I am on a roll here
Nov. 18

Vegetable update (see entry below): The first thing I did this morning is trip over the cabbage in the hallway. It’s still there. It wasn’t a dream. I tasted the vat of salted cabbage/carrot mix, and it is very, very salty. I used a carrot in the soup I made for lunch. Other than that, all is quiet on the vegetable front. I’m awaiting another round of vegetable-battle tonight with mixed excitement and dread.

Went to the detski dom (children’s home) again this morning. Now I want to adopt all the kids. Except that I’m still under the ideological influence of this film we saw in summer school with the underlying message that Russia should stop letting foreigners take its children, and if a foreign family adopts a Russian child then that child’s drug-addicted mother will stop having any reason to try to reform and just kill herself. Don’t remember what it was called. I talked to the teacher in the 5-6 year-old room today. She had a sort of disturbing “blood will out” approach to the future of her young charges. Still, she very proudly showed me the various ancient cloth-bound child-development books she consulted when charting how far behind all the kids were in their development, and also the notebook in which she made the week’s plans. As far as I could tell the day’s plan would be “Math. Drawing. Animals.” but it was plain she was very earnest and sincere about it all. She also related the personal histories of some of the kids; one pretty, smart little girl had a mother in jail for narcotics trafficking, and a grandmother too old to take care of her; one wild little boy had a mother who came to see him but who was often in psychiatric wards, and so on. I thought of what Maggie once said, that she tries not to know anything about the home lives of her students so that she doesn’t make excuses for them. They apparently get adopted fairly often, almost always by foreigners, who come into the room and play with the kids and then choose one. The idea of choosing a child is sort of astonishing; especially by the time they’re 5, and such clearly defined individual human beings. We played musical chairs, and duck-duck-goose, and that was about the end of their tolerance for organized activity, so we did a lot of throwing balls around the room and spinning hoola-hoops. When one would get too crazy it was amazing how effective it was to pick him up and look out the window with him; this almost always is amazingly effective at calming down children, as I found with many a crying Thunderdragon. It is also one of my favorite activities, looking out a window with a kid. The whole world looks different, and it’s so calm and companionable. So I heard about Irkutsk from several different kids today; we talked about the pretty little painted wood houses on the streets nearby, and who lived there; we talked about tramvais and trolleybuses and marshrutkas; we talked about the big, pretty old hospital on the hill far away; we talked about another children’s home, pink and boxy, a few blocks away, and so on. There were slight differences between looking out a window with these kids and with the Thunderdragons, of course: the Thunderdragons are also excited by police cars, but because they want to grow up to be policemen; these kids would go crazy when they saw a police car because they think of them as roving villains who shoot people. The Thunderdragons usually talked about their parents when they looked out the window, and how they related to that outside world, and what their parents were doing right now; Nadya, a sweet little girl with a blond buzz-cut, repeatedly cried out the window for her brother in another children’s home (Bratyik! Can you hear me! Brother! Answer!).

evening update:
We shredded all the remaining carrots. And once again had a dinner consisting entirely of carrots. Next time any of you have to make a meal for a vegetarian with gluten, nut, and dairy allergies, you might consider the option “shredded carrots with honey.” Otherwise I recommend making use of other food items. The non-substantialness of the meal, however, did allow for having tea (the meal rather than the mere drink) about 3 times today. Oh further interesting pieces of carrot news: 1) I somehow managed to cut my finger on a carrot. There was no knife in my hand at the time, so it really was just the vegetable. I have a new respect for the root. 2) When I get tired of Valentina Petrovna’s conversation consisting largely of unwanted personal advice, my new tactic is to start an English lesson; today it turned out that she is a big fan of the English “r,” as in the middle sound of “carrot.” So... after the peeling stage of the process, in which it was possible to actually talk to each other, ended, the shredding stage was entirely accompanied by a very charming pronunciation of the word “carrot” repeated several thousand times.

In non-carrot news, the director of Ironia Sudbi, the film some of you may know as “that one where the wrong guy gets on the plane on New Years,” turned 80 today or sometime this week or something, and there was a huge televised “jubilee,” with every famous old actor in Russia reciting poems and singing parodies of songs from his movies and generally being amusingly theatrical. I was quite impressed at Valentina Petrovna and Katya’s ability to name every person in the audience. I was even more impressed at the event; I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that, impossible though it may be to actually live in this country, they have a superior culture. The whole thing was just so classy. Actually their film industry may have come to the end of class; I think this even was a sort of grand, explosive finale of the Soviet film culture, where censorship and state control prevented the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. But I also just made up this theory and know nothing about it really. My only other comment is that I really like when people actually shout “Bravo!” at public events, and my affection for Valentina Petrovna is greatly increased by the revelation last night at the poetry reading that she is a bravo-yeller.