you may thought that this page will be dedicated to the eponymous frank show but unfortunately or thankfully, that's some therapeutical shit i've graphomaniaced just because i felt that i need it. there's no need for you to read it but if you want — feel free. hit me up afterwards, i'm just curios to hear any thoughts that may occur:

First year at school, a bit above average Obolon school, my parents are signing me up for Greco-Roman wrestling. The classic one, if you wish.

I was surprisingly good. I barely weighed 20 smth kilograms and could throw my classmates or some other kids on the mat. There was no anger in me when I did it. Moreover, I felt no anger or despair when I was thrown on the mat. I was on auto-pilot at that time. Cruise-control-like state of being. I don’t think I thought about this weird condition my brain was at that time. But as I’m now thinking of it — I like it.

I won every tournament I’ve attended. There’s still a bunch of gold medals hanging on some toy in my empty child’s room at my mom’s house. But there are several silver ones as well. Exactly two of them.

So I haven’t won every tournament. I won almost every one of them. I remember getting second place crushed me deep inside. I was feeling anxious about not being the very best. Neither envy towards competitors, nor to anybody else. Just unhappy with myself. Weird and unpleasant feeling, to say the least.

And then I went to another tournament. And I was not even a prize winner. Not 1st, not 2nd, not 3rd. It’s been 4 years already as I’ve been wrestling. And it turned out to be the last tournament I took part in. I quit.

From now on I was playing football. My father was a goalkeeper in his youth. He earned good money, provided for his mom, went to parties, and could buy some expensive stuff. I thought of football as a great opportunity to have a remarkable life. People are gonna praise you, you’ll always have bread on the table, and you will play football. And football is a cool thing to play.

I wasn’t the best at it. I’d say above average. But I remember it was so hard for me to be a striker. I don’t why but I couldn’t hit the ball hard enough. My legs have always been quite big, especially in the hips, so it felt wrong when I couldn’t send the ball to the net as powerfully as my fellow teammates did it.

Could it be a sign that I should become a goalkeeper? As my father was. What a great story it’d be.

Yeah, that's what I thought to myself. I asked my coach to let me try myself in the gloves. And sometimes I was surprisingly good. Instinctively, I could dodge such hard shots that my trainer once exclaimed ‘Look at him! Ulianov Junior!’ alluding to my father who he knew and as far as I remember trained as well. Yeah, he wasn’t a young coach.

But that was the most memorable part of my football career. We won some tournaments, yada yada. But I had no consistency at the goal entrance, so our coach swapped me with a better kid. And I was playing defense for a while. And then quit.

I also quit swimming, judo, table tennis, and maybe smth else as well. There were too many to remember.

I always was quite good, but almost never good enough. Sounds sad but it’s actually not. Don’t be sad for me! It’s just as it is, neither good nor bad. Actually, when I was about 15 or smth I had quite a good life I’d say. Carefree. I was studying at the lyceum. National Technical University of Ukraine ‘Kyiv Polytechnic Institute’ but it was more like a high school to think of rather than a uni.

I had great fun during those two last years of school. My grades got worse, I started smoking, drinking booze (cheap obviously), and having sex. And relationships. I had some but they were mostly ridiculous, to say the least. Or maybe not ridiculous but childish for sure. Those high school ones were surely an upgrade, a serious one, but with ups and downs. They ended because at some point I cheated and we broke up. That was a fucked up thing for me to do.

As I’m writing this I quit smoking. Like 2 or 3 years ago? Probably 3 already, yeah. Well done, me. But on occasions, I romanticize those smoking times. Mostly I smoked Parliament Aqua. I also liked Dunhill and Sobranie but those were expensive, so when I had no money or usually took a drag from my friends, acquaintances, or people on the streets. Or when I wanted to buy not only cigarettes but food as well, I bought L&M or smth like that.

The first cigarette in my life happened when I was a lot younger. Probably in the 10 to 12 age range. We were at my grandma’s yard with Mahmud, a childhood friend of mine. His roots are from Azerbaijan but both my grandma and his family live in Kerch, Crimea, Ukraine.

So yeah, it happened at night. We used to organize overnight stays at each other place, but when we did it at my grandma’s we always stayed in a tent. Because it’s summer, come on, who would like to sleep in the house?

