June 6, 2013 It’s tough to say why I haven’t written in so long. Maybe I find the time now because my job is slowly winding down, and I have more time than I had up until recently. Maybe there have been moments when I had time, but the desire was lacking, and what brings it back now is a mystery to me. Writing, maybe, is like exercise. There have been times in my life when I didn’t exercise much. I think I took a whole year off from sports when I was at university, and unfortunately didn’t record the experience of such abstinence, but remember reaching the conclusion, after starting sports again, that I had been foolish to leave them behind. I can imagine myself thinking fondly of sports during that year, remembering what it was like to have a heartbeat, to run after a ball or a frisbee. In retrospect, it’s a wonder that I lasted as long as a year. Now I’ve gone several months without writing, and I wonder if I’ve gone through the same withdrawal. I probably haven’t, since I actually have written a lot, only not in any blog. Maybe I’m starting again now because I don’t have as many students to write to as I had through May. My reading has been on and off. As I write I have a pile of books in front of me at my feet, all of which I’ve read since January 1st. I’m pretty proud of this feat, since it’s not a small pile. There are other books about the room, many of which I’d like to add to pile at my feet, but only a few of them will be able to fit, because of time restrictions. I’ll be home in a month and two days, and what comes after that, nobody knows. For one thing, I’m afraid I won’t want to read as much as I have, since reading for me has been a real get away from work, but at home in California, there’s not really anything to get away from, since you’re already pretty far from everything. My anxiety about employment in the states and finding a place to live will probably quadruple as soon as I’m out of the job here. In any case, I still have three more weeks here. As in previous years, I feel like I’m three weeks before death. Before, it wasn’t a problem, since I knew I would be reincarnated the following Autumn, either as a teacher, or a student. Now, I’ll be reborn again, somehow, only nobody knows as what, and where. It’s kind of nerve-racking. On a side note, I’m even more convinced that reincarnation is practiced on the grand scale. What I’m going through now is like a mini-death. I’ll leave, and in all likelihood, never return to where I am now. This is just a mini version of what we all have to go through some day. The sadness, fear, or anticipation that I feel now, I may feel again somewhere ages and ages hence, when I’m getting ready to go on a much bigger trip, into a much bigger unknown. With this in mind, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to document my last month as Dolgoprudny-Peter. That’s what my last entry will amount to. June 16, 2013 It rains here in the summer. I like it. I’ve decided that there’s nothing bad about a warm rain. It’s actually rather refreshing. It might be a little inconvenient if you’re going to work, but it’s not the end of the world; and if you’re free for the day, then the sun is sure to come out soon after the rain, and dry you up. That’s what I was thinking a week ago on a random walk in Moscow, what will be one of my last. I could smell the rain coming when I got off the metro station, and soon after my stop at Ashan, it started coming down pretty heavily. I had my umbrella, but the rain was so heavy, that it almost didn’t matter. If I wear my backpack normally, then it gets soaked, so often during rain, I wear it backwards, in front of me, so it becomes a ‘’bellypack.’’ This way it stays drier, but unfortunately my back pant legs get soaked. It’s not the end of the world, as long as you stay outside for the coming sun. Tomorrow’s Monday. It’s the beginning of my second to last work week. I feel all right. June 28, 2013 15:55 Some documentary this has amounted to. I thought I’d have written more by this time, but oh well. To be clear, right now is officially about two hours after the end of my last lesson on the last day of the last week of the last month of what looks like my last year of teaching English in Russia. To be fair, that last frame of time isn’t one hundred percent. It might not be my last year, but in any case, I have reached the end of this year, and it’s a momentous occasion no matter how you cut it. If it’s not my last year, then I’ll follow my heart, or gut, or whatever it is that leads me, perhaps to Ekaterinburg, the gateway to Siberia in the Ural Mountains, for a long time. My heart has also been set on many other things, and I won’t be able to have everything I’ve ever dreamed of. How do I feel, now that I’ve finished? Dead. What I feel now must be how a dead man feels. Or a retired one - but is there a difference? Sure, I guess I’m still alive, in a way, but not as much as before. I’m deader than I was three hours ago (this is a universal truth, but particularly apparent for me now). I feel, unsurprisingly, as though I’ve just finished a marathon. Of course I made my job that way. I saw the finish line coming a few weeks ago. And since then I grew more and more exhausted the closer I came to this moment. Honestly, it would have been better if somehow there hadn’t been a finish line to begin with, or if I had been able to deceive myself as to where I was in the race. For some reason the metaphor of race or marathon doesn’t please me as much as it used to. Maybe it’s hard for me to feel competitive or ambitious when I feel as exhausted as a dead man, but I can’t help but ask myself just how enjoyable a marathon actually is. Do you like the torture of acid flowing through your veins and of your joints being pulverized with every punishing step, every lesson in your schedule? On the other hand, the torture part only comes at the end. Furthermore it’s very psychological because like I said before, if you didn’t see the end coming, you might not feel the hardship that comes with running for a long long time. Near the end you begin to ask yourself why you work so hard when you’re going to stop eventually, one way or the other. The torture increases with the decline of your will to continue. Maybe something I don’t understand yet is that there must be a finish line somewhere, to everything and for everyone. One probably remembers this fact when it’s time to retire, first every once in a while, and then gradually more often until it’s constantly on your mind as you see that everyone running around you is so much younger than you are. It’s in the nature of races, marathons in particular, that the faster you run, the quicker you come to the end. So if life is a race, or an event –a term a little less exhausting – then it behooves us not to run too quickly – if you like living, that is. That way not only does it last a little longer, but I think you can enjoy yourself more along the way. I’ve taken my time in life in some respects, but in other ways I’ve worked too hard, and might have wasted my strength on things not as worthy as others. June 28, 2013 19:00 I spent the last hour or two throwing away papers that I don’t need. During that time, I might have realized why people like running fast: It makes life brighter, more vivid. I understood this after coming by an article, which had been given as a reading assignment, about sports; about how they are bad for your health. There was some German doctor and former athlete (marathon runner, of all things) who had reached the conclusion that sport is more detrimental than helpful. The real way to live long and prosper is allegedly to exercise little while eating only a little food. This seems reasonable since this sort of lifestyle is more efficient than the high octane life of an athlete. On the other hand, Dr. Deutsch, we’ll call him, might be forgetting the thrill of spending energy on a fast run. He may reach the end of his life when he’s one hundred and twenty, but by then will he have lived? Maybe he’s missing something. Then again, if he was a runner, he knows both sides of the coin. Maybe I’m missing something. I came across lots of other papers too. I found some thank-you letters from a year ago. They made me feel good. Most of the other papers were more recent. I had taken many of my students through a portion of my inspiration program, which includes discussions on climbing mountains and the genetics of language learning. The latter is basically a discussion on genetics all together. I asked my students what they thought would happen if we cloned Pushkin, Mozart and Einstein. Many said that Pushkin and Mozart would be drunkards and nothing more. Einstein’s potential fate was less decided. Personally I agree with the claim that these people wouldn’t amount to what they were in their original time and place. But if that’s true, then it follows that these people were products of their surrounding environment, and not of their genes, because if their genes played a role in their achievements, then the same genes would play the same role in their clones living today, which we agreed wouldn’t happen. Ergo so-called genius is not genetic, but a product of society. I find this an extremely interesting conclusion. Not only can I still safely, naively perhaps, believe that I might still amount to something great, perhaps a little more than a few thank-you letters, but the potential for greatness is then open to all. I can walk through the park, find a nearby drunkard (there are plenty of them) and try to convince him that if he gets his act together he might amount to something. Maybe he enjoyed studying physics in high-school; well, what is he waiting for? I don’t think the drunkard would care to listen. I’m really telling all of this to myself. Linguistics is on my mind. Am I sober enough to go down that long road? Maybe I’d have to be intoxicated to dare such a thing. September 20, 2013. When you can’t do anything else, you might as well write something. I’m tired. I haven’t been sleeping well. I took a nap this afternoon and noticed a huge difference some quality rest can make. So much has changed over the past nine weeks, I don’t know where to start explaining. I returned home nine weeks and one day ago, and have since then concentrated primarily on two things: finding a job and a place to live outside of Napa. I’ve succeeded in both endeavors, but I wonder if I’ll end up regretting it. I guess it was the day my parents came home from Europe that I was interviewed at City College of San Francisco for a potential job teaching in the math department. I talked with the head of the department who seemed rather desperate to get a replacement instructor for a full-time guy who had unexpectedly retired. I was to take only two of his classes, the others had been distributed among other instructors. I was told then that CCSF had been recently discredited by the one and only accrediting agency for California community colleges, which would cause the college to shut its doors at the end of the coming year. I presume this might have inspired some people to retire while they still had the chance to claim benefits. Yet the college still had at least one more year of operation with a depleted faculty in the math department, and here I was looking for some sort of job in math education. So it seemed like a perfect fit. Now, having taught a few weeks, I can say I’m rather satisfied with the job. The biggest problem I have to overcome is grading mountains of homework efficiently. If I can get over that, I’m set. But there’s this other job that I’ve signed up for too, in Palo Alto. My boss there says the minimum load is ten hours a week, so I’ll try to start with that, and see how hard it hits me. I did my first commute there just yesterday. It went well, aside from the citation I got for not having the right ticket. I had underpaid by two dollars, for which I might face a penalty of over two hundred dollars. People in Palo Alto seem to be of a different culture. They all have huge smiles and they talk really loudly. I guess I normally come across as soft-spoken, but over there people might have trouble hearing anything I have to say unless I project in a tenor’s voice. Honestly, I think some of them, young as they may be, are a little hard-of-hearing, which I suspect comes from listening to really loud music. Anyway, that’s about where I’m at right now. I’ve moved home, back to the other side of the world, changed jobs, and I still don’t know where I’m headed. Maybe only in that final respect has my world has not been flipped upside down. In any case, I’ll be struggling to come to terms with this world for a while. I better get going. I have lots of homework to grade. What should I say here? This might be my last paragraph that I blog ever – the grand conclusion my Russian adventures. God, I’ll miss them. That was a fun marathon.

