I woke up with a cold, so instead of being responsible and a good friend to all of you who were anxiously awaiting my next update (hah!), I woke up late, and then took a nap and went to the grocery store and Jenna's dinner party instead of the internet café. Whatever. There's nothing happening in my life that's so important that everybody needs to know about it immediately. And if there was, I'd call. Besides, I only get two emails a week (one's usually from an ex of some kind and the other's from facebook), so there wasn't anything urgent.

Anyway, the dinner party was way fun. Jenna and Autumn (for those of you who missed last time, Jenna is a friend of Meg's from the Fullbright, and Autumn is Jenna's recently arrived roommate) cooked a shit-ton of vegetables and a chocolate cake and invited cool people over to eat good food. And I felt very lucky to be one of them, because I experienced my first nasty Russian food this weekend. My host family like to take off for the weekends, which is fine, although sometimes a little lonely, but they usually leave me food. And the food for this weekend was some kind of meat patties in the fridge and some kind of kasha on the stove. Kasha is word that means "cooked grain of some kind" and there are lots of different types of kasha. I really like the one in the morning that tastes like oatmeal, but this was not like oatmeal, and it was really nasty. Maybe some kind of buckwheat or something, but I've never seen buckwheat, so I dunno. Anyway, it was way gross. But other than meat patties, that was about it for food. So I did what all good Russians do when they get food that tastes gross: loaded it up with sour cream and salt and tried to think about how much I actually liked it. Which was still a lie, but it was at least edible with salt and sour cream...

So the dinner party. It's always way more fun writing these entries when I'm not on my meds because they're more rambling and I never quite know what's going to come out. All my carefully laid plans for what I'm going to talk about go out the window because I can never remember them. I'm sure they're infuriating to read, but too bad for all of you. Right. The dinner party. Lots of vegetables that were pretty yummy, but I still remain not a fan of peppers or mooshed up yams or squash or whatever the fuck it was. I don't care what anybody says: yams are nasty, and marshmallows are for s'mores. The combination of yams and marshmallows is an abomination that should be sent back to the depths from which it sprang. Along with jello with candied fruit in it. However, this is a separate rant that threatens to derail the entire entry, so I'm going to return to the dinner party, saying only that I didn't care so much for a few of the dishes, but it was overall very good, and they had excellent cheese and chocolate cake.

One of the guests was a professor of Autumn's who is a frequent visitor to Petersburg. He was kinda weird, especially when I mentioned that I'd graduated from Reed. He went there a year in the late sixties and then transferred to one of the Ivies and was very adamant that Reed was not a very good place. Other than that, he was a pretty nice guy. Anyway, I mention him because he's involved in some kind of HIV tracking and prevention program to try and get a handle on the epidemic over here. Alex, I know you're kinda interested in that stuff, and Robert's a smart guy. If you're interested in talking to him, let me know and I can get you contact info.