I'm in Rome. For the past two days I've been wandering around, stopping when I'm hungry to eat delicious food and read my book (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino...Mom sent it to me a couple months ago and I grabbed it because it's Italian...a cool book, it spends a lot of time describing to you the experience of reading itself). Tomorrow I'm off to Parma, then to Milan on Friday to meet a couple friends from college. I can't wait to be around people who I can talk to and trust that they'll know what I mean, both words-wise and culture-wise. It's been delightful not to talk to anyone for the last couple days, but I'll definitely be ready by Friday. I hope Italy will make me feel reconstituted for my last 10 weeks in Moscow, not make me wonder why I'm going back.

Kiwi's going home tomorrow. As a last hurrah, about 8 of us went to Darbar, an Indian restaurant on the top floor of Hotel Sputnik near Leninsky Prospekt. It's a decent walk from the metro, past a giant statue that looks a bit like an Oscar, except 30 feet tall, more planar and futuristic, and on a 50-foot pedestal. The statue's a monument to Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space (before he took off, he said "поехали," "let's go," the Soviet analogue of "One small step..."). Inexplicably, the statue has a six-foot-tall metal soccer ball underneath.

The restaurant, 16 floors up, is one of my favorite places in Moscow. Out one window, you look down on a bend of the Moskva River, and across it to a stadium with the city stretching behind. Downstream a bit, you can see one of the Seven Sisters, outsized cathedral-like buildings commissioned by Stalin that taper in spires to a final red star at the top. They have an architectural term all their own, Stalin Gothic, and are incredible lit up at night.

Unfortunately we were seated by the opposite window, which looks down on a nuclear power plant. Everyone else in the restaurant was part of a corporate party, and was drunkenly dancing up a storm. We were right next to the speakers, which pretty much ruled out cross-table conversation. The music was a medley of Arabic trance and 90s dance-pop--songs like La Bouche's "Be My Lover," which I haven't heard since the 7th grade (except for all those times I Youtubed it out of nostalgia.) (R, they also played "It's the time to disco," which of course made me think of you). The food was good though, as always, and I'm glad I got a chance to see Kiwi off. Blueberry's leaving tomorrow also, leaving the language school nearly depleted of friends.

(wrote this a while ago, forgot to post it)

The Omaha shootings have been all over (government-controlled) Russian TV. The frequency and the tone of the coverage seem...off. The story played over and over, I strained to make out the Midwestern accents under the dubbed Russian, and whatever newsworthiness and emotional impact it had was quickly overshadowed by the subtext that somebody at the Kremlin thinks this is a political windfall.

Blueberry pointed out that things like that always get lots of coverage, and that America has way more than its share of them, and she's right. Plus, I wouldn't put it past Fox to have a similar field day if someone shot up ГУМ, the huge Soviet-general-store-turned-designer-mall on Red Square. Still, it was eye-opening and depressing to see what from America (which is more a part of me than I ever could have imagined before I left) gets plucked out and portrayed as representative.

Relatively mindless anti-Americanism has also hit the jackpot with Creepo Ed (who, turns out, is married with a 9-year-old daughter). He has a column called "An American in Moscow" where he wheels out all the old platitudes against Bush, which, regardless of whether I agree with them or not, sound parroted to the point of meaninglessness. The America he describes is boring, hypocritical, obese, psychotic, etc. What doesn't come through in the articles, of course, is that in Moscow he gets to live it up as Mr. big-shot Editor in Chief (though I strongly suspect that one of his main qualifications for the job was his ability to speak English), whereas in America he's just some dude from Pittsburgh whose parents take him shopping at Wal-Mart on the weekends (excruciatingly telling moment that night at his friend's house...he says something about driving to Wal-Mart, then says well actually my parents take me there because I can't drive, realizes how that sounds, steals a reaction-gauging glance at my poker-face).

He's basically struck a bargain where he gets to keep his self-image, and the forces here that want to tar all of America with the same paranoid, unstable, moronic brush capitalize on his insecurity about not being able to hack it it back home. Government ownership of the Weekly also probably means he's shot himself in the foot for any sort of journalism career in the States.

I've been writing my grad school essays. So far I've finished Berkeley's, which are 10 pages in total. The first one is about academic/professional experience/goals, and was basically an exercise in rummaging through my previous experiences, gauging their weight in my palm, rotating them under the light, giving them a sniff, keeping them or chucking them, and finally piecing them together into a ludicrously logical narrative on why I was born to do energy policy. The limit is 12,000 characters, and I've pruned it down to 11,987 (thank you, Word, for that button), but I still need to include why I want a Ph.D. instead of a Master's. With my remaining 13 characters, I can write "me Ph.D. yes!" but that's about it.

The second essay is trickier. It's the one about social/economic/cultural/academic/familial/personal/animal/vegetable/mineral challenges/opportunities/experiences, so, in a word, anything. I'm going with familial challenge, because it's the only hard thing I've really had to deal with that I didn't choose. It feels like a minefield of sounding messed up, too cold and formal, and like I'm asking for pity (shudder). I'm eternally grateful to Edith the French goat farm lady for basically telling me to put a sock in it, it happens to everybody, when I gave her my really-I'm-ok litany that college students seemed to need.

My Cultural Experience is Russia, so trying to show perspective and understanding without aligning myself with any politics I don't want to or coming across like I think I have my own little sociological petri dish. The question also asked how you cound contribute to diversity, so I was on the fence as to whether to trot out gender. I ended up doing it because the question so pointedly wanted me to. As I was writing it, I realized what I had to say was more substantial than I thought, but still I hate the idea of being cut slack.

Processing it all so minutely and reminding myself who I was in the States is showing pretty starkly how so much of what defined me back home draws only blank stares or polite interest here. I'm excited at the thought of reentry, but there's a little nagging fear that my world will have left me behind.

Being on the metro so much is giving me a new understanding of Moscow life. Before I moved out to Строгино (Strogino), I could walk to the language school from my apartment in 5 minutes, and only took the metro (such a pain) to go out at night, do touristy things, or visit Blueberry or Kiwi. Now, just to get to the metro stop, it's a 20-minute marshrutka ride.

I've taken on some private students, two from my old morning class (the guy who replaced me, according to Holly, is "batshit crazy"...Катя (Katya) and Роман (Roman) would probably agree if they had the vocabulary, but they just went with "awful"), and one from the class I'm still teaching, Михайл (Mikhail). I meet them in the center a couple mornings a week, when I'm not at the oil and gas magazine.

The entire length of the platform of my metro stop, Щуткинская (Shchutkinskaya), is about five-deep with with people waiting for trains, which come every minute or two. I usually have to wait for a couple trains to pass before I can squeeze myself on. The ride from Щуткинская to the circle line in the city center is 15 minutes, packed so tightly that I'm practically lifted off the ground. Each successive stop I think no one else can possibly fit, then another five or so people shove their way on. Usually I read on the metro, but in the morning it's so crowded that either I can't lift my arms or my book would just be pressed against my face.

When we get to the circle line, half the passengers pour chaotically out like air from a let-go balloon. People waiting on the platform are lucky if they can get on before the doors slam shut. There are no sensors and "Please stand clear of the doors" like on the Washington metro, if the Moscow metro's doors close on you, you frantically tug your limbs either into or out of the train before it starts moving. I broke a flip-flop that way a few months ago.

My first few commutes like that left my nerves on edge for hours. Наташа (Natasha), my flatmate, does it every day and says you get used to it. People indeed seem to acquire a remarkable obliviousness to each other, the tighter they're packed. (A couple days ago as I was getting off the train, by accident I pretty much stuck my finger in the ear of an elderly guy who was sitting down. "Oh sorry!" I said because it came out of my mouth before "простите," and he kept staring straight ahead like nothing had happened.)

Not acknowledging strangers definitely alleviates the wierdness of being 3 inches from each others' faces. Plus, if you were polite to everyone you'd never have mental space for anything else. The metro mentality must involve some sort of dampening of the sense of others' humanity, which is maybe even necessary in a city like this not to go crazy from lack of space. It gives new context to peoples' general rudeness.

So many people come to Moscow because it's where the money is, and get stuck in the to/at/from cycle of work hoping for a job that pays well enough to both offset the expensiveness of the city and leave them with something to bring home. I can feel the treadmillness of the lifestyle starting to wear on me, and I'm even in the unique position of having an out.

The office complex of the oil and gas magazine has its own little cafeteria. For about $4, you can get a salad (Russian salads are finely chopped, sometimes cooked veggies held together with plenty of mayo adhesive), a bowl of soup, meat, and potatoes or rice or cabbage. My favorite meat option is a little cylinder of chicken, lightly breaded on the outside, that erupts butter when punctured. The cafeteria lady is a grandmotherly sort who thankfully finds my crappy Russian amusing rather than burdensome.

Natasha, my new flatmate, eats at an old Soviet-style cafeteria every day too. To get to it, you walk past the Burberry and Tiffany's boutiques in the city center, through an archway, back from the street a little ways, and into the basement of an old rundown building. The cafeteria lady is glowering, built like a brick, and has probably worked there since 1960. Yesterday, Natasha told me, she was in line behind a guy who asked for lemon-water. The cafeteria lady said "Лимон?? Что лимон?" (Lemon? WHAT lemon?) Natasha ordered brown bread and herring, typical Soviet lunch, and the woman gave her a little smile.

Yesterday the Russian soccer team beat Andorra (a tiny country on the border of Spain and France that I hadn't heard of until a few months ago) to advance in the European championship. My students were talking about it today, in a sort of nonplussed, ironic way. Wait, I said, Russia won, aren't you proud? No way, they said, the Russian team is crap, and they're just going to get humiliated when they play the good European teams. Everyone agreed. It was strikingly not American--back home, I think people would love the underdog status and see it as almost an advantage, because it would be such a good story if we won.

The metro is a PETA nightmare. As it gets colder, the fur coats are coming out--some look like they're made from multiple entire animals, and are older than a system of government or two. I usually can't identify the animal, but a couple weeks ago I saw a scarf that was a chain of three little foxes, each biting the tail of the next.

I'm getting to people-watch more now--at least that's my positive spin on having to take public transportation everywhere since moving out to the boonies (I left the city center for Строгино, an old resort section of the city that overlooks the Moskva River, by Шукинская metro). I take the metro in on the nights when I teach, and a tram to the oil and gas magazine.

