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April 21, 2005
Pleasure and guilt
Since I had my Russian oral finals yesterday, I finally feel as though my Russian is my own, unsullied by the dread of exam assessment or by the student's game of peer oneupmanship ("My soft Ls are softer than yours", and so on.)
I sometimes feel guilty about these pages, and hope I have not done too much to consolidate the stereotype of Russian people as vodka-guzzling fatalists, frozen in time in some Soviet tableau. I get annoyed by this page's colour scheme, by the obviousness of my themes, by the poignancy of it all - is Russia really more "poignant" a country than any other?
This is about all I can offer from the outside, though. I've decided to move to New York rather than back to St Petersburg because I want to choose somewhere that offers at least the potential for "settling". I calculated, the other day, that since leaving highschool I've packed up my things and undertaken a major move eighteen times. I'm bored and exhausted by it all and I'd like clusters of friends rather than a global connect-the-dots.
This is all sounding very final, but it's not meant to be.
Posted by michele at April 21, 2005 2:32 PM