This was extremely cathartic.

Also, I didn't realize how much I'd missed the sound of rain. I'm sad it only lasted for about 10 seconds.

I start work at Abercromie and Fitch next week. What does this say about me?

My first venture into the wacky world of summer school has been...painful, to say the least. 30+ hours of chemistry a week is absolutely horrible. Every day I return from my 6 straight hours in lecture/lab and subsequent torturous drive through traffic starving (no time for a meal on campus), near tears (due to exhaustion), and anticipating an additional 2 hours of homework. Too bad I can't actually complain because technically I don't need to take chemistry right now, and especially not this 5-week condensed version of terror... Guess this will prepare me for the intellectual overload that will be my fall semester?

Also, animal collective in LA was INCREDIBLE.

I need to shut my brain off for a while.

The feeling I experienced as I took my final stroll through campus, down Bancroft, and across Telegraph back to my dorm was nothing short of elation... not at being done with finals, as sweet as that may have been, but at being done with BERKELEY! Don't get me wrong, my experience really wasn't all bad; I took some interesting classes with excellent professors and met really great people in the process. However, the kind of personal growth I needed to experience was hindered by (A) my selection of a university well within my comfort zone and (B) my attempt at keeping that comfort zone close and tight by taking integral elements of "home" with me. Although the people & things that made my first semester shitty are no longer relevant to my life, I know I won't be able to attain the self-awareness I seek in an environment as understimulating (for me personally) as Berkeley. I want/need to get out, and now I can! This is my chance to shatter the walls of that comfort zone and lunge headfirst into a world so drastically unfamiliar to me, a world that will swallow me whole, shake me to my core, and spit me out raw and ready to take on anything. This is my chance to get it right.

I WAS JUST ACCEPTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AS A TRANSFER STUDENT FOR FALL 2009. HOLY FUCKING SHIT. I'M DONE WITH BERKELEY FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just booked a flight home for May 11th...I'll be spending finals week on a mini vacay in SD, and then I'll return to Berkeley on May 18th to take my exams. Best/worst decision.

When she walks, the revolution's coming
In her hips, there's revolution
When she talks, I hear the revolution
In her kiss, I taste the revolution

so this is what happens when you mix different sedatives

in other news, im pretty sure i'll end this semester with a 4.0, an executive position in my internship, a financial aid offer of about $20,000, and a significant degree of physical fitness. oh, plus a sick riot grrrl band to practice with over the summer when im not working/ farming/ hanging out with all my favorite people in the world.

Good bye Good bye Good bye Good Good Good Good Good Good Good Good Good good good good good good I am going to go ride my bike really really really far away, and then I'm going to come back. Goodnight.

Interesting conversation with Vicky about past relationships today. Specifically amusing excerpt: "Why would any man over the age of 18 months, let alone over 18 years, want to drink breast milk?"

Spring break is treating me real nice. Highlights include:

I don't want to leave SD, as usual. At least I have 3 more days, which will entail...hiking, partying with chewu, "hydrotherapy", more hiking? etc. Living it up.

The words most commonly featured in my blog:

(click to enlarge)

This year is going by fast!

I have to keep a food diary for my core class, which I've never really done before. Some interesting observations:

I am rootless. I'm like the pathetic little potted plant I gave my mother for her birthday when I was eight years old -- the one that's been relocated to a million different two-by-two square patches of my backyard but withers the second it leaves its terra cotta cocoon. I've spent my life searching for a sense of belonging, an origin to return to. I am geographically, ideologically, and spiritually displaced.

As an ethnically Jewish, religiously ambiguous, Russian-born U.S. citizen, my cultural identity is perpetually in limbo. After my first three, lonely, Russo-centric years in the United States, my mother recognized my inability to speak English as the potential source of ostracism in school. In order for me to properly assimilate into American society, I was to learn English and immerse myself in a cultural experience analogous to that of my peers. However, culture is largely inherited, and the defining traditions, practices, and cultural understandings that pass from American parents to American children were lost to me. I was on the outside looking in. My active attempts to compensate for missing cultural knowledge -- visiting American friends' houses, watching more VH1 than any child should -- allowed me to 'fake it' with relative success. However, I could not shake the underlying feelings of cultural estrangement and nonidentity.

