I'm scared of losing my English. Having to think about grammar rules day in and day out is starting to make me see my language not as something living that I can manipulate however I want, but as something static and dead with laws you can apply paint-by-numbers style to more or less convey your ideas. It's amazing how much of a leap it is from having a working proficiency in a language to using it with any sort of nuance. I doubt I'll ever get there in a foreign language...appreciation of nuance maybe but production no.

Last night I went over to Aubergine's to do my laundry. He lives in an huge block-of-flats complex near Medvedkovo, all the way at the end of the red line. He called a couple of his DJ friends while we were on the metro to see if they wanted to come hang out and drink, but to my relief they didn't. I don't know how he keeps the pace of life he does, or why he can't stand to be alone with himself. We spent a couple hours hanging out in his kitchen and talking. He reminds me a little of Alex S-C from the Cove, minus the misanthropy and plus some style. What I mean by the Alex comparison is that he really concerns himself with making sure people are okay, and he has the uncanny ability to draw out my innermost thoughts whenever we have a conversation more than about 10 minutes long. Next year he's going to be the Director of Studies for the school for all of Moscow, so he'll be teaching a tad and doing lots of observations and, as he put it, making sure everyone's okay. Plum thinks they gave him that job because with his drinking and all they can't trust him with a ton of responsibility, and she's probably at least partially right.

This afternoon I went to see a movie with Peach and her friend. The theater was by Novokuznyetskaya, and is one of the few with Russian subtitles rather than dubbing. The movie was called The Science of Dreams. It was about a guy who moved back to Paris to live with his mother after his father died of cancer (I've lost all perspective on how that should affect someone). He has bizarre dreams that often start while he's awake and fade in and out of his actual life...the dream sequences were visually really cool. Lots of paper cut-out animation and bizarre coloration.

Plum and Cabbage are back in her room, after going out to buy noodles. She looked like she had been crying when they went out but now I hear laughter. Hope she's okay.