More than 2 months have passed since I’ve posted an actual update as to what I have been up to here in Siberia, so this post will serve as catch up for the past two and half months, during which a lot has happened. I’ll sort this post into categories so as to try to keep it somewhat organized, but it’s going to be long. In no particular order:
Mom: My mother made a journey to visit me here in Russia, and I think she might have regretted it. For those of you who have been here, Russia can be very difficult to adjust to, and I would imagine becomes more difficult the older you are. I flew to meet her in Moscow, and the first thing that happened was I had to search for her in the airport for 2 hours because she had turned her phone off right after landing, and….had fallen asleep!!!! When I found her I was pretty angry. She had apparently taken a sleeping pill on the plane and it hadn’t worn off yet. She definitely did not like Moscow. Moscow is a very fast paced city and it can really grind on you, especially if you’re not used to it. The amount of walking and having to take the crowded metro everywhere was difficult for her and caused us to fight a lot. My mother obviously does not speak Russian, and not being able to do anything for yourself (such as even ordering a meal) can quickly become frustrating. Luckily, Tomsk was much easier on her, and she actually liked the city. She really enjoyed meeting the old lady I used to live with, and the highlight for me was seeing two grandmothers force my mother to take shots of cognac (my mother has never drank before other than a few sips in the past just to try something). I felt bad that we fought so much, especially because she had traveled to the other side of the globe to visit me, and not very many mothers do that.
Work: For the moment, I don’t really have any, other than two sets of private students. At the beginning of June I was fired from my job at the private English school I worked at for the stupidest reason I think anyone could ever come up with. The entire story is this: There was an American girl (Madeline) here in Tomsk that worked at another university as part of the Fulbright program. I kept hearing her name over and over again and since she was another American in Siberia, I thought it might be interesting to meet her and share experiences. We met up one time back in February, and went to a coffee shop and sat for a few hours discussing our lives here in Tomsk, then we parted ways. Fast forward a few months to May. I get a call from the secretary at the front desk, whom I happened to be dating at the time. She informed me that the director of the school was furious at me and wanted to fire me, but she had convinced her not to. I asked why she was mad at me. Nastya informed me at some point during my conversation with Madeline 3 months earlier, I had told her that I don’t make very much money at English House, and that a teacher from the university I work at had overheard me and ratted me out to the director. I was obviously very confused as to what she was mad about, especially because back in February when I had made my alleged remark, I only worked there one or two hours a week, which totaled about $70 a month, ie: not very much money. I wasn’t complaining about the salary itself, I was just making a general statement. I shrugged it off thinking the director would calm down and forget about it. Besides, I thought, why would she fire me? I’m one of only two native speakers she has, and that would be stupid to fire me.
I didn’t hear anything about it after that until a month later when I received a text message from the front desk stating that I was fired. My first reaction was to burst out laughing. Then, I called the front desk to see what this text was all about. Nastya and I weren’t really on speaking terms, so she wasn’t very keen to answer any of my questions, and hung up on me. I decided I would go in when the director was there and demand that she fire me to my face. After waiting for her for over two hours, she walked in and ignored me. I waltzed into her office and she just looked at me until I confronted her about the text message, to which she replied “but, you never worked here,” as if she was trying to play some Jedi mind trick on me. At this point I became really angry and really let her have it. I demanded my pay and she told me I would have to come in the next day. The next day I came in, she saw me, and immediately left. It took me a few more days before I got my pay. I never did get to tell her to fuck off, which really disappointed me.
Other than my private students, the only work I have is to plan my course at the university for this upcoming semester. I’m pretty excited because this coming year I will have my own course and be a full teacher, rather than just an assistant. I originally wanted to teach a cultural course about social problems in Russia, but the dean decided it would be a better idea for me to teach a course about short stories. The course doesn’t exist, so I need to design it myself, which is somewhat daunting because I need to think of an objective for the course, set up the grading structure, find stories, etc.