30.1.13 I have a little time to write, so here I go. I was thinking I might come across as a real egotist after not denouncing Ayn Rand like so many others do. After all, she’s a champion of egotism, and indeed, you might consider me to be one of her followers in some respects. I was telling my family over Christmas, I think she’s a hero for writing what she did. From what little I’ve heard of her, I understand that she immigrated to the US from the Soviet Union when she was about 20, that she didn’t speak any English when she came, but she overcame this hurdle with flying colors, eventually becoming a very popular writer and influential political figure. Having read only Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, I find that she was trying to show Americans the great things that they’ve had in their country. She seemed most adamant about the pursuit of happiness and success that all Americans are allegedly entitled to (evidently this was something new for her, coming from the Soviet Union), but she also incorporated into these works the necessary role of government in people’s lives, or rather, the necessary lack thereof. This latter part may have been secondary to her, but I guess it had the greater political ramifications. I’m not sure what she would think, if a big government would not be so problematic as long as people still had the chance to achieve their dreams. Conservative politicians might appeal to her philosophy when addressing the subject of taxes. They might say that taxing people is wrong, because people’s money is a measure of their success, and the founding doctrine of America prohibits the limitations of citizens in this way. You might also see Ayn Rand’s spirit in the uncompromising nature of the conservatives. I get the impression that Rand was a really stubborn person who considered the smallest compromise equal to an absolute defeat of her principles. As hard as it may be to agree with the politics of taxes that might have resulted from her works, it’s not hard to understand it: any increase in taxes is precedent for more; if the government can raise taxes this year, then the government won’t have to worry about how much money it spends, and then how do we know that they won’t come back again next year with another tax increase? Of course, conservatives have so blinded themselves to the idea of compromise they don’t see that liberals are willing to sacrifice government programs which cost a lot of money (not only the military (which, not surprisingly perhaps, Rand actually condoned as one of the few purposes for government spending)). I think the following compromise makes sense: for every dollar in tax hikes there should be a dollar in spending cuts. In the end, no side loses face, taxes go up as the size of the government goes down, and in the end the national debt decreases. Who could complain? The people will complain, that’s who; how can they fork over more money when the pursuit of happiness (an education, a sports car, a house and a family) already costs so much? 6.2.13 I’ve not only been reading political literature on the greedy side of the spectrum. I’ve also finished reading a small pamphlet called “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” that’s right, the one and only. I didn’t understand it entirely, and might read it again sometime. It’s not very long, and it’s rich in ideas, so it might be worth another reading. As with Rand, I disagree with some points made by Marx and Engels, but also am fascinated by some of their ideas. While Marx goes into specific examples of the working class and its exploitation by the aristocracy in different times and places, thus demonstrating a historical relationship between these two extreme classes, Engels, in the second part of the pamphlet, explains what communism is all about and also gives something of a ten-point plan as a political platform for the party, wherein lies some interesting points and suggestions for the structure of society. One of these points that I really find fascinating has to do with education. Evidently, one of the problems of the time when the authors wrote was the severe exploitation of workers in factories. These workers were given a menial task to do under rather harsh conditions. If these were too harsh for the worker, then he or she would be fired without any loss for the employer, as there were thousands of people literally dying (of starvation, for example) to get a job. (One example of this story is told in the novel ‘the Jungle,’ which brought to light this sort of order in the American meat industry in the early 20th century.) What I understand from Engels’s explanations is that under communism workers were to be trained to do many different things. This way, if workers were in a meat or vegetable factory, for example, they wouldn’t be able to only chop meat, or shovel guts, but they would do both equally as well, in fact they would be trained in all aspects of farming and agriculture so that they wouldn’t have to rely on a single menial skill in order to get by in life, but could apply any number of skills where and when they needed to. This is a brilliant idea, one which I think has been adapted into our society – even our greedy capitalistic one in the west – but which, I think, could be taken to an even further extreme. You see, one of the things I might not like about my current job is its monotony. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to quit being an English teacher because of the fact that it’s the same thing day in and day out. As a matter of fact, I have to admit that most other jobs would be much more monotonous than the one I have, and I don’t think I could possibly change jobs until I find one equally as demanding in creativity, planning, perseverance, and other aspects, all of which I can’t imagine as applicable in any other profession as in my own. As various the demands of my job might be, however, there’s no avoiding the eventual monotony of the same rhythm of work day in and day out. Why can’t I get some further training, maybe in a new field of expertise? I’ve so much as even toyed with the idea of finding work at some restaurant and learning the ins and outs of food preparation, or at least taking a cooking class, if only I could find the chance and the time to attend. The really sad fact is that this monotony is something we have to deal with in most jobs. No matter what career a young man decides to undertake, it’s invariably only one thing, all day, every day, for the rest of that poor young man’s life. How can a person enjoy their job when they do it over and over again for the span of decades? They are inspired as children or students at university, they go down a certain road and then they realize to their horror, regardless of the road they chose, that there’s no way out. There are no other roads left. All doors are closed, your way is chosen, or in other words, your life is more or less over. No wait, life begins again at retirement, when you’re sixty or seventy, and you can’t walk up mountains or run marathons like you used to, but if you’re lucky you still have a few dozen years to take your arthritis medication and enjoy the sunsets in whatever home you’ve managed to afford yourself… 9.2.13 Life would be better if people had many different jobs. This is what Engels was suggesting almost two centuries ago, and the suggestion is still applicable today. When I walk to work at this time of year, I often see so-called guest workers, who come from former Soviet states and current regimes that have little to offer their people in the way of education and employment. I see them chipping ice or shoveling snow from the sidewalks with large picks and shovels. I see them and am a little jealous that they can enjoy the outdoors and use their muscles as much as they do. Russians will laugh at me if I tell them that I’m envious of the poor guest workers who have to do this menial labor to get by in order to live in sordid conditions and to help their families back home with what little they earn and don’t waste on cheap vodka. Of course I don’t want to be in their economic position. I don’t want to have to do that kind of work, but I would like to be permitted to do it every once in a while instead of repeating the same toil of the previous days and weeks. I would love to give a Tajik a break, do his job and chip ice just for one day. My arms would be sore and my fingers calloused after a few hours of this challenging labor, but my psyche would be flooded with endorphins of a kind I haven’t felt for a very long time, ones that come from doing hard work of a different kind. You’ve heard of the idea of a balanced diet. I say this idea doesn’t apply only to food, but also to every sort of activity, including our professions. What could the Tajik be doing during the day that I work for him? He could teach English, or if he doesn’t know it, he could study the language and learn to teach it, or he could train to professionally occupy himself with something new and interesting to him, cooking for example. This idea of balance in our professions and of continual growth and development of the working class isn’t new. It probably reeks of socialism, the validity of which westerns have long since refuted, foolishly basing their judgment on the history of the Soviet Union. But there are other countries, some of which might be called socialist, where this sort of balance is possible (I’m thinking of some Scandinavian countries). It’s perhaps most necessary that the people want to acquire new skills. It’s then necessary, if not sufficient, to employ lots of teachers in every area of profession that society needs. The former necessity might be circumvented if a government simply forced people to learn new things, and the latter necessity would be fulfilled trivially (also by the government). This sounds somewhat draconian, but is it any less so to force a child to eat vegetable at supper? We are, after all, talking about a balanced diet here. Ironically perhaps, this idea could also appeal to the stringent capitalists out there, who are so concerned with their levels of production. Consider how much a professional of any kind can work in a week. Most people can work forty, maybe fifty hours a week, doing their single profession the entire time. If, however, these people didn’t have one job, but three, then they could be much more productive. I think they could even work sixty hours a week, twenty hours at each job, and they would finish the week having produced more at less expense to their psychological health because they will have done a larger variety of different tasks, instead of spending the entire time on a single profession and, therefore, a less balanced diet of work. Do you see how simple this is? This is capitalism and communism working together: production is maximized when the working class members have a variety of different jobs, and are allowed to balance their work with further training, with the goal of enriching their lives further with even more avenues of occupation.