The fact that I am geographically distant from my place of origin has fostered within me a sense of aberrant dislocation. Though I understand that political conditions necessitated relocation, and I appreciate the opportunities awarded to me in the U.S., I often regard my parents' immigration as a rerouting of my 'destiny'; my life in America ran parallel to a life in Russia that not only might have been, but should have been. However, subsequent returns to my birthplace have lacked the romanticized sense of homecoming I desired. I reunited with relatives, walked familiar streets, even played with childhood dolls, and yet an eerie detachedness remained; it was like walking onto the set of a movie I didn't remember acting in. Though technically my motherland, Russia is not my home: the histories, the politics, the struggles of the people are not my own. And yet, neither are those of Americans.

Perhaps this discrepancy is irreconcilable. Perhaps I am indeed the eternal expatriate, forever a refugee. But my condition is not unique: displaced peoples across the globe -- immigrants, refugees, exiles alike -- face similar crises of identity as a result of their uprooted existences. As Hannah Arendt describes in an analysis of post-World War II refugees, to have one's cultural and national roots compromised or severed is to succumb to the "abstract nakedness of being nothing but human." My cultural ambiguity doesn't allow the comfort of hiding behind distinct identity categories, and though my situation is not as dramatic or politically charged as that of the WWII refugees, I emerge nevertheless as a human in the rawest form. However, this is not a state of being that I should fear, spurn, or lament; I should, instead, celebrate the liberatory potential that the "abstract nakedness" of an unterritorialized identity holds.

The traditionally arboreal concepts of nation, origin, and rootedness are limiting; they lead to a sort of cultural sedentarism, to a territorialization of personal identity. They relate people to place in a way that conceives identities as rooted in distinct localities, and thus mark displaced peoples as rootless and restless. The cultural uncertainty of my position offers me the freedom to define my identity in a uniquely personal way, to choose which elements of my inherited and acquired culture contribute to the richness of my character, and to create a radical space of heterogeneous connectivity.

My sense of belonging doesn't come from a metaphysical bond to the soil of a given country; instead, it comes from the formation of relationships with my surroundings through direct engagement with my community. Rather than viewing my roots as broken and dangling, wrongfully removed from the soil of my homeland by external forces, I can imagine myself in rhizomial terms: I have the privilege of planting myself where I feel fit, allowing my roots to grow and stretch horizontally, thriving wherever I choose to make my home. I'm a plant that is at the same time a root and a stem linking unlike and unlikely elements and creating new paths of motion, conjunction, and connectivity.

I realized what I want for my life:

I want to remove myself from the fucked up world that we live in, and I want to take everyone I love with me: friends, family, anyone and everyone that isn't afraid to let the fuck go. I want us to build a big, beautiful house together in the middle of a big, beautiful nowhere. I want to learn to farm--not on any large scale for any sort of profit, just to become food sovereign, completely independent from our bullshit globalized capitalist economy. I want to spend my time learning, creating, and sharing instead of working to consume consume consume. I want to be a painter, an actor, an activist. I want to be Glenn Gould, Maurice Ravel, Martha Rosler, bell hooks, Emma Goldman, Kevin Shields. I want it all, and I will have it all, because I realize that there is NO OTHER WAY. There's so much beauty out there waiting to be explored and enjoyed, and here I sit surrounded by so much shit. If I don't watch out, it'll consume me. It's time to get up and get out!

I'm so busy. SO MUCH shit to get done before March 1st (and then after), and I just spent like an hour looking up videos of how to 'say' different dirty words in sign language. Favorites: abortion (obvs), penetration, menstruation, vomit. Also, the guy kind of looks like bob....haha ugh

So lately life is......good? Am I even allowed to say that? I'm going home this weekend. I miss my mother (and chewu!!!!!!!!!!!!). Also, I love that I got/get to see sars 4 weekends in a row!!

Best day I've had in a long, long time. Today I:

• Almost planted trees in oakland...haha
  
• Explored the urban ore, found a time machine and went back to 1995
  
• DROVE around oakland and across the bay bridge
  
• Ate the most delicious vegan mole tacos and chorizo burrito
  
• Walked around the mission and climbed the steepest fucking hill to see an amazing view of the city
  
• Started singing "everywhere you look, there's a heart... a hand to hold on to" when the golden gate bridge came into view
  
• Stuck my head out the window for the entire drive across the bridge, and subsequently...
  
• Sported a really awkward/cool jew fro
  
• Went to Marin, sat on the beach, jumped in the water, got buried under the sand
  
• Hiked to the top of a hill and witnessed the most breathtaking sunset... second night in a row
  
• Sobbed uncontrollably for about 30 minutes
  
• Ate maggie muds! Vegan malt fudge swirl
  
• FELT SO GOD DAMN ALIVE.

(For Siera). God damn it, facebook chat.

