"We went further and further... When, whether you expect it or not, you turn twenty, life must be lived. However, it doesn't go upwards or downwards: it wants to go broader, and further. It wants a direction. It doesn't matter which; it's just having a direction that matters. I can't say why we chose the east..."

---
On the cover of my travel journal, this time a kitschy, little spiral job, I wrote: Lithuania 2005

Goals:
- Frank Zappa statue
- Soviet nuclear plant
- the Dunes
- chateau de Trakai

Of these, I am sorry to say that the first two goals were not attained. The Frank Zappa statue is actually located in a small town outside of Vilnius, erected by an repatriated Lithuanian artist who believed is quaint little town was just the right place for the only existing monument to the rock star.

As for the power plant, it was just not in the cards. Traveling around Lithuania is still a bit, well, shall we say inefficient, complicated by those of us that are linguistically challenged, such as foreign tourists and bus drivers, who can barely manage monosyllabic utterances even in their native language.

The Chateau, which is actually a medieval fort built on an island, was certainly beautiful, but not as beautiful as the surrounding lake region where Stephane and I were lucky enough to camp. Perhaps the real highlight of this part of the trip was meeting our Polish friend Boguslav, who asked us to call him "Bogus" for short. "Hey Bogus! I really like your shiny white velcro sneakers!"

The Dunes were, as expected, amazing. After climbing the 150 steps you can run free in the dunes, seeing the lagoon and the little town of Nida on one side and the forest and Baltic sea on the other. In certain spots, all of this is invisible and all you can see is sand. Lots of sand. In which I bounced, rolled, and sculpted. Sand that stayed with me for days, in the oddest of places.

Unfortunately, we forgot the charger for our camera so we only have photos from the first week of our trip (which I will post eventually). The Dunes are not included, but I will try to procure some things.

But as with any adventure, it is not the expected that you cherish afterwards as much as the surprises. AssRay and I were lucky, the weather was pretty much perfect every day except for one, during which we spent half of the day on buses and ferries (it was a travel day) and the other part holed up in this great Soviet art deco movie theater in Kaunas.

Here is a brief list of lovely, little things that I "discovered" (kind of like how Columbus "discovered" America) in Lithuania:

- already mentioned our friend Bogus
- old ladies wearing knee high hose and sport sandals
- geometric, Howard Roarke-like statues scattered throughout Vilnius
- the hip/not-hip dynamic of the Contemporary Art Center cafe where I seemed to spend too many nights, each drunker than the last.
- The Usupis Republic, a neighborhood of Vilnius where you have the right to squat, where you have the right to sleep where you like, where you have the right to have a name, or to have no name, where you have the right to have no rights. Plus it is full of cafes with back terraces that jut out over a hill the overlooks the whole city.
- the Galerija Vartai, where our Italian painter friend had a retrospective of his work being shown
- male beer glasses and female beer glasses
- MACHUNAS (this one will get its own entry)
- Lithuanian pagan folklore and Witches' Hill which has incredible powers over the creative mind and imagination. Stephane and I experienced this first hand (also more on this later)
- beer snacks. on every menu at every restaurant. beer snacks.
- Lithunanian art critic, poet, essayist Alfonsas Andriuskevicius, responsible for the opening quotation
- a soviet beach resort
- the Baltic Sea!

Oh, and so much more. I really hope to be able to write more meaningful posts about this experience, which was, as every travel experience is, very formative. Right now though, I am relieved to be home after a harrowing travel day that started in Kaunas and ended in Paris via Vilnius and Amsterdam. I say good night and I promise pictures and more in the coming days. Plus a lot of interesting stuff found it's way into my inbox, which I hope to get out there as well. Gotta keep those memes buzzing.

I have adopted a good friend's philosophy on language learning while traveling. Learn how to say hello, goodbye, please, thank you, and cheers in as many languages as possible and you will do just fine. So the title of this post is "cheers" in Lithunanian, taught to me by the conductor of Machunas (aka Cactus) shortly before his forceful clink shattered my mug showering us all with wheat beer and lemon.

I have only very limited time to blog as the premiere is in about an hour. I must say that from what I've heard at the rehearsals, I think it is going to be a major event. It takes place in 4 different rooms, in four different colors in the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius. The audience moves around the space with their chairs and apparently there will be food served during the performance. But more on Machunas once I have seen it.

Speaking of food, I must say that I have become a blini maniac, trying them in all of their forms and modulations--apples, chicken, cheese, potatoes, pork, with a healthy dose of sour cream on the side. And the beer is fabulous.

Tomorrow AssRay and I leave for the beach, a small town called Juodkrante located on the Neringa peninsula that just into the Baltic Sea and forms a lagoon between it and the mainland. Lithuania shares the peninsula with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which we will nopt be visiting because it is a bitch to get a visa.

