i nearly got a pastry this morning. chose a bagel instead — substance over sweetness; but i could have gotten a pastry. hesitant at the lack of ceremony at first, i broke pesach last nite over sub-par italian food (pasta rarely excites me.)

there are other psychological barriers that make food choices significant, ones that last much longer than eight days. there was a time i would never order a pastry, or eat salad that arrives dressed b/c russian waiters do not understand “on the side.” guilt when it peaked towards the end of high skool never would have let me, or if it had would have guaranteed furtive, joyless consumption.

on an unrelated note i got an A on my film midterm and she read part of it aloud to the class. that brings my average for the four i have in hand to a sturdy B -. go me!

anne liked my newly developed pictures so much she went running off with them. it’s always nice when one’s possessions or productions merit theft. luckily she brought them back. they are, not so luckily, from the wrong roll, which is to say not the roll i had intended to give. but that’s okay! after all, i would have had to get these seen to eventually. it allowed me the opportunity also to reflect that i look so much better [in pictures] when i’m happy.

my midterms were a less pleasant surprise. i resolved i wouldn’t regret not studying [extensively] and i won’t. my grades don’t transfer. for now i’m taking comfort in teacher jeanne’s comment that my essays were, if not perfect, “well-written.” actually i did fine on her test. hopefully the two i get back tomorrow will be same-par or better. –get thee behind me, satan of guilt and shame! i still have my finals and piles of work to mitigate those less-than-happy numbers. in all honesty, that’s my real balm.

elated. the sky is blue and i want to wear orange in it. cairo station turned out to be a silly black+white 1960s moralistic film heavy on the close-ups-of-eyes while violins surged in the background. but interesting, still, shannon and i agreed, for those reasons.

came home leisurely and curled up in a corner in my bed, verses in hand, quaking, as the devils deliciously described on the pages tripped off of them into my bedroom. then i dreamt that eliz and andrea merged. from the beginning they struck me as senselessly similar; now they’re both bunnied, so more so. i woke up laughing. read aleichem’s charming autobiography (pp. 1 – 33) for my j. in e. class (“why novels? life is a novel” –> exactly) over an elongated brunch of matza creamcheese and strawberry jam. my mother used to make me sandwiches of that nature everyday for lunch til i despised the combination, associating it as strongly with being young as i did sucking my thumb backwards. my longawaited package should come today and i can pick up my film. only 50 kr. for howmany! pictures of ben? what a deal.

sorry for the recent morose nature of these posts. i’m feeling a little out of place, out of time here. what makes it worse is i don’t have any sort of fixed ideal in my head. certainly towards the end of the russia trip i got antsy and wanted to back here (home?) now that i’m here i’m still shifty. the film festival is starting. maybe that will anchor me. i’m seeing my first of at least six (i bought the package deal) in thirty minutes or so with shannon, who i ran into this afternoon here. cairo station, an egyptian flick neither of us know anything about.

we ended up wandering back up to christiania and looking more closely at it while debating the wisdom of traveling by oneself in eastern europe. she’s planning a solo trip to poland. considering she just navigated herself through finland and the arctic for a comparable length of time, i’m sure she could handle it. psychologically the camps are something different though, or at least having been there that’s my opinion. something you just don’t want to go through alone.

so you’re hardcore jewish, she says. i squirm under the label, hearing echoes of abby’s disdainful ‘superjew’ and other adjectives+ people having used in reference to me: cynical jew at barnard that summer: straight jew on eliz’s page. is this worse/better? hardcore makes me think settlers and haredim; rigidity, dogma; at least observance. things voltaire would sneer at. religion isn’t intellectual, faith isn’t cool. do i really want those things associated with me? the people who can pull them off have admirable strength of character. i respect them much. so in a way i despise myself for squirming; still, my answer is to play the Cultural card, meekly. she nods, having neither gained nor lost respect for me. to her it was merely a question.

