Metro Mayonnaise

…and Christmas Lasagna!

The holiday has come to an end, at least for the foreigners hiding out in the Ural Mountains [Hills more like it], but for the Russians things are just getting started. We’ve already finished off three bottles of champagne [with just as many still in the fridge, waiting for next year, or next weekend… whatever comes first!], consumed roughly 10 kilograms of chocolate, opened all the gifts and read Luke chapter 2 from the Holy Bible. So I guess you could say that we’ve done ours, now you Russia do yours! Actually, joking aside, Christmas this year was by far the best I’ve ever had in Russia. Well, since last year sucked big time [no need to dig deeper into that bad box of drunken Chinese people and other disturbing Siberian truths] maybe it’s no surprise that our dinner on Sunday night and breakfast together on Monday morning won the challenge.

I ate enough for five Russian villagers from Yakutsk in October trying to store fat for yet another freezing winter. I drank enough for five Russian villagers from Yakutsk trying to morally prepare themselves for yet another dark, long, freezing winter. And that was great. I wonder why I don’t do stuff like that more often. After all, it’s well known all over the world that this town [Sverdlovsk/Yekaterinburg/New Jerusalem/Old York] is famous for two things:

Number 1: This is the place where people eat more mayonnaise than anywhere else on the planet. It’s even in the Guinness World Record book, you can check it out. Yes, I’m sure all of you are looking at me like a crazy woman [and you should, comrades] but it’s true. Where I grew up, in a small country in a small part of the world that goes by the code name “European Union”, we only had two kinds of mayonnaise – regular and diet. That’s it. In Russia, that would be a crime, to only have two kinds of mayonnaise, of which one is DIET! No no no. In Russia not so much. They have so many different kinds of mayonnaise that any foreigner stepping inside a shop will be disgusted when he or she or it finds out that there are more diversity found in this dairy product than in any else. And that’s if it’s a small shop. If it’s a big shop… I can’t help you, I’m sorry. And I might add – I’ve never eaten mayonnaise in Russia, never the less here.

Number 2: This town has the smallest metro in the world. That’s also in the Guinness World Record book, all in all it’s five tiny stations and I think it’s faster to walk than ride it if you’re going in that direction. It’s also pretty ugly. But I’ve only been on it twice and both times I thought it was okay. But then again, I’m not hard to please when it comes to public transportation. If you want to know a secret, I’m actually blissfully happy on a trolleybus stuck in traffic at five o’clock going somewhere, not knowing where. Trolleybuses rock the world – it’s the cleanest way to travel, it’s best for nature. I think Gagarin could’ve built a trolleybus line out in space if only the Soviet Union would’ve allowed him to. Gagarin is so out of this world, he could’ve done it.

In two days, on Thursday, I’m going to Tobolsk. I bought the ticket yesterday, and so I’m going to spend New Years with Gulnara and her family. I can’t wait!!

By the way, I got the best Christmas gifts ever this year – and I know you’re going to be so jealous when I tell you all about them – I received a long, knitted pink scarf from Betsy, Gogol’s “Dead Souls” from Midori [in Russian, duh], Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago” from Jennifer [also in Russian, duh again], a pink stone necklace from Johanna and a cup with an elephant on it from Christian. I gave really good gifts too. However Christmas is not all about the gifts we get. It’s all about the good food and the good alcohol we get to gorge ourselves in without any guilty feelings at all. That’s, my dear comrades, what it’s all about. And you know it.

Happy New Year!

Today when I went to get my tickets at the Lufthansa office for when I’m leaving [Sverdlovsk] and hitting the [home country], I had a wonderfully strange encounter with an office employee. To me people working in offices are like people living on Mars – something I just can’t relate to, all the while deep inside of me I’m fighting myself over whether or not I should go closer or step aside. Mars-people could possible hold the key to the meaning of life, and I could do much good with it, but – what if they drag me in and forbid me from returning to Earth? The office employee I met today was the sweetest, scariest woman I’ve come across in a while. I sometimes come across such folks. She saw where I was going [via Frankfurt] and said: “You know, Europe is such a boring place, I get a huge depression just after three days.” And then she went off on this theme for five minutes. So I replied: “You kind of made me stop wanting to go home there!” She waved her hands wildly in the air: “No, no, see family is the thing that keeps life together! That’s all we’ve got in this world, if we loose them uncles and aunts and fathers and mothers and brothers and cousins and husbands, we’d have nothing! NOTHING!” And so on for five more minutes. I nodded my head, as in agreement, all the while making sounds as if it was news to me. I have noticed that more often than not people do not wish to be replied when they rant, they just want you to prove that they still exist. Prove that somebody still exists is easily done with a grunt or a moan or a sigh or why not, to lighten the mood, a laughter.

