she sleeps

There was a dusting of snow today. I was singing Verdi’s Requiem at the time, and now the wind aches against the ears of those outside.

I had ten dreams in two consecutive nights last semester and I wrote them all down.

1) worms from eating seafood coming out of my throat; parasites. This one is clearly influenced by watching the Tin Drum.

2) grandmother dying.  

3) grandfather undead: playing poker with my father and a red-headed mean version of a friend who has played poker in real life.

Last night I was at Hannah’s house. We ate soup and then I decided to treasure hunt in her house. The place has seen many students come through, and many of them have left strange things, beyond the simple furnishings. I found a nice glass jar and three tea pots and a book titled “Is Sex Necessary?” from which we read aloud as we drank tea from a new found teapot, with chocolate and ginger. 

4) a rooster who was harassing me, following me around; literally a cock being a dick.

5) a man who had no reflection and then was a scare crow. When I spoke to him he told me he got into the MIT engineering school, but never had a chance to go because he died. I told him “but you’re aging”; I did not believe spirits could age, and so I knew either I was incorrect, or he was wrong about him being dead.

6) a boy at my college, but he was Georgian instead of Indian. I talked past him to someone else.

Kelsey is coming over in an hour and we will watch The Science of Sleep (2006 USA) upon Zoe’s recommendation. We went to a consignment store that went out of business a few days ago, and now I have two skirts, leggings, a velvet shirt, a a small bag, and a necklace.

7) terrifying physics defying roller coaster with no clear safety measures

8) the dead undertakers traveling through eternity: dead cats

9) a TV series with two female leads. The main character is an uncharismatic and awkward leader, for whom everyone is waiting to fail. And at some point you see her through the eyes of her right-hand woman: Marlin Monroe smoking a cigar.

My housemates have arrived back to our home. I was going to go to NYC again on Wednesday but I felt like I was coming down with something; sleeping for 21 hours over a 48 hour period seems to have successfully mitigated the threat.

10) The merchants. Someone asked “What was here before?” and the merchant said “I don’t know, maybe hot dog stands, we didn’t set anything up” and then I came by and said “before this, Native Americans lived here, but we murdered them”. And then someone tried to destroy my computer data.

deep snow

Valentine’s day morning Hannah and I went for a walk, enjoying the 21 inches of snow that had recently fallen on top of the snow that had already been there for a week. I look like Snow White: dark features against white skin when I was five I thought I was ugly because I’m so pale. I told my father I thought I wasn’t pretty and he was very confused, but I don’t remember telling him why. I told him I thought I stick out in the class picture they took of us at school; a white face, a red splotch of lips, a dark tangle of hair that nobody could manage. He told me he didn’t think I stuck out oddly, and that he thought I was pretty, and possibly that he wasn’t just telling me that because I’m his daughter.

I went to the root cellar briefly and but soon left with a friend. She was angry,  we took a walk -- kicking snowbanks and then sneaking into the music building to try and play someone's drums but the sound we created was terrifying and so ended up in Blithewood, looking at the cold-struck vines lacing against the moonlit sky.

That weekend I took a walk to the waterfall, where the only animals before me had been deer. Their hoof prints in the deep in the snow, their dragging bellies making a path that split in two closer to the water.

Movies the last two are ones I forgot to jot down from two years  ago:

1. 砂の女 (Woman in the Dunes, 1964 Japanese)
2. Amores perros (2000 Mexican)
3. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997 USA)
4. Submarine (2010 UK)

cat and wolf

Today after lunch I played squash with Dean.

[note to self: remember to ask Hannah for her squash racquet next time, tennis racquets are not kind to the wrist when it comes to swishy motions].

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Around midnight on the first of this month, two students from Bard got killed in a hit-and-run. I did not know them. All I could do was be horrified for everyone who had witnessed it, grieve for those who knew them and be furious that this woman was intoxicated and had a previous conviction for drinking and driving, and that the college had previously tried to get the town to put in sidewalks in that area but had only achieved a slight reduction in speed limit.  Before the identities of the deceased came out, the campus was somber as everyone called their friends and family to assure that they are alive, and is everyone okay, and how are you doing, and do you need anything. There was a midnight vigil held and reporters tried to stealth their way around campus like cockroaches.

