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

Oh my God, the preciousness

So there is a child in the courtyard outside my window singing "We wish you a merry christmas" along with his radio. It is the most adorable thing I have ever seen in my life. I want to bottle that sound and carry it around with me for when I'm sad.

In other news on the adorable singing children front, on Monday I took a group of five primary kids to play a game during class, and as I left I heard the teacher promising the rest of the class that they would get to do something fun to. When I come back with my kids at the end of the class, the (hilariously sprightly) teacher bounds across the room and goes "look what I taught them!" She turns on a CD player and all the little children start singing along with Yellow Submarine. It was amazing.

because

hi, so i´m at work right now doing a covert blog entry becasue i´m a.)bored, and b.) becasue i want the adventure and have increasingly come to regret my lack of getting into trouble. not that i would get into trouble if they even did know i was writing a blog, i´m supposed to work three days per week, but i don´t think ive done so yet and were half way through the experience. so what´s new with me.

having finally had enough of my spanish roommate and incredulous dueña, i have decided to move out and into a dorm style residencia. it has internet, a good kichen, a large sofa, and french girls all of which were lacking at my previous apartment. i am however, scared about breaking the lease/rent but luckily i dont pay until the middle of the month.

homework has finally...well i wont say increased becasue that would imply prior existence, homework has come home. ususally i do my grammar HW in another class but yesterday i forgot my grammar book so instead made a menu of all the dishes i know how to cook. Actually, i looked at it when i was done, and i could probably open a bad restaurant, you know, those restaurants that are pretentious and snooty but the food isnt actually that good, they just have sulfites in the wine to make you hallucinate and want more.

Wow i have been typing on one of those ancient keyboards, the really loud ones, and no one has looked over or asked what im doing. I guess if you look busy and intense about what youre doing no one will question you...that´s a good life lesson, you should write that down--movie, anyone? Van Wylder.

Ok thats about it, ill probably update on the situation when i move in. i think my new roommate is going to be australian, which is sweet. later, boss.

Quickly.

Sorry for the last (un)post. It was a drunken mistake of mine, made when I wrote an incomprehensible entry (a) detailing how much you all need to come back, soon, and (b) declaring that I'm withholding an endorsement of any Pres. candidate, b/c I'm still stuck b/w Clinton and Biden. Both these things are true, but--

--it was a dumb post that I only understood when I reread it b/c I had written it. Also, since apparently this blog is on Greenwich Mean Time, I write a drunken article and it says "posted at 9:05 AM." And that is not a good idea for anyone, except maybe Lucille Bluth.

But, besides that, and this applies to Miles and Frazar BECAUSE THEY WATCH THE WEST WING, I found my Bartlet, and I'm making them SGA President next year, if they submit to running.

ciaoooooooooooo

--gs

Witches are purple?

Fraz here. I realize that it´s been a while since my last update, so I thought I´d add a little bit, if only so that my most recent post isn´t full of whining about my tummy hurting. Though I´m still reeling that they don´t have pepto bismol here.

Classes at Carlos III are...how can I put this delicately? Bad. They probably form the worst part of my experience here. It´s an annoying ass commute to get to them, and lectures seem to just be in exercise in learning the obvious and not having work. While this is, in some ways, kind of the answer to my prayers, it just makes going to class all the more annoying, since it seems so pointless once I get there. I also just kind of feel like a listless bum in general, and at the same time, have an intense fear that I´m going to fall into that "easy class" trap, where you so blow off an easy class that you still manage to fall below standards.

But I´m not that worried. And I don´t mind it that much, since I´m doing a great practica, which feels more like my main academic pursuit here. I´m an assistant in the english department of a local school, teaching kids ranging from 8-17. It´s really awesome, because I have so many different roles to play depending on which class I´m with. When I´m with the youngest kids, I speak mostly spanish, and we really just go over vocabulary and do "cultural activities," which means that I got to spend all of last week doing Halloween activities from elementary school, like drawing pumpkins and making masks, and that kind of thing is good for the soul. I also work with the older kids, who speak great english, and I just kind of act like one of our language TA´s with them, holding conversations about whatever so they can practice their english. This was kind of terrible the first couple of days, though, because I didn´t know I was going to start so soon, so I first had to do it with no conversation topics, so had nothing to fall back on when there was an awkward silence, and then with a list of conversation topics that the teacher gave me, except that they were made for adults learning english in Canada, so they were all about southeast asia and raising children (Have you ever worked on a farm? How do you feel about teenagers today?).

My most academically rewarding students, however, are the ones who are like 14, because I get to do focused work with the remedials, and it´s awesome. I have to talk with them in spanish, because they´re really behind in their english, and so we go over english grammar in spanish, which is 1) pretty trippy, in and of itself, 2) making me realize how impossible to explain some of our grammar and phonics are, and 3) really teaching me a lot about how to teach english to non native speakers, which is incredibly interesting, and makes me really wanna do teach for america even more.

The other fun part about my practica is recess, when all the teachers go to the cafe, and I get to shoot the shit with them. No real stories to relate here, but it´s just a fun opportunity to speak with some natives, all of whom are very nice, and very complimentary of my spanish, which provides a much needed ego boost on certain days. My favorite teacher so far is the primary english teacher, who is also the religion and art and science teacher, and whose english, as you might suspect, is hilariously bad. Imagine your spanish teacher from second grade. She´s a blast, though, and we have a good time.

Hmmm...on the social front, not a whole lot to report that Mile´s hasn´t. We have a good time, but nothing too exciting to relate. My family had another big dinner the other day, and it was a blast. I sat next to the funny uncle (funny as in he´s a blast, not as in the creepy one) and I was pretty much cracking up the whole time. Coincidentally, there was some procession going on that day in the church we live across from, where all these peruvians come out and parade their little Mary idol or whatever. Anyways, we were watching it from the balcony, and everyone was pretty much adopting their mildly condescending "oh, how cute" attitude, except the funny uncle, who was sufficiently drunk enough to start making fun of catholicism and the procession march, which sounded suspiciously like the Godfather theme, my screaming "Vito Corleone!" over and over again. Then he started talking about immigrants. Which reminds me, earlier at dinner they were all joking that they needed to act more civilized in front of me, or I´ll "think we act like Africans!" I love it.

