_ Emma and I have been in Moscow for a tumultuous five months now, and perhaps the most “adventurous” aspect of our life here has come in the form of being tenants.  The roller coaster began on our second day, when we were evicted from our first flat for undisclosed reasons.  We arrived to find our liaison lady in tears as two people were cleaning any remnants of our presence there.  Our bags had already been repacked, but we didn’t ask question when Diana (the liaison lady) said, “We need to go now.”  That seemed clue enough.

Our company put us up in a nice hotel for a couple of nights while Diana had our rental agent locate another apartment.  While waiting, we made ourselves at home at Hotel Katerina, where choice selections from breakfast buffets dangled off the plate and the staff offered up friendly smiles each time we entered.  Had the opportunity presented itself, we would have gladly hung our hats there for the remaining five months, living off the teat of our mother company, enjoying the complimentary mini-bar and free gym/sauna.

However, the tarot cards turned up some new leaves quickly.  We woke the first morning to find that we’d been scheduled to view two apartments that Saturday, our inaugural and soon hard-to-come-by morning off.  After waiting forty-five minutes in the Metro station for Diana to meet us for the earliest appointment of the day, a two-thirty engagement arranged an hour prior while we were doing our best to be tourists in the new city, Emma finally went above ground to discover the “viewing” had been cancelled.  Not long after, the second apartment dissipated as well.

Sunday morning we met Diana at Prazhskaya Station, the Metro stop closest our hotel, to view a nearby apartment.  Immediately, the landlords refused us as tenants, citing that they didn’t want foreigners for logistical reasons.  We stood in the doorway, not having even seen the far corners of the one-room (not one bedroom, but one room) palace we were being pushed out of, though we represented around $1000 a month in rent.  Diana, who translated the occasional exchange for us, let us know that the heated discussion was simply a Russian custom of “landlords getting to know” their renters.

Indeed, within about ten or twenty minutes of arguing, the landlady was guiding us on a very short tour of the flat, and feeling obliged to end the saga, we readily accepted the fourth apartment, on what had been, to that point, a very rough-and-tumble introduction to Moscow real estate.  Since then, our status as renters has remained choppy and unpredictable.

We have the rather strange monthly ritual of meeting the landlords at a Metro Station in the center of the city, about half-an-hour to forty minutes away, in order to handover an envelope bulging with impressive 1,000 and 5,000 ruble notes.  In addition, we have to monitor our own water meters and deliver a handwritten account of both hot and cold water usage to a rather inconspicuous letter box about a block away, in an unmarked building.  Furthermore, we are in charge of maintaining the only running record of our electricity, which we give to the landlady on a slip of scrap paper.  We have accepted these responsibilities blindly.

From early September through the end of October, we went through a series of seemingly forgotten promises, no-shows, cancelled appointments, and improvisational appearances in an effort to replace what seemed to be well-functioning windows.  The two month drama culminated in the landlords spending the afternoon watching over workers in our apartment, all the while Emma and I were teaching our classes for the day.  At about ten-thirty that night, the landlord and window “master” left the building, and Emma commenced to cleaning a dust-laden flat, her hungry husband hunkering down over the stove to prepare dinner.

The latest development happened earlier this month: We were told that the landlords had decided to sell our flat, which meant we might be moving yet again.  We were offered the consolation of another apartment owned by the same barons, a place about an hour away from our office, clear across town.  After the landlords sheepishly brought a real estate guy to take photos of the place, days after scheduling a viewing with possible buyers, Emma and I felt a bit fed up.  We asked that our company look into the legality of us being forced out of another place despite having signed several versions of a very official seeming rental agreement.

As the situation stands, we are still here, still clueless, and still awaiting our next twist of fate.  For a more detailed account of our first eviction or finding our current apartment, visit the hyperlinks, which will travel you to the travel memoir page of my website.  There is a tale of our window woes in the works, and I’m sure there will be more tales to come.  I don’t know if this is typical story of renting in Moscow, but it’s certainly come off as rather status quo to us. 

_ One Friday night, back when I was a waiter, some of the other senior staff and I pulled a prank on this new kid.  Scott was nervous about his first weekend evening shift (when the big money rolls in), so as the chef ran down the specials for us, the newbie had taken detailed notes in his order book, only he’d been so thorough he’d missed what type of stuffed fish we were serving that night.  We told him it was trouser trout.  A couple of hours into the shift, one of his customers finally broke down and informed him he’d been the butt of a joke.  By then, Scott had probably offered stuffed trouser trout to two dozen people.  It was classic.

