im very disappointed in the commitment level--that means you eddie

as the title suggests i am disappointed with the lack of entries as of late. that being said, i am also guilty, though perhaps not as guilty due to the fact that mine is the last one there; regardless, here is another post.

School is winding down in Madrid, finally, and I have actually been doing some work. those of you at middlebury will not appreciate this anomaly, but "work" in spain holds a different connotation than it does in the U.S. "I'll be going to work at 9" really means, "actually I think I'll skip work today and go to watch futbol," which is exactly what i did causing me to almost fail my internship, a both scary and self-fulfilling experience in which i realized i am untouchable. Apparently my work loved me so much they didn't care that I skipped so many days, they were just happy to have the free labor when i came. the director got pissed at me though, but since the whole internship is run through a private organization there's really nothing she can do about it, as I said, I am untouchable. I know in saying this that i will probably bring down upon my own head the formidable "karma train" but i don't care.

i'm going to london next week to interview for an internship for some kind of investment firm, dunno it should be fun. though next week will be a bitch, tuesday exam, wednesday fly to london, thursday fly back, friday fly to burlington, monday start second semester. holy crap, only 3 semesters left at midd. i dont wanna talk about it.

what else...oh yeah, so my dad wanted me to do market research for his company to shop the competition and check out the viability of a bubba gump in madrid. so we went to hard rock cafe here to check things out. all 5 senses were bombarded with america. rock and roll, good hamburgers, peanut smell, drunken americans everywhere, and other stuff. we, and by we i mean me, had a blast.

so i don't know if anyone but fraz knows this, but i've been rooming with elizabeth chinloy for the past few months. this has been an unusual experience due to the fact that she is a.)female, and b.)always hungry. other than that it's been fine and actually convenient due to the fact that we wrote a 45 fucking page thesis together on latin american development. we presented it in class to some faculty and students and i think it went well. we're going to get an A cuz the teacher loved us. muahahah.

so a very odd thing happened the other night in our pregame club Cibeles. Fraz's friend Correy is here from stanford and we were with her. all of a sudden, one of my high school friends walks through the door and says hi. weirder still is that my high school friend and fraz's high school friend know each other...twilight zone nenenene nenenene.

superbowl this weekend. i'm on the fence about this one. i do worship tom brady, as quite possibly the best man on earth (other than swanson), still, i do like an underdog. however, i think my detest for Eli manning after turning down the chargers in the 2005 draft may sway me toward the pats. after all, how cool is it to be the only undefeated team in history...fuckin' sick.

right then, cheerio as they say in London, or as i say, later dudes.

miles

I am Legend (you know that will smith movie where he's the last guy on earth)

I am all alone sitting in my dark room listening to Dashboard Confessional wallowing in my solitude. I am the last Middlebury student in Spain, i am the last human in my residencia. I say human because my duena (landlady) doesn't count, she's here but i am avoiding her at all costs as she has been known to drool acid. It's 5:47 here and i have not left my bed all day, i have watched music videos, movie trailers, and youtube videos until i can't stand it any more. I thought about porn but at this point i'm too depressed to get excited about anything. So instead i thought i'd ejaculate some words onto the paper to clear my...head. As i write this i'm thinking of Gabe's Arrested Development quote by Tobias with the oh so many poorly chosen words, and smile. I have also played guitar today, some Fall Out Boy, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Elliot Smith. Perhaps when this is done i can put on eye-liner, go to the bahamas, and then kill myself--but i digress.
Yesterday, Shapiro, Miranda and I went to a Cave Bar, and not a fake "oooh this is cool it has a downstairs" kind of bar, but a real built into the rock bar. This bar is known for its enormous amounts of alcohol and one drink called Leche de Pantera, or "Panther Milk" which I thought fitting considering present company. Anyway, we drank, we laughed, we peed...a lot and then said goodbye. BOOHOO, oh get over yourself you pansy we'll see each other in a few weeks. I think i am a bit of a schitzo today, inventing alter egos to remain sane and singing way too loudly simply to hear voices. I wonder what daylight was like today.
I got mother a leather purse for christmas that looks really expensive but was only 20 euros, so don't tell her assholes. And that's enough about shopping.

fgsfds (none of you know what that is)

Today after classes finished I was feeling low because those of us heading home in a coupla weeks got information packets about “”Reverse Culture Shock” – something I do not think I will be experiencing. As this is probably because I have almost totally resisted any kind of cultural assimilation here, I felt like I’d wasted my time here and been deficient. I use past tense not because I don’t think so anymore, but because I’m not currently agitating over these.