Mahmud’s parents are shop owners. It’s a regular corner shop with goods like fresh fruits and veggies, cigarettes, alcohol, bread, some candies, ice cream, crisps, and other stuff. So one day Mahmud simply stole a pack from the counter and brought it to our overnight tent party. When it was a deep night already, we went out to the garden further from the house and smoked several cigarettes. Not fully, I think. And as far as I remember, I wasn’t inhaling smoke inside my lungs. I rather smoked with puffs and each time I tried to inhale the smoke I started to cough.

Mahmud said that I could get lip cancer because of that. It was scary, so at some point, we stopped.

And about 7–8 years passed until we smoked together next time. That time we smoked weed.

By the way, I started to smoke weed at the high school too. Not like a lot, but regularly at some point. It was a lot of fun, we used to eat ice cream and some stupid supermarket shit after we put down a couple of jars if you know what I mean.

We also had a great theft. Not like a single one but a month or smth of regular stealing at Megamarket — a big supermarket chain. Our classmate Zhycha found a blind spot somewhere between racks of juice and soda and huge pallets of packaged goods that store workers had no time to unpack and put on the shelves. So we came up with a great scheme and stole dried meat, chocolates, candies, Haribo, drinks, and other junk.

The scheme was simple — several people go in. One is waiting in the blind spot with an open backpack, and the other one walking between the racks and checking out whether some customers or workers are strolling around. The others are getting stuff they want and on the road to some other store section, they pass through the blind spot and leave the expensive snacks they want in the main person’s backpack. Before going out everyone bought some Chuppa-Chups or other cheap shit just to pretend we really wanted to buy smth.

After 3–4 weeks the supermarket strengthened security and we stopped stealing. No one was ever caught and overall we stole those goods probably for a thousand dollars at that time. Maybe a bit more.

While studying at high school I started to think about this shit like ‘who I wanna become after school’, ‘what do I want from life’, and all those stereotypical but relatable and common life questions. Unfortunately, I’m the type of person that suffers from such a reflexion. It’s surely a beneficial thing to think about, however, I usually struggle to be 100% sure in smth, so this state of uncertainty eats me from inside.

Firstly, I had a feeling I could become an engineer. Like a coder or developer, I mean. In the lyceum, we had one of the best teachers I’ve ever met in my life and I bet one of the best ever to live on planet Earth — Liudmyla Bulygina. She has a big heart, she’s empathetic, she listens, and she always is ready to help. She encouraged creativity and I think one of not many people who let us be childish. In addition to that, she surely knows her shit. She could get almost every person interested in smth. Programming is demanding shit but she had such a comforting approach that you simply couldn’t imagine yourself doing anything else except programming.

However, as we approached something harder than arrays and shit like that I started to lose interest. It got too hard and less exciting than it was entry-level. I had several additional tries with HTML, CSS, JS and to be honest it felt a lot better. I even got into some local web design competition, failed it badly, but noticed two interesting things: ‘web design’ had a word design to it (for real) and I enjoyed those pathetic attempts to structure up the website and make it look nice.

And then it all happened. Like in Everything Everywhere All at Once. A whole new world of information began to pass through me as if I was connected to my computer by the USB-C and was downloading all the information connected to design.

I’m not gonna lie I looked a lot at the Russian design industry, its studios, famous designers, and educational materials. I’m not proud of that in any way, yet it was a part of my journey. Thank God eventually I stopped focusing on them and began to look at what other guys all around the world were doing. And it turned out there were a whole lotta them. American, British, Scandinavian, and Asian studios began to be my orienteer, source of inspiration, and place where I stole from.

Then, I got the most weird and probably the first job interview I’ve ever had. (ATTENTION, I’M GONNA BREAK THE 4TH WALL: As I’m writing this, I remembered that I had several job interviews before and I passed all of them, however, I ended up working only at one of those places. It was a wedding agency that used to scam foreigners by making some teenagers or students, who could speak English or at least weren’t too stupid to use a translator properly, to chat with those foreigners from some lovely Ukrainian girls’ accounts. Yeah, like from their POV. Catfishing or how do they call it? Yeaaah, not the best thing to do but let’s remember that I was still young, stupid, and broke. Now it makes more sense. And in my defense, I think I made smth like 100 or 150 bucks there. After like 1.5 months of work! Yeah, lame shit, but maybe that’s good that I’m not a good catfisher. And the other several jobs I applied to but never worked at were game tester, and English teacher. But fate saved me from that.)