Unlikely as it seems, this story notes the beautiful power of English syntax, that craftsman-like combining of “trouser” and “trout”, to create a completely different tableside offering.  Put the adjective “stuffed” in front of it, and the punchline is just exploding everywhere.  English, when in good hands or in the warped wrinkles of twisted minds like ours, has the power to be so versatile and poignant, but if you’ve ever tried teaching phrasal verbs to non-native speakers, as I do often and with little success, you’ll long for those days of Chlamydia olives and tube steak smothered in Fruit of the Loom.

Phrasal verbs, for the non-grammarian, is when a verb (give, go, get) is combined with a preposition (out, off, on) to make a new, non-literal expression.  Let’s use “get” and “down” to start: Note that “get down” can mean the more directional “Get down! There’s a grenade on the way” or the groovier “Get down, get down!  Jungle bogey” call to shaking it.  Should we feel so inclined, we could “get down” to really examining the possibilities of this combination, but it might “get me down” thinking of trying to explain the subtleties of when, why, and how new English speakers should use this.  Regardless, I need to "get down" to brass tax.

While we, masters of the English, can easily chortle at a paragraph like the one above, not in the least confused by “get” (i.e. to obtain, acquire, receive) transforming into this schizophrenic three-letter enigma, language learners might find such pun-fully fun word dazzlement infuriating.  After all, there are over a million words in the English language, and we just combined two to create five new meanings, completely indecipherable from the original vernacular.  This sort of thing can really get to them because, by the time a learner gets to a certain level, he or she expects to get new linguistic concepts without getting too confused.  (Okay, it does allot for a little fun in class.) 

It’s almost like throwing a third language into the mix: phrasal verbs inspire pages of lists and explanations for the EFL student to ponder.  That’s just considering the verb side of things.  Consider for a second how the preposition—let’s say, “up”—changes: We can take up (to start) this task by looking up (to research) lists of phrasal verbs ending with “up”, but soon we’ll be fed up (to feel frustrated) and throw up our hands [to give up (to quit)] because there are so many examples we can conjure up {to think up [to come up with (to dream up)]}.  It makes me want to tuck my trouser trout between my legs and scamper off like a frightened puppy.

Here’s the real problem: We use phrasal verbs a lot.  They aren’t stupid, pointless grammar asides like “whom” and reflexive pronouns.  We get up in the morning, pull on clothes, and go off to put in a day’s work full of phrasal verbs.  So, perhaps we should—now that we are older and more compassionate—take it easy on these language rookies, let them have their Friday night under the lights before we blow their mind with s(word) play, and as the responsible Jedi of the universal language, be kind to people with the accents f-ing up delicate word combinations.  They can't help that they were born phrasally-challenged.

 

_ Both of our heads were sunken into our scarves, fending off the minus-fifteen temperatures with slight blustery breezes.  Taking a look required a tortoise like maneuver, heads slowly clearing our woolen shells to discover the origins of these—what seemed like, though oddly so—gleefully rising howls.  A kid was careening down the local sledding hill at a quarter to nine on Sunday morning, a very understanding mother for an audience and emergency medical needs.  As he or she—the bundle of waterproof warm-wear didn’t suggest gender—skidded across the flats at the foot of the hill, Emma sank back into her crocheted shelter, muttering something about lunacy. 

It took winter a while to get to Moscow this year, but I’m pretty sure it’s official.  Snow has begun to pile up along the edges of pavements, quickly moving from ankle-deep to knee-high to above your average waist-waders.  Snow falls and stacks and stays, requiring an ever-present prowl of men with wide-spaded shovels to clear a path.  Often I see them working the road that rings our apartment complex, snowflakes pattering against their shoulders as they clean a sidewalk, ten steps back, already getting its second, third, fourth coat of snow again.  They plod on, looking forward, knowing all their work will have disappeared by the time they circle back.

As snow covers the world in a wintry white blanket, inspiring moments of bewilderment, Oh! the beauty of nature type musings, it also does much to dampen the season.  Beyond the shovelers, there are the floor-cleaning ladies at the entrance of my office (also a shopping mall), who stand mop-in-hand, battling the muddy residue of snow melting off of boot bottoms, sometimes the traffic so thick with footprints that I’m reminded of Looney Tunes episodes, Bugs Bunny confounding a determined Elmer Fudd.  The women wipe away the tracks only to find a new set, three sets, laid in the meantime.

