No it's Not!!!!!

Yeah, okay.
Sure it is.
It's fucking November here again ya'll. What the hell????

A Letter to American Debt Collection Agencies

Dear Debt Collectors,

I really appreciate the diligence with which you are trying to locate me to collect the monies that I owe you for an education that I didn't complete. Seriously, the methods that you used to find that one friend that I had as a contact on my school loan application were probably close to criminal. I don't even have her home number, so I applaud the effort that you must have exerted in order to obtain her contact information. Kudos and good job!

Now Steve, I appreciate that I owe your company 47,000 dollars, but I'm afraid that you're just going to have to get your ass in line after the people that I owe the 60,000 dollars to. They're sort of ahead of you on the "Plusha owes us a shitload of money" list. And furthermore, as I explained to you on the phone yesterday, when I had the courtesy to finally call you back (and thanks for thanking me, that was classic), I am unemployed and living homeless in Goa, India. So no, Steve, I won't be settling my debt with you today, or any other day in the near future. And as I further explained to you, given the current GLOBAL economic crisis, I really think that you need to calm the fuck down about the measly 47,000 that I owe you. Now I realize that in part, I probably contributed to the said crisis, but honestly, it's not my fault that the banks that decided to loan me money for lawschool thought that I would finish it and was therefore a good investment. Motherfuckers gambled and lost. It's that simple.

In conclusion, my dear debt collection agencies, please stop harrassing my friends and former employees. I am currently a deadbeat with debts, and I'm not going to pay you until I'm good and ready to. Until such a time, you need to just slow your roll and keep doing those breathing exercises because as my mamma used to say (my mamma never really said this), "you can't squeeze blood from a stone."

Thank you for your attention,

Sincerely,

Plusha the Deadbeat (from India with Love)
Suckas!

Just a Joke

Hey everybody!

Ok, I don't have a whole lot to write about right now. But I did hear this joke recently. So here it is for your pleasure:

God comes to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and says to them

"I have two gifts to bestow upon you my children. The first gift is the ability to pee standing up."

Adam excitedly puts up his hand and yells "Me me me! I want it I want it I want it!"

So God gives him the gift, Adam pisses all over everything, the plants, the animals, God's foot, while screaming "look at me!"

So after he's done pissing all over the place, Eve looks down kind of discouraged and quietly asks
"Um, so what's the second gift?"

God replies "Brains."

New Complaints!!!!

Alright folks,
I thought that now that Spring is here, my incessant complaints would finally cease, but no such luck. I was going to write about my London trip, but it was actually kind of boring. However, since I promised, Here are the only two things worth noting about London:

1. The British people are afraid of school children. Apparently British school children are like one of the Biblical plagues when it comes to shoplifting. And here is the adults' way of dealing with it:

People, they just banned a whole shitload of customers from coming in to their store. Mind you they don't say "Only two school children allowed in the shop at a time." No, they say "Only two school children allowed." Which two school children are they referring to? And that's why they managed to have, and hold onto, a huge empire for so many years. Cause they know hot to get shit done!

2. All I could think when I was served this for breakfast was "I wonder if it was the British that taught the Mexicans to eat beans with every meal, or if it was the Mexicans that taught the British?" Either way, this was so disgusting that I had to debate whether I should eat it or regurgitate what I had eaten the day before on top of it. I doubt it would have made much of a difference:

And that's all I'm going to say about England.

Now, onto what's really important, the weather. Here are some pictures of Saint Petersburg winter, just so we are clear on the climate here.
So these were taken at the end of February:



This was taken at the end of April:

I went to London right after snapping this shot, where it was SPRING. But as far as Saint Petersburg is concerned, it's still fucking winter and it's perfectly ok to snow it's ass off.

But then finally, at long last, Spring began in good old St. Pete's:

I hadn't seen the color green in so long, I forgot what it looked like. Also, at long last, the ever-elusive sun:

Ok, so Spring is finally here. Great! Now please take a close look at the two following pictures of the Fontanka:
1. So it looks pretty warm. Please note what the woman is wearing. Short sleeved shirt. Clear skies, lovely warm Spring day.