Today I’m doing good. Today was the last day of the fall semester, my first semester at the Ural State University, and I had my final test today, in Scientific Speech, my absolute favorite subject. I finished it with flying colors – five [which equals an A in the USA and a MVG in Sweden]! By the way I got the same grade in all of my classes. Something must have happened to me – either I’ve become smart or I’ve started to work hard. To quote Jennifer yesterday, when we were both sitting in the kitchen cramming for the exams: “I would be so smart if I wasn’t so stupid!” Though she is smart, I would rather blame her lack of concentration, not her lack of intelligence, for the fact that she finds it hard to study complex Russian grammar for more than five hours straight. Yes, I know what you’re all thinking, she is indeed a weak woman… As far as my studies goes for this year, I’m done and I could be taking things slowly and just relaxing, had it not been for the theater. I have rehearsals tomorrow (yes, on the day before CHRISTMAS EVE) and on the 25th, 26th, 27th. Though I’m not too bummed out about it, actually I’m starting to like it, now, finally, after three months of fighting it. As ya’ll know, in October I passed the audition in order to get in, and in January there’ll be yet another audition, and if I pass that one, then I’ll be a part of the Student Theater. In the beginning there was 100, they chose 25, and out of these 25 there will only remain 8 or 10 students. I’m not sure just how badly I want to remain. They demand a lot of time from their students, and as you all know, I’m not the kind of person to waste or donate time freely. But anyway – it’s worth a shot! So for my audition, I’m doing the finally scene in Ibsen’s The Dollhouse [the best play ever written] with Nora speaking in Swedish and Helmer in Russian. However, I wasn’t able to choose a man on my own, by my own choice, but the teacher Irina picked this director Aleksey to play with me. Yes, yet another Aleksey. As every day goes by, I get more and more convinced that my future husband will be called Aleksey! Awful, isn’t it? Tomorrow at five I begin rehearse the scene with him. I hope everything will be alright. He seems like a cool enough man, he can be rough [like when asking me when I chose to shout “East” instead of “West”] but in general he’s like all those Russian men – much talk, little else.

The weather changed last weekend, and went from a second fall to a second winter. Snow fell all of the week, we had sun every day [like in Siberia, people, can you imagine!] and now it’s minus 14 and dark outside. But its okay, I got a lot of sunshine today so I’m happy. In general I’m pretty happy right now. This fall has been a long, hard trial for me, and now I finally realize that I made it to the other side. I overcame a whole lot of issues during these four months, things that I never had to face before and never imagined myself capable of dealing with. Now I even like living with Midori, she’s been through a lot in her life, and so have I, and we may be completely different when it comes to most things, but one thing is the same and that’s enough. We both prefer to look at the bright side of life. Some would call it being in denial of our past, but come on, even unfortunate damaged goods people should get the chance to relax and kick it from time to time. When it comes to that I like her. A lot. Things with Jennifer and Betsy are also coming along nicely. I would love to live with Jennifer if I should get the good fortune to stay here yet another year. I think she and I could give each other a lot, she’s the kind of deep person that doesn’t even realize just how deep she is and just what she’s got hiding inside of her. I like people like that. With such people you can play subtle games and make them discover themselves, bit by bit, step by step. I feel like I’m a coal digger working in Ukraine with one of them lights on my forehead, digging deeper and bringing out all the coal. Or gold. Maybe diamonds. Whatever I feel like.

