I’m not quite sure what day it is anymore. Flying five hours east, five hours in Moscow’s future, it’s hard to keep track, and harder to stay awake, especially during tours of town (in freezing weather) and the nature museum where we’ll be working. The apartment problem has turned into quite the intrigue: last night Marina called the parents, sounding furious that we were not given what we had thought we would get. The phone was passed between Melissa and Sveta, our host mother, with no clear resolution. After finding out today (from an American working at the office of an ecological NGO called FIRN) that an apartment in town costs only about two hundred rubles/month we emailed Marina, at the least to find out how much money we should give them (1800 dollars was the original price). But when Melissa tried to send an email this evening she happened to notice Marina had emailed Sveta, moye mama. It sounded like Marina was now angry with us, not with them; in fact, it seemed that Marina was even apologizing for the inconvenience we were causing. Oy vey, unclear. We’ll talk to IREX tomorrow; who knows what’s going down.

It doesn’t matter; we’re on the other side of the world now.

And in this moment of transition, of an obvious sliding between persons, I'm wondering again: how much is my sense of openness, my glasnost, actual, and how much of it is a convenient cover for some deeper concealment, some secrets about me? There are things I don't want to face, but my self-insistence that I face them,and my belief that I do, often proves false--especially when time and space exist for thoughts and memories to wash around my brain, without the need for explanation or words.