One thing that struck me was the variation of commentators.  The actual commentators for the TV broadcast, not my friends’ comments.  Although my friends’ comments struck me for a different reason.  Usually forced to turn on the game because of the one or two soccer fans in the room, they begrudgingly turned their attention to the game to comment half way through:

“Which is worse: a red card or a yellow card?”

“Which team is wearing blue?”

“I think Canada is the blue team.”

But what I didn’t realize before this World Cup was that each country has its own style of commentary for TV or radio broadcasts.  I had watched my first World Cup in Spain in 2006 (okay, it’s obvious that I was asking one of the aforementioned questions), and I assumed the experience was the same everywhere.  The commentators hardly paused for breath as they shouted out every twist and turn of the game.  The atmosphere matched the one at the bar, where crazed fans in German-flag colored mohawks jumped onto tables to cheer a good pass.

But now that I’ve seen the game in Sweden, I’ve been exposed to the Swedish style of commenting.  And I’ve even heard other languages thanks to the radio, and a host of international soccer fans.  I wondered what it would be like to hear all of the commentators together, telling one big story about the game.  I think it tells a little something about the different cultures.  Here’s how I think it would go:

England: “The score is Spain nil- Paraguay nil.”  “Pique passes to Puyol.  This team appears to be all mouth and no trousers!”

Sweden: Silence.

Spain: “THE PASS IS GOOOOOOOD!  PIQUE GOES FOR CARDOZO, OH NO!!!  IT’S A PENALTY!  WHERE IS THE REFEREE?”

Sweden: Silence.

Russia: “An interesting story about this player… he once got into a fight with a bear in the Andes, and only lost one sock.”

England: “Looks like Cardozo has gone arse over kettle.”

Sweden: “Penalty Paraguay.”

Spain: “NOOOOOOOOOO GOAAAAAL!”  “WAIT!  PENALTY SPAIN!  WHERE IS THE REFEREE?  WHERE IS THE REFEREE??”

Russia: “In the early days of football, before referees, team captains would consult with each other to resolve disputes.”

England: “This many penalties in this short of time is as rare as hen’s teeth.”

Sweden: “Penalty Spain.”  “Didn’t count.”  “Penalty Spain.”  “No goal.”  “How dramatic.”  “Indeed.  Very dramatic.”

Spain: “NOOOOOOOOOOO GOAL!!  THIS IS TERRIBLE!  OH HOW TERRIBLE!  THE FIRST GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL WAS GOOD AND NOW THIS!  THIS CRAZY REFEREE!”

And so on.  Thanks to the strangely calming white noise of the vuvuzelas, and the very sporadic comments from the Swedish commentators, I’ve seen a baby fall asleep on more than one occasion in Sweden.  Now you’ll have to excuse me.  I’m off to do some research about Canada’s big game tonight.

I am turning in my thesis next week, and I, like my red-eyed colleagues, sit in the library, words swimming in front of me, totally unsure about what the next sentence should say. Why does the word “of” look so weird? We’ve been through it all: changing minds about our topics, checking books out of the library because they look small enough to read in less than 24 hours, seeing what that girl on Facebook from high school who won the hot dog eating contest on a technicality wore last Halloween… I see my colleagues through the thick glass of the computer lab, and I wave feebly- it’s almost time.

Next week, as we sit down with our supervisors one last time, and we decide to leave in the paragraph about Britney Spears, because there isn’t time to fix it, we will glance through the 100 pages one last time before committing to a PDF version. Which of course will have a spelling mistake in the title. How important is it to spell your last name right?

I know the feeling I’ll have as I hit “send”. Relief, of course, but also exhaustion. It will take a while to get back to normal- to remember what that bright thing in the sky is. But I won’t be able to shake the feeling that I did it.

A year ago, my friend gave birth. We were there with her for nine months, through the sickness and the fear, through the calm that surrounded her in the last months, and then in the terror that was the Birth Day. I will spare you the details, but it’s no walk in the park. Not even a walk that ends in stumbling upon a beehive or in crashing a golf cart into a bear. But she told us the next day, as she feebly stepped forward, her husband holding the sleeping infant, that as soon as they put the baby on her chest, she knew that it was going to be okay. We looked at the tiny curled fingers, and the soft, sleeping face, and we knew she was right.

The road might be long and filled with terror, but the moment you get there, you know it was the right thing to do all along.

