HAPPY HOLIDAYS, FROM RUSSIA…
I cannot believe that it is Christmas already. It doesn’t seem possible –mostly because I just don’t feel the spirit being so far away from home. The majority of it is that the weather here is actually pretty nice, better than what I’m use to in Colorado around this time of year and a lot warmer than what you guys are experiencing now. Plus the normal holidays that come before Christmas, like Halloween and Thanksgiving, sort of just passed me by. My whole time clock is thrown off here. In fact, my birthday was on the 17th and I still don’t feel like it took place, at all. Is that part of culture shock or is that just growing older? I’m not sure.
So nothing exciting has taken place recently, which is why there is a lack of posting being done on my part. I’ve just wrapped up my first semester of teaching, because with the holidays approaching they take time off as well. The University will have ten whole days off, starting next Friday, to celebrate New Year’s and the Orthodox Christmas. During this time, I’m not sure what is going to happen with me. As I don’t have a family here or many friends, I guess I’ll spend most of the time writing and thinking about my future plans. Once January hits, I think that I’ll realize how much time I have left here and what I need to start doing to prepare for my return home –let’s face it, I will return home and have to start the rest of my life right away and I’ll be doing it from scratch. Anyway, the only real thing I have planned for the vacation time here is to go to Moscow to take the GRE. Yeah, how fun! Needless to say, I will be spending all next week studying non-stop for that stupid test, and then on January 2nd I will leave Rostov.
My trip to Moscow will only be for about five days, which puts me back in Rostov on Christmas Day. Not sure what, if anything, I’ll be doing for that day, but as it isn’t my day I don’t think it will effect me much. In fact, I think I will be happy to see December end because since Saturday, I’ve been in an awfully bad mood. The whole homesickness has set in, and to make matters worse an actually physical illness side-swiped me on Wednesday. Now I pride myself in being a pretty independent American male but as my mother, grandmother, aunt Nola, and now Alina, can contest to when I’m sick I am the biggest baby in the world. Granted this wasn’t any small head cold or stomach cramp, it was more like a tsunami hit my gut. I was out cold most of the day, only waking to…you don’t want or need the details, just know it wasn’t pretty. As you could probably guess, or know from your own personal experience, being sick in another country, when you’re out of your element to begin with, totally sucks. At home if I were sick and my mom wasn’t around to take care of me (god forbid), I’d have gone to the store, bought medicine and such, and returned home and taken care of myself. Yet here, I had no such luxury. I had made up my mind that I was just going to ride it out until my friend Alina called and said she would bring me medicine and such. Now I won’t give away any ‘secret Russian remedy,’ but I will say that I never would have thought to take some of the things she gave me for the stomach flu… It worked in the end, however. Today I feel much, much better. Just hope it’s the last illness to visit me during my time gone.
I realize that that is probably too much about my bowel problems, but you are reading my blog. If you find this an inappropriate topic for a blog, than perhaps you should check out some other ones: I hear there is a nice Republican, ‘We Love George W. Bush,’ blog only a few more hits away from mine. Feel free to check that one out anytime. As you can guess, I must being feeling better because my smartass sense of humor is fully loaded. Let me see, I should change the subject again…but I was always yelled at about my abrupt transitions, so I will try to make this one as smooth as possible…perhaps I will now speak a little about my birthday.
My birthday was okay, I guess. Nothing spectacular. But it was my fault that nothing special took place. You see, as I said early, I’ve been in one of my funky moods -the whole I hate the rest of the world, people are the worse creatures on the earth, I just wish that a comment would fall from the heavens and strike me dead kind. So as you all can contest too, I am not the best person to hang around when I’m in such a mood. Knowing this, I took it upon myself to extradite myself from others; yet, this was seen as somewhat rude. Russians aren’t closed off like Americans, so they turn to friends/family at all times. Well if I were to turn to friends/family at all times…Jesus, the thought frightens me to death =). I’m kidding of course, but I do value my personal time and my personal time also is the time for me to do creative work, which helps me when I’m in such spirits. Okay, I digressed again, I’m sorry. Let me get back to the subject at hand, my birthday. Simply because of my (shall we say) fowl mood, I kept telling everyone not to even worry about my birthday. Of course some of them took my advice and some didn’t. Overall it was alright. I was treated to a lovely lunch at a Chinese restaurant by Galina and was also given a few nice presents from her as well. Then because I hadn’t made up my mind as what to do about my friends until 5pm that night, I ended up inviting only a few people to my room to drink. Well because of my fantastic ability to plan a part well in advanced, only three people showed up. It was Alina, Lucy, and Lucy’s husband Mustafa. It was a grand ol’ time! (If you didn’t catch the sarcasm in that statement, well then just forget it…) I spent the whole night listening to them speak Russian, when they all know English, and drinking drink after drink but to no avail –I didn’t even get drunk! I mean now this of course wasn’t the worst birthday in my life, but it wasn’t one I’ll be writing home about any time soon…Damn it! Look what I just did. I guess I am writing home about it, aren’t I? So it wasn’t horrible, and at least I found out which ‘friends’ here care about me. The only two are Lucy and Alina, without either of them I don’t know what I would do…
Well that is about it for now. I don’t know the next possible time I will post, but it probably won’t be until after the New Year and my trip to Moscow. That is unless something dramatically exciting happens to me in the next week. For now, anyway, I wish you all the very happiest of holidays (I refuse to say Merry Christmas, because some of you may be Jewish, Muslim, Atheists, whatever and I don’t want to offend). I hope that everything at home is wonderful for all of you, and that you start the New Year off with a bang! I miss all of you guys –yes, even those of you who don’t e-mail me regularly –and wish you all the best. Take Care and I’ll see you in April!!
