Scattered notes accompanying my packing for our group trip

I have returned to good old apartment 56 (I think that’s our number) somewhat earlier than is my wont today as 1) we’re to meet at the train/bus station at 8:00 this evening and I don’t want to go downtown and back in the afternoon, only to return in the evening, 2) there’s not much to do on this side of the river, and I already went to the Всё Будет ОК Гипермаркет (Everything will be OK hypermarket) with Natasha, Ivan, and Joseph, where I bought deturgent (in our last attempt Natasha and I actually bought fabric softener, so this time we carefully matched the box with the one Natasha's hostmother uses) and a chocolate bar for the train journey and an ice-cream bar for lunch; and then walked around numerous very small stores looking in vain for a hat and gloves to purchase; and put money on my cellphone in one of the between-kiosk-and-stores along where the marshrutkas stop; and bought a pair of running pants, as it is officially too cold to run in shorts; and I tried to go to the hole-in-the-wall small-boy-infested internet cafe, but all the computers were taken by small boys, 3) since I'm leaving this evening I just don't feel as guilty as I usually do about coming home to sit around, and 4) I want to be sure to be the first one home around the dinner hour, so I can make dinner myself, a major event in life if one has pretty much absolutely nothing else useful to do in life. I was going to make dinner yesterday, but then I was downtown at the History Department until 4:00, and went to the Cafe Fiesta while in was in the area (actually fairly far away, but not technically requiring paying for a marshrutka), so didn't get home in time to be the first one here, as I usually am. I am planning to make potatoe soup, which seemed like a pretty good idea yesterday when there was a little bag in the kitchen with 10 potatoes in it, and seems like an even better idea today, when all of a sudden there are two of the BIGGEST BAGS OF POTATO EVER sitting in our hallway. I guess the special potato delivery man brought them? I have a hard time imagining anyone carrying them, so maybe there is a special potato cart. I like how I am spelling potatoe differently every time. So, anyway, these bags are about as big as I am. This is important, because I no longer have to fear using the last of the potatoes, because you know what happens then: the last potato leaps out of the oven and runs out the door, singing some sort of rhyme about the «magic sack» one can procure at his capture, and you are forced to pursue him, weeping, crying «Potato, Potatoe, come back, come back, or my mother will beat me, alas, alack!» And it is an open question whether the magic, bottomless potato sack that you do indeed procure at his capture makes up for the psychological trauma of the afternoon. I hope I can buy a hat and gloves in Ulan Ude, before our mountain climbing, or I will be very cold. I do have a scarf, I think. Off to start some packing.

I just looked through the Lonely Planet guide for the Baikal region. I have a lot of 3-day weekends to spend. I feel like I should be going off and seeing things, but I'm not sure what I should do when I get there. Also, I have not seen anything in Irktusk that I am supposed to. I guess I should get started... but apparently this guidebook's Siberia section hasn't been updated for many years, so I don't know what's still true.

Packed, I think. Got my tapochki. And Chekhov, in my continued campaign to like him. And long underwear but no hat or gloves. And lots of Siberian history to read and not really understand, and the course description of the mainstream Russian History class to attempt to read without freaking out about how much work I have to do and how I have no idea what is said in class. And... I forgot my scarf. Ok, got that. I just got concerned that the sweater I packed will not fit under my jacket- I'll wear another one to the bus station. And I have a lot of packyeti, as they are always needed.

Note to all fans of Caps for Sale: a girl in Baikal Studies class asked today if there were any monkeys in Russia. There are not. It seems like something you shouldn't ask: if you never ask, you can just go on thinking that maybe, somewhere, you will come across a monkey, you just haven't happened to hear about the Great Siberian Ice-chimp yet. Baikal Studies class continues to be amazing. The fact that I understand about 8% of it, both because of it being in Russian and because it's usually about ancient metal-working or prehistoric geology, or geography, or biology, or some other subject that I don't understand in English, makes that information a highly-prized store of wonderfully disconnected statements. They don't seem quite so important in English, and out of the context of the long periods of complete incomprehensibility that preceeded them... my notes, actually, show a remarkable, rather admirable, I think, delight with the mere existence of things. What, by the way, does 'existentialism' mean, exactly? I think it's one of the many words that I have pretended to understand for many years now without actually having any idea. Living in complete language-confusion in Russian has given rise to great irritation when I can't think of the English word I want, or realize I don't know what English words mean, or in general that English is not a perfect haven of absolute linguistic confort. Anyway, back to my notes – they're mainly things like:
«Exoskeletons!!!!»
«Lots of volcanoes!!!!»
«Mammoths, retreating to northern island, turning into mammoth graveyard, running toward the south, nowhere to go now; were they hunted, or just eaten as soon as they died?»
«The Transgression of the Sea!!!»
«The northern sea, in Jurassic Period, had long tongue.»
Actually the mammoth facscination is fairly ongoing. I am almost as entrigued by mammoth as by wooly rhinosauroses. I think it's part of my odd new enthusiasm over things that are Big and Dramatic and just Happened, if that makes sense. Perhaps this is what it's like to be 3 years old. I don't understand the intricacies of anything, I haven't really formulated any connection between historical events or cultural realities and and any grand narrative significant to me in any way (I don't know if that's true for 3-year-olds or not), and as far as I can tell most of what I see has no purpose or explanation: so, I'm just impressed by the Large. And the idea of hundreds of people racing through dense pine forests with stone weapons after huge hairy beasts, fighting to survive the very ice that is necessary for the life of their prey and is shrinking every minute in a huge, global weather shift that takes no account of human or animal life, seems like the coolest thing ever. And the mammoth bones piling up at the very north, when they had all, the mammoths and the people, run as far as they could, with the people maybe just waiting across the channel from the island for the too-dense mammoths to starve to death, is endlessly fascinating in its awfulness.