Returning to the interview — it was a vacancy for an intern at some small design studio. Picture this, the lead designer was interviewing me and 3 or 4 other girls for this position simultaneously with all of us sitting in the same room (it was the only one room this studio had). During this interview not only did I share smth about my huge missing design experience but also about the fact that I was getting wasted at my lyceum while skipping classes or smth like that. Why so? Because Vlad, this lead guy, had been also studying there 3–5 years before me and had been telling us all pretty much the same stories to characterize himself as a person.

It was stupid to think about it now. But at that time I had no perception of how it should be. So it felt weird but at the same time, I thought yo these guys are crazy here, and they make some great designs, and they have this cool studio with a Persian carpet on the floor, iMacs, and Taschen books with Asian girls showing vaginas. I have to get this job.

And when I got home immediately I got the offer to work for free as an intern. If everything goes aight, they’ll offer me to stay and become a designer.

Three months later I became a designer. They started to pay me like 10K hryvnas half of which I gave to my mother to solve some money problems our family had. So I still had no bread, only some pocket money to buy sausage rolls in the shop next to our office.

6 months later I was offered to lead a big project in the studio. It was a Russian bank. At the same time, my gf Diana asked her sister, her sister Vlada, Vlada asked her friend Dasha, and Dasha recommended me to some IT company for a junior product designer position. And I got an offer from them as well. At that time, I was having moral struggles with our studio working with Russian projects and the IT company I was applying to offered me a *** salary raise. So I left right before this bank project started.

I’ve started to work there. Met great people, awful ones, memorable, and not. I’ve learned a lot, got a new close friend (Alina, hi!), had a crazy growth from junior to senior in 3 years, and fucked myself up.

I don’t want to write too much about this period because work is work, and I have so much more interesting stuff in my life. Relationships with Diana got serious, COVID, I quit smoking, gained weight because of Diana’s granny (oh my god, I wish you try her holubtsi), a fucking full-scale war started, I started to drink wine, I began to organize wine tastings, and overall during this period of life (mostly) — I got more self-aware and self-centered. Not in a bad way tho. I began to care about my future, I grew huge ambitions, and I wanted to get peaceful and harmonious with myself. That’s where I am now.

I love drinking wine, reading about it, looking for it everywhere around the world, hunting rare bottles at some forgotten old-school restaurants, and sharing it with people.

I love cooking, leaving a fucking outrageous mess after myself in the kitchen, annoying Diana with that, and watching thousands of cooking videos.

I love making designs for good people, good products, and good ideas. Especially, when afterward I can touch it. Like literally, in the real world, with my finger.

I love filming something stupid even though I do it so rarely nowadays. My first job ever was as an assistant director for ICTV! If you know, you know. Actually, I had to write about it in the ‘around 15 years old’ part but I forgot so fuck it.

I also love eating, I love when air slightly breezes at my face when I’m in the front seat in the car with a window rolled down, I love watching some stupid teen series, I love watching YouTube, I love jumping into the snow pile literally with my face, I love debating, I love to be in a room with people who are smarter than me, and I love when I get comfortable with them and can show them my inner crazy self.

I also love getting things structured. I have a lot of spreadsheets and notes on my phone and laptop. I’m super bad at saving money and having a super healthy routine. I swear, I wank, I have a bath every day, I don’t like showers, I want to be a chef, a sommelier, a designer, a director, a blogger, a rapper, a businessman, and an actor. But I want to be referred to as a cool guy, not by any of those titles.

I don’t know why exactly I’ve written about things that I wrote. Maybe I had to let them out of me. I have more stuff to tell about myself, both good and bad. But I was trying to edit it as least as possible. So that it turned out as raw but honest.

I also don’t like wasted unfriendly people. Just saying.

This is the end of this fucking therapy session. I don’t know if anyone fully read it, but to be honest of course I want people to. I also don’t know what would you think of me, but certainly, I want you to like me. I used to feel guilty for it but I’m not now.

Fuck I want to end so pretentiously but I struggle too much so I’ll end it right now. Thanks.