My body aches, it heaves, it shakes
All somersaults through so-called art
And I still don't know exactly who I am
I never will, amen.

So much has happened and the lines above are the only way I can think to begin to describe it.  Life is changing drastically and quickly and in many ways it is so freeing, but in many other ways I am so scared I make myself sick.  Regularly.  I wake up feeling as though I have been run over by a truck, wracked with dreams that speak to and amplify all my fears, or I wake up and I just want to sleep away the day.  Perhaps if I do that then I won't have to feel and deal with any pain and confusion that is my life.  Which ever would be easier.

It is wonderful and frustrating how conjoined my emotional and physical selves are.  When in emotional pain, I seek out ways to make it physical, to focus it into something I can deal with and solve at least the cause of that specific pain.  Going through senior year of college, the final societal hoop to go through, and being in an environment of emotional turmoil is just making this current time a roller coaster for my life.  I hate that the emotional environment flavors how I respond and how I feel places. 

Plus, it seems that God is continuing to take away the things that keep here.  Moreover, I am getting the feeling that here is not the place I am supposed to be.  Now, 'here' has yet to be defined.  Whether it is Newberg, the Portland-metro area, the state of Oregon, I have no idea.  I know that God will provide a path and a place for me to go, but still.  Part of my humanness struggle is to give up the desire to plan and let God take care of me, but I don't like not knowing things til the eleventh and a half hour.

Where do I go?  What do I do?  Do I continue to act?  Do I go do camping and indulge in my love of the outdoors?  Do I go elsewhere to follow some dream?   What dream?

But no words to convey
The loneliness building with each passing day
You never get used to it
You just have to live with it

Enough said about my heart and my loves.

But I have been dreaming again at night.  Which is both good and bad.  Its good and nice because I haven't been dreaming for many months now and they are very important to me.  My dreams always speak in someway to my life, and whatever is going on with it.  Some times very metaphorically, but always revealing a new connection and something I need to consider.  Bad, because most of my dreams are still scary and more like nightmares then anything else.  5 out of 7 mornings, I wake up tense, keyed up, heart racing for no other reason then the dream I had just been having.  I know what is worse that I am not remembering all of them, my mind protecting me from whatever I have been dreaming of. 

I may not know who I am or even what I will be doing in another 2 months, but I am I going to try to follow whatever the Lord wants me to do and the dreams that I have been blessed with. 

I so want to get back on track
And I’ll do whatever it takes
Even if it kills me

October 16, 2008
Time
Wow… have already been here a full month and that’s a little crazy.  But normal at the same time because time and days goes missing all the time at home.  Where has the last month gone? Or even the last week?  I am really at voice class again already? Bah….I don’t know about this voice thing right now.  I know I can sing and I have a voice but I get so self conscious and nervous about it that it just kills everything and then I can not sing.  Which is not helpfully when you have a wonderfully crazy, short, incredibly vocally blessed, short, Russian women yelling at you trying to get you to do something.  Plus I feel as though every time I have an unsuccessful class that I get more nervous and apprehensive about singing around her.  Maybe I need to adjust my expectations for what is a successful class, but I don’t know to what.  I think that having a successful class be that I go in and sing out is a good expectation for myself.  But it is the thing that upsets me, that I am not doing that at the moment.
So I went out again with my friend Jen and some American students that are here at another university last night and I realized that I really miss simply hanging out with people where it is easy company and easy to communicate.  This also came to me when I realized that getting to hear the voice and laughter of my friends and family is really important.  To feel that familiarity and comfort is wonderful.  To those of you that I have talked to in the last month, thank you.  Your amazing and I love you all very much!  To those that I haven’t talked to yet, I still love you and look forward to talking you to you soon.
I think my friend and ensemble member out it best when he was explaining his theory as to why he has been so hungry.  That really it is an emotional hunger.  A hunger for connection and not a hunger for food that he has been experiencing lately.  And I realized as he was saying that that I was experiencing something very similar.  That I have not been getting enough genuine, open, accepting, playful connection with people.  I know that that will get better as long as I work at it.  A dear friend recently told me that ‘to have a friend, you have to be a friend.’  And I am doing my best to be a friend, guess I’m just slightly off of how everyone else interacts.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, just different and I’ve always been that.  It will just take effort and time on both sides.

October 19, 2008
Can’t Stop the Rhythm
So clubbing in Moscow is a fun, strange, remarkably familiar experience.  It seems that white people can’t dance anywhere on the planet.  The night was wonderful.  Hanging out with new friends, starting with this great Italian dinner then walking about to a bit and go to this tiny little Irish pub getting a Bailey’s Coffee and watching a rugby and fütball game, walking through Red Square at night (which is amazing, by the way) and wandering about for awhile, then stopping in a park and almost getting hassled by the militsia so we stopped to get dessert at the Chocolate Restaurant place (it’s a chain that is all over Moscow) and got dessert.  Then on to meeting more people to go to the club with…the story goes on but it was a great night.  It was strange to be out in the city at crazy times in the morning and have it seem like it was just like the day.  Sushi for breakfast is good and the metro at 6 in the morning is pretty close to the metro in the afternoon on the weekends.  This city really doesn’t ever sleep.  There is always something going on and something to do.
Even though I got into bed around 6:30 in the morning, I was still up at noon and went to my scheduled excursion to Stanislavsky’s Museum (it’s his down town apartment).  Woo for me!  It’s strange in the last two days I have gotten less sleep then I normally do and been out way more then before, but I feel so much better.  I feel as though I have really connected with the people I have spent the last two days with and that is so important to me and has improved so many things.  I don’t know if I can adequately explain it…

