AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhHHHHhHhhhhHHhhhhHaaaaaaHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhahahahhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHH!

I think "overwhelmed" accurately describes how I am feeling at the moment. Not necessarily overwhelmed in a bad way, just.... overwhelmed. It also doesn't help that I just went on Facebook and now "the New Facebook is the only Facebook" and it is confusing and overly complicated and just DUMB and I don't know where anything is or what information who can see and blah blah blah and then I downloaded iTunes version 8.0 which wanted me to keep all my songs arranged by album art and TECHNOLOGY AHHHHH (how old do I sound right now?). Anyway.

Sorry for all the short, spazzy entries I've been writing lately. To make up for it I am now going to write you a long, spazzy entry.

SO.

Last you heard from me I was reading in bed on Thursday morning. Interesting. Well, yeah, Thursday was fine actually. I don't know what I am saying. It was totally low key. I slept a lot. I read a lot. I even got all my reading for class done before I went to Smolny so Thursday night I spent just reading.... for fun??? I only had my film class from 4:40pm - 8pm and even though I was out of the house from about 2:30pm to 8:30pm -- still a solid six hours -- it felt like I had just stepped out briefly because I am used to my marathon 15 hour days out of the apartment from this summer. And last week.

But it's okay, yesterday and today made up for that. I was out of the house from 10am yesterday morning until 2:30pm today. Ah, yes, a nice full 27 and a half hours. Beautiful.

So, my Fridays suck. That part of my schedule has remained the same. I have three classes on Fridays -- two RSL classes and then Jonathan Platt's Bakhtin class until 8pm. So that kept me busy for most of the day, I didn't even have time to drop off the two rolls of film I shot with my Fed and my good old Nikon N75 (35mm film SLR). At 8pm I then hauled myself over to Sennaya Ploshad' with Emma and the tutors (as we were all leaving the Bobrinskii Palace at the same time) to meet up with the group to go BOWLING. So that was fun. That was great, actually. God, I love bowling. I took some polaroids and felt like maybe it's okay, maybe I don't miss the summer people as desperately anymore, and during it all John McGillian called me and said he is in St. Petersburg for the weekend and wants to meet up with me tonight (!) for a drink (!!) at the classy Astoria Hotel (!!!) and that I can bring along "as many friends as I like" (!!!!). Ha. Yeah, so I'm seeing him tonight and Ilana is coming with me.

But okay post bowling I was with Ilana and Vicky and Claire and Maneka and Eric and Eric's friend Pavel and we tried to find a place to eat something because it was 10:30pm and we'd all missed dinner by this point but everything was closing and we ended up walking in a huge, "ineffectual" (quote: Maneka) circle around Sadovaya and Sennaya Ploshad' ending up back where we started which was at, none other than, Макдоналдс. (Yes. McDonald's.) This was about when I felt like I lost it and got kind of giggly and decided to spend the night at the dorms again with Ilana, Vicky and Lauren because Ilana and I wanted to celebrate as yesterday/today is our THREE MONTH ANNIVERSARY... in Russia. (When I pointed this out to Emma yesterday she said, "That's it??" Yup. Sometimes I have that feeling too.) We felt like we should do something appropriate like toast Sovetsckoe Champagne at midnight but we ended up just all drinking tea and falling asleep at the dorms because we were tired. We also went to bed earlyish as both Ilana and I had to wake up very early this morning because Ilana is helping one of our professors from this summer with an English language phonetics class that she teaches that starts at 9am on Saturdays and today, at 10am this morning I had..... oh, right....

PRINTMAKING???!!!!!!??????!!!!!!

AFTER ALL THAT CHAOS turns out they are having the printmaking class after all except now it is on Saturdays from 10am to 2pm. It's still not technically registered as a "real class" or what and there is still general confusion about the whole situation -- especially for me. SIDE NOTE: I still am not sure what classes I am taking. I was planning on going to Video Production, the last 2/3rds of it, on Monday after RSL but now it Printmaking is happening for real then I think I will have to drop Video Production because apparently you're "not technically supposed to" audit studio art classes (WHY?) and also as of right now my schedule involves me going to.... five????.... academic classes plus RSL, meaning that Wednesday nights are my only nights off. And Sundays. Oh thank god for Sundays. But this should get straightened out this week. This BETTER get straightened out this week. ANYWAY -- but the class happened today, from 10am to 2pm, and there were six of us -- me and Cathy from the Bard-Smolny program, three Russian Smolny students and Lauren, the Reed Fulbrighter who Adams told me to be friends with. And we did stuff! YEAH!