The other people on the tram are overwhelmingly elderly, and mostly women (the life expectancy of Russian men is 56). I pretty much never get a seat, either because it's crowded or because I feel bad watching some octagenarian hold on for dear life around the curves. I honestly wonder where they're going all day.

Russia is aging (I'm not sure how true that is of Moscow, which has about 10% of the country's population but is extravagantly unrepresentative of Russia as a whole). There's a public service ad in the metro that says "Наша страна нужно ваш рекорд--Россия [I forget] 3 человек каждый минут," "Our country needs your record, Russia loses 3 people every minute," and has a picture of a beaming woman holding three identical Photoshopped babies. I'm not sure if the agewise topheaviness I see is a result of the population decline, or if it's because the Russian elderly are more integrated into daily life and less confined to nursing homes and Florida-equivalent as Americans are.

Russian has two words for "you," ты and вы. т sounds like t, в sounds like v, and ы is a vowel that doesn't exist in English but I think it happens for a split second in the middle of the word "squeal."

Ты is your friends, your family, and anyone your age or younger who you meet informally. Вы is most people you meet for the first time, anybody in a transaction, and people who are substantially older than you. Of course people are rarely that categorizable, so I often find myself trying to talk around the word "you" (which is pretty acrobatic and usually impossible given my Russian), or I just go with вы because it seems better to be uptight than disrespectful.

The idea of two words for "you" at first just seemed like it created unnecessary hierarchies and minefields of opportunities for awkwardness. Creepo Ed's friend Sam made me start to see it differently (he also argued pretty artfully that feminism destroyed the Western world, which was really engaging once but would probably get tiresome fast). He talked me through how our meeting would have gone if it had happened in Russian. When he met me at the door, we both would have been вы. Sitting around the kitchen, he would have switched to ты for me, but I would have stuck with вы since he's a good 15 years older. Then, when we were in his living room, a couple bottles of wine deep, listening to Depeche Mode and making bad 9/11 conspiracy jokes over our game of Jenga (I was totally winning until Ed knocked it over with his knee), then he would have been ты also.

The more the language starts to permeate me, the more I can feel the distinction between the two words and how it reinforces the way you should relate to someone. Being called вы makes me poised, being called ты makes me smile, and either makes me more sure of myself because I have a better sense of who I'm talking to.

In some of the younger, more Western-type companies, everyone is ты around the office, I guess to create the atmosphere of hey, we're all buddies here. I wonder how much that lightens things up and makes people comfortable, and how much it sacrifices peoples' respesct for each other and hides the power dynamic that's there whether it's spoken or not.

I almost went home for Christmas, thanks to Prime Minister Zubkov. He announced out of the blue that Russia is ratcheting up immigration laws, mostly in an effort to get even with Western standards (it's a ten-fingerprinting, interrogation, waiting, expensive nightmare for Russians to get US visas--"Are you sure you don't want to stay in America? Why? Under what circumstances might you stay? Why don't you want to stay? What do you have against America?" Honestly, my students have stories.)

So now, the tons of Americans and Brits working here with no permit can't just buy 6-month business visas, settle down, get paid in cash, and pop over to Kiev or Helsinki every 6 months. Now you can only spend 90 out of any given 180 days in Russia, and you have to renew in your home country.

The language school is one of the only businesses around that can issue year-long multi-entry visas with work permits. So I would have saved myself a big headache by not quitting a couple weeks ago. In my rush to figure out how to stay in Russia, and be on a plane instead of in jail the next time I go to the airport, I asked the editor of the oil and gas magazine if she could help me out through the business. She (surprise) went through the roof. She doesn't have time for this, other people have done my job and haven't etc etc. I had assumed that her business was in the same ballpark of legitimacy as the language school, and hoo boy was I wrong. She can't issue work invitations. She doesn't even have a work permit for herself, she pays her employees in cash US dollars (way illegal), and I'll eat my hat if she declares any taxable income.

But I didn't know this, so I asked her to have a 2-minute conversation with Big Midwestern Underground Fungus. He wanted to see what her situation was before he'd agree to give me a month-long grace period on the visa, to make sure she wouldn't get him in trouble. She flat-out refused to talk to him ("I don't know who he is. You probably don't understand what I mean by that, Rhubarb, because you haven't been in Russia long enough. I DON'T KNOW WHO HE IS.")

I ended up solving the visa thing by negotiating with BMUF to teach just one class in exchange for visa support until it expires in April. He's desperate for teachers, I'm desperate for a visa, and both of us were trying not to show it. In the end I'm glad to be independent of the editor. I don't think I want to work very long for someone who talks to her employees the way I'd maybe talk to someone who just shot me in the leg (although Лена and I have plans to rent "The Devil Wears Prada," which I'm looking forward to), and partly because her business is wicked sketchy. Apparently that's how Russia has been running since the 90s, but things are changing now and it's bound to hit the fan sometime.

It's a gold mine of info about the Russian oil and gas industry though. I just wrote an article on an interview I did with 2 students who are going into the oil industry. (She decided last minute that she wanted me to interview them instead of sit in while she did it, so I had about 5 minutes to prepare then she sat there the whole time and interrupted when she felt like it.) The two guys are studying at a program run jointly by top science universities and a big Russian oil company. The universities have the theory and brains, and the company has the money and practical problems (How do you extract the exceptionally globby oil from Sakhalin II? How can you use seismic data to tell where it is?) They were really sunny about working for the company and even talked about "corporate patriotism." Big oil doesn't have the moral mixed-baggage that it does in the States. They're going to Houston soon, and I put them in touch with Tyler from the Tibet trip. I love when I can fit my incongruous worlds together.

Yesterday was Наташа's birthday. I was really glad I could go, since I missed her wedding a couple months ago.

The party was in their apartment, a nice, sunny (ok, when there's sun) 3-room place by the same metro stop as the oil and gas magazine. She and her mother had spent the last couple days making this amazing spread of food--beet salads, little salmon sandwich-wraps, tomatoes with something garlicky on top, bread with butter and caviar, fruit salad, and a fish-jello type thing I wasn't as much a fan of. All of her friends brought flowers, which were in vases all over the floor.

Her friends are a fun, fairly artsy bunch. Many of them spoke some English, and my Russian's starting to get good enough that peoples' personalities take on higher resolution. Some of them were Наташа's friends from university, others were people from Женя's architecture firm or people they had met skiing in Europe last year (they're going again this winter. I might drive with them to Austria, which would be sick...originally they wanted to go to the States, but Наташа couldn't get a passport in time). I had a good laugh with this guy named Igor who kept acting like I would offend his whole nation by not consuming my bodyweight in vodka and pickles ("Not George Bush and Putin. To Rhubarb and Igor!")

People went to a club afterward, but I caught the metro home just before it closed. I spent all of today on grad school stuff, then saw Seeded Grapes off on the train to Kiev (she quit, after about a month here). We were pretty different, but we had that intangible American thing in common that gave us a comfortably shared sense of what to talk about and how to talk about it (Artichoke calls it self-satisfaction, I guess I'd call it a certain sort of energy). I might be seeing her in Kiev soon, depending on what my options are for getting a new visa once the language school cancels mine (I told you I quit, right?).

I spent most of today working on my application to Berkeley (their Energy and Resources Group-- erg.berkeley.edu). It's an interdisciplinary program that covers everything from the physics of solar cells to the history of the environmental movement to the macroeconomics of nuclear power plants to policy issues surrounding renewable energy. I'm quickly and unwisely getting my heart set on it, but there's really nowhere else like it. The main guy there has his name on everything energy-policy related, from journal articles to congressional testimony to last September's Scientific American. When I look at papers by other profs all over the country, I swear he's a co-author about half the time.

In keeping with easing back into my American life, I had a precious can of Campbell's split pea soup for dinner. I love how the can warns you not to cut yourself on it--Russian cans couldn't give a crap, and barely take responsibility for what's inside them much less what you could do to yourself on the empty packaging. The "Save these labels for your school!" was rather adorable as well.

There's a commercial on TV where a man of heavyish build with short gray hair walks into a kitchen, sees the dishwasher full of dirty dishes, puts on a pair of sunglasses, then impassionedly plays a saxophone until the dishes get clean. I swear it's supposed to be Clinton.

A couple weeks ago, Seeded Grapes walked into my empty classroom almost in tears. She had taken a job copy editing for an oil and gas magazine, but between that and teaching full-time she felt like she couldn't hold it down. She knew I was into writing and science and energy policy, so she asked if I wanted it. I felt bad that she was having a hard time of things, but thrilled for the opportunity.

She gave me the contact info of the editor, and I called her up and started a few days later. The office is by Войковская, one stop over on the circle line and three up on the green. From the metro station, you have to take a marshrutka to the office. Marshrutkas are vans that hold about a dozen people, which come according to no particular schedule and leave whenever they're full. Whoever's sitting closest to the driver collects everyone's 20 rubles, makes change if people need it, then gives the wad of cash to the driver. People get on and off whenever they feel like it--at red lights, in the middle of traffic jams, at the actual stops...

To get into the office complex I have to give my passport to a security guard in a little booth, who records my passport number and the time I arrive. I think my crappy Russian has made me memorable, so now they just wave me through.

The magazine's office has two floors. On the bottom floor are Алексей, Петр, Александр, Татияна, Ольга. Алексей and Петр are the layout guys. Петр is a tall, kindly older guy with flyaway gray hair, a stuffed Ice Age squirrel perched on his Mac computer, and a badass collection of Russian 80s pop. Алексей is shyer, and divides his time between tweaking the layout and firing darts into the dartboard upstairs by my desk with deadly accuracy. Александр is younger, grew up in Azarbaijan, and speaks perfect English. He sounds even more American than I do. I asked how his accent got so native-sounding, and he said he had Joey and Chandler to thank. He learned English entirely by watching Friends and Simpsons over and over, with English subtitles, analyzing what every line meant and repeating it.

Upstairs are me, the editor, Ягмур, and Лена. Ягмур and Лена write articles, they get sent to a very mediocre translation agency, come back in English that sounds like this:

"Visual demonstration was really impressive proving that minimum 50 bcm of gas is flared in reality with about 24 billion falling to Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous District (KhMAD,Yugra) alone in 2006"

and I have to make it sound like English that people would actually want to read.