my resolution that Housing doesn’t Matter is being called into question by everyone’s fretting –reminders that it must, cuz surely swatties don’t stress over nothing. it’s hard being so far away. i can’t be active; i can only write emails and read read read.

i’ve been thinking about skool more in the past few days that i did the past few weeks. anne asked me yesterday what my best classes have been. she’ll be a senior at bryn mawr and is a little bored with the choices so she’s considering taking something at swat. i got all excited and blanked at the same time. best classes? can’t go wrong with religion. film. uh. everything’s, moreorless, been at least good. when do we have to choose classes by? i haven’t heard a word about it.

haven’t heard from cty either. my summer is very much up in the air. meanwhile, with little to distract me, i get sucked into the de–bates raging on the opinion page of the post. ben mentions casually in email that it’s a good thing he and i don’t discuss israel. he might be right. on the other hand, people here ask me what’s going on sometimes, or ask if i have family. the most anyone does thereafter is nod politely. no one challenges, no one fights. (no one cares?) with no opposition, to whatever it is i’m thinking, i can float along without a solid opinion myself. somebody, say something. inflammatory. awful. wise. thought-provoking. just so long as it’s important.

no water and no carbs have affected me strangely today. the former self-denying action has no religious significance: i just casually realized that i’ve thrown back a couple liquids today, but no water. not as such. no. i simply have yet to correct that. perhaps i shouldn’t assign too much weight to my theory of chemical connections. perhaps i would be feeling cloudy/rocky/crumbly even if i’d drowned myself in Evian and gnawed through mountains of bagels, biscuits, and bread. perhaps, as i originally speculated, it’s just a product of the natural difficulty i have with reentries.

i ate another indian meal yesterday and read 100 pages of the terrific satanic verses. don’t mind me. i’m sure in a couple days the long awaited springtime sun will have soothed me, smoothed me. i’ll be back to normal, slide right in, no reentry problems, no sir, none at all.

sapna made me veggie curry for lunch. it was extra spicy so i had to make the executive decision to eat rice. not such a big deal, i’ve done that at home. i’m eating chocolate too — i decided that in russia. i have no k. for passover options here. surely i have to get points for creativity: craving the taste of macaroons (just imagine making do without them!), i bought a bounty. no meat or bread in this country is hard enuf without trying to remember whether chickpeas are legit, especially when there’s no logic behind half the rules. to make things trickier, supermarkets are closed on sundays and today too as it’s a national holiday. luckily the cafe in my building has cheap, if bare bones, tuna salad and i still have half a box of russian matza.

it’s particularly hard at the moment. every time i think about food i’m reminded that i’m jewish. that on top of confronting constant mideast coverage leaves me much more aware/sensitive than usual. maybe i wouldn’t, under normal circumstances, have cared. but it’s hard to know.

i can’t tell whether copenhagen is actually giddy or whether it’s just me giddy to be back. it’s a glorious 15 degrees here and on my way home i kept looking up at apartmenters reclining on balconies and over at kids playing soccer. i rode the bus back with kris on the top decker with our feet on the railing feeling quite regal and accomplished indeed. what a break it’s been; what hopping i’ve done.

it’s been so long since i’ve been able to sit at a computer without rushing. i have so many emails to write; i have two letters — one from lananomijamie, one from darling liz — to read; i have to shoutout HAPPY 21ST BIRTHDAY to pennbecca; i have to call andrea to congratulate her on her various french exploits; and i have to figure out how i’m going to feed myself for the next four days. thanks for the lovely thoughts, by the way, throughout the week. they made me grin even if i didn’t have time to respond straight away.

