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.