I´m also thinking of coming back next semester, but, despite a brief moment of clarity last week, I´m still very much on the fence about it. I love the city here so much, and I´d love to have another semester to get to know it, and the cultural expereince is great. What it kind of comes down to is whether I can take another semester at Carlos III. I mean, I can mentally justify one semester of laziness for a cultural experience, but a whole year is harder, which is why I´m also considering transfering to the sede next semester. And, of course, I miss all of ya´ll, but, honestly, I´m so pigheaded about not letting that influence my decision that it´s probably doing more to make me stay here than to come home. At the same time, I´m really realizing that my time left at Middlebury is finite, and if I miss a semester I can never have it back. And I miss my sunday schoolers. Meh, I dunno, I´m very conflicted. I´m talking with the academic advisor here on monday; I´m guessing this is a fairly common phenomenon and I´m hoping she can help me out.

My Midd Experience

I hope you guys are still enjoying what are now your closing months abroad. While I am aware of the plural insinuations that I'm doing naught but pulling teeth here, I must kindly chide all a' y'all; Middlebury is, in fact, neither boring nor exasperating, but stimulating in a salad of ways.

For example, Balanced Debate is getting off to a good start. After going through hell choosing its initial members, we've already got three faculty debates in the works. Katie Hylas (our Senator,) is working on getting a sociologist to debate a psychologist over the origins and nature of gender. The sociologists seem to be all over this, while the potential psychology professors so far approached have all seemed squemish to debate a sociologist. Dan Roberts, also a member of the committee, is planning a debate between an Art History and an English professor over perspectives on art. Specifically, "does context matter to a work?" Finally, Colette Van der Ven, whom we all know, is getting two, maybe three, Political Science professors to debate international development: helpful or hurtful? On one side we have our very own Nadia Horning!

Just so that I won't be accused of nepotism, only appointing the three people, all of whom I already knew, I must add that I've also appointed to strangers, who are not as active as my friends.

We're also planning student-only Soapbox Debates! Hopefully making them a biweekly thing, getting the Ross Fireplace Lounge at 7:00 PM, to get the out-of-dinner crowd. The first one is planned for Nov. 13, and the topic: "Should the U.S. be the world's moral policeman?" Specifically, universal human rights versus cultural relativism. Future topics would probably include current events that make people angry.

Finally, Dr. Mr. President Max Nardini and I are planning a "Great Debate" for J-Term or the Spring, bringing in outside speakers to a real, Lincoln-Douglas-style debate. We're meeting Tuesday to discuss topics and specific speakers.

The biggest mistake I made with this subcommittee was to have three of the five people be going abroad next semester. Therefore, I need new applicants. Eddie's expressed interest. And, while I love you all forever already, that feeling would be magnified if you all applied (when the time comes, of course.)

Secondly, Debatable deadlines are coming up, soon. Being an editor, I have something invested in this, and am politely requesting that, if you guys have time, you could submit something. Topics include, but are not limited to: Politics, Diversity, Academic Affairs, Pop Culture, Sports, etc. etc. Submissions should be limited to 850 words (3 - 3 1/2 pages,) or "blurbs," which are just two paragraphs.

I got two tests back, today, and on both, I received an 89.75 ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!? OMG OMG OMG OMG WTF>!?!?!?!

They really couldn't spare a quarter-point, each?! I didn't even know we graded in quarter points in this country/world/dimension.

Anyways, I'll go to bed now; I wanted to write to kill time, let you guys know how I'm doing, hope you're all doing well and make a note of the fact that I am not morbidly bored.

Love you all. enjoi.

--gs

update in madrid

let me just preface this with the fact that no entry will ever match the excitement or terror of eddie´s russian chain saw massacre tale. that being said there have been some interesting things happening here.

like today, right now. i went in for work to my internship and low and behold there was no one there. i waited the appropriate 30 minutes and left. however, i saw one of my bosses walking to the office (on my way away from it) and what ensued was a sluethful mission impossible game of cat and mouse where i had to avoid being seen at all costs. there was a significant amount of ducking behind people and at one point i actually hid in the bushes, however all of my charades paid off and i am now sitting at midd school with nothing but free time. on monday, when i have to go back to work, i will simply say that i was waiting for half and hour and left. my phone is conveniently out of batteries at the moment so there is no question of them calling me in. also they go easy on me: 1 because i am not paid 2 i do not speak fluent spanish and 3 i have repeatedly failed at the simplest tasks due to my cultural, linguistic, and overall ineptitude.

so holloween is approaching soon and guess who´s coming to stay with me for several days?.....................................go ahead, guess...........................................................that´s right, aki ito. apparently next thursday all of europe has off and she´s coming down to party. this has cut into my travel plans, but no matter, i would rather see good friends then try to make new ones in a strange city. i have decided to be a madrileño for holloween, that is, someone from madrid. they are exceptional people here, that is to say exceptionally strange and unfriendly. my costume will consist of capri jeans, a very tight shirt and incredibly jelled hair--and the ironic thing is that when i go out, no one will know i´m in costume becasue i´ll look like everyone else normally does.

also, i received a rather distressing text message from mother the other day. it read something like this:

PLEASE CALL, WE´RE BEING EVACUATED

i called and guess what, san diego is burning. there is not just one fire there are about 5 different fires going on all around san diego area. my house and my aunt´s house were in incredible danger but as of now i believe, are safe. however, i have talked to some friends in SD and they say that upwards of 500 homes are gone and several thousand acres of land. right now the national guard is stationed all around because of the possiblity for looting. anyway back to my mom.

so i called her and she answered the phone and said in a somewhat frantic voice (trying to be funny) guess where i am, i´m at your father´s. you have to appreciate the irony here, being that my parent´s were divorced more than 10 years ago and have not lived together since. and not only was my mom there, but her two sisters, their husbands, and all of the dogs, cats, and children. all in all my dad´s house turned into a compound with 10 cars, 14 people and 6 dogs. after 2 days there, the fire has receded slightly but the air quality is still atrocious so everyone went to disneyland to distract themselves and to breathe the nice clean air of los angeles (i jest LA has the worst air in the US). however, it appears that the fires are under control now and my parents have returned to their respective homes. also as a side note, my dad just got a new car and i really wish i was there to drive it. he won´t tell me what it is though which means its sickkkkkkk.

