Another post with no real theme

I don’t remember anymore how I felt about leaving America for Russia. I would look for my journal and try to remember but a) it’s packed at the bottom of a box of letters and stuff that is going to cost me a lot of money in overweight luggage and b) I’m fairly sure my journal entries are never true. Anyway, the point is, I can’t figure out how I feel about going home in two weeks (and two days), and I can’t remember my one applicable point of reference.

[assume a long period of time in which I stared alternately at the computer screen and my weird zodiac comforter-cover trying to thing of something appropriate to type]

This is lame-- I just lived for 9 months is a foreign country, saw history, culture, and humanity from new and unfamiliar perspectives, peeled countless carrots and potatoes, and I can’t think of anything at all to say whenever someone asks me things like what my impressions of Russia have been, what I’ve learned, what Russians are like in comparison to Americans, etc. It sort of kills conversations, and essays on final exams. You know that movie whose name I’ve forgotten, with the boxer? Raging Bull. Where the guy is a hopeless lump of inarticulateness and therefore leads a life of violence and eventually tragedy? I think I’ll skip the life of violence and tragedy part, but I am more and more annoyed at how unable I am to say what I want to, in any language or form. Being forced to speak a foreign language for 9 months-- well, like 12 if you count summer school—has brought my annoyance with the situation rather forcibly to my attention.

Here’s a translation of a nice Bunin poem, so I can take advantage of someone else’s artistic use of language by pretending to participate in it:

The flowers, the wasps, the grasses, the grain,
The azure, and the noonday swelter...
The time will come—God will ask the prodigal son:
“Were you happy in your earthly life?”

And I’ll forget everything—I’ll remember only these
paths in the fields between the grain and the grass—
and from sweet tears I won’t manage to answer,
fallen at the merciful Knees.

Ok, it seemed less corny in Russian. Also, anyone who can think of a way to avoid the internal rhyme in the third line, let me know. Mainly I like how the capitalization of ‘Knees’ brings out the funniness of that word. Also, I do sort of miss that sweltering summer feeling, when the heat is so far beyond uncomfortable that the discomfort isn’t worth noticing, and you’re just crushed between the heat from above and the humidity rising off the ground. I mean, I like it in the way you like the freezing cold—I’m glad it exists, to make the universe seem a little less under control and boring, but I don’t consciously decide to be out in it for more than seconds at a time.