I currently have a precious jar of Skippy chunky peanut butter resting against my left hip as I write this in bed, and it might as well be gold. Jackie’s parents are visiting her, and Jackie had them bring a giant communal jar for all the Americans as well as a special jar for myself. She whipped it out at about 11 am this morning and I shouted with shock and happiness so loudly I’m sure everyone in Smolny heard me. Best thing that has happened to me all day. However, this means that I’m going to stress about how long this is going to last me, and tonight marks the first of many where I will literally be scooping peanut butter out of the jar like a bear and honey. I put my jar on the other side of the room in order to write this. It’s literally my CRACK.
Ok, let’s get down to business. This blog post is going to be full of angsty complaints. Prepare yourself.
So, a lot is going on with Connecticut College this week. Rising senior class registration began on Tuesday (did I just write... senior?), and the senior housing lottery also opened on Tuesday. East coast time. In terms of my academic schedule, I signed up for a slavic class called The Net Generation, which is about contemporary Russian youth, International Economics (my last econ requirement for my IR major), a government seminar on Germany with my all time favorite gov professor (I <3 Patton), and I’m hoping to enroll in an honors thesis seminar with the history department (granted my honors thesis proposal gets accepted). I’m really excited for my government seminar, but I can’t say I’m too pumped about all the others. I don’t know; has this semester’s academic classes at Smolny disenchanted me? Perhaps. The fact that there are no Russian language classes past intermediate offered this fall (#smalldepartmentproblems [#ineverhashtag]) is deeply saddening, and on top of it all, I won’t be taking any classes with my Russian professor Petko next year... AHH! (Did you hear that?? That was the sound of MY ENTIRE BODY AND SOUL DYING). УЖАСНО!!
But I digress. That was senior registration. Onto the housing lottery. So, out of about 500 seniors, my lottery number was 432. Shitty, but I don’t usually get lucky with those sort of things, so I expected it. I became available to select my room at exactly 6:42 pm EST yesterday, which translated to 2:42 am St. Petersburg time. This meant that I woke up out of my beautiful REM sleep (I was probably having nightmares anyway) at 2:30 am this morning in order to select my room. I threw my mac onto my bed, and with sleepy eyes logged in and waited until the moment of truth. However, when that moment came, and I clicked on the button “Search for Available Rooms,” I found that the only rooms that were available to me and the other unlucky seniors to have received such a high lottery numbers were located in the plex.
The plex is not a bad place. I lived there all freshman and sophomore year, and it has great perks like being attached to the dining hall and AC. The rooms are large enough, and if a hurricane decides to blow through New London like one did last year, I know I’ll be safe. With that said though, NOOOO! I was so spoiled with living in Knowlton in south campus last year that the mere thought of going back to that dungeon castle makes me sad. Luckily, I don’t think I was fully awake to get this angry at nearly 3 am this morning, so I selected room 505 in Lambdin, my favorite dorm in the plex. There is a room swap period at the end of May that I’ll take part in, so there’s a chance I won’t actually stay there. It’s just a bummer because I really wanted to spend senior year in central campus, but oh well. I have ZERO right to complain. I get my own room, and I go to Connecticut College for crying out loud. SNAP OUT OF IT, LIV! Be grateful, ya brat.
So there’s that. In my reading and writing class we began to go over participles on Monday, and it’s only Wednesday, but I feel like my confidence in Russian has plummeted down to the deepest depths of my core in this short amount of time. There are few things in this world that makes me smoke-coming-out-of-my-ears angry and frustrated (well, at least I’d like to think that there are only a few), and not getting a concept in Russian is one of them. Of course, I make mistakes every time I try to speak Russian. My accent is actually so bad it’s not even funny (Barry tells me that I just have to pretend I’m a Russian gangster and everything will sound more authentic), and I forget really important vocab when I desperately need it. But not understanding a concept is different. It reminds me of all the times in Nucci’s 7th grade math class when I had to go get extra help, and I was always on the verge of tears because I felt so stupid. I also remember being so mad this fall when I couldn’t get the concept of который for about a week (I finally got it though, thank god), and the concept of participles has been evoking the same oh-god-Liv-don’t-you-dare-cry-in-class feelings. How does one describe participles? According to my text book, “adjectives formed from verbs can be called participles or verbal adjectives.” Okay, that doesn’t sound that bad, but trust my brain, they are. Here’s an example. In Russian literature (participles, thank the heavens, generally are only used in formal writing, not speech), a sentence like “Since 1824 the theater has been called the ‘Malyi’ to differentiate it from the Bolshoi Theater, which is located next to it.” “Which is located next to it” can be condenced into one long-ass Russian word. Along similar lines, in the sentence: “It’s a list of world-famous cultural figures who have attended the Malyi Theater,” “who have attended” can be replaced with one word. Except these magical, long one-worders seem to evaporate and appear in complete RANDOM (not really, I think there’s a reason behind it) places in the sentence. Are you lost yet? Good. So am I. On Monday’s class, as all this was being explained, I was like, yeah! Totally got this. Until we started going over examples. Like I said earlier, I get things wrong all the time. I blank in classes occasionally, but on Monday my brain literally stopped working. I think I forgot how to read cyrillic, and when I was asked to answer an exercise, I sat gaping at my paper as the seconds ticked painfully by and my poor friends cringed and watched me crash and burn. AND THEN I forgot the ending for the dative case. I should have taken the time to think before I said that I forgot, but I was so embarrassed and ashamed at that point that I didn’t want to dig my grave any deeper, or speak for that matter. My professor responded by asking the class if she should bring in a chart of case endings. Now, THAT really ticked me off. NOOOO!!! I KNOW THE ENDINGS, GOD DAMNIT. BELIEVEEEEE MEEEEE.
