I've been having laundry dates with Artichoke. My flat doesn't have a washing machine (of all the language school flats, it has the best location and just about the worst of everything else), so he lets me come over after work to use his.

He lives a few stops north on the grey line, in Отродное. It's about a ten minute walk from the metro to his flat, through one of the giant parks usually adjacent to the giant block-of-flats complexes. We stop at a Продукты and buy a couple beers (and don't speak any English. A downside of living in the outskirts is that you can find yourself in situations where there's no one around except skinheads (or the police) looking for a fight. Artichoke's had a few run-ins with both. It doesn't help that he's half-Iranian and darker than most.)

Safely back in his flat, I put my clothes in the wash and we pop open the beers. Then we have to decide which movie to watch. He suggests an old Soviet film, I say I don't have the brainpower for subtitles and contextual analysis, let's watch Terminator. He suggests something else, I say okay, sounds fine. Then, a couple minutes before or after he's put in the movie, he convinces himself that I hate it. I tell him no, really, this is fine, I like it. He works himself into a mild lather of guilt and gets scared that I'm judging him based on this movie I allegedly don't like, so he puts on what I wanted to watch. Last night it was Aliens (after 5 minutes of Ali G). The week before, it was Alpha Dog (after he had talked me into some WWII movie).

We spend more time talking than watching the movie anyway. I really like spending time alone with him because he stops entertaining (a range of personality I lack, but apparently it develops if you've been in this job long enough). We talk about the city, the school, why people are here, Russians, Americans, British (him: Why do Americans take themselves so seriously? me: Why don't you want to be held responsible for what you say?)

Last night things got snuggly, then they got a little more than snuggly (unmistakably but not excessively). I slept better next to him than I had in a while. He really helped reverse that inward-burrowing tendency I have every so often and was starting to slip into again. I would guess that he's susceptible to the same.

I haven't been mentally present in my classes for about a week. I feel like I'm watching my students through a TV screen, and grammar explanations and vocabulary words are coming out of my mouth without passing through the conscious part of my brain. If I were better at teaching that might be a fine way to operate, but as it is I think I'm coming off as detatched and a little spacey. I lose my sense of when to put off questions, and end up letting a student drag me off into a hazy beside-the-point grammar woods (It can take up to two hours to climb the mountain? It could take up to two hours to climb the mountain? When can nouns split the particles of phrasal verbs? What?)

It's getting harder and harder to perform and to pour so much into teaching. It's like Onion (who has gone back to Canada) said--when he started teaching, he was practically ripping off pieces of himself and giving them to his students, but eventually he wanted to save something for himself. By the time he felt that way, he had been teaching long enough that he could just let his technical proficiency carry him. I'm not there yet, but I'm still starting to withdraw. I hope I snap out of this, at least somewhat.

A lot of it's because I've started to wonder what I'm doing teaching. It's as if a one-year-since-graduation timer went off in my head and now I'm antsy about what I'm doing next. I'm still waiting to hear from the Magazine, and soon I'm going to get stuff together to send to the expat newspapers here.

I went to the American diner by Mayakovskaya with Strawberry after class, and unloaded to her over burgers and milkshakes. By the time we were halfway through, I had stopped seeing the world on television. She said she's hit a groove in teaching and is kind of sad to be leaving. Hopefully she'll come back in September.

T minus 9 days until new computer. Yesterday the lightbulb in my monitor-illuminating desklamp exploded. As in exploded.

On rock? Rock on.

I finally emailed my application to the Magazine. I spent most of last night (after a few failed attempts at sleeping) editing my clips. What seemed really good two and a half years ago when I wrote it now sounds choked with adjectives and totally overwritten (why "reminiscent of" when I only mean "similar to"? why??) Now I can take a deep breath and wait for a response. Hopefully the clips were decent enough that they'll at least give me a chance.

On Tuesday I went climbing with Strawberry. She's leaving in two weeks, but I'm happy to lavish that fruit on her because I really like her and soon she'll be in California.

She's only been here since January, and for the most part has stayed out of the social fray of the language school. She spends time with Russian friends who she's met here and there, but besides that is fairly independent. She's different than a lot of people I've met here--she's earnest and outdoorsy and strongly evokes memories of high school friends who I haven't seen in years. (The only thing that doesn't fit is her heavyish, but apparently quite droppable, smoking habit.) She volunteers at a refugee center, teaching English to an 8-year-old Armenian girl. Definitely a refreshing counterpoint to most of the teachers, who know English commands top-rouble and are almost cynically willing to capitalize.

