Conclusions to a Year Abroad

When there is trap
Set up for you
In every corner of this town..

Fate, chance and free will. Yes, Melville had it right, it’s these three that tumble around and mess with the flow of things. Some things happen by chance (good things are serendipitous, bad things are accidental), something things are predetermined (pleasant predetermination means God loves you, unpleasant predetermination means…?), and some things you-in-all-your-limitedness get to choose.

That’s what I was thinking about after the Belarusian military put me on a train to Minsk because they caught me in Belarus without a transit visa.

I thought about that, and I also thought about the number of times that my host mother told me that it would be “absolutely no problem” to take this train to the Ukraine; that, in fact, "they do not even check passports at the border, and sometimes you don’t even notice you’ve crossed the border because it happens around dawn”.

Dawn is when the military got on the train.
Dawn is when they meticulously checked/stamped passports.
Dawn is when I was given 30 seconds to grab my bag and get the hell off the train – or else!

When there's a trap set up for you
In every corner of your room,

And so you learn the only way to go is
Through the roof.

Was this fate, or chance? It was fate a month earlier, when I left Saint-Petersburg to renew my visa in Helsinki and discovered that, due to international passport laws, what I thought would be a 3 day trip ended up being a two week trip. But what of it? Sure I didn’t have enough clothes… but I ended up with a whole journey, meeting a couple random Canadian opera singers and an architecture student, following them to Tallinn, where we met a crazy old hippy named Yura who lived permanently in the hostel. Yura had long white hair, small round sunglasses, American flag shower shoes and a persistent wish that I go with him to an Estonian strip club.

And then onto Riga, a city which is nothing short of an Art Nouveau masterpiece, where I ended up hanging out with some guy who’s “wife” became a “serious girlfriend”, and whose “serious girlfriend” became just a “girlfriend”, and finally not mentioned at all (drink by drink) as he catcalled other birds. I lost track of this catcaller somewhere and spent the meanwhile almost getting into a fight with some random kid a full head shorter and 40 pounds less than I (and a death wish!) who seemed to think I was dancing with his girl; but I did indeed run into the same - though much drunker - cat sometime around dawn as I was returning to the hostel and he gave me a million dollar grin as he closed the door behind him and the three girls he’d just then led into his room.

Oooo ooo ooo through the roof, underground!

Or back in Helsinki, where I was reintroduced to civilization (Russians are a long way from it), where people are exceedingly polite and helpful and human. Every day I’d sit for an hour or so with the Finns in the sauna and discuss sauna strategy. The secret is getting a delicious Karhu (fantastic Finnish beer, recognizable by the grizzly bear on the front) and pouring it over the coals so the whole sauna fills with beer steam and the yeast burns and everything smells like fresh baking bread and I, too, bake. Normally, they tell me, they also roast sausage on the coals, but they couldn’t understand why I thought that was a funny thing to say.

And as we're crossing border after border,
We realize that difference is none.
It's underdogs who, and if you want it,
You always have to make your own fun.

But that’s just it. You get your fate, or your roll of the dice, and then it's up to you how you decide to respond to the snake eyes or the double sixes. Which is why I started to get really excited about going to Minsk—despite the circumstances: pulled from a train, without means of getting more money and a little under 100$ in cash—because chance/fate had not screwed me yet. It worked in Riga. It worked in Tallinn. It worked in Helsinki. And it got me to Saint-Petersburg in the first place. When the hell was I ever going to see Minsk? Where is Minsk anyway?

So that’s the most important thing I learned with my year abroad. You get your lot from a whole set of circumstances you have no control of, but whether you see it as serendipitous luck or bad luck—well that’s completely up to you.

It’s sort of an extension of that quote that Quincy taught me, which her father taught her which, at some point, he got from Abraham Lincoln: “People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

Just like their meanings, they lay between the lines:
Between the borders the real countries hide.

And so I finally made it to Odessa after sweet talking the Transportation Office ladies in my well-practiced I-am-pathetic-please-help-me American accent and enjoyed this hot strange land of gold, stray cats and beaches before getting on my flight home.

