I can’t say she was particularly nice to us – but she wasn’t an alcoholic or a thief either, and sometimes, that’s the best you can hope for.

Rest in peace.

He studied documentary filmmaking with director Marina Razbezhkina. Also for free.

And while he studied for free, he always had ways of “giving back” – whether it’s helping organize a drama lab in a remote town, or put on a play in a provincial theater, or organize a free movie showing for people who may not otherwise be able to afford to go to the movies, or offer help to a struggling production free of charge, and so on.

There’s something weird about a system where everything is monetized. I didn’t notice it when I was much younger. I was just used to it. “This is how things are,” is what most people think when thought to consider it. And more people than that don’t even get as far as that – they have no consideration for the system, they just exist within it. Except I don’t think that this is how things have to be, not really. The people who let my husband get a free education got something right. They were investing into the future – their own, and everybody else’s. They weren’t investing into a golf course for a multimillionaire student debt industry exec such as Albert Lord (incidentally, dude has an appropriate last name).

The jug used to belong to my great-grandmother, who was a revolutionary, but also loved flowers.

And white flowers in this time of year are a bit like inviting winter indoors – but asking it to wipe its feet and to generally act civilized.

…And Holy God, it is amazing how much Lev looks like his father here. Like, we broke out some of Alexey’s old baby pictures and had a look recently – and it is ridiculous, how physically similar father and son are (though the forehead and the hair are clearly mine, all mine ).

Incidentally, Sasha is oddly modest about the photographs she takes. Modesty is great and all, but in her case, it just ain’t right. This woman has somehow managed to immortalize some of the biggest moments of my life and done that in a way that actually makes me want to go back and look “at that photo taken of me right after The Worst Break-Up Ever” or “that photo we took when I felt as though I was about to DIE.” I don’t have that kind of talent with the camera and am flattered to be her occasional model.

I need time and space to finish my book and I do not have these things.

You know what, I wish my jaw would stop hurting. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK, JAW?

I’m tired of fretting as to what kind of a future our son is going to have. I mean, he won’t have a trust fund! What kind of parents are we?!

I’m tired of fighting.

I missed a deadline with a play because I am too tired and because I have writer’s block. My head feels as though it’s made of cotton wads.

I hadn’t noticed Caitlin Flanagan’s sexist, presumptuous article about Karen Owen and Duke last year – I was busy becoming a parent and such – but it has since been pointed out to me. The odd thing about Flanagan is that she would be a really good writer, if she were a little more brave and a little less of a snob. If she didn’t extrapolate her own anxieties unto others, but focused on why she has them in the first place. Still, I’m tired of the fact that people like her launch writing careers after “holding forth” at dinner parties and so on, while the rest of us have to bust our asses. The only reason why I bring this up, of course, is Flanagan’s own sneering contempt for women who must bust their asses.

I’m extremely tired of being told that I am a bad parent by the people who are closest to me. I’m tired of hearing that “the baby is not developing properly” when he’s developing nicely according to every single damn source I have read. So how about you keep your “helpful advice” to yourselves, bastards? Before you take an arrow to the knee, and such.

I miss sleep. I mean real sleep here. Not the fake bullshit that passes for sleep around here.

I’m tired of not having a proper home, one that at least feels like home. It doesn’t have to be fancy. I am not a very fancy person, no matter what rumours you may have heard. I would like a balcony onto some quiet dvor. And think that the real estate bubble in Moscow was and is a crime against humanity.

I’m tired of visas and work-permits and constantly feeling as though I am on the edge of some bureaucratic disaster.

Incidentally, I want to take a sledgehammer to Russian bureaucracy.

I’m tired of uncertainty and really wish my hair would style itself.

Hysterical gif is hysterical:

We got our water back in the morning. Which is as nice of a present as any.

But Eff Em Ell! Do things have to be So Very Bad right now?! First there’s no heating when we get in. Now we haven’t had water all evening – and may not have water for the next 16 hours (I just accidentally typed “years” – I am SUFFERING over here, dammit). Grizzled workmen digging around the pipes out on the street told my brother that the water situation depends on “God’s will” at this point. I do not like it when grizzled workmen make such dire pronouncements.

I need to beat the crap out of an oligarch.

P.S. My husband has some weird illness and clearly, We Are All Going To Die. Soon. Goddamit.

And two:

Happy New Year, guys! Let’s hope it’s a good one, etc.

Sasha & Marina's house. Voronezh region, Russia. From the documentary "Katya, Vitya, Dima" by Alexey Zhiryakov.