so we´re heading over to casa de iris tonight which is a friend of ours where her two italian roommates cook amazingness for us and we pay them next to nothing for it. i can´t wait. also, on i have just found out that every monday night james bond is on in español. i watched "una mirada de mater" (a view to a kill) the other day with shapiro. i can´t understand how the bond films made it out of the 80s, they were so bad. also, may day (the large black lady) scares the shit out of me perhaps more than even xenya from goldeneye. because at least if xenya kills you you´re most likely having sex and to die at that moment isn´t so bad, but may day just snaps you like a twig. that was also the night that i had my first true middlebury dinner (proportions wise). lizz and i made spaghetti and salad but there was a mountainous amount--like at least 2 or 3 pounds worth of food. after dinner liz changed into pants she could fit in and i unbuckled my belt. i don´t know if i´ve ever actually had to do that before, but it was both an amazing, exhilarating, and disgusting experience. i felt like that guy from "7" the gluttony guy who is forced to eat to death. luckily, i survived.

in terms of classes, all three are going well. my econ class is difficult but the teacher likes chinloy and i because we actually know econ as opposed to the rest of the class who is just interested in socialist politics and inequality of gdp per capita and such. i have decided to write my 8 page paper in my international organizations class this weekend, the purpose of this is so that i will never have to worry about that class again. it is stupid, pointless, and a waste of time, so i am not going to go to it. there are 4 people in my linguistics class at the middlebury school here being that everyone else has opted to take something else somewhere else. i don´t see a lot of some people (which does not bother me in the least). however, i do see a lot of chinly, which is not surprising or uncomfortable being that we no longer have to have conversations but can rather communicate telepathically.

oh yeah, so yesterday i was riding the metro back from school with the lizzes and a random guy came up to us and said "be careful, there are gypsies on the metro who are going to rop you." i thought gabe was just being racist before, but apparently they exist and do steal things from you. the gypsies were these 3 women who acted very shifty which means that there was probably a plant somewhere else on the metro who was actually doing the stealing. anyway, we were careful and there were no thrown babies involved. however on a similar topic, fraz chinloy and i were walking and were accosted by 2 old ladies who thrust flowers in our hands and then asked us to pay one cent for them. i thought that was a good deal, but then the 2 ladies got weird, we pretended like we didn´t understand, and walked away with the flowers. apparently what they do is when you go for your wallet to get out the one penny, they simply take your whole wallet and leave. that´s it. aaahhh. que susto los gitanos.

that´s about it, i´ve wasted enough time writing and avoiding work (not that i regret it), so i will sign off. later gaters,

miles

What to say today . . .

I’ve been to the local tex-mex resturaunt twice in the last . . . two days. Both times I have attempted to eat two chimmichangas. Both times I have failed. Both times Vanya and Natalie have finished the last of my second would-be victim. This is part of my “be willing to spend way too much money” initiative, which is involved in the general “don’t ever be bored again” offensive. I mean, just reasons to be wandering around with other students and getting into situations where I have to speak Russian are good, and I guess the best way to learn.

A much bigger deal than the good tex-mex (which is a big deal!) is the cool concert I went to last night. Originally I wasn’t gonna go, because I was too lazy (people having been planning this for like two weeks or something), but because of the new offensive (which I declared after “publishing” my last note/entry), I spent yesterday buying last minute tickets for Joseph and I (I was just getting his ticket, he paid me back of course) to the “Zemfira” concert (can you believe there are no soft signs in that?! I can’t. I don’t base my expectation of soft signs on anything legitimate, just how weird a word is). I didn’t expect to like it (I don’t know why, she’s a girl or something). But I really did. It wasn’t Helsinki 1972, but it was interesting and I thought the band had some nice not-totally stale licks. And they keyboard player got a lot of play, and there was a guy on trumpet – pluses for me. There was good energy. I drank beer in a bar/club setting. It was great.

Today I bought the album this tour was in support of, and am so far enjoying it. Though not as much as the actual concert, of course. I don’t really get people who don’t like live music, or people who don’t like concert discs.

My classes are not very good. I don’t like them. Little is expected, so that’s what I do. I suppose you can make an argument for self-motivation, except what are you PAYING a college for? If you had the self-motivation, you could probably learn most of this stuff yourself. What’s lacking in people is usually not mental ability, but discipline. So you pay someone to make you care about learning well and in a timely fashion. According to this philosophy, I am not getting Mom and Dad’s money out of the classes here. Though of course there are lots of other perks about being in Russia of course, especially as relate to learning Russian. I have a very hard time in class making myself pay enough attention, so I’m understanding, probably, significantly less than I hypothetically could. Which is not to say nothing. And that’s enough Nietzschean conscience-gnawing.

I finished “The Red and the Black” a coupla days ago, finally. It is interesting for being a book that is fascinating but, for me, was a huge pain in the ass to read because all the characters are so obnoxious. It’s like a parody of love, with all these characters raving about being in love, and then falling out of it in like two days, and then loving someone else hysterically, and then going back to the other person. Ugh. But I certainly get why Nietzsche liked Stendhal so much, and why he’s highly regarded. His depiction of the more detestable/commonplace elements of the human psyche is erudite, to say the least. And it has that sort of narrator-as-a-character voice that is neat when Stendhal does it and bad when Stephen King does it. And Stendhal was probably a Napoleon-worshipper, as is Julien Sorel, as am I. Man, Napoleon was just awesome. This Felix Markham biography is just great. I even mostly agree with it for once.

St. Petersburg is coming up in like three days. Wow am I ever excited. Sara says the hotel she found for me has free internet.

I mean I can’t wait to see the city!

Concerning the Recent Unpleasantness

The most exciting thing that has ever happened to me happened this weekend. It was also the most terrifying.

PROLOGUE

Some of us had been planning to go to the island (or near-island) of Alhon for most of last week. These little excursions to various touristy villages scattered around Baikal are easy and ubiquitous. You buy a ticket for a bus or a microbus (8-12 dollars one-way), ride 4-6 hours, rent a little room or a couple of rooms at some local inn-thing, and then wander around in nature and go to banyas. Also you drink there because Middlebury has stupid obnoxious rules about not drinking when we’re on a Middlebury-led trip and trying to get home drunk in the city is scary, with all the stuff they’ve warned us about (the police, etc.).

I wasn’t gonna go, simply because I didn’t feel like it. But then I wondered what I would do in town, and people going seemed to want me to come along, so I changed my mind at like the last possible minute and went.

I am VERY glad I did. I would not have wanted to miss the trip this turned out to be.