We met on Saturday at Baked Beans' and Pineapple's going-away party (though, as it turns out, Baked Beans was the only one who left). We somehow got to talking about climbing, then fell into a pattern of her explaining things to me then realizing she didn't need to ("Belaying's not that tricky...oh you can do it? Well, they don't use ATCs like in the states, but I can show you how to use a gri-gri...oh you've used one?) We were both really surprised to meet someone here who we had that in common with.

She goes to a climbing gym near the Кутузовская metro, just west of the circle line. Like a lot of places worth going in Moscow, it's tucked away among office buildings and you'd never know it was there if someone didn't tip you off. The inside of the gym looks a lot like its counterparts in the States. Sun-tanned, well-toned people balletically making their way up 50 feet of wall studded with multi-colored holds, while a satellite radio mix of American pop plays in the background.

As with Moscow itself, though, after you've spent a while in the climbing gym subtle but fundamental differences start to appear. First of all, the walls are absolutely vertical. None of this 85 degree, fudge factor, coddling nonsense like at Sportrock back home. It's imperceptible until you do 3 climbs and realize your forearms are destroyed (ok, maybe more then 3 for people with muscles). It's good practice, apparently, if you climb in the Crimea because there are a lot of vertical pitches and overhang there.

Another difference is the equipment. Some of the ropes are in scary condition (in reality, they're probably fine for suspending a person, but they're what I was taught to consider scary). They have thin and thick spots that get stuck in the belay device and make for jerky lowerings. Sometimes the sheath detatches from the innards and gets all bunched up at the ends. There'sno belay test, they just trust that you know what you're doing. I think whatever I signed when I paid my 480 roubles releases the gym from any sort of liability. I find that I frequently have a feeling in the back of my head that if something bad happens to me here (fall off climbing wall, fire in the flat, food poisoning, whatever), someone would be responsible. A corporation or the government or something has its finances/reputation/existence staked on its ability to keep people safe and fend off the liability lawyers. I have to catch myself and remind myself that in Russia that's simply not true. In all, I like the trust and freedom of the way things are done here, but it's a mental adjustment for sure.

The upshot (probably the wrong word, for chicken-and-egg reasons) is that Russians seem to rely on their friends and watch out for each other more (according to Aubergine, that's the origin of the Russian mafia myth). Strawberry, comparing her climbing-gym haunts in Boston and here, says the Moscow climbers give each other more advice and are generally more cooperative and aware of each other than the Boston crowd. Silly to draw big conclusions but interesting nonetheless.

Hopefully Stwarberry and I'll go climbing again before she leaves next week. I love how comfortably we relate.

I just got home from celebrating Pineapple and Baked Beans' last day of work. Baked Beans is headed back to the UK to finish university, and Pineapple's bouncing around Scotland, talking about getting a job in Poland, maybe coming back in Se;ptember, maybe not even leaving at all if some sort of visa problem doesn't get solved.

On the way there, I met Katie and another American girl coming out of the metro. Katie doesn't get a fruit becaues she's leaving in the next few days (plus her name is anonymous enough...takes one to know one), and I don't really know the other girl.

Katie is very Ivy League. She went to Brown, and has that aura about her of suspecting she's better than you, but not being certain enough to disregard what you think of her. When she talks it sounds like she;s trying to calculate precisely what she should say to you in order to do well on some social achievement test or something. On the way to the bar she was relaying a story about a French guy (I assume they have some sort of history) who was proud of himself of getting into a pretty good grad school in France, then he caught wind that she was going to Harvard and got really self-effacing. I bit my tongue to keep from wondering aloud when the rest of the world would start doubting the clothedness of the Harvard emperor as Americans are. It came up again when she and Baked Beans and I were talking. Baked Beans said Harvard's pretty much the top of the top , isn't it, and Katie said Yes, yes it is, and by that time there was enough vodka and apple juice in me that I said, well, it depends on the program and it depends on who you ask. They both chose to ignore it, rightfully so. I know I'm snarky because a tiny part of me wonders if I made a bad decision by turning my back on places like that, but mostly it's just tiresome how people blindly buy the hype.