Then, there is me, the pedestrian strained against the wind: wincing, squinting, crouching, slumping, wrapping, and fighting for each tiny step I take, praying for balance atop the slick stretches of pathway.  Point A to B has never felt so the obstacle course as gliding over the snowcapped ledges of stairways, over the melted and refrozen puddles of snowfall, the packed ice thoroughfares of pedestrians, all of us trying to make it to B without busting our asses.  The horror is that we’ll have to get back out there to return to A.  Then, do it again tomorrow.  Amongst us, there is a real sentiment of screw-the-great-outdoors, give-me-a-cup-of-tea.  

Still, once you’ve made it to the office, braved those slippery sidewalks, laid your footprints of horrible brown slush, you can’t help but admire that kid on the sled, so enamored with the possibilities of powdery hillsides that he or she just can’t resist it, and kudos to that mother for bundling up to oversee this next commencement of sledgery.  Growing up in Louisiana, I have no reason to feel this way, but there is something about fresh snow that is reminiscent of childhood, as if nature has provide a whole new canvass on which to scribble.  Luckily, any dreams I had of being an artist have long since blow away in the blizzard.  

_ What single word perplexes native English speakers more than that of whom, an utterance that has all but disappeared in regular speech, one that sounds ridiculously posh, especially when preempted by those hoity-toity prepositions: with whom, to whom, for whom.  At some point, whom must have held a high court of fandom, something so powerfully sustaining and academically certain that these days, days of the universal—English—language, the lingering prowess of whom has remained, indeed, can’t seem to be erased.

In the intermediate stages of learning English, when speakers have moved beyond those standard question-answer formulas (What’s your name?  How are you?  Where are you from?), every book seems to devote some manner of time, be it a page or a chapter, to the use of whom.  The ironic asterisk, informing learners of the archaic nature of whom, that you might as well use who all of the time, like every native speaker outside of Cambridge and the Ivy Leagues, doesn’t seem enough to deter publishers from including the moot grammar point.

For those of you not daily engorged in the minutia of English grammar, the use of whom may still seem shrouded in mystery, a proclamation of pun, a pretentious point with which pompous pedantics project themselves as intellectual superiors, quickly interjecting to correct your offensive word choice.  Worry not, dear friends, today I will distill these ancient quandaries, release the trade secrets of whom (in a single and simple paragraph no less), while continuing to berate its supporters.

Simply, who is for subjects, and whom is for objects.  Who does the action of sentences: Who wrote this sentence?  I wrote this sentence.  Whom receives: For whom did I write these sentences?  I wrote these sentences for you.  Who cares?  No one cares.  To whom does this matter?  This matters to very few.  The reason for those equally troublesome tagalongs, those tos and fors, is that the same grammatical buttheads that celebrate the use of whom also forbid us from ending sentences with prepositions.  So, “Who are you talking to?” becomes “Whom are you talking to?” becomes “To whom are you talking?”

That pretty much sums it up, so why does it continue to confuse lifelong speakers of English, the people who (not whom) should understand this stuff intrinsically?  The irony of knowing a language fluently, “naturally” so to speak, is that native speakers learn sentence structures mostly via experience rather than books.  Thus, when language evolves, becoming more efficient and less elitist, little used grammar constructions like whom disappear.  Unless you learn it for an exam, you’ll never need it.  After all, “who may it concern” is no less clear than “whom may it concern”.

However, now, having drudged through this grammar lesson, you may be enthused to use this new knowledge, perhaps drop a whom here or there in your next conversation.  Equally, you may still be concerned about coming off like an ass.  So, I suppose our final question is this: With whom do we use this decaying grammar?  My British wife and fellow grammarian, Emma, suggests its use if and when you meet the queen, and I, your lowly guide to the underworld of EFL, would suggest you use it when speaking to foreigners because they are amongst the only people who'll know you’ve used it correctly.

_Going into the Metro takes total commitment, putting your head down, bulling passed the people distributing flyers, ads for tattoo shops, electronic stores, restaurants, furniture outlets, plumbing.  These distributors cause dangerous rip currents in the traffic, the flow engorging them, pushing us all tighter together as we begin our descent of the stairs, these days capped in a grease-like combination of mud and snow.  By this time, there is no turning back, those behind you will not stop, the wave will only snap and crash atop you, snow boots slipping into an all out avalanche.