PART 1: Arrival

We rode our little microbus to the village we were staying in on Alhon (I don’t know/remember the name). This was Saturday afternoon, and I had spent all that time on the little bus reading or listening to music (though my batteries died fairly soon – I have quite a collection of dead batteries in my backpack). When we got there we found a little inn to stay in, and set up there. Then we wandered over to this big rock sticking out of the lake and scampered around amicably thereon. It was one of the five poles of shamanism, apparently, and when I asked with incredulity about five poles, Vanya suggested, drily, that the others must be near by, since the particular shamanism of the Buryati probably did not get exported all that far.

We had a dinner of pelmeini, which I ate and sort of helped clean up from but did not help in preparing, because I am lazy and despicable. Then we settled down to drink some vodka we had brought with the Russians staying also in this tiny hotel. There were three Russians and one Buryati man. The woman who ran the hotel said they were cheerful and fun and worked as electricians on the island. They certainly were not boring, and at first things proceeded normally (jovial Russians make girls in our group uncomfortable while we sort of simultaneously have a good time, though I am on edge because I cannot think of a way to be of assistance to said girls).

INTERLUDE: Our Setting

A brief description of our accomadations will be important very soon.

The hotel consisted of a hallway which ended at the door to the building on one end and a sort of sitting room (where we drank and carried on) at the other. There were rooms on each side of the hall, six total, the first two near the door being the kitchen and a small store, then four rooms (two a side), then the sitting room, then two more bedrooms branching off from it. We occupied the two rooms before the sitting room, three boys in one and three girls in the other. The other guys there occupied the rooms attached to the sitting room. The bathroom was, as is custom, outside.

PART II: In which the action of the story is framed by two bathroom trips

We had, after a short time, begun the process of extricating ourselves from our friendly comrades. Leaving a group of Russian men with whom you have been drinking is invariably a long process, exponentially increased by the number of girls in your party. I went outside to the bathroom, figuring the others could uneasily mumble “No, we really have to go to bed now, we’re nothing without a good twelve hours of sleep.” over and over just as well without my help for a little while.

When I returned, progress appeared to have been made. Vanya and Joseph were in our room, and the girls were in theirs with the door shut. One Russian guy was watching TV. The others were no where to be seen, but I could hear some of them in one of their rooms.

Vanya quickly told me, looking a little confused, that Boris Andreivich was beating the shit out of the Buryati man. I, too, began to look confused. Joseph, clearly already on the adrenaline high we would all be joining him in soon, narrated in our language of broken Russian and charades that the Buryati guy had been talking about drinking more with them (Vanya and Joseph), when, for no apparent reason, Boris (about three hundred pounds and probably the friendliest-seeming, up till now) had arrived and driven him into the room the two of them shared with enormous punches to the face.

We moved into the sitting room in an attempt to sureptiously watch. The Russian there watching TV, one of two brothers so far not involved, was blase. I could see this Buryati guy, himself LARGE, richoceting off his bed and wall as Boris laid into him. Joseph reported that his jaw was sheeted in blood. We soon returned to our room, and things quieted down.

At this point, we heard a low growling noise, loud but distant. It sounded like it was in the yard or next door somewhere. It went on for a little while without us really acknowledging it (I thought to myself “haha, now there’s a chainsaw noise somewhere. what a creepy coincidence”). Then the noise cut out. For about two minutes.

When it came on again, it was clear that this chainsaw was not running in the yard or next door. It was in the next room and moving through the building in our direction. Our door, perhaps a third of the way open, displayed a very surreal picture. Boris backed past it, hands out in front of him, in kind of a fighting crouch. Probably ten inches from his amble belly followed a running chainsaw, and following that came the shirtless, blood-covered Buryati manning the chainsaw. We watched, open-mouthed, in extremely honest shock.

Then they went down the hallway, towards the door to the outside. Joseph and Vanya and I all looked at each other. Joseph said something like “Hey did you guys just see that guy with a fucking chainsaw?!” I put both hands on my head in a hilarious half-mock display of comic panic and said, hoping for a laugh, “I don’t have this merit badge!”. Vanya remained calmly sitting on his bed, regarding us. Somehow, without seeming to discuss it, we decided to join the girls in their room (the door was still closed), there to barricade ourselves and perhaps make a plan.

My first thought was “passportwallet”, and my second, as I stuffed the first into one pocket was “where are those damn batteries I just bought?”. So I took my backpack too, with my CDs and player and new batteries. The three of us hustled down the hall – I don’t even remember if the Russians were still inside or not – and got the girls to let us in. We locked the door and began to speak English.

We debated how easy it would be to kick out the window, how to break the headpieces into our beds into weapons, whether or not the drunk chainsaw-weilding Russians would recognize our neutrality, where to go if we did successfully flee, and so on. All the while shouts and chainsaw roars continued outside (they were definately in the street in front of the house by this time). I reflected that it was nice to be breaking the Language Pledge for an actual emergency, and babbled on about organizing ourselves into the proper formation to bash attacking drunk chainsaw-murderers in the head with panks of wood.

After probably ten minutes, the sounds of fighitng stopped. I don’t remember the specifc order of events, but one of the two brothers came and talked to us, telling us things were alright. We got the impression that he and his brother had been trying to break up the fight. Periodically, shouts and sounds of a scuffle would resume, and then subside. Eventually the Russian guy left and Joseph went out to use the bathroom. Upon his return, he informed us that the end of the hallway by the door was covered in blood and Boris was cleaning up with a mop. The Russians claimed the Buryati guy had been subdued and was now in his room, unconscious or passed out.

I went to the bathroom this time, seeing only an ominously bare hallway slick with mopwater. Opening the door, I almost had a heart attack because Boris was there, smoking a cigarette and looking into the dark street. Also because the front stoop looked like the deck of an industrial fishing boat after a big haul – that’s the only analogy I have been able to supply myself for the amount of blood.

I went to the bathroom. When I returned, Sonya fairly forced me to drink some water. I had felt okay when I left the room (indeed I would characterize my feelings as excitement punctuated by little spikes of real terror throughout the experience), but I was pretty freaked out after that porch, and apparently looked it. I had also heard moans and yells coming from the dark in the street.

PART III: Aftermath

After this, the two Russian brothers, their hands and pant legs splattered with still more blood, periodically visited us. It was clear that they were still thinking primarily about getting a little, which is insane, but we stonewalled them (this is something that you pick up pretty quickly in Russia). All that means is that everyone keeps talking while you wait for them to get it through their heads that no one here wants to sleep with them. Then they cynically leave. This is what happened. It was about two in the morning at this point (I think this all started around ten or ten-thirty?) and we all agreed that things had been quiet for long enough that everyone felt good going back to their rooms.

