We've Shared a Life: America Meets 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?

posted by James @ 12:20 PM