The first time I couchsurfed, I was traveling to Northern Ireland for a conference with two of my work friends, and I decided to give it a shot.  Since my male colleague was traveling with me, it seemed safe to choose a man’s house to stay at.  When the time came to travel, my colleague went and got his passport stolen, and forced me to venture alone on this Couchsurfing expedition.  Thanks, Dave.  I wasn’t nervous, because I come from Naiveville, Vermont, where most houses don’t even have locks, but my female colleagues who were traveling with me kept asking questions like, “How big is your can of Mace?” and “Do you know how to break someone’s nose with a banana peel?”  I began to feel uneasy, and my imagination ran wild with scenarios, most of them ending up with situations much worse than fireplaces.  But when I met my host, I immediately felt safe, and I enjoyed his company.  He was so gracious, he even let me sleep on the bed while he took to the floor with only a blanket.  We talked until the wee hours of the night, which I just had to mention, because I was in Northern Ireland, and that grants me the use of the phrase “wee”.

Since then, I’ve been hosted in many countries, and every time, I’ve been amazed at the kindness of strangers.  The strangers on Couchsurfing don’t remain strangers for long: I am immediately catapulted into their lives, and learn personal details, like how reading Harry Potter in the third month of pregnancy can leave one sleepless, and less personal details, like how one can have an unhealthy addiction to KISS coverbands.  When I first moved to Sweden, I stayed with a very sweet Swede who spoke with a New Zealand accent, and she took me all around town apartment hunting (to get me out of her house?).  She made me pancakes from scratch, and showed me how to grow tomatoes.

Last night I hosted my first Couchsurfers, and I was eager to show them the kindness my former hosts have shown me.  They were from my part of the world, so we had a lot in common, and I made sure to make them feel safe and at home.  So I gave them finger paints and let them go wild.  Not really…I made them stay in the lines.  I realized that what we all want is to have a comfortable place and a smiling face to come home to, especially if it rhymes.  The moment of recognition, when you realize that you rang the right doorbell, when you see that your host is not hiding a Joker playing card and an oversized knife– that’s when traveling becomes more than seeing monuments and huddling on multi-language boat tours, and becomes a step closer to knowing someone who knows a little bit too much about snakes, or who sculpts famous rockstars out of fruit.

And so we called.  The police, who don’t have much to do around here, arrived quickly after, and came to our door.  They were a man and a woman, who wore very serious expressions, and had night sticks and thick jackets on.  We pointed them upstairs, and we shuddered, looking at the muscles on the beefy policeman, who appeared to be a man to steer clear of.

We went back inside our apartment and started to have dinner, but we couldn’t eat.  The shouting above us had stopped, but we couldn’t tell when the police had entered the apartment.  We knew of another couple in the building next to us who had called the cops when they heard shouting, and when the police came back to their door, they found out that indeed, a man had been beating up his wife.  We were sitting at the dinner table, unable to eat, afraid of what we would hear, when we heard the clomping of police boots.

When I opened the door, the policewoman looked almost relieved.  “There was a football game,” she said.  It turns out that our upstairs neighbor had been watching the game alone, and had gotten so excited that he was running around the house shouting at various moments during the game.  She said she had asked him if there had been screaming, and he replied, “Yes, I did scream.”  With the case closed, the policeman smiled, looking the opposite of intimidating now, and I apologized for bothering them.  “Oh no!” she exclaimed, “You SHOULD call!  Just in case!”

They left, and we breathed a sigh of relief.  We pictured the scene of the two scary policemen showing up at our neighbor’s door and forcefully stating, “We got a call that there was a woman screaming in here?”  Not only is your football celebration too exaggerated, but it’s womanly too.  We wondered if the next time he heard me singing he would call the cops and report that chickens were being slaughtered in the apartment below him.  I heard a story from a friend who called the police for domestic violence, and it turned out the couple was just… making love.  Passionately.  I heard another friend tell me that she had called the police when she saw a fire in the furniture store across the street.  It turned out that there was a fire in a firepit on HER side of the street, and it was merely reflected in the window of the furniture store.  It happens, I guess.  I never, however, will regret calling.  Just in case.

