Entries by TATIANA

Because of the pandemic also known as COVID-19 or Corona as some call it, Burning Man at the Black Rock Desert in Nevada was cancelled this year. First cancellation since the event started being held there which was in 1990. Although Burning Man did not start there, the event was born in San Francisco at Baker Beach so I decided to go there this year and check it out.....
I just had a FEELING something would be happening there. I read and heard talks about Burning Man gatherings planned at Black Rock Desert anyways and I know that others decided to do something in the Alvord Desert in Oregon, which looks a lot like the location in Nevada and would be a good location for the event if for some reason there is a need to move somewhere else. I decided against going to Black Rock Desert, I wanted to go to San Francisco where it all began.
So last Saturday is when the Man would burn according to the original plan and about 8 PM I arrived at Baker Beach California. I knew that the event was held towards the north end at the beach the first four years, Burning Man started in 1986. And yes as I headed down the beach I could see people and lights and then I saw the Man! And the Golden Gate bridge illuminating the sky in the background.









It was fun, the spirit of Burning Man.....nothing like the real deal but STILL a great feeling to be there and take part in it. Had there been an option this year to go to Burning Man in Nevada at your own risk if there was no cancellation I would had went without hesitation.
I don't know how others are going about their lives but I work, go to the grocery store and do my everyday things that I have to do almost like normal, the only thing different is that I wear a mask when required and I am more diligent about washing my hands. That's about it. But more on that another time....maybe.
I know that San Francisco's mayor London Breed sent out this message last Sunday, "Last night, over 1,000 people crowded on Ocean Beach to celebrate Burning Man. This was absolutely reckless & selfish. You are not celebrating. You are putting people's lives at risk. You are putting our progress at risk. No one is immune from spreading the virus."
Yes I know....BUT I can say that I saw crowds (hundreds) of people sunbathing, playing and hanging out at a beach by Fisherman's Wharf both Sunday and Monday. No beach closure, no talk about being reckless and selfish. So I guess it all depends on where you gather and who gathers.
Yes, I drove to San Francisco from Portland and back to attend Burning Man at Baker Beach because I am selfish and reckless I guess. Some people go to Mecca, I go to Burning Man.

What is happening in Portland lately? Lots of unrest. I haven't been to any places where the protesters have gathered lately because I have been busy but since my last time visiting downtown at night, one person was violently beaten by a group of sad examples of humans that are out there screaming Black Lives Matter, Fuck The Police etc and want justice for one group of people but think it is completely OK to attack a person and beat and kick them bloody and unconscious. Cowards. Hypocrites. It was also discovered that the main suspect had walked around downtown and acted violent towards others and acted threatening in general. He has a criminal record consisting of past violence. He belongs locked up for a LONG time.
Also last Saturday night a protester of one group got shot and killed by another belonging to another group. Like WHY? Same again....you are out there screaming for justice and supposedly being against violence and injustice but in reality you are a hypocrite. As with the other perpetrator, the offender has a lengthy rap sheet that speaks loudly of what kind of a piece of shit he is. Father of two as well. Pathetic "role model". Same as with the other piece of shit, he belongs locked up for a LONG time.
I am not with any group. I am for what is right as in the right thing to do. I hate the looting, shooting, destroying, violence and killings. Fuck that. Go burn down your parent's, grandparent's, cousin's or a friend's house and destroy their property or your own dwelling (if you have one) instead of public property. Low intelligence morons.
Can't people see that the destruction will cost money to fix, tax payer money. Money that could go to something else instead. That something else that people are protesting about. A better life. Destruction leaves ugly blemishes on a city for all to see.
So Elk sculpture got put away and the fountain Elk stood on is destroyed. Recently somebody put up a new elk (or whatever it is supposed to be) where original Elk once was.



Sure new elk is fun but it does NOT make it right what happened to original Elk that was put there in 1900, so 120 years ago. I heard somewhere that maybe (key word here is MAYBE ) the maker of Elk was a racist (Roland Hinton Perry, a sculptor an artist). Or perhaps the person that commissioned the elk. Who knows? You know what....I don't give a fuck!
Guess what....Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek are still standing in Poland and Dachau in Germany and people are OK with that. Ponder the history in those buildings for a second.
So yeah.....to the idiots that ruined the fountain and the original Elk. YOU SUCK.



"DEFUND" in pretty and somewhat burnt letters made of flowers was put in front of City Hall. As in defund the police. So defunding the police CAN be a good thing IF the money goes to something that will be useful and helpful for the community. I am for that if it's well done. Several cities (Austin, New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles to name a few) have cut funds, of course not completely but allocated the money elsewhere. How this will play out in reality only time will tell. But if you are out there yelling Fuck The Police, Kill All Cops and similar insults and think shooting police officers is OK, like the murders of David Dorn and Tamarris L. Bohannon, (WHERE IS THEIR JUSTICE?!) then you do not deserve any assistance from the police should you ever need it. Ask a friend or a neighbor for help if you get assaulted, robbed, burglarized or raped and hope for the best. Tags like these are all over Portland. So lame to spray paint shit like that.



