What's wrong with her?

Russian, like German and French and pretty much any non-English language, does that thing where every noun, even if it’s inanimate, has a gender. I was completely OK with this logic before Sunday morning, when, while working in my room, I overheard my host mom and my babushka complaining about how “she doesn’t do anything useful” and “something’s wrong with her.” I was ready to burst into tears until I realized they were talking about the new dishwasher.
About a month into this semester, I got up the nerve to start taking my iPod to school, but so far it’s been worth it. Here in St. Petersburg the songs in my music collection take on different meanings and characteristics than they do at home. My morning commute on the metro, for example, is best accompanied by the kind of old-school punk rock I thought I'd jettisoned back in high school: “Teenage Lobotomy” by the Ramones, “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols and, naturally, the Clash’s “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” And then there was this one time when I was doing the daily red-to-blue-line transfer (the basic procedure: stand in crowd of commuters until train pulls up, align self by one of the doors, almost get knocked over by crowd exiting the train, join crowd attempting to enter the metro, get violently pushed or kicked out of the way, swear under your breath as car doors close and train leaves the station, repeat until you can find a square inch of space in a metro car to call your own) and the approach of the train and opening and closing of doors synched up perfectly with “Toxicity” by System of a Down. How appropriate.
My collection of wimpy college “rock,” from Death Cab for Cutie to Rilo Kiley, has about as much relevance here as do the Pomona Student Digesters that keep showing up unbidden in my e-mail. I wonder if I'll even be able to listen to it once I'm back home, or if it will just depress me that I've returned to that mindset, so juvenile-seeming in this city, in which I can identify with Ben freaking Gibbard. Ugh.