Жди и ничего не будет

Out with the roommates on Friday night.

One week later and I’m still smoke-free – though it is less clear as to whether or not I can as proudly confess to being ‘men-free’, or even ‘date-free’… Though this now matters less and less to me, especially considering that last week contained several extravagant experiences: on Thursday I taught my first class of Russian at Berkeley [as most of our department was in LA for the big conference several of us first year’s had to fill in] and on Friday I visited a class in Swedish and spent an entire hour only answering questions about myself. Both of these occasions were the first time I interacted with this university’s undergraduates – more than walking past them in the hallway or on campus – and I must say I walked away with a huge smile on my lips. I love to teach, and I love students. I can’t wait until I’m actually going to be teaching my own very course and have my own very students – again. I miss it. After the afternoon seminar on Russian romanticism I and M. went out to dinner and proved our friendship in the deepest of ways: first by splitting a pizza and secondly by getting two different kinds of dessert and eating both of them together from one and the same plate. After a couple of hours – during which I do believe that I acquainted her with bulky chunks of my personal history and so did she and that’s very cool because such intimate aspects of one’s private experiences cannot [nor should they] be shared with just anyone – I went out drinking with my roommates to celebrate that one of us passed her Ph.D. qualifying exams earlier the same week. It all started out in a style akin to those applied in polite society: we had drinks at one bar and it was nice and then we went to another bar and had more drinks there and it was also nice. Then it was suggested we’d go to a party at a frat house. I had never been to one of those before, even though I’ve heard of them – and literally heard them from where I live so close to campus – and I am pretty sure I won’t be going to any such event soon. Frat houses are crawling with undergraduates – though not entirely and certainly not exclusively [for we were there and we are all ‘respectable’ graduate students] – and the walls are soaked in alcohol, to say the least. I do not remember the night at the party in its ‘entirety’, there’s no coherent ‘narrative’ so to speak; my memories constitute of haphazard flashes of different moments, all displaying me engaged in one inexplicable action after the other…. I believe I even played the vuvuzela? And that I danced with someone who said I already “have the legs of a marathon-runner”, which pretty much implies that I must have mentioned something about my preparations to run a half-marathon prior to this, but when? Ничего этого неизвестно и все покрывается туманом, like my homeboy Niklai Vasil’evich Gogol’ would’ve put it. Undoubtedly, there should be a limit to how many individuals one is allowed to make out with during the course of a night. When I woke up on Saturday – with an enormous hangover that I had indeed earned – what worried me most was what effects this kind of promiscuity might have on my mouth hygiene.

Retelling this tale today during downtime at my department, a fellow graduate student commented quite insightfully: “Now I know why you had so much fun in Russia – you just go with it.” And I did have a lot of fun in Russia, especially on all those wild occasions when I simply ‘went with it’. The same is, however, also true for life in the US: I certainly enjoy myself here whenever I just go with it. As a matter of fact I don’t think I’ve laughed this much at any time in my life before! Here I laugh while with my colleagues at the department, I laugh when I’m at home with my roommates, and I laugh when I’m hanging out with M. But the best part of all is when I go to the Norwegian Church in San Francisco, for that’s when I really get to enjoy the most fun of the entire week. I can’t even really explain it. I guess you just have to be really into Jesus to get it; or celebrating your Scandinavian heritage occasionally, for that matter. You should know, comrades, that for several years I was not only deprived of living in my COUNTRY, but also of living with my PEOPLE, thus I don’t know my people all that well. Spending time with fellow Scandinavians at church has brought back to me a sense of what exactly it is in me that makes me a part of this culture [though I also become acutely aware of what in me has changed during academic exile], and what about these traditions I can appreciate and explore. Swedish people – and how could I even ever forget about this since I myself am exactly like this, as are all the people back home that I know and love? – are all about solitude, about being introvert and intimate, yet not necessarily inviting others to share this [this doesn’t meant that it isn’t there, though]. Yesterday I got to talking to a couple of Swedish people after mass; our highly interesting and even more so informed conversation made quite an impact on me and left me questioning some things I thought I had made up my mind about long ago. I suppose that the danger of entering into a foreign culture is that you’re bound to lose some of your native heritage in the process – no matter how much you fight it or surreptitiously think it isn’t going to happen to you. Not only did I lose bits and pieces of my native language during these years – I lost a large lump of ‘Swedishness’ too.

There is always this feeling of being outside looking in. I’m not sure it is a bad thing. I prefer to think of it as a blessing. I remember this conversation I had a few weeks ago when we talked about traveling and I laughed and said that I hate traveling, even though I’ve been so many places all over the world and continue to travel despite my better intentions, for, as I argued, “I like to be home”. Then the other person asked: “And that is Sweden?” I thought this was a weird comment to make, and so I was soon to correct: “Home is where I live”. Home to me is a very definite spot. I’m not going to tell you exactly what this ‘spot’ is made up of. I can only tell you that I can take ‘it’ with me from Siberia to California but I would never carry ‘it’ on my person in everyday life. ‘It’ must never be exposed to sunlight or strange air. ‘It’ is waiting for me here every day, and thus every day I come home.