28.11.12 OK, I have a little time to write before class. I wanted to write a little more about moods and happiness. I’ve been thinking about the two ideas, and sometimes writing your ideas down helps develop your thoughts even further, so here we go. One’s mood, mine at least, and most other people’s I think too, can be measured by a sine curve. For those of you who forget what that is, suffice it to say that it goes up and down, invariably, for eternity. It’s a simple suggestion for a measurement of mood, but I find it fitting. If your mood is up, then it’s bound to go down, and if it’s down, then, ironically, things might be looking up. Again, I say that this is invariably so. Your mood can never, under any circumstances, stay positive (or negative) for a long time. [Revision: Depressed people have a constant negative mood. Conclude: constant positive is nevertheless impossible.] You can try to do the things that make you happy, you can take all the anti-depressants you want, and by doing so you might manage to delay the inevitable, but eventually your mood has to go into a negative zone. This is clearly so because no matter whatever reason you have for being in a good mood, you get used to that reason’s validity, until in the end it’s no longer valid. A new car, for example, puts some people in a good mood, but does a car that you’ve been driving for a year? The car is still rather new, it might look and drive exactly the same, but it doesn’t give your ego that kick that it used to. All of a sudden your mood isn’t as high as it was at first. It’s falling, as indeed it must. The frequency of this rise and fall depends on the person and their lifestyle (i.e. the quality and quantity of anti-depressants); also the measure of the peaks and pits of your mood, the high and low points, may vary from person to person – these variations can be expressed by parameters in the sine curve formula, but in general our mood is a sine curve. For those who like to see a concrete expression, we could say, for example, that Peter’s mood is as follows: m_P(t) = P1*sin(P2*t), where t is time, and P1 and P2 measure the peaks of the mood, and its frequency of change, respectively. Having established mood, it’s easy to define happiness. I think it can be reasonably defined as the change in mood. Look, if you’re in a good mood, but your mood is going down, then you must be unhappy, because you’re losing goodness. Conversely, if you’re mood is bad, but it’s getting better, then you have something to be happy about, so your happiness is positive. In short, while mood is a sine, happiness is a cosine, and happiness is thus a derivative of mood. This makes sense. Leaving happiness aside for a moment, let’s consider only moods. I’ve put a lot of thought into what effects moods. I don’t take anti-depressants in the traditional sense because I don’t trust pills of any kind; but I do take anti-depressants in the form of physical exercise, sleep, good food and music. These all clearly affect one’s mood. The question I’d like to address someday is how other people affect our moods. When two people interact in some way, their moods might affect one another. What happens when they’re both in a good or bad mood, or if their moods are at different extremes? 1.12.12 Sasha and I have had an argument. We have arguments every once in a while, which I think is necessary in any relationship, but yesterday was an extreme in some sense. That’s not to say it was such a horrible argument. Honestly, it could have gone a lot worse. Maybe the worst is yet to come. Anyway, the topic fits right in to this blog entry. Maybe I was subconsciously aiming for an argument so that I could then write about it (Sasha will accuse me of it if she reads this.) 14.1.13 (Happy New Year!) I’ll write for twenty five minutes and see what comes out. I’ve felt a little apprehensive recently about the daunting schedule I have before me. In the previous months at work, I knew that there was a finish line of sorts, not far away: Christmas; I only had to work so much before I would be free to enjoy some time off in paradise. Now I’m looking at two single-day holidays between today and May, the rest of the time my schedule is as full as can be. Will I be able to keep such a pace for such a long time? Who signed me up for this marathon anyway, huh? It’s been almost twenty minutes. And this is it! I guess my writing muscles are sore. Oh well. By the way, I’ve been reading a lot more since the beginning of my second academic year here. I record myself reading and send it to whomever is interested, so far mostly to Sasha, although I don’t think she manages to listen to much of what I record. I thought that being a professional reader would be an interesting job, if there actually were such a profession. I think it’d require some acting skills, not to mention an ability to read complicated prose in a clear and understandable way. I don’t have any of these skills, but I’m working at it, and it’s been a lot of fun so far. Tonight, I think I might start part two of A Tale of Two Cities, or continue with Revolutionary Road or Frankenstein. 26.1.13 These words are a revision of what was previously written on 1.12.12, which ended up being a long and detailed account of an argument and how the elements of which might contribute to the study of moods and their changes. Without going into details of the argument (which was remarkable mostly in its complete lack of foundation), it’s enough to describe the day itself, which could hardly end in any other way but a stupid argument. I had had a long, miserable day, had woken up early to see an older student who rather resembles an ogre both in appearance as well as English proficiency (and if you wonder about the latter, please remember that ogres are not the most intellectually adorned of fantastical creatures), then raced off to the company on icy streets, before racing back home to wolf down lunch and desperately prepare for the last two lessons of the day and week. One of those lessons was supposed to be the last one of mine with the group, and an extremely unfortunate last lesson, for I had to give them the results of their first test, which four out of five of them failed miserably, and then report to them that as I had evidently failed miserably as their teacher, they would have another one from then on. I unfortunately failed to part with these students on a positive note, which set the tune for the rest of the evening. I remember leaving the company with Sasha late after my last class that evening. There had been an ice storm. The trees were all decked in crystals, as fragile as whatever psychological strength might keep a person from screaming bloody murder at the world. The evening was cold, not by today’s standards, but relative to the warmer days not long past, and the cold broke into my tired defenses, rendering my mood as frosty as the coming winter. It was not a good evening for a chat or a walk. I just needed to sleep. All this is evidence for claims that I’ve made before. If other people are like me (which is questionable, and if true, then only in degrees). Bad moods are caused by the following: lack of sleep; too much work; and bad weather. Does this sound about right? As for the weather, I’ve since then confirmed the observation that mood is directly related to the amount of sunshine on a given day. Or am I only projecting what I’ve heard other people say? With the New Year I inevitably fell into thinking about my future, the future year, and further. In past New Years, I had resolved not to hurry into any rash decisions and established that although I wasn’t sure of my place in the world, I was nevertheless happy enough; I was happy with being unsure. This year, after leaving a Californian paradise for this cold, cloudy, dark place that I’ve been calling home, I couldn’t help but feel a little anxious for some substantial change in my life. But then, eventually, the sun came out, and all of a sudden I realized how great life was after all. I think I’ve understood how the sun influences me, and am currently studying the effect of sardines and mustard as a substitute on weeks when the sun doesn’t show itself very often. What other things can be done to keep your mood on high? Well, there are pills and tablets of all sorts, probably filled with all kinds of vitamins from sardines and mustard and other ‘natural’ antidepressants. So why should I be so picky? I guess the inevitable truth is that your mood is never as high as when it comes off of a cloudy day. This gets back to the inevitable ebb and flow of a person’s mood. Every day could be sunny and you can have fresh fish with mustard every evening, with dark chocolate for dessert, but that can’t maintain a quality state of mind over the long term. At the very least, you’ll get used to whatever you serve yourself, be it actual sustenance, or food for the mind, no matter how ‘good’ it might be. This suggests the necessity for constant change, or at least the wherewithal not to spoil yourself with too much of any one positive thing. Just as a lack of sleep, too much work and bad weather are sure to cause the worst of moods, maybe in the end these things are necessary so that at the very least we don’t forget that they’re there. These negative experiences help us appreciate the good in our lives. It’s the Yin-Yang of our psyche. A question which arises is how much negative we should expose ourselves to in order to not lose sight of the wonderful things we have in our lives. Here I am, complaining about cloudy skies and too much work, when I’m lucky enough not to have to deal with starvation or the horrors of war. Somehow I don’t think I have to live in a war zone to be able to appreciate the peaceful cities that I’ve enjoyed living in. So I don’t have to go to that extreme in order to recognize a good thing in my life. But what does one have to experience in order to live a full life? With this question in mind, I can’t help but think that working as an English teacher isn’t a bad position to be in. Here I’ve recently got my CELTA certificate – a rinky-dink teaching certificate which is nonetheless the standard for the worldwide market – and there’s a world out there still waiting for me. Am I in a hurry to get out of my current life? I guess not, as much as that might hurt some people reading this. They’re apprehensive about my fate because my future is so unknown. It’s unknown to me too, but I still think it would be worse to put myself in the standard track of life: career, money, wife