2. And then I literally turn around and take a picture of the opposite direction:

What the fuck!??? Maximize this picture and take a look at what the two dudes are wearing. Jackets. Because Saint Petersburg exists in the Fifth Dimension of the Twilight Zone where two entirely different weather fronts can exist in the exact same space. I was literally standing in one spot and just took a picture of each direction. I swear to god I didn't photoshop the actual pictures. What the hell is this? Wizardry?

Ok, and now I'd like to seriously discuss something that's been driving me batshit crazy over here. See, people here walk everywhere. Because the subway stops are far and few inbetween, most people just hoof it. So naturally, when they tell you that something is just a short walk from your house, it's actually a good 30 to 40 minute walk. Again, reminder, I live in the Twilight Zone where time, apparently, speeds up and slows down depending on how long you've lived here for.

Recently, I was invited somewhere and told that it was literally on the next street over from my place. So I decided to go. I was tired after working all day and wasn't up for a "short" walk. I made the inviter swear to me that this place was actually near by. After walking for 30 minutes down this street, which actually was one street over, looking for building number 50, and noting that I was finally at building 32, and assuming that I'm close to my destination, I see this bullshit:

What??? The??? Fuck??? 32/11? What is that? And how many more of these are going to pop up before I get to 50? In NYC, they just sort of go 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. There's no fucking fractions involved there. I swear I almost started crying. I was so pissed at my mother by the time I got to the bar that I refused to speak to her for the first 10 minutes.
But I calmed down after a while. Here's a picture of me at the bar, just for posterity's sake:

Yeah, I decided that since I already live in a place where time and space don't matter, I'm going to live in 1976.

Another thing that I've discovered with the advent of warmer weather, is this lovely playground right underneath my window, where children like to hang out and scream as loud as they can when I'm trying to sleep on the weekends.

And I thought that I was over my whole child-hating phase...
I'm going to start throwing garbage down on them if they keep interrupting my sleep. Because I AM that kind of person.

One last thing. If you are planning to come here during the summer, be ready to see a lot of this all around the city:

The winters are so rough here, that every single summer, they dig up all the streets in the city to "fix" the pipes, and everyone has to learn how to not get their heels stuck in these little "bridges". I think they do it just to make the "short" walks even more "fun".

Trip to London and More

Hah!
Fooled you!
I'll update the blog this weekend.
It'll be all about how I went to London, with a re-posting of the pics from there, along with some pics of Russian Winter and Spring that I've collected on the old camera, and a cute little story about my first encounter with a Russian Nationalist, or "patriot" as he called himself. For those not in the know, these are not the same as the skinheads. Also, I went to see a psycho billy band and am now completely in love with that style of music.
But all that is coming this weekend. See, the weather has improved, so the hell that I'm living in is not so frozen anymore, which makes it difficult to bitch about the cold. Ok, so we're in agreement. More this weekend. Check back here on Monday and I promise I will post some new stuff. I know that I'm missed here, so scout's honor there'll be some new shit on here come Monday.

P.S.
Are previews allowed in the world of blogging?

Hello Jews! Hello Fashists! (FYI, Two Seperate Groups)

I've recently had occasion to spend some time with two, you might say, completely opposing groups of people, accompanied by some conversation, and wine/beer.

First, for some reason this year I decided to celebrate Pesach and go to Seder. For those of you not in the know, Pesach is the Jewish Passover and is basically a holiday where Jews celebrate how first, God killed an assload of innocent Egyptian children, and then drown a shitload more Egyptians in the Sea. Nice holiday right? Oh, we also rejoice at some other nasty shit that God did to the Egyptians. But the most important part is that we got our freedom. It's just like Amistad, only 4,000 years ago and with a lot of dead Egyptians involved. Also some chel named Elijah is supposed to come by and have a drink during the Seder, but I don't think that he's real. He didn't show up. Asshole...

So, I told my friend Katya (Uberjew who prances around the city with a giant gold star of David nestled in her bosoms. That's just asking to get your ass kicked by the way) that I'd like to do this Seder thing, and you know what she did to me? She somehow supposedly by accident got us invited to a Chabad Lubavitch Seder. Again, for those not in the know, these are Hassids. I wish someone had taken a picture of my face when I found out that I'd be spending 4 hours listening to the gory tale about the dead Egyptians, surrounded by people that I tried to stay very far the fuck away from back in NYC. But "what the hell?" I thought. Might be interesting.

