mental category, “photo-journalist,” because of the maturity and professionalism with which I laughed hysterically as I took pictures of his two male friends posing in awkwardly homoerotic poses. (The guys may have been awkward. The poses weren’t; they were quite comfortably homoerotic). Everyone in the room took pictures at some point, whether intentionally and of other people/things, or of whatever was caught in the objective during the course of soberly-coordinated movements of camera-holding and button-pressing. Yet my efforts at recording an interaction that, in hindsight, seemed questionably commonplace for this group of friendly guys was, in all seriousness (as I later learned), comparable to that of a NY Times reporter. I would have revealed to him the reason why Sweet’N Lo packets formed a trail from their door to the exit in a Hansel & Gretel- like manner: that his friend, who seemed to be unaware of the difference between two clear liquids (water, vodka, whatever), needed to find his way home… and also because, in his state, he was unable to carry two things in two hands. But I wasn’t ready to discuss my job at the CIA during the slow photo season.
We spent the latter, post-concert part of Saturday night searching. Our capacity for philosophic thought rendered the existence of a tangible object to direct our searching behavior unnecessary. Instead, we continuously moved through various concentrations of singing and dancing- sometimes, by slowly and gradually shifting our interest, other times, by running with unjustified amounts of energy. It was really nice spending time with different groups of performers/observers. And then, with different groups of long hotel corridors, oddly conducive to entertainment via hotel carts. Lana mentioned the visibility of stars -relative to the NYC sky- as soon as we reached our destination on Friday night. Walking up the stairs back to our room on that last night, I stared up. I couldn’t find the Big Dipper and was therefore unable to orient myself in the night sky, to internalize it in any systematic manner other than by avoiding looking in the direction of streetlamps. As previously mentioned, the latter part of Saturday night was spent searching.