Vanya and Joseph and I talked awhile, pretty predicatable unwinding stuff. Joseph and I eventually elected to go investigate the street (I had heard those moans and Joseph had actually talked to someone, but it had been too dark and the other guy too drunk for Joseph to understand him). We wandered around at the edge of where the light from the porch gave out for a little while, calling out, before our nerve deserted us and we fairly scampered back in side.

Then we went to bed.

Other stuff happened, but nothing that really rates, considering. The next morning we went on a little microbus trip around the island, looked at scenery, and talked to this Australian/British couple there with us. Sunday we came back. The end.

P.S. The next night the three Russians told us that the Buryati guy was okay, and had left. Who knows if that’s true? They were pretty subdued but we avoided the hell out of them anyway.

Fraz Needs a Hug

Ok, I’m prefacing this by saying that, on the whole, I love it here, and I do not regret coming. That being said, this is not Disney World, and my stay has been less than perfect. This post will be dedicated, then, to everything bad that has happened to me thusfar.
Now, thanks to Miles, you all know about Saturday. and I’m more or less OK with it. I was so completely blackout that it’s difficult to feel that embarrassed, since I have absolutely no recollection of doing anything, and, let’s be honest, I’ve drunkenly hit on girls a lot uglier than Miles.
What I did not like about Saturday was the monster hangover I had on Sunday. Actually, no, I take that back, the hangover wasn’t even that bad. It’s only distinguishing feature was that it strangely continued into Monday. I had to get up early on Monday to talk with Teruca (our coordinator) and attributed it to this. Still, it was a strangely persistent hangover, and I was getting these weird pangs in my stomach.
Come noon, I was still feeling kinda blugh, so I decided to go for a run, since normally a little bit of exercise does a lot to cure a hangover. The run was impossible, I felt terrible through the whole thing, even afterwards, when you usually get that satisfied feeling, I just felt gross. I also cramped up all over my body, like, every muscle that I have wanted to be stretched. I attributed this to the cold, and after I took a shower, I seemed OK.
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, except for the fact that I kept getting these stomach pains, and they kept getting more intense. They weren’t unbearable, though, and I had an interview for an internship at five, so I sucked it up and went. The interview went pretty well, except for the last five minutes when I started swooning, and when the guy asked if I was OK, I couldn’t say anything except “No, not at all…” He basically had to push me to the nurse’s office (this is at a high school) because I can’t see anything and I’m dizzy, so I lay down there for a bit, we joke about how this is only supposed to happen in movies, and I walk home.
Home isn’t that far away, like ten minutes, but like twice on the way home I have to actually stop and sit down because when the stomach pains come, I can’t do anything but wait them out. I finally make it home, explain to the two ladies I live with that I’m actually sick, and ask if they have any pepto bismol. Now, I would expect Pepto Bismol to be a pretty much universal thing, but they just stare at me blankly, so I try and describe it, and they both start nodding and go “Ooh, manzanilla!” Ok, I think. Manzanilla = Pepto Bismol. Not so. Manzanilla is tea. Fucking tea. What the hell? I’m in a major city, not Siberia, I will have none of your folk cures!
I try again, trying to cognate my way through it. “Antacida?” I meekly try. Blank stares. They thankfully decide to take me to a pharmacist, and I try and describe what I want, and the pharmacist goes “Oh, antacido,” and I’m like “yes!” and the women are both like “Oooh, antacido.” Really? Is gender that important to you? You couldn’t bridge the gap there? Well, if nothing else, a good grammar lesson. I get some pepcid, and while the next two days are still pretty unbearable, I’m at least not in unbearable pain, and my ladies totally made up for their earlier ignorance of Pepto Bismol by pampering me very nicely during my convalescence.

But that’s not all! Last night, I was out with Miles and Jer and the Lizzes, and we had a good time, didn’t even get that drunk, but when I’m walking home (ironically because I didn’t wanna pay the eight euro cover charge to get into some salsa club) some “drunk guy” bumps into me for two seconds, and afterwards I have no cell phone. What the fuck? What really pisses me off about the whole situation is that it’s not like I’m some ignorant country bumpkin who got taken advantage of, I’m super paranoid about pickpockets, and I’m almost always on guard. I even saw this guy and braced myself, but his fake drunk fall concealed what was a pretty aggressive move on his part; he basically grabbed me and shoved his hand into my pocket. He left my keys, though, so I appreciate that courtesy.
This little incident let me finally understand white flight. Before last night, the city was all sunshine and butterflies and I was like “who wouldn’t wanna live downtown, where you’re close to the Opera and the nightlife and everything is beautiful,” but now my Texanness has kicked in, and I actually caught myself this morning thinking “Dallas really is the perfect plan for a city, because you can live far away from all the fucking thieving gypsies, and just drive in whenever you wanna go somewhere.” I’m kind of ashamed but not really. I know I’m really lucky since this is such a minor incidence, but it just kind of makes you bitter about humanity in general.
What really pisses me off is that he stole a shitty prepaid cell phone with no minutes left on it, so he basically inconvenienced me without really gaining anything for himself. It’s like a net loss for the world. It only costs like thirty euro to get a new one, but I’ll have to put my numbers back in, tell everyone my new number, etc.
Which allows me to segue pretty smoothly to my last point: yeah, it’s thirty euro, but that’s actually a ton to me right now. I know everyone makes fun of me for bitching about how “poor” I am, but I really do have almost no disposable income, which is hardly a big deal at Middlebury, but here you can’t do anything without spending some kind of money, and it’s really killing me, no matter how stingy I’m trying to be. This cell phone? That’s almost like, two weeks worth of spending, and I honestly need every penny I have. Part of me almost hopes that second semester I don’t make any friends, because I probably won’t be able to go out at all anyways.
Bleh.

And again, to clarify, this is just kind of all my concentrated Madrid beef. I’m really not this pissed off, but I needed to vent, and it came out in kind of this distilled bitterness.

I need sleep.

The Battle of Lechfield lasted me all night, and much of the morning. I had two other mid-terms, and I just finished class now. It's 4:15pm. I'm not going to bed until 6:00pm, because I don't want to wake up at 4am and be completely rested.

And, as miserable as it feels, there's something to be said for not having slept for a whole day and a half. You feel pleasantly buzzed, but without saying stupid shit. I was just in Russian, and I'm pretty sure that Sergei thought I was drunk in class.