During the past week I’ve had three more meetings with my Academic leader, Aleksey [should I start with a number system, so to keep them all apart?]. I absolutely adore that man. And I have a feeling that he also adores me. In a pure scientific research kind of way, dear comrades, what were you thinking? On Monday he finally dragged it out of me that I’m a writer and he started to laugh: “I knew it! Well, well, now things are getting more interesting…” On Thursday he gave me the best gift anyone has ever given me [except for the computer I’m writing on right now, that my parents blessed me with in August]: he sent a mail to Viktor back in Omsk [director of the Dostoevsky museum] and asked him if he had an electronic version of the book “Dostoevsky and Omsk” that he wrote back in the days. He had! So he burned the files down on a disc for me, plus he copied the entire Siberian notebook from his Complete Collection of the Works of Fyodor Mihailovich Dostoevsky in 30 volumes [I’m so jealose just writing about it makes me turn green] for me. I’ve been wanting to get my hands on that thing since I first arrived in Siberia, and now, now I have it! Also I tipped him off about reading Hjalmar Söderberg’s “Doktor Glas” since it has some interesting parallels with “Crime and Punishment” and he was noticeably impressed with my wide knowledge of literature. Actually, it’s not really my knowledge, but if he wants to believe it, I’m not going to be the one to stop him. It was Natasha that tipped me off about the book, and then I broke the law and downloaded it. Bad girl. But I haven’t read it yet. And maybe I will buy it when I get back to Sweden, and then I’ll erase the file and no tracks will remain. Please, anyone with the police reading this, I’m a young fragile thing not quite in her right mind. You know how it is…

Later tonight I’m heading over to my friend Irochka’s house for something which I should’ve done a long time ago. She knows this awesome hair dresser, who works in a fancy downtown saloon, doing the hair for the rich and famous of the Ural Mountains for a thousand rubles per piece. Of course, that’s money I don’t have. But since she knows him, she can have him come over and do her hair for a mere 300 rubles. At first he wanted 400, but then I offered to get my hair cut too, and then he put the prize back down again. So there you have it! I’m getting my hair cut today! Not really that much of a change, I hope, since I panic every time anyone cuts my hair, but at least I won’t look like a hippie anymore. Hopefully I can stop by the store and buy us some alcohol too. Or maybe drinking and cutting hair is like drinking and driving – something not recommended unless only on your own risk?

Almost Christmas! Can you believe it! I can’t. No, really, I can’t. It still feels like November to me. Like an eternal November. At least last Sunday I bought all the gifts for my international family. I think it will be a fun Christmas. It will be me, Jennifer, Betsy, Midori and Johanna [Germany] plus the Lord Jesus Christ Amen. We’ll go to church on Sunday morning, then celebrate with dinner on Sunday night, and on Monday morning we’ll have breakfast and open the gifts together. Actually things start already tomorrow, with one Christmas party at this Russian girl’s house. I don’t know if I’m going to make it though, since I got to take The Dollhouse under control with that Aleksey number 27. On Monday I’m going to buy train tickets for Tobolsk. Yes, I’m spending New Years with Gulnara and her wonderful family. Of course everyone remembers last year when I was with them during the first week of the year. I can’t wait to see her again and just talk about everything! And rest. Rest. Rest. And once again – rest.

So have a good one and don’t forget – wash your teeth twice a day.

Snow

Midori photographing the Second Coming of Winter about five minutes ago.

Свердловск [Sverdlovsk]

The view from my window on Sunday.

During the past two [or is it three?] weeks it hasn’t been cold here in Sverdlovsk, and for almost a whole weeks it’s been even a few degrees above zero. The snow is melting. Winter came, said privet and then went away for some reason I’ll guess we’ll never know. I would like to blame global warming and so on, but when you’re in the middle of something bad you don’t want to mention the Devil, I guess. The whole town has turned into a muddy hell, with ice still lying over the asphalt, making it dangerous to walk again. And it’s so dark here, the night begins already at 4 pm and the day light hardly breaks through the clouds after 10 am. All we’ve got right now is 6 hours of light, but no sun. I haven’t seen the sun since the snow was still on the ground. And I never before though that people are so dependent on sunlight, but now I guess I have to throw down my gun, my towel, my Bill Clinton autobiography and that fake Russian passport I bought at the Chinese market. Sunlight makes all the difference. The problem is I get no daylight whatsoever right now. I get up in the morning, and before it’s even light outside I’m already at the university. Then when I leave in the afternoon, it’s already getting dark. And this town is so gloomy grey without sunlight. I guess all of Russia is. That’s why I decided to call this town Sverdlovsk instead of Yekaterinburg, which was the name it had during the Soviet years. It was named after the famous [?] revolutionary Sverdlov and still almost 90% of the streets in this city are named after his friends, which in other words means just this – Sverdlovsk is the town of the revolutionary hip crowd, the political VIP of the 1920’s. All the while this city being so far from revolutionary in spirit that it’s such a sad joke that only communists could ever come up with it. Yekaterinburg is a beautiful name and should belong to a beautiful city, not to this muddy mess of wet concrete and run down asphalt.

