I’m still here, barely

I am rather sure that no one reads this anymore and with good reason. In recent years I’ve had various blogs, all of which I haven’t really kept up well, with the exception of the blog I keep in Russian at livejournal. Of course, to most people who know me this is pretty worthless because they don’t know a word of Russia, or maybe just one or two words– my dad, for instance, has mastered ‘privet’ and ‘do svedaniya,’ but you get the idea. A clever and Internet-savvy user might have tried copy and pasting my Russian journal entries into a damn text translator (there are tons of these websites), so for anyone who really wants to have some sort of account of the past year is advised to give that a try.

It’s too bad I failed to use this blog for its stated purpose–to have an account of my impressions and experiences this year in Russian in English–because there were many many impressions and experiences that I could have written about. As it stands, they exist only in my head and I hope that I don’t forget. The unexpected thing is that I think the most important experiences I’ve had here had very little to do with Russia, but were in thinking about myself, my life and goals, how I feel about things in the past and different people, how I feel about America. It was a year spent largely in reflection. Of course I experienced many visceral things in Russia that were very much Russian and I appreciate that. I just feel that the changes I’ve gone through have been even more important.

The year is essentially over, I leave for home in 5 days. It’s a bittersweet feeling, as changes usually are for me. I’m mostly happy to go home, but there are some other feelings of wanting to stay and knowing I will miss things. There’s a certain helplessness and futility to these sorts of feelings– a sort of feeling sad in anticipation of feeling sad. Hmm. I am sometimes a bit too melancholy as a person, I’ve been told that, and this is a damn good example of that. I wonder if other people have this.

So as the year is over, I might start using this as my all-purpose blog. Or I might not. We’ll see. I don’t have a personal blog (in English) anymore and I miss that. The whole idea of blogging is something I am ambivalent about, but by and large I’m ok with it and find it worthwhile.