moscow: arrived on a night train from st. pete’s, virtually fresh as daisies. unfortunately we withered fast under the formidable glare of the city. by afternoon, i was determined to get out of my soggyair/overdose of DISers/homesickness/arab summit induced funk, which meant that i had to find a real seder. creative alternatives not an alternative. mel and i met in the lobby, wrangled for an hour with the harried, incompetant hotel folk (you can’t really blame them: our hotel boasts 6,000 beds and is a perfect example of why huge bloated bureaucratic structures are, um, bad) and got a taxi complete w/ driver who knew the way. only visually of course; he couldn’t just direct us. no problem. as soon as we arrived and i crossed the threshold of the shul, i felt the pollution slide off of my aura. jews! russian jews, sure, so like real russians they look guarded if not unhappy. but unlike real russians, i could communicate with them (!!) using a funny overexcited mix of hebrew and yiddish. managed to figure out there would be a seder in two hours and to acquire tickets.

mel and i killed time in an elegant cafe where we thoroughly confused the waitstaff by refusing free bread and ordering french fries, chocolate, and tea. we caught the tail end of services back at the synagogue. i cried. i’m so damned sentimental. something about the beauty of the building and reciting the same prayers i could hear anywhere with a sizeable number of people, who just looked familiar somehow (i was like, hey! i have your body!) got to me. i think we made the community nervous. they invited us to the seder for free, sat us at one of the two women’s tables, smiling at us occasionally and otherwise left us alone. one old man attempting to chat with us communicated only that “russia is bad for jews.” that we’d kinda figured. the seder was fascinating and the longest i’ve ever sat through. the rabbi leading it did not skip words, and more often he elaborated on them with long speeches in russian. we hung in there, regardless, and afterwards a nice man walked us back to our hotel.

this morning a blue sky greeted us, as though to say just kidding about yesterday, and we trekked through the kremlin underneath it. first a wait in line, then a cross under the gate of a metal detector where guards snapped at boys carrying bags, and we were there, in the fortress, the Kremlin, baby — only now it’s a musuem. of dresses. the name that struck fear into every american thirty years ago presently is a showcase for tsars’ apparel and their ornate excesses. once they sparked the revolution; now our guides seem indulgent, if not proud.

there’s no mention of recent history (the past 100 years) anywhere. a couple statues of lenin. a handful of hammer and sickle insignias on the roofs of buildings. busts of stalin or his face on little dolls on vendors’ carts as they hawk history to tourists as kitsch. but no more. is is too recent maybe for them to distance themselves enough to memorialize? it’s just bizarre not to see any evidence of their rather unorthdox road to democracy.

lovely lunch today and long walk. despite persistently scowling/barking russians and the memory of the fact that yesterday policemen stopped batches of DIS boys and had to be paid off, i’m feeling friendlier to the city. it’s beautiful in spots and certainly in a complicated, unique way. i’d love to come back in ten years, see what’s changed.

for the first time in my life, i led a seder this evening. back at the hotel, after a long day’s wandering with jess and krissy to the grand synagogue (this after walking through catharine the great’s summer palace in pushkin). i bought a box of matza at the shul, exchanging a few words of hebrew with one man and yiddish with another, and determined that it didn’t make sense to try to attend the seder tonite. we have to catch a train to moscow this evening; there simply wouldn’t be time. disappointment carried me, and my box of matza, back in the street, which was at least blessed with quiet sunlit air. guideless and in a strange nontouristy area, werealized we were in russia — russia — for real. we made our way to a metro stop, wrangled the system until we finally made it work, and arrived back at the hotel around 5:45.

i’ve never been in this kind of situation before. i had no idea what customs to obey and in most cases how. but looking at the hotel buffet, i realized i could pull off some of the parts of the seder. i helped myself to a hard boiled egg and some gefilte-like fish. as krissy started asking me questions and showing interest, i invited her in and got more ambitious: garnish that looked like parsley served as green vegetable; cranberry vodka, free at the door, could be wine for the ten plagues. i told her the stories behind the objects which is a commandment in and of itself, only i’d never explained why these actions were traditional to someone who didn’t know before. by the end, i was buoyant.

happy pesach everyone. four more days of this holiday in this country. hope i can do it; but at the moment, i’m optomistic.