Pulp Fiction, Those Who Discuss Russian Women, Black Leather, and the Man Purse

* I hope to be traveling to Odessa this Sunday to speak with an American searching for a wife through the marriage agencies there. Look for his story next week. For now, a quick tease: opera house, broken hip, and she done disappeared.

* I had a lot of visitors yesterday, not a record, but still a lot, 50, and a good number of them came from the Russian Women Discussion site, where I posted an offer: talk to me when you're in Kharkov, I'll show you where to find a decent cup of coffee. So to those new arrivals, hello and welcome. Browse the archives (and from yesterday's 200 page views, I assume you already have), and if you'd like to see some pictures from the area visit the Flickr sidebar.

* A couple weeks ago I mentioned that a new marriage agency will soon be opening its doors in Kharkov. Staprius Club isn't quite online, but today I did tour the site of its future offices -- a brick building on Sumskaya Street that still had pencil marks in one door jam, monitoring the growth of Lilia and two other children. Earlier that afternoon, I had my signature notarized on a letter I wrote on behalf of the Club's two owner-operators, who are seeking an affiliation with American-owned companies. There were four people in the room, two at least half-clothed in black leather (a statistic I've been thinking of tracking more closely). We had tried to get this letter notarized about two weeks ago, but the notary we met refused to add her stamp to a "personal" letter. The notary today refused to notarize the letter unless it was also offered to him in Ukrainian. After he'd pointed out some mistakes, necessitating a quick flurry of rewrites by the native-Russian speakers starting the club, I asked Igor, "Did he enjoy pointing out these mistakes?" And with a short laugh, the answer came back yes. Expect a Staprius Club website very shortly. Some design problems caused a delay.

* Some good news on the personal front. My doctor gave me a clean bill of health today, so perhaps this odyssey of mine is over. It's a little easier to talk about in retrospect, and here soon I'll do so at length in an essay (that honors past promises of privacy); but for now maybe you can help me. What does a man buy another man in Ukraine if he wants to thank him? My doctor -- I'll actually miss seeing the guy, if not every weekday, like it was for a while, then here and there, just to make sure everything was okay. I got to get him something to show him my thanks. I left saying I'll always praise the Ukrainian doctors, but it doesn't seem enough. I paid him $200 and saw him probably 20 or 25 times over the last five or six weeks -- and that price included an initial drug regimen similar to (if more powerful than) one which cost me $125 in the United States. I don't mean to reduce this to dollars and cents, I'm just saying -- well, would it be innappropriate to buy the guy a nice man-purse? Am I secure enough in my sexuality to buy another man a man-purse? I'm sure men don't do that over here. My girlfriend already tells me I wear my scarf wrong, like some fancy man from Moscow or western Europe; last thing I need to do is buy a man-purse and give it to someone else. Stuff to ponder, this.

* I've all but given up on Bloglet. Don't know why it doesn't send out notifications when I post. The mystery deepens. No? Okay, I just don't know what to say. I update every day or three, and maybe twice on Tuesdays. Best method: look.