I also just sent out the emails accepting and rejecting people. As much as I disliked some of the applicants, I still feel bad rejecting them, you know? They may be crying now, and I'm not okay with that. I'm glad to hear that you want to join, Eddie. And the paper was for "Making of Europe." Also, glad to know you'll be back in the spring.

Miles, how do you like the internship?

Fraz, where are you?

I need to stay up for another hour and a half. But then, I'm gone.

--gs

oh man

so i was reading gabe´s newest blog, procrastinating from my own assignment which is due in less than two hours and thought, hey why not waste more time telling people about it. its for an econ class on latin american development. i was simply going to go to the middlebury school, print out the paper and go to my spanish school all with plenty of time to spare. but after reading my paper, i realized not only was it shit, it was also flat wrong. so in the last hour i have typed like a madman (getting some weird looks from people in the computer lab) and rewritten my 3 page essay. i thought that was damn impressive--though ten pages in one night is better, i concede.

anyway, i haven´t seen fraz since we went to see "funeral de muerte" literally translated as "funeral of death" which i thought was funny. its supposed to be that english comedy "death at a funeral" but apparently something was lost in translation.

hah, gabe, you and your silly major changes. twenty bucks says you change it again to psychology or international studies cuz that´s the only department where your riffraff of classes will all fit. also, i´ll bet you made one of those life schedules yet again planning out every detail until you graduate. ok, they were impressive freshman year, but now that´s just 3 semesters more--shit isn´t that scary? ok gotta go.

miles

The Battle of Lechfeld and Contemporary Historiography.

Thus is titled my paper for tomorrow. It's 10-pages long. Have I begun it? No. It's 1:35am and I'm going to be up all night. Yet I write on this blog.

Did I tell any of you? I switch my majors, again, 'cause that's how I roll. Double: PSci/History. So here I go again.

Anyways, I started up this Committee for Balanced Debate, through the SGA. I (and others,) felt that there was insufficient coverage of ides on campus: there'd be one speaker giving one viewpoint, but we'd never hear the other. Like last year, when we invited Chris Murray (author of "The Bellcurve,") and had him tell us why having given minorities more opportunity to go to college was a bad idea, but didn't have an opposing viewpoint. One could easily say "well, the opposing view is clear enough," but it really isn't, not after you heard what he had to say.

So our (at this point, my,) ideas are these:
1. Get one huge DEBATE, with outside speakers, once a semester. Focus on a single issue. Have students moderate it, introduce questions.

2. Get two faculty debates a semester (not panel discussions.) An idea I heard today: have someone from the Psychology department debate someone from the WAGS department on whether gender is biological or social. Kind of eh, but an interesting starting point.

3. Student open forums, focused on an issue. Hopefully it'll get really intense and people will start throwing chairs at each other because someone mentioned "the Islams."

4. Balancing lectures with opposing lectures, like, the week after. Like the Chris Murray example.

So I interviewed like 30 people today. I though I was going to die. Especially the ones who were there for no reason other than to waste my time.

I also had a Debatable Editor's meeting tonight, which I'm part of this year. I'm the "Political Editor," which I think is awesome.

And I was just at the Grille, and was talking to Dave and Sid and Rohan, and thought about Eddie's eternalest of questions: would you give up your sex drive if it meant you never had to sleep again? I mean we really THOUGHT about it. And the answer is "Oh my God, of course, in a heartbeat, rightnowwhere'stheoperationtableomygodplease.

I really have to work now.

--gs

(I'm so caffeinated.)

despite what you may think, Gabe, i do enjoy reading your blog becasue at times i get homesick and i can live viscerally through you--also you are a much better writer than me. however, i agree that more posts are necessary thus here.

today was hell. i have never spent more time on public transportation. it was ridiculous. my internship started today, and they had me go all over the city interviewing people to create a guide book or something. oh yeah, i´m doing an internship, its with a non profit organization that helps immigrants start small businesses. i figuered i should protect my sould before i go into the banking world and forever damn myself until i turn philanthropist.

not much to report about in terms of class. oh yeah. so Liz chinloy and i saw a doctorate thesis presentation at my college. it was a failure and i do not believe the poor guy got to change his title to dr._______. oh well, just 3 years or so down the drain, no big deal right. wrong the guy was like 60 so i felt even worse.

i´m also taking this class called international organizations. i bought the textbook, so i probably wont end up going to that class.
also, mi clase de...yeah that´s spanish sorry, my linguistics class is 4 people, me the lizzes and leah skahen. oh well, at least i´ll learn a lot.

fraz and i are very close to the point of having you, gabe, break into that family´s house and retrieve west wings being that we miss america and are further missing out on the presidential race which i´m sure is fascinating. although i do not support hillary, i recognize her majesty.

that´s about it. eddie i´m really glad you will be back in midd for spring, you made my day. however, maybe you should take some normal classes, cuz who´re you going to party with if you´re the only one awake? see ya soon guys--no actually not that soon but later than soon so see you later--dudes.

So today I got my changing-how-long-I’m-gonna-stay form from Elisabeth, our RC. I decided a little while ago to come back for second semester, but was planning to keep it a secret from all my friends at Midd – indeed I’d already revealed this plan to Miss Jones and Mr. Bestor, soliciting their discretion. The point of this plan was to make everyone happier to see me by surprising them, to REALLY surprise them, and to generally pull off a stunt.

I’ve chosen not to do this cause it’s too hard. I’m not sure why but, the idea of telling all my friends at Midd I’m not coming back for sure, and making them sad, is too difficult, and I don’t think I’ll be able to keep that secret anyway – I’m too excited!

I’m really looking forward to next semester. Mainly because the last semester at Midd was so great once the Arockening got going, and I am making it my declared intention to make (or to continue) the Arockening every day operating prodecure. This will be enhanced by the fact that, for my first time ever at Midd, I will NOT be taking a class that meets every weekday morning. I will be taking as many history seminars as possible, and the results of this will be numerous and universally positive.