Suffice to say that, while I have been to plenty of bars, restaurants, and even a few museums, while I have wandered around the city once or twice, I spent a lot of time at home, and not having long conversations with my family or even watching Russian TV. Mostly I’ve read, listened to music, and typed stuff on my computer. I’ve spent a lot amount of time (compared to other people here, not compared to in America of course) on the internet (and spent a lot of money doing so). Basically, I haven’t been that “immersed”. I will not have a lot of trouble getting used to home again because I haven’t really changed any habit that I have not been forced to change, and I feel like this is evidence of a damning lack of adventurousness and willingness to take changes/learn/grow/blah blah blah.

Please do not try to reassure me about this. Please do not try to convince me that this isn’t the case. I’m sure it is, but I know myself well enough to know that I’m not good at not lying to myself or being convinced that really everything is fine and good and I’ve done a thoroughly bang-up job.

Also I had a conversation with my host sister today (an exception, I assure you) where we talked about school. What we’d read, and a little about pedagogy in general. I’m pretty sure they read more than we do in school. They get big long summer reading lists. She told me that, though it was not like this in Soviet times, today students are often allowed to disagree/debate with a teacher, and class debates/discussions do exist.

What?! The Slav can’t comprehend freedom and individualism! Reverse racism! White males are a minority victimized by discrimination! Etc.

On a related note, I’m reading this article by Bob Argenbright (no, almost none of you should know who that is, he’s a colleague of Mom’s) about the evacuation of industry in World War Two in the USSR. This is my paper topic for our class on Baikal. It’s an interesting article, and relates to that stuff up there about the Slav because it’s going on about how chaotic the evacuation was. A lot of history really just praises the evacuation as a singularly amazing achievement (like they do the Five Year Plans – clearly a more-or-less-latent sympathy for communism which I, depending on the day of the week and how much traveler’s diarrhea I have, share) – and this isn’t to say that it’s not impressive, but that A) it was not accomplished by a well-organized government carrying out a well-organized plan and B) the cost, in wasted time and money, in lost or damaged equipment, and in lives, was quite high. But MY point in bringing it up is not about any of that. I’m currently interested in the fact that the evacuation, like the construction and running of the entire Soviet state before/during Revolution and Civil War, like the Five Year Plans, and, like other events Argenbright has alluded to but not specifically mentioned, was run in a very, very “individualist” way. The total lack of high-level organization (sometimes entirely intentional) in these instances meant that you have a lot of mid-to-low-level pseudo-commissars “rolling up their sleeves” and just getting this shit done as best they could. I am not arguing the goodness/badness/effectiveness/desirability/etc of this system. I’m pointin’ it out for all those “the Slav can’t learn the free individualist spirit because he lived under barbaric non-European despotism and then under godless communism” types – that this system is MUCH more individualist, which is to say requiring much more personal leadership, creativity, and decision-making, than the way the American government now runs or frankly has ever run. Come to think of it, the Nazis worked this way too.

Not a fan of Nazism – or even of communism anymore. But packaged understanding of history and philosophy and crackpot superficial estimations of national character and study obviously heavily skewed to prove a political or ideological point is obviously junk.

This wasn’t very much about Russia. I plan to write an entry sometime soon talking about all the Russian food I really love soon, since all I really ever do is complain about that and I really will miss a lot of it. Only two weeks to get that done though!

Oh yea: obviously white males are a minority. What the heck kind of an accusation is this? The point is that white males are obviously not oppressed, and people who say otherwise are just being ridiculously goofy. Affirmative Action may even actually be wrong – white males are still about as far from “oppressed” as it is possible to be.

Later that day!