Until we meet again... viso gero!

In the second-floor vending machine, located next to the coffee machine and across from the men's room, you can get such delicacies as Mars bars, madeleines, and condoms. Yes, for 1 euro and some change you can buy a three-pack of Durex "jeans" (apparently these little caps are as comfortable as your favorite pair of Levi's...). This combined with the two-champagne lunch from a month ago and the gardener from earlier this week are making me a bit suspicious about the "behind-the-scenes" activities that are going on in my place of work. Is my job here simply an entry into sexual slavery, catering to the niche market for artsy girls and boys?

When I opened my eyes this morning I felt great! Then I tried to get out of bed and I fell over because I was still drunk. And while you're in quite a good mood when you wake up drunk, you know that it is about t-minus 45 minutes until the misery hits.

And this morning was not fun.

But I cured it! How? Water, Japanese sautéed noodles, and a coffee. Perfect! I feel like a million dollars. And on the hangover prevention front, I discovered a few weeks ago that Belgian chocolate seemed to counteract the after effects of the Belgian beer. This experiment needs to be repeated however...

Any other surefire hangover cures floating around out there?

This week, with the admin site running again after a month of bogus head-scratching on the part of our IT consultants, I have set to the task of copyediting dozens and dozens of pages of the museum Web site. As you can imagine, this work is not very stimulating. Today I brought my iPod to work. But I am sick of all the songs I have and thus nullifying its "monotony breaking" function.

So, reaching back into my primitive mind, I decided to try something different. I tuned into WBER. After all, it is "the only station that matters." It was 4 am in Rochester and they had the automated DJ on playing old BER standards from The Cure and Bjork (It's oh-so-quiet). It wasn't until the morning show came on at 6 am (noon here) that I began to get the creeps. It is the same dude that did the morning show when I would pull out of the driveway in my little, bright red Dodge Shadow on my way to "the high school." I started to feel as if I had suddenly been transported back in time. Or like I was apparating, trying to squueze all of my life experience back into my puny pre-18 year-old brain.

I realize that no matter how far away I try to get, Rochester, NY is and will always be that creepy and familiar place called my hometown.

And as if the BER timewarp wasn't enough to undermine all of my adult zen, I got picked up by a 21-year old gardening apprentice named Guillaume in the cantine today. Jeez. What is going on here?

I am tired. I yearn for mind-numbing activities when I rarely find myself at home. Yesterday, I watched The Skulls II (which was a direct to DVD release...yeah.) I know the names of contestants on France's Top Model. Every time I pick up House of Leaves, which AssRay brought to me from New York on Carey's recommendation, I make my way to the fridge after about 10 minutes. Every morning, spaced out in the shower, I have the same debate: bike or Metro? I should bike. It's nice out and it's good for me. But I am so tired. What if I get flattened at a traffic circle because I am unfocused? But what if there is another problem on the 5 line and I get there a 1/2 hour late...again?

I often work myself to the brink of whining when I try to figure out what I am doing with my life. Why do I spend so much time preparing for my lessons when I don't really care? What do I truly want to be?

But the other night, walking home from the movies with AssRay, it dawned on me. I no longer need to worry about what I am going to be when I grow up. I am grown up. The time for dreaming and planning is over. I put everything into place between ages 15 and 25. I may not have realized it, but all of my disparate experiences and all of the random people I have met have formed a base, a sort of perpetual motion mechanism that is pushing my life along. And it is very difficult and very stressful to fight against this. Like trying to walk up a down escalator. So, in my long quest to quell my nerves (which have always been a bit edgy) and get a good night's sleep, I think that I just need to ride this wave out.

Yes, I may not have achieved some of the goals I had set for myself when I was leaving high school or leaving college. But my life is not uninteresting and still has great potential for success. If I can stop trying to undermine it with my controlling tendencies (after all, my Wu Tang name is Excessive Dominator).

And no, I am not subscribing to theories of destiny and cosmic predisposition. I will never except a situation that truly makes me miserable. I still believe that in my reactions to events and opportunities, I maintain my self-determination. But I also have learned that I can't control the world. I am not pushy (assertive, if you prefer) nor do I care to be. It stresses me out. This does not mean I am not confident. I just despise conflict and am tired of living contrary to the "pushing and contriving," as Thornton Wilder would say, of my own life.

'Course, I could just be really tired.

Three years ago today, a young Mandounette sat on the steps of the Angelika awaiting a certain young man to join her for the then new and now forgotten Steven Soderbergh film, Full Frontal. Seven hours later, after a coke in a glass bottle, a few Belgian beers, a bottle of wine, some Moroccan food, a little bit of belly dancing, a Serge Gainsbourg impression, a virtual odyssey from Thompson Street to the northern edge of Alphabet City (he walked me home!), a lot of laughing and a kiss on the forehead, I thought I might just be in crush.