October 23, 2008
No More Patience
I am at the end of my rope for caring about what people think of me or how I do things.  Which is both a good thing and a bad thing…good thing because then I am a bit freer to just put myself out there but a bad thing because I am not caring about being late or offending anyone.  A very bad thing in Russia, especially here at MXAT.  I need to care about what they think of me and there opinions of me and my work.  I think really just I’m just really tired and not feeling well again.  Apparently Thursdays and Fridays are not good days for my health here and I need to figure out why.
This week has suddenly felt like I’m in school again.  I have had so many meetings, rehearsals, classes, shows and homework that I am really wondering where all the time went.  And I am realizing that three months here is a really short time in life.  Honestly 90 days is not that long at all and there is so much of the world and life to see and experience. 

October 27, 2008
St. Petersburg
Midnight train! It was so wonderful to get out of Moscow and seeing something different, go at a different pace.  I love this city!  Classic, beautiful, open, it felt so much more like home to me.  Not only the pace but it did help that is was spit-raining almost the whole time.  But o man ‘power-tourism’ is crazy, made more crazy by doing in a group of 43 people.  In just about 36 hours we saw (parts of) multiple churches including St. Isaac’s, Church of the Spilled Blood; the Hermitage, Neovdachy Prospect, the rivers, Pushkin (the town) and more things in passing then I could possibly mention.  It was beautiful.  I also found out (because we drove past it) that before the October Revolution there was a riding school in St Petersburg.  I can’t find out whether it was good or not, but the riding hall is beautiful and the park in front of it (that they used for training) is gorgeous and seeing all that space just made my soul feel better.  Also the city of St Petersburg in particular really knows how to do statues and statues of horses.  They are everywhere!  And they are amazingly done.  Proportionate, expressive, encompassing so much of a horses spirit and heart.  It was really good to see it and also made me miss Gem and the barn soooo badly.  I just wanted to go ride.
The air was so much cleaner then in Moscow and the canals, rivers and the sea totally changed the pace that city moved at.  I don’t know how many of you know but I have had real trouble breathing here in Moscow due to the smog, climate, lack of space and wind and it has just set off my asthma in a way that I haven’t experienced since middle school.  So it was such a wonderful relief to be about to walk and breath at the same time.
The Hermitage is amazing!  It is freaking HUGE.  There are over 3 million exhibits (pieces of art) in it and if you were to look at every piece for only 30 seconds each, it would still take you over three years to see it all and that is going for 24 hours a day without ever taking a break.  So in less then two hours I saw basically nothing but at the same time I saw a lot of just really beautiful things.  Sadly I didn’t end up going inside St Isaac’s (which I have been told is one of the more beautiful cathedrals)  but I did go up on its colonnade, which was interesting.  Especially since you can see the whole city and the hill that Pushkin.  So you can see the changes to the city and the area that has been preserved since the 1800’s and the area that seems to be nothing but cranes building new buildings and new skyscrapers.  There is just so much to see…Sphinx’s from Egypt, monuments to every war ever, damage that still hasn’t been fixed from the siege of Leningrad, the river, the buildings themselves, the Hermitage, the modern art museum, the museum of curiosities, the battleship Aurora and so much more that with only a little over 30 hours in the city you get a bit overwhelmed and just excited to try and see as much as you can.
One of my favorite places in the country is there now though.  I went with my coordinator to one of her favorite restaurants, its called The Idiot and it’s the place where Duskyevsky wrote the book The Idiot. (at least I think that’s the author)  It is the coolest, coziest place with one of the best wait staffs I have encountered in Russia.   I felt so comfortable there.  People need to go whenever they are in St Petersburg to this place.  It helps make everything better in whatever way you need.
The train back was still fun though we were all so exhausted that people nerves were definitely on edge.  There was this sense of coming home to Moscow, which was nice but strange to have.  This is not my home and even if I lived here for longer I don’t think I would ever be able to consider it my home.  But I woke up early and got to watch the countryside go past the train.  I miss countryside.  It was a stark kind of beauty, but I enjoyed it anyway.
All in all I like Petersburg better, it was a great weekend but it made me really homesick.  I wish at moments I was sharing these sights and experiences with people I am closer to though I look forward to seeing you all in December and getting to share them in a different way.  I love you all very much and appreciate all the good thoughts and prayers you are sending my way. 

October 30, 2008
Fear or inability?
So today started out well and then rather quickly after getting to singing class it went straight down to hell.  I have a voice, God blessed me with the capability to sing.  I know this; but for some reason I cannot seem to be able to sing or do anything that pleases my teacher.  In fact I was told today after I had burst into tears (again) that that reaction is offensive to my teacher.  It in insults her and has everything to do with my attitude to the work.  I do try, I am doing my best at overcoming my fear of singing.  I am nervous about just putting my voice out there and I guess I should get over that, but its not that easy.  Plus Marina is a very expressive person and goes all over the place to try and get you to understand what she wants of you, but it often makes me more nervous, skittish, and shy, which just annoys her more.  I don’t understand this misunderstanding and assumption that I am feeling coming through on Marina’s part.  We have some amazing trained singers in our group but there are also those of us who haven’t ever been trained and I am not seeing her try to teach or help us figure stuff even though we are just working to put together a final concert since we don’t get anywhere near enough time to work on actual vocal training.  O God, I don’t know what to do to improve things…help.