At the bottom of the stairs, the floor turns to puddles, and the crowd seems to idle, reducing speed to rubberneck at the underground shops, tiny hole-in-the-wall places with window-display merchandise: sweaters, kitchen tack, eyeglasses, week-old pirogues, yarn, locks and keys.  The traffic jams as people constantly jerk left or right, mesmerized by an electric kettle, a new pair of boots.  Pensioners dawdle with Buick-like integrity, conserving energy for better gas mileage, as young slicksters weave around them, burrowing out passing lanes.  Yesterday, I saw a man reach from behind to shove my wife aside, simply to walk the same speed in front of her.

Then, you find the doors, and they are the next obstacle, the wind pushing and/or pulling them in either or both directions, the person in front of you letting the heavy glass panels swing hard, whether you are ready or not.  And, there always seems to be a second row of doors so that, clearing the first, another Tyson-like right hook is headed straight for your nose.  Reaching the turnstiles, you emit a tiny prayer to the god of bar code readers that your Metro card will work, open the gate, allow passage, and prevent another incident of floundering about as the grandma from the corridor catches up and looks poised to beat you with her handbag if you don’t get out of the way.

 After that comes a strange interlude, bottlenecking onto the escalator (no manual steps available), where almost all passengers merge right, coming to a complete standstill as the motorized staircase eases them into the howls and screeches of the platform proper.  The sense of urgency disappears, as if this mechanically-produced motion is maximum speed, no need to clamber or climb until you reach the final fifteen feet.  There, the surge builds up again, a collective holding of breaths as the escalator spits riders free like errant pinballs.  God forbid an outgoing train arrives in those last fifteen.

Generally, the platforms boast a station-specific style of décor, mosaic tile-work or brass columns, something distinctive to ignore as the swell gathers round waiting for the next departure.  The trains careen in every three minutes or so, doors clanging open as new passengers create two walls between which the arrivals depart, something like a high school football team running through lines of cheerleaders.  Here, though, the cheerleaders crowd in on the last few exiters, begin throwing basketball elbows, boxing out for position, then seemingly pivoting in unison once aboard, creating a red-rover-type wall you’ve not seen since the elementary playground.

The wagon’s doors slam without discretion, unrepentant about trapped bags or scarf ends.  The big locomotive heaves, flinging any unprepared passengers off-balance and into the arms of strangers, changing gears, then driving the two of you closer together with another lunge.  The rails through the tunnels scream conversations into submission, drown out max-volume MP3 players, and create the same choppy jar of a speedboat skittering across a lake.  The brakes grind, squeezing it all to a crushing halt so that the whole passenger exchange happens in reverse, nine times out of ten providing a good shoulder wallop from a boarder terrified of getting clamped in the doors.

It’s a mad dash to the escalators again, sometimes resulting in a massive mob of zombies inching their way towards freedom, but very few seem willing to use the left side of the escalator, the climber’s side, where undoubtedly, halfway up, you’ll be blocked by a couple engaged in a full-on make-out session during the transit lull.  You will stand like the rest, too reserved to interrupt the foreplay, so you spurt out of the top with the others, racing through the turnstiles again, trying to time it so that the gate doesn’t close on you, beyond the two rows of swinging doors, up the snow-capped staircase, where the grand old workday begins.

_It’s bothered me for years, the ridiculous amount of useless grammar trivia that I’ve picked up in my EFL career.  Far too often do I find myself engaging in soulful analyses of inverted sentence structures, carefully considering obscure verb tenses (Can anyone give me a positive passive-voice sentence using the past perfect continuous tense?), or stressing out over the finite differences between similar strands of conjunctions.  It never seemed so tough at Conjunction Junction when I was a kid, so why has it become so complicated now that I teach it?   

This week in my advanced class we’ve been covering reflexive pronouns, which are those words that end in “self”, such as myself, himself, or themselves.   We use these pronouns for either things we can do without help—I can wipe my butt by myself—or when we do something to ourselves—“When I think about you, I touch myself” (kudos to The Divinyls for those memorable song lyrics, so sweet and right). It seems simple enough and fairly infrequently needed unless you’re a teenage boy.  Unfortunately, the story goes on, the plot thickening into a horrible grammatical goulash.