That being said, I love how she's smart. She's starting a Ph.D. in Russian literature, and she clearly has a lot of cool ideas. I think the first time I met her I cornered her and thoroughly explained the pros and cons of MIT's science writing program because I saw so starved for the company of anyone who could relate to that. Katie reminds me vaguely of a version of myself that might have been (how's that for concrete?) if Dad were still alive. She's still on the track of clearing hurdles (Ivy Degree, check; Structured Travel Experience, check; More School, pending), and blatantly hasn't had that wait-what's-it-all-for moment (at least not in the same way I did). I kind of envy her.

What cracks me up too is that she seems to think I'm one of the cool girls. It's funny being recontextualized into the American girl social scene after not really thinking about it for a year and finding that not caring has elevated me in the eyes of those who do.

I need to save my roubles and get a new laptop...The backlight of this one is dead, so I have to shine a desklamp at it at full blast so I can see what I'm typing. I think I'll have enough money byJuly 7th (or even June 22nd, if I can stretch $40 for 2 weeks...long shot)

I hope my writing doesn't turn out like my game of ping-pong with Onion today. I was on fire when we were just messing around, then when we started a real game I was hitting it off the table, into the net, whiffing it... I hate how something as universal and essential as thinking can completely ruin your game. It's so easy to find that crucial balance between trying and not trying when you're not thinking about it, but then it shatters when you become too conscious of what you're doing (W, remember our drunken conversation about this in Vienna before the Shakira concert?). I think that's exactly what happened with the piece I tried to write for that women's travel website about my hike in Spain. I watched myself write the whole thing, and as a result it spun into a boring and turgid disaster. But I'm choosing to believe that was an exception.



Anyway, Onion. I can never tell what layer I'm on, even though he's got a really distinct internal hierarchy. His shy, awkward, honest moments must be coming from the center, and when he's going on about how LAST night he had this crazy dream that he was a baNAna and he came to WORK and he was STILL a banana and nobody noticed, that must be completely surficial, but what about the rest? I have no idea, for example, if he really converted to Russian Orthodox (although Artichoke buys it), if he's really 27 (he seems much older), if he's really going home to Canada for good in a couple weeks (he finally divulged a date, at least), if he's letting me win at ping-pong... I can't shake the mental association of him with Kaiser Soce from The Usual Suspects. He's that intelligent and impossible to pin down.



He's been here for 6 years. Never plans a lesson, just goes in there and wings it and is successful through sheer force of charisma. He has a perfect knack for entertaining people, which he says, cynically, is what English teaching is all about. You create an engaging, fun atmosphere, tell some stories, jump around, and the students don't notice that they haven't actually learned anything. It sounds like his cynicism built up over the years (today he was telling me how he used to give so much of himself to his students, a phase I'm still in), and it has a lot to do with his decision to go home. His teaching personality is creeping into how he relates to everyone else and he's starting to be sickened by it.



If I were a student I think I'd hate his classes (which would put me in the tiniest of minorities). I don't respond well when people try to put on a show...I keep trying to peek behind the curtain and figure out what they're really about, and figure out what exactly is so important about what they're saying that they get the right to monopolize everyone's head-space. I think Onion picks up on this (like I said, he's smart), and is at a bit of a loss for how to relate to me. It's completely my fault as well, for not being able to meet him halfway...recently things have gotten easier between us (which wasn't really helped by the fact that he's my boss). I think we both find some sort of humor in how we're different. He's leaving too soon for that to bear anything interesting though.

A few days ago I took a walk. I started off east from our apartment, popped in a computer store to look at laptops (I'm afraid James' is on its last legs), then wandered past a pond (more like a large dirty puddle that a few people were staring into expectantly, of what I'm not sure), and into an old apartment subdivision. The buildings of the subdivision were blocky and drab, but the surroundings were beautiful. More trees than I've seen since Plum and Cabbage whisked me away to Подольск that weekend. People were out walking their dogs and pushing their kids in strollers (the weekend walk in the park is a strong tradition here), it was a beautiful corner of the city. I emerged close to the ring road and crossed it via the переход, a long underpass that usually has stalls selling music, sunglasses, baked goods, magazines, lingerie, mp3 players, etc. Sometimes there's a 6-lane (or 8-lane, nobody seems to know) road to cross and no переход, in which case, as Plum says, you had to be born on the right side of the street.

