4am and i couldn't breathe from some respiratory thing i picked up after surgery and poor chris has got to be completely panicked by now and he's been so sweet and so good to me and i hope you all get to meet him soon.

amazingly tired feeling and my head is spinning and i feel like i have some advanced kind of jet lag...and i can hardly keep my eyes open to type this but just wanted to say that i'm alright, everything went well...and that i'm going to sleep now.

i mean he's like really old, he's like 22...

stop treating me like you're my mother, i'm a grown woman...

these and other comments swirling around my office, down the hall, round and round again...am i just remembering having said that once...or did i just say that because it feels like it can't be true that i've come full circle, that i'm hearing what i once spewed out, that these girls are both me and not me and that i need to be careful of overlaying my memories, the memories flooding back, on top of their own...

even though i asked the doc with no personality to remove my uterus right then and there, we're going with the regular surgery on the 28th...and i'm home for the second day in a row because i'm in too much pain to leave (read: amongst other things) and sweet chris bought and cooked me a steak last night and even though he said "well, it wasn't hard" it still meant more to me than anything else i could imagine at the moment...

so my period arrived a week early...just like i told the doctor it might...and despite the fact that he lectured me last month about how if it did come early he'd have to reschedule the surgery...it still came a week early...go figure that i couldn't comply with the doctor's orders on that...

so i'm sitting at my office at the dorm and my head's killing me and i feel like throwing up and if i have to take this damn medicine anyway...and i had nightmares all weekend about what if i do report the mess with everyone's number one fan...what happens then...and just thinking about it all makes my blood run cold...

fuck fucking fuck fuck fuck...i HATE when there's a computer crash and my post didn't get saved. anyway, in sum...i'm trying to stay awake so that i don't miss my flight to champaign...i'm at o'hare now...blah blah american businessmen...my team outperformed, outsourced, out, out, out....i just sent out ten emails to the team in california while i've been sitting on the ground...bush will win, they say, thank god for our business and i want to scream in their faces...baaaaaahhhhhhh baaaaaaaahhhhh

god...and to think i was missing hearing a voice that spoke english...what i meant was that i missed hearing a voice that i could stand hearing speak english.

protests all over the country and it seems that it's the best time to be leaving although i'll miss this city that is both beauty and ugly all wrapped up into one and the view from the 13th floor of the sovetskaya and the apartment house that looks amazing from across the water...

day of national mourning which means no tv, tons of places are closed and it's dark and gloomy out...although i'm not sure the russian government had control over that. still...it's a monday and the metro was so crowded that it took me three tries to get onto a train...and when i did it was only because i shoved my way in like the russians were doing.

meanwhile back at home...i've lost my tuition waiver thanks to departmental budget cuts and i'm really looking forward to figuring out how that's all going to work out when i get back. so no time to rest up after this! ooohh...i hate how thoughts of crap back home starts coming back into your consciousness as a trip winds down.

haha. good to know that russia is on top of the scene and anything can be had...for a price. well, except photo sqares...or photo corners. no one has those. but stockmann's in finland did...but not at the branch here in st. petersburg.

internet cafe -- huge internet cafe -- is where i'm at now on the nevsky prospekt. i saw the church on spilled blood...fucking amazing. fucking amazing. and the canals? omg. i took a little water taxi all over and it was...damn. cool.

ok, it's still insane here but it's mostly due to the GIANT amount of tourists out and about at this hotel that's making it so crazy. this place is hard to describe so far, this st. petersburg. i told chris that the metro was like new york...only soviet. that's the best way to describe it really. then...there's the show, big brother...russian style. damn where are the subtitles? and in case you were wondering? there's no forgetting about not drinking the water...something about the fact that it is brownish and smells like iron...yeah, hard to forget that rule!

btw, i'm now yet another hour forward...although they kept saying on the train that moscow time was one hour ahead of finish time...and? how about st. petersburg? the train isn't going to moscow and it sure as fuck ain't spring.

seriously, though, shit the russian people are good about helping completely lost people. say...like me! :)

dear expedia.com, you suck. you will all go to hell.

maybe the tip off should have been when the blonde russian woman asked me on the metro "uh, why the sovetskaya?" oh well. at least there's lots of ruins around of old soviet times. but let me tell you...the st. petersburg metro? i have no idea how i got here. thank god the gypsy woman saved me from the hard line lady guarding the station gates or i'd never have gotten my suitcase/backpack through. the most surreal moment was the ride on metro 1 when the little boys came by playing "hello" by lionel ritchie on accordian...of course getting of the train with the russia national anthem piped into the station was a little bizarre too...

greetings from cafe neo -- yeah like neo from the matrix...cheese -- an actual fucking internet cafe in tallinn estonia of all places. im here for another couple hours...not the cafe, the city...and im having trouble finding the apostrophe on this keyboard that is half in cyrillic and half in roman letters. 20 estonia crowns...about 1.50 us.

im getting closer...the nevsky cathedral...the dismantled bricked over kgb building...a manhole cover from 1971...and it was hard to tell the feelings of the restaurant owner who had cnn international on right as the russians went into the school...but come on...these are children, surely no one wants anything bad to happen to them...even if they do seem to hate the russians here.

god damn it's hot in this hotel lobby but here's the fucked up thing...for the past two days i've seen finnish soldiers everywhere and it seems...that they have collection cans. finally i go up to one and ask what's up? they are collecting money for the finnish war in iraq. man...how fucked up we've made the world...soldiers from other countries are now begging for money for the war on the streets?

the train back from joensuu was like a party train and somehow the australian woman and i figured out how to give an old woman who spoke only finnish directions to her train car (6) and the guy from west indies who only wanted to talk about cricket learned how to play baseball and basketball on a ps2 and, anyway, i'm back in helsinki and god knows how i found the hotel but somehow i knew it would be a stop on tram two öäåäöåäöåäöåäöåä ok i'll stop that now.

€€€€€€€€€€€€

alt gr gets you to useless symbols like @ and yes, i'm tired. thanks lucia and loria for the russia info -- at this hotel they have cnn international so i was able to catch up and it sounds like, yeah, all the trouble is down south (isn't that always the case?) so i should be ok but it is a little weird going into the craziness.

tomorrow i'll ferry over to tallinn estonia for the day, you know, check it out. then on saturday...russia. a strange feeling of homesickness caught up with me yesterday...a €60 bill awaited me this morning...

hfg september. hair = dark brown with red chunks, bored in joensuu, shocked the hell out of some new zealanders that i met at the conference and we'll see how the greek judge weighs in later today. for those of you back in the states? you won't be shocked...it's not that crazy. but...my hair REALLY needed the cut though...interesting souvenir.

um, can someone tell me what's happening in russia, you know with all the bombings and hostage situations? 'cause, you know, i'm going there in three days? for some reason cnn is blocked on this computer...go figure...and all the news on tv is in finnish.