and kids. It’s not that I deny myself the possibility that I might want those things in the future, it’s only that I want to know that it’s I who want them, and not all the people around me who want these things for me. It’s easy for people who care about me, myself included, to be apprehensive about putting these things off, because besides them, they might not know what to value in life. They might not understand or believe that life can have meaning without kids playing football on Saturdays and parent-teacher conferences. I’m not sure there’s meaning out there either, aside from these traditional values; nevertheless, I don’t think it hurts to search, maybe even for a long time. Will an entire lifetime of searching end in vain? Maybe even if little is found along the way, there might have been meaning in the search itself. I feel like a fifteenth century European sailor exploring unknown seas. I may fall off the edge of the world, or my ship may sink and I’ll be eaten by sharks. Who knows what dangers lay waiting in that horrible unknown? I could easily run from it all and return to my home to set up a life for myself which will be exactly as meaningful as everyone else’s, which is to say … something would be missing. Or maybe I need to come to my senses, realize that the world is flat and that there’s nothing out there except a dismal end. 27.1.13 I’m not sure if the people who suggest that there is nothing out there can really be trusted. After all, what do they know? For one thing, they might not have searched very long themselves before they decided to follow the footsteps of whole generations, past and current. How can you tell me I won’t find what nobody knows? I’ve been reading a lot recently. I’ve started this new hobby and have really taken to it full-bore, so that I risk a relapse of boring myself with it before long. I’m currently reading three books, along with some collections of short stories intermittently. The first of three novels I’m reading is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I started this immediately after finishing Journey to the Center of the Earth, also by Jules Verne, which I had listened to but never read before. I liked the latter novel more than the current one, since there seemed to be less focus on secondary material, such as local plant and animal life of whatever ocean Captain Nemo’s submarine is sailing through. Speaking of whom, however, I have to admit that I kind of like Captain Nemo – a hermit scientist who has ostracised himself from all of humanity for reasons as of yet unknown (will I find out?) I’ve been called a hermit before, and I have to admit that while I wouldn’t want to cut every single tie with people, every once in a while I think it might be nice to spend some time in a library in a submarine a few kilometers under water. This appeal of reading fiction, I’ve discovered, is in how the reader can relate to the characters of the book. It may be selfish of me to like reading for such a reason, because in the end I’m sort of reading about myself as I put myself in the characters’ places and thus enjoy the story as it goes along, as though it were happening to me! (As selfish as it may be, I don’t think I’m the only one who has enjoyed fiction in this way.) Just yesterday I finished rereading a novel called ‘Revolutionary Road,’ by Richard Yates. This might have inspired me to express my hesitance on going down the road of fatherhood; if I was five or ten years from such an endeavor before, I’m now twice as far after reading this novel. I find it comes across as a horror story for those stuck in the quagmire of life in suburbia. Or maybe it’s a warning to people like me, who have waited patiently thus far, testing the waters of a different life before plunging into one pool or the other. I’ve also started reading ‘The Fountainhead,’ by Ayn Rand, a second time, which will probably scare my family members a little. I’ve heard plenty of criticism of Rand in the past years, mostly from my family, and although I can’t disagree with all of it, there’s still plenty of stuff that I like about this author. Again, I can easily put myself in the position of the hero, more because of his dissatisfaction with the world around him than anything else. Furthermore, I find the other characters are rather well developed, and I see them in my everyday life too. On the other hand, it might not be smart of me to apply her writing to my life, since Ayn Rand was evidently not the most tolerable of other people, and not one willing to compromise, so my adopting such an attitude might have negative effects for me at work and elsewhere. On the other hand, there are lots of people whom I just can’t tolerate. I can’t help but relate to this author. I’ve also started reading Frankenstein, and A Tale of Two Cities. They both are good vocabulary exercises. Reading them is like drinking a fine wine. It takes some effort to understand them completely. The latter novel tastes a bit like Sense and Sensibility, which I finally drudged through earlier this month. Dickens has a more varietal language, though, not as monotonous as Jane Austin or Mary Shelly. I have a list of books that I’d like to at least look at this year. I’d like to get into Anna Karenina when I’m finished with Verne, and this summer, if I get a month or two off, I might undertake something even bigger, like War and Peace, Ulysses (Joyce), and or Paradise Lost. I’ve been told that they’re worth reading. If I have the strength, I might get through one or two of them.

20.10.12 My first full week has come to an end. I’m alive. I can do it. Soon it will be routine and it won’t seem like any more work than I used to have. Already next week I’ll have a small break on Tuesday because my student at the printing company has flown to South Korea to negotiate with their ink dealer. Furthermore, I might also be able to adjust my schedule a little bit more, to cram some classes together back to back, thus giving me more time in between for lunch and other things important for health and sanity maintenance. I already moved that same student from Thursday to Friday last week, which gave me plenty of time to prepare for a long day at the end of the week. 28.10.12 Today is Sasha the 1st’s birthday. Sasha the 1st is the guy I lived with in Vladimir during my first year in Russia. I hadn’t written him since his birthday last year, or maybe even two years ago, but I remembered him today and wrote him a short note. Last week at work wasn’t as hard as it was supposed to be. There were plenty of cancellations, all of them convenient, as almost any cancellation fits well into my schedule. This coming week I’ll see how this new schedule works. Last week wasn’t an accurate test since that one student was in South Korea. Aside from work, things are going well. I’ve been writing much less, but reading much more. I’ve begun to read aloud. I record myself, and send it to my girlfriend, Sasha (the 4th). I don’t know if she listens to everything I record, or, if she does, how much she understands. She and I have switched books so that we have different things to record and read. This way, she can catch up to the point in a book to where I stopped recording, while I record the other book that she’s been reading. So far, we’ve been doing a lot of girly literature: Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, and a book by Louisa May Alcott. I’ve also been reading Shutter Island, a typical thriller which was made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio several years ago. Aside from that, I’m still reading “B’esy” (Demons) by Dostoevski. This I read aloud too, but I don’t record myself. Who would listen to me? I try to read fifty pages every week, at which pace I should finish by Christmas. Working as much as I have been and will have to, I can’t help but dream of loads of free time. Halfway into one of Dostoevski’s novels, there’s nothing more I’d like than a week off to finish it. Recently I toyed with the idea of arranging to return to Vladimir for a few months. I could arrange a reading list of classical literature with my former teacher there, and I would take a few months off and read like a madman. Alas, the desire to read so much might disappear as soon as the opportunity comes. It's another example of wanting mostly the things that you don't have. I’ll just have to stick to picking away at some very large novels, page by page, and I’ll get there, wherever I’m headed, eventually. 2.11.12 I’ll write for half and hour and see what comes. I’m listening to some of Bach’s violin sonatas right now. I haven’t listened to these for a long time, so now they are especially therapeutic, as though I were taking a vitamin that I’ve deprived myself of for several months. I have been depressed recently. The work load is heavy, and the weather sucks. Under these conditions, if I don’t get enough sleep, which occasionally happens I think due to sudden severe changes in atmospheric pressure, then I’m a real grump and not the best guy to be in the same room with. This is not good for a teacher, but my students and I make do, somehow. I felt like crap on Wednesday. I talked with Sasha about my day, and she explained, as I knew deep down, that the day hadn’t been all that bad after all. I replied that my mood was such that it was very easy to make mountains out of molehills. Wednesday was full of molehills, each of which felt like the greatest disaster to me. In fact, almost every day is full of molehills. A good day doesn’t depend of the problems I encounter, but on how I relate to them. The quality of a day depends on my mood, which depends on a lot of things. It’s interesting though, how much my work depends on my mood. You would think that the opposite is truer, that if I work well, then I’m in a good mood. While this is true, I think the reverse dependence is even more valid: The better my mood, the better I work. The question arises, then, how can I generate a good mood to begin with? Can it possibly be maintained? The latter question is easy to answer: No, it can’t. This is because good and bad are relative things. If a good mood lasts a long time, then you get used to the goodness, after which bad things, however slight they may appear at first, have nevertheless more and more weight as time goes on. Conversely, if you’re used to living in bad conditions: bad weather, too much work, not enough sleep – then the slightest positive thing can have a terrific effect on your day. Two Wednesdays ago, for example, I was running late at the