I walked along the ring road a little ways, past clothing boutiques and themed coffee houses, and took a right on Цетной Бульвар. A бульвар (bul'var) seems to be a long stretch of road with a park in the middle and blini/ice cream stands at intervals, where businesspeople spend their lunchbreaks and friends go to hang out and drink beer (at all hours of the day...it might as well be Sprite here). Цетной empties out a few blocks north of the Kremlin in an old, pedestrian part of the city. A lot of the buildings there look like they could be in Vienna (they have the same sorts of sculptured flourishes and pastel colors), except they're about 3 times too big.

I walked down towards the Kremlin, the shops getting posher with every block, and ended up near where Baked Beans and I stood and watched the Victory Day parade. I passed the Duma (the federal legislature, a building that's immense and completely inscrutable save for a little plaque out front), and took a right on Большая Никитская, a beautiful street lined with coffee houses, florists' shops (classy artistic ones, not the 24-hour apology-boquet kiosks around Новослободская), and onion-domed churches. I stuck my head in the Bol'shoy theater, but I think it's under construction and out of commission for a little while longer.

I have to go meet my exam class at Кофе Хауз (that's Coffee House, spelled phonetically...kind of like the Russian Starbucks), but that was pretty much the end of my walk. Down another бульвар, past an outdoor Christian rock concert (I had no idea what was going on until someone handed me a pamphlet and I sounded out the Cyrillic and found some words that were vaguely like Jesus Christ), into the Pushkinskaya metro, and home.


Yesterday morning, there was a message on my facebook wall that said "rhubarb, have a great week. tretyakovka was fun."

D and Tretyakovka

A few days ago I got an email from D, a Williams '03 grad who's in Moscow for the summer. He was perusing facebook, found Beach, got in touch with her, and she pointed him in my direction. He got to Moscow only a couple weeks ago and hasn't seen much of the city yet. He suggested we meet at Tretyakovka, a gallery of Russian art that spans from early Byzantine icons up through realism of the 20th century, pretty much always in the wake of European art. After getting minimally lost by the Третяковкая stop I found him at the gallery at noon.

Last night I mentioned D, before I knew anything about him, to Aubergine and his friend Julia Mafia (yep, that's her real name). Julia Mafia is a fabulous Russian girl with hair, lips, and eyeshadow all strikingly different shades of red. The last time I saw her she had bought a pair of shiny silver shorts (she hasn't worn them yet...maybe on her birthday).

"You didn't ask for a picture??" she asked last night. "What if he's fat and ugly? *wrinkles nose* *wild fit of giggles*" Hate to say it, Ms. Mafia, but you are wroooong. D is easily one of the most attractive Russian men I've met. That places him comfortably above average on the American scale. Forgive my bias. Maybe if Putin clamped down on the rampancy of mullets and pointy elf-shoes, I would feel differently, but by and large, Russian men don't do it for me.

D is a very pleasant surprise. His looks are just a bonus--I could talk to him for hours. He grew up in a small, beautiful town (the gallery had some paintings of it) about 3 hours south of Moscow. He studied English at school, got a job washing dishes for a summer camp in Massachusetts, got an affadavit of support from his host family to stay in the States, spent a couple years at Berkshire Community College, then transferred to Williams as a junior. Harvard was his original goal. He ended up getting accepted there, but only as a freshman. At 23 years old he wasn't interested anymore.

He's every bit as intelligent and self-assured as you'd expect him to be. There must be crazy undercurrents of tenacity and resourcefulness, but in conversation he's affable and almost soft-spoken. He majored in political science, and is a gold mine of fascinating insight and perspective on America and Russia. Plus he smells really nice. Okay, before I talk myself into falling for him, let me tell you his reason for coming to the States. It's...

...wait...

...a little more...

...trust me, this one needs one more ellipsis...

...crap, I can barely make myself type it...

...Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yep, the gubernator. Either D is way too good at being deadpan, or has a clinically underdeveloped sense of irony. I bet it's the first one--when he said he wanted Arnold as the next US president and I showed no signs of taking him seriously, he said ok, actually he likes Hillary.

I have to say, though, that he ended up having a surprisingly decent and substantial explanation for the serious side of the Arnold thing. He read a book about Arnold when he was a teenager (intended to be an expose, but he said he was oblivious to the bad parts), and that put the idea in his head that if you find a way to get to America and are hardworking and resourceful, you can do pretty much whatever you want. He obviously understands, better than I do, the problems surrounding that...myth, I'd go so far as to call it, but, for him, it was what it was and he did what he did and I can't bring myself to snicker at that. Except when I picture Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Other interesting things D said: I mentioned to him Embassy Guy's comment that if America had helped Russia to its feet more in the 90s, we'd be reaping friendship rather than missile-threats now. D said that's totally off-base. If anything, he said, Clinton was too hands-on in the 90s, and a larger American presence would only have created more resentment and confusion.