In other news: я жива!!!!!!!! какая прелесть!!!

I want to find a place for us to share. I want us to explore and explore and explore until we know every inch of our Eden like the back of each others' hands. I want us to sing and dance and play so freely that tears stream from our eyes and our laughter resonates in all directions like the hum of a million tiny mosquitos on the hottest day of the summer. I want to run around barefoot, scrape my hands, bruise my knees. I want to get dirty.

Can't we just run away? Please? I promise it'll be okay, or at the very least it'll be SOMETHING, anything. There's a whole world out there for us to explore. We won't explain, and we sure as hell won't turn back. It's so easy! Just close your eyes and take my hand... all you have to do is trust.

Let's go! Let go!

I just read through my website archives all the way back to 2004 and am now crying a little bit because I miss me.

When did I stop writing for myself? When did I lose the capacity to be honest about how I feel? When is the last time I wrote some fucking poetry, and WHY has it been so fucking long?

• I want to go home
  
• I miss my sister so fucking much, I can't even explain it. I miss making up operas while cleaning the house together, I miss watching nsync tapes and immitating the dances, I miss 'poor solomia' and 'rock n roll' and 'it is my opinion, it is my...motivation' and everything else that no one else can understand but her, I miss knowing each other better than anyone else in the world. I basically miss feeling like we're sisters.
  
• I hate Berkeley.
  
• I hate most people. And most of the people that I don't hate, I rarely get to see.
  
• I blame a lot of people for a lot of my problems, but that's because it really is their fault. Fuck all of you.
  
• I used to think that I wasn't (skinny, pretty, cool, interesting, funny, smart, insightful, talented) enough. This is what ruined me.
  
• I'm always waiting for something to happen, something to change, someone to catch on but...to no avail.
  
• I am Stuck.

Did that make you uncomfortable? If it didn't, then you're as insane as I am.

At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.
At present you need to live the question.

Things about my life:

-6 straight hours of class tuesdays&thursdays. fuck my life.
-today in my "history of western music" class, i almost cried during the second movement of mozart's piano concerto in A...so beautiful
-SO stoked for my "women in american cultures" class...same prof as last semmy! SCORE!
-i'm volunteering with this feminist after school program, mentoring (and hopefully inspiring) girls k-8 in shitty, underfunded oakland schools
-just ran so much and now kind of want to vomit but also feel really good
-my abs still hurt from the 10 minutes of toni's ab class i experienced on wednesday
-i'm running late to a frat party....haha

break was wonderful...

back in berkeley, so much class tomorrow.

SO, TONIGHT I REALIZED THAT:

-Life is MUCH too short to be spent annoyed/ dissatisfied/ surrounded by assholes
-Monogamy is a big joke
-I think I know what happiness is and how to maintain it
-My body won't stop until it's successfully purged every toxin it has accumulated in these 18 years I've spent eating drinking smoking breathing SHIT

Moscow in the winter

It's almost 6am. My sleep schedule is completely screwed up from all of the travelling I did over the past two weeks, so I've been up all night painting. Now I feel really strange, especially because outside the wind is blowing so hard it seems like it could knock the house over.

I've been too lazy to upload pictures from Russia/Chicago, but they'll be on my flickr soon. I had a really amazing trip, and grew to love both Moscow and Chicago. Maybe I'm just overly sentimental, but Russia felt like home in a way I've never known before. I'm thinking of studying abroad in Moscow and/or moving there after I graduate. Also, since I reached my goal this semester (4.0!), transferring to U of Chicago might be a viable option in a year! We'll see how this next semester goes.

The day after tomorrow I leave for the motherland.... 10 days in Russia followed by 2 days in Chicago, then I return for a day of rest before my lil roadtrip up to Santa Cruz. After that I'm home for another week and then drive up to Berkeley, hit up Davis for a few days before class starts, and then dive right into another semester. Woo! Lyfe!

I'm exhausted. Verenice dragged me out "clubbing" tonight... it was a hilarious and much appreciated mid-finals break, but now I smell like a million different types of cheap cologne (gross).

Walking down certain streets in San Francisco still manages to make me feel weird. Some memories are just real slow to fade away.

BTW, this shit's cute! Ch ch ch check it ch check it out

Verenice's advice on dealing with difficult classmates: "Next time that bitch opens her mouth, just turn around and say 'BITCH, I WILL CUT YOU. And if I don't, I promise I'll find someone that will do it for me.' If she steps, punch her in the fucking face."

The funny thing about solitaire is that even when you win, you're still a loser.