The articles range from the fairly dull (Volvo just released a new machine that lays pipeline), to pretty interesting (the government is saying you have to use the natural gas you find in oil fields, you can't just torch it all and release all that carbon), to the rather fascinating (an interview with an oil exec about his company's environmental practice...2 pages of masterful dodging, optimistic jargon, and comments bespeaking his paternalistic approach to his employees). I have to understand every sentence so I can reword it more readably, which is making me learn a ton about the industry.

My first day on the job, I saved my edited version of an article to my desktop instead of a network folder. The next day, I saw Seeded Grapes in school and she asked me, did the editor get ahold of you? I said no, and Seeded Grapes said You better call her... I did, and she let me have it. Where did you save that article? You just cost us 6 hours of work. I hired you to make things go smoother, and this is setting us back. You need to follow procedure. We can't have this kind of messing around. And so on. I apologized and explained what I did, hung up, felt bad for a while, then realized the absurdity of costing her 6 hours of work by working for 3 hours, saving it to the desktop of a computer that sits 2 feet away from her, and then being within constant reach by telephone.

Being around the office for another week showed me that that's how she often deals with her employees, by talking to them the way I don't think I'd talk to someone unless I was pretty sure I could never forgive them. According to Лена, a smart and softspoken woman from Belarus, it often costs her employees. Her loudness on the phone upstairs can be interesting, though..."Well, I think a man should go. It can't be me. I think you're the guy for the job. You can carry this off in Russian, right? That'll throw him a little....Yeah, bring him along too, that'll take some of the heat off you. He can push the tape recorder button in his pocket...Well, I know, but this isn't America, is it..."

I'm going to talk to her about going full time (I tried yesterday, but got a huge earful about catching her at a bad time). I'm enjoying the work, I like the staff, and I think I can handle her explosions. Plus she's clearly more interested in publishing my work than in getting laid.

A couple nights ago, Artichoke and I had a real conversation for the first time in 3 months. I normally only see him in passing--I'm not around the language school as much as I used to be, our schedules don't coincide, and after the summer I kind of felt like avoiding him.

After work, a bunch of us went to Вогзаль (a bar named "Station" because of its high-ceilinged, darkly-wooded interior. The ambience is sort of warehouse, but people go there because it's cheap and close). Artichoke and I were together at one end of the table.

Like an unstable chaotic system, something tipped us ever so slightly and we spiraled into math-nerddom. I think it started when he mentioned an elementary school teacher who looked at him with repulsion when he asked what infinity plus one was, and I said that's like asking what the universe is expanding into, and he said no that's more of a legitimate question. I said no, possibly not, and was soon tipsily insisting that the rectangular formica tabletop was actually a torus, if you thought of each pair of parallel edges as being the same edge, so that if you walk your fingers off one edge you're immediately on the opposite one, and if you take that up a dimension there's a decently convincing argument we live in a giant dodecahedron where you go out one face, get spun around a fifth of a turn, go back in the opposite face, keep going and eventually end up where you started. In that case the universe is a finite boundaryless 3D object that's just expanding without expanding into anything.

He said come on, it's not a torus it's a formica tabletop, I said bear with me it's an analogy. He said you can never verify anything like that experimentally, everything is bound to be an approximation, I said of course it won't be perfect, but it's still a useful model, and yes you can support it experimentally. He loves pure math but scorns the idea that it by itself can teach us anything about the world and I totally disagree. Take the one simple beautiful assumption that light moves at the same speed in all frames of reference, use it to derive a lot of purely mathematical equations, and, as soon as your equipment gets sophisticated enough, watch them predict how the world works, right? If your assumptions and your math are perfect, you can learn a lot in advance of it being observed. It's a whole other can of worms why the universe would behave according to math, but it seems pretty clear that it does. Given the rest of his personality, with his mercurial moods and mistrustfulness, it somehow seems fitting that he wouldn't believe in that sort of order.

We went to the kiosk afterward, then the quasi-compliments began. "It's wonderful when a woman who can speak lyrically and eloquently about maths. Your geekiness is almost redeeming." "You've got the second-most beautiful eyes I've ever seen." I just looked at him like what on earth are you saying, and words kept coming out of his mouth.

It passed 1 am, when the metro closes, and Blueberry, Artichoke, Radish, and I were still by the kiosk. Radish lives walking-distance away, but farther than me, so he went home and Blueberry and Artichoke came back with me. (Blueberry had pulled me aside earlier and said, do you want me to go sleep at Radish's? Do you like Artichoke? I said no, come back to my place, if anything I want Artichoke to go to Radish's).

At my flat, Artichoke passed out on the mattress on the floor (where I usually sleep) and started snoring like a freight train while Blueberry and I hung out on my pullout couch and talked. She had an interesting insight into him. He's half-Iranian and half white, and to me he looks fairly unplaceable. He comes from a part of London where there's huge tension between British Asians (a term that seems to refer mostly to people from the Middle East and South Asia) and whites. His dad is Muslim, his mom is Christian, and he went to a Christian school with pretty much only white kids. He was pretty cruelly singled out (which he had lightly referred to before, but I hadn't realized the extent of it until Blueberry gave me some context). Most white girls, Blueberry says, probably wouldn't bring him home to the family.

He goes by David, which is pretty close to his given Iranian name. His accent's of the right London sort that, according to Big Midwestern Underground Fungus, if all the teachers had it we'd be the richest school in Moscow. Here he's British, which is how he likes it. In London he's caught between not seeing himself as British Asian and not being wholly accepted by white culture. His sensitivity and insecurity and attachment to the Moscow expat ego-feed make sense in a different way now.

Through the turnstiles and down the bomb-shelter-deep escalator into Mendeleevskaya, where walkontheleftstandontheright is obeyed even in the rush hour crush, onto the flourescentlit platform where metallic molecules loom like space age versions of the toothpick and styrofoam models we made for Ms. Hepp’s sophomore chemistry class, Zack sorry I took yours down and made a snowman. And Mendeleev the Siberian periodic table founder, not Gregor of the peas.

Through the переход to Novoslobodskaya on the circle line, the caterpillar shuffle and an ocean of bobbing heads to the escalator bottleneck, then down to the platform. The redlit numbers count up, two going on three whole minutes between trains, come on, do I look like I’m made out of time? Backlit stained glass workerpeasants, marvelous last April, but now just like the cement honeycomb of Washington. The tealblue train rickets to a stop, buoys like an iceberg as people pour off, sinks as we squeeze back in. The loudspeaker Остарожно, дверы закрывается. Следущая станция, Белорусская.

My article's up!! If you Google my first name, last name, and Moscow it's the first hit.

About a month ago I emailed Ed, the Weekly editor, that long list of article ideas, and we discussed them over coffee. The conversation soon wandered to his new job, how it's only his third week, everybody's coming to him with questions, he doesn't really know what to do, he didn't realize how much work it would be...the kinds of things you’d tell your good friends, not your potential employees.

He’s probably 40ish, and has been here since the 1990s. He has an easy laugh and a similar sense of humor to mine, and I enjoyed talking to him. What surprised me though was that he kept sending me little shyish/fear-of-rejection signals—unsteady eye-contact, a certain kind of smile, hesitation, I don’t know. It felt like he, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, had packaged up the power in the situation, tied a ribbon around it, and just handed it over to me, the random twentysomething who out of the blue asked if she could do some freelance work. Puzzling.

We went for coffee a couple more times (Him: It's nice chatting with other Americans, are you free again next week? Me: Sure, I think I'll have made some progress on the article by then. Him: Oh...well I guess we could talk about that too), and last Friday he invited me to a party with a bunch of newspaper people.

Or rather was supposed to be a bunch of newspaper people but it ended up being me, him, and his friend Sam who writes the movie reviews. Luckily the awkwardness dissipated pretty quick, 30% because we killed multiple bottles of red wine and 70% because Sam is really cool.

Sam has the sort of nice, ambient flat that you’d expect someone a little older and more settled to have—a wondeful change from my normal, poorly furnished, hideous-Sovietly-wallpapered, landlord-crap-laden, this’ll-do-for-now surroundings. We got along famously. He loves to argue, and substantiates his points by doodling on an ever-present piece of typing paper (his picture for why September 11 was perpetrated by the US government had two vertical rectangles with downward-pointing arrows, and a circle with a line through it that represented the different sides of the brain that deal with images and facts.) I loved having carte blanche to challenge and dissect and mouth off, a rare feeling when most of my social-time is spent in an English classroom or with people who aren’t as into talking about ideas.

Sam walked me and Ed to the metro (and said he had really enjoyed my company, which was hugely flattering coming from him). In the metro station, Ed started saying Oh, I left my keys somewhere across town, I don’t know where I’m going to stay…mind if I come over? I wasn’t going to say no if he really didn’t have anywhere else (although the obvious choice in retrospect was go back to Sam’s), and I refused to believe that he was trying to sleep over sleep over with that sort of line, so I said, as disinterestedly as I could, Ok you’re welcome to come crash with me, I live really close to the language school, so people I work with sleep on my couch all the time. Still a little stormcloud of Bad Idea had gathered over my head.

He got super cozy next to me in the empty metro car, took my hand, and started carressing it. (I had given him zero indication I was into him. I’m sure he saw the 1984 when he xeroxed my passport so he could put me on the payroll. I swear this city preys upon a certain kind of Western man and makes him think it’s forever okay to try his luck.) I didn’t respond, he gave my hand back, and I looked down at it and thought Rats, what do I say when I have to look up and meet your eyes. Thankfully he read the silence, got off at the next stop, and waved at me magnanimously from the platform. I’ll spare you the details of the subsequent flirtatious text messages.

Blueberry pegs him as your garden-variety sleazy boss, but that’s almost giving him too much credit. He doesn’t have any quid-pro-quo agenda, he’s not shrewd and manipulative, he just seems kind of clueless. I spent a lot of the next day putzing around the flat, cleaning stuff, making brownies for Olga and Vladimir, and at intervals wondering aloud to him What did you think?

The Weekly and the Daily are the biggest, if not only, general-coverage English newspapers in Moscow. There are a couple more niche expat papers, like the bitterly humorous Exile and the culturally-focused Element (where Orange just started interning, and did a hilarious interview with Aubergine about his DJing...I just scoured the website and couldn't find it. If they put it up later I'll post a link).