company, as I often do, and it seemed I wouldn’t have time for lunch before my first lesson at the Vodniki center, where I work evenings. I finished my last lesson at the company that day, and discovered that I had received an SMS from the Vodniki receptionist. My individual had cancelled. I could go home and enjoy a decent lunch! Oh heaven! Just that small event made my day. Imagine how simply happiness can come to us. Which brings me to the more complicated question: how do we generate good moods? What is the formula for happiness? I think there are many kinds of happiness. There seems to be a sort of vicarious happiness that a parent feels which their child scores a goal in soccer, or gets good grades in school. Still, I think this might be a particular case of a more general form of happiness, in which the parent considers the child’s physical or academic prowess to somehow be their own achievement. Consider a simpler example. Imagine you had to run a marathon tomorrow morning. You would have no help along the way, but at the end there would be a banquet of fruits and drinks. You would struggle and might nearly die of starvation during the event, but you would reach the finish line where there would be a ripe banana waiting for you. Can you imagine how good that banana would taste? Do you know how good its sugar would make you feel? Whatever that feeling is, I think it’s the same as what we feel when we perceive the rewards of any goal which requires hard work to achieve. In the case of vicarious happiness, the parent works hard to make money to support the child to see it grow and succeed. Getting back to the maintenance of feeling happy, bananas won’t suffice for long. The tenth banana is never as tasty as the first. Our child’s most recent perfect report card is never as rewarding as the very first, when the child worked hard to achieve high marks. However, it seems to me that according to an American way of life, people try to achieve and maintain positive feelings via, metaphorically speaking, bigger and more frequent bananas. Or maybe some people try to move on to supposedly better things, like papayas or avocados. They’re missing something. They don’t realize that a very important key to that good feeling they had when they finally reached their goal was the hard work, particularly the starvation they endured and the deprivation of those things that bring happiness in the end. A good friend of mine has imparted his wisdom on me on more than one occasion: there’s nothing romantic about poverty, or something like that. I think he says this to encourage me to make more money, although I feel that I have more than what I need to be happy. Consider two extremes of the professional spectrum. One on end there’s a man who has to work very hard to earn a day’s worth of food, and on the other there’s a multibillionaire, whose work entails checking a few stocks every once in a while (or hiring someone to do so), who has everything he could possibly need. Who’s happier? I think you could argue for the case of the hard worker for two reasons: First of all, he has a clear goal every day - work enough for a good dinner; Secondly, the worker is more likely to be able to appreciate the things he has. The so-called ‘rich’ man, on the other hand, lacks not only the ability to recognize the value of his possessions, but also a good reason to work hard, aside from getting more possessions – an empty endeavor. What good is a warehouse full of bananas when you’re too fat to run up an appetite good enough for eating a few? In order for my friend to convince me of the value of his advice, he’ll have to explain to me why I need luxuries like my own house and car. As far as I can tell, I maximize my satisfaction in life with a good meal at the end of my day at a job that I enjoy doing. The so-called rich man is a glutton. Is he any better off than a heroin addict who has access to exponentially increasing amounts of his drug, enough to keep him continually satisfied? If I come across as a communist or socialist, don’t think it’s because I’m in Russia. I’m actually a big fan of Ayn Rand. My parents might be unhappy to hear that alongside their lessons, she has also taught me a few things about hard work. But as far as happiness goes, I think I may have learned most of all from my dog, Caesor. I’ve written a lot about bananas here. Caesor liked bananas too, along with anything else thrown near his mouth, especially tennis balls and Frisbees – he loved chasing those. Have you ever seen a dog smile? I sometimes pass smiling dogs here and I think of Caesor. They must be going after a tennis ball, I think to myself, as I see them trot by, off to work, or whatever business stray dogs do. Many Americans and people in general, don’t like to lower themselves to the status of an animal. I’m not ashamed to admit not only that humans aren’t really special, but also that they can learn a few things from other creatures. Happiness, for example, can be a really very simple thing. Maybe it’s even necessarily so. All you need is a tennis ball, or a banana – call it whatever you want – and then you have to run like mad to go after it. Do you have yours? 4.11.12 I’ve been following the Presidential Race quite closely. I somehow enjoy looking at a map of my country, in red and blue. Sure it sort of highlights our lack of unity, but it also is a symbol of democracy. The battles are only at the voting stations, and they’re fought with our thoughts and reasoning, and not with violent weapons. Maybe Americans can be proud of themselves for this process. I was also wondering about people who live in swing states. I understand that polling agencies are surveying the citizenry of these states daily. Does that ever get annoying? If you live in, say, Wisconsin, then do you get called ten times every day by ten different polling organizations interested in your choice of candidate? I also think it’s interesting how Obama’s performance over Hurricane Sandy has seem to have a positive influence on the undecided voters. It indicates a very short attention span. Maybe, in future elections, the incumbent can secretly arrange a small terrorist attack in an important city. The attack would take place in such a way so that nobody is hurt, but so that access to power and clean water is lost. Then the President can fly over there and, with a fat smile on his face, stand where the cameras can see him while he takes charge of the water distribution exercises. So voters are swayed by how well a President handles a big hurricane, but not about what was done, or not, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, or Detroit? Again, I guess some voters can’t remember that far back. As far as hurricane Sandy is concerned, I guess Obama can thank his lucky stars that he didn’t need any votes in Congress for allocating emergency funds to devastated areas in New York and New Jersey. 7.11.12 It’s election night over in the states. It’s early morning over here. I’m excited about the event. It almost strikes me like a championship football match. It’s like a political super bowl. I would say world cup, but this sort of thing doesn’t happen in the same way in other places. For one thing, we’ve got a twisted voting system. Let’s see how it turns out. Speaking of the electoral college, why don’t we take it to a further extreme? Not only could the president be chosen by the votes of delegates from each state, but those delegates’votes could be chosen by representatives from each county in each state, and each of those representatives’ votes can be chosen by additional, subordinate, representative voting from each district. In the end, my vote could be tallied in a household vote which gets contributed in our street vote, which is part of the district vote, then the county, state, and finally national vote. If you find yourself asking, ‘what’s the point of such a silly system?’ then you get my point. It’s silly, isn’t it?

2.10.12 I should write about my time away from my Russian home in Dolgoprudny while it’s still a little fresh in my mind. It was hard to leave here in the last week of August. I had really enjoyed my three weeks of vacation here, not travelling anywhere but where classical literature would take me in my head. It had been more than enough of a release from my everyday work life, and I wasn’t especially keen on travelling for real. But I had practiced my German, and studied some Polish with the hopes of building some sort of foundation for further study of language during my course which was to take place in Krakow the following month. It was the day before my mom’s birthday when I left for Domodedovo airport, anxious that I had forgotten something, and address to a hostel, or important information for the first day of the CELTA course. I found myself feeling the outer pocket of my computer bag to ensure that my passport was still there. If I lose my passport, I’m screwed – I kept thinking – please, just don’t let me lose my passport. I had never lost it before, but I wasn’t sure that that was reason to worry less, so I worried more. Sasha called me when I was in the express train to the airport. This was the last time we would be able to talk to each other for a few weeks, because while I might have been able to figure out how skype works, it wouldn’t have worked out anyway, since she would spend much of the month in the boonies with some distant relatives of the older generation. On the train, she asked me if everything was all right, if I had everything I needed. I said yes, we wished each other well, and said goodbye. My nervousness went away when I finally arrived at the hostel in Berlin. I had established a place to stay and a place to get food at a nearby supermarket. Life was good again. So in the last week of August, I spent a few days walking around Berlin, with my brother for two days, seeing the sights, but also walking the city proper, probably in places where few tourists go, coming in and out of the more familiar areas here and there, making ‘connections’ to known places, like I often do on walks in Moscow. On my last day there, I went on a very long walk, which featured three branches of a local bookstore, called ‘Hugendubels,’ where I couldn’t help but buy a few more books for practical reading before my next trip to the country; featured also Charlotte’s castle, where my parents, Aunt and Uncle had visited a few years before. I walked around in the garden behind the castle before heading home. I walked on a dirt path along a canal until I reached