Nope, Liv. You done fucked up. I wouldn’t have believed you EITHER.
Grr...
Let’s keep going and rant about how much I hate the gender roles here. Yes, it’s finally gotten so under my skin that I’m ready to curse out the next person in this country I hear saying something about women (good thing I can’t understand anything anybody says [yes, this is actually still true. Why haven’t I improved?]). If there is anything that is going to prevent me from ever coming back to this country (I will come back, don't kid yourself), it’s the inequality of the sexes. It’s not that obvious, but, on the other hand, I’m not very observant. What I have noticed though is that once women get married, they are expected to do all the cooking and cleaning while their husbands watch TV in the living room until they are called (my blood is starting to boil). Women are supposed to get married young, like <27 I’d say (I learned this when I tried to explain to my host mom my marriage pact with my best guy friend: “we agreed that if we weren’t married by age 40 that we’d marry each other.” My host mom’s response: “Why so late??” I think my host mom began praying for me double after that, and then triple THAT when I told her I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have kids or not). Additionally, women don’t really play sports. To which I say, fuck you, Russian society. I get weird looks at the gym. I’ve noticed that I’m the only one that wears shorts. There are no female club sports teams at Smolny (that I’m aware of). I know I shouldn’t be getting this worked up because I’m only here for a little bit longer, but this has really been getting to me.
I'm ashamed to say that I have never been this fierce about feminist issues before. My mom loves Gloria Steinem and she has always encouraged me to listen to her podcasts on women’s rights and whatnot. I’ll get to them eventually, I would tell her. In all honesty, it just wasn’t something that was interested in. Moreover, you’d think that growing up with a half-Cambodian family that I would have developed an opinion earlier on in regards to patriarchic, sexist cultures. I’ve been surrounded by it my whole life, but my parents have done the best job of letting me do what I want and standing up for me to my grandmother and whatnot. I’m forever grateful to that. Of course, it’s a bit easier to defy my Asian relatives at home because, well, they are in the minority in the States. That’s not the case here in Russia. I don’t know; feminism definitely still has a scary connotation to me, and I am in no way against men now. Dear lord no. I cannot survive without them. But, again, I feel like I’m about ready to bite someone’s head off if they say anything that merely IMPLIES what a women’s place should be. Sometimes people don’t even have to say anything; I can just tell by the way they look at me/react to something I say. Oh gosh, I sound frightening, don’t I? Like my eyes have turned red and my teeth have gotten sharper? I apologize. I used to laugh at Will Hallet’s sexist jokes in high school (hi Will Hallet...), and I can absolutely still joke along because I think it’s insanely stupid if you’re THAT sensitive, but I’m definitely coming back to the states with a different perspective on women's issues. I mean, I’m not going to take any classes from the gender and women’s studies departments, nor do I picture myself diving into any feminist literature, but who knows. Maybe someday...
Ok, I think the world has had enough of Liv (I certainly have). Hah, sometimes I wonder when I walk over that bridge on the way to Smolny in the mornings, “will anyone like me and/or respect me anymore after having read my blog and all my secret, dark thoughts now? Am I going to have ANY friends when I get back to Conn in the fall?” I feel like you all have gotten a little big more than you bargained for my choosing to read “Adventures in St. Petersburg”...
P.S. Ingrid Michaelson's new album "Lights Out" released yesterday and I'm obsessed with it. Two thumbs up (go listen to it now)!
No comments:
Post a Comment