I just watched the daily installment of “Crime and Punishment”. I think it’s fairly common for some Russian TV station to make little mini-series out of great Russian literature. Anyway it started yesterday and I started watching today. So I already missed the murder! So really it’s more like “and Punishment” for me. No one’s favorite part. It seems high quality – I don’t understand anything, but the guy playing Raskalnikov looks upset a lot, so that can’t be bad. A doctor visited him. He went to the police station. But not in that order.

I think a fundamental difference between people is being able to pity more than one person at a time. A lot of Republicans (or a lot of people, whatever) seem to think that only one person can be pitied. But I feel sorry for Raskalnikov as well as the old lady. Sure he’s guilty and she’s not (of murder at least). But not recognizing that Raskalnikov is going through shit that is bad and that he didn’t chose to go through (both before and after the murder) is only sane. He didn’t just kill her out of the blue. I think CS Lewis said it in Mere Christinaity (and we’re not dealing with one of those pussy-on-crime liberals here) that God recognizes that there are ALWAYS extenuating circumstances, but man doesn’t. We simply look at the most visible cases of “evil” and decide that a perpetrator can’t possibly ALSO be a victim. A murder is not always (probably not usually) a fount of misery in others, but a waystation for all kinds of hurt and evil and problems. His crime passes through him; he doesn’t create it from nothing.

Anyway, I’m not saying we shouldn’t punish people or anything like that. But to assume a criminal is an independent creator of his crime is bogus. You can pity victim and predator. And you can do it while you punish one, if you feel you must. The strength of an entity can be measured by the parasites it tolerates.

Also I love my host family. Sometimes Sasha is totally obnoxious, but even she has bright spots. Actually, usually she’s totally obnoxious. She was screeching about something at Host-Dad the other day and he just goes “Oh excuse me Your Majesty!” I just about shit myself. So I like the family in general!

Still putting off my homework. I miss being up really late on school nights here (usually I go to bed early because there’s not that much to DO, whoever’s fault that is). This is actually kind of a strange thing to say, since last weekend (we have three weekend nights because we don’t have class on Monday) I didn’t go to bed before four a single night, and that’s not really unusual. But I guess that’s why I said “school nights”. I very sincerely miss actual schoolwork. I really like writing papers and reading for interesting classes like history and philosophy and that Palestinian Lit course (even though I think most langauges have a more ornate poetic tradition than English, since all the foreign poetry I read I think is too syrupy-thick – or it’s just really impossible to translate poetry very well). I especially like writing papers real late at night. I miss my really hardcore productive all-nights from last year. God willing, I will soon repeat them.

But I sat down to write this ‘cause I just talked to my host father some. Mom was encouraging me to talk more to my host family, so I’ve been asking them who they like for the upcoming elections. This, combined with some other stuff I’ll talk about, makes me think my family is a little unusual. Keep in mind my group for comparison is very small – I’m just going based on what other people have said about their host families and stuff our teachers have said.

So my mom, who I asked first, said she wasn’t sure yet. She was gonna think more, but probably Putin, who she generally likes. My older sister said she wasn’t sure either, and then sort of seemed to take it as a matter of course that she’d vote for Putin too. This sounds a little different what other people have reported from their host families – the idea that my host mom was gonna think it over more surprised me, since a lot of Americans don’t do that (though Russia has a lot more viable choices – well, probably, I’m still not entirely convinced that Putin will outright tamper with election results, or that he’s in a postion to). Also most other people have seemed to say their families think of it as unimportant: “It doesn’t matter, we don’t really control anything like you do in America” seems like something I’ve heard from several people, like our teachers.

Then my dad said he didn’t think his vote made much difference – hey, buddy, now you’re speaking a language I understand. He told me the most coolestest anecdote ever. It’s a Russian sequel to that one about the fox and the crow with the cheese (“Wow you sing so pretty!” bird sings, drops cheese, i tag dalia). It goes like this:

Crow: crow is in TREE with CHEESE . . . eating CHEESE
Fox: arrives at TREE (insert relevant VERB of MOTION – a pod- GLAGOL, if I am not MISTAKEN, which I probably AM) Hey, didja vote for Yeltsin, or against him?
Crow: filled with PRIDE at PARTICIPATION in Russia’s new POLITICAL PROCESS “Yo! I totally voted for him!” KONYECHNA, CHEESE upals. “Chort!”
Fox: cyels CHEESE and IDYOTs
Crow: THINKING to SELF Well . . . what if I’d said no?