the street of June 17th (I think that’s the right date), which brought me past the Column of Victory, and the Soviet monument, just as it did on my first day in Berlin about seven years ago. The central train station is near that monument. There I got on a train back to my hostel for the night before my trip to Krakow. The train ride east was discouraging. The tracks within a few miles of Berlin are in perfect order. You can just imagine them being a certain distance from one another with an error of no more than a fraction of a millimeter, but then you go further and further east and soon the planks on which the tracks are laid change from cement to wooden. Some of them seem to be rotting away. The platforms too become all the more overgrown with grass and weeds, the further east you go. And then you arrive in Krakow. The main train station, where I arrived that evening, left a good first impression. Sure, the planks were still wooden, but they looked good. The lighting was uniform. No lights had gone out, and none were flickering. The platform was precisely paved and free of cigarette butts and beer bottles. There wasn’t even any trash among the tracks. I took my time leaving the station. I wanted to enjoy the fact that I had arrived in Krakow and not some other city in Poland or some other country. Sure, the train had been direct from Berlin, but direct trains haven’t stopped this American from making really stupid travel mistakes. So I eventually made my way down an escalator and into an adjacent mall. There was a currency exchange counter there. I took note. I exited the mall, found the street name and was happy to have that very street on the map I had drawn to help me reach my accommodation. It turned out to be really close. I found the street without any problem, but passed by the hostel at first, and was forced to turn back to find myself in front of the entrance to what looked like a strip club. There was a sign in black and white with the profile of a woman wearing little more than very high-heels beckoning to the passers-by to pay her a visit. This was where my hostel was supposed to be. For a moment I thought that I had been had, and would have to make an immediate change in accommodation plans. It was already past nine in the evening, plenty dark, and not the best time to be running around an unknown city while carrying a few bags and dragging a huge suitcase. I entered the building with the strip club’s sign, climbed some stairs, and found, attached to a door on my left, a small business card which I recognized as my intended hostel. I rang, and was accepted and given a room. The strip club, it turns out, was further along the first floor, down some stairs. It wasn’t very popular, I would find out. In fact, I spent a good deal of time in the area (stretching in the courtyard after running), and saw so few people go inside, that I began to doubt that it was a club of any sort. Lots of possibilities come to mind, if you have a little imagination: a hackers’ base, for example, maybe associated to some spy organization. My place at the hostel was rather nice. I was in a room furnished for five or six, but over the course of the whole month, I was alone in the room most of the time. I had gambled on the popularity of Krakow in September, and my gamble ended up paying off, since I usually had peace and quiet while doing my homework, but also paid about half the price that the CELTA administrators’ recommended accommodation providers had offered. Aside from the room, there was a kitchen with a small cooker and a fridge. I cooked a few times a week and had leftovers for when there was no time to cook. The month flew by, and soon I found myself packing my bags again, getting ready for the trip back. I’ve said before that leaving a place that has been your home somehow reminds me of dying, and I was reminded again when leaving Krakow, even if I had been there only a few weeks. This feeling was accentuated by the fact that my trip back was the same as the one had been forward, only much faster. It was as though my short life there were flashing before my eyes before my return to Purgatory. I travelled back to Berlin on a night train (because I, foolishly, had bought a round trip flight between Berlin and Moscow). I had to catch two connecting trains, one in Warsaw at midnight, the other in S’czens’c’a (I think) around six in the morning. I could have left my luggage in a locker at Alexander Platz in Berlin and walked around the famous museum island for a few hours, but I decided not to dilly dally and take a bus straight to Tegel airport, where I would read Hermann Hesse instead of walk. The bus ride there was nostalgic. I passed through central Berlin, saw the buildings I had seen only a few weeks before, passed a café where my brother and I had had lunch, drove up to the Brandenburger gates before turning and leaving the town center for more distant locations. I have to make a long story short here, because it’s bedtime, so I’ll say simply that I’m back. Today was my first day on the job. They’ve given me the first week off from the company, which I really appreciate. I expect there might be a very tight schedule next week when I try to commute (on foot?) from one end of Dolgoprudny to the other. Today was all right. My first lesson was with a 7-year-old Russian monster to whom I first tried to impart my knowledge of English of few months ago. She was nicer than I remember. Today’s second lesson was with a group of young Russian monsters. That could’ve gone better, but at least I’m not so shell shocked that I’m not willing to try them again. A lot of these monsters know me already. We worked together last year, even if just from lessons that I covered for another teacher. I don’t know if I can call my work ‘teaching’ as much as ‘spending time in the same room while attempting to incorporate elements of language instruction.’ It’s always been a bit of a struggle for me, working with kids. Fortunately, I’ll be able to teach adults too. In the end, it will be a good balance of work, and a good experience overall. So here’s to the start of another marathon! 3.10.12 The CELTA course was demanding, as they said it would be. The second and third weeks were most difficult. I had four papers to turn in overall, and the first two they asked me to resubmit. I was expecting not to pass the third on the first try either, but somehow I did pass, and the fourth one was a breeze in comparison to the others. Nobody was asked to resubmit that one. Aside from these papers – analyzing grammar and lexis; producing a lesson based on a given text; producing a lesson for a particular student (to be interviewed) with certain problems (to be discovered from the interview recording); and lessons we’ve learned during the course – we had to give eight short lessons for observation by our peers and tutors, all of whom are experienced language teachers and teacher trainers. You would think that giving the lessons was the easy part, since I had been teaching a work load fifteen times as great for the past two years of my teaching profession, but in the course quantity wasn’t as important as quality. The lessons were scrutinized down to every word said and gesture made. If you were but one second over the forty-five minute time limit, you were commanded to cease instruction and give the next teacher five minutes to set up the class for his or her attempt at avoiding dismal failure in the instruction gauntlet. Needless to say, the tutors wanted to see your plans for each lesson, with every word and gesture highlighted, every breath taken measured by the clock, and every activity planned from instructions through to the feedback stage. The planning was in insane detail, but as used as I was to much simpler and more concise planning, I didn’t resent the attention to the microscopic units of each part of the lesson. As a matter of fact, in some strange way, I almost enjoyed planning very much. I wrote a rough draft, a first draft, then rewrote it for myself for class, and then finally rewrote it a final time for the tutor. This final draft was to be written on a special form which tabulated stage, aims, time, and procedure, along with separate pages for grammar and lexis analysis, prediction of problems in the functional language, grammar or lexis presentations. If I had learned to appreciate planning like this back in high school, I may have enjoyed English class much more. It strikes me a good skill to have, when writing an essay for instance. Back then, I drudged though every single written assignment given to me. Today, having somehow come to appreciate planning things, I might enjoy writing essays much more. If only there were a way to go back to school again … Incidentally, my enjoyment of this part of my job isn’t without a connection to mathematics. Teaching English seems to me to be more and more an intricate science the longer I try to do it. There are so many variables that go into one lesson. The students are a huge variable that I can’t completely control. Although I can control them to a certain extent, depending on how I carry out my job with them: I can make them fall asleep, or scream in rage, or frustration. If I’m successful and a little lucky, I can make them interesting in learning, but that doesn’t happen every day. Aside from them, there are still plenty of variables in a lesson which I do control: what material to cover; how to cover it; how to review; what tasks – should I put this task first or second?; Will the students be tired of speaking at this point and be ready to write a little, or should they listen or read instead of write? In short, the whats, hows, and whens of each lesson are only a sampling of what I’ve had to think about when planning. In the end, lessons are really kind of mathematic. Each lesson is an optimization problem. What combination of possible solutions to what, how and when will get the students as far as possible within the given amount of time? Some lessons get them far (when the right combination is chosen), others not so far. I wanted to write about Krakow, where I took my CELTA course last month, but it’s time for bed. Tomorrow is day three of the current marathon. This week they’ve got me running at a slow jog. They’ll set me free (put me on full time) starting next week. Maybe the analogy isn’t expressed so well that way. Maybe this week I’m still free of too much weight on my back while I run, whereas next week I’ll have to carry a two thousand pound elephant along with me – prime print.