Yes, I’m extremely tired right now. I guess that’s why I sound so down. But from the way I live right now, locked in a black box for most of the time, can anyone blame me? I get home from university every day, I cook, I eat, I do my homework, then I retreat to read ten pages in my book on Russian culture [“The Icon and the Axe” – does a title ever get cooler than that!?] and that’s when I fall asleep. Every time. Every day. At around six o’clock every day. It works automatically now. I’m reading something about freaky tsars or devoted monks or schizophrenic writers and the next thing I know two hours have passed and Midori’s talking on Skype in Japanese slang with her boyfriend back in Osaka… That is my life, ladies and gentlemen; it doesn’t get any better than that right now. And it’s terrible; it’s down right awful, since I have roughly two weeks left of this semester and really need to work and pull everything together with my studies. And I don’t have any energy at all. I can hardly keep my head up long enough to nod at my teachers in the morning. I need the snow. I need the whiteness that it gives. It brings light too. I need light. Or else I’ll just sleep all the time and never get further than the 17th century in my thick-thick Russian culture book.

And everyone knows that the real cool stuff happens in the 19th century!

On Dostoevsky [I know you are just like me and just can’t get enough of him]: I’ve been writing my first academic work in the field of Russian literature for almost a year now, since my professor back at my university in Gothenburg gave me the assignment to write about Dostoevsky’s four years in Omsk. I haven’t really worked that hard. At least not when it comes down to having something to show the audience at the defense in May. I’ve been collecting material, reading books, taking pictures, thinking and so on. But no, I haven’t actually done any scholarly notes in my scholarly note book. I’m really ashamed of this. So here I am now, at Ural State University and I’ve decided that I’m going to write it. It’s now or never. I’m old enough. And I want to become a professor of Russian literature badly enough. Two weeks ago I had a fight with my first academic consulter ever, here in Russia, and after this I’ve been very broken down and felt bad and even considered the fact that I might not be cut out for the academic world at all. Today I met my new consulter – his name is Aleksey [everybody probably sighing and rolling their eyes right now] – and he is the eight wonder of the world. What he told me blew my mind. He said all the things that I think, he put my Swedish thoughts into Russian and I finally had it black on white that I’m not completely a lost case when it comes to studying literature from a deep, critical point of view. And he aid he was ready to help me out with everything that I need. He didn’t think my idea was “pointless chaos” but actually even implied we could go to some conference on literature with it next year. Can you imagine! Also, as it turns out, back in the days he was consulter to Viktor, the director of the Dostoevsky museum in Omsk and my former boss, who also wrote his paper on Dostoevsky. I’m at loss for words. They are still close friends, since they’re not really that far apart when it comes to age, just that Viktor spent two years in the army and Aleksey didn’t. So he promised he would send him an e-mail and tell him that Faith brought us together and hopefully Viktor will realize that all his efforts on me [all those discussions we had on Fedya, all those badly translated short stories I gave him, etc. ect.] weren’t lost, that I was actually going to take that next step. I guess it was quite funny for Aleksey too: now he’s teaching the student of his student. I can tell this is going to be good. Our next meeting will be on Friday afternoon. He promised to look up all the books that I need to read, and that’s helping more than I even thought he would.