When I was in high school, my friends and I feared the kind of ordinariness that could one be borne out of the boom of the 1990′s. The walls of our houses could only cave in on us in the metaphoric sense.

Because my parents had money during that period, I thought I had the following two choices in life: grow up to be great, or grow up to ride around in a minivan. It was the assumption one makes as a child in an upper-middle-class home: the idea that one would even have a set of unfashionable wheels to be miserable about.

But I didn’t imagine such future possibilities for myself because I’d never been poor – I’d just never been poor by Soviet standards. And America then seemed to be made of wealth, though I didn’t think of it as wealth, it was just how Things Ought To Be. The continent was made of rock and money.

In the colder months, the Big Dipper hung its ladle above the home of the retired Irish couple across the street. White Christmases were a bit hard to come by in North Carolina, but we did alright without them. I hung lights around the windows of my room year-round. When we first moved into our house, I picked the bedroom that faced the street and not the woods. Squirrels nibbled on the boxes in the attic and sneaked their way across our nightly dreams. A magnolia tree was planted in the mortgaged soil and flowered every spring – until the spring it didn’t. Everyone once in a while, I look up that house on Google Maps. I still remember the address and telephone number by heart. I think I will them until I die – unless (and I realize I always say this) dementia happens to me first (who says old age doesn’t have its perks?).

On Christmas Eve this year, Lev had trouble getting to sleep. His grandma was in town, so she picked him up and rocked him when he had an outright crying fit. I cracked the window open and curled up in my pajamas, listening to the wind whispering across the snow drifts. Every year in Moscow, some of the homeless will freeze to death, even during the warmest December in the last five years. At a time like this, you learn to be grateful for what you have.

Since leaving the old American home, my relationship with my mother has suffered. I suppose in a way, she has yet to accept the fact that I began living my own life, as opposed to living as an extension of her own hopes and dreams. She plays “gotcha” with me at every opportunity. Husband too tired to take baby out in his stroller? I married a lazy jackass. I take half a Saturday off to go to the banya and swim a few laps in the pool? Baby “is not living in a loving household” and must be taken away by his grandparents in order to ensure his survival.

This situation is made worse by the fact that my husband and I are currently renting a flat the approximate size of a matchbox (the family home is “too hot right now” – a.k.a. my mother’s dispute with the co-owners sluggishly continues, and there is no way I would want Lyovka to feel unsafe in his own home). Which is why I’m glad to be in our old apartment in Kiev at the moment, which is the sort of place where one can at least wander away from an argument.

Arriving to Kiev in the morning all bleary-eyed, Alexey and I collapsed on my old sofa bed without even bothering to fetch a blanket. Little Buddy slept between us in his blue fleece hoodie, so tired that he didn’t even need to be rocked. The cat wandered in and gave us a strange look – strange even by his standards, that is.

While we were waiting for a taxi at the train station, my father called to tell us that the heating had been turned off inside our building – a typical incident around these parts. Though it was restored later in the day, the morning was still cold. My mother came in and covered me with her shawl and brought a blanket for Lazy Jackass. There’s a buttload of construction going on across the street, but the eternal stray dogs are still there, howling. I think their howls must be etched into the ground and the trees and walls and the sky by now.

What is home? It goes no further than your body and the bodies of people you love – everything beyond that is a wilderness. Bodies degrade as homes do, but the former is not yet mortgaged or occupied.

At this time of year, we put up garlands of lights around familiar objects in an attempt to beat back the darkness – we’re old pagans with knowledge of electricity. We claim the streets with our lights, and the darkness hangs back a little, turning away and pretending as though it has something better to do this evening.

Alexey and I leave Little Buddy in the care of his granddad and go walking the streets in the early evening, wandering into an old Greek restaurant that seems to exist solely for the purpose of money laundering – and good tzatziki. Prices in Kiev seem comical after you spend a substantial amount of time in Moscow. I put my head on my husband’s shoulder and listen to the noisy office party taking place next door. When we come back, granddad is hopping about in a jester’s hat with bells – while Little Buddy remains stubbornly displeased. I pick him up and wander my childhood apartment – this is the room where my great-grandmother died. My brother sleeps here now, under a huge American flag – whenever he’s home that is, which is not that often (my brother is smart). The room where my grandfather died – with the artificial Christmas tree glowing in the corner. Little Buddy seizes a snowman ornament and sends it flying to the floor. The snowman remains cheerful and unscathed. The cat gives a disdainful look that suggests that he could never get away with such nonsense.

We’re home for now, I think. We’re home as much as it is possible to be so.