Eighteen hours later I had another one of those moments. You know, one of those moments I described earlier that only occur when you’re flying .3 miles per second thousands of feet in the air and things get plainold contemplative. And I stared out the window at the mountains in east county San Diego. A storm had just blown over and the residual patches of rain left six or seven quarter rainbows poking straight up out of the tops of mountains... and I was really happy to be home.

Серебряные зайцы водят хоровод!

Russians are Relativists

I’ve been thinking a lot about a hypothetical creature. This creature lives for a thousand years, and has a memory of a thousand years. It watches humankind as generations upon generations pass. What does it see? To it, we appear to be a species that is constantly spawning like any other animal, and making the same mistakes over and over again. We as a generation must learn the very same lessons as the previous generation. So to this hypothetical creature, we seem a blind species, bumbling about in the fog of the limitations of our memory—but we have one defense: monuments. Through our monuments (whether they are architecture, literature, art, or now—the internet), we have the ability to set place markers, reminders which say “Hey there, next generation. Here is where we left off. Take a good look at this stuff and continue from this point."

We humans are the only creatures on this planet that have the capacity for this sort of memory, and—unfortunately—we often fail to acknowledge that the very fact that we have this power means we have a duty to use it responsibly.

Is history just what we say it is?—or does it exist in a true form beyond ourselves?

It’s a really tough question to answer because, on the one hand, of course we as human beings write our own histories, and thus all our histories are inherently flawed and only portray the limited perspective of the author, or even firsthand participant. (Note: even the participant has a very limited perspective on what he or she has witnessed; history is the sum total of human choices, natural phenomena, and whatever divine phenomena—thus, even without accepting divine phenomena, we have too many variables for the human mind to fully take account). One can’t help but mention 1984 in this regard, where the argument between the captive protagonist and the authoritarian government hinges upon the retroactive creation of history: whether any history is indeed “true”, or whether it is just what we all agree to have happened. At the heart of this argument is the question of absolutism and relativism.

Acknowledging that humans can never know perfectly what has taken place, and therefore every history is to some extent a confabulation, we can nonetheless endeavor to write histories as accurately as we possibly can, given the resources available—which is exactly what Orwell’s thought police do not do; they, on the other hand, assume that since there is some subjectivity in the compilation of history, the slippery slope fallacy allows them to invent histories entirely. Thus, if everyone agrees the world is flat, then the world is flat. They see no responsibility to do their best to be as accurate as possible. They do not believe in any “true” version of history outside of human experience. And for them, inevitably, the ends always justify the means.

Russians put ketchup in all the wrong places.

Eggs. Rice. Vegetables. Pizza. All places ketchup should not be.

But I expected that. I knew when I came to Russia that I wasn't doing it for the food. I mean, it's Russian food! They eat beats and cabbage and potatoes and mushrooms and all those other things that grow underground and survive long winters and heavy snows. Heck, if I wanted delicious food and good weather I would've gone to Italy [someone please remind me: why didn't I go to Italy??].

I was wrong. Russian food is delicious, and a testament to the saying that limitations inspire innovation. Borsch, blini, pickled tomatoes, "salads" (which generally contain meat and potato, no lettuce), jam, fresh bread and Russian cheese, yum.

Fine fine pickle brine,
Salt and sweet intertwine!
Together we can dine divine..
I'll be yours if you'll be pickle

Bureaucratic Sharks

Dealing with Russian bureaucracy is a lot like being mauled by a shark. It's awful, messy, painful and terrifying - but if you survive, at least you have a cool story/scar to tell people about at cocktail parties.

I say this on the eve of my attempts to get:

1. Paid for my job.
2. A Russian tourist VISA for the summer.
3. A Chinese VISA for the summer as well.

Wish me luck.