James
P.s. Also a nightly event that takes place in Russia is fireworks! I swear to whatever-power-there-be that when you see them every night for three months in a row they somehow loose their meaning. The reason why I state this is because just as I am closing this blog, at 10pm, a bunch of fireworks (artillery shells) are exploding outside my window. This happens every night here, and I mean every single night. I feel like WWIII is taking place outside and I am oblivious to it. That’s life in Russia…
Beware: There is Some Bombastic Language Found Within…
It seems so odd that I’ve been away from home for almost three months now, and that I don’t have a lot of time left here –well sometimes it feels like it will be forever until I’m home, but that’s just not true. Soon I’ll be boarding the plane home and this whole experience will be a thing of the past. Trust me, after a few days of being home, I’ll want to be back here in Russia but until then we just won’t go there…
Yes, I know I haven’t been as good about updating this as I had planned on and many of you probably are wondering what the hell is going on in my life here. Well let me catch you up to date. Truthfully, nothing new has really happened to me. My life here is pretty day-to-day average. I wake up, eat breakfast, go to the department and e-mail home and do some prep work for my classes, and then on the days that I teach I hold class. Pretty standard stuff, nothing out of the ordinary. This is my life, I just happen to be living it in another country right now. It seems pretty everyday to me now, which I never thought it would. In fact, for about the last two weeks, I’ve been waking up in the morning feeling at home – it is such a weird feeling to open your eyes thinking you’re at home and then realize you are millions of miles away. Now I don’t want to sound like I’m going to call Russia home anytime soon, but its nice to feel at ease here. Time seems to go by faster when I feel this way, as opposed to feeling like this place is foreign. I have grown rather accustomed to my Russian life, and sometimes it petrifies me to think about leaving and saying good-bye to all those I have met her and befriended.
Other than becoming as adjusted as I think I will here, I have been preparing/studying for the GRE. In January, I’ll be going to Moscow with my friend Alina and we’ll both be taking the GRE. Now if you have never studied for this, let me tell you it’s the biggest pain in the ass. I have never felt so stupid in my life, as I do when I sit looking over the ‘general vocabulary’ that I’ll be tested over. I mean seriously, who the hell chose the words for this damn test? Most of these words sound more foreign to me than the Russian language does. I, and I’m sure most of you, have never used some of these words in everyday life. Well unless you walk around saying, “Oh, I wish I can become amalgamated (to unite one in body) with that person over there.” These words are just not used in everyday life, and most of them make me feel that I know nothing about the English language. This is very saddening and disheartening for me since I am an English Major –poor Alina must be going mad trying to comprehend some of the dumb words found in her second language.
Not only is it bad enough to be challenged in an area that I feel strong in, its almost unconceivable to think that I’m also going to be tested over a subject that I feel like an anachronism in –Math. I have a real diffidence to math, because I was never good at it. Whenever I look at numbers, I just feel like a real dupe and I pray (in a very loose sense of the term) that the answer will just appear. It doesn’t matter what sort of math it is, I’m just no good at it. I could study every second from now till I take the test and it wouldn’t help me at all because I’m such a neophyte at it. (I apologize for all the strange words, but maybe using them in sentences will help me remember them but I doubt that.) Perhaps maybe they will give me ‘dumb people’s GRE’ instead of the regular one. Standardized test are the worst and should be illegal! I fear what this one test will do with my future, because if I don’t score well I’ll probably be back at Hollywood Video for the rest of my life –oh just kill me now…
See, life in Russia is no different than life in America. You wake up, reluctantly crawl out of bed and get ready for your day, work all day and feel like nothing was accomplished, and then spend the rest of your free time worrying over something that you MUST do just in order to better yourself. This is human life and no matter who you are or where you’re from, its like this. Oh well, maybe one day far in the future I won’t be worried about such stupid shit (this is NOT a GRE word but I’ll use it nonetheless), but I really doubt that. So that is the update on my life, told you it wasn’t very interesting… Also, I’ve been so out of the loop that I have almost completely forgotten that my birthday is on Saturday, and I have no idea how I’ll celebrate it!!!! Hopefully, I’ll get really drunk and just forget about everything but knowing my luck, I’ll spend the night drunk thinking about how to add fractions… Jesus is this what life really is?