Oh man, I was so right. I knew all summer that I would be in such a better state of mind this fall if I could only take a studio art class. That's why I was so damn upset when it looked like printmaking wasn't happening and that no other studio classes really existed for me to take at Smolny. Studio art is the only thing that seems to hold my interest right now, the only thing I find exciting and challenging and exhilarating. I guess I have just written too many analytical papers in my life. Even reading for classes is tedious to me now sometimes. I guess this is just that whole getting-burnt-out thing that happens to so many college students who have been students, you know, for eighteen plus years. But studio makes me interested in class again and, yeah, sure it's not "academic," but that doesn't mean I don't learn a lot and am not mentally stimulated. In fact, I was more engaged and interested in class today than I was most of this week but, shh, maybe you shouldn't mention this to my other professors.

Hell, I thought drawing was the hardest thing I have ever done. Printmaking is a thousand times more difficult because not only do you have to 1) draw what you want to do but then you have to 2) think about what parts you want to be light and dark and then how you have to carve it out so that actually happens when you print it and then 3) you have to do the actual carving which is not a little bit difficult and dangerous (I may or may not have cut my finger slightly in just the way that Pyoter warned us not to in his demonstration. Oops. Don't worry. I cleaned it. I'm fine.) and 4) then you actually have to print it and 5) hope it doesn't look like shit.

This morning was frustrating because I felt like everyone else immediately had interesting and exciting ideas for things to draw and I am feeling void of creativity at the moment. This is part of my current burnt-out frustration with life -- I feel like I once had this deep creative well that is now completely dry (LOOK, POINT AND CASE, JUST LOOK AT THE CLICHÉ. GROSS.) -- so I drew some terrible shit of a fish under some waves with a sun (what is this? pre-school?). The thing about Russian studio art professors and the thing about Pyoter in particular (Yuri wasn't there today, he's still traveling) as he is more of an artist than a teacher is that the teaching style is a bit more blunt. Pyoter looked at my etching and says straight out, "I don't like the sun. You should cut that half off." And then, "You really can't draw circles, can you?" (Ahh, a familiar criticism from Drawing 105 with Bunny Harvey last fall.... a year ago.... already, wow.) And then, after I fixed it in more ways after his suggestions, Pyoter looks at it and goes, "Well, it's boring. But it's an experiment. So it's ok."

But instead of this pissing me off or making me more frustrated or what, I mean, well, yes, I was frustrated, but this made me want to try really hard. This gave me a challenge and interested me and this class might be the push I need to get myself out of this funk and brain block I feel like I have been in for the past few months. Maybe I will finally figure out what interests me agian in life and academia and what I want to study and DO. But I'm going to start on a small scale with figuring out what the hell to draw for my designs for next week's class. And, hey, it may have been boring and stupid the piece I did today, but it WORKED. I made a PRINT. I have evidence of something that I actually DID. I CREATED SOMETHING for the first time in months. And that felt good. That felt really good.

So, yeah, it's a total bummer that the class is on Saturday mornings -- when I came home this afternoon and told Olga all about my yesterday and today she said, "Pyoter and Yuri are free all the time. Why does the class have to be on Saturdays? I don't understand." Neither do I, Olga -- and I am going to have to miss at least two classes for our weekend excursions to Pskov and Moscow, but Ilana also has a commitment on Saturday mornings now so we can be lame on Friday nights together and both go to bed early and, I don't know, I kind of liked that it was on Saturdays. I felt refreshed being in class in the morning/early afternoon instead of from 4:40pm - 8pm which is when I am tired and dead, and there was something nice about getting there in the quiet, calm instead of during Metro rush hour.... people seem to generally just be more relaxed in a Saturday state of mind.... and leaving the studio at 2pm and smelling cold fall air and seeing the leaves all over the ground and the sun high up but the air still brisk made me really glad that this class will get me out of bed early on the weekends and up and about. I feel like I waste so much of my time on Saturdays and Sundays sleeping through beautiful days or sitting on the internet doing things like writing in my blog.

So. That's all that. Now it's time for a shower and a nap and a little homework and organization of my life as tomorrow is kind of busy..... I'm taking a bunch of people to the flea market at Udelnaya for the first time at 12:30pm and then Bryan wants to have a sports day and then I'll still need to do homework and what. But it's good. Things are good.

See? Overwhelmed but in a good way. Which makes me want to end with this quote, just for Rosie:

"I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?"
"I think you can in Europe."

WELL YOU CAN IN RUSSIA.