What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Read Online Free PDF Page B

come up with. When Russians meet, their “Nice to meet you” literally translates to “How many years, how many winters?” Why couldn’t it at least be summers? It’s all very dramatic and dark in Russia.
    So when we were “practicing Russian,” Sasha and I would translate “Enjoy your meal” into “I hope you don’t choke and leave your family devastated.” “Have a nice day” became “Today, try to forget this world is gray and bleak.”
    Et cetera.
    Sasha did teach me a couple of actual Russian phrases that became my party trick for the next three weeks. I could say “I am a bride for sale” with a pretty decent accent. Also “Be my daddy” and “American thighs.” When not chirping those phrases, though, I was just the chesty blond girl smiling and nodding while Sasha chatted up Russians. I reminded myself of Ulla, the agreeable but only Swedish-speaking secretary in Mel Brooks’s
The Producers.
I’d smile, nod, smile, nod, then Sasha would turn to me and say:
    “Kristin, say your thing!”
    “I am a bride for sale!” Ulla would proudly pipe up.
    And we would have new Russian friends.
    I did ask Sasha’s mother how to say “Have a nice day” in Russian, but she just frowned and said, “We don’t really say that.”
    T he trip was a combination Russian history tour and walk down Sasha’s mother’s memory lane. We met the original Sasha after whom my Sasha had been named, and had big dinner parties full of her mother’s old Russian friends and the families they’d formed in the twenty-six years since she’d last seen them. No one spoke English, and Sasha and her mother both spoke Russian, so at these dinners I would have to sit quietly and pick at my egg, cheese, and mayonnaise bowl that Russians call a “salad.”
    Sitting quietly at dinner parties was not my natural strong suit. At home, I worked
hard
at dinner parties. Notjust at being entertaining, which I believe to be a holy duty of dinner party guests, but also at keeping the conversation constantly going, noticing people who were being left out and asking questions to draw them in, filling the awkward silences. Maybe this need to keep everyone happy and getting along is just my nature, or maybe it stems from a childhood as an only child of a disintegrating marriage, trying to be the happy glue that kept the splintering family together. Either way, I’m not complaining, since it’s a skill that’s probably exclusively responsible for my success as a sitcom writer.
    Sitcom writers often group write, sitting around a big table, so we talk all day long. Sometimes, on some shows, you literally never sit alone in front of a computer just writing. And I worked exactly as hard in a writers’ room, around that table, as I did around dinner tables. I never realized how hard I worked around tables day and night until the trip to Russia, when I couldn’t. I just had to
sit there.
At first this was
excruciating.
I felt completely not myself, dead weight in a little life raft adrift in a sea of incomprehensible and sometimes stilted conversation.
    Earlier that year, at a meditation workshop with a stressed-out friend, the meditation guide was walking us through an exercise, and asked us a question that we were to think about as we sat.
    “With no thoughts, with no words, what am I?”
    Dead.
Immediately, with medium-size panic and a shortness of breath, that was my answer. Without thoughts, words,
speech
 … death. My career and my identity were filled with millions of words daily, and without them Iwould be a black hole. My friend and I talked about the question after the class, and I was surprised to hear that her reaction had been absolutely opposite from mine. For her, the idea of no words, and no thoughts, made her deeply calm and peaceful.
    For me it meant I was gone.
    But on that trip to Russia, I eventually got used to being without words. I could still smile at people, and pass the bread, and look friendly. I was not just the