The News: I was on it. One of the local news programs runs a series about interesting people around town and for whatever reason they picked me. I have turned down interviews in the past based on the principle of “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” and I considered saying no to this one, but the girl was a friend of one of my students so I agreed, thinking that this would be for a newspaper no one read. I was quite surprised when this girl showed up with a film crew. I’ll be honest, at first I said no and they left, but after 5 minutes I felt bad and called them up and agreed to do it. I was a bit surprised because most of the questions I was asked dealt with my band in the US rather than with my life in Siberia. After much pleading and prodding, I agreed to play them a song or two on guitar, which is something I HATE doing. They requested that I do one of my songs, and for whatever reason I decided that I was going to change the time signature from 4/4 to 6/8 and play all the chords in jazz voicings. I played the intro and then immediately switched to Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” which I must say, I sang pretty well. Unfortunately that’s not what they used for the news. They instead used my second attempt at playing my own song, this time with the original chords intact, but slowed down quite a bit and with my voice warbling.
I was pretty worried about how the actual news clip would turn out. I wasn’t too keen on being on the news to begin with, and it came across in a lot of my answers. Part of the reason I had turned down interviews in the past was that the questions are so boring that I was afraid I would start making up ridiculous lies to entertain myself, but I answered all the questions straight, but somewhat absent-mindedly. Usually when you are given a sit down interview, you are told the questions ahead of time, and you can often edit your response a few times. Not in Siberia though. I was especially concerned because I would be speaking Russian on TV, and didn’t want to make a lot of mistakes. I thought they would give me a few chances to answer the questions, but they kept just telling me not to worry. In the end, the clip turned out better than I had expected, but I did come off as kind of a douche. They added their own narration, a few times making up things that I hadn’t actually said, or they had misunderstood. The one clip of me actually speaking that did make the news was a grammatically incorrect story about how my friend and drummer Carson had taken in a picture of Zak Hanson to his barber so that he could get the same haircut. Other moments included them using footage of me just sitting around and not knowing they were filming. Once a get a copy of the clip, I’ll link it here.
Misc: As previously mentioned, all of my friends who are not Tomsk natives have left for the summer, making me pretty bored. This past month has been filled with a million goodbye parties for various foreigners leaving, and I really miss them all. My initial impressions of foreigners in Russia were those of the rich old American men in Moscow who are there because of a midlife crisis. I wanted to stay far away from that scene, and swore off hanging out with foreigners here. However, I wish I had given them a shot much earlier here in Tomsk because they are all students, and I ended up meeting some really great people, some of whom I really wish to see again in the future. I’m so used to thinking that my Russian friends are coming back that it seems a little strange to think that my foreign friends aren’t.
I have been trying to put my boredom to good use, but I still haven’t managed to start tasks such as “getting fit.” Today I spent way too much money making a cheesecake (cream cheese here is rare and really expensive), and I have been trying to learn about wine. One major plus is that I’ve had time to focus on music again. My mother brought me my guitar, and the ability to write once again has alleviated a lot of stress. It’s been almost a year since I’ve completed any sort of composition, and getting back into it takes some time. I’ve been experimenting with a lot of open tunings and have come up with about 5 song structures already in the past month, but lyrics don’t come easily. I often have a lot to say, but once I put it down on paper, it just doesn’t seem right. The stuff I’ve been coming up with also seems a bit strange because it doesn’t have the “pop” quality I usually strive for. I blame my recent immersion into Dylan’s catalogue for this.
Apartment: I moved! For those of you who have read past posts, you know that my last apartment was a piece of shit. Well, at least the building. The apartment itself in retrospect also really wasn’t that great. However, now I live in a new (5 years old) building that until a few days ago was completely graffiti free. This means no piss or shit in the hallways, no crazy old ladies diving through the dumpsters, no gangs of kids in the stairways, no needles, and no drug addicts shooting up in the stairwell. I was hipped to this apartment by one of my former students who informed me that he was moving and put in a good word to his landlord. I pay the same amount of rent as before and have a bigger and much nicer apartment that is still in the center. Comparison pics:
Living Room
Living Room Continued
Kitchen
Entrance Way
Balcony
Elevator Area
Hallways
Bonus pics of old apartment building:
Can you count the needles???
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