This weekend did it. I got the hell out of my funk, finally, thank God. Though not before, in the mere few days between Tuesday and Friday, things got worse. I got a nasty little cold, went through some emotional distress trying to figure out whether to drop my Russian Avant-Garde class or not after realizing I had enough credits without it, and then, get this, on Friday, you know who else had her bank information stolen? Oh, right. My roommate. AGAIN. Yes, you can read her second, pathetic, ridiculous tale of woe here. So we came to the conclusion that it seems someone has hacked our wireless and got a hold of our information when we were accessing our banks online. It was too much of a coincidence for both of us to get taken down in the same week. Luckily the Reed professor who is bringing my card can bring Lauren's along with him, but until then we'll be having fundraisers and accepting donations of canned goods. In the mean time I'll be changing all of my passwords and using an ethernet cable.
But Friday, glorious Friday, everything changed. I came to the logical, brilliant conclusion to drop my Avant-Garde class, feeling panicky with only four months left in St. Petersburg, not wanting to spend my Friday afternoons in a classroom, but out in the city doing the thousands of things I have been meaning to do in all my time here. So, after my two RSL classes in the morning, I ran out of the Smolny building (partially out of guilt, seeing my now-former Avant-Garde professor) and into the first sunny day we have had in months.
I started by just sitting on the embankment across from Smolny, in shock at what to do, just staring at the reflection of the sun in the melting Neva, feeling hopeful. I took the above photograph, and then decided to do my favorite walk which I hadn't done since October, from Smolny to the Summer Garden all along the Neva embankment. I listened to Bob Dylan and felt sun on my head and ate the lunch I had brought with me sitting next to the river across from the garden. Louis met up with me because we were planning on seeing Watchmen later, and we walked through the Summer Garden which was actually fairly funny because all of the statues are currently wrapped up in boxes for the winter. It looks now like a garden of outhouses or upright coffins scattered in the snow. There was just so much SUN, all along the Fontanka, all over Nevsky, the colors of the buildings looked brighter, everything looked brighter, I felt like I was coming out of hibernation. Fucking brilliant.
Anyway, I found out about Lauren's tragedy along the walk. She had been planning on going to this concert that evening at A2, a French-German cute Euro inde electronica type band called Stereo Total, but everyone she had planned on going with bailed on her, and since she was bummed, we decided to do the movie another night and go with her. There was some scraping together of the last money we had on us to cover the 700r entrance fee for the concert, oh, the things I do for my roommate, but oh, it was so worth it. Probably the most fun concert I have ever been to, definitely in Russia, that's for sure. They are so much better live than on the few tracks Lauren had played for me before. Here's an example of one of their songs:
Lauren and I danced away our anger, Lauren got up on stage even and charmed the hell out of the German woman in the band (don't worry, lots of pictures to follow), and we felt hugely better about our lives afterwards. Better enough to even go out to Dumskaya and dance to bad music at Belgrad for about ten minutes and come home late for an impromtu macaroni and cheese and champagne session with those Oberlin boys.
Hugely better. Saturday morning, walking to printmaking, Ben and I were fucking giddy on the sunshine and the blue sky. I felt like I was high out of my mind, I couldn't stop smiling and laughing at stuff along the walk on Sadovaya ulitsta. It was just fucking GORGEOUS. I called it the "most beautiful day in the whole world," and Ben found this funny, but it was true. Sunshine is some kind of fucking miracle.
So I was in a brilliantly wonderful mood during printmaking, and in addition it was the model-drawing day which is always such a fun day doing fast sketches and getting more and more into a rhythm as the time goes on. I worked with black ink and a brush and really enjoyed figuring out the movement of the lines of the model's torso. Yuri said I had improved a lot since last semester ("You're a professional now! It's not quite accurate, but so free! So alive!") and encouraged me to make some large-scale monotypes later in the semester from my sketches after I am done with my artist book.
During all this, Bryan went on a texting rampage to see if anyone wanted to literally take the plunge and go "polar-bearing" in the Neva with him that afternoon. I ran home to grab multiple cameras and Lauren, and we got there missing the first round in (Bryan, Zach & Killian -- though we witnessed them from Trotsky Most going in, and I got some personal detective-esque photos from afar), but in time for round #2 (Cathy, Eli & Louis). The Neva is starting to melt, but it is still solidly frozen around Peter & Paul's fortress, so that is where every winter they cut a small swimming pool sized hole in the ice, install a make-shift ladder, carve some steps out of ice, and let the crazies do their thing. It was just nuts to see people swimming around in the river in skimpy little bathing suits in the same frame as people in fur coats cross country skiing on the ice further out. It was incomprehensible to me, but inspiring, maybe inspiring isn't the right word, but energizing, and everyone who went in said they felt alive and brilliant.
So I said fuck it, fuck the last of my sniffles. Yesterday was a big holiday in Russia (and in other former Soviet Union countries, and many other countries around the world) -- International Women's Day -- which is a lot like Mother's Day in the U.S. except it celebrates ALL women, not just mothers, and has a vaguely romantic feel to it like Valentine's Day as flowers are usually given. This holiday is such a big deal here that we got today off from school because of it, and so I felt, I am a woman and on International Women's Day I am going to do something ridiculous and brave and something only one of those Wellesley feminist types would do. So, yesterday, on the 8th of March, I went swimming in the sunlight and the ice in the polluted, grimy Neva. And it was the best decision of my life. I would even go so far to say that it cured my cold completely, which is what the Russians would have promised me. The whole walk over there I was on the verge of a nervous break down, certain this was stupid, certain I would bail the moment I was there, but then I thought about that word живая and reminded myself yes, you are alive, you won't die from this but you will live even more so, and when I got there Radhika handed me a bottle of cognac, I took a big swig, stripped down to my little turquoise American Apparel bikini and got the fuck in. The water is so cold I didn't even feel it at first, and then it starts to burn and your toes immediately lose all feeling. And, of course, the top of my bikini got messed up in my frantic paddling to keep warm as I went to the other end of the pool and back, but it was too cold to fix it under water, so I succeeded in flashing a good portion of the St. Petersburg population, including some police officers, but I was tingling too much to care or notice. I could feel every single nerve in my entire body. It seemed like I could count all the pores in my skin, they were all suddenly so vivid. My feet were entirely numb, and I cut my heel a little on a sharp piece of ice because you can't feel shit, but I dried off and stood in the sun by the fortress and pretty damn proud of myself, if I may say so, and feeling something along the lines of completely and one hundred percent drunk on the cold, the sunshine, the water, and the cognac (more of which, of course, I had to drink immediately after emerging from the pool). But so alive.
SO alive.
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