Since I'm struck by how much more socially at ease I feel surrounded by a bunch of Americans at the embassy (even in comparison to other native English speakers), I asked him if he found it easier to talk to people in Russia and if it was a relief to be back. He said it was quite the opposite--he misses how Americans go out of their way to be friendly, even if it's not exactly genuine, and prefers that sort of interaction to what he described as the sullen, oblivious silence of his Russian co-workers.

I hope I see him again soon.

Oh, right, the paintings in the gallery were cool too.

You type fast for a grungy bird

Last night after class (the last one for a few days, thanks to Russian independence day), I went to Safir with Artichoke, Apple, Celery, Apricot and her boyfriend, and some of Celery's students (Celery was the first to duck out, of course.) The conversation was pretty typical. Artichoke and Celery egged each other on into an increasingly graphic conversation about sex, Apple threw in occasional snide comments, Apricot and I glazed a bit, then Artichoke got self-conscious and set about redeeming himself by talking about something intellectual, jokingly at first but then more involved. I took the bait and argued, this time, that pure mathematics isn't just a physicist's toolbox, that it can anticipate advancements in physics (when Euclid's parallel postulate couldn't be proved, leading to the discovery of spherical and hyperbolic space, nobody had a clue that maybe the universe was spherical or hyperbolic, right?). Unfortunately I don't have Artichoke's skill in talking about math so that normal people are still interested in it, so Artichoke's and my conversation splintered off from the other 4.

Afterwards, Artichoke and Apple and I went to the kiosk. We met some Russian guy who Artichoke knows because the guy used to work at Vogsal, a restaurant really close to school. The four of us went back to my place (Plum's still off visiting Cabbage's family, yesssss), drank champagne, listened to my deliciously shitty iTunes collection. The Russian guy (can't for the life of me remember his name) left and it was the 3 of us.

All night Artichoke told me how unfathomable I was. Usually he can get a decent read on people within about a week of meeting them, he said, but it's been two months with me and he doesn't have a clue. He says I have no modus operandi. I only vaguely understand what he means by that--something along the lines of me not putting up a front, for better or for worse, when I relate to people. He would ask me Who are you?, I would tell him I was Rhubarb and that's about all there is to it, he'd be horribly unsatisfied and tell me to just start confessing things, and I'd have no idea how to respond. Apparently he finds me fascinating and frustrating, which I already strongly suspected, and which explains his frequent bizarreness towards me. I feel like I have something in common with him that I don't have with anyone else here, and maybe that's what enables both of us to perceive that there's a lot going on under each other's surface.

Apple went to sleep and Artichoke dragged me into the kitchen and poured me another glass of champagne. He asked me what I thought of T, his girlfriend (one of my ex-students--not sure if she'll be a major enough player to warrant a fruit). I was non-committal, which is honestly how I feel. I have nothing at all against her, but she's too socially well-honed to be all that interesting. When pressed, I told him I preferred people with more substance. He told me to elaborate and said "one person's substance is another's baseball fan," which I thought was a cool insight. I defined substance as an abiding interest and passion for something outside of oneself, he looked amused by that judgement of T, and I felt kind of chagrined because it really wasn't my intention to bash her.

At one point he was looking through my iTunes, found Born in the USA, tried to play it, saw that it need a password, and called me over to type it. I sat down next to him on the couch and typed away. His arm found its way around my waist by way of some semi-drunken, unconscious variation on the movie-theater yawn. He retracted it once it registered. iTunes crashed or some such, and I absentmindedly went to nytimes.com. "You type fast for a grungy bird," he said (bird's the British approximation of chick, as far as I can tell). I asked him if he thought those two were contradictory. To me, he might as well have said "You're tall for someone with blue eyes." Yes, I'm both of those...can you honestly not imagine them simultaneously characterizing someone?

On Wednesday, after dropping the entire remainder of my paycheck on a presentable-looking dress, I went in to the US embassy to meet Embassy Guy, the head of the science policy department who Mom's friends-of-friends put me in touch with. Two stops over on the circle line, past the zoo, down the hill towards the river, around the spotlit brick walls of the compound, past the alertest security guards I've ever seen, and in through the south gate.