Maybe most people think I’m a boring nerd. Maybe most of my friends and family don’t really get [though you do a hell of a good job pretending!] why I want to study literature so badly, why I just can’t seem to get enough of reading and looking at words, constructions, train of thought, biographies of famous writers and then try to make my own conclusions. I’m trying to figure it out, but I can’t understand it. Where did this interest come from? Was it all Fedya’s work on my soul? Or is it really just a trait of my character? One day I would like to write a really thick book on Russian 18th century journalism. That’s my dream. Yeah, to get all the way to the archives I’ll probably do research on Dostoevsky, but as soon as I get that title on my shoulders, I know where I’m heading. After reading Joseph Frank’s biography on Fedya I just couldn’t stop thinking that it must be the most interesting subject to research. Especially since it’s so tight, almost hand in hand, with the literature of that period.

Enough!

Now – baking. Yes. That’s what I spent all of my weekend doing. I baked lusebullar [Swedish buns with saffron, only eaten in December around the 13th, for the Saint Lucia celebration] all of Saturday. It was hard work, let me tell you. I worked so hard and it turned out so amazingly well that Betsy came in and said: “Watch it, Joe, this means you’re ready for marriage. Be careful, one of these days you might wake up with a ring on your finger!” Haha! Yes, maybe I can really bake and cook nowadays, but that does not mean I’m going to give up all that I’ve worked so hard to achieve and give my freedom to some stupid man. No way! I’m not saying men are bad, I’m just saying I do not need one right now. Though I really enjoy flirting. I always did and I still do. Sometimes men can be the most amazing thing in the world. There’s something so wild and crazy about men, especially about men with glasses. I just can’t resist them. I’ve tried in the past but now I decided that I’m just going to let it all out and flirt as much as I like to.

On Sunday night we celebrated the second of advent [yet another Swedish thing] with Natasha and her husband Misha. They are so sweet. We drank glögg [hot wine with spices] and got rather drunk and ate lots of good candy that I made and everybody had a good time. It was the first time I actually threw a truly cozy party that left a feeling of warmth in everybody. I like my life most of the time. Now I really like this city. Okay, so maybe Sverdlovsk is a dark and gloomy city, but the people I know here are some of the coolest people I’ve ever met. Okay, so maybe I’m not living exactly the way I thought I would, but come on, is Midori or the American chicks really all that bad? No, they’re not. It’s mostly my bad, since I can not live with people. I need privacy about the size of Russia. All the while needing conversations about as long as the average Soviet documentary [five hours minimum]. Anyway, it’s getting late and I have a lot of work left to do before bedtime.

I think 2006 is the best year I’ve ever had. Best not only because it was all happy go lucky,but because it was hard and difficult and I still made it all the way. Well, almost – knock on wood. I love life. Life loves me. I love Russia. Russia loves me. Forever and ever and ever!

The Master

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

on his death bed

January 29th 1881

The picture above is my favorite picture of my master and eternal inspiration when it comes to all things beautiful. He was a Russian writer. According to some people, he is the greatest Russian writer (others say Lev Tolstoy claims that title) and according to most he wrote the world's best novel - "Crime and punishment". Fyodor [Fedya to his family and friends] was born on October 31st 1821 in Moscow, Russia. He had a tough road to walk through life, but he did it, and with every step he took, he grew richer as a person. When he tried his literary wings for the first time and published the spendlid novel "Poor Folk" in 1846, he was but 25 years old. Little did he know, when that first fame was buzzing in his ears, that he was to be sent to Siberia for ten years as a political prisoner just some four years later. Fyodor spent four years in Omsk in prison and later six years as a soldier in Semipalatinsk [now Kazakstan].

Much has been said and written and thought and argued about Fyodor's time in Siberia. Some say he found faith again there, others claim he never lost it in the first place. Some say it wasn't that important, just a pain in the ass in general, others claim that without out those years of ordeal, he would never have become the gigantic figure he is today. He is every where in literature of today. Nobody can say he has read some book if he has not read Dostoevsky.

In Russia Fyodor is not like he is on the picture above. The picture above portrays [in my opinion] a peaceful man, a true believer, a writer greeting his fate - a too early death - with grace. My personal Fedya is a kind man who loved the world. Who loved telling stories. Who loved to know what ws going on in the world. He was a cool person. Russians see him differently. They see him as a bit of a crazy individual. Like something dark, something troubled, something scary and very-very deep. I'm not saying that my Fedya ain't deep, it's just that I refuse to call the creator of "House of the Dead" crazy. No, I firmly believe that one has to be 100% sane in order to write down something like that, something so close to oneself and at the same time - so extremely far away.

