Notes from the Functional Tundra

Lately, I've been feeling a lot like I live in Russia. For one thing, in the years I was gone from the state, something happened here: People started wearing fur lined caps with ear flaps and permanently pinned up brims which I'm certain have long been de rigeur and all the rage, well, at least some of the rage, on the streets of Moscow, not to mention the steppes of Siberia. This haberdashic fashion might be sufficient to raise my geographic concern, but when they're coupled with the frigid temperatures, the shock-unabsorbable potholes of our urban roadways, and the overwhelming morass of the civil service to which I've been exposed now, I am pretty certain I live in Russia.

My new friend GL, who was born and schooled in Moscow, laughs at the notion. "You know how you can tell you're not in Russia," he chides me, rolling thick Russian consonants like river steamers down the Volga as we gulp down tofu chunks and apple juice in a way appropriate to recently liberated Muscovites. "You're not in jail for saying that." With that, we clink our juice glasses and toss another shot of AJ down our gullets. But really, it feels a lot like Russia here in the American midwest these days. Not only are faces hidden under fur brimmed Ushankas, young women are wearing down coats to work, long and puffy and white usually, like enormous marshmallows, as if function has overcome fashion, as if everything Marx wrote about the dialectic of change has really come true here in the heartland of America. Quantity transforms to quality, function to fashion. You can no longer see the truth of any person. Faces and forms are uniformly obscured. Being warm is everything. Soon we will all be wearing thermal longjohns under our trousers and not caring if the stretched out and vaguely graying cuffs show when we cross our legs, leaning back from the conference table. Next thing you know we'll start smoking again. Waking up in the morning and asking for Wodka.

Don't get me wrong. I am one-quarter almost-Russian. Well, occupied Russian. My grandmother came from Lithuania. Maybe that's my problem. You see, my grandmother despised Russians. She would speak nothing but German just to spite Russians. Me, I just don't like it when people wear animal skins around their faces. I don't care what kind of fur it is, don't even care if it's fake fur. In a different but somehow related way, which came up today at work, I don't like it when I see that the practices of state employees who are protected by both trade unions and the civil service result in mediocre work being done in an indifferent fashion by people whose only genuine interest in their work is its retirement plan. Is it only me who thinks that it's absolutely insane to work a job you abhor just in order to retire? I mean, why not do something you like so you don't focus on retiring, which is pretty much guaranteed to happen almost exactly at the same time you become so old you're incapable of really enjoying it? We're back to Marx here: alienated labor. Work is something wonderful. Labor is... well, if you've ever had a baby, you know what labor is.

But it's cold here. It's so very cold. I'm going to go crawl under my stack of heavy wool blankets that Dr. Zorba Paster on NPR's "On Your Health" broadcast has told me at least twice are probably responsible for my inability to sleep through the night. "Try sleeping with lighter weight blankets," he urges his caller with such assurance. I'll stick with the amazingly warm Hudson Bay blankets my friend Ann donated to my freezing bedroom. I'll go dream about people tying the skins of dead animals around their ruddy cheeks and chortling as they trudge through the big open square in front of the Kremlin with the snow falling all round and a steamer whistle blowing in the distance, as Putin watches from a second floor window.

My friend GL is probably right.