My Philosophical Viewpoint on Life…
Reader’s Note: This post has nothing to do with my stay in Russia or any good/bad experience I have had. It simply deals with some of the shit that is floating around in my mind. You may agree or disagree with what I am saying or after you read it feel that you could give a crap about what I say, but that isn’t the point. I needed to put these words on paper and share them with someone. Perhaps some of you will remotely agree or can relate to what I’ve said in someway. But all in all, you’ve been warned so you can’t say I didn’t at least do that…
Being away from home, now almost three months, and approaching my next year of life, I am left thinking that what is this all for. Sometimes, while I’m either communicating with someone here or simply mulling over life, I am left wondering if anything that I’m experiencing or learning will ever benefit anything in this world or even in my own individual life. Although I would like to think that I’m some how different here than I am at home, its not the case –perhaps, I’ll never change. I may walk this earth until the day that I die, and be the same person I was when I started.
Fear takes control of me almost everyday, which then spends me deeper into my own head and no one will ever understand what takes place inside of it. Being someone who likes to create, and who thinks he is able to create pretty well, this lack of being able to express myself fully is a real annoyance. How I would just for someone to understand me fully, but that is somehow important because I don’t fully understand all the aspects of my mind. I am not an intelligent person, and how can I ever expect for someone to comprehend the insanity taking place within my mind. However, I am no one, and that each and ever single person on this earth has their own issues and most likely they are much worse than mine.
Am I selfish that I would just like to find one person who will grasp the whole spectrum of who I am, or who I want to be. I just want to live and be something to someone. Now, I know that I mean something to my family and maybe even some of my friends, but for some reason that isn’t enough for me. Or could it be that its too much for me? To have so many people interested in me is a hindrance for me to grow as an individual. I often feel that I have to be someone else for each and every person I know. For my family I am something/someone different than I am say for my friends, peers, students, random people I meet, and pretty much every single Russian I’ve meet. No one knows who James really is, but than again I don’t think I know who James really is. Nor do I think I want to. Maybe James is a weak, incompetent person, who relies on others for his livelihood. This scares the hell out of me. Why can’t I rely on myself, because when it comes down to it that’s all I have.
The randomness of this writing will probably confuse anyone who reads it, and most likely by this time in the writing many have given up reading it. These philosophical questions, which life is full of, really are unanswerable. Why do people create? Because we all have something that haunts us, some pain that is far too hard to deal with within the contours of our minds, so we expel it through art hoping that others will relate. Yet, they cannot truly relate to it because it is not their own feelings. Yes, they may understand or feel that they share a similar feeling but how can they fully comprehend what another human creates/feels. Each human, each race, each nationality has different feelings and problems that it would be impossible for an outsider to see things the same way.
Maybe this thought processes that my mind seems to be stuck in at the moment, although its always been dealing with this in one way or another, is the catalysts to my own doom. This may be what I as an individual am looking to unravel in my life and if I ever am able to completely understand it myself, I may not be able to live in this physical world. Don’t worry, because I’ll stand up to this pain and wake up to fight another day. What I am simply trying to express with these words is that each individual has their own thoughts like this, or their own pain, so why do we all individually feel that our own problems are some how more important than those of our fellow man. Even this is too far beyond my own ability to answer that I will not try to.
I am a pessimistic introvert and this maybe what makes it so hard for me to communicate clearly and coherently with other humans, but I also find it so damn frustrating when others just won’t respect the fact that what I’m thinking and dealing with in my own mind is my business and no one else’s. Okay, I understand that I just completely contradicted myself by saying that. But the truth of the matter is that I do want to be able to open up to someone; yet, this is so hard when I am not allowed to really deal with my own thoughts because whenever I go running inside, people are offended by me or think that I am being rude or dishonest. It’s not the case, but before I can clearly demonstrate or explain something, I myself must come to terms with it.
