I got accepted into the Master’s program at ISU, and I start in the spring.  I am a little over a week away from graduation, which is weird as hell.  It’s funny meeting a goal at 28 that most people realistically achieve at 21.   M.A. by Thirty, here I come!

I am the fattest I have ever been.  I am on Weight Watchers, which I suck at. Every day it’s a battle between “get thinner” and “stop giving a shit” and not giving a shit wins about 75% of the time.  It’s a work in progress.  I think not giving a shit would win out entirely if I could still fit into my clothes in the medium fat range, which happen to be my favorites.

I realized recently that the slide into middle age has begun.  It might have been when I realized that drinking more than three beers will give me a hangover for two days.  Or when I met a dude who was out with his daughter and I realized that I have a thing for men who are good dads.  (that last one came out of nowhere, but now it’s like top five on my list).  My fate as an old lady in training was well and truly sealed, though, when I took up quilting.

Pictures to follow!  You can look at pumpkin heads, snowy mountains, and poorly-crafted quilts and scarves!

I will certainly miss the adventure of living in Eastern Europe, but as I sit here on a second-floor deck overlooking a mountain while the sky turns itself into a painting about the West, I think that might not be too bad.  So what will I talk about without the entertaining and frequent situations caused by my lack of cultural understanding?  Expect more stories fueled by my general awkwardness, a lot of talk about Vespas as I finally get the scooter gang I have wanted for ten years, some thoughts on crafting as I dive into business on Etsy, and a fair amount of whining about the wild world of academe.

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go cut a bottle into earrings, then watch some good old American TV.

For some reason, though, it makes me feel like I need to document the last ten years of my life in some way.  I wanted to do a nice, contained, chronological list but my memory won’t let me.

In the last ten years, I have officially majored in: Dental Hygiene, Mass Communications (photography emphasis), English, Ecology, Anthropology, English and International Relations.  My degree will be in English with a Russian minor.   I have worked as a telephone customer service agent, a telephone sales person (for a day), a hotel housekeeper, a bowling center cook and server, a gas station cashier, a brewery bartender, a waitress in a Greek restaurant, a library assistant, and a writing tutor.  I am currently working with an NGO as the project coordinator, a freelance columnist and copy editor, and a jewelry smith.  In my many careers, I have gained certain special skills, including how to properly floss teeth, how to pour the perfect beer, and how to make Greek flaming cheese.  I have been in love three times.  I was married for four years and a day, but I was only in love for six months or so.  I still make scenes when I see him, if I’ve had any liquor.  I stopped drinking liquor in Lithuania, after the night of Mindaugas and the 999s.  I’ve struggled with alcohol, and I have given it up several times, but now I am happy with just drinking a beer or a glass of wine, usually.  I have taken five different kinds of birth control.  I have gained 80 pounds, lost fifty, and then gained it back.  I think the previous two things might be related.  I have PCOS, which makes it awesomely hard to lose weight and keep it off.  Thanks, ovaries!  I have owned two cars, two bicycles, and a 1965 Vespa VNB.  I sold my last car five years ago Christmas.  I have been vegetarian and vegan, but mostly I have been an omnivore because I tend to make poor food choices, and limiting my options just makes the tendency worse.  I have lived nine of ten years in Pocatello, and one of them in Lithuania.  I have made many, many poor financial decisions, and I am trying to dig out from under them now.  I have learned hundreds of folk songs, and how to sing them in public.  I’ve had conversations in five languages, on two continents. I suck at four out of the five languages. I’ve learned my way around a toolbox and an engine, only to be told that I should let men fix things for me so that they can feel useful.

It’s hard to fit ten years into a paragraph, even a poorly written list of a paragraph.  I don’t feel like I have gotten much older, but I have done so much stuff. I didn’t manage to get the husband and the babies, but I think I am successful for all that.  If anything, I am really good at changing my mind.  Really, really good at changing my mind.

Figuring out where I fit was easy.  I grew up in this town; when I ride my Vespa down the street, it feels like nothing has changed.  I can still time my ride to my favorite coffee shop within a few minutes, and the cars that line a street that I used to live on are pretty much the same.  Sometimes, if I let my mind wander a little, I feel like I never left, that my time in Lithuania was only a dream.  My third day here I actually had to call someone and have them verify that I had, in fact, been gone.

When I saw my best friend for the first time, I walked into her office and she just looked at me, smiled, and went back to the computer to finish what she was working on.  It was a little shocking, because I am used to the effusive, European way of greeting, where even a weekend away is justification for hugging and a kiss (or three) on the cheek. For me, it was infinitely more comfortable to be greeted like it was just a normal day than to be forced into hugging and kissing just to prove our affection.  The reactions since I tried to slip into town without people noticing have ranged from stunned silence to yelling, but I have yet to be hugged by anyone outside of my family and very, very close friends.  I am sure it seems like I was raised by wolves, but I appreciate a nice punch in the shoulder so much more than a hug.