Федор Михаилович Достоевский

*

Heard on Kinoproba

International Filmfestival in Yekaterinburg December 1 - 4 2006:

- "I was a fat boy and I didn't steal any bikes." [Gay film critic in the Jury trying to justify why he doesn't ride a bike to town, but relies on the rough commute system.]

- "I'll bring you a Dostoevsky next time that you can marry!" [sculptur in the Jury after I totally trashed his statue of Fyodor.]

- "Nobody knows what Gagarin did in space. All we know was that he was up there for 10 minutes. What if he met an angel up there? And they fell love? And two souls flying up there? Like together? Josefina, write me a script and I'll do the movie!" [one of the winners, from Moscow, when after too much booze the conversation turned to the Holy Saints of the Soviet Union.]

- "We'll meet again next summer in Baden-Baden. You bring the money and I'll bring my glasses!" [Swiss director when we said goodbye on Monday morning after 12 hours of partying.]

*

Oh gosh, I'm so tired. I fell asleep late last night, at two o'clock I think, and got up at 6. Then I had school for five hours. Then I came home and slept. Then I baked pepparkakor for three hours. They failed just like they did last year. It's nobody's fault, the least my own, it's just like they say - на чужой манер руссккий хлеб не родится [in foreign manner Russian bread isn't born].

News! I'm heading out of the Ural Mountains on the 10th of January. I'm flying through Frankfurt. So anyone who wants to catch the traveling country artist this winter, just throw me a note and I'll bring the guitar.

The Perfectionist

Johanna (my sister), Mattias (my brother) & me in Italy, July 2006.

More often than not in my life I look around and ask myself: “How did I end up here?” [more likely “how the hell did I end up here”, but for the sake of posing as a well up brought Western and cultural individual, I skip those non-printable words] In general I’m a silly person. You all should know me by now – I jump to conclusions, I make mistakes, I mess up, I talk about strange things when one should discuss the weather. And even though I consider myself an adult with those 21 years hanging around my neck, I freak out every time somebody else takes me for a grown-up. I wouldn’t go out and shout that a lot of stuff has happened since last week, though it may be the truth. I learn something new every day. Both about myself and about the world around me. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Mostly a mix of both, actually. I’ve been scared this week that I might get hooked up in my old depression again (yeah, that’s the cross I’ll have to carry) but now… Now it’s Friday night and today was such an awesome day that I don’t think I’ll have to be worried anymore. Or maybe I should? Anyway, right now I’ve got enough vodka in my blood not to think about it. Russia is a wonderful country! To you, my beautiful Rus’, I drink! And drink, and drink, and drink…

As it turned out, not everything was all bad at the Poetry Slam competition last week. I did win the prize that they gave me; it wasn’t just them trying to make the Swede happy with some booze. No, it’s Russian tradition. That’s all. And I kind of like Russian traditions. I mean, after all, a country that was closed for so long, how could they but look at us foreigners in a different way? We’re guests, no matter how long we stay or how much we pay or how many Russian village drunkards we marry. When I swung by the Literature faculty on Monday, I of course met two of the Jury members, Katya and Oleg. Both of them greeted me in a completely different way, as if they saw me for the first time as a complete human being, not only just some weird foreign girl tripping about Dostoevsky. Even my crush-professor flirted with me! He smiled such a big smile I’m actually worried he might be a happy man and not just a professor struggling with the art of Pushkin on a daily basis. Katya was very glad to see me. She and I joked for over an hour together. She’s so cute. And smart. And funny. She makes fun of me and I like that. I like it when people don’t take me for more than I am. I’m just a silly girl. Maybe this town isn’t so bad after all? Maybe this country can be redeemed?