But Paris is more than the Louvre, and I wandered around outside, next to the Seine river, and past the beautiful Notre Dame.  I saw the tiny cafes, where all of the customers turn their chairs toward the street, like they’re watching a show, soaking in the sun and lazily sipping wine in the middle of the afternoon.  Right, French people, it’s totally good for you… we believe you.

I knew it wouldn’t be long until adventure found me- it always does.  I turned the corner and stumbled upon the tell-tale signs of a fashion shoot in the process.  Against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, three of the skinniest women I had ever seen stood in brightly colored dresses, as artsy people with scissors and cameras and champagne hurried around.  I spotted the designer at once, unmistakable in his velvet jacket and puffy white shirt, shouting, “Hello!  What is taking so long?”  I stopped with the small crowd to watch as they set up the shot, and it was so interesting for some reason, to watch people fuss over one strand of hair, or pin a size negative six dress on a stick woman.

And while I stood and watched, one of the producers came over to talk to us.  And then, in a moment reserved for romantic comedies or Lifetime made-for-TV movies, she asked us if we’d like to be in it.  They needed some people for the background (read: normal people dressed in sweatshirts and looking like they’ve been traveling for days to make the models look like princesses).  So I of course agreed, had to sign a release, and got to stand behind the models, still watching like five minutes before, but now… as a Co-Model!

And if that wasn’t an adventure enough, on my way back, I was asked for some food by a man.  Normal, right?  Except that the man who asked me happened to be dressed like a gorilla, and the food that I gave him happened to have been a banana.  Weird.  As I watched the gorilla peel and eat his banana with his big, hairy gorilla hands, I thought to myself that maybe it was time to sign with a manager.  If I can’t get work as a French model, maybe I can find work in the circus.

I was supposed to leave Portugal 5 days ago, and the day before my departure, learned that there was a big no-fly zone over Europe that had a huge X over Sweden. My parents went on their merry way, and I was stuck in No-Man’s-Land, a.k.a. Paradise. But the secret is that it’s not really paradise when you’re just waiting. And I do mean waiting. I waited over six hours in line at the airport for a new ticket, and then I waited four hours again today to get yet another ticket. People were surprisingly civil. Kids ran their energy out and then passed out on the luggage carts. Actually, so did old people. There was one Lifetime TV drama moment, when one man had his wife stand in for him for hours, and the riotous crowd wouldn’t let him back in. Picture a British accent, crying out: “We’ve AWLL been here since 7, AWLL of us!”

And so I’ve been spending every day out in the sunshine, walking up steep, unpredictably beautiful streets so narrow that a golf cart would get stuck, with colorful laundry flapping in the lazy breeze over my head. I stumbled upon a concert in front of a bright white church, with neighborhood children playing bagpipes and revolutionary war drums. (Don’t ask…)

But the truth is, it was incredibly lonely. Sure, I loved the sea breeze, and the red roofs, and the beautiful blue tiled buildings… but something was missing. I waited every day for news that I would be able to return to Sweden. And no news came. And then I realized that what we’re all searching for is human contact: when I went into a shop, I found a tiny curly-haired three-year-old hanging out in her parents’ store, and I stayed for half an hour, a huge smile on my face, playing a game with the belts. (Not alone, she was playing with the belts too… otherwise that would have been weird…) When I walked out of the store, she waved a three-year-old hand at me, and I felt so much lighter. Also because I forgot my heavy coat there. Just kidding.

When I made friends with the people in the line around me, the time flew by, and I didn’t remember that I had been standing in the same spot for hours. I was weary to start up conversations, because, you know, once you start, you can’t really stop… you’re kind of stuck in the same three feet of floor. But once I did, I didn’t regret it. We were in it together, and I didn’t feel so alone anymore. Now if you’ll excuse me, Eyjafjallajokull is showing signs of decreased lava flow…

At this point, I should mention that I’m a vegetarian.  I haven’t eaten meat for about 7 years, but you can keep reading, because I’m not about to give you a lecture!  When I’m traveling, my general rule is that one or two bites of meat is okay, because it’s part of the culture.  I also don’t want to offend, so if I happen to be served a plate of snails, well, so be it.  People eat plenty of things that live on sidewalks, right?