The Daily is free, and you can find it in stacks all over the city. It's independently run, and the bylines are an even mix of Russian and English-sounding names. The Russians, in particular, are fairly harsh and brave in their criticism of the government. They articulate exactly what they find wrong with it and never just spout stuff about Democracy. Yesterday I sent my career profile of the American venture capitalist to Edna, the editor of the Daily's city section. Hopefully it'll appear this Monday or the next.

The Weekly has been around since the early 20th century (the Daily only since 1992). It started as an English-language purveyor of Communist propaganda, had a rocky history through most of the last century, and is now owned by a government news agency. (Seeded Grapes, when she found this out, sent me an alarmed text message--"Are you sure you want to write for a government rag??" Ed admits that he's had to develop a sense of what will and won't fly in terms of political slant, but the articles I plan on writing are apolitical enough that I don't think it'll be an issue. Interestingly, one of my most pro-Putin students, a guy about my age, told me he hoped my articles for the Weekly wouldn't criticize the government like Weekly's articles often do).

The Daily seems to run a tight ship, and has launched successful careers of journalists in the States. Their efficiency and organization means the assignments they'll give me as a freelancer are pretty strict in terms of content and word limit. The Weekly is less well-known, and seems to be taken less seriously by people who know journalism, but it'll give me a lot more leeway in what I write.

In a couple weeks, this huge oil and gas technology conference is being held in Moscow and I really want to write about it. I was trying to decide whether to pitch it to the Daily or the Weekly. The Weekly would probably let me write about it however I want, but the Daily offers better editorial guidance, plus an editor that doesn't creepily hit on me. Details to follow unless I get sick of the thought of it.

Tomorrow I'm meeting with Big Midwestern Underground Fungus to talk about going part-time. Right now I'm on 31 academic hours a week (an "academic hour" is 45 minutes, a concept designed so you can charge students for 3 hours and give them 2:15. A real hour is an "astronomic hour," don't ask me.) I'm hoping I can go down to 15, but I think the least he'll let me get away with is 20. He pays the same amount of tax on each teacher regardless of how much we work, so it's cheaper for him to have a few full-time people than a lot of part-timers.

They're hemmhoraging teachers though, which gives me some leverage. Pineapple gave her notice yesterday. Blueberry's leaving at Christmas. Artichoke is talking about leaving, but he's been doing that ever since I got here. Aubergine is starting his own company (he got fronted the money by a yogurt company or something, already bought property, offered me $70,000 a year to go with him, but I'm dubious and don't really want to teach much more anyway).

At first I was going to tell BMUF I wanted fewer hours because applying to grad school is so much work and I want to focus more on learning Russian and I couldn't possibly teach full time and do those things, when the truth was I mostly just wanted time for newspaper work (he gets snarky about his teachers taking other paid jobs, when it's him paying the taxes and sponsoring your visa and work permit). But the more I look into grad school apps the more work I realize it is (just unearthing all the profs around the country doing research in science policy, focused on energy and alternative technologies, is harder than I thought--it's so interdisciplinary that every school groups it with a different discipline).

I hope I'll have fewer hours by next week, the last couple weeks have been a bit nuts.

Olga and I met at bellydancing. I had seen her there for a month or so, but we didn’t talk to each other until last Wednesday. We showed up at noon, as always, but instead of finding our usual teacher Kristina we were surprised to find Sasha, an excitable 19(ish)-year-old with a 100-watt smile, about to start her striptease aerobics class. Between my crappy Russian and Olga’s not-much-better English, we pieced it together that Kristina had rescheduled the class for Fridays, then we decided hmm, well we’re here, might as well stay. (Olga later performed for a friend in the hospital, and tells me they both about died laughing).

Olga was thrilled that I’m American. I keep waiting for somebody to respond negatively to my nationality, but everyone I’ve met here, to a person, thinks it’s fascinating. She invited me to have dinner with her and her husband a couple days later, in their studio a few blocks from Novoslobodskaya.

They have separate apartments in different parts of the city, but spend much of their time together in the little studio. The whole multi-storey building is a block of studios that, I gather, are slowly being converted to apartments (none of them have their own bathrooms, though, there’s just one in each hallway).

Olga’s husband Vladimir does most of his work there. He’s a cariacture artist, and his pen-and-ink drawings have appeared in big-name Western publications (I’m almost sure he said Time and Newsweek, but if not, they were of that ilk). He was also the art director for the satire magazine Krokodil, pretty much the only of its kind that the Communists let slip by (I remember it came up in my Communism and its Aftermath class in college).

I pored through a stack of his drawings (anyone was fair game, from Russian politicians and celebrities to Bill Gates as a python to Lenin and Putin playing chess to Al Gore riding a donkey backwards) and he explained the ones I didn’t recognize. He’s been honored by the Russian Academy, has shown his work all over the world, and has a thank-you note from Bill Clinton for a portrait. I wish I could tell you more of his thoughts on being a satirist under Communism, but it didn’t feel right at the time to ask the big cliched What Was It Like questions.

Dinner was brown bread, different kinds of cheese and sausage, radishes, green onions, stewed pork, a block of Ukrainian bacony fatty (delicious) something, pickled cabbage, and a veggie-plate of cucumber, pepper, and tomato. I was there for hours, just chatting about life in the city and America and Russia and Vladimir’s art.

Vladimir can express pretty much whatever he wants in English, even if he can’t find the exact words and grammar (Olga’s not as far along). They ask me questions about language and I happily answer them. A lot of the teachers don’t hang out with Russians because they suspect they just want free language practice, which seems like a strange mentality to fall into—people are accommodating you by speaking a language you can understand, but you act like you’re some sort of expensive language-vending machine and save your conversation for those who can afford it. It’s funny because even if you insist on viewing me and Vladimir as a transaction of learning, I could teach him everything I know about English and still feel like I came out way ahead.

Andrey is the only student in my Tuesday-Thursday noon class who shows up consistently and on time. (Olga trickles in at about 12:20; Sergey comes in a few minutes later, out of breath, putting away his iPod, saying he overslept--now he's in LA, I haven't seen him for a few weeks; Nastia's always away on business; Natasha's still honeymooning in Spain; Daria's university schedule is always changing; no idea what happened to Roman).

Andrey's about 40 years old, a couple inches shorter than me, kind of stocky, ruddy complexion...I'm trying to find a way to help you picture him, but all I can come up with is the Bob's Big Boy sign. Not that he looks like that at all (except I haven't seen the sign in forever, so the longer I think about it now, the more my memory of it looks like Andrey).

He's a Ph.D. economist with a high-up job in a company that sells wooden doors. When he joined the class he was really serious, but he's loosened up a lot. Everyone else is in their mid-twenties and all on a similar wavelength, so sometimes it's hard to rope him in when the group gets talking, but he's always a good sport.

A couple weekends ago (hours after that party with Blueberry), he, Olga, and I went fishing. Another teacher, who had covered their class when I was in Tibet, was supposed to come too (I think Andrey had originally suggested it to him as a sort of guy thing), but it ended up being just the three of us.

Russian fishing trips, conventional wisdom says, consist of sitting around and drinking and talking and eating barbecue (pork shashlik on skewers, which is really good). There's a joke that you don't even need to get out of the car. Our fishing trip pretty much followed suit. After a couple hours of sitting in a little shelter out of the rain, talking, eating, and glancing occasionally at the fishing pole propped up at the pond's edge, we went back to his house and had a conversation that I'm kicking myself for not writing about at the time, because now all I remember is that it was about politics and what he said was interesting.

I mentioned to him a few days ago that I was interested in energy policy, and he emailed me a couple articles on the subject from the Russian newspaper Коммерсант. I recognize words like "Wednesday morning," "important," "problems," "spoke with," and other words that tell you nothing of what the article's actually about (maybe I'll sit down with the dictionary this weekend). He asked me to send him links to the science policy grad programs I'm looking at, so I sent him my 3 current favorites: Georgia Tech, RAND, and Cornell (What's it like to live in Atlanta, does anyone know?)

I've enjoyed getting to know him, but I suspect that him getting to know me is only hurting my credibility as a teacher. (Russian teachers of English, after they're fluent, spend about six years getting a degree, and it's sometimes a rude shock to our students when somebody lets slip how little training we've had.) When Andrey asks about my past education and future plans, teaching is pretty noticeably absent. We have substantive other stuff to talk about though. I wonder how much it matters to him.

After a pretty long silence from the daily newspaper, I got an email last week that said "Dear Rhubarb, Okay, here's your first assignment. Interview this guy and write a career paths profile on him [details details details] Okay?"

The guy is an American venture capitalist, originally from Detroit, who worked his way through Canada and Europe and eventually set up shop in Russia about 10 years ago. He developed a way of financing companies that's halfway between venture capital (where the company gets money in exchange for a bunch of its shares) and a normal bank loan--his firm, in exchange for the funds to develop the company, gets royalties from the profits. He said it worked well for small businesses in the States, who don't want a venture capital firm to own that much of their stock, and it works even better in Russia, where the business climate isn't ripe for venture capital.

I had fears of him being a self-satisfied cowboy-type, not unlike Big Midwestern Underground Fungus, who showed up here in the 90s, made a killing, and enjoys telling himself stories about all the good he's done for the world by getting rich and being him. This guy didn't strike me like that--he had story after story of him thinking through ways to make something more economically efficient, and scraping together all the contacts and resources at his disposal to realize his plan. It was never really mapped out, he just followed little incremental opportunities as he saw them, almost like he was solving little puzzles as he came to them and then using what he learned to solve bigger, different puzzles. He's still far from complacent.

He has a crystal-clear, and well-substantiated, view of himself as someone who's independent, risk-taking, self-starting, carpe-diem, etc, and throughout the interview he'd remind me explicitly of how he sees himself. It made me wonder how much peoples' personalities develop as a result of whatever it is we happen to repeat to ourselves about ourselves.

W, thanks for the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/fashion/30russia.html?ref=europe

(An article about Russian teenagers and twenty-somethings embracing hip-hop culture even though the political climate is so anti-American--the photo was taken yards away from where Ира and I were sitting the night of the psychological-portrait guy)

I missed the competition, but the article definitely jibes with what I've seen around. People wear that style of clothes (even if they'd never be mistaken for American), and I've even seen some freestyle competitions by the metro. It's also fun going to clubs where Aubergine DJs and seeing everyone go wild when he remixes Cypress Hill or the Talking Heads or the Beastie Boys (I gather he's pretty well-known on that scene, and his (British) nationality must help).

