mild horror. very mild. but horror nevertheless.

I just packed both my thesis and my dissertation.

My thesis wasn't so scary. I took it off the shelf and looked at it. It was in English. The source materials were all in English. I didn't have to translate anything to write it. I remember what it's about (mostly). I put it in a box.

Then I took my dissertation off the shelf.

The title, in case you are curious, is "Godlessness in Marxist-Leninist Propaganda: Dissonance, Compliance and Coercion." Yes, really. The rebbetzin wrote her dissertation on scientific atheism in the Soviet Union.

And then I looked inside. And it only got worse.

I don't remember writing it. I don't remember what's in it. Forget not remembering it--I can't even understand it. (NB: I filed it exactly five years ago this month.) And I'm looking at the stuff I translated from Russian, hideously dense multi-claused Soviet prose that is impenetrable even in English, and somewhere in the back of my mind a little voice reminds me that I did that on the fly, without a dictionary.

Five years ago.

And now I have a hard time chatting with the Russian checkout lady at the grocery store. I have to run through case charts in my head before I can construct a sentence about cheese.

Cringe.