The point obviously being, that it doesn’t matter who you vote for. I guess this is a fairly normalish Russian view (though he didn’t draw an contrast to America). But then he talked a little bit about the Soviet Union. He said things were better now (kind of unusual, at least for what I’ve heard about other kids’ families?), but only a little, economically – we’ve already established he doesn’t think much of electioneering. He says that now, its easier to find things you want to buy: no waiting in huge lines, no going across town to find a store with whatever you want. But that a lot of stuff is so ridiculously expensive now you can’t afford it anyway. His example was also plane tickets. In Soviet times, families could afford to take trips for their kids to go skiing. He said he could go, in those times, on his salary and buy a ticket to anywhere in the USSR, round-trip, and spend a longish time vacationing wherever he was (I think he said a whole month!). Now, though, he definately could not afford that. And the best professional skiiers (maybe they’re not professional) in Irkutsk can’t afford a trip to some big ski conference or competition or something.

Interesting that Russians don’t give a shit about political freedoms. I don’t think they see a big difference between Soviet times (after Stalin anyway) when you could have whatever opinions you want as long as they were indoors and now, when you can have opinions. What’s more important, to them at least, is buying shit you want/need and so on. I dunno how I feel about this. I don’t have very much (any?) belief in my personal political efficacy and not THAT much in the difference between the parties (okay, actually this is less true. it doesn’t affect me directly, but the fact that gay people can’t get married? what the fuck is that? and while I may have some issues with huge amounts of public welfare now, it still makes at least as much sense to me as spending all our money on weapons that we only use to antagonize everyone so that we need to buy more). Ugh, I dunno. If your tradition is that you look out for you and yours by going around the government or through legal gray areas, and if your tradition is living in minor to moderate censorship . . . I can understand this outlook. It’s always obnoxious when some asshole right-winger with a degree in assholery writes a book about how the slav simply can’t understand freedom because he’s always lived in godless, backward totalitarianism not like Classical Athens and Western Europe and America. Who let’s these dickheads out of the Victorian period, anyway? I found a list on Wikipedia once of the ten most influential battles in history from some book. One of them was Valmy, so I was all tickled until I scrolled down and saw the list had Thermopylae because the Spartans saved Ancient Greece, cradle of freedom and truth and democracy and thinking and freedom and Monday Night Football and babies and puppies and baby puppies and blowjobs from the evil Persian Japanazi athiest rock and roll feminists. Then I saw the book was from like 1850 and by an English guy. I think there was even something about some battle from the Thirty Years War saving Western goodness from Papist fanaticism.

That was kind of a long rant. I really like that anecdote though.

Reasons why I am not a lot better at Russian than I was at the end of Language School, here being posted so I don’t have to explain them to everyone when I come back: I surf the internet a lot here (this is also why I have no money), in English. When I’m not doing that, I’m reading or writing in English and often listen to music in English. I think all these things are reccomended against in the Middlebury orientation literature. But I could’ve figured out by myself that these things were bad. I don’t spend much time on our homework (which is not that involving to begin with). Basically I make very little effort to actually learn Russian. Please don’t be surprised when I am not hugely good. But I still speak more Russian than you.

Also, like I’ve been saying: “Thick as a Brick” is NOT THAT GOOD. I love Tull – Bryce helped me get back in a little bit (so did Songs from the Wood on its own, some), and I take back some of the dirty/snotty thoughts I’d been having recently. But “Thick as a Brick” is just about my least favorite Tull album. No, it really might be my least favorite. Though my copy has a cool Ian Anderson/Martine Barre/Jeffery Hammond interview. I love these, there’s one on my Aqualung too. Big long, like, fifteen minute interviews. Though this one mostly seems like it’s about A – how little time Anderson spent actually writing the music and B – how gross the studio and cafe they ate at while recording it were. Perhaps all these detailed descriptions of gross food and dank basements taints my enjoyment of the album . . .

