English / 12.06.2019 / 942
love can exist in personal relationships, it can exist in business, and it can exist at any point of contact between you and the world 
A beautiful, handsome fellow. And by his side, a fat, ugly, short…
“But what about me?” the reader bawls, sniffling. “I tried so hard! I worked out my butt at the gym, I went on a diet, I posted pretty pictures on Instagram. I shared suuuuuch smart thoughts on there…”
What was that Russian song?
“Under the pine tree, chewing a blade of grass. Why was it his path that I chose to cross? He's on a date now, with another girl…”
One beautiful evening on Cyprus, a self-proclaimed “psychologist” (for lack of a better word) friend of mine declared to me:
“I can’t give the gift of love. I don’t know what that means. And I don’t want to know.”
As my sexist friends and I like to joke:
“Chicks aren’t dumb because they’re dumb, they’re dumb because they’re chicks.”
But we say that out of love. And you know, there are men who are dumber than that “psychologist”… Really, I’m the most consistent feminist there is. I firmly believe all my girlfriends are geniuses, each in their own right, and each unique. Like that line from a Russian poem:
“...God doesn’t repeat his mistakes…”
This knowledge gives me confidence that my next girlfriend, too, will be genius and unique. Maybe even in love. But that is, alas, a rarity…
Because I know why there’s such trouble with compliments, both for men and for women. I even got the idea to organize an evening of compliments. The people in that company had just recently met. They’d spent a couple days together in the same villa. They demanded I give them a lecture, about love, naturally.
“What good will a lecture do for you, especially a lecture from me… I don’t know anything about love… Let’s do something else… We’ll play a game. Here are the rules: everyone get into pairs, one guy and one girl, and you each have to give a complement to the other person. ”
It was a sorry sight...
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The destructive energy of creation...
Philips and Sony unveiled their invention, the CD, in the ’80s. Owners of music studios tried the novelty out. How can one make a music lover buy a Beatle album again? Release it on a new medium.
The production costs of the CD were lower than those of vinyl, and yet the invention was being sold for more money. Music producers destroyed the vinyl market and set revenue records. The ’90s were the platinum time for studios.
Don’t You Worry, Dear, You’re Tripping
There are hallucinations that we join in on. And there are those that we walk past. And there are people who hallucinate, but don’t want to share their world — we call them schizophrenics. Schizophrenics are outsiders in our hallucinogenic world. We’re not going to talk about them today. We’re going to talk about the leaders of the hallucinogenic world.
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“The problem is, Nikolai, that you never finish anything you start. You don’t even have a degree,” my girlfriend scolded me. We were on the subway.
She had just received some money to make a website, where she would eventually put up some boring local news. The site had dramatically less subscribers than even her Facebook page. In a couple years, the project went bankrupt. But she never lost her faith in the magical formula:
“You need closure. Every beginning has an end…”
My grandfather Semyon escaped dekulakization, a wave of Soviet repressions in the 1930s. He grew up in a big family. His father died fighting in the First World War, and his grandfather (my great-grandfather) had a fairly decent, by rural standards, household. He had a sturdy house, some horses… In the Soviet thirties, this was a death sentence.
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