And it was, sort of. First of all, there were only two Hassids there. One older rabbi, and his attractive young assistant. Here's how the evening went. I swear it was one of the funniest things I've experienced in this country to date. The first reason for this being a combination of the fact that the rabbi wasn't Russian and his Russian was "funny", and the second reason is that while the Pesach seremony requires all the participants to drink FOUR glasses of red wine, these being Russian jews, they obviously didn't limit themselves to just the four glasses and were plastered about an hour into the 3 hour ceremony. We're talking about 150 people here. Since the poor Hassid rabbi was struggling with his Russian recitation of our daring escape from Egyption captivity, the drunken Russian jewery spent some of the time helping him pick the correct words (some of which were dirty and totally inappropriate) and the rest of the time was spent giggling like 5 year olds. Just as an example:

Rabbi: God so mad was at Egyptian he (gibberish in yiddish to determine the next word)
Member of the audience: fucked up
Rabbi: yes thanks to you for your helps. Yes, God so mad at Egyptian he fucked up the lambs that was his first.
Followed by all 150 Russian jew bastards giggling their asses off.

And so on and so forth. This was my evening with the Jews. Katya and I spent most of the evening giggling and then when we felt full and like we couldn't take anymore, we made our own daring escape out of captivity.

That very weekend, we went to Ch P. The bar is really called Chort Poberi, but Russians have some weird thing with not saying Chort which means "Devil." Apparently if you say his name, he might show up and eat your eyeballs or something. Whatever...
So anyway, there we are at Ch P when who should we see sitting right across from us? Three whole Fashists. They immediately noticed us and we heard words such as "Shidovachki" (little she-kikes) resonating from their corner. Which we ignored. But then they loudly, while staring at us, said "Didn't they just have Pesach?" At this point I decided to engage them in conversation because honestly, I was just as interested in them as they were in us. So I just nodded and said something like "Actually, Pesach continues until the 16th." This is how our conversation began.

One of them by the name of Yuretz was a very cute litte skinhead and seemed fully harmless, one was extremely drunk and slimy and kept asking me to go home with him and love him. Also fairly harmless. The third one was considerably older than the first two, and a total hater and Katya and I concluded might totally kill us no matter how cute we two little jew girls were.

The highlight of the conversation was when Yuretz first asked me why it was good to be a jew and I had to explain to him that the only cool part was being one of god's chosen people, then told me that he was very excited to speak to me because while he'd seen some jews from afar, he'd never seen one so upclose and actually spoken to one before, and then told me that actually, he's friends with a jew, and he seems like a cool dude. I did not feel the need to point out the contradiction of what he had said.

Then their hateful older friend dragged the two younger ones, that basically just wanted to bang us, away and that was the end of that little encounter. Ah, my first encounter with Russian nazis. T'was fun.

So, first Jews, then Fashists. I'd have to say that honestly, the fashists were more fun.

Gogol's Birthday and Spring is Here (But not reaaally)

So yesterday was Nikolai Gogol's 200th Birthday. Good on him. Damn that niggah is old. And also born on April Fools Day. That's something.
I went to some sort of celebration which was a bit boring (I'm back on the wagon, remember?). But there was decent food and a few people showed up in costumes. Those few people consisted of me and my moms. You know that feeling when some ass invites you to a costume party, but then neglects to tell all the other guests that it's a costume party, and then you're the only idiot that shows up in a costume? Yeah, it was like that, but Russian.

So here's my moms in a costume.

Here's Dr. Zukov. Remember him? The man who experimented on my brain, and then gave me some antibiotics that first made my hands itch a lot, and then I had to spend the last two weeks PEELING ALL OF THE SKIN OFF OF MY PALMS. I don't care. I still love this chel because he's a kind-hearted, if somewhat misguided pussycat who treats me and prescribes me medication for free. Also, it was his party if you all get my meaning. Luv ya Dr. Zukov.

In other news, Spring is here at last! Ya'll know what that means. It's 30 whole fucking degrees instead of 10 now. Yay Spring!

And here's what it looks like.

Anygogol, here's me at the fantabulous (sarcasm) celebration. Happy Birthday Comrade Gogol!