Coincidentally since the protest in Portland began on May 29 several cannabis shops here have been burglarized accompanied by armed robberies at some of them. 22 dispensaries so far. Since the police is busy in other places, mostly nightly with the protests they can't get to people that need their assistance. All fun and games until YOU become the victim of a violent crime or a property crime huh?



This statue of a woman, man, child and wagon wheel is also destroyed and gone. It used to be in the same park as Elk, which is a park in front of the Justice Center where a lot of the protesting has been going on. Here is what I have found about the statue called "The Promised Land".
"In Chapman Square is a bronze statue commissioned by the Oregon Trail Coordinating Council to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail in 1993. The Promised Land, by Oregon artist David Manuel, depicts a pioneer family - father, mother, and son - at the end of their journey. The red granite slab upon which the statue is mounted is inscribed with a quote by Thomas Jefferson."
So the people that emigrated to the US in the 1820's and forward, the majority of them fled poverty and famine, like the Swedes and the Irish. To my knowledge they were just poor people trying to make a better life for themselves but this statue has angered people in the past. I have read up on some of the objections to it (the land belonged to the Native Americans and was stolen, the man is holding a Bible) and at the base of it there is a quote by Thomas Jefferson and he did own slaves. I am personally against the destruction of the statue but I can see where others come from on the issue.





What's left of "The Promised Land". A slab that people now sit on.



I DO get why there is anger, unrest and pain. But I do not think destruction and violence is the solution. Neither do several African Americans that I personally heard speak downtown Portland.
I am not going to be one of those people that suddenly because of BLM give others advice to educate themselves on the history of the US and the struggle of blacks just to look good and collect points, to try to come across like I care just to forget about the whole thing after a few days or weeks. I have read a lot of history on different topics since I basically learned to read.
And I do understand that since I am not black I have not experienced certain complications and situations.
I feel that every able adult has a social responsibility, what that means to me can mean something completely different to somebody else.
Although I most of the time have little hope for humanity because we are destroying this planet and everything that is beautiful on it but that doesn't mean that you should give up, you need to continue trying. I believe in the message painted on the plywood below.....just like many others. And I believe in it until somebody does something so they don't deserve it. I can think of a few individuals that I have no love and respect for. I don't go around gushing "love" for everybody I see, I am not that nice.



Portland is a beautiful city. There are so many nice things to see and do here.
I truly enjoy living here and I often go on long walks in the city and I volunteer downtown with some of the less fortunate and somehow miraculously where I volunteer we ALL get along....different colors of skin and all. Nobody is yelling or acting violent. Imagine that!
We are approaching day 100 since the protests started. I am hoping for peaceful gatherings from now on.



Eric Ward (director of progressive nonprofit Western States Center), "Portland has become a proxy for a reelection campaign, and for alt-right and white nationalist paramilitaries and vigilantes who want to live out their fantasy of racial war."
"I'm enraged that a person was killed on the streets of Portland. I don't care what their political ideology is."

Reverend E.D. Mondaine (president of the Portland NAACP), in an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Mondainé denounced what he called the “white spectacle".
“Unfortunately, ‘spectacle’ is now the best way to describe Portland’s protests,” he wrote. “Vandalizing government buildings and hurling projectiles at law enforcement draw attention — but how do these actions stop police from killing black people? What are antifa and other leftist agitators achieving for the cause of black equality?”