Yes, of course, poetry solves all problems. Also I bought new winter boots. On Wednesday I splashed out and purchased the most expensive shoes in my life. But they’re so cute they are almost worth it. I love them. They’re dark brown leather lace up boots with a heel of about 5 centimeters or so. You’ve got to see them. They’ll make you smile. They make me smile anyway. I had to buy them to cheer myself up on Wednesday, after having a huge fight with my scientific leader with whom I was supposed to write my paper on Dostoevsky. I don’t think I’ll ever speak to him again. That’s what they say – once you argued about Fyodor and found you’re standing in different ends, then you’ll never kiss and make up. No way in hell am I ever going to consider Notes from the Dead House a documentary. And he says the same thing, no way in hell is it a novel. So there you go. And I cried on Natasha’s [teacher at the Foreign Literature department who loves Sweden and is studying Swedish – didn’t I mention her before?] shoulder for an hour and she decided that from now on I can consider her and her husband my parents in the Urals. Which is a relief in so many ways. I always need to find a mother-stand-in wherever I go, I can’t make it without an older woman teaching me the reps and giving me advice when I need it. Or a shoulder to cry on for that matter.

Well, enough about that. Let’s talk about today. Let’s talk about why I sometimes don’t understand just who I am and where I’m going or what I’m doing. But I’m sure we all have that problem from time to time? Today was the first day of a four day long Film Festival here in Yekaterinburg. I’m in the Jury. At first, when they asked me, I didn’t think much about it. I said: “Sure” and figured that maybe it would be something small and Russian and cheap and not very glamorous at all. Just a gathering of artistic nerds in all simplicity. Boy, was I wrong! I arrived at the movie theater on Friday at two o’clock and left at midnight. Yes, that’s how much I mingled. At first it all seemed rather humble. Lydia [the director of the festival] met me and gave me a plastic folder with a lot of stuff in it. She then put a name tag on me. I was shocked, since all of these things looked very professional and not at all what I had expected. The longer the event went on, the more it resembled something that my father could’ve been invited to. All the people there were older than me, more experienced than me, most of them famous and in the movie business since many years. And then they tell me that it’s lunch. And I say okay and follow the crowd. We pass through the restaurant and I want to sit down, but they tell me: “No, you’re expected in the VIP room”. Ladies and gentlemen – I’ve never before in my life been expected in any kind of VIP room in any country at any occasion. Not that I can remember anyway. And in there was the Jury. Five men and one woman. All of them experts. And there I was – the 21 year old blonde from Sweden. I know nothing about film. When I say nothing, I truly mean nothing. I joked with them and said that in my whole life I’ve seen two movies – one I didn’t understand and the other I didn’t like. They all laughed. And the food was great. I ate a lot since I’m a poor student who can’t afford to cook such things for myself. It was surreal. Later they served really good vodka, and of course, for the same reason, I couldn’t but drink as much as possible. Now I realize that might’ve been stupid, since there are three more days of the festival left and I’ll probably be sloshed two more nights in a row. I saw my face in the paper about the festival. Oh my. Everybody comes off as serious and smart; I come off as a cutie. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just that I’m smart and serious too, just I don’t look like it. Well, we’ve already been over that subject and got nowhere, so let’s not dig deeper into that whole. At six o’clock was the opening of the festival. And there was even a Russian director who won an Oscar there! Maybe now you’ll get who it really was that I was rubbing shoulders with tonight. They ask up all of these famous people on stage and in the end they invite me. Little me! With the rest of the Jury of course. And cameras flashing, people applauding, and everybody’s smiling. And then we watched some movies. It’s only animated movies there, but animated movies from all over the world. A lot of foreigners were there, after the show I flirted with some of them. All in all the day turned out very good for me indeed. I got so many compliments I don’t even know what to do with them [sell them on eBay? donate them to Bono’s fight against AIDS? lend them to Britney Spears?] and one man even kissed me. Right out of the blue after telling me I was a “krasavitsa” [Russian word for beautiful woman]. It was kind of strange but funny at the same time. Because I’m so far from the VIP room in real life, so far from all those things, for God’s sake – I’m just a girl! I love to be alone, I love to read, I love to think, I love to have deep conversations with a selected number of individuals and take long walks without anyone disturbing me for hours and hours. That’s who I am. I’m not the most beautiful girl in the room to whom people make toasts [though that seems to happen when I least expect it] or try to get alone for a one-on-one conversation. I’m not the life of the party. Before I found Dostoevsky I used to be. I consider myself quite boring nowadays. But tonight! I was that girl tonight!

