I still have a cold, but it's not as bad today. Yay only blowing one gallon of snot today instead of five! I talked to Rob this morning. Yay for a sweet election! Jenna sent me a text message saying "The Dems win! We can go home!" Yup, pretty much.

Today is also excursion day to the Dostoevsky museum. It was really excellent, except that there was a film crew making a documentary about why foreigners (non-Russians) like Dostoevsky so much. Although the more that I think about it, the apartment "museums" (which are more like shrines that make money) are a really weird institution. I was going to say that we don't do that as much in America, but I guess we do. I've been to Mark Twain's house, Louisa May Alcott's house, and the house of seven gables even though I've never had the misfortune to read that particular Hawthorne tale. I guess maybe it's just that our literary tradition is less revered. I didn't give the blog address to any of my high school english teachers, so yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say that our American literary tradition is less rich. Yeah, Art, that's right. Less rich. American literature mostly sucks. Regardless, I still think that these apartment museums are slightly strange. I mean, it's really cool to see this stuff that these famous people owned, and the the rooms that they lived in pretty much the way they left them (or as near as the restorators can figure out), but there's something about it that also really creeps me out.

But I've been distracted from the museum. It was really pretty cool. They'd done a really good job with all the restoration and stuff. In favor of authenticity, they'd even papered it in the same really ugly brown wall paper that was there when Dostoevsky lived there (they knew it was the right one because people put sheets of newspaper underneath new wall paper, so they were able to date it from the newspapers). They had his top hat under a glass dome, and even a cup of tea on his desk. The tv camera was really obnoxious, and most of the kids (except for Claire) weren't so hot on being video taped for tv. They interviewed Margaret for their show. It was excellent. Then Claire volunteered to be interviewed as well, and said nothing, much less articulately than Meg. Is anyone surprised? I mean, really.

After the museum, I hit up the internet café, mostly for grad school applications and other useless stuff like that. Today brought home to me the absolute impossibility of applying for grad school from here unless I have a lot of help from state-side. I'm going to have to ask for help from Mom and Dad. Fuck me. Fuck me a lot. Really hard. Yes, Zhenya, I could take another year off to figure out what I really want to do with myself, but if I took another year off, I'd also have to work 70+ hour weeks again, and I'd be so tired all the time just trying to live, I'd never be able to do anything and I'd end up like Rob, having the best of intentions to go back to school, but never doing anything about it. At this point, I feel like staying in school is the only way that I'm going to get to where ever it is that I want to be.

The second part of our "Dostoevsky-day" excursion was to see the play, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man." It was ridiculously awesome. It's a pretty typical Dostoevsky "love will save the world" parable, but the play was so cool. It was in a room like Raskolnikov's: a little attic room with period furniture and lit by candles. We sat in chairs around the perimeter of the room, and the actor appeared out of a huge trunk in the middle of the room and delivered the monologue in period costume, etc. He got right up in our faces and climbed and stomped around. It was way cool. I want some glow in the dark prayer beads.

So Dostoevsky is all about love, which started me thinking about how we express love. I won't expound at length because it's boring, but I started thinking about the difference between expressing love in prose versus in verse. Mostly because I also had the misfortune of reading some incredibly bad love poetry recently. Why is it that so much poetry sucks so much? I'm not really a fan of poetry, and I never really have been. Maybe I'm just uncultured, but I don't get it. I'm not a poet and I don't have any pretensions to being a great writer either, but I feel like you can do so much more with prose while avoiding more clichés. Whatever. Love is dumb.