More contemporary, mainstream American culture is popular too. Next week, Kerrill, of the diamond-studded spinning dollar sign belt buckle, is missing my class to see the Beyonce concert (last month it was Black-Eyed Peas). American movies make it over too, and are always popular (though, frustratingly, always dubbed).

The one thing in the article that tripped me up was this : "Anti-American sentiment may be big in Russian politics right now, a sure vote-winner for the country’s leaders..." I don't gather that people are going to vote based on anti-American sentiment. It sounds like it's much more important that a candidate guarantee stability and prosperity, and encourage people to be proud of being Russian (in which anti-Americanism could play a secondary part, I guess).

This Times article from a couple weeks ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/world/europe/10sitcom.html contains this howler:

"Older Russians typically roll their eyes at mention of “Schastlivy Vmeste” [a "Married with Children" Russian remake], as if they briefly wonder whether life under Communism was not so bad after all."

There's no "briefly wonder" about it. A lot of older people here (and a decent amount of my generation) feel near-unqualified pride for the USSR and Stalin's leadership (granted, maybe it's exaggerated when they're talking to an American), and the question of whether life is better then or now is honestly a difficult one. And that's coming from people rich enough to afford the language school.

A couple weeks ago I got an email from Arthur (namer of Bullshitstan) asking if I wanted to go for a walk sometime during the weekend. I always accept my students’ invitations, because they’re an interesting bunch and they invariably show me a side of the city I never would have discovered by myself. The free Russian lessons aren’t bad either. As my teaching personality deflates from super-energetic-Rhubarb-hoping-to-God-you’ll-like-her to normal-Rhubarb-trying-to-explain-how-English-works, I’m more comfortable hanging out with my students. It feels more like they’re inviting me, and not that perpetually-smiling person who’s endlessy enthusiastic about grammar.

The weather was nasty last weekend. Arthur and I ended up stranded under an overhanging entryway of a building, watching the rain form dirty puddles in the potholes of a Novoslobodskaya side street. He asked if I was cold, and I said truthfully that No, I felt fine. A couple minutes later he said Your lips are getting blue, we’re going inside. I was surprised because I wasn’t at all uncomfortable, but he said, half-jokingly Hey, I’m Russian, I can tell these things. I guess it makes sense to be attuned like that, if you live in a place where dying of cold is a real threat and common occurrence every winter. I remember blue lips in America seeming more like a funny curiosity than a warning.

The situation also rang bells of what a lot of expats notice—Russians, generally, are tirelessly protective and concerned for their friends, even if they seem to give less than a shit about the strangers they pass on the street. “Friend” in Russian even has two words—your знакомые are people you sort of know and hang out with occasionally, your дружья are people you trust and stick by no matter what. It irritates Russians how Americans call everyone their дружья, when it’s really a more significant relationship than that. I’ve also heard the argument that a lot of the Western paranoia about the Russian mafia is due to misunderstanding of that sort of friendship.

Arthur and I ended up finding a coffee shop. He decided my Russian needed improving and set to work, and I was more than happy to go with it.

We hung out again this past Sunday. We met by Novoslobodskaya, then went downtown to a bookstore and to Red Square. I don’t know if my mood was different or what, but he was doing my head in. He kept steering me by the elbow or the waist through doors and around the corners in the bookstore, and would touch my arm to get my attention even though he clearly already had it, whenever said something. It got to be pretty agitating, and soon I couldn’t stop myself from pulling away. I can deal with the different ideas here about personal space, I’ll play along with the gender stuff to some extent, but when the two combine it’s a little much.

In terms of relating to him, it was kind of downhill from there. Once we had talked about the obvious stuff, there wasn’t much left, and I didn’t have the incentive of the classroom to force the flow of conversation.

I’ve taught his class a couple times since then. He’s started correcting the other students (half the time he’s right, half the time he’s not), which annoys everyone, especially me. Plus he gets all huffy when I work with him on his mistakes. He’s acting like he wants to be exactly on my plane, which doesn’t work for the classroom. It’s made my stern side flicker on and off (I’m developing Dad’s stern-face, with the slightly raised eyebrows, steady stare, and mouth in a line) and I think he’s getting the picture.

Rhubarb—originally grouped with the vegetables, reimagined as a fruit, known to grow wild in Russia, delicious when properly prepared, revolting when not, weathers the winter, and what I’ll be calling myself from here on in.

Also, from Wikipedia: “It is or was common for a crowd of extras in acting to shout the word "rhubarb" repeatedly and out of step with each other, to cause the effect of general hubbub. As a result, the word "rhubarb" sometimes is used to mean "length of superfluous text in speaking or writing."”

Blueberry was originally named after the obnoxious girl from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who turns into a blueberry and floats away. Blueberry, I take it all back, you're a lovely person and your namesake is delicious and versatile.

Blueberry arrived in June, after quitting her job at an English law firm and spending a month at a teacher-training program in Prague (the same as mine in Krakow). She's unguardedly nice and normal, which makes her a bit of an expat anomaly. The lack of mental baggage that sets her apart from a lot of expats (and enables her to relate pleasantly to all of them), I think, makes her immune to Moscow's pull. The city's cold and dirty, the people are unfriendly, everything's expensive, and she misses her boyfriend. She doesn't need the bright lights and distractions, the attention people give Westerners, or the ready-made (versus self-created) interestingness of life. She'll probably go home for good at Christmas (so will I, unless a newspaper can give me enough financial and visa support that I can cut ties with the language school).

She's much less forgiving of the Western male shenanigans than I am. (Maybe it's because she's been involved with Aubergine, who seems much less a victim-of-circumstance than Artichoke.) Last week, we were standing on a chilly balcony outside a house party where Aubergine was DJing. She was having a cigarette and I was wrapped in a Tibetan shawl trying to stay warm. We were idly looking through the plate-glass window, back in on the party inside, at American guy who I had been on a couple dates with the week before making out with an utterly wasted British girl (let's call her Orange...lay off the self-tanner, honey. Rawr!)

Hmm, that's a shame, I thought, but no hard feelings because nothing between us had really progressed and I wasn't convinced I was into him anyway. Blueberry went a bit through the roof and thought he was being really rude to me. I didn't feel slighted, I just felt like I had got a useful piece of information about his personality.

We started talking more generally about the expat guys here, and I told her I felt kind of bad for the ones who need what Moscow offers and who for some reason feel like they can't go home. Blueberry, on the other hand, has zero sympathy and says they made their bed, they can fucking lie in it.

I took a cab home soon after that (something I don't like to do by myself, but I didn't want to wait until the metro opened at 5:30).

Epilogue 1: The convoluted soap opera. Orange, Blueberry, the aforementioned American guy, and a few others went back to Aubergine's soon after I went home. As things were winding down (Blueberry reports), Orange was all over Aubergine, who shed her long enough to tell Blueberry he'd get rid of Orange if she stayed. Not surprisingly, Blueberry (who's slept with him before) just shook her head, snapped something, and left him with Orange. (Blueberry and Orange have both kept it quiet--thanks to Starfruit, it's me the rumor mill associates with Aubergine, as I was surprised to learn when I got back from Tibet. If you're having trouble following all this, so am I.)

Epilogue 2: The American guy who I had been out with then had seen snog (great British word) Orange left yesterday morning. He gave me a weirdly rib-crushing hug, cheerfully said he'd see me in hell, and that was that.

Epilogue 3: This morning we had a "Welcome to [Language School]" meeting for all first-year teachers, meaning everybody but Pineapple, Artichoke, and the administration. It was basically Aubergine at the whiteboard with a marker presenting stuff that anyone with half a brain figured out after the first two weeks of teaching (What levels do we teach? What books do we use? What do we write on the attendance sheets?), then telling us how lucky we were to have mandatory unpaid professional-development workshops for a profession most of us are leaving in a few months anyway. While I sat there and doodled on my newspaper that I would have felt a bit too cheeky to read, and hoped they would end it soon, Blueberry was humorously but pointedly calling Aubergine and Pear on the bullshitness of it all. She used to work for an employment-law firm, and really knows the ins and outs of how (British) companies should treat their employees.

It reminded me of the balcony episode. I say fine, expat boys, pull that shit, just don't expect me to date you as far as I can throw you; fine, Language School, pull that shit, just don't expect me to pass up the first opportunity to jump ship. Blueberry says wait, this isn't okay. I withdraw from situations and selfishly cling to the freedom of my thoughts, while Blueberry takes a stand and enters the mix. I admire her confidence and faith in her ideas, and I wonder if it can be earned without sacrificing depth of observation of different points of view.

Also, I've dumped Artichoke for her as my laundry date.

Last night Ира and I were sitting on a bench in Pushkin Square, talking and drinking a cans of fruity god-knows-what from the kiosk. A few benches away there was a severely drugged-up teenager staring intently at us, speaking at a mile a minute, and fidgeting with a decent-sized paintbrush. Ира finally got irritated and asked him what the hell he wanted. He was painting my psychological portrait. It's a picture of a baby Siamese cat. (?)

I keep meaning to tell you about Blueberry, but I just spent the last two hours writing an email to the editor I met last week, so I'm going to be lazy and cut and paste that instead. It's a brainstormed list of article ideas. If you were about to move to Moscow, what would you care about?

Dear [Mr. Ed],

I hope you had a good weekend. I've brainstormed some article ideas, both expat- and science-oriented. Please tell me if any sound promising.

Expats:

-a guide to kiosks. What's good to eat? Who frequents them? What's the etiquette involved? What on earth is "Hooch"?

-markets. Where does the food come from? Who runs the stalls? If they're not Russian, is their job threatened by new immigration regulations?

-Who, among Muscovites, are learning English and why?

-If you live in a block of flats, odds are you've heard drilling and hammering at all hours as your neighbors remont their flat. What's the philosophy behind all the home repairs? How/why do people do it? Where do they get the supplies? Are trends changing as capitalism and prosperity set in?

-Starbucks is opening soon. What made them decide to enter the coffee market here? Could coffee-to-go culture take root in Moscow? (My students are always amused when my bright green travel mug shows up on my desk).

