festivities and failiures

ohhh boy..... i haven't posted anything in a real long time and i sincerely apologize for it. i'll not even try to make up any excuses since i don't really have any. i spent a shit load of time doing absolutely noting when i could have been doing something productive, or at least semi-productive like blogging. and i know it's terrible but frigging solitaire is ADDICTING like hell. and i hate it. but i love it. that's my really bad excuse, or lack thereof and i can't do anything about it. i'm sorry. i really truly am...

on the upside i do have a few things to write about. i'll start with the least recent as always. and as so often it revolves around a celebration, or rather lack thereof. christmas: an epic failure. no. let me rephrase. an epic failure beyond epic failure. first of all there's little old me thinking that hey, all my life we have celebrated christmas. i mean yeah, we lived in other countries where people do that sort of stuff but none the less. it's a nice excuse to make good food and sit down and chat within the family. well i thought wrong. it so turned out that there wasn't even anything remotely resembling christmas decorations up. the night before i left we put up the christmas tree. about which my dad ended up nagging a lot since it so turned out that we paid ~$20 too much for (boo-friggin-hoo). since it was an extremely pokey tree, by the time i got done putting in the light my arms ended up looking like i had the most horrid rash over them. then i got do decorate it with some of the ugliest christmas toys i've seen. i wouldn’t be surprised if they are back from the soviet days. i really wouldn't...

being more than mildly displeased, i ended up returning to the dorm for new years. just so you know. in russia new years is like christmas and the fourth of july combined. thus a pretty big deal. though it has never been that for me, so i decided to be selfish and willful for once.

the celebration itself was vastly amusing. and i did have a very good time. a bunch of us went food shopping in the local walmart wannabe. and we cooked all day the 31st. luckily we happen to have a cooking enthusiast amongst us. a second year. the funny thing is that he has no issues with cooking pork, but refuses to eat pork. (islam... go figure) we had some fun figuring out which of the two dishes was the one with pork, and which was the one with beef. but i'm pretty sure we got that right after we tested it on somewhat less religious people.
at 3am the university had a fireworks display sort of thing. and considering that the whole university does not exceed the size of state high, it was quite a stately firework. lots of shinies and explosions, and lasted a respectable amount of time. basically here it all amateurs trying to be awesome, and succeeding at it. though two of the rockets i'm sure went somewhere where they definitely weren't supposed to go: straight into the fence of the stadium. two people who were launching even had to throw themselves on the ground so as to evade the projectiles. but on the other hand the slight misfortune turned out to have a rather epic and prettyful effect. only lucky part was that the fireworks didn't end up shooting into the crowd. otherwise some people would have started the new year somewhat badly.

but that was not the only slight bout of misfortune that happened to come upon us that night. after the fireworks we all started walking back to the dorm, but being as we are Lera and i didn't feel like calling it a night. it just seemed like an extremely anti-climactic and to something that should have been great. so after failing to convince the others to come for a walk with us we just walked out and about. of course the slight complications that might arise out of the myriads of drunk guys walking about didn't occur to us. we had a camera and a baseball bat (as to how you go about acquiring a baseball bad in russia is very simple. you walk into a convenience store, and there they are. a wall filled with a variety of baseball bats. however they sell no gloves, no balls and no helmets. just bats. you do the rest of the figuring. and we simply borrowed it from one of the guys and forgot to give it back.)
so here we are two girl walking about pointlessly armed with a camera and a baseball bat. naturally, soon enough we decided to turn back, and went back in the direction of the dorm, but we still were reluctant to call it a night. basically we just stood there at a loss at what to do now. of course the drunks didn't loose a minute in seizing the opportunity.
we hadn't been standing there for more than a minute until the first guy walked up to us. whom after some difficulty we sent away. no sooner had we relieved ourselves of the pest, as the next came up. whom i sent away in a not exactly pleasing way. Lera made excuses that our friends are waiting for us at the dorm, which was true, and i insisted that we simply did not want to go with them, which was also true. after we got rid of the second one, we briskly made up our minds that we should go back. and we did, and saw our friends coming towards us. naturally, we stopped and started talking to them. unluckily the guy we just sent away yelled something over to the guys in out company. and one of them is quite the confrontational type. and the situation escalated slightly. our guy defending us. and the other guy being drunk and pissed that some kid apparently landed girls that he himself wasn't able to. then they went aside to talk "man-to-man" at this point Lera was ready to shoot herself. they went aside, clear of any obstacles, ant the aggressor event went as far as taking his coat off. luckily, our guy was not drunk. we hadn't let him drink, and were very thankful for that. after over 15 minutes our guy finally returned. unharmed. lucky for us that these were al students from our university, meaning that they actually have brains, and use them occasionally.
lesson learned: do not walk around outside when there are drunk guys about. bad things can happen.

when we got back to the dorm we still stayed together, as two of the guys were from other dorms, and wouldn’t be let back in even if they would have left. and there was cleaning to do anyways. naturally no one really thought about cleaning up after that strain on everyone's nerves. Lera got downright depressed. the rest of us contented themselves with simply chatting with another about various happy topics including, death, murder, torture, and any other unpleasantries you can think of in all their forms. that's how we spent the night and around 9 am we were all sufficiently tired. and finally called it a night.

now i've told you about the festivities, right? what’s this talk now about failure? well that's what i had been doing today (well technically it's already yesterday). namely i had been busy failing my mathematical analysis final. why did i fail it so badly: well there are several reasons.
reason 1: i spent the past week doing all sorts of shit including reading, sleeping, eating and going on an anime binge rather than studying.
reason 2: the math department has decided to have their arms up to their elbows in the blood of the first years this year because we're all idiots, and thus made the test diabolical.
but it's really mostly reason 1 for the most part.
right now i'm just somehow hoping that everyone else did just as horribly, or even comparably horribly as i did, and thus the score needed for a 3 (the lowest passing grade) will be sufficiently low for me to make it. and if that doesn't work i'm sincerely hoping that the wonderful institution of retaking the test will be able to save me. but here the world is tough. you fail once you go to the first retake. fail again: second retake. fail that: third retake. fail again: off to the army with you! see, here the army is forced upon all guys unless they're in university. and that sucks. the army is no threat to me, since i'm a girl, but i still don’t want to flunk out, because i think that if i do i might just not be able to make it back here, and that would suck... a lot... because if i do flunk out of the school i'm left with only one thing: this one question: "what am i supposed to do now?"