Now that I have a working computer, I just write worthless things.

So I’ve been reading Abby’s blogs about Archangelsk and it makes me really excited to be potentially traveling alone for awhile. I can’t decide, however, when I do this enormous amount of traveling, whether or not I want to bring stuff to read in Russian or in English. Maybe both. My plan was to read great Russian literature, but the language question is the hard part. I’m pretty sure that if I had a dictionary next to me, I’m fairly competent enough in Russian to read books. However, the English versions would save me much irritation. However, I am going to have A LOT of time, and reading in English isn’t going to be great for my language development. Anyway.

Some guys are here putting in a new window in Nadya’s room. It’s loud and the cats are scared. This, however, gives me an excuse to close my door and not do anything but read or do homework or plan my course schedule or anything, really, except eating.

Also Karrina all of a sudden absolutely LOVES me. She’s in my room all the time, she jumps into my lap whenever I’m sitting in the kitchen, she slept at the foot of my bed, she’s been rubbing up against my leg, purring a lot, etc. And the thing is, I don’t think she’s in heat right now (which was the explanation as to why she was so affectionate before). We’re totally in love. Maybe she knows I’m leaving soon and wants to get in some quality time before I take off for bigger and better things.

Further update: Just got back from Tanya’s. It was very nice, actually. I really liked her mom and her little sister. We looked at pictures, had pilmeni, blini, and tea, and watched this very long (hour and half) video tour of St. Petersburg. I then looked at more pictures and various things. We talked about various natural disasters, and she showed me her belly dancing costumes. I realize she’s sort of crazy sometimes, but I think I have a number of weird friends like that. I can’t really say no to anyone, so anyone that’s persistent enough is probably going to end up being my friend. So it is with Tanya. I don’t really know what happened in that process of us becoming friends, but it’s fine. I don’t think she has that many friends, actually, so I can be her friend for my last month and a half. And even once I’m back home. Actually, sometimes I think I’d have better relationships with some of my friends if we were to put 13 time zones between us. Anyway, the point of that is, Tanya and her family are really very sweet, and I had a good time.

And I think because of that on the bus on the way back I was having one of my “I love Russia” moments. Where I was on the bus listening to awful techno, and moving very slowly, and all these Russians were sitting around me, but it still felt quite peaceful and nice.

This was all entirely destroyed when I returned home. I am now currently in one of my “get me the hell out of this country” moments.

So I came back, and naturally I was offered food. This is fine, this happens often, it’s sort of like “how are you?” in English. But then my host mother asked what I was doing, where I was, etc, so I told her that I had this friend from our history class and I went to visit her. And she flips out and tells me that it’s totally unsafe to be going to this girl’s house in a region that I don’t know and did I ask Elisabeth about this, don’t I have to do a form, didn’t Elisabeth talk about this during orientation, what if they had wanted to kill me, I need to give her an exact address of where this is located and shouldn’t be anywhere when it’s dark. First of all, Tanya is this like 17 year old girl who is, although somewhat strange, completely harmless. Second of all, I AM NOT 12 YEARS OLD. I’m not socially inept, I know how to read people, I’m not going to some ax-murderers house (the chainsaw story makes this point somewhat ironic). I am a fully functioning adult who is INTELLIGENT enough to be making her own decisions. I’m not completely clueless, I am, in fact, able to get myself out of situations (INCLUDING those with creepy men, this is actually not at all related to the subject but just so everyone knows I’m not stupid and not about to get myself into a situation that I can’t get out of, ie being raped by some creepy Russian), and Tanya is not what I would call a threatening situation. They walked me to the stop, made sure I got on the bus, etc. This is a completely fine, normal, and actually GOOD situation (interactions with Russians that are only sometimes insane!), I don’t need to be treated like some stupid 12 year old that’s going to get into the sketchy car with the guy that has candy. JESUS CHRIST.

I knew I would have problems with this lack of independence in Russia, but why do all of the other American students here have so much more freedom than I do?

I have a lot to do but seriously can’t bring myself to do it. I don’t want to do anything but just sit and watch movies (which I can’t do) or read a book (also can’t do). I have a very strong desire to look at an atlas, as maps are always interesting and more or less understandable in all languages. Tomorrow Sonya and I are going to find the new wi-fi café, I also plan on finding the belii dom (white house, which is the main Irkutsk State University library, and is actually yellow. I don’t remember why it’s the white house and not the yellow house, I think it was painted over or something, but yellow house is also slang for a mental hospital or something). I’m going to do lots of work there and hopefully hide there for long periods of time when I don’t want to be in the apartment. I actually have 2 ten page research papers coming up, so that’s a really convenient excuse to just live there for like a really long time.

Did I mention that I’ve gone completely off the deep end? I think I have mentioned this before, actually. Well my host mother told me that in Washington, D.C., they already put up the giant Christmas tree. And I went on this long sort of rant about how it is WAY to early for that, it’s always unacceptable to do anything Christmasy before Thanksgiving, and even after Thanksgiving, it’s still early if it’s not December. This, of course, makes me a COMPLETE hypocrite because I’ve already started listening to Christmas music. I don’t know how this happened, usually I absolutely refuse to do anything like this before December and even then I usually don’t get around to it until my finals are over (giving me, like, a week to prepare for Christmas). But maybe this year when Christmas comes around I’ll actually be ready to stop listening to Christmas music, instead of when that usually happens in like mid-January.

Now I sort of want to be home for Christmas.