-I read that there's a guided tour starting near Patriarch's Pond at midnight on weekends, all about the Master and Margarita. I'm almost finished reading the book, and am curious about the tour.

-I miss peanut butter, maple syrup, brown sugar, brownie mix...where, if anywhere, are these things to be found? What do they cost? What are acceptable substitutes?

-A Russian expat and Moscow State University alum taught a class at my college called "Communism and its Aftermath." She spent some time back in Moscow recently, with her American husband and newborn daughter. What's her perspective on how the city's changed? What does she miss about Russia? What's life like on the flipside of expat-hood?


Science ideas:

-Russia's Druzhba oil pipeline is the longest in the world. It stretches from eastern Russia through much of Europe and the Middle East. Recently, it has been at the center of Russia and Belarus' energy disputes. What is the daily operation of the pipeline like? What were the challenges of constructing the segments that run through the permafrost of Siberia? How much maintainance does it require? Where exactly does the oil come from?

-The International Science and Technology Center, located near Novoslobodskaya, gives grants to ex-Soviet weapons scientists so they can pursue other areas of science and not be involved in further weapons development. What is the daily work of this organization like? Where does their budget come from, and where does it go? What changes have they seen over the past decade?

-The New York Times magazine recently ran an article that questioned how drugs are approved in the States, and how medical advice is decided upon and propagated. The article looked at the practice of clinical trials, and the role of the media and drug companies in influencing peoples' medical decisions. What is pharmaceutical development like in Russia? What sort of review process do drugs undergo before they go on the market? What government office is in charge of it, and what are the regulations involved? Are knock-offs of name brand drugs a big problem? How aggressively are prescription drugs advertised?

-In the States, a lot of published scientific research comes out of universities. In Russia, as far as I know, the Academy of Sciences is much more influential and prolific. What does this mean for how science is conducted? Does it help or hinder collaboration between scientists? How do people rise through the ranks? What does it mean for student involvement in major research? What important results has it produced recently? What's the internal organization like? Is the system working well? Is it changing?

-The zoo. What does it do to get ready for winter? How have recent warm winters affected it? What's in store for the future? Who plans the exhibits, and which are the most interesting?

-What's the deal with the space capsule at VDHKh? How did it get there? What's its history? Who upkeeps it?

-Stroll through a fruit and veggie market and you'll see shiny green apples from Chile next to their smaller, spottier local counterparts. How much market produce is locally grown, and how much is imported? From where? What are agricultural operations like outside of Moscow? Also, there's a dairy farm a couple hours south of Moscow that sounds kind of interesting (it's run by a German-Canadian guy who's registered on the website where I found all the farms I worked on in Europe).

-Russia is filthy-rich with oil and gas reserves. Geologically speaking, how did it get that way?

-Russia recently resumed sending planes to patrol its borders and nearby oceans, and the US government was quick to dismiss the aircraft as outdated. What sort of technology do the planes use? How much has the technology developed since the planes were built?

I know the head of the US Embassy's Environment, Science, and Technology Department and I'm hoping to see him again soon to talk about possible ideas and contacts.

Thank you for going through these, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

[that girl who's STILL hoping someone gives her a pen name]

Belly-dancing class is getting crowded. All summer only three or four of us showed up regularly, now there are eight or ten. (The city in general starts up again come September--people come back from their dachas, kids go back to school, offices resume full-time hours, the language school fills up.)

Of the women who show up for class, I think the instructor and I are the youngest by 10 years. There are a few pairs of middle-aged women--my favorites are the two who crack each other up singing Shakira songs. It's a really friendly, laid-back bunch. I'm sort of surprised that it doesn't attract more supermodel dyevushkas (one girl with perfect hair, black leg-warmers, and impossible breasts came a few months ago and gave herself bedroom eyes in the floor-to-ceiling mirror the whole time, but she was definitely the exception).

The instructor's really good at reading who shows up that day, whether they've been coming for a while or it's their first time, and tweaking the lesson accordingly. (I'm pretty sure she just wings it every day, which makes me sort of jealous in terms of my own teaching). Every class, she goes over all the basics, spending more or less time depending on who's there, and throws in some new stuff towards the end. I'm getting to the point where I'm decent at a lot of the individual moves, but I wish I could put them together into a few minutes of something coherent.

It's a lot of fun, and I wish I had discovered it while I was still really running. All the tightness in my hips that was giving me fits through college cross-country has dissipated, plus it's a hell of an ab workout. When I don't feel like going for a run, sometimes I shut the door to my room and practice to ABBA.

This morning I talked to the editor-in-chief of the weekly English newspaper. (I could never get hold of anyone but secretaries at the daily, plus I like the idea of longer, more thought-out weekly pieces instead of banging stuff out under daily deadlines.) I had agreed to call him at 11, so after waking up at 8:30 I went online and read all the back issues I had time for, drank too much coffee, watched youtube's Pat Benatar collection, paced around, picked up the phone and almost did that 7th-grade thing where you dial 6 numbers and hang up, and called him. He said he had time to talk to me that afternoon, and gave me directions on how to get to the office ("takethemetrotoПаркКультурыtaketheleftmostexitgoundertheпереходtakealeft"...I could've sworn he was testing my ability to take rapid-fire dictation).

I taught my noon class, then headed to the newspaper office. Over a cup of coffee, the editor told me he liked my clips and wanted to hire me part-time. Their budget is maxed out for September, so anything I write in the next few weeks will have to be freelance and paid retroactively. He just got this job a few weeks ago himself, and is still struggling with the larger news organiation about budgetary stuff and nationality quotas of employees (apparently you can only have so many Americans). He invited me to their next staff meeting and said he'd keep me posted on possible assignments and hopefully, once the new budget is in place, a staff position. My best-case scenario was that I'd give my notice at the language school today, but still I'm thrilled to have my foot in the door.

In honor of my new combo of location, occupation, nationality, and historical moment, I think I'm going to cleanse my blog of proper nouns. Or at least eggregiously misspell them so I don't have to worry about overzealous Googlers (J, your unfortunate experience with Congressman Constipation is definitely influencing my thinking).

I'm getting rid of my first name, so do any of you, dear readers (assuming I can still use the plural), have a name for me? You can follow suit and name me a fruit. Also, if I get familiar enough with the newspaper staff I'm thinking of naming them after 80s rock stars (more interesting than electrical appliances, less insulting than insects, more plentiful than fast food chains.) So post a comment or email me. I won't ask for an explanation I promise. Also email me if you want a link to the newspaper, and any articles I end up writing for it.


On a different note, Stephen M (not sure if you're still doing humanitarian stuff in Mumbai or if you've moved on to the hedge fund), my strongest memory from 6 years ago today is of exchanging holy-shit glances with you when the principal came over the loudspeaker and interrupted Mr. Zeljo's Chinese History class to tell us about the two planes.

Foods I would kill to have a constant supply of: real maple syrup, tofu, Tostitos, Newman's Own salsa, natural crunchy peanut butter, cheddar cheese, brown sugar, chocolate chips, Morningstar Farms vegetarian corn dogs.

Also I want to drive Mom's Prius down highway 81 from Virginia into Tennessee to visit Uncle Sandy up in the hills by Nashville, as the setting sun makes the sky all streaky and pink, with my bare left foot hanging out the window, singing along to my Greatest Hits of Journey CD even though it's scratched to hell and most likely lost by now. On the way I want to stop at Taco Bell. Moscow has its own brand of late-night neon fast-food depravity, but it's harsher and different.

And Rew, I know we haven't been in touch, but you should come too. And unlike that time in Canada, I'll believe you when you tell me we're on the right highway.

Today was my third day with Apricot's upper-intermediate class. She went back to Scotland a few weeks ago, so I have her class until they finish in December. The first time I taught it 8 people showed up, then four, today two. I hope it's stochasticity and not me.

Arthur and Helen and I had a good time though (Helen's real name is Elena, not sure about Arthur). When I teach big chunks of vocabulary all related to a similar theme (school, work, health, entertainment), the next lesson I put the students in pairs and give each pair a stack of cards with the words on them. One of them picks up a card, uses the word in a sentence, and the other one picks up the next card and continues the story. Last class we learned vocab about government, politics, and war.

Me: *draws 2 adjacent globs on the board* "So here's a map of two countries. This one is...Fakeistan. What should we call this one?"
Arthur: "Bullshitstan!!"
Me: "All right, Bullshitstan. The king of Fakeistan is...Arnold Schwarzenegger. Who's the king of Bullshitstan?"
Arthur: "George Bush."
Me: "Are you calling my country Bullshitstan??"
Arthur: "Are you calling California Fakeistan?"
Touche.

Under Helen and Arthur's watch, Bullshitstan invaded the civil-wartorn Fakeistan. After a brief occupation, Arnold advised his people to surrender due to Bullshitstan's superior arsenal, plus he was too busy bodybuilding to really give a shit. Although the land and infrastructure of Fakeistan was wholly incorporated into that of its militarily superior neighbor, Bush was kind enough to give Schwarzenegger an upper cabinet position and peace reigned once again.

I had my first Russian lesson in a while. My previous teacher Lola left (Artichoke had recommended her to me, amidst choruses of "met her in a bar down in old Soho..."), so now I have Natasha. Like Lola, there's no real glitz or performance, she just teaches me the language and is an affable person along the way. I think if I had a more ego-driven teacher I'd hate it, which makes me feel better about my own functional rather than entertaining classroom presence. But then again, if I want to hear crazy personal stories in Russian I can just prick up my ears on the metro, whereas teachers are the only native English speakers most of the students know, so maybe it's more justified on the English end of things. Speaking of which I have to go teach.

It's the season of the interns. About 50 newly-arrived Americans and Brits (for the most part), divided into six groups and trained at the school over the next six weeks. Both Monday and today a couple of them observed my evening pre-advanced class ("teaching observed is like shitting with the door open" -Onion).

Monday/Wednesday pre-advanced is pretty laid back. I think seven or eight people are signed up for the class, but a different three or four of them show up on any given night. They're all around my age, or a little older, and love talking about anything and everything. We usually start off sticking to the coursebook, then go off on various tangents. I spend much of class collecting mistakes to correct on the board as a group, and feeding them new vocabulary where they need it.

