Thoughts about Russian

russian. is. hard.

like, really hard.

because bilingualism isn't enough...

soooo, since the last time i came on here, some stuff has occurred. i passed stats (i can now officially graduate college tomorrow if i wanted to, good for me). my two best friends moved into my empty room. i got my russian books (wasn't really freaking out about the whole cyrillic alphabet thing until i opened said books, now i am). i have watched an inordinate amount of t.v. and to top it off, i have not worn real clothes for the past month. when i say real clothes, i mean i basically wear the two pairs of pseudo-athletic shorts i own and an assortment of kappa delta tshirts. shameful.

in other news i can't believe 1/3 of my summer school in cville has gone by - i would say it was quick but that would b a lie because really it was quite tedious and useless to go to class every morning. so it was slow in that regard. but i suppose a lot happened over the past 4 weeks, and really if you think about it a majority of my time was devoted to watching reruns of brothers and sisters, boy meets world, and an inexplicable desire to listen to radio songs that i don't even know the names of. and even tho i got a tiny pay increase last year to go from shelving to processing books, i have been relegated to wandering the stacks and getting papercuts in strange places, straining to find slots for the miniscule pamphlets that someone in the u.s. government cared about printing. thanks, america, for printing 54,834,324 versions of some obscure national park in nevada that literally no one will ever check out. but i have to shelve it anyways.

i must say, being in the stacks isn't all that bad. i was beginning to see regulars - well actually just the one person who happened to be at the same carrell every day working on who knows what, but still there was a solidarity in the awkwardness of my rummaging through call numbers (not the dewey decimal system, the weird library of congress filing that uses letters) and reordering shelves. thank goodness, actually, that no one's in the stacks, because i make a lot of inconvenient noise that would interrupt any stereotypical studier. sorry in advance, stack-dwellers.

thank goodness russian starts on monday. it's from 8:30 to 5:30, so there will be significantly less time to shelve my life away, and more time spent actually sitting at one of the desks making strange symbols that translate into a culture that loves vodka, spies, and siberia. my mom, as an ardent polaca, doesn't particularly care for russian as a language. neither did her parents, grandparents, great-grandparents...you get the idea (altho ask my babcia and she'd swear that the ukranians were the worst, hands down). but, i guess if i were born in a country that got partitioned a million times a century, i'd be irritated too. i would really like to go to petersburg though. i like all the old buildings and history.

orientation is tomorrow, so i'm sure that will be interesting. i'll be spending the next 40 weekdays with the same 20 people, for 9 hours a day, so i'm sure we'll all be good friends by the end of it. In the verdadero espiritu de Rusia, here's two Tolstoy quotes i felt were especially poignant.

"Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won't come out for twenty year, if you really wish to learn." - Leo Tolstoy

"I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence - I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love." - Leo Tolstoy