1-It will be so much fun. Nothing is more fun than history seminars. It will be exactly what I want to do.
2-I will be learning exactly the kinds of things I want to be learning.
3-It will be what I should be doing, academically.
4-It will easy.
5-It will provide a ridiculously flexible schedule. This will facilitate lots of rocking out, Arrested Development marathons, Dota marathons, spontaneous trips to the Burlington Denny’s, crazy parties, and so on. The overall, and most-anticipated, aspect of this, however, will be that I can completely re-arrange my sleeping schedule, and make an utter mockery of the hours normal people keep. Not only will I stay up all night QUITE OFTEN, and then make up for it in numerous moderate-length day-naps, I will strive to keep no order of any kind. I will sleep when I am tired, and only then. I will pull sufficient feats of staying-up in order to keep this as uneven as possible. Also, I will be able to work at 3 am a lot, which, despite my own incredulity, is my most productive time of “day”. Last semester, which included perhaps two weeks’ worth of all-nighters, was my best semester by a comfortable margine.

ANYWAY, what about Russia?! Today I went to class and ate pozi, which are the national buryatski dish. I’ve had them a few times before. They’re meat-balls wrapped loosely in dough and boiled. You get this, like, dough-bag with meat in it. You’re supposed to bit a hole in it and suck the hot meat-water out, which I am less a fan of. But I like eating them a lot.

I think we’re going to some island on Baikal this weekend? There we will probably drink vodka while banya-ing. A sauna but with steam and you hit each other with tree-branches/bundles of some certain kind of leaf. Quiet, mellow Vanya is quite the dominatrix, I can assure you. Also you usually jump in Baikal after this. Baikal’s going to be pretty damn cold by next weekend, but it was pretty damn cold all those other times we jumped in it after sitting in hot little banya rooms/hot springs, etc.

The weekend after that, we have another break – the whole week of October 29th to November 2nd, plus the weekends around it and that last Monday (cause we never have class on Mondays). I’ll be spending it in Petersburg, which I’m turrible excited about.

I bougth toothpaste today! Hoo-ray! Given the responses to my toenail-details (heh!) I won’t explain just how rarely I engage in dental hygeine. Hint: rarely!

Did I tell everyone I fought a volume of Nietzsche in Russian? I bought it but have yet to make an attempt to read any of it. The best part though is that I found it in a train station bookstore. No Stephen King or Michael Crichton for the Russians, видно.

I am really, really starved for history. None all summer (usually I pick at a book or two), and none this semester. I only have one short little Napoleon biography with me (though it IS a good one), and I've already read almost all of it by nipping around here and there for so long.

Still at Middlebury.

My posts can never be as... what's the word?... good, as yours. I'm not in Madrid. I'm not in Siberia. I'm not in China getting censored and not being able to post, I'm in the Land of the Bread Loaf. Which is quite a ridiculous name, now that I think about it. Any word, if you think about it will begin to sound ridiculous, but place names especially.

Anyhow,

WHEREAS I now have an iPhone and it's possibly the most amazing thing ever ever, and
WHEREAS I have joined, like, sixty things now that yous guys aren't around to pass afternoons, and
WHEREAS I live my abroad time viscerally thru all a' y'all,

LET IT BE RESOLVED that you must all post more frequently. Eddie has done a goode job with this.

LET IT FURTHER BE RESOLVED that you should all remain intact while abroad, so that we can come back and watch three more seasons of the West Wing, which I've watched and none of you have and that should be fixed because while Season 5 is middling at best the last two are returned their former glories. Eddie, again is exempt, since he doesn't love America. obviously.

Furthermore, Hepburn 5 is fun. We each have our little (actually mid-sized,) cellars and interact with one another often. The salt shall be missed, but we'll manage. ditto for trays. Juice at dinner has been eliminated as well, and there are bills in the SGA Senate that would demand more and better washers and dryers, as well as free washing (but more expensive drying.)

One thing I do not regret about staying is my ability to follow the 2008 horserace oh-so-closely. Is Fraz in the missing of that? It's getting exciting, simply because everyone is floundering (this time, it's for real, say the scientists,) except Her Majesty, as I'm sure she poisoned everyone else's entire staffs, and she now leads in Iowa, NH, and SC and nationally by about 30 pts., she's broken the 50% barrier in most polls.)

Anyways, I'm also glad you guys are abroad b.c. this semester I can't "work secretly" as I've always done. I really do need to work a lot, so there would be little opportunity for me to say "you'll go to bed 5 minutes later."

So on that note, I'm going to watch an Arrested Development. ciao.

But seriously, I hope you guys are loving it.

college hilarity

although we have been going out regularly here in lovely madrid, it has been a while since we really went out college style. that is to say, when one enters the night of madrid one usually goes to a tapas bar orders a copa of wine or beer and proceed to bar hop until 4 in the morning where traditionally we have ended up at the chocolateria which is a place open incredibly late (or early who knows) where they serve melted chocolate and churros. anyway, i, tired of such nonsense, decided to host a true college party at my apartment. luckily, my two flatmates were out of town being that one is a douchekill creepy guy while the other is way to good looking and suave to be allowed around drunk friends. exorbitous (is that a word i don´t know)amounts of alcohol were bought and lizz shapiro bar tended. long story short everyone got hammered in a period of less than two hours.

we then proceeded to go out. i feel it is my duty to tell of the further tales of the evening being that i am one of the only ones who did not completely black out. one such story is as follows. some of us really had to pee, like badly, like public urination badly, and we did. we stumbled into some dark back alley and did the business. (im not sure who all is reading this so i will spare the details, suffice to say that we almost got killed by a homeless guy or something/someone who yelled at us and chased us away. what else. oh, so fraz was the drunkest i´ve ever seen him, and the funny part was that he walked home alone through madrid traffic and everything without making a complete idiot of himself--shocking right. actually i take that back, fraz did something very funny, he hit on me. being that i am a nice person i did not lead him on falsely, just ditched him to go pee.

there is much more to that night which i´m sure will come back to me however, there are many people who´s honor i do not wish to violate, only my own and fraz´s, so i will leave you all here with a final note. COOOOLLLLEEEEGGGGEEE.

Today was a nice day in Russia! I got up at two in the afternoon (barring a few earlier trips to the bathroom!) because I had had a Legitimate College Experience the night before, of the type I powerful miss. I stayed up until five in the morning on the internet, talking to people about games and science fiction and who was and wasn’t a dick. The cherry on top was foraging for junk food at four am (COLLEGE!) and finding some! Also, it had a nice “you’re in RUSSIA” twist to it, since the junk food were these little fried dough cake things that I slathered in honey. And now there is honey on my pants, since I willingly wiped it there. Less cool is the fact that my Russian host-sister remarked to me skeptically, and jokingly that I had been wearing these pants for a while. Russians wear clothes more times between washings than Americans, in general. But I have broken even them! Victory! My pants actively smell. We are reaching “I stink too much by my own standards so we have to change soon” – but that just means all is as it should be.