Gross food! Reminds me of how I was gonna write about my food/stomach issues. Even if I wanted to stay here for a whole year, I think I would probably just die from gastro-intestinal problems. I’d just sit down one day and shit out all my organs. Which might actually be a relief. Let me simply say that the initial period of . . . disruption that travelers are warned to expect turned out to, in my case, not be very “initial”. I think I’ve had problems, ranging from simple discomfort to other more discomfortable problems, for at least as much raw time as I’ve not had them. Plenty of the food is decent to good. But I get these terrible soups. I don’t know if this is normal, I don’t eat a lot of soup, but I’m getting a seemingly-random grab-bag (I guess you don’t have to say random if you use the expression “grab-bag”) of stuff: potatoes, noodles, and what seems like more pieces of chicken skin rather than actual chicken in water. Hot. The big problem is the watery-ness. It’s so watery! Agh!

Another problem is richness. Maybe other people usually butter their sausage-and-cheese on bread. I never say someone butter something and then put cheese on it before, though. Sour cream on mayonnaise on eeeeverything (though I shouldn’t complain, I manage to dodge both). My host father tried to get me to butter cookies today at tea. Grease. So much grease. Finish your broth (again maybe that’s usual for other people, but it’s terribly gross for me). And quantity. They force a lot of food on you. A lot. Forcefully. You don’t understand, trust me. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s more. And if you forget to eat bread or something, woa boy. They practically holler, and always very accusitorily, “And why aren’t you eating any bread!?” I just remember Homer telling Bart to butter his bacon and bacon his sausage. It’s like that. Also the most hilarious event is as follows:

Eddie: eats hurridly, like a fugitive, trying to cram everything into his mouth before the Food Gestapo arrive.
Mother: walks by, scoots PLATE of SAUSAGE closer to EDDIE
Sister 1: walks by, scoots PLATE of CHEESE closer to EDDIE
Sister 2: walks by, scoots BOWL of SOUP closer to EDDIE
Sister 1: walks by, scoots PLATE of SAUSAGE closer to EDDIE
Mother: walks by, scoots PLATE of COOKIES closer to EDDIE
Mother: walks by, again, scoots BOWL of SOUP closer to EDDIE
Sister 2: walks by, scoots PLATE of SALAD* closer to EDDIE
Father: walks by, exclaims “AND WHY AREN’T YOU EATING ANY BREAD, MY BOY?! HERE, PUT SOME BUTTER IN THAT TEA!” initiates CONVERSATION about SKI LIFTS with EDDIE
Mother: “And now the CAT isn’t eating enough! The CAT! Why aren’t you eating?! I gave you two pieces of meat!” notices EDDIE, scoots PLATE of SOUP closer to him “Would you like some (more) sour cream with your soup?” EDDIE has laid down his BREAD to eat some SOUP “And why aren’t you eating any bread?!”
Eddie: dies, exeunt EDDIE
Table: FALLS OVER, as entire entire CONTENTS have been successively shifted to one eigth its total SURFACE ARE
Cat: is in heat

None of this is made up. Mom told me to butter my tea today. She yelled at the cat for not eating enough.

*Russian salad consists of a whoooole lot of mayonnaise.

A Post I Probably Shouldn´t Post Due to Possible (Though Improbable) Legal Repercussions

Yesterday was tuesday for all of you who are currently out of contact with the world (that would be you Eddie), and after our grammar class, which runs from 7-9, several adventurers and myself decided to have some fun. We started off the night at our favorite tapas bar and ordered two jars of sangria. Remember that there were 4 of us, so we really had about a half jar of sangria each, which is not a whole lot, but enough to impair judgement to some extent--and more importantly, enough for us to decide that we wanted to get wasted--which we did, kind of.

After Tapas we went to another favorite bar called Habana Club, where they serve zombies, which if you don´t know, are the most alcoholic drink you can buy without just straight up asking for a bottle. We each had one and were well on our way to anebriation, when we happened to meet an interesting looking cuban with some interesting promises--that is to say he was drug dealer. Several of the more adventurous of our already adventurous group decided to talk to him and perhaps realize a transaction. He sat down and began to chat, first in english then in spanish as soon as he realized that we spoke the language. He joked and laughed and reminisced about Cuba and how much he liked Madrid: we got comfortable with his presence. Then we started talking about rent prices, did a red flag go off in any of our minds? nope, becasue we are/were idiot americans. Then he changed tactics, and began to sketch out the girls of our group with some whispering, exorbitant amounts of touching, and some promises, "oh don´t worry, i´ll just sleep on the couch." It was now or never, becasue at that point we wanted him to leave but also wanted to have fun so we entered into the buyout, payed him his money and he left supposedly to go get things.

