6/4. I stay home from school

It is Thursday. I stayed home from school. Irina didn’t go to work. My bed and I have a wonderful and stronger relationship now.

A few things prompted me to want to write this. I started reading Medvedev and Putin’s bio’s along with Hitler’s. There were a lot of incidents cited in those that had Westerners pinpointing Russia as the bad and intolerable one, and refusals to understand and compromise, on both sides, which resulted in further separation between westerners and Russia. During the midst of reading, Irina came home from running a few errands. She bought more vitamins for me to take, along with some medicine for my stomach. She got crackers and fresh bread as well. I felt a surge of love and gratefulness towards this wonderful woman. She treats me like I am her family; like I am just as important to her as her own child would be. Why, with all of this separation between the world and Russia, has the fact that Russians are people as well been forgotten? We see the face of Russia as Putin or Medvedev, but rarely do we ever hear what the citizens are like. I am afraid that when I leave here, it will become close to impossible to stay in contact. It takes two months for airmail to get here, and Irina has no Internet. Do I call and spend $4 a minute to use the phone? How do I even send airmail?? Do I write the address in Russian or in English? I’m afraid of never seeing Irina or Tamara again, of never being able to say goodbye with the right words.

Anyway I got really aggressive about not wanting to lose this family and wrote something to vent that. Whether it conveyed that or not is irrelevant. It helped me to write it all down.