I recently got some new books. Since I like to read books about dancers by dancers I got "Anything But a Wasted Life" by Sita Kaylin. I read through it fast, it was interesting but had little in common with my life as a dancer. Sita worked at Mitchell Brothers (O'Farrell Theatre) in San Francisco for years, a club where I actually auditioned once but did not get hired at and it would had been a very short stint of work for me had I been hired there.....most likely one night or two at the most.
I have been to San Francisco three times, once to audition at Mitchell Brothers, the second time to go to a rave (my fave DJ was playing and I just had to go) and the third to celebrate New Years at the Cat Club.
Me and a German girl I met at one of the first clubs I worked at went to San Francisco after a girl we had worked with started working at Mitchell Brothers and came back to the club one night and told us she was making about $200k/year. She might have been exaggerating a bit but I DO think some girls made that kind of money and maybe even more at that club back in the day. Absolutely.
So me and Constanze (the German girl) flew to The Golden City to check out the club. $200k/year? Yes please! In order to get hired you had to enter their "amateur" contest if I recall it right, which we did. All I remember is a large bright stage and a pole and that I was nervous. I was kind of new to dancing, still shy and just wanted the song to be over with and the lights were so bright I could barely see anything besides a few feet in front of me. I did not place in the contest and neither did I get hired. Constanze on the other hand came in second or third and got offered a job. Afterwards we actually explored the club for a while and it was like nothing I had seen before, then and now. Back then I was new so everything was different but I knew after looking around that Mitchell Brothers wasn't a typical strip club.
The girls working that night had first and last names, their names were put up on a sort of announcement board by the entrance each day. The club consisted of different "rooms" and each room had it's own theme or show put up by the dancers. I remember a large round table that rotated and a room that looked like a movie theatre with porn playing on the big screen. Some rooms had doors which meant the rooms were private. I am not sure dancers would be the right word to use for the girls working there...perhaps entertainers is a better fit. I am sure that there was way more than dancing/traditional strip club style stripping going on there. I mean, when we were in the dressing room I saw a large bucket of condoms. And that is definitely NOT the norm. And after reading Sita's book I got it confirmed that the place had way more activities happening than just stripping. So yes, I am sure that the girls made a lot of money there. But it was not a place for me and not for Constanze either, so we flew home and just continued working at our normal little club. Not even later on after I was more experienced and would had probably gotten hired did I think to go back there and try my luck again. Not a place for me.
Sita's dancer experiences are completely different than mine. I am compared to her a nun in the world of dancing. The book ends abruptly, I think she should had worked more on the ending or wrote a few more chapters. But I will re read it for sure and keep it.
Then there is another book that I haven't read but I saw that the author was advertising it on a dancer site I go on sometimes, "A True Hustler" By Elena R.
Both books are available on Amazon in case you are curios and want to read about fascinating dancer stories. Because fascinating it is.....
I have the blog with plenty of those fascinating stories, so writing a book about dancing will probably not happen for me. Never say never but right now I barely have time for the blog.
I do wonder what happened to Constanze, we lost touch. I especially wonder about the girls I met during my first years of dancing, I remember almost all of them, they made the most impact on me.



I made my own jalapeno lemonade. Simple. And deliciously refreshing.

As soon as the weather permits I dig out my flip flops and basically live in them until it gets too cold to wear them. It is good to let the feet breathe. I have been using Havaianas for a long time but I noticed that they would break. Usually one would snap and I would throw that pair out. Well after it had happened too many times I would just keep the one that didn't break and start pairing up the non broken ones, why throw away a good Havaiana when you can still wear it? I don't care that the flip flops don't match. I also stopped matching socks a long time ago, I don't have energy to find the mate to a sock....and nobody can see my socks anyways and if they do, I don't care.
Besides, Pippi Longstocking had mismatched socks and I want to be like Pippi.
Another household thing that I never do is iron. Completely unnecessary according to me.



Today I was in the mood for some food that taste like home. I noticed that Costco have been out of the pierogis I used to get since a while now, so I went back to a food cart area here in Portland that I love and got some borscht and vareniki. And a jalapeño lemonade. I am going back next week again I promised myself. Food makes me happy.



Before I go I want to show you this hollyhock, it is taller than me. In case you wonder I am 5'9.



Have a beautiful weekend everybody! ❤️

Have you ever seen an unboxing video? It usually involves some Youtuber or Instagram girl either unpacking an expensive purse while oooh-ing and aaah-ing and trying to look sexy at the same time. The more expensive the purse the better so you can brag about it, in a subtle way of course. Or it involves the unboxing of a high tech product. What that would be I don't know, perhaps an Osé would work? Anyhow.....I am presenting to you my own unboxing pictures (not a video).
Oh look....I got a package, a BIG package! What could it be? How exciting!



Let's peek inside....can you guess what it might be?



Look! A foot massage machine! Guess who is a very happy girl!? 🙂
Oh.....and the nail polish at the end of my big toe toenails is what’s left of the last pedicure I had, at the beginning of March. I have been too lazy to put on nail polish plus it is good to let the nails rest from chemicals.





Best unboxing item ever! I highly recommend getting a foot massager. Way more useful than a Chanel bag.

The full moon rose during my evening walk this past Sunday night in Portland. I looked across the river and saw the moon coming up from behind the buildings and it was so pretty....moon over Portland. I went for a walk tonight as well and stopped by the Justice Center again to see what was happening there. I have so many pictures of what has been going on in Portland since May 29.....it will take me a while to put it all together and gather my thoughts and write them down. You know what's good? Walking, watching and reflecting. I am going to sleep now. Another busy day for me tomorrow. I have a class starting at 10 AM and then my day will stay busy until 10 PM.