In Portugal, vegetarian is a dirty word, and their salads consist of slices of left over vegetables from the meat dishes.  Their motto is: the sun is warm, we’re being incredibly friendly, so just let us eat a lot of meat!  The first night in Lisbon, my parents and I chose a restaurant after walking the gauntlet of waiters, who were waiting by the giant menus in the small, cobblestone streets, waiting to pounce and follow you, looking you in the eye and chanting a list of dishes they offer.  “Good evening-salmon-monkfish-steak-pizza-pasta-cheese-no?-okay-thank you-have-a-nice-night-cod?-no?”  It sure is hard to say no to a guy who looks like maybe his mother cooked that cod, and thus, we sat down, lest another waiter try to take the chair out from under us and drag it over to his restaurant.

We opened the menus.  I’m pretty sure this restaurant listed all of the meat dishes it knew and then just started naming cute Disney animals.  “Salmon, Pork Cheek, Baby Veal, Soft Lamb, Bambi’s Mother…”  I tried to choose the least offensive dish, but was told they were out of it.  The waiter suggested some sort of fish, which seemed like a safe choice until it arrived, mouth agape, and eyes piercing my soul.  Instead, I tried to imagine that it was a mean fish from Finding Nemo, but only ended up seeing a slow, cheesy montage of Nemo and his buddies, playing over and over in my head.

Throughout the meal, its eyes kept watching me, but not more than our attentive waiter.  When I tried to give the international symbol for “finished”, by putting my fork and knife together, he informed me that in Portugal that meant “finished.”  Yes.  “But you’re not finished, are you?”  He looked even more horrified than the fish.  So I scooped up the silverware and nervously laughed.  No, I was just about to take another forkful of Nemo.  I wasn’t about to get let off the hook (and neither was the fish), and I discovered what was worse than eating Nemo while Nemo was watching: eating Nemo while Nemo was watching while I was unbelievably full.

I’ve heard of parents finding their kids smoking and forcing them to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes to cure them of the habit.  Well, eating a fried fish while guilty meat sweat dotted my forehead worked the same way.  And so, you can find me on the beach tomorrow; I’ll be the one catching fish just to hug them.

This was not new.  It snowed last year in April too.  It will probably snow next April too.  It’s God’s way of evening things out for Sweden: you want to have a perfect society?  You’ll have to live in the COLD!  The rest of us have heat in April, and are seeing flowers bloom around our doorsteps, but it takes us years to implement a bill that gives health care to all.

When I discovered it was snowing, the first thing that came to my mind after I realized I wasn’t time traveling, was that every single Swede was looking at the same snow and feeling a deep sense of dread.  Not because they didn’t want to go out in the cold, but because they knew that every single foreigner, no matter if they had been living here for two days or two years, would be approaching them in a run, barely containing their livid energy, opening their mouths and spilling out a stream of complaints, in the form of questions that they did not require an answer for.  “Why is it snowing?  Isn’t it April?  Aren’t we supposed to be having barbeques by now?  Are my hands going to fall off?  Why am I still living here?”

Yes, why are you still living here?  That’s the exact question the Swede wants to ask you back.  Swedes are used to the long winters, the dark afternoons when you watch the 12:00 news by candlelight, wearing your bike lights in the pitch black of 4pm.  Foreigners love it too, the first time they come.  But once the honeymoon period is over, it’s the game of finding a Swede and letting her know that it’s warm in other places, that you can cut queues in other places, that you can eat a hamburger at McDonald’s for less than $12 in other places…

I’m not a Swede, and I’m already sick of hearing these complaints from foreigners.  And since the typical exchange student stays for six months, the Swedes are guaranteed a constant stream of complainers breezing through, then returning to their sunny homelands.

I suppose it’s the same in every country: an Australian told me that when Americans arrive, they say, “You know, this isn’t normal to have this many flies!” as they swat at their head, looking like that dirty kid from Peanuts.  I’m not even living in America, and I hear complaints from people who have been there: “I tried to bike through central Los Angeles and ended up in the middle of six-lane traffic going 120 kilometers an hour!”  Well, drive a car like the rest of us.  And measure it in miles.  Yes, I’m aware of the failings of my own country, and I expect this is how the Swedes feel.  You’re here, you can love it, you can hate some things about it, but for Pete’s sake, if I hear another word about how Spring is supposed to be, I’m going to fill your pajamas with snow!

