Yesterday, we went to my professor's apartment to celebrate my birthday, Gina's birthday and Brandy's birthday. We took the opportunity to introduce her to some typical American birthday traditions: lighting candles on a cake, singing "Happy Birthday", lighting fireworks in the living room, drinking vodka and cutting the eye out of a dead fish's head with hands wet from its gushing blood. She gave me a book of Anna Akhmatova's poetry and we got home at 5 in the morning. Right now I should be researching the global sex trade and its connection to Russian Organized Crime for a 3-page paper and presentation due on Tuesday (my birthday) but instead I have opted to not do that.

I don't know how to sum up everything I've done since I stopped writing. We're leaving so soon, and getting to that point of the semester where you have to think "this is probably the last time I'm ever gonna do this" every time you do anything. It's very depressing. I found a Nazi lighter at a market. It's probably fake, I guess. But interesting. Alycia came and went. Thanksgiving too. My host mom observed the 1-year anniversary of her husband's death, and I helped her prepare by chopping up vegetables for a few hours. It was a nice experience to share.

Strange, right? A Ukrainian woman living in Murmansk falls in love and marries a man. They love each other madly and have a wonderful marriage until he dies of throat cancer (from smoking). And out of all her friends, relatives that she has amassed over the course of her entire life, her only company and help on the evening of the day she commemorates the one-year anniversary of his death, a very important day according to Russian tradition, is me. And thus I end up playing a somewhat important role on a somewhat important day in the history of this woman's life. Someone I didn't know 4 months ago and will likely never see again. The next day at dinner we drank wine while she told me about how wonderful he was (though I'd heard it many times before) and I proposed a toast "to Garik".

I miss home and have many reasons to be excited and pleased about returning, but I will miss Russia terribly and will do everything within my power to return whenever life presents the slightest opportunity to do so.