The strangest thing, so far, has been going to shops.  People here are friendly.  They want to talk, about your purchases, the weather, or the vehicle you drive. The entire time I was in Vilnius, I missed people talking to each other and generally showing that they recognize you as a fellow human being. It was impossible for me to understand why a person wouldn’t smile back at you on the street. I can’t tell you the number of times that we exchange students commiserated about  the lack of friendliness in official settings in Vilnius.  Upon arriving home, I discovered that not only had I gotten used to the way it was done in Vilnius, I actually like the Lithuanian way better.  I just want to buy my pack of cigarettes or my coat hangers and go on my way.  I don’t want to chat, to discuss my clothes, to talk about the weather.  It certainly shocked the hell out of me the first time that someone tried to strike up a conversation in line and I found myself trying to make an excuse to get out of talking to them because it felt like he was intruding on my life.

It’s been a week since I arrived home.  I have seen all the friends I wanted to see, every ex boyfriend I have had in ten years,  and I have begun to adjust to the fact that people want to talk to you all the time, no matter what.  I’ve only had two  minor meltdowns, and neither of them have been public.  All in all, I think I am adjusting well.  The differences are subtle: listening to people discuss a person that I haven’t met while drinking a beer on the porch, finding out my favorite jewelry shop is a grocery store.  My reactions are different, marked by my time in Vilnius in a way that maybe no one but me notices.  Well, me and my hippie friend who told me that I smell like a different place.

People have already started their exodus back to the various places they come from and are going to.  We put Audrey on a plane to France and Lucas on a plane to Budapest.  Tomorrow, the other Brazilian will leave to his fancier apartment in Uzupis, and Ieva will continue to move her things to her mother’s, piece by piece.  Tomorrow, I will clean all traces of myself out of my bedroom, and start putting things in storage in the room I will come back to.  Then I will get on a train, cry when I tell Ieva goodbye, and it will be Warsaw and then home, where I will sleep off the dream of the last nine months and come into a reality that might very well include a job selling tools and electronics at Sears.  It will be weird, to say the least.

The nice thing about this process is that I am not saying goodbye.  I am saying, “see you later, I’ll keep my key because I will need it”.  For the others the change might be more permanent, more like a return to the lives they walked out on when they decided to come to Lithuania, of all places.

Who would have thought I would want to build my life in Lithuania, of all places?  Life is a journey without a map, for sure.  I think the most apt experience I could ever have to sum up what life is like is when I got off the bus in Paris, no map, no real idea where I was, and decided that I would just walk in a direction until I decided that I had gone far enough, and turn when it felt right, and eventually the hostel would appear in front of me.  All the time, we are making choices without a clear view of the consequences, and we end up somewhere, almost never where we’ve planned.  A million little choices, and here I am, looking at another big change.

When it was almost time to go to Lithuania, I made up lists in my mind of the things that might be different, the things I might need to know to get through life in Lithuania without making a big fool of myself. The things that were different weren’t on any of the lists, and I found that I will always make a fool of myself, and I just need to be okay with that.  Now that I am going home, I am making lists again.  I wonder how it will feel to understand all of the small conversations around me.  I wonder what it will be like to be able to ask for just what I want in any situation, without that moment where I freeze and panic, muttering unintelligible phrases at people.  What will people think when they see that I managed to gain weight in Europe, rather than the miraculous loss that was universally predicted?  Will my friendships be the same?

I guess I will just have to get on the plane.  It is the same as coming here, I just need to get on my way and trust that I will be able to survive whatever is thrown at me in the process.  I hope that the hamburgers are really as perfect as I remember, and I can’t wait to get a plain old American coffee on the porch of the College Market.  I can’t wait to see my family, to sit at Grandma’s table and watch television shows.  To have dinner with the family, and listen to my father laugh.  I want very badly to use a washer and a dryer, and to see the mountains again.  I want to drink a crappy beer with friends, and hear all about what has happened when I was gone.  I want, I want, I want.  Now let’s see what I get.

Generally, when I am on the bus, I try not to look at anyone, listen to music, and generally pretend that there aren’t any people around me.  I think that this is the most common reaction to suddenly being placed in a tiny moving room with a bunch of strangers, and most people play along.  But not everyone plays along, oh no.