Did he return? of course not, and we were taught a hard lesson of street. actually, we were just taught how big of idiot´s we all were for trusting someone like that and we all left sober and pissed off. However, irony strikes hardest when you least expect it, and on my walk home I smelled a certain aroma that only pounded home our lesson.

I ______ Russia (The Postening)

Well let’s start trying to get this out!

I don’t think I’ve posted for . . . two weeks? Or is it three? This is the second weekend after Petersburg, so that probably means at least three.

My flights to Petersburg were both good and bad. I don’t know if I flew on the only good jets Aeroflot has, but my Aeroflot experience was completely different from that of everyone else ever, apparently. The jets were nice – roomier than American ones, and they gave us lots more food. I’m a fan of the airline, except I got delayed four hours in Irkutsk, so I missed my connection in Moscow. Have you ever had to get rescheduled in a Russian airport, in Russian? I have. Well, it was more like getting rescheduled in Frantic/Exhausted Gesturing, but whatever. After I got all that stuff done (which involved getting at least six different people at different desks to stamp and/or sign my ticket – varying from a belegured looking woman behind a desk who dealt with, like, entire flight (I was at the back of THAT line) to a very official looking guy in a big office with a nice suit/uniform. i don’t think i was really supposed to see him either time, but he obligingly signed my ticket on both visits) I talked to Sara using this machine that you stick your daddy’s credit card in and then dial numbers. I was limited to “thirty” on that, but if that was minutes, rubles, dollars, euros, or sheckels I can’t say. Dad can! Then I drank a beer. Then I flew to Peter.

Seeing “St. Petersburg – Leningrad: Hero City” in huge letters on the side of the airport as we bused in from the tarmac was frankly, enormous. Chilling. I already began to feel what I’d known I would: the beast of history is thick in Peter, probably only that thick in four or five other cities on earth (we’re talking Cairo, Rome, that level). You can feel the press of ghosts around you. Thirty dead people behind each living today indeed. Sara met me in the airport, and it was as wonderful to suddenly go down some steps and see her waiting as I had expected it would be. Deleriously pleased to have arrived, with Sara on my arm (or really me on hers), I found my bag and we found a bus. Sara’s waiting was not so hot, I don’t think, since she got to get to know not one but two lecherous uzbeks. One complete with hilarious moral advice.

So we made our way to the hotel. Then we went to a bar and I started meeting her friends, who were cool. Some kids on the Midd program in Moscow were visiting and pissing everyone off about being super language-pledgy (I indulged in being annoyed with those pushy geeks – this WAS my speak-english week).

The week generally worked like this: Sara was at school during the day. I would meet her at her classes-place when she had some class trip (she has lots, probably the best part of the ACTR program) I could tag along on. When she didn’t she’d come to the hotel and we’d make plans to go out that night. I think we went to bars every night, sometimes with her friends, sometimes not. We at at lots of nice restraunts and generally played the extravagantly rich (which is were you ignore how much money you have – NOT were you have that much) couple about town. I mostly slept during the day, or read a little Gogol, or listened to Meat Loaf, or screwed around online.

I got my wallet stolened on the way to Petropavloskaya Krepoct on Wednesday (after Dom Knigi), so we didn’t go and instead called my parents to get my cards canceled. Then the week got really fun, since Sara bought me anything and everything I wanted (mostly beer and hamburgers). On Halloween we partied down with her friends at the ex-patriot bar. Absinthe may have been drunk.

