Activity

Never in my life had I seen such a boring movie. I chewed nine consecutive sticks of gum, to remind myself I was still alive. The boy in front of me fell asleep and started to snore. The professor didn’t notice because he himself had left after the first half hour. “I’ve already seen this film seve…

Russian met every day, and quickly started to feel internalized and routine and serious, even though what we were learning were things that tiny children knew if they had been born in Russia. Once a week, we had a conversation class with an actual Russian person, Irina Nikolaevna, who had been a dr…

I ended up taking a literature class, too, about the nineteenth-century novel and the city in Russia, England, and France. The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian, to show how bad the translations were. I didn’…

“Thanks,” I said. The following Monday, I went back to the music building to look at the seating chart. My name wasn’t there, not even in the second violins, nowhere. I could feel my face change. I tried to control it, but I could feel it wasn’t working. I knew that everyone and his cousin at Harva…

The film professor had an even worse cold than I did. It felt magical, like a gift. We met in a basement room full of flickering blue screens. I told him about my mother, and we both sneezed continually. That was the only freshman seminar I got into.