One sunny day I was riding the bus home, it was pretty empty and there were seats to spare after the old and the infirm sat down, so I took a seat.  The girl next to me was politely staring out the window, we were all playing the game well.  That lasted for exactly one stop.  At the next stop, a man got on, who looked like he would smell of booze (and he did), who for some reason decided to stand next to my seat even though the bus was pretty much empty.  He was leaning against my shoulder a little, and I kept inching away, trying to maintain my illusion that there weren’t any people around me.  I looked out the window, I leaned over, and he kept leaning in more.  If I were a little more worldly, I would have realized what was going on.  When I felt the first movement, I convinced myself that it was nothing, that there was no way, that I would just lean over more and nothing would happen. I was pretty much all the way into the seat next to me, and about ten seconds later, the movements became unmistakeable, and I realized that the man was indeed masturbating on my shoulder in a trolleybus. (he kept it in his pants the entire time, otherwise I would still be in a bleach bath, I think)  I was stunned for about half a second, and then I jumped up and went to the front of the bus, putting as many people between myself and him as I possibly could.  I was too shocked to make a scene.  I looked back at him once, and his face, oh yuck, he was looking at me with this sad sack look, like I had hurt his feelings by not allowing myself to be turned into a human sex toy.

So, after that, I walked everywhere for a week or so because I wasn’t mentally able to deal with riding the bus.  Then, after a long day at school, I decided to take the bus again.  I mean, I have been riding it for months without incident, what are the chances that something bad/gross/almost funny but in a terrible, terrible way would happen again?  With all of my justifications firmly in mind, I got on the bus. I looked out the window, I tried with little success to decipher the Russian that the young men were speaking next to me, and I get to my stop without incident.  When the doors opened and I began to move toward it, the loudest of the young men stepped in front of me, looked pointedly at my chest,and said, simply “big tits”.  In English.  Why he chose English, I have no idea.  I am not sure if he sensed that I am an English speaker and he wanted to be sure that he was understood, or if he is in the curse words only stage of learning English and he was pretty sure that I wouldn’t understand.  Either way– what. the. fuck.  Can’t a woman even ride a bus without being physically or verbally assaulted by a random man?

So, now my love for public transportation is more of a love-hate thing.  I still think it’s an effective way to move lots of people around with the minimum resources.  I just think that every person I see on the bus now is a potential wackadoo.

I miss my bike.

It makes me glad that I hold back on the really embarrassing stuff.  (no, really, I do)  To get to the good stuff you have to get a few drinks in me, and I can’t type for shit when I am drunk.

With that auspicious beginning, let’s talk about my week.  I got some Very Good News that will result in me staying in Eastern Europe for much longer than I originally expected.  I will still be coming home to the great state of Idaho this summer, but it will be more of an extended visit than a return home.  I will get to do all kinds of exciting things, like getting Emma a doggie passport (seriously) and disposing of my worldly effects.  I also plan to ride my Vespa like crazy, because I am going to miss that thing and it won’t fit into my two suitcase lifestyle.  It might seem like a good decision to sell it since it will just be collecting dust back home, but that cursed hunk of metal is one of the most important things to me.  I would loan it to a friend while I am gone, but I am pretty sure that they would die at its hands or be driven insane by its endless problems, and I can’t be responsible for that.

My Russian is…  well, it’s still coming along.  This morning I had a whole conversation with someone in Russian, and I think that I got most of the gist of what was being said when I wasn’t having an internal meltdown about not understanding every word.  I am finding myself in more situations where English is not an option.  I am also memorizing vocabulary like it’s my job, so that is probably helping a little too.

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If you came from Baltic Reports, then welcome. Only the stories that I feel are fit to print make it to the paper, here you get it all, even the boring stuff.  Especially the boring stuff.

There were cyclists everywhere.  There was a critical mass event this afternoon that I missed because I am bikeless, which makes me feel like I am ready to renew the search for a bicycle that was called off last fall after weeks of wandering the city following different tips on where to get good used bikes and constantly being disappointed.  My bicycle wishlist is a little weird, apparently,  because I want a bike just like the old racing bike that I have at home.  When we were on the bicycle odyssey last fall, all we could find were cheap mountain bikes for way too much money or obviously-stolen mountain bikes for way way too much money.  I don’t think I saw a single street bike, and I am firmly against riding a mountain bike in the city because I think it is silly to carry all kinds of weighty extras on a bike that will never, ever see the mountains as long as I am the one riding it.

This week I had a “small surgery” on my tooth, where they had to cut some of my gums back and do something to the bone that I didn’t think merited too much curiosity on my part because I get a little squeamish when I think about people doing things to my skull.  The small surgery wasn’t so bad, although I spent a great deal of time cursing my small mouth because he had to pull my jaw out of joint in order to get the drill in to do whatever nefarious things he needed to do to my bones.  The pain mostly laid me out for a day or so; I had forgotten how much tooth pain sucks.  I watched the third season of Deadwood, though, and made it through a Very Important Meeting, so the day wasn’t a total loss.  All in the name of getting a brand new tooth straight from the factory, I guess.