By the time the weekend arrived, we realized we had done very few cultural activities, and were chagrined. So we crammed in as much as two lazy-ish people can in a weekend. We say the palace where they killed Rasputin (it actually has a name that doesn’t involve Rasputin! can you believe it?!). There wasn’t a cafe across the street, because across the street was a canal (I’m not sure anyone knows this, but Peter is full of them, imagine that!). We climbed up a big cathedral (though not Smolny, the tallest) to look out over the city. We say Petropavloskaya FINALLY, where every Tsar since Peter is buried (if that’s not right, they’re only missing a few in between Peter and Catherine, but I don’t think they are) – I guess all the Emperors and Empresses, really. We saw several famous monuments, including one to Suvorov (my new crush), Rimsky-Korsakov (with which I have a personal history), Peter I (I sat on its lap and made it wear my new Red Army point hat – how perverse!), and, of course, the Medni Vcatnik (Bronse Horseman). It was, true to legend, covered in shattered champagne glasses.

We also walked all over the place, mostly from Petropavloskaya to the Vcatnik and from Issakevsky (the cathedral) to my old dorm (that was a good two hours). So we saw lots of the city, much of it on the canal at night. It was frankly glorious. And of course all po Nevskemu. Really an amazing city. Really.

And then I had to leave, so that was frankly miserable. Sara and I just sort of rode morosely to the airport and parted ways, me laden with a ridiculous amount of junk I’d brought, her with all the stuff of hers that had accumulated in the hotel. Flights back were just as cushy and about a billion percent more on-time. Returning to class was miserable, and those first few days back were rough. I think my bad mood was because vacation was over and I was five timezones from Sara again, and because my classes are mostly dumb and obnoxious and, you know, not history. And because I had a doklad to prepare, which was unpleasant. Once that got done I was perked up some.

My main class I do not like is Praktika Rechi. That’s conversation practice (well, sort of), anyway, we’re always talking about really dumb psuedo-deep shit like “Who Needs Oridnary People?” and stereotypes and stuff. Also the teacher likes to tell me how much I suck and then still pretend we are somehow close. I’m actually starting to really like the film class more. Most of the last four or five films have been really good (am I really understanding them better? i doubt it, to be honest, but it seems that way). Vladmir Konstantinovich is nice, he just drones on so. But I think he’s been doing that less of late. Praktika Grammatiki (I bet you can figure that one out) is grinding and awful, but our teacher is kind of saucy and fun. Kind of. She’s an aquired taste. Our real course (our mainstream) is not very demanding. Once I week I sit there and try to pay attention (fortunately I fail within twenty minutes usually and can go to doodling). Most recently, I sat a lot closer (instead of the very back, where we sit because we are afraid of Russians and they all have class in that room all day so when we get there they’re all long deployed) and understood more. This could have been because I sat closer and could hear better, because it was about Peter Pervi, or because I succeeded (slightly more – in most contexts what I did would still have been “fail to listen”) in paying attention. Sonya always writes down lots of stuff. Bah! Baikalovideniya is probably my favorite, mostly becuase Pavel Alexandrovich is such a friendly, intelligent young man with an awesomely strange moustache. It’s hard to explain why I like him. He’s nice and he’s smart (probably, I don’t understand much). He laughs when I pantomime “elk” because I forgot the word (this is a long time ago, I do actually know it know: lyos’).

Most days we go to a little cafe at the bus/marshrukti stop nearby (Universitetsky) which we call Morsckoi Cafe because all the waitresses wear sailor uniforms, but I think it’s really called Brig Fortuna. The food there is good (I just get blini with sgoshonka – God, I hate transliteration) and very cheap. And they play positively awful music videos. They’re at least as bad as American ones, and some are like, actually pronographic. I mean, there are, like, girls covered in oil in bikinis rubbing against each other and moaning. There are sometimes people actually having sex on big plasma screens on the walls. One day they played “Thriller”, and it was fantastic. Now I want the album. Other times we go to the Tex Mex restraunt here. It is actually very good, and I can feel the addiction squeezing my brain in class most days. I have eaten roughly twenty chimmichangas in the last month. Really. Big beef ones. Hmmm. Usually waitresses at these places are huge bitches. And usually Vanya loses his tag from the coat check. Seriously. Like four out of five times. But we love him.