30.7.12 Let me draw you a picture. The sun is not far above the horizon, although it's nearly noon. There is snow on the ground, hard packed. I'm walking towards the railroad tracks, which I'll then follow one station past Dolgoprudny, where I'll veer away to get to a cluster of buildings where Prime Print is located - that's my company work site. We haven't had snow for awhile, so that whatever snow is present has long since turned to pack ice, and this makes for trecherous walking sometimes. I pride myself on my ability to keep my footing on the hazardous ground, although even I have moments where I unexpectedly find myself head over heels in the air, about to hit a very hard, cold ground. On this day, I don't reach the tracks without having one of these moments. The best thing to do when you have been betrayed by a lack of friction, and gravity is quickly pulling you towards a rather uncomfortable impact with elementaly hardened ice, is to relax, say to yourself that bad things are bound to happen, and at least try to enjoy to view of a possibly crystal blue sky as your short flight comes to its bruising end. Luckily for me, the sky was clear and blue on that day, and I enjoyed the view. I let a terrific grunt with the impact, then I picked myself up, brushed myself off, checked for broken limbs, and having found everything in order, I got on my way. I realised only half an hour later, as I was approaching my turn away from the tracks, that my digital camera had fallen out of my pocket. And then I remembered the guy who had been walking towards me when I slipped that morning. He gave me a strange look after I had gotten up, although I hadn't said anything to him. What, had he never seen anyone slip on an icy street before? Maybe I slip with an American accent too, I thought, and so he had recognised a foreigner by the way I fall. But then it occured to me that he might have seen my camera fly out of my coat packet and was waiting for me to, perhaps hoping that I wouldn't, feel in my pockets and notice the camera's absence. Of course, I didn't do this after I fell, I must have been in a hurry to get to work. Thus I lost my camera, it would seem, to some Russian bum. For the sake of political correctness, I should note that there are no more nor fewer bums in this country than any other. I would remind anyone who has been conditioned to hate a fear anything associated with the Soviet Union or communism, that an American might have also taken a camera up for grabs. Anyway, I didn't mention this incident to get into any comparisons, but to explain what has happened with my camera. I promised someone that I would post some photos at the end of the blog, but without many good ones of Dolgoprudny, I'll have to restrict myself to photos in words. Turns out, describing a photo in writing is an interesting and challenging exercise. The idea came to me as a homework assignment that I gave to my students. I had long since been doing an activity in class where a student describes a picture to a partner who draws what is being described and asks questions for any details. If the students are motivated, the activity can be very communicative. But for the first time this past month, after doing this activity in class, I asked my students to write about their own favorite photo at home, then to bring it in and explain what they had written (without reading their text), sort of a show-and-tell assignment. I took their texts at the end of class, and as usual corrected them and responded. But with such an assignment, how could I respond but with a description of a photo of my own. It occured to me then that I didn't have to provide a hard photo, but that I could pick any memory and describe it. I rather enjoyed doing this, especially since my students had chosen some beautiful pictures, which allowed me to do the same. I am sitting on the bank of a shallow creek. The water isn't more than a few inches deep as it flows in a wide swath across a bed of large rocks and small boulders. It's night, and the moon is full. The otherwise visible stars are hiding behind the light of the moon, which in return lights up the trees on the other bank, and the sides of the mountains looming in the distance on each edge of the valley. I can see the reflection of the trees and the mountains in the water, centered by a long white streak of moonlight. The rocks interrupt the reflection here and there, but not so much that I can't see Half Dome standing sentry across from me. I look up and see the actual mountain jutting out of the valley floor. The plan was to climb it the next day. (This memory is one of the most beautiful pictures I have in my collection.) 2.8.12 In my next picture, I'm in Russia again. It's last winter, and rather cold, but no weather could stop me from enjoying my Saturday walks. I am in a new place again. I was in the area last week, but I didn't come this way. I must have walked a long way already, possibly all the way from home, because I'm still well north of the station where the train from Dolgoprudny stops. It's a typical street, leading from one street to, as I will soon find out, a broader avenue that I have walked along before. There's snow on the ground, but the sidewalks have been cleaned well enough that whatever slippery sheets of ice may be lying on their surfaces are easily visible, and can be carefully crossed, if not avoided all together. There's a vent releasing room-temperature air from a thick pipe which is sticking out of the ground next to some sleeping trees in between the sidewalk and the street. There's a bush next to the vent, also sleeping. Its branches come close enough to the vent that it is getting a constant blast of air. The air comes out relatively warm and wet. The water evidently condenses on the branches, and then freezes. Icicles form and grow as more and more water comes out, condenses on the already frozen sheath of water, and freezes in turn. Furthermore, the blast of air is so strong, and the branches are so close to the vent that the icicles grow slightly sideways, because every additional drop of water is still blown a little away from the vent. As I walk by, the branches already have been adorned with icicles almost a foot long, extending first to the side, then curling downward as gravity overcomes the flow of air from the vent as the icicles grow more and more. With the added weight and form, the otherwise bare branches sway much more in the artificial wind than they would otherwise. The icicles bump into one another and make not the sound of chimes, as you might expect by their appearance, but more like marbles bumping into one another. It's cold. I move on to find a bookstore and happily go inside to warm myself up. I'm in a train. I'm going to work in the central school Moscow. I ran to catch this train, because the later one is more packed and takes longer to arrive. In this train, I can always find a seat, as I have today. I am writing in my notebook, brainstorming ideas for an 'agree or disagree' handout that I'll write up after arriving at school, and then use in that evening's lesson. We don't know what the topic is, maybe sports, or education, or vegetarianism. The sun is shining through the windows of the train carriage from the east, which is strange, since it's already late afternoon. I'm wearing an old polo shirt, my blue jeans, and my nicest shoes. My backpack is on my lap. I'm using its back side as a table to write on. The table is a little sweaty from the run to the train station, but that's O.K., it's still a good table. There are textbooks inside, and speakers, plenty of hard things on which to write. The textbooks are not for that evening's class, I only have to make some copies from them for the company's classes the next day. I may use the speakers that evening. I might have a song lined up, maybe "We don't need no Education," if the topic is education, or "Another One Bites the Dust," if it's sports. I might also just have a random song prepared in case nobody has anything to say about whatever topic I have planned for the evening. (That happens sometimes. I've done these topics so many times, that occasionally I forget to start from the beginning and my starting point is too complicated for anybody to have an opinion on it.) In the train, I don't pay much attention to the other people in the carriage with me. We're all going to Moscow, but each for his or her own reason. So late in the afternoon, I might be one of few who are going to work. Other people might still be on the job if it requires them to travel from place to place; others might be visiting a friend; some of the young people might be going to a class of one sort or another. This picture is very recent, taken within the past month. Not only as I sit in this train, but elsewhere and elsewhen, every day, constantly, I am trying not to think about how many classes I have left. The Moscow Marathon is coming to an end, but I mustn't think about the finish line, because sometimes you're finished as soon as you think about it, whether or not you've actually come to the end. It's best not to distract yourself with thoughts of free time, good weather, long walks, sitting in parks with some nuts, dark chocolate, a bottle of water, and a good book - it's best not to think about those things until the job is done. Because such thoughts don't motivate you anymore, they kill you. They bring your tired run to a dead halt and you collapse along the way. You won't be able to get up after thinking about such things, but will have to crawl along until the merciful end. Your legs, having gone on strike, will already be on vacation, but your soul will be forced to drag itself to and from work whatever way it can. "Finish line?" you must force yourself to think, "What line? What vacation? I don't know what you're talking about; now leave me be please, I have a delightful lesson that I want to prepare for, oh boy!" Today, I am on vacation. Yesterday was my first day. It was a good day. Today is too. I've wanted to write this last entry before the exhaustion of work leaves me entirely. It's almost already left, though not completely. I only have to imagine that I have a lesson in a few hours, and a muscle in my brain tightens. It's still rather sore, just like a runner's quads and hams and joints after a three-hour run. A few weeks' rest will do it some good. Of course, I've already begun to enjoy my free time in ways that weren't possible before. In the absense of work, there's a big void that needs to be filled. I'd like to fill it with a lot of reading and writing, but also some other things that I want, or nevertheless have to do, like some homework before my CELTA course starts next month. I'll put that off, a few days at least, to the last minute at most. 4.8.12 Here are two more pictures. I may have described them already, but I'll do them again, because after thinking for a few minutes, I decided that these were ones which might stay in my memory for a long time. It's late Februaury. The Presidential elections are in a few weeks. I'm standing on Pushkin Square, along with a crowd of a few hundred other people who have gathered either to support one of the opposition candidates or, like me, to see the spectacle. The candidate is Vladimir Dj., I call him the Joker, a fitting name, because not many people take him seriously. I can see the Joker up on the stage that has been set up on the edge of the square, which isn't very big, no bigger than a soccer field. It's enclosed by streets on all sides, one of them being the busy Tver avenue, which leads to the Red Square in one direction, and to the Belarus train station in the other. People have flags and banners of all sorts. On one side of the square there's a huge banner in black and red which says, "[Vote for] Djirinovski, or else it will get worse!" And on the other side there's a banner of the same large size, spanning almost the entire length of the square, which says, "Djirinovski, and it will get better!" There are traffic jams all around, with cars honking, either in support of the Joker, or to disrupt whatever he's trying to say. He's up on the stage. I can't see him as clearly as I've seen him on T.V., with his shortly-cropped