An American and a Canadian were observing my class tonight. They're both headed to Volgograd in a few days, after finishing up the training in Moscow. Aubergine threw them in my class about 30 seconds before it started and told me to incorporate them in the lesson as much as I could. My students (Evgenia, Kerrill, and Andrey showed up today) were eager to chat with them (I'm the only native English speaker most of them know, which surprises me).

The lesson today was about a Survivor-ish reality TV show where the students had to pick six of ten contestants to go on the show, argue about their selections, and learn personality adjectives along the way (Kerrill thought for 5 seconds and picked all the attractive women--which irked Evgenia--and also the black guy because maybe he can rap. Kerrill is the one who asked me on Monday what "stanky" meant (I deflected the question to the intern) and has recently been sporting a belt buckle with a fake-diamond-studded, four-inch-in-diameter spinning dollar sign).

The interns were fun tonight. I had them participate in everything, which livened things up, let them practice explaining stuff to students, and made my job a lot easier. It'll be a relief though when the school settles back to normal.

Today, in search of peanut butter and tofu, I walked half a mile down Novoslobodskaya to Азбука Вкусна ("Tasty Alphabet") an upscale grocery store on the inner ring road. Everything's imported and has a little flag next to it of the country where it's from.

I weaved my way among the cutely-uniformed salesgirls and powersuited midday clientele and found a tiny little jar something Jiffyish for $7 and a half-sized package of tofu for $9. I scoffed at the tofu and stared longingly at the peanut butter for a few minutes, thought about buying a $2 cucumber (I ended up going to the market instead and paying 50 cents for 3), and left emptyhanded.

The media keeps reporting that Moscow's the most expensive city in the world, which is funny because the average salary is $1000 per month (what I make now--Giant Midwestern Underground Fungus gave me a raise--plus I don't pay rent). Being a familyless, carless, healthy person, I can easily put away half of it and not feel like I'm scrimping.

If $1000 is average, that means that for every one of my students who occasionally steps out of class to tear one of his employees a new one on his fancy Nokia, there are dozens of people who make approximately nothing. The markets largely make it possible for people to get by (a loaf of bread costs a quarter), but that could be changing. Immigrants from the former republics run the markets (Salim the fruit and nut man, who I was buds with until he got pervy, is from Kazakhstan, and the woman who runs my favorite veggie-stand is from Azarbaijan), but they're getting forced out as the government cracks down on illegal immigration. Eventually the chain groceries might be the only option.

There were a few weeks during the summer when the sky wouldn't get dark until after midnight, and dawn would arrive again just past 4. I would leave my 7-9:15 class feeling like it was the middle of the day. Since I've been back from Tibet, it gets dark about halfway through my evening class.

If it's light from 4 to 12 in the summer, and from about 9 to 5 in the winter, we lose twelve hours of daylight in 6 months, or half an hour every week. I've never lived in a place where the change is as palpable as it is here. It gives me this bizarre feeling of hurtling around the sun that seems particularly suited to Moscow life.

I got back from Tibet on Sunday the 26th. As I got off the express train that runs from Domodedovo Airport to Paveletskaya Metro on the circle line, I had a bizarre and entirely unexpected feeling of coming home. I told Aubergine about it, and he said I'm sucked in now, Moscow's got me, I'm one of "us" now, there's no escape. Shudder.

Tibet was...I can't think of an adjective. What a bizarre interaction between my group and the place. Cast of characters:

Tyler, my friend from the geology summer thesis program. He's getting his masters in geology (salt tectonics) and planning on working in the oil industry for a while (I love the new breed of environmentally-minded but steelily ('steely' should have an adverb) pragmatic recent college grads). He spent all summer in the field with...

Thomas. Enormous gravitational pull in a group. Entertaining, considerate, smart, decisive, stunning green eyes. There was a certain chemistry between us from the get-go (funny how quickly "I'll never be happy with someone who's not with me intellectually every step of the way" turns into "I'm a thinker and he's a doer and that's perfect"...) but nothing came of it. It might have made for weirdness in the group, and it would have felt like a betrayal of Tyler, perhaps for no reason in particular. (Pineapple: "Did you pull?" Me: *pause* *long-winded explanation about the complexity of the situation...* Pineapple: "Right, whatever you want to tell yourself to feel better.")

Ward is Thomas's childhood friend. He's working in Beijing for a company that sets up hotels or something. As far as I can tell his job consists of listening to conference calls. He lives in an Ikea-perfect apartment in some sort of "international" building, well-insulated from actual Chinese people. For the last part of the trip he complained nonstop about the food, the weather, the people, you name it. He was always really kind to me, and it was great of him to put us up in Beijing, but I have no burning desire to keep in touch. (Damn, now that Americans are entering the picture I have to be vigilant about partitioning the blog-readers and the blogged-about).

Nelson is Thomas's college friend. He spent a couple years working for the Chicago stock exchange as one of those guys down on the floor who waves tickets around. That, combined with his carving out his own personal plush expansive territory in our tiny train-cabin, raised my hackles a bit, but he grew on me a lot as the trip went on. He's got this great, super-competent outdoorsy streak that he doesn't rub in your face, and he's 100% who he is and will accept you as the same.

Traveling with a group and traveling alone are like night and day. Half the time I felt almost like I was back in America hanging out with these guys and watching Tibet on TV. So much of my mental space was occupied by group stuff that the place itself almost seemed like an afterthought. It's impossible not to be struck by the contrasts in Lhasa between old Tibetan life and the new influx of Chinese, or by the tiny yak-herding towns with mud buildings draped in prayer flags, or by the opulence of the monasteries (is there any religion immune to gold and war?), or by, um, the Himalayas, but I felt much more removed from it all than ever before.

Granted, I've never been to a place where the lifestyle is so different from my own, and I'm sure that had a lot to do with my feeling of distance as well. It affirmed my choice of Russia as a place to live--I don't think I'd get as much out of a place where I felt like a complete outsider.

I'm writing from an internet cafe in Lhasa...everything's in Chinese, so if you're reading this that means I guessed right as to which button is "publish post" and which is "discard."

We took the train from Beijing to Tibet from the 7th to the 9th. Me, Tyler, Thomas, Alex, Nelson, and Ward (who met up with us later in Lhasa). Alex has since had to go home because of HAPE (high-altitude pulmonary edema)...he was fine once they put him on oxygen, but he was coughing up pink stuff and pretty out of it for a while. It definitely sobered the rest of us up. (I've been fine, save for a barfalicious encounter with some questionable palak paneer.)

The remaining 5 spent last night at a "resort" (some canvas tents) by Namsto Lake, 16000 feet above sea level. Tibetan yak-herders were camped nearby as well, and some of the little kids came up to us and made friends. All of the yak-herders have motorcycles, decked out in the same bright colors as their clothing. Prayer flags (a staple of college dorm rooms) hang across the valleys, and the highways are lined with little souvenir stands selling beads and statues.

The day after tomorrow we're going to Tengri (Tingri?) and starting the hike to Everest base camp. I think most of us are pretty acclimated. It's a great group...sometimes I'm not quite sure of my place among all these guys from the Carolinas who've known each other forever, but they're fun. I'd definitely be experiencing it differently if I were by myself, and traveling with a group has a whole new interesting set of challenges.

Lhasa is changing fast. The population has skyrocketed in the past few years, thanks in large part to the Chinese government providing incentives for ethnic Chinese to move here to basically dilute the Tibetans. The Chinese quarter is new and ritzy, with fancy hotels and western stores, but there's still a substantial Tibetan part of the city. Narrow roads with people hawking homemade bread, pasta, dumplings, yak meat (which will be fine if I never smell again), and vegetables; bicycle rickshaws competing for space with pedestrians and carts and the occasional mini-bus; robed monks strolling around; public squat-toilets wafting their smell out onto the street (the boys complain, but add worse aim and blood and you've got the women's).

Right now a Tibetan girl who looks to be about 6 is staring transfixedly over my shoulder. I think I'm going to go back to the hotel now, probably to sit up on the roof with the guys and have a Lhasa beer (think my stomach's in good enough order now) and look at the rooftops of the city and lit-up Potala palace.

It just hit me that I'm flying to Beijing tomorrow. I bought the tickets, got the visa, talked to Tyler and his friends about everything, but I've been so distracted by other things that the trip didn't seem real until I was packing today.

I fly into Dubai tomorrow night, spend the night in the airport/cave and get a hotel room (or follow Aubergine's advice and explore the city's party scene), then Dubai to Beijing the next morning. I'll be the last to arrive--Tyler's getting there tomorrow, his brother Alex arrives a few hours before me, Ward's already there (he's been dealing with all the Tibet logistics), and the other two get in around the same time as Tyler.

We're taking the train to Tibet on the 7th, spending a couple days in Lhasa, then hiking to Everest base camp. After that, the group might split in two, depending on what people want to do and how much money we want to spend, then we're flying back to Beijing in time for Alex and me to catch flights out on the 25th. I'm glad the trip will start with a couple days on the train--it'll be nice to relax, catch up with Tyler, and watch the world go by.

A week and a half ago, I sent applications to the two biggest (and pretty much only) English-language newspapers here. Neither of them got back to me, so I called them today. I got hold of an editorial assistant at one of them, who gave me the impression that the person who deals with applications is on vacation or something. I sent her my resume and clips, and she said she'd pass it along to the editor-in-chief and if he was interested she'd get back to me. At the other newspaper, the line was constantly busy.

I go back on forth on whether I like teaching or not, and whether I can happily do it for the moment even though I'm pretty sure it won't lead anywhere for me. I'm seriously thinking of applying for science writing grad school in January, to start the following September, and the biggest piece missing from my application is journalism experience. Plus it would be a fascinating time to be an American dealing with current events in Moscow (at least, the New York Times gives me that impression. As I've mentioned, I wouldn't really know that from daily life here).

But then, I start thinking, if I want a newspaper job and don't get one here, what's to stop me from moving? St. Petersburg could be nice, and Vladivostok just got an English-language newspaper, but if I'm going all the way to Vladivostok (about 8 time zones to the east, I think), why am I staying in Russia at all? Then it gets kind of vertiginous. I'll see what happens with the two newspapers. I don't think I'm done with Moscow yet.