Anyway I got up and ate something and went to see Leonya. I hung with him a bit, we listened to music (a group he has recently discovered called “The Horse Cock Kids” – and the songs are even better than the name! and Tom Waits, one of his favs), and then we went to visit his aunt, who is Natasha’s host mom. That was the first time I had visited a kid here on our program in their host-house (except Lucy, of course, who lives with Leonya). Sonya’s family is never home (except when they stop by to ask her incredulously why she isn’t in a night club), Joseph has just an old babushka who weighs him every week and gives him самагон (moonshine) and drinks with him.

Anya arrived hot on our heels, and we sat around being hilarious and gross in Russian for like four hours while we trank like six gallons of tea each. Then there were lots of jokes about being full of tea which wanted to be freed and having to pee very often. I sort of brought down the house by grossing everyone out with the story about how I like chewing on toe and fingernails so much I salivate at strangers who have longs, and how I spent like a week working on my big toenail, which Dr. Daniels gave to me after he pulled it outta my foot. That coversation went something like this:

DR. DANIELS: (enters) All right, everything's good. Here's the nail – some people are biters! (he winks – he is a jovial, friendly man)

EDDIE MCCAFFRAY: (sitting on examination table – he is unsure if DOCTOR DANIELS is joking or not) Heh heh . . . thanks. (he decides that, regardless, he will begin to consume said toenail in the car on the way home, while listening to FRANK ZAPPA'S song «FLORENTINE POGEN» which includes a delicious driving RYTHYM GUITAR, and some COOL SOLOING – and also NAPOLEON MURPHY BROCK provides and ENJOYABLE VOCAL PREFORMANCE)

EDDIE MCCAFFRAY: (in MOTHER'S tope-colored mini-van, hurridly crams TOENAIL into MOUTH, drooling like PAVLOV'S DOGS and singing along badly with FRANK and NAPOLEON) SHE WAS THE DAUGHTER OF A WEALTHY FLORENTINE POGEN – DA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NAAAA!

CAR SPEAKERS exeunt

Then we wandered around downtown for like twenty minutes. There were fireworks and also some music, since today was the 70th anniversary of the Irkutsk Oblast (or something like that). Then Anya and Leonya and I returned домой.

Now I am listening to Dispatch's live album «Gut the Van» - it's really great (not that this is news to me). Some people may not like the overly-slick «college» lyrics (and they have occasionally grated on me), but mostly they're average, with a few moments of what is probably genius or something close to it. I am sorry they do not present the lyrical mastery present in such recently-popular works as «Candy Shop» (I am all too afraid that Fifty Cent really would allow me to «lick the lolly pop»). As for their groovable, meolodic, and emotional playing . . . I don't get who doesn't like that. It's not the most complex thing out there, that's for sure, but it's put together so dammed well. There are a lot of moments on both discs that really floor me.

I thought about a lot of mildly-funny ways to coyly warn people about this entry. But instead I opt for bluntness. Mild-mannered bluntness is also a common form of humor, after all.

So, friends and relatives, if you don’t want to read about hemorrhoid-related experiences, don’t read this.

Hi how are you?

Anyway, so digestion has not really been going that well over-all here in Russia. Usually it hasn’t really been bad enough (I thought) to use the pills I brought with me, and like a lot of minor medical inconveniences I’ve experiences, I just elected to wait it out. A good other example of this, for anyone interested, is of course my recent in-grown toenail experience.

And then we had our trip. There were really no good places to go to the bathroom in the way that relates to this story (of course I could find places to pee – and puke while trying to get a fishbone out of my throat one evening) so I did what I spent all of public school doing. I just held it until I got home. Except this time it was like four days. Anyway I didn’t really feel bad. But when I got back and relieved myself, I was saddled with the above-mentioned affliction. Which is terribly difficult to spell.

So I started doing what Dr. Daniels told me to do the other time I had one. Lots of short, warm sitz baths, sitting on hard stuff, and trying not to eat anything particularly troublesome. I did not want to tell my host family about my troubles, both because I don’t like announcing the presence of hemorrhoids (other than writing about them in blogs I make everyone read – errrr) but even more importantly because the oddness and moderately uncomfortable nature of my previous run-in with Russian folk-medicines. I did not want a lot more jam-tea, or to become better aquainted with the heat-lamp. Little did I know I would instead become better aquainted with various Russian medical personnel all too soon.

So I did these things, and stuff seemed to be about even. Occasionally I thought I might be improving, other times I thought the opposite. There was no large change until Saturday when I started bleeding. That was a change! I was displeased.

On a related note, I had had a great victory with Joseph the night before when we actually managed to find, and drink in, a bar. It was a nice bar we found despite the fact that I had forgotten the directions Leonya had given me (he reccomended it). They have horse-sausage there, at least it was on the menu, but the waitress said then they didn’t have any. And in any case Joseph had eaten dinner already and didn’t feel up to it – and it was listed as four people. So we drank beer and vodka and ate those little salty beer-snack things that make you want more beer and I ate some tasty ribs and french fries and possible something else? No I don’t think so.

But then the next day I was bleeding in my boxers, so that took some of the wind out of my sails. The next day, when I woke up I felt very sick to my stomach and couldn’t keep anything I ate in me. Also no great improvements had come in the night, so that afternoon I confessed to my host sister. Keep in mind that some description was required, despite the fact that I had looked up “hemorrhoid” in Katzner’s – she didn’t know exactly what they were, in the same blissful innocence I remember. Also keep in mind that the only word for “butt” in Russian that I know (or knew at the time) is жопа, which is a swear-word. So my sister enjoyed that.

Then a doctor came to examine me, and we become very close friends. I was at least reassured that this doctor's examination was both probitive and hands-on. Also by the fact that this doctor was a woman of approximately eighty years. But she wasn't sure – not being a «specialist» - so we went to the hospital. It seemed to me she already had a pretty good grip of the situation, but what do I know? I rode in an ambulance, feeling moderately silly (I was just sitting on a chair inside), though the ambulance-driver getting fed up with traffic and using his siren not-very-successfully to make better time was enjoyable.

Then a fairly joial middle-aged male doctor got into the whole affair. He told me what I had been doing was exactly wrong, so I have spent the last two days lying in bed. Which is not that bad. Also I recieved a cream. Things already seem to be improving. No one should worry. Mom.

I'm hungry!