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Dream: I was at a gas station and I found a fancy phone on the ground. I tried to give it to the guy who works at the Mart so that the lady who dropped it and drove off could pick it up later. But the phone started crumbling like a piece of cake and the guy at the Mart asked me what my name was and was suspicious of me. “I know what your people do” he said. He was Israeli and I didn’t know what was wrong. Later I was at my house and the police were over with the newspaper people because Yosef had refused to introduce a group at a public event. The group gave scholarships to underprivileged kids, but then was also leveraging them with the money, so that their public profile would look nice. My brother didn’t like their manipulations, and then the guy from the Mart came by to apologize for being suspicious of me. His name was Yaniv and he had a black ink tattoo on his inner forearm that looked like a wolf, about the size of a hand. Since the police where already there, they saw him, and his tattoo and mistook it for a cat. They took him in to custody since the cat symbolized some sort of cocaine dealing ring.

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I went to Amanda’s and Jo’s double birthday party later that same weekend. Another party was thrown a couple weeks later by Kalena and I went to NYC this past Wednesday to work on my project. [insert metaphor of choice about life and death here].

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Dream, cont.: I woke up from that dream into another, riding down a large hill on the back of a grocery cart, gaining speed and losing control. I finally managed to maneuver the cart onto another street, where I gave Sasha four cupcakes and told her about how I had dreamed of Yaniv, and how shitty it was that he was brought into custody. [I don’t know anyone named Yaniv, but the wolf and the cat hang in Hannah’s house].

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About a year ago over winter break, one of the Bard security guards, Larry passed away from flu complications. I had talked to him on the last night before leaving for break, and he told us a few stories about his earlier days working here, when the students were more apt to have crazy parties which left some attendees [most none-students] filling up the hospitals in the neighboring counties. Larry was one of the first Bard non-professor people working at Bard I met, he was caring

dual degree

At the end of last month, my housemate Jono said that they needed some more people to work at an event, and that I should come by and possibly get paid. Partially what reeled me in was that the even was a conference for dual degree programs between American Universities and Russian ones. There were 14 pairings in total, not all accredited and/fully running, but most of them were.  Bard is with Smolny in St. Petersburg.  Many of the institutions I had never heard of, but some are well known, such as Moscow State University, and The Higher School of Economics). Some pairings other pairings were lost on me – Astrakhan State University with Clark University, Irkutsk State University and University of Maryland University College, Omsk State University and SUNY Broome Community College, Tomsky State University of Control Systems and Radio electronics and SUNY Empire State College, Skoltech and MIT. So many different levels of jetlag were represented at the conference, I can say that. There were ear pieces for people to listen to the translators, who sat in a booth in the corner – two aging Russian immigrants.

There are many problems in these programs, and I suppose that’s the point of having a conference, but one of the main issues is that though the duel program is aimed at both Americans and Russians, almost exclusively the result has been Russians with dual degrees. And the difference is staggering, proportions of American to Russian graduates in programs look like this – 0:200, 0:527, 0:795, 2:1090. And of the handful currently enrolled, it sounded like they were like me – ‘heritage’ speakers. One of the supposed problems is that not enough Americans know Russian. But really, it’s probably a question of economics: why would an American want to learn Russian? The only people I know that try to do it because they are interested in Russian culture and literature, but those are not good motivators to get large numbers of Americans through the door. And anyway, none of the duel-degree programs are for ‘Russian studies’ – many of for technology or economics.  This is not true for, say, China, which is both sending students abroad, and educating foreigners. Regardless, this meant that when I did end up talking to the representatives there I got a lot of (joking in Russian) “So I assume you’re from Russia”, making a joke at how obvious it is that I am from Russia, which made my refutation of that ‘fact’ all the sweeter.

Bard 'распушил хвост' or ‘fluffed its feathers’ for the occasion, so I got to see it as I had never before. The very fact that it was inside Blithewood Manor was a revelation to me. I had never expected to set foot inside the building, and in fact when I was told go to Blithewood I dressed warmly, assuming that the event was outside. I treated the mansion as if it was filled with cement, impenetrable though present. They then took us to the Fischer Center were wine and sushi and baked brie was served, before returning to Blithwood. The part of the mansion that I was in is usually closed off even to the Masters Economics students (who usually use it) due to the art collection stored there. The will required security guards or something along those lines, and though I understand nothing about furniture, I did find Egon Schiele paintings. After that dinner was served and I came the next morning to work before they all left for NYC to continue the conference.