Spy mania

“We lived without roads… and we will continue to live. Otherwise, as soon as we fix the road, the dragon will come…

And even worse—the inquisitors will come…”

from the film “31 June”, episode 1, time 0:09:52.

In May 2019, when East and I were returning home to the Russian Federation from another country, one of the Russian frontier officer approached us at the border, asked us to go into a separate room and asked me about all my close relatives, then demanded that I give him my phone, because he “needs to check the IMEI of the phone, make sure it’s not stolen”. The cost of my tiny phone (an older model, not a smartphone) did not exceed 700 Russian rubles, or about 10 US dollars.

The next suspicious event occurred when we were a quarter of the way home from the border. When we stopped on the highway, where there was a bus stop, in order to change the driver, and East took the wheel, a passenger car stopped ten meters ahead of us, driving behind us. While we were standing at the bus stop for a couple of minutes, another car stopped a hundred meters behind us, it stood there for a few minutes, then drove around us and after 300 meters went to the right to turn. As we continued on our way, we were overtaken by a car in front of us; there was a woman driving it, who looked at me carefully.

This scene reminded me of chase sequences from spy action movies. I note that this all happened on a deserted highway.

Half an hour before this event, the idea occurred to me why the frontier officer needed my phone; I told East that IMEI is used to track the geographic movements of the phone, and, consequently, its owner.

The comic “suspicion of surveillance” arose in me due to the fact that a few months before, on October 15, 2018, I published my first book 19+ via the Internet.

In the fall of 2019, my mother traveled to another country and at the Russian border, frontier guards checked her with double attention, like no one else from their group of tourists.

Hobbies or 32 fouettés

“We would like to hit on you! It's a shame you're a ghost.”

“Who is the ghost?? Am I a ghost?!! I am an honest woman and a decent widow! Even twice a widow!! I also found a king… from the other world!”

“Am I from the other world???”

“Yes!”

“I live in this world, and you, beautiful lady, came to Perador from the other world!”

“You are from the other world! And I am from this world!!”

“And I… from what world?…”

“Don't know…”

from the film “31 June”, episode 2, time 0:41:54.

Ballet, music, mathematics, computer games

“I see the blue, distant light again,

Ballet is my Charming Prince,

He gives me a gilted shoe

And he leads me into a mysterious world.”

Song “Ballet”, singer Alla Pugacheva, 1985.

Ballet

In mid-august 2018, I was sitting on a bench outside my house, where I lived in apartment 109, wondering what I should do in my future life. On June 19, 2018, I finished the book 19+; then East and I went to the city of Rechitsa regarding the issue of a deed of gift for half of my father’s house, and for a month now I had not done anything, and was quite ready to clarify my way of communicating with reality.

I rejected all options that included direct communication with people, because I essentially had nothing to say to them, I had no intention of deceiving or manipulating them, and in principle, it is unknown whether there would have been any benefit in this hypothetical verbal interaction of ours.

Further, I did not consider any opportunities for increasing my well-being, increasing the comfort of my life, or growing my impact on nature. I either didn’t need this or didn’t want it.

All that remained was art. But which one? I was thinking about taking up fine art, dance, music or singing.

Fine art, a plus was that 25 years ago I made sketches that I personally liked, but it didn’t go any further. I did not choose this type of art, because as a result of the artist’s work, paintings and drawings remain that need to be placed somewhere. And for a beginning artist, this is a big problem.

Next on the list were dance, music and vocals, in my understanding they were in equal positions, but I chose dance because I felt an internal predisposition towards it, I heard that some people after 40 suddenly start dancing, i.e. this was not my unique path, but it was at least a little common, and I also found out on the Internet that there are ballet schools for adults in Moscow and St. Petersburg!

As I later found out, these schools appeared quite recently, around 2008, and initially they were located only in the capitals; previously there was no such direction at all. In ordinary ballet schools, they teach children from 4–6 years old, who by the age of 12 become “adult children”, they can do everything, and often stop to study.

The fashion for practicing ballet (classical dance) with adults (older children) aged 25–50 is a completely new and unexplored phenomenon.

“Ballet is a woman’s world, in which a man is only an honored guest.”

George Balanchine, Georgian-American ballet choreographer, 1904–1983.

Regarding gender discrimination. About half of the ballet studios fundamentally do not work with men, regardless of age, because this “confuses women”; and women are the main source of income. Women have the opinion that men “stink”, they “look in the wrong direction”, and they only need “this”. I.e. they believe that the main goal of a man who goes to practice ballet is to make his erotic fantasies come true, looking for hours at 40–50 year old fat women wearing 3 sets of clothes.

