last couple days

My (James') computer is finally back from the shop, and internet has decided to work again. Bonus!

On Sunday, Plum and Cabbage and I drove down to Подольск for the day. We stopped on the way to see the new apartment complex where Cabbage is moving next year. He's going to keep his job in Moscow apparently even though it's a bit of a schlep. Plum says he's not pressuring her to move in with him yet, though he has convinced her to come visit Mom for the weekend, which is a bit of a deal.

The day was gorgeous, and it was cool just sitting there in the car watching the Russian countryside go by. I'm still struck by the oldness of the houses and the standard-issue Продукты that line the streets. Those buildings have seen so much history, but at the same time they make me wonder exactly how much peoples' lives have changed in recent years once you get beyond the major cities.

We spent most of the day by the river, just lounging around and reading and munching on picnic-food purchased from the Spar below our apartment. There were a few other families there, but for the most part it was pretty quiet. For some reason the landscape looked like it couldn't possibly be in America. I'm not sure if it was the scale of the river, the flatness of the landscape, the type of vegetation, the quality of light, or what, but it was distinct from anything I'd seen before.

The night before, some of the teachers went out to celebrate Pawpaw and Baked Beans' birthdays. I'm a huge fan of Baked Beans, I don't mean anything derrogatory by the nickname, just that he's comforting and palatable and rather distinctly British. We went to the Depeche Mode bar, kind of by Mayakovskaya. It was fun...I adored the music of course. A few of us danced. I've never seen anyone dance like Lychee. I was kind of afraid to get in her way. Plum said Lychee once told her that she felt like she had a choice between being invisible and being weird, so she chose the latter. Now her way of relating to people (especially when Beach was over (college people can have their old names)) is to dominate conversations with unconvincing BS and demand to be filled in on everyone else's partially completed conversations. I don't mean to be as harsh as that sounds, I like her when it's just the two of us, but around other people her self-conscious weirdness is kind of impenetrable. I want to say hey, accept invisibility, then your actions will speak for themselves and people will admire your self-containedness and you'll no longer be invisible. Or something. She's moving to Krgyzstan soon. I'm sure I misspelled that.

I'm halfway through The Perversion of Knowledge, by Vadim Birstein. It's about all the terrible things scientists were made to do under the Soviet regime. Parts of it are interesting, like the details of the organization of the academies and their relationship with the government. There's also this great quote from one of the leading Soviet, um, evolutionary biologists...let's see if I can find it..."There is not, and cannot be, a class society in any plant or animal species. Therefore, there is not, and cannot be, here class struggle, though it might be called, in biology, intraspecies competition...All intraspecies relationships among individuals...are directed toward the securing of the existence and thriving of a species and this means, towards the increasing of the number of individuals of a species." (Lysenko) Wow. A lot of the book, though, is just a catalogue of all the prisoners poisoned by the Communists, which is less interesting.

Tomorrow I'll email Terry and see if he can put me in touch with the Environment, Science, and Technology department of the American Embassy so I can beg them for an internship. Tomorrow.