When I first heard that a policeman had been shot at MIT, there was no impulse to tie it to the marathon bombings. I thought these guys would be smarter, somehow, and that they would have left the city right now.

I keep coming back to that photo of Martin Richard, a little boy watching the marathon – one of the alleged bombers looming behind him.

These guys were kids themselves recently, is what I keep thinking. They most likely cried over scraped knees and took lunchboxes to school. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was born in 1993. He’s a 90s kid, for God’s sake.

I keep thinking that having a city on lockdown is normal and reasonable. No one is questioning that decision and I don’t question it myself. But background checks for weapons, though? Totally irrational and out-of-this-world.

As a P.S. to all of this – while everyone was watching Boston, a coffee shop bomb in Baghdad killed 27 people.

There’s nothing good to report. Days like this make me want to do nothing – just shut off the phone and sit on a park bench somewhere with Lev, and watch him chase pigeons around. It’s finally warm in Moscow, and he is wearing his new little keds.

This episode made a lot of people very uncomfortable, with good reason. I thought this was excellent television, because I fully believe that TV *should* make us uncomfortable. Obviously, I cringed as well.

What I took from it is a nice reminder that consent doesn’t necessarily equal great sex. The elephant in the room here is that sometimes, sex sucks. Some people are bad lovers. Others have the capacity to be good lovers, but, at one point or another, reveal themselves to be capable of seriously messed-up behavior.

Bad sex can be violating. It may not necessarily cross over into sexual assault in the legal sense, but it can be more than just unpleasant, it can be profoundly hurtful. It can leave emotional scars, physical scars, you name it.

I didn’t see a rape scene in the latest “Girls” episode, but I did see a woman clearly unhappy with how her new boyfriend was treating her. And I saw said boyfriend using her body to prove something to himself. It was very ugly, and it was very real. This stuff happens, even if people hardly ever talk about it. Who wants to admit they were treated like dirt by someone they had trusted?

The fact that Adam is an alcoholic who has just had a relapse is a crucial factor. He seems disgusted with himself, and it’s as if he is trying to make his girlfriend feel similar disgust. The scene starts with her making a few light-hearted, but somewhat critical comments about his apartment. He clearly seems insecure about having her over at his place. Insecure enough to punish her for it, in fact.

Dude, you have no idea.

For me, the key to this scene comes immediately after Adam is done. His girlfriend, Natalia (a “cool girl name,” obviously) tells him that she “really didn’t like that.” What does he do? He gets sad and angry. He’s concerned about whether or not she will leave him now. It’s all about him, you see. If he gave a crap about her in that moment, he would comfort her, or at least apologize. But he isn’t thinking about her. He was trying to work on his insecurities through her, and that has failed, and all that worries him is possible rejection.

That’s the other thing about bad sex – it happens, and you can’t take it back, but there are different ways of confronting it. If your lover complains to you afterwards – something that Natalia did immediately – you listen and discuss, understanding that they just did you a favor. If your lover is in distress, you comfort them, or give them space, should they need space. You absolutely do not get to make it all about you, jackass.

Emily Heist Moss wrote that “On All Fours” was a reminder that most men are way more physically powerful than most women out there - and terrifying things happen when that power is not used for good.

For me, that has always been just another dull fact of life to contend with, but lately, I’ve been thinking about how little is actually said on the subject. We tend to gloss over the amount of trust a woman puts into them every time she allows herself to be vulnerable with a man. And in many ways, we set women up to lose. Too vigilant? She’s obviously a “psycho” then. Get hurt? Well, clearly, the bitch had it coming – stupid enough as she was to trust the wrong person.

I hate to go all “Spiderman” on you guys, but great power? Great responsibility? Hello?

She said, and promptly got down off her cross.

Also, apparently I’m the deputy editor and the acting editor-in-chief of The Moscow News. At the same time. Makes so much sense.

But, as Humbert Humbert put it, society columns and the like should contain mistakes. And if Humbert Humbert said it, you know it must be true.

P.S. OK, granted, Natalya Antonova is a brunette in that picture, and I also recently became a brunette. It all makes sense. Somehow. A director also recently mistook me for her online and bitched me out for something random, and then apologized. So Duke Magazine is in good company here.

Whereas before I was pretty certain that, in spite of all of the entertaining conspiracy theories out there, it came down to an avalanche and the bizarre behavior that’s commonly associated with hypothermia, now I’m not so sure.

Maybe I’ve lived in Russia for too long – but military testing gone awry seems to be the more likely theory to me now. They did abandon their tent in a hurry – but they were also cutting it from the inside at first, making efforts to peek out and take a look at something. If the government was testing rockets in the area, they may have been confused about what they were seeing.

After that, it’s possible that panic set in when they left the tent. As Anna’s story notes, investigators concluded that at least three of them were trying to make their way back to the tent when they died. Still, their injuries, some of them downright strange (like skull damage with no visible bruising) invite other possibilities.

The conspiracy theories often obscure the sad awfulness of this story. You’ve got a bunch of student hikers off on an adventure – and you end up with this, with journalists still trying to pore over the details of the deaths decades later. A lot of the case files still remain top secret, in the meantime. I mean, yeah, this is Russia, where your grandma’s knitting patterns might wind up being labeled top secret, but still. I wish they would make more stuff public – though probably not under this administration.

The Dyatlov Pass story is a good reminded that the landscape never belongs to us. Especially not in Russia – but really, it doesn’t belong to us anywhere. It can turn on us in a second. So much of our art, so much of what we produce, is ultimately about that.

It’s fun, but the pain begins to add up after a while.

You can’t take solace in people envying your freedom forever.