Unfortunately, no matter where I studied, with a new group, for the first 10 lessons, strong negativity came towards me from the ladies, then they resigned themselves and simply did not pay attention to me. However, if they suddenly noticed my presence, for example, during the first allocation of places in the hall, they tried to bite harder, showing that they were people, and I was something insignificant, like a pet.

Naturally, I learned to deal with this by simply ignoring most women.

The usual distribution was 1 in 10. It was rare that there were 2 or 3 men and I could compare women's reactions to other men. The most important factor for building relationships for girls (they were all girls!) was age, i.e. all women paid maximum attention to one man who was younger.

“Hidden man-haters” make up about 70% of the pack. Of the remainder, about 20% had a positive attitude towards me. And surprisingly, these 20% would have a positive attitude towards men regardless of age, beauty or social status. These women were simply completely different, with a different psychology, softer and friendlier. Their means of interaction with the opposite sex have not atrophied.

There were another 10% – these were “outspoken feminists” who were looking for the possibility of biting me at some point, but this was a completely uninteresting type. They were even worse than the bulk of man-haters. The tone was set by the silent 70% who carried hidden negativity, they despised the 10% who openly mocked men, and did not understand the 20% who treated us kindly.

I started taking ballet in September 2018 when I was 45 years and 4 months old. Before that, I practically did not do anything related to physical activity or art. Physical activity ended with karate and wushu in 1989. Art – flashed in a short period from 1992 to 1996.

At the beginning of September 2018, I came with East to St. Petersburg with the goal of studying for 1–2 weeks and stayed there for 4.5 months. It was very expensive in terms of money, it cost me a third of a million rubles [$5000], but a year later I returned and spent another 4.5 months from mid-September 2019.

I studied every day for 2–4 hours. I had unlimited passes to two ballet studios, and there were days when I was running from one studio to another to make it to my next class.

The day off was only on Saturday, then I went into the city. Despite the fact that I rented a room almost in the fine historical center of the city, I only had enough strength to eat and sleep. Although it’s more like this: after class I got home, went to bed, and then, after resting, I could eat something. Naturally, after several months of training, I lost about 15 kg of weight.

Then I had a break from visiting St. Petersburg due to the coronavirus epidemic. I lived in my city, where there were only two ballet studios that were “women only”, I managed to study in one of them for 4 months, from October 1, 2020 to March 11, 2021, but they still kicked me out, because the women's band was against it. I studied in the second studio from August 2021 to the end of 2021, but I was asked to leave because they had problems with having a men's locker room.

Sure, I could have found fitness or stretching classes, but I wasn't particularly interested in that.

In St. Petersburg, I studied in two ballet schools twice for 4 – 4.5 months at a daily rhythm, several hours a day, with 4 different groups. I had 3 main teachers. How many joint dances do you think have been learned with women? That's right, not at all.

The teachers tried to start somewhere, but even the simplest touching hands of a man and a woman clearly looked like harassment, because any woman was almost certainly married – and, therefore, caused such a violent flow of negative emotions, which was even expressed in a complete refusal to work, and was accompanied by obscenities. The initiative ended there.

I think the main reason was that most of the time I was the only male in the group. Almost certainly, if there was another permanent man, then the teachers could come up with a joint dance of two men, because in the modern world, a man dancing with a woman is something immoral and impossible.

It may seem that I had a negative attitude towards the ladies and what was happening. Rather, I distanced myself as much as possible from what could develop into a negative reaction. I switched my attention and went about my business. And I felt the negativity from others very well and this, of course, worsened my physical health.

But if I had a choice, I would still choose these women over a friendly male group, because men in my life did not interest me at all, and women carry something within themselves that has always attracted my attention. And my way of thinking is closer to women’s, I understand and feel them better.

All the teachers were obsessed with the correct execution of individual movements, they constantly drilled us on this topic, and it was wonderful.

There was only one teacher who tried to teach something more than a combination of 2–3 movements, but, like all the other teachers, she did not make sure that we did it well, because even what we did today was already the next lesson was falling apart.

Moreover, the teachers were, I believe, some of the best in the amateur field, they just didn’t really believe in us. This is about sad things.

I trained so intensively for only two seasons, and if I had extended my classes to 8–10 seasons, then everything would probably have been different, the attitude of women gradually, imperceptibly changed, and I believe that in 5 years they would have already treated I think it’s rather positive, and maybe even some joint work has appeared.