Consulting Ghosts

I've applied to Brown as a transfer student for Fall 2009, and my response should come from Admissions any day now. I'm not sure what I should do if I'm accepted - I have great friends at Vassar (I really miss my pals), it's a beautiful school, great reputation, great professors (whom I've already located), the departments I'm interested in may be stronger at Vassar than they are at Brown, it's safe, comfortable, and I just picked out my classes for next semester and they look fantastic:

Art 385 - The Art of Nature (Peck/Lucic)
Eng 328 - Literature of the American Renaissance (Peck)
Art 370 – Rome of the Imagination (Adams)
Art 331 – Durer and Rembrandt (Kuretsky)
Eng 235 - Old English (Amodio)
[Audit] Russ 371 Myth of Saint-Petersburg (Firtich)

I will be sad not to take this schedule. Not to mention I'm pretty sure I am going to win another English Department prize this coming fall, which means more money for books, and more pleasant things to write on my curriculum vitae. Moreover, Tatyana tells me it is better to be a big fish in a small pond than a nobody in the ocean.

So, when my Tarot cards failed to give me an answer I could reasonably decipher, I went to consult with my main man - the local hero - my idol, Peter the Great, and ask him what he'd do. Generally, it's important to be careful what sort of advice one asks of Peter; for example, when drinking, it is never a good idea to ask this man (who, along with his colleagues, drank so much in his lifetime that the stereotype of the "vodka guzzling Russian" lives on to this day and whose death was the result of slow, painful kidney failure, followed by a gangrenous urinary tract infection, peeing blood, and the removal of extraneous fluids via whatever was the 18th century equivalent of a giant syringe) whether or not it is a good idea to have another beer.

However in matters of war, leadership, vision, actualizing potential, and building cities in awkward places, he's really quite good. So I went to the grave of Peter the Great and asked:

"What do I do if I get in, Peter? Should I go?"

And he sighed, and stared, and mentioned something about the frivolity of asking the man who changed the capital of Russia whether or not to change schools.

"And if I am denied?"

To which he replied: "Work harder, sleep less, burn the land before your enemies, and never, ever let that asshole Charles XII dictate the terms of defeat".

"Victory" Day

Some weeks ago our teacher asked us if anyone knew what День Победы ("Day of Victory") was. I joked that it was the day for dinner (the word for "dinner" sounds similar to the word for "victory") and got a good laugh.

Unfortunately, I had never heard the word "victory" before, and — jokes aside — actually didn't know what the holiday was for; so I asked. This was my teacher's response:

You don't know?
—No.
Are you serious?
—Yes.
You're joking, right?
—Really, I don't know. Seriously.
Do you know what WWII is?
—I am American. We Americans don't know anything.

At this point in my public humiliation, a friend of mind just whispered it to me in English and I spent the rest of the class simmering simmering simmering, outraged to be asked whether or not I knew what WWII was and condescended to for not knowing a word that wasn't at all obvious, nor was I the only one ignorant of it.

They say Necessity is the best teacher — I think Humiliation wins a close second.

Well here we are, it's May 9th at last : Den Pabyedi!















The "Day of Victory" is so called by the Russians who lost some 23 million soldiers and civilians in WWII before embarking upon another half decade of Stalinist repression and persecution.

No wonder I had trouble understanding why the end of WWII would be considered a "victory day" for Russia: the name demonstrates the residual, Soviet revisionistic view of history with sickening irony. 23 million dead civilians and a ruined country is not a victory by anyone's standards (except Stalin's, for whom the ends always justify the means).

In America, where WWII casualties are around half a million, there is a similar holiday at the end of May known as "Memorial Day".

God, however, is a true lover of irony. I'm not one to invoke God, but today I really think something was there. I watched a blue sky darken and an enormous black cloud billow up from the Gulf of Finland and spill over the Admiralty into Palace Square where, at first, gusts of winds inspired whirlwinds of dust, followed by heavy, heavy rain just as the Parade was arriving.




Ironic fact number 2: Tatyana, who is always reminding me not to forget my jacket, or wear a hat etc., forgot her jacket today.
















I did publicly drink a Coke in honor of Victory Day.

Found a baby bear

Held it... carefully.


He makes little baby-bear grunts.