We went to a bar on Friday, and then the tex mex place afterwards! That stuff was fun. We drank beer and I ate pelmeni. Our waitress was nice. At tex mex afterwards our waitress redefined the above-mentioned standards of bitch-ness, however. But she brought me chimmichanga #18, so I didn’t beat her up. Taxi home. Next night movie with Leonya, Anya, and Lucy. Theatre was way comfy. Movie was “Golden Age”, about Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada. Hollywood history: good on epic, bad on historical accuracy! Philip II was channeling Darth Vader. Like, really. I sipped beer. Stella Artois = good. Leonya told me that we are going to see Stephen King’s “The Mist” when it comes out in like a week. Of course it will be in Russian. I am way excited.

Money is becoming an issue. Mom’s gonna have to wire me more (becuase I have no cards, re: the wallet theft). Also that guy got my social security card, though I’m not too worried about identiy theft. Plus it doesn’t look like it’s very important, so I’m not sure he’ll even expect he COULD try to do something with it. I have to buy cards all the time: cards for phone time, cards for internet time. My lifeblood. Can you have two lifebloods? What a dumb question.

I’ve been talking to Elisabeth about buying my ticket back. I think she’s got it by now, for mid-day on the 16th of December. I’ll fly there, spend a day or two with Sara (she’s flying back to America the same day as me, the 18th) and then fly home through Atlanta. My plan is english-culture fest, where I beg as much money from Mom and Dad as possible (my finances will by then be in utter tatters), go out (dead from jet-lag) and proceed to buy my body weight (greatly increased by my stay in Russia) in CDs and comic books. Then I’ll rent twenty movies, go home, and lie on the floor underneath all of this stuff. Then I’ll start watching movies and reading comic books, ordering and eating Brooklyn Pizza pizza as needed. When my strength is up, I’m heading to La Fondita. Home Friends who’ll be living up to their name will be invited, nay, begged, to take part.

But the real point of bringing this up is to say that whenever I’ve had to talk to Elisabeth about this ticket, I’ve been hit with a big wave of sadness. THAT’S perverse. What am I going to miss? Feeling like an idiot every time I open my mouth? Having tons of food, most of which, whether I like it or not, is murder on my digestive system – MURDER, forced on me at all times? The classes I just explained why I don’t like? The cold (okay, we all know I won’t lack for that at Midd)? The not being able to order from Amazon (this has been death, despite the fact that all the stuff I want to order I only have come in contact with through Leonya)? No comic books? No HISTORY books?!

I know I will miss Leonya and Anya a ton. A ton. They’re just great. But they’re just two people, and I’m returning to gastronomic and cultural comfort, dozens of close friends and relatives, and studying something that is not Russian (the reasons this is good are many: I do not look like an idiot when I’m studying history or philosphy, I like those subjects better, I’ve been studying Russian at insane levels for six months).

But I will be sad. I’m already sad! So I can only conclude that Sibera has in fact cast a spell on me, making me love it completely unrelated to all the reasons living her is hard. I believed that this could happen – smart people I respect told me it would. But I didn’t think it would happen to me, until about three days ago. I just have to stop talking about this write now. The asshole culture shock graphs told me it would go this way, but I’m not even sure I want to leave. Jesus.

I expect this coming semester to redifine awesome, frankly. I’m signing up for awesome classes, I’m pumped about seeing all my friends (and playing DotA . . . oooooh, computer games – my first and forever love). I’m really thinking I’ll look up a ton of awesome history books for myself. I’ll get to see Sara a few times while she’s back. I love college! Phew, talking about the good things I’m going back to is a little comforting. The strength of loving (God, what’s the right word for this?) Siberia is honestly frightening.

And, to be honest, once I start really worrying about these two ten-page papers I have to write (yes, of course in Russian), I expect (really?) to go back to miserable homesickness and depression. I wouldn’t describe the norm here as “miserable homesickness and depression”, but I’ve been melancholy for much of the semester. Except recently it seems like I’m chaging from “not so hot with little breaks of happiness” to “usually good with little spikes of depression”. Who knows? Too much psychoanalysis never works. I’m done.

I think Miss Jones said at some point that there aren’t words to desrcribe just how she feels about Russia. Ooooh, I feel that way.

I ______ Russia.

Schedules.

I love making them, as you all know.

I'll make them for you, because one's not enough.

Let me know if you're interested.

--gs