This evening the subway was packed.  A woman got on at 42nd St and her hair, a couple feet long, was so lit with static electricity that it moved through the air like seaweed underwater.  Strands kept lifting toward my raised hands and touching them cautiously.  I felt very close to her, like her body was extending to meet mine, until she got embarrassed and smoothed her hair down and I went back to my book.

When I was little, we had these science books with wire binding, stiff covers, and things hanging from them–magnifying glasses! magnets! packets of mold spores!  And the books were called something like EXPLORATORIUM or SPACE-O-RAMA or something else just as exciting.  I half-remember so many pieces of trivia from those books–like a dog’s tongue has less worms than a human’s, or if anyone ever offers you either a million dollars right away or thirty days of money, the first day just a penny and every day after double what it was the day before, you should always pick the latter offer.  I have a slippery memory,  too, of some page that showed how long it would take for everyone in the world to be connected to everyone else via five degrees of handshakes–say I shook a hundred people’s hands, and then they each shook a different hundred’s–like a chain letter of handshaking.

I was thinking about the handshakes today because for the third time recently a friend mentioned that they knew someone who I’d only read about in the news before that.  I moved away from home more than three years ago, but these naive feelings of surprise at the world show no sign of fading.  ”You know her?  But…how could you know her?  She was in the newspaper.”

Maybe soon there’ll be no strangers!  Only friends of friends.  And we’ll all have shaken each other’s hands.

In other news, I had the most wonderful night in the snow last night.

I know this isn’t the most productive thing I could be doing right now, but I got lost on Wikipedia and ended up here.  Wow!  What a face!  Someone with that face had to be famous.  There was never any other option.

“Вступление (2)”
Анны Ахматовы

Тихо льётся тихий Дон,
Жёлтый месяц входит в дом

Входит в шапке набекрень
Видит жёлтый месяц тень.

Эта женщина больна,
Эта женщина одна,

Муж в могиле, сын в тюрьме,
Помолитесь обо мне.

Even though it’s awfully stressful, it’s always an interesting time for my mind when finals are here and all I do is study all day.  My whole life, for those few days, centers around my readings.

Anyway, here is my very plain translation of the second section of “Entrance” by Anna Akhmatova, in preparation for my Russian oral exam tomorrow: “The calm Don flows quietly, / The yellow moon enters the house / / Entering in a tilted hat / The yellow moon sees a shadow. / / It’s a sick woman, / It’s a lonely woman, / / Husband in the ground, son in a cell, / Say a prayer for me.”