Three years later, the best first date of all time is still going. Many more cokes were drunk, much more Moroccan food was eaten (almost to the point of vomiting once because I didn't know the pastilla was an appetizer and I ate like 4 pieces), many more bad films were seen. Oceans and continents have been crossed. A cat and an apartment have been added to the mix. Nicknames have come and gone. We have seen each other in some unflattering positions: I was pretty much psychotic my first year in France, he's just goofy. But so far it has been a beautiful three years and I am certain that there will be many more.

Paris finally feels like home. With the addition of a bike to my life, I know the streets a lot better--which ones are one-way, what the main axes are. I have a small repertory of favorite places in various neighborhoods--cafés, gardens, restaurants, stores. I love giving tours of my neighborhood, having discovered many of its quirks: "here's the robot shop, here's the cajun pool hall, here are the many Senegalese restaurants, that's the "philosopher" practicing his samurai sword skills on the sidewalk, there's the punk bar with the coffee-vodka shots, here's the restaurant that puts pepper in their desserts, there's the clown shoe store..."

But each time I start to get sit back and relax in my advanced state of expat nirvana, the god of humility gives me a wedgie and makes me realize that I am nothing but a goofy foreigner.

Example:

Today, at lunch, I saw what appeared to be boeuf bourguignon, that famous French beef stew made with red wine and mushrooms and potatoes. I'd had it once before at the Louvre cantina and had been pretty impressed. Compared to the fish pastries and the blood sausages, it seemed like my best bet. So I ordered the beef accompanied by bulgur and green beans. Yummy!

I find a great corner spot in the dining room (all of my colleagues are on vacation, so I've been flying solo.) I pour myself some water from the carafe and spear a piece of meat. Or is it a mushroom? It's hard to tell. I take a bite and nearly vomit. On my receipt is marked "rognons." It all starts to make sense. Now, I do make an effort to develop and diversify my palette, but there are some things that are not meant to be ingested and kidneys are one of them. After all, it's where urine is processed.

I instinctively hid the kidneys with the bulgur and beans only to curse myself 2 seconds later, because, having touched the kidneys, they were thus rendered inedible.

I shamefully carried my tray to the belt and ducked out of the cantina (hopefully) unnoticed. There was only one solution to this nearly fatal mishap. Go directly to the Grannies (what we call the one reasonable bakery in the neighborhood) and buy myself a sablé framboises, which--like chocolate after a dementor attack--brings back the comfort and warmth of pre-kidney life almost immediately.

Sunday nights have always had a sort of cathartic rhythm for me.

When I was very small, we would go to church and, the part that sticks with me more than sermons and Sunday school, then we would head to the Ridge Donut Shop with my grandma and her friend Jane. My mom would let me spoon out the custard from her Bavarian Cream donut, a taste I still find myself craving in this land of beautiful pastries. It got me ready for those trying weeks of pre-school when I was chastised over and over again for not being able to write my name and refusing to say the pledge of allegiance.

When I was about 10, I would take my weekly shower, put on my pajamas and watch "The Simpsons" with my family (who, AssRay likes to point out, are frighteningly similar to the Simpsons). My mother would sit on the floor playing solitaire (her cathartic activity before another hellish week as a special ed teacher). This tradition lasted all the way through high school, except that the shower bit was no longer so exceptional.

Throughout college it was chorus rehearsals. From 7:15 to 9:15, every Sunday. On fall evenings at sunset we would sing "The Evening Song" in front of the chapel. On special occasions, rehearsal would be followed by more singing, beer and corn nuggets at The Chariot. Not really ever in that order.

First year in NYC (the Queens-era), my roommate and I would make "Sunday dinners" (ok he would make, I would eat) and we would watch "Six Feet Under." Those were the glory days when I had HBO and a job that I was excited to go to on Monday mornings.

Secondish/thirdish year in NYC (the Brooklyn-era), Sara and I adopted ideas from previous years, particularly the meal (mostly consisting of Spaghetti-o's and Oatmeal Cream Pies instead of the swordfish and homemade mojito ice cream of the previous year) and the Simpsons.

In Paris, AssRay and I often went to the movies, which I have to say is a great way to ease the Sunday night anxiety. But now, more often than not, you will find me at the Highlander, beer in hand, kicking major ass with my friends at the weekly pub quiz. And thus the reason for the post. For EasyJetsetter's very last pub quiz--a poignant moment considering it was her Scottish enthusiasm that brought us all together originally--we earned 36 and a half points and secured ourselves first place and the requisite bottle of champagne. So, now, my new tradition to ease into the work week? Equal parts drinking, concentrating, and trash-talking, trying to figure out what Clint Eastwood, Hillary Swank, Mel Gibson, and Michael Caine all have in common.