Twenty Minutes...Take Two

...Please excuse the untimely interupption of my internet service and attention span...Where was I?

After my night with Noah I was so out of it, so confused, and my one encounter with the councilling center put me back on track. I've never told anyone about it, that I was there, except Jess and Amy, and Riana who dragged me there cause I was such a mess. Sometimes I think nothing really has changed minus the setting, and for the moment this whole abroad thing allows me a fleeting confidence that will dissapate back in real life. But which life is real, which life is a quickly fading illusion?

Gospodi boze mou, this is what I get for wiling away this rainy day writting in my PJ's. And now its almost 7, what good would it to to get washed and dressed?

I had this amazing cultural revelation between nap number three and found this afternoon. The weather is finally changing, and its about 7 degrees Celsius on the street today, so I was cold. My first reaction was to get up and put on a sweater. Then it occurred to me what a strange resolution that is. Americans would just turn up the heat. Russians would rail at the inadequacies of their world for a while, then throw another blanket on the bed. But me, putting on a sweater, so individual, so non-provacative, so...conflict avoidant. Made me think though...

I think the biggest thing I'm realizing about Russian society here is the overwhelming lack of ideology, and the yearning for one. I expected the same old cries from the old guard for societ security, for a return to back in the day when salaries were paid and health care was free, and no one got evicted for not paying rent. I didn't expect the ideological vacuum to be so palitable. People really consider Russia under Yeltsin to have been anarchy, as the aftershock of the fall, the polar opposite of what they had fled. And now, there is whiplash almost, among the young people, who are trying to orient themselves to something not communist. With no enforced set of beliefs and mornals, having to make that choice of what and how to believe in for themselves for the very first time, they fall to drugs and alcohol and street life, or at the very least a mumbling hopelessness, 'cause it fills the time and space. There is nothing to believe in, nothing to hold on to, limited hopes for the future, and its felt in every minute of every day. I think thats the key to Putin, hes solid, he reminds people of their past, of their future, and most importantly does not leave any room for doubt. Its all about the strong arm of the law, people look at the vacuum of money and power and morals after the fall of the USSR, and they recognize thats not the way. They'd prefer the government to make the choices than to have to make them themselves, or no choices at all.

Then I start thinking about ideology in America, and I get nowhere, interestingly enough. American children are raised in as much of a vacuum void of all but commercialism, and we have our own problems, but on much less of a scale. The difference? We are raised with every expectation that we will succeed, that we will grow up and have a productive life of our own. More than that, from birth we are filtered to series of activities that further indoctrinate us that we are better. Scouts, sports, music lessons, the works. They used to have Pioneers here, or just the idea that they were building communism for a better world. Nothing but money and power and escapism has come to take its place in Russian society.

I want to be back at school to get on with my life. Sometimes I feel like this is limbo here, and sometimes I get a kick out of that neitherworldly quality. SOmetimes it makes me impatient as all hell.