Thoughts, feelings, words, everything that the human spirit must contend with on a daily basis make it so hard to live. Yet somehow, we do. It may be that we are in fact the dumbest species on the planet, or that we are just to afraid to face what meets us after this life –I have no fucking clue, and I do believe that no one does. Millions of people on this planet wake up every single day, and what for? We all have pain, we all have joys, and we all know that sooner or later it will end, but what will this all mean when it does end? Will any of it matter? Anything that I do, or that you do, will it change the world? I seriously doubt that, but we still go on living. I guess that’s why we are here, just to live and experience everything, both good and bad, that this crappy, beautiful world has to offer us… We are all human, which means that we are all dealing with unpleasant things that we wish we could change, but instead of trying to help our fellow man we are too consumed with only helping ourselves. Yet this in and of itself makes us all miserable, so why can’t we all just learn to live and let live. I guess my final words will be these: Next time that you thing of how horrible your life is or how alone you are, just remember that all over the world people are dealing with just as bad, possibly worse, situations than yourself are and they feel that they are alone too. It’s the human condition and something we all must face no matter who you are, where you’re from, or what type of personality you are.
A Hot Roof...
Here's the scenario: I sat in my room last night, after holding my TOEFL class, and was writing a short story on my laptop. The writing had taken on its own life and I was completely enthralled with it. My mind was wondering over what would happen next in the story or what the hell the story was going to be about in the first place. You see, I've had a new feeling of inspiration lately, especially when it comes to stories, so the last few nights I've been working on my writing. There I was then just writing and enjoying the whole processes; I wasn't paying attention to anything except that. I had been writing for about an hour when all the sudden I heard a sound that was not natural for the atmosphere of my room. Of course, at first, I blew it off as coming from the music that I had playing on the laptop, but then I heard it again and knew for sure it wasn't from the music. The sound was the mixture between a pop and a hiss. Deep inside, I knew this couldn't be good. Not wanting to, I sat my laptop down on the couch and looked focused my attention on the room. Again, I heard the sound this time a little louder, but this time I also saw, from the corner of my eyes, a flash. I had just enough time to tilt my head up and witness as the light fixture in my room popped loudly sending sparks flying through the air, right on top of me I might add, and then catch on fire. Yes, the light fixture actually caught on fire, I'm not making this up. Luckily, I've had my fair share of close calls with fires, so this didn't frighten me too much. I jumped up from the couch, well that actually happened when I was being attacked by the sparks, and ran to the light switch turning it off. Now I don't know if this was the smartest thing to do -I'm not an electrician- but the building still stands so it might have helped. Once the power was off, I ran under the fixture and saw that two small flames were enjoying their moment. Yet with one swift gust of my breath I extinguished both flames...
Okay, I thought to myself, you may have avoided your room being the first to catch on fire but what if there is some sort of electrical problem that will make the whole building catch on fire. This thought rolled over in my head for sometime, but what was I to do? If I ran downstairs and tried to tell anyone they wouldn't understand what I was saying and I sure in the hell couldn't explain what just happened in Russian. So I did what I do best here and that was to relay on someone else. I tried calling Lucy, who lives close to me and is my big sister, for she would come and help. But damn the luck, she was already asleep and had her phone turned off. I finally got hold of Galina, who called down to the lobby and told them what was taking place. They sent a stout man to check on it. As I opened the door of my room for the man, the thought crossed my mind that he looked like Mario (you know, from the Nintendo Game). He walked in suddenly, saying hello, and then walked to the light switch. Being like any man, thinking that the other person was just imagining what had just taken place, he switched on the light switch again. This only caused the fixture to spark again, popping ever so lightly. Mario, let's just call him that, looked back at me and smiled shrugging his shoulders. He turned the light off and walked out the room, motioning me to wait one minute. When he returned, he carried a chair in with him, which he positioned underneath the fixture. Climbing on top of the chair and then standing on his tip toes, he inspected the fixture. Mubbling something which of course I could not decipher, he climbed off the chair and walked out the room again. When he returned, he wore a bright (well at least in spirits) smile on his face and was chuckling under his breath. Knowing that I didn't speak Russian, because Galina had made them aware of that when she called them, he began to speak with me. He spoke very slowly and pronounced each of his words clearly and slowly. This did help me in comprehending what he was saying. He told me, in Russian of course, that there was nothing to worry about, and that they would fix it in the morning. Using not only his language but also his movements, he informed me that I was to drop my key off in the lobby in the morning and sign a book, which would give them permission to come into my room and fix it. I understood him, I actually understood all he was telling me and it wasn't just because he was playing sherades. Certain words and phrases he used I was familiar with, so the whole meaning was there for me. Although I was pretty upset by what had happened because I had had a horrible day anyway, I was happy that I was able to comprehend a whole conversation in Russian.
The room is fine now, although I still don't have light in it but that is to be fixed today; no one was hurt, unless you consider my nerves being shot a form of pain; and I was able to understand what I was being told, when I know very little Russian. I guess it could have been worse...isn't that what you're suppose to tell yourself when things are crappy but you're still alive?
