first impression

Today I was on the campus bus on my way to school, and I remembered the first time I rode the campus bus.  My dad had taken me to campus to ask about a summer job. It was right around the beginning of summer - beautiful day, gentle shining sun, all the trees green, everything frolicking in the joy.  And I remember thinking that everything felt so light and happy.  You could barely see the buildings behind the blooming trees.  Everything was in high spirits, the leaves, the students.  Even the bus felt like it was floating through a wonderland.  My future university campus seemed like paradise!
Of course today, with winter pressing on me from one side, and loads of missed deadlines and homework from all other sides, I had a slightly different feeling, but I still love our campus, sometimes just as much as after that first impression.

Personality Picture

It's so strange, goes along with feeling "in sync" with a desktop background - also important to feel in sync with your facebook profile picture. I mean it's not necessarily important, but if you're that kind of person and part of that kind of generation, than it sure is. So I spend quite some time every once in a while trying to figure out a good picture, one that would really match my facebook page from my point of view. It's pretty interesting in general, to try to understand what you're whole facebook profile means to you. I think for me the conflict is to match my facebook page to the person that I want to be. And whether it matches the person who I really am - I don't know, who knows who I really am?

But going back to the picture issue, I put up pictures from here and there, doing this and that, and most of them just don't really fit. So now, I put up a picture of me from ten years ago...and it's perfect! It's so weird, it's like all these pictures, where I'm trying to pose for the camera and show myself - are absolutely useless; but a picture where I was right next to my best friend, just being a girl, in a natural setting - just shines through with my true personality. I look at my profile and I feel like 'yes, that is me on the picture'. Doesn't matter that there I was 10 and now I am 20 - it's just simply me on the picture!

Birches

I often wish that my desktop background was reflected on my forehead for everyone to see.  I spend a lot of time on the computer, and get constant glimpses of my background.  It always has to match by mood in everything - content, color, and texture.  It just makes it easier to work when it matches.  The desktop background is kind of a reflection of my current mood, or the little backdrop to my current state which helps the day run smoothly.  So whenever I have a particular background, it means that at that moment I really have a lot of things to say about the image, a lot of emotions for it.

This, for example, is a little forest or field of birches, not far from the church in the previous post.  To me a birch is so natural, and most importantly so peaceful.  If I was to make up an international peace sign, or maybe a new yin-yang sign it would have a birch on it.  A small birch, slightly succumbing to a gentle northern wind.  And look at the ground, it is a carpet of moss, soft as the touch of love.  You feel as if the ground will embrace you if you take a step in.  You follow the birches and the tree tops are so gently rounded against the neutral sky.  Everything is perfectly set together, and you really feel the undamaged and unrivaled power of nature in its ability to create such a balanced loving seen.

The church in Sloboda

So much of art historic study focuses on churches.  I think a church, more than an abstract painting, a triumphant sculpture, a palace, or even a religious image, requires one to understand its purpose and meaning in order to understand the full significance of specific architectural styles and elements used for its construction.  So to get an insider view on a general feel and meaning of church, I think about the only church that has always been present in my life.

It is not any longer in use.  In fact it hasn’t been in use for a very long time.  You could say that it is hardly there at all, and hardly a church at all.  It stands in a now abandoned village, and I visit it when I go there once a year.  One of the domes has fallen off, the floor boards are dissembled, the wall frescoes are almost gone, windows broken, and only the long hook stretching all the way from the dome remains where a chandelier used to hang.

The wooden staircase from the second floor to the roof still remains, and we used to climb up there, using first the bricks sticking out of the wall, then the metal bars of the window, and then the staircase.  All accessible and seemingly inaccessible parts of the walls are covered in written and carved out names and inscriptions, and everything useful has long been taken out.

But when you look at the rounded wall of where the altar must have been, the tripartite entrance to the altar, and the remaining frescoes beneath the dome, it is very simply and clearly – a church.  And then I start thinking that it has a basilica ground plan, that must have come from the western cathedrals, a bell tower attached to the main body of the church, a feature that started in Pskov, but I have to stop… 

Because I can’t think of this church as an exemplar within a large history of building churches.  This church is just a church.  This church is a set of my memories, my feelings, and my experiences.  The importance is not how the architecture of this church relates to other churches, but how it relates to me, and how I relate to it.  And I think that this is exactly what one has to understand about churches.  That it forms a privacy, a space for a person to be with himself.  And the only way to understand the physical elements of a particular church, is to search for the spiritual meaning that they convey to you alone.

wine & cheese

This is a little stream of thoughts on my newest re-discovered love, wine & cheese.  What do you think when you think wine & cheese?  I think: mmmmmmm...

But beyond that, I think a completely relaxed state, a warm happy friend, in a perfect world - some kind of gentle warm music, a sort of 'whole in the wall' restaurant, and maybe Paris outside the door.  And then of course, unlimited wine, and cheese, although in a wine & cheese combination there is always enough cheese, and almost always enough wine.

I have always been called mouse, but never because of cheese, because, in truth, I barely ate cheese until a few years ago.  I only ate one kind of cheese, and only with breakfast.  Before leaving to live in Spain, I realized that I should try to gain an appreciation for olives (which I did, and it came in very handy), and somewhere along with sumptuous olives came sumptuous cheeses.  The best of Spain was manchego cheese with Andalusian sherry.

And so it happened, that here I am now, blogging about wine & cheese...

она одна

Вы знаете, вроде живу и живу, изо дня в день, и жизнь веселая, втречаються приключения, приятные моменты, комфорт, все нормально.  А потом вечером, ползаю по Контакту, полу-случайно включаю добавленую знакомым песню, какую-то простую, даже совсем не интересную песню, и вдруг чувствую что мне не надо стараться чтобы уловить слова, уловить мотив, натсроение, аккорды..  С первых секунд перед глазами темный спокойный вечер, дворы, парадные, какие-то то боли знакомые люди, совершенно понятные ощущения, и у кого-то на мобильнике эта простаю, не интересная песня..

Я не знаю точно почему, но некоторые вещи такие родные.  Если только податься этой родине, то ничего больше будет не нужно.  Но почему-то боишься, боишься что-нибудь потерять, не успеть, забыть.  А неуежели что-то может быть лучше?