Tuesday, September 9, 2008

creepy woman

So there is this Russian woman in the community who has been a presence for the last couple of years. She calls periodically to leave messages about her art shows -- really terrible drawings of Russian peasant woman and so on. When this first started she also bent my ear about her passionate interest in how Russian is taught in America (always understand this as code for "I want you to hire me to teach Russian in your department"). I (very generously I thought) told her that she was welcome to come and observe one class session of mine and we set it all up. She didn't show up. Since then just the occasional phone message about her 'exhibits'. There was such a call a couple of weeks ago - on a weekend to my office so I got a voice mail. It doesn't occur to me to call her back since the call seemed purely informative and I have no interest in getting friendly with her. Well, yesterday I come in to the office and there is another Saturday message from her. This time it is long, rambling and includes such choice phrases as "well, you are arrogant" but she goes on to say all Americans are. Then there is rambling about how she speaks two languages and while she knows that she has "heavy Russian accent" in English, "it is so funny that all Americans have accents, and they don't even know it." Clearly a nutcase. I saved the message and played it for a couple of colleagues who confirmed that it really was weird and inappropriate. Well, today she called again. In addition to all the previous content there is now extensive ranting about how she is a real Russian and I should not be duped by those Jews and Ukrainians who speak Russian but hate Russia. CREEPY. And I'm not even a Jew or a Ukrainian...Will call the woman on campus who deals with weird, disturbing people in the post Virgina Tech world that we live in.

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