frizzy grey hair, beady eyes and smoke-stained teeth, but despite the distance, I can recognise him from where I stand. He's wearing a light grey winter coat, maybe you call it a frock, and he puts on glasses whenever he wants to read something from his notes. His voice is as clear as ever because there are loud speakers which translate his speech to all corners of the square. For some reason he's talking about historical events from the past, and I don't understand how they pertain to what he wants accomplished in the near or distant future. I get the impression that others might not understand this either, or that they're used to him talking like this, and they've stopped listening until the Joker indicates that it's time to cheer again. He does this with a change of intonation and volume in his voice. The topic changes accordingly, and suddenly he's talking about current problems and solutions. There's a small climax within the speech, the crowd cheers, then the Joker goes back into seemingly less relevant material, and the atmosphere goes dormant again, waiting for the next surge in emotion, be it hatred towards the current administration, or hope for the future, or amusement at the prospect of the Joker as President. Later that day, I've walked further into downtown Moscow and have come to what I think is called Theater Square, which extends all the way across the street from the Bolshoi Theater. Here the communists are having a meeting in support of their candidate, Mr Z. The location is fitting because there's a monument on the square, I think of Carl Marx, with an engraved epithet calling for the proletariate from all countries of the world to unite. The street, another big avenue which goes in a circle around the Red Square, has been closed for the meeting, and a small crowd extends from a stage on one side of the street, set up right next to the monument, into the small square in front of the theater. The place has been decorated extensively. Everything and everyone is dressed in red: there are ribbons on the fountains and lampposts, and flags of all sizes with the legendary sickle and hammer. The stage itself is practically covered in red curtains, red in the back and on the sides, and a red banner spanning the top saying, I forget exactly, but something like, "Power to the Folk." The crowd here is not very big, no more than a few hundred people. Most of the supporters seem to be of the more elderly generation, those who can well compare the current times with the old, and who have decided that the latter were, despite their faults, nonetheless better than the former. In this meeting, there are many speakers. I've arrived in time to hear the candidate himself, Mr. Z. He has a heavy build; he's not overweight, but looks rather like an aged weight lifter. The material in his speech seems more to the point than that of the Joker's speech, and his voice is deep and penetrating. In short, the man looks and speaks like a tank. He doesn't speak for long, though, after my arrival, and other speakers come to take his place. I don't know where they come from, whether or not they are waiting in the front rows of the crowd, or in the background of the stage. There are plenty of people on the stage, one of whom I recognise from a photo I saw of Mr. Z speaking somewhere. This man must be his body guard. He's huge, also with a very heavy build, although seemingly sooner as a result of one too many Russian doughnuts than of lifting heavy weights. He's middle-aged, maybe nearing fifty, with short black hair spotted with grey, and a mean looking face. His arms are crossed one way or another, either one hand in the other arcoss his substantial waist - that's when he's relaxed - or, when he's serious, across his chest. He stands there the entire time, never asking anything of anyone, never drinking the hot tea that's going around. He's silent as a mouse, but he doesn't stand far enough away (and it would have to be pretty far) that his presence isn't obvious and imposing. He moves his position according to where Mr.Z goes to sit down as the other speakers take their turn. At one point the meeting takes on sort of a religious tone, as one or two particular speakers come on - I don't know whether I should call them cheer leaders, or communist priests - and lead the congregation in an intermissionary prayer. I can't help but think of my own experiences in my hometown catholic church, as we used to repeat 'Lord, hear our prayer,' after whatever the priest wanted to pray for that week. Here, on the avenue next to Theater Square, one of the speakers says, 'for this or that,' after which the crowd shouts 'Ура! [Hurray!],' whereby the last chant is for those who fell in the war for the motherland at the hands of the Nazi fascists. I think to myself, you don't need to have an elderly audience for this comment to have an emotional effect; the Joker probably invoked this moment of history in his speech too. That ought to do it. This marathon's over. The academic year has come to an end for me, and this blog has temporarily reached its end too. It may seem to have reached its end long ago, judging by how little I wrote this past Spring, but believe it or not, I was still chugging along at work and on the weekends through Moscow. I was already tired then and, try as I might not to, I was counting the months, then the weeks, and finally the days left before now finally arrived. Now it's now, finally! It's here, I've passed on, so to speak, and am in heaven. But I'll resurrect as a teacher, probably at too soon a time. I'll have to make the most of my time off to gather enough willpower to go back to work in a few weeks. How am I going to do this? Well, by running a marathon, or course - only a marathon of a different kind. Maybe I'll write or read like a madman. I've already started my Polish textbook (I'm going to Krakov next month for my CELTA course). If I can learn enough Polish to be able to read Alice in Wonderland, I'd be pretty proud of myself. Like I said before, there are plenty of other things that I want or have to do. I'll have to plan well to not miss out on much. People might say to me, I can hear them now, that I should take it easy, relax, lighten up. I guess I can't help myself. I run one marathon after another, in whatever figurative sense you can think of, and at the end of my day, there's no escape from the fact that for me life is a marathon. I'll be running until the day I die. Would I want it any other way?

1.5.12 I repeated a walk today that I did last week for the first time. I found a metro station that had eluded my travels thusfar, even last week I passed it without noticing. The avenue I walked along was called Komsomolskaya, a name which was often heard in Russia in its past, and now, outside of old movies, only in names of streets and squares. Strangely enough, the avenue is on the other side of town from the square of the same name, where three train stations are located, but the metro station it crosses is on the red metro line, as is the station on the square, and Komsomolskaya was about as red as could be, so in a way it makes sense. I was debating whether or not I should go to different branch of Ashan which was within my walking distance (but I've become such a walker that there's not much outside of my walking distance, if you give me enough time, some good weather and provisions) - the branch next to Moscow State Univerisity, which was not far away, but I decided to continue repeating the route I had done a week before, especially considering that it went through Sparrow Hills park, which makes for a walk worth repeating. I didn't regret it. The trees were blooming today, more so than a week ago. There's nothing like a forest on a hill in the spring that lets you see so many shades of green, from the lightest tones, almost verging on yellow, through dark tourquoise all the way to the brown of the trees that aren't early risers in the season. Just as delightful to me is the number of people you see out walking, enjoying the warmer weather in spite of a rather bitter spring wind. They weren't only walking, but riding bikes and roller blades, skateboards and two-wheeled scooters. I tried to think, as I walked on the side of a paved road without any cars, but which was busy with the traffic of people exercising, if there were any places like this in America, where people enjoy being outside for the sake of moving around or enjoying the fresh air. Central Park in New York comes to mind, but when I was there last, allbeit at this time of year, while there were people running and jogging, it didn't compare to what I've seen here in the past few weeks. National Parks in America also come to mind. There are places there for people crazy about hiking, such as myself, big enough to last a whole summer without the hiker seeing any one place twice. I guess that's something to be proud of. I don't think they have national parks in Russia, and if they do, I doubt they're as well kept as the ones in the states. 8.7.12 Oh! I haven't written here in such a long time. I've been writing, sure, either in my other journals, or in replies to students, but it's been quite a while since I took the time to write entirely for myself (whereby I include whoever reads this as a part of myself). The biggest change since my last entry is that I've been seeing a girl. I guess I can blame her for not having the time to read or write as much as I would like, but on the other hand, I guess you can measure how much you care about someone else by the things you're willing to sacrifice from your own life. For me, that might not be that much. I was telling Sasha - that's my girl - the other day, after hearing that her mother had complained about a newfound stench of garlic, explainable only by her contact with me and whatever I eat, that if I had to choose between a girl and garlic, I think I might have to show that girl the door. Poor Sasha couldn't have been happy to hear this, but she's understood how much I appreciate what I consider to be good food, and that she can't hope to compete with it after such a short time. We've only been seeing each other for a few weeks. Other than that I've started working at the central school in Moscow three days a week. They were going to give me another group, so that I would have been working there five days, but they were merciful and gave that group to someone else. They understand, it seems, that the commute is a bit of a pain. Round trip, I'm on the road (by foot) or on the tracks for over two hours to and from central Moscow. It would be tough to do that every day. I'm still working at the printing company in Dolgoprudny, which I guess is why they didn't ask me to move to another apartment and make me more available for other lessons. I should be thankful for my students at the company, even if one of them is rather lazy and evidently sees me only for the prestige of having lessons with a native speaker. I still enjoy walking there every day. While I at first found the timing inconvenient, those walks have given my working day some backbone, some structure around and during which I can plan the rest of the day. Among other things, the experience of walking ninety minutes (round trip) to and from the company hasn't at all lead to the desire to own a car. On the contrary, it's further strengthened my wish never to own a car, but to constantly live close enough to wherever I work to reach my workplace on foot. Spending ninety minutes in a car or private transport can be very stressful, but walking for ninety minutes is often the best part of my day, which isn't to say that lessons don't go well. In fact, it's walking that puts me in a good enough mood to walk into class day after day ready to teach some people some English, or at least make them feel like a million dollars about attending lessons with a native speaker. Without those walks, I'd be sunk. To be fair, I'd probably take the extra time to run some more, but the effect would be the same. In short, I don't see how people live without exercise. It can make the difference between a hellish, stressful day of the same old work, and a day where, despite any bad weather there may be, the sun shines from within.