People often tell me one thing. It’s more of a sentence. I’ve heard it many times and I seem to hear it everywhere I go. It doesn’t matter if it’s at a party, in a public restroom or on an airport in Moscow. I don’t know if I should believe in it or not. Sometimes I want to, other times it scares me. Tonight one member of the Jury whispered in my ear: “You’ll have a great future, I’m sure of it.” So there we go again, more talk about that Great Future that’s out there waiting for me. I would like to have such a future, but at the same time, I’m perfectly happy and at ease with the fact that I might not have any future at all. Right now I feel like the load is too heavy for my shoulders. But still – I can carry it. And I know I will carry it. Many things scare me in life. Well, maybe they don’t scare me, but they worry me. Right now I’m freaking out about my life in general. I have no idea what I’ll do after Yekaterinburg. I have no clue as to whether or not my book [Ryska Hundar] will be published next year. For a long time, almost all of this year, I wanted it to be published so badly I took a lot of chances on my artistic possibilities. Now I’m scared of publishing anything at all. Because what you put out there never goes away. And what if I one day wake up and decide that I want to go away? Also, when the book is done, it’s done. I can’t write it again. And I’ve lived with it for so long, I know it so well and I love it. I hate it too, of course. It’s just, I want to be sure that I’ve done all for it that I could do. I would hate it if I wake up and realize I was wrong about something. Or didn’t give Elton and Elva my best. They deserve my best, they truly do, but how can I know what’s the best now, now when I am so young and yet only in the beginning of everything? Oh, fuck that Great Future of mine – I’ll live here and now instead. Even though I might suck so bad at dealing with the present…

My teacher called me a perfectionist the other day. I was stunned. Come on, aren’t perfectionists supposed to be way better, way cleaner, way smarter, way more perfect than me? In a way I guess she’s right. I am a perfectionist. And I’m proud of it. The other day I was buying groceries and I just had to give the girl who was packing my bags a lecture on how to do it right. Come on, she was putting bread in the bottom! My parents taught me better than that. Maybe it was unnecessary, but if I don’t give her directions, then who will? Someone’s got to carry the load of the whole world. Remember, I’m the one who has been cleaning mine and Midori’s room for the past three months. I won’t even let her do it anymore. The poor girl just doesn’t know the power of bleach yet. I considered nothing quite clean until you’ve poured bleached all over it. That’s a thing I picked up when I lived in Siberia.

Dang, I miss Siberia!

I wrote a letter to a girl who lives in Irkutsk today, asking her to give me the Grand Tour when I get there in January. I don’t know if she’ll answer or not, but I hope she will. Everybody in Russia is really crazy about buying tickets to go somewhere in January, and there’s almost no tickets left. So if I should change my mind and want to go home, it might be impossible. Well, let’s just put that in the hands of God and let him decide what to do. I have a dream. And that dream is more of a need. It’s starting to cling closer to my skin now, it’s getting inside my breath; it wants to ache in my fingers and dance with my hair. The dream is a nightmare because I can’t make it come true right now, right here. I want to leave the university and just write. I can’t take it anymore. I know everything tells me about one thing – I’m all about writing. I don’t think anybody can ever understand just how much I write. Just how much writing means to me. I write constantly. I think about writing all the time. I never stop writing, I never stop collecting phrases, faces, meetings, pictures and emotions for my books. I’m completely inside my head and inside my words. If I could I wouldn’t do anything but talk about literature all the time. It’s so hard for me to interact with people who don’t write. Not that it’s THAT HARD, but when they don’t know what it’s like… I don’t know. I’m scared of my own profession. I’m scared of leaving my studies to live the dream. I want to live the dream. I want to write. I want to cut myself loose and just write. I want to be a writer. And I know I’ve trying to hide it for so long, but now it seems to be clear. Some people weren’t born to do anything but write. I’m one of those unlucky bastards.

But at the moment I can’t do this. I have to publish one book before I can settle down and become what I need to become. Then I’ll have money, I’ll have proven myself not to be just a dreamer but a writer. God, why is life so hard? Why can’t You help me out a little more? I know I’m probably the worst sinner You got on Your hands since Judas, but come on and cut me some slack. I love You so much. And I know it’s all in Your power. You can grant me this. You can make it come true. You can hold me tighter than anyone else. Plus it was Your Son who died for my sins. And being the great sinner I am, there’s no way in hell I’ll ever forget that.