Please congratulate me! I realized recently that I've been (successfully) on the no-smoking wagon for more than a month. Since the day before I left town, as a matter of fact. I'm still pretty grumpy and usually want a smoke real bad, but it's mostly more for the sake of having something to do than because I actually need or want a smoke. And I suspect that the grumpy is more just because I'm always some combination of tired, hungry, cold, and stressed.

I also started grinding my teeth and clenching my jaw again. I'd been getting headaches but I couldn't figure out why until I woke up one morning and my teeth hurt. Yay for low levels of stress all the time...

Indian summer is officially over in St. Pete as of today. The weather up to now has been pretty nice (although since I'm a wuss, I started wearing long underwear about three weeks ago) and it sometimes gets warm enough to take your sweater off in the afternoon. However, today was fucking cold. Like end of November in Portland cold with lots of rain. Just a really nasty day. I can't wait until they turn the heat on.

So, I spent most of today sms-ing (or texting, but I'm going to go Russian here) with Ivan of the bad breath. At some point in the last couple days he invited me to "go to nature and gather things." Probably meaning "Let's go pick some mushrooms" but what we were going to gather was left unspecified. Anyway, I declined and went to that funk show. Today, I got a message from him asking how the show was and we proceeded to spend the rest of the morning and early afternoon sms-ing back and forth. The result of all of this was that he said "Hey, come hang out with us!" But by the time I got out of Monday Meeting (that sounds as religious and dippy as it is) it was time for them to go to class. So I went to Russian class with Ivan and his two stoner friends.

Russian class was absolutely incredible. I never went to public school, but I imagine that that's kinda what this class was like. Made even more ironic by the fact that the title of the class was something like "Intellectual Communication." Anyway, the kids spent literally the first ten minutes of class arguing with the professor about whether or not they could hear her from the back of the room. Then she finally made everybody move up two rows. Then there was more drama when she asked whether they'd done the reading and why or why not.

Twenty minutes after we walked in, the prof finally starts reading her lecture. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that only two people were paying attention. And no, I was not one of them. I passed notes with Ivan. I found out that he's a big stoner, but he likes punk music, Douglas Adams, and Hunter Thompson. No real surprise there, I guess. Anyway, the rest of the kids were just reading novels or magazines, poking each other, or whispering. Even the two chicks in the front row were talking to each other. It was amazing. I'd never seen a class like that anywhere I've gone to school. And Ivan said that it's always like that.

When it was break time, Ivan and his one remaining friend (the other one having snuck out halfway through the first part) went out for a smoke because Ivan was peacing out. Slava was very interested in why I came to Russia: "So, I get that you read Dostoevsky and liked it. But why are you here?" Why, now that you mention it, I haven't the foggiest. Why the fuck am I here? If any of you figure it out, please let me know.