I have an imbedded hatred for reflexive pronouns because I’ve tried to learn Spanish, a language overstuffed with them, and I say “overstuffed” because I can never seem to remember the massive list of reflexive Spanish verbs.  Spanish speakers stand themselves, kneel themselves, and feel themselves (both emotionally and physically).  Their abundance of self-inflicted actions dazzles me, and I constantly fumble and f-up the language because I can’t wrap my head around when things are reflexive.  For instance, in English, we can get close to a hottie, but in Spanish, we must always get ourselves close to a hottie.  It sounds a little too suave and cool for my liking.

More annoyingly, my job has turned me (not myself) into a hyper-geek, and because reflexive pronouns are rarely needed, native English speakers drive me crazy by constantly misusing them, shoving them into sentence subjects, creating impossibly mismatched reflexive objects.  For example, in the case of shoved-in reflexive subjects: “Jimmie and myself are going out pimpin’ tonight” is not correct.  It should, of course, be Jimmie and I are going out pimpin’.  As for objects, “That ho pushed up on Jimmie and myself” should not use the reflexive “myself” or the subject “I” for that matter, but in actuality, grammatically, that ho pushed up on Jimmie and me.

More alarmingly, I think these mistakes occur in an effort to sound stuffy and educated, especially as they most often occur from stuffy overly-schooled people.  When I was getting my AIDS test done in order to apply for a Russian visa, the doctor made me wince several times, not because she was cutting off my circulation and jabbing me with a needle, but she kept explaining things to me using “yourself”, such as “in the case of yourself” instead of “in your case” or “in the case of you”.  It bothered me so badly that I had to prevent myself from puking out a grammar lesson to the obviously brainier M.D.

So, as for you (not yourself), please watch yourself.  Use the reflexive pronoun with both wisdom and humility, the only thing more pretentious than saying “My wife and myself prefer to flatulate in private” is to explain why that statement is just wrong, despite the polite intentions of solitary flatulation.

__Generally I regard port-o-potties as places of depraved acts, where somehow stuff that logistically should never make it onto walls does, smells are released that are so vile even blue chemical sludge can’t mask them, and toothless sexual deviants pretend it’s their own, well, public restroom.Throughout my life, I’ve felt dissuaded from ever wanting to live in a portable toilet or feel that anyone ever should, which is why I find the port-o-potty ladies in Moscow, who I’ve amply named Port-o-Lou-s, to be an absolute marvel.  

The first time I saw this phenomenon was the most disturbing, as I believed the port-o-lady to be actually engaged in one of the aforementioned acts of depravity, but after further study, which we will not discuss what might insinuate about me, I could see that this wasn’t the case.  There were blankets in there.  She was dressed for the long haul, with fingerless gloves and a kerchief around her head, things usually removed in such intimate moments.  Her dress wasn’t hiked above her knees.  Most notably, there were stacks of newspapers and magazines, which, at the moment, a moment that should have been the time to be reading them, she wasn’t at all interested in.  She was working!

Outside Prazhskaya Station, the Metro stop nearest my home, there are three separate lines of portable toilets, the only public restrooms within a twenty-minute radius, at which time you’d reach the next tiny village of little blue hovels, where a new twenty-minute radius begins, spreading throughout Moscow.  Each line of these port-o-potties consists of three to four separate units, the last—the end unit—of which is occupied by a Port-o-Lou, a lady employed to sit in her own specially re-engineered model (the door designed to be more like that of a tollbooth) and collect money from anyone who might want use of one of the other, unoccupied portos. 

Perhaps every bit as troubling as that first sighting is that I never pass these nomadic potty conglomerates without seeing the same respective Port-o-Lou-s in wait.   I’ve seen them playing card games, chatting with passers-by (regulars, maybe), actually reading those magazines, texting, having a snack, and just staring off into the distance, but I have never seen them not doing these things, simply not there.  From about seven in the morning to about nine at night , I have no fear of walking by, and I so inclined, relieving myself in portable privacy.  And, my wife thinks I spend a long time in the bathroom.

I’m not sure what to take from it all: a feeling of sorrow for someone who is living out one of my nightmares, respect for someone who has gainful employment despite unsavory conditions and the attitudes of others, or absolute wonderment at the things this lady will have seen in a lifetime spent at the helm of where people who put stuff on the walls, where out-doers of blue chemical sludge, and where sexual deviants converge to pay their pittance before visiting the wholly, transportable grail.  Simply put, I’m in awe.