I had forgotten what it feels like to be an athlete. For the last couple weeks I've been running more and more, so Tibet will be more fun and less painful. I've been happy for the past few months running 10 or 15 miles per week, spaced out over 3 or 4 days, but over the last three weeks or so I've increased it to 35-40 miles a week at 7:15 pace, so not far from where I was when I ran for real.

Almost all of my mileage has been on the treadmill, which is kind of a drag. (I've been for a couple runs outside, but there are too many street-crossings, and I'm pretty sure that by the end I actually felt my lungs burning with all the pollution). The gym I go to is right by school. It has a weight room with some treadmills, bikes, and ellipticals, and a big mirrored room downstairs (where I take belly-dancing. I went to step aerobics there once, which is even more fun and ridiculous when it's in Russian).

The staff all look to be in their 20s (except for one huge frightening blonde guy who looks like he'd be right at home sneering at James Bond), and are probably the most well-manicured group of people I've ever seen. They're stylishly dressed and impeccably coiffed, and furitively appreciate their reflections in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

The two televisions show a constant stream of runway models on Fashion TV (at least they're up front about trying to undermine your body image), and pounding club music plays in the background (I turn it down when I think I can get away with it). The whole place sort of has the feel of the gym in "Dodgeball," but I don't mind, it's fine for my purposes. Plus I know I'll appreciate the sauna in the winter.

On Sunday afternoon I went to ВДНХ, an old Communist exhibition center filled with worker-statues and ornate buildings dedicated to the former Soviet republics. The acronym (pronounced vvv-dddnnn-khkhkh (that last part like you're trying to cough something up)) stands for something about the amazingness of the national economy.

The layout is large buildings semi-haphazardly arranged around a huge expanse of asphalt with a fountain in the center. That kind of sprawl is common here--it's as if Russia says hey, we've got more space than we know what to do with, let's build things as big as we possibly can. A lot of people were on rollerblades, weaving in and out of families pushing strollers and meandering groups of (Russian) tourists. After trekking the entire paved length of the place I was jealous of the rollerbladers--ВДНХ covers an area bigger than the Principality of Monaco, or so Wikipedia says.


Some of the buildings were really affecting. From a distance, I saw the golden spires reaching up towards the sky and the statues glorifying the common people, and they conveyed a powerful sense of hope and a vision of a better, alternative future. It was really moving--the effect was diluted when I got closer and heard Justin Timberlake blaring through loudspeakers and saw that the buildings were filled with little stores hawking every type of souvenir crud you could possibly imagine. But for a moment I was honestly caught off guard by the architecture's ability to (I suppose I want to use the word "manipulate," even though it saddles the Communist builders with cynical motives that I don't think they entirely deserve) manipulate my visceral response.

The only other time I've felt like that (in a man-made setting, at least) was during Mass at the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela. I had just finished a two-week hike from Salas (kind of near Oviedo, in the north of Spain) along the old Christian pilgrimage route (El Camino de Santiago). The tradition is to go to Mass at the end of the pilgrimage, and hug the statue of the saint and rest your hand on a stone carving of his head (there's a hand-shaped hole worn on the stone from hundreds of years of hand-resting). The music and the architecture and the crowd and the light somehow produced in me that same emotional response, and I freaked out a bit and (to the befuddlement of my German companion) refused to go near the statue or the carving.

It's a feeling I've also gotten while watching a really fantastic thunderstorm envelop a canyon out West, though there I was free from the sense of being manipulated. It's as though I'm part of something bigger than myself that I'll never entirely understand but can give me muddy access to some sort of hidden truth. I wonder why, in evolutionary terms, that's in the repertoire of human emotions (I also wonder why so many scientists sneeze at evolutionary psychology). It was fascinating and a little frightening to experience Communism and Catholicism's efficiency in producing and distilling that feeling.

From one of Plum's textbooks, attempting to teach the phrasal verb "knock over."

"Correct this sentence: 'Who knocked up my snowman?'"

Hahahahahaha*snort*

Last night I went out with Ира and Adam, a guy who's staying with her through hospitalityclub. Adam's halfway through studying to be a pediatric cardio-thoracic surgeon in Warsaw. He's taking the summer (and next semester, if things go well) to travel around Russia and Asia, scrubbing into surgeries as a Second Assistant along the way (he gave me the website where he arranged all this, and I tried to remember it for you, James, but failed...tell me if you want me to dig deeper).

He emails the doctors a few weeks ahead of time, and they're invariably welcoming. While he's a little shocked at the lack of regulation, it gives him a great opportunity. He's collecting experience and references like crazy, and the doctors have been wonderful to him. They gamely answer all of his questions in English, although they're from a generation for whom that's more of a struggle. (Adam's English is impeccable, I could use my real vocabulary and say exactly what I meant and he was right there with me.) He just spent two weeks in St. Petersburg, and left Moscow today for Novosibirsk. After a week there, he'll continue to Mongolia, Beijing, India, Nepal, and Africa, if he decides to take a whole semester.

When we were trying to find a place to eat last night, Ира and her flatmate Аркади walking ahead, Adam and I behind, he came out with the fact that he had just seen a really difficult, unpromising surgery on a newborn. He's worried about being able to cope with that part of the job. I asked if he had talked to older surgeons, and he said not really, it's something that's not spoken of much. (I'm curious James, what kind of psychological support is there for surgeons in the states?)

When he spoke he just talked, he wasn't trying to perform or be adored. The teacher's room of the language school is so full of people who define their worth through their ability to entertain, I catch myself starting to think that's the norm.

Ира and Аркади left, and Adam and I hung around a while longer. He walked me home, past the neon signs and filthy puddles of Novoslobodskaya (Ира and I live only one stop away on the grey line), and went back to Ира's to sleep for 4 hours before his last day at the Moscow hospital.

I woke up and found this text message: "Hi Rhubarb, this is Adam, hope u r not sleeping yet, it was a great pleasure 2 meet u. I found u very natural_ i like it, wanted 2 tell u that personally but maybe im too shy :-) anyway hope 2 c u sometime in the future, take care_adam"

There's a good chance I'll see him again. He might be in Beijing when I'm there next month, I might see him in Poland if I visit my friend Alicja, and he wants to visit the States sometime. His sister's there now, studying abroad in Baltimore (I can't shake the gut reaction that studying abroad in Baltimore is about like scuba diving in the bathtub).

His 'natural' comment touched me especially--sometimes I worry about leaving class and not being able to shed that mode of relating to people where I have to be happy and interested no matter what, and usage of the present perfect continuous is the most fascinating thing on the face of the Earth. It's a strange balance.

Choose My Own Adventure

As I was leaving after my class on Tuesday, I saw T sitting on the couch by reception waiting for Artichoke. She was wearing cropped black pants with a bit of a shine, a ruffly maroon top, and (yet another) matching pair of heels with an intricate bead-pattern. Her makeup was subtle and flattering, and not one of her long, black hairs was out of place. In other words, she looked about like she did every day in my class a couple months ago. (The advantage of being an American girl and not giving a shit 95% of the time is that, during that other 5%, people notice...right?)

We chatted for a while until 'Choke showed up, then the three of us went to meet Celery, his girlfriend K, and another friend for a drink (jasmine tea for me--I'm regressing to college, when beer grossed me out).

T spent the entire evening, on and off, half-playfully grilling me about 'Choke and other women. I kept trying to think of bland, light responses, while 'Choke just sat there like a doofus. Didn't help when he randomly reached over her and touched my thigh. Idiot. T, with half-mock incredulousness, asked me how often he did that. I froze a little, and Celery, to defuse the situation (I guess), touched my other thigh. Thanks...

What (barely) happened between me and Artichoke a few weeks ago is the tip of the iceberg, in terms of what he's keeping from her. He has another girlfriend in England, and thinks of T as a fun affair to have before he moves back home and starts his serious life (a decision I've seen him make and postpone twice since I've been here). The two know nothing of each other. Celery's Russian relationship is similar, in a way--there's no English girlfriend, but there's an equal sense, on his part, that he'll leave when he feels like it, and it'll have been nice knowing K. I'm almost sure K and T are optimistic that they've roped themselves husbands. And who knows, maybe they have--this city doesn't attract the most strong-willed and decisive of British guys.

************************************

As I was leaving after my class on Tuesday, I saw T sitting on the couch by reception waiting for Artichoke. I hadn't seen her since our class ended 6 weeks ago, and it was nice to catch up. She's looking for a job (something in marketing/finance), and just finished an exhausting few weeks at university. 'Choke had gotten drunkenly self-righteous a few days before, and demanded that she come meet him after work ('You're my fucking GIRLFRIEND and you can't even...).

'Choke showed up, then the three of us went to meet Celery, his girlfriend K, and another friend for a drink (jasmine tea for me--I'm regressing to college, when beer grossed me out). T kept asking me about Artichoke and other women. I hope my awkwardness just passed for normal social nerd-weirdness. It was a gross situation, trying to disguise evasiveness as lightheartedness. I can't straight-up lie to her.

The more time I spend with her, the more I like her. The more I like her, the more I start to think of us as friends, and I know things about her relationship that I couldn't keep from a friend. My own little what-have-you (every word I can think of--tryst, fling--seems like overkill) with Artichoke pales in comparison to what else he's keeping from her. He has a girlfriend in England who he thinks of as the priority. He'll go back to her eventually, when he decides to get serious and move back home, and brush off his "affair" with T. In the meantime, he's lying to T and wasting her time because he can.

It's nauseating to go out with them, watch him lie to her and treat her like she owes him so much, and feel complicit. I think this finally tipped the balance. I feel like avoiding him as best I can for the next week, going to China, coming back, and having a life here with much less of him. I can do without our hour-long arguments about the ending of Foucault's Pendulum, respect for being able to correct him on the number of homeomorphic loops on a torus, bouncing ideas around about what chaos theory says about free will. Also I bet I can find someone else with a washing machine.

(Final straw: The next night Starfruit, [I'll think of a veggie name for this guy later], Artichoke, and I were, where else, by the kiosk. Somebody mentioned some girl who would go for anyone who paid a little attention to her, and 'Choke points at me and goes "YOU!" Right. We see nothing in each other as people, I'm lonely and desperate, and you're the only one who notices me ever. I know if I called him on it he'd say "oh it's guff, it's all guff, British people just talk guff, it doesn't mean anything." I've learned not to take him seriously, but it's still obnoxious. Shut up and be responsible for what you say once in a while. Enough, всё.)