Running out to see if the small boys are still in control of the internet cafe.

Returned. Not a place to be had. My correspondents will have to just hold their horses, or reindeer, or moose, or whatever it is that they use to pull their buggies or sleighs, until Wednesday, when I return, at 7 in the a.m. Tuesday evening, for you east coast types, late afternoon for those of you living further into our nation's heartland. I walked past the potatoes again as I came back. They aren't really as big as me (as I) (as I am); that was apparently wishful thinking stemming from my love of the large. They are half as big as I am, which means that, if you put them together, my initial estimate was correct. Other events of my return for the internet cave: trying to kill the flies in the elevator with my huge brass key that makes me look like a robber, trying to open the big iron door opening to our and our neighbors' doors, with said key, quickly enough that the neighbor did not once again come out and annoyedly open it for me.

What reflections can I offer as I wait around for 6:00, a reasonable hour for dinner preparation? So, the university. It is pretty much like high school, or like a movie about high school that you're glad isn't really quite true. Since students only study in one department (scattered about in completely different parts of the city), they're all in the same building all day, and classes are usually all in a row and always with the same students as in all your other classes, and there are bells between periods, and in this between-periods interval the hallways are too crowded to squeeze through. The students sort or have the same air as high-school students too, a sort of flouncing confidence that sizes up everyone's outfit as they pass by, and they gather in the same gossipy bunches, and the atmosphere of the bathroom is the same, with the girls all fixing their hair and reapplying make-up. Unlike high school, the toilets have no seats and the stalls have no toilet paper, and, on the second floor, the stall doors are only waist-height. Judging by my one mainstream class, which perhaps isn't fair because it's for freshman and for all I know they improve with age, the students are about as attentive and respectful in class as in high school too, with the difference being that they are never disciplined. They play with their cellphones, they pass notes, they sleep, they whisper to each other – it's sort of amazing. In our last class in the history department, my slight offense at this behavior was entirely overshadowed by my excitement when Eddie and I, who were at the same table-thing, got a note passed to us. It said, in English, «We have to write an essay about gender discrimination. Do you know anything about it?» We replied that we did, in fact know something, and in our opinion it was, in general, bad; maybe we were supposed to offer to write the essay for them? We have heard that Russian students take a rather collective approach to the grading process.

Would it make sense to describe my enthusiasm in Baikal studies class by saying that I have a new delight in the 'ontology' of things? For some reason this word was before me constantly in the past academic year, like 'hegemony' the year before, and I always found it a little odd that such a word existed, let alone that so great a use was made of it in everything I read. But maybe this is an appropriate time for it? I don't know... I don't really care about the nature of being, which I think may be the actual definition of the word, but whenever I read it it seemed to just mean something like 'existing in state its name suggests that it would,' or 'by the nature of its existence as itself.' Hmm, I just searched my hard drive for instances of the word 'ontological' and I have apparently used it myself, in the sentence «While every icon is ontologically an invitation to transcend the visible world for the invisible, “a road we must travel on in order to transcend it” (Evdikimov 235), Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity uniquely embodies this invitation by the appeal of the summons at the icon’s narrative level and by its success in convincing viewers of the existence of its Hyper-icon.” I wonder what the heck that means. Oh, man, I just did a search for ‘hegemon,’ with depression results. At least, I am glad to find, I have never (at least in a document saved on this computer) used the word ‘suasion.’ That may be my least favorite made-up-for-some-academic-article-and-then-copied-by-the-entire-academic-world-but-perfectly-useless word.


Edit: I have returned, and the trip was most excellent, but I don’t have time to recount it right now. I’ll just say, so as not to leave you all in suspense, that when I went back to the internet place after dinner, with 40 minutes until I had to leave for the train station, the small boys had been replaced by ‘nagers. It was sort of unsettling, like the boys had aged 10 years in the two hours I had been away. But anyway, I still couldn’t use a computer, and I was annoyed. On the other hand, the expedition was most fruitful, as the Central Asians selling jars of things they had pickled had been replaced, at some magical evening hour, by Central Asians selling hats and gloves. It was amazing. I bought some.