This month I have been touring Sweden with the play “The Vagina Monologues”, a play written by Eve Ensler, which includes monologues on various issues including hair, menstruation, and rape.  The stories are from real women, of all races, ages, and sexual orientations.  My actresses were from different countries around the world, and three wrote their own monologues.  After some of our performances, we had a question and answer session with the audience, but even for the performances we didn’t, I still heard many comments afterward, ranging from  “I love vaginas!”, to “How dare you?” to “I guess this isn’t the hall for the stage adaptation of ‘The Monica Lewinsky Story’?”

During one question and answer session, a male student stood up and said, “You know, you’re complaining in one of the monologues about the ‘cold duck lips’ that they use for gynecologist exams.  Guys have rectal exams which aren’t any fun, either.”

Another comment was, “Where are all of the men in this?  I see nine women on stage, but why don’t you have any men?”

Which was followed by, “I found the whole play very negative towards men.  The only time a woman is having pleasure, it’s from another woman, and you make men out to be only rapists and semen-donors.”

One man even stood up and told us that he came from a conservative culture, and said that we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

My responses here are similar to the responses I gave during the question and answer session.  First, yes, we’re complaining about ‘cold duck lips’ and tampons, and yes, guys have plenty of things that are annoying about being a man.  But in society, it’s generally okay to talk about those things.  You can see men having male exams on TV, and so many movies joke about turning your head to cough.  But when was the last time you saw Rachel on “Friends” talking about the time they told her to relax her vagina so they could shove cold instruments inside her at her last gynecology visit?  We’re annoyed by those things, and we want to say it out loud!

Why don’t we have any men on stage?  First, it takes a lot of courage to stand on stage and talk about the most intimate, scary things about being a woman.  I have seen how much my actresses have grown throughout doing this play, to the point where they can perform orgasms on stage and shout the word “cunt” in their language.  They wouldn’t be able to do that in front of men in the first rehearsals.  Having men around would squash any hope of being open and free.  To be honest, I considered it this year, having a few men do monologues about their relationships with women.  But in the end, I decided that women needed to do this alone, for the bravery, but also for the mere fact of empowerment.  We felt strong as women, and we felt ownership of this play.  It would have been different with men.

As far as the man-hating comment, I have to say that this is not a new complaint.  It’s one I’ve heard from a woman as well.  But is it really man-hating?  You just need to look closer: all of the monologues written by the actresses were not against men, but against their cultures.  (They referred to how women are supposed to be virgins until marriage, and about how it is completely legitimate if a man has a lot of sex, but a woman is supposed to keep herself untouched.)  They were negative against their patriarchal cultures, not towards men as individuals.  In fact, they mostly blamed female family members – mothers and aunts – for reinforcing virgin-obsessive thoughts.  Even the monologue in the play about rape as a systematic tactic of war is not against men in particular, but against this horrible atrocity of war.  Women are the subjects, not men.  The only times men were singled out in a negative way were in the monologue about how one woman’s husband hated hair and made her shave her vagina, how in the 50s, a man called a woman “smelly” because there was a flood “down there”, and how one girl got raped as a teenager by her father’s friend.  That’s three monologues out of twenty.

As I said to the male student, this play just touches on so many issues, and we don’t have time to praise men over and over.  We have one monologue that’s completely dedicated to that, about a woman who came to love her vagina because a man found it so beautiful, and made her feel beautiful by loving it. We had to spend the time touching on so many other issues that woman can’t talk about.  It’s still shameful in our society (and much more in other societies) to come forward and say you were raped.  And yet, about 300,000 women are raped in the United States every year (by strangers, but also by family members, boyfriends or husbands.  Yes, it’s still rape if it’s between a husband and wife).  It is estimated that only 5% of rapes are actually officially reported.  That hundreds of thousands of women walking around everyday with the trauma of rape who are not able to talk about it.  And hundreds of thousands of men who think that having sex whenever they want might be okay, that they can get away with it.  And that’s just the tip of sexual-taboo iceberg.

After seeing “The Vagina Monologues”, both men and women came up to me and said that it was so amazing to see women on stage finally speaking about these things.  Male and female students from Sweden, Kazakstan, India, Poland and China told me that they wished they could talk more openly about these issues, and praised the actresses for being brave.  A girl from China told me she was looking into producing the play in China because it was so important for them to see it.  A German guy told me that he wanted to produce it in Germany, because he thought his city was very closed.  But he was worried that no one would want him to produce it because he was a man.

