I have just succeeded in dipping half my hair in my coffee.

Good morning Peggy. Its Monday and I have just succeeded in dipping half my hair into my coffee. Brilliant. I'm sitting at Papaccino's nursing a rather large carmel coffee concoction and a bit of an endorphin rush after fighting my way up the hill. I wanted so bad to stop this morning and decompress a bit, to purge some of this craziness on paper. But honestly, I don't know if I can let it flow when I know theres a time guillotine hanging over my head. I'll be late enough as it is, even just leaving here by 7, I'll make it up to campus by 7:30. But its finally a five day work week, so horray horray horray I'll be in and out in 6 hours.

Summer is slowly snowballing into one big experiment and excitement trip. I fear that the bubble will burst and the secret well where I'm finding all my energy will dry up and disappear. I've made a pact that doing good works will keep me sane, and so far so good, but it is such a novely I cant help but question the unexpected gift. I started working for Catholic charities a few weeks ago, doing volunteer, what? Tutoring? Life Skills? Cultural Orientation? Some conglomeration of all of it I gues. The coordinator for the refugee program is an L & C grad, desperate for Russian speakers, thus entery Peggy, stage left. She matched me with a Meshketian Turk family who arrived maybe a month ago from Uzbekistan by way of Voronezh for maybe 15 years. Only real hitch is they live way the hel out in SE, basically Gresham really, its like SE 182 and Stark, the end of the Blue line MAX.

En Route to Gresham...

So a rather delayed start due to some loss in the translation when I tried to kall the kids earlier, but hey, an unexpected detour to a new haunt and a beautiful barista who allowed my pithy attempts at flirtation, and hey, what more could a girl ask for?

I don't know why I want so badly to do this right, the whole Russian thing. Maybe it feeds these pangs of destiny that keep ringing so close, the unshakable affliction that I am in hot pursuit of my calling. I keep being told in very many small ways that I should be teaching, and I cant run far enough. Or maybe I'm full of shit and I just get off being able to speak Russian and do some small good in my world.

En Route to town...

I'm sitting on the train and the guys around me don't realize I know they're talking about me in Spanish. The girls behind me are trash talking some guy in Russian. And suburbia is forever suburbia, except for Portland is so gentrified that here the poor are pushed to the outskirts and the rich lounge about in $1000 apartments. But here the two faces of suburbia have come to a grudging peace and you have the modest 2 bedroom single family homes sitting across the wannabe culdesac taunting the newly arrived. The stratification is palpable, and I'm intrigued. Out as far as my charges live, not a person of color to be seen. Well, no, thats not true. When I got off the train earlier I saw a whole Black family chasing this very drunk Russian guy, screaming that he'd stollen some of their shit. I just do what I do best, keep walking, and imagine I'm as inconspicuous as I endevour to seem. And suddely everyone I see on the street, on the bus, on the trains, everyone is someone from somewhere else. I swear to God I was sitting across from the Russian woman who works at Ross who always yells at me for messing up the shoes. And its weird because faces are all taking on new weight and new meaning, and everyone I encounter becomes someone I knew in a past life. The recollections come in layers and suddnly it hits me, all the small mysterious sources of this petulant dejavus, whatever it is. Like on this trian now, suddenly, I am on the train v Cechach on the ourskirts of rural Prague, watching the monsterous panelaky give way to the city I so adore. The settlments are built up around transit stops, real autonomous villages with their own gyms and shops and bars, the endless trek into civilization encapsulated in the last 800 yards of parking lot to some consumer mecca. It is not in the grand philosophical meanderings that we are able to grasp the oneness of humanity, but rather in the mundane dailty battles and the well worn trip to somewhere and someone and something neccesary. And suddenly life here is life elsewhere, the layers of existance then just a matter of circumstance and faith. I wonder then, how rare it is to never really get that far in their quest for...what wholeness? Identity? Understanding? Its all luck, and the only thing that distinguishes my experience here from those people's lives back in Voronezh is just luck, perception, and the faith I have in my surroundings and my relationships. Thats just it though, experience is a matter of perceiving and processing the world, not of the events themselves.