:: essay/articles ::

[1] I wrote a column for element, a moscow entertainment magazine, between January 06 and July 07. You can find my column if you go into the back issues page and search around a bit.

Here are a few quick links; check page 5:

How To: Become a Babushka :: because why fear the reaper when he reaps so good? ...

How To: Break Up Moscow Style :: why do anything less than spectacular? ...

How To: Appreciate Moscow :: pollution, traffic, sometimes you do need the encouragement ...

How To: Get to Petushki :: it was the best day of your life ...

How To: Get to Domodedovo :: you have to get to the airport, but only have 650 rubles ...

How To: Eat a Biznes Lanch :: they're delicious and cheap, but you have to be on guard ...

How To: Be an Obnoxious American :: as opposed to just loud ...

How To: Torture your Tenant :: how to revel in their vulnerability ...

How To: Be An April Fool I :: some sound advice, I promise ...

How To: Be An April Fool II :: part two ...

How to: Get Drunk Fast :: sometimes you must grip and you must rip ...

[2] Here is an essay on why I hate my former landlady. Do you think 14 degrees celsius is a reasonable apartment temperature? If so, I can recommend a great Soviet apartment bang in the city center.

[3] Back in 2002 the Moscow Times asked me to write an article for them on my experience at the Salt Lake Olympics. By the time I got them the article everyone was already so pissed off by the various medals scandals that the paper was trying to run as little on the Olympics as possible. Don't really blame them. But you can read my Olympics essay on the blog, baby.

[4] A few years back, when I first started the blog, I thought it would be hilarious to post one of my grad school papers about the roots of the word Hell, and how there is no direct evidence that it actually exists in either Testament as such. Notice my tough-and-clever introduction to it, trying to distract attention from the fact that I was actually posting a grad school essay...

[5] Speaking of grad school school, I thought this essay was a funny parody of academic writing, but feel free to form a different opinion. It's a deconstruction of a Michelob commercial.

[6] Funny story. Four years ago, when I first started my now-defunct Stanford homepage at stanford.edu/~skij, I decided to throw up all kinds of academic papers, more because I felt like a tool only putting up a poetry collection and a play. I was grasping for content. So, I included this essay on Hayden White's Metahistory on the page, not thinking much of it. A few months later, I found my essay had been cited for all kinds of essays, including the wikipedia and answer.com article on Metahistory. It even somehow started this metafilter discussion, whatever the hell metafilter is. Pretty unexpected for a grad school book report. I actually did take a class with Professor White, but never mentioned that my little article on his book came up higher on a google search than the book itself...

You can see the 65 places where that White articles was referenced here.

[7] Sadly, not many people found my mime on suicide as funny as I did. My favorite comment is "because I want to live" - not really rising to the challenge, I thought.

[8] Also, this seems as good as anywhere to mention my translation of one of Akhmatova's poems.