This is something important, so listen closely: men and women have to work together to improve gender relations.  Men are not evil, and they care about women, and want to respect women.  Men are more than “rapists and semen-donors”.  But people are wary of feminists.  The reason some people criticized “The Vagina Monologues” for being men-hating is because they wanted to see it that way.  They assume feminists are crazed man-haters who sit in their basements and complain.  But we want to work WITH men to stop rape, to start respecting women, and to finally be able to talk about these sexual taboos!

Strangers still approach me at parties, in corridors, in the library, sometimes in a whisper, and sometimes shouting, “I love vaginas!”

We had many meetings scheduled during the trip, with various institutions in Moscow.  One thing that stuck out to me about Russia was that the government certainly knows everything you do, say, and think.  And they won’t exactly hide that fact from you.  Sitting in the office of the Swedish news correspondent’s office, he sipped on pineapple juice as he casually explained that the building had been renovated in the last few decades, and that a multitude of listening devices had been uncovered, in the walls and the light fixtures…  We laughed nervously, but even then we knew… there are no secrets here.  In fact, they are surely reading this article, maybe even as I type it.  That’s why I will be ________ed and be a little _______.

We met with one famous Russian radio station editor-in-chief who had interviewed various presidents like ______ ________ and _______ _____, and had even spoken with Prime Minister _______ ________.  His manner of speaking seemed so confident, as he told us that he would never agree to censorship, even though he knew that 17 journalists had been _____ in Russia and their deaths remained a mystery.

When we visited the _________ of Foreign ________s, we met with a _________ who was very businesslike in his introduction, but rushed away to take an urgent phone call.  “About Finland, you know.  It’s _________”  His two aides were left to read from a script about the great cooperation that can happen between Sweden and Russia.  “We just want to be friends!” they said.  When one group member brought up how ridiculous it was that there existed a rumor that Russia planned to invade Sweden.  They laughed stiffly.  “Yes, how ridiculous indeed.”  Then they assured us again that they just wanted to be friends.  I wondered if this was how a mouse feels when a cat taps it lightly with it’s claws and then lets it run a bit before “befriending” it again.  They assured us with a verbal promise that they would not invade Sweden.  I wanted to get a pinky swear on it, but I was afraid it might be taken as a symbol of ______ and I would be _______ed.  They concluded our meeting by asking for exact details of where we were visiting, and the address of our blog.  They could have been being nice, or they could have been following __ on us.  When we went to the radio station the next day, we told the editor-in-chief that we had been at the __________ of Foreign _______s, and he simply said, “I know.  They called me.”

All _______ship and exaggeration aside, I have to say, that even after the first day, many things revealed themselves to be mere stereotypes.  The policemen were kind in offering directions (and didn’t harm one of our group members who drunkenly tried to convince one cop to give him his large furry hat).  I never caught anyone’s hand reaching for my wallet.  The subway stations were more beautiful than museums (and some were decorated with beautiful communist mosaics, depicting happy workers receiving… a new tractor!)

What I got out of the meetings was that we have a huge problem.  Russia is so separated from Europe and the U.S. that we have so many stereotypes and scary stories (as well they do about us, I’m sure).  They DO just want to be friends, and we could be friends, if we were able to visit them without listing every relative we have that has ever been present at a construction site or responding positively to the question, “Have you ever read the warning on the car mirror and not understood how large objects should actually be?”  Russia WASN’T scary, and we had so many wonderful adventures, like when we had to use English and tried to buy… anything.  Once, we spent hours discovering a grocery store, because it was split up into many tiny sections of the store.  Imagine going into the meat section and hitting a glass wall, and then going into the next door and finding all pasta supplies, and then having to leave and go to the baby food part.  Later, we had to buy five kilograms of chocolate because “five” was the only number I knew in Russian.

The Russians were so kind to us, and they welcomed us so warmly to their country, that I wondered why so many Americans and Europeans think of Russia as so foreign.  Turns out Russians love buffet breakfasts with nice salty cheese, they have a beer or two with strange Swedes and an American on the night train to Saint Petersburg, and they only slightly mock us when we can’t open the bottle of vodka.  Besides, what’s creepier: that the Russian government follows your every move and you know about it, or that the U.S. follows your every move and you don’t know about it?  In the end, we have to ______ that Russians _____ and _______ just like ______s, so let’s just be ________ at _______ for florescent lights!