This Segment was Recorded Earlier

Sorry I haven’t been updating you on my doings lately. They just haven’t been all that interesting to me. I must have been here long enough for things to seem normal, or at least the things that seem interesting to me are not of the culturally-comparative type and would not be good blog material.
I’ll try to think of some things I’ve done recently though.

I just got back from English class (the college-aged group), where I made the students sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” we discussed the extended meanings of baseball phrases such as “bush league,” “pinch hit,” “cover your bases,” “screwball,” etc., and I showed part of a Simpsons episode that takes place at a ballpark. Most of the class was taken up by discussion of the rules of baseball, though.

In my recent drive to see all possible theatrical productions in the city, I saw a French play on Friday, a Turgenev play on Sunday (both in the big, handsome Dram-teatr), and Oliver (along with millions of kids on fieldtrips) on Sunday. Tomorrow I’m going to see The Cherry Orchard, also in the Dram Teatr.

I haven’t fallen in my high heels yet.

I forgot to mention a few weeks ago that the high point of the movie Donkey Xote was that the hero’s name, in Russian, was ‘Don Kihot Lamanchaskii.’

Warning: this part is sort of cheesy and belongs on a brochure for the benefits of making spoiled middle-class students study abroad or something.
I’ve recently been feeling a deep sympathy for all who are displaced. I think I have a hard time living in a state of constant incompetence and cultural irrelevance, but really I carry at least some aura of exotic interest, and then people congratulate me at every turn for how great it is that I came here, for how impressive it is that I traveled so far, for how well I am dealing with a foreign culture; no one congratulates the central Asian marshrutka drivers, shouting through static on their cell phones in harsh-sounding languages as passengers snap at them for not hearing their requests to stop the van; no one praises the Mongolian women selling leather gloves near the central market for their resourcefulness; the Chinese venders in Shanghai market get only distrustful glances and unceremonious demands. As an American I will always be part of a privileged class, everywhere; even where I am hated there will be an especial status to the hate. And aside from that I’m not a seller of leather gloves but a college student, middle-class and educated and economically non-threatening. And I know when I’m going home: as alien as I ever feel, I am always aware that it is temporary. I can only catch at the edges of the terror of losing one’s country, of the dehumanization of living permanently outside of one’s context. This weekend I sat in a marshrutka across from a smallish but solid-looking man in jeans and denim jacket, middle-aged, working-class, with sandy hair low on his forehead. He seemed so pleased with his world, to fit so well into it; everything about him, the way he moved, his voice when he called his son on his cellphone about what stop to meet at, the expectation with which he watched out the window, but mainly the way he wore his jacket, was just right for him, fit him. I was unreasonably concerned that he would leave Russia, and that his ease, so utterly un-cosmopolitan, would break against an incomprehensible world. And nothing about the incomprehensibility would be a cultural experience to reflect upon later in a study-abroad forum, or an adventure of youth to store up to remember in later years in a boring, well-paying job, it would just be lonely and humiliating.

It’s supposed to be cold and snowy here for the rest of the week.