Your teeth fall out because you clench them too many times. When you wreck your boots and go in to have them fixed, the cobbler gives you looks. At night you press your forehead against the glass and try to discern shapes in the dark – and when you do discern them, you wish you had something here on the inside with you to distract you instead.

Madness is like light from a forest fire – it’s a different story when you’re watching it advance, hear the crackle and the frightened birds. People who think of going to the movies on a Friday night as entertainment will tend to forget that. Other people’s stories are looped and fenced – with a beginning, middle, and end – and the fences leave you out. Spies deal with paperwork, the mad get puffy-faced from pills, guest-workers sweep up broken glass in the wake of the young and attractive rebels. You can afford not to know these things when you’re young, or rich – or both.

People get hurt. On the outskirts of cities, where there are stars to see in the reaches, you think you can afford to be philosophical about that sort of thing – but the reality of it always catches up with you. It’s as unsentimental as winter skin, lack of sleep, and the sign for the morgue across the road.

You keep saying that the game has gone too far, but your words are thrown back at you with full force – twisted, comical, pathetic. “This is how you cry – ah ah ah, poor me, poor little me, these are the words coming out of your lying face, liar, because it’s your nature to lie and twist around, like a squealing pig, like your mother and her mother before you.” And you know that it’s true – you do have a lying face, it has lied to you from every mirrored surface for all of these years, and now the skull underneath shows through, smiling and watchful.

You’ve stood on the trains, with your head sticking out of the window, the midnight branches reaching so close as you laughed and dodged them, and you thought that you could do it forever. Now when the scream of terror and confusion comes at night, you shush it with words about bad dreams – but you’re not nearly as good at it as you were when you were lying to yourself. “I’m so sorry – I didn’t know. If only I had known.” Yes, that’ll make it all better. If you say it long enough, the magic door in the mountain will surely crack open.

But you’re in the footnotes of history already, you’re told, and that’s supposed to make it all worthwhile.

I’ve lived like they live in “On the road.”

And “Eastern Promises.”

And “Revolutionary Road.”

It’s not a life.

And it shows no signs of abating. The pacifier has really got to go, but Lev has yet to accept that. A lot of things have got to go, actually. I’ve been waiting for spring cleaning season, but in my head, time has stopped. Spring cleaning season will come and go for other people. Maybe the human race was so enamored of the idea that the world is flat, because falling off the edge had some appeal. The fact that it’s round implies that it’s fairly inescapable. Also, my husband says this picture is from 1987. Proving, once again, that time has stopped, and we never noticed.

This old Tori Amos lyric keeps playing in my head: “And if you could see me now…” I’m not sure to whom it’s addressed to, though.

I keep thinking, “Well, anyone can see me, really. I am a very open person. Too open for my own good. But I’m too open – and too old – to regret that last bit.”

So much of growing up involves learning to go on. Not being dragged through life by fate or chance or one’s only halfway articulated longings, but going on. Accepting the paradox of being in charge of your own existence and not being in charge of anything at all. Getting up in the mornings without too much complaining. Calmly stirring your tea in a cafe, knowing full well that in the next minute, a person who will once again change your life, for better or for worse, may walk in – and not waiting for that person. Not waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not waiting for anything at all – except for the tea to get down to drinkable temperature, that is.

It’s likely that you have no idea as to what I’m talking about. Then maybe you are not a neurotic writer type – the one who sees a potential plot development in every snowflake that falls on the hero’s collar. Maybe you’ve always known what it’s like to let go. In that case, I envy and admire you.

You can see the paradox of free will and no will playing out in the expression of Bronzino’s Madonna here:

The Madonna with Child and Saints

I’m not going to comment on it, because it’s something you either see or don’t see.

I am learning to see.

Merry Christmas.

He’s a winner who aims high.

And we are winners for managing to change his diaper in an economy-class bathroom without much of a fuss. Trust me, when you’ve got a kid like Lev on your hands, it certainly feels like an achievement.

Our film, “Katya, Vitya, Dima,” premiered in Istanbul and was shown at the Listapad Festival in Minsk. It’s now going to be included in an online festival organized by Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s most prominent independent newspapers.

Alexey also worked as one of the directors behind “Winter, Go Away!” a hilarious and sad documentary about modern politics in Russia – it premiered at Locarno and is still on the festival circuit. We showed it together with one of his co-directors, Anton Seregin, in Turin – and that was how I saw Italy for the first time.

I traveled way too much for an alleged mother of a toddler – to Turkey, to Greece, to the Black Sea, to Dubai. Italy was supposed to be the final trip this year, but then we bought plane tickets to Kiev at the last minute, and I am now writing this with a view of our old street, snowed under and encrusted with black ice, as shiny and treacherous as a mirror. The stray dogs were supposed to have been “taken care of” ahead of Euro 2012 this summer, but they are all back, and are as mournful late at night as they ever were.

My boss left The Moscow News, and I became the paper’s acting editor-in-chief. That hasn’t stopped me from staying true to myself, I don’t think. I still have my skull-patterned scarf. Our new chief editor of the website wears jeans with skulls on his bum, so you can say that we have genuine harmony in the office.

I started writing columns in Russian, and began publishing them in Moskovskiye Novosti, our sister paper. This is kind of a big deal for a person who never went to school in Russia. My latest column is about the cruel and self-defeating Dima Yakovlev Bill, which treats orphans not as human beings, but as the country’s strategic resources. In some ways, Russia has moved on from the anti-individualism of the USSR. In other ways, not so much. Or not yet, anyway.

We drove through hills with clouds snagged on top of them, blurring the sun and leaving trails like teardrops on the arms.

And Lev learned many important words. Such as “tea,” for example. On top of the whole walking thing, he’s been a real champ.

Happy New Year, yo. Say no to hard drugs and doomsday cults. Say yes to family bonds and dragons.

Don’t be afraid to get burned.