EG is an unpretentions older man with a pleasantly unhurried demeanor and an amusing tendency to overuse the expression "feeling their oats." We spent about an hour talking about the function of his department, life in the foreign service, and cool places to see in Russia. My best-case scenario hope was that he'd offer me a part-time paid internship on the spot. Didn't happen, but he had a wealth of other ideas--he got in touch with his friends at NASA and ISTC (an international organization that gives grants to ex-Soviet weapons scientists so they can research more peaceful things instead of relocating and getting a job with another country's nuclear program). And he knows someone at the website of a world-famous magazine (I don't want to mention the name for fear of jinxing it, but it's the one with the little yellow rectangle) who was lamenting the lack of coverage of Russia. The first two ideas didn't pan out, NASA because they just got a couple interns and ISTC because I don't have enough security clearance, and the NG guy hasn't written back yet. At least it's a start, and hopefully even the dead ends are helping get my name out there.

I thought EG's department would be much more hands-on and collaborative with the Russian government (maybe more along the lines of ITSC). It sounds like it's more concerned with surveillance of Russian science and science policy then reporting back to Washington. So it does have that communicative aspect of looking at science, synthesizing it, and relaying it to non-scientists, but it's more of a one-way street than I thought.

Before I went in, I told one of my classes about it. As soon as the word "non-proliferation" was out of my mouth (and I had explained what it meant), I had one of those sickening shifts in perspective where all of a sudden you see yourself from the point of view of the person listening to you and you think ohhhhhh shit. Now I've just aligned myself with everything that's paranoid and hypocritical about American foreign policy. I made something up about how the embassy division and Russian government were working together towards non-proliferation (cough) and it blew over.

I got an email today from the head of the science-policy department of the embassy, saying I can come in on Wednesday (today's Monday) and meet him. I am beyond excited about the possibility of an internship there. I'm getting a little antsy to get serious again about science and various things, and this would be an amazing opportunity. If this doesn't work out, I'll look for other opportunities in science writing or science policy, and if I can't find anything, I'm not sure I'll last here much beyond the summer. Right now I'm trying to think of intelligent questions to ask and trying to get myself up to speed on news and everything...wish me luck

People ask me a lot what it's like to be in Russia right now. If you're reading this much later, just to situate you, a few days ago Russia tested a missile capable of penetrating missile-defense systems like the one the US happens to be building in Poland, and Putin's drawing more and more criticism for censoring the media and curtailing freedom of speech.

I don't ask my students about it too much, because I don't want to treat them like my amateur pet sociology project, but when politics does come up, they seem fairly resigned to the fact that the government's going to do what it's going to do and it's a waste of time to think about it much beyond that. The same attitude, I suppose, is common in America, but the difference is Americans feel guilty about it. We hang on to the belief that the government represents us and that, in the end, we're responsible for its actions because we elected it, so we really should be paying attention even if we're not.

That feeling of responsibility doesn't really exist here. People view the government is its own beast, something that has to be sidestepped and accommodated so they can go on with their daily lives. (Khrushchev's granddaughter has interesting things to say about the government and peoples' mentality: http://www.readrussia.com/a_1_2007_12.htm) The protests in Red Square a few weeks ago got a fair amount of press abroad, but here there was barely a blip. The people who paid the most attention, as far as I could tell, were the expats.

Artichoke

Artichokes and I have always had a conflicted relationship. They're fascinating because they're so complex, and they're really unique among vegetables, but all the same I just can't stomach them.

One of the first things Artichoke said to me, a Кальян the first night I was there, was "What are you running from?" I answered noncommitally and it got swept under by the rest of the conversation. The running-from theme is one he returns to a lot though. Not about me necessarily, but he thinks a lot about people and their reasons for being here. His theory is that happy, functional people stay in their own countries, and everyone else has some sort of damage they're trying to escape, but they can't, obviously, because they're carrying it around. I'm not sure to what extent he thinks of himself in those terms. I bet if he's honest with himself, his theory was tailor-made to his own self-image.

He's studied a ton of math, and yet is surprisingly socially lubricated. When he's in a room with people there's almost always some sort of noise coming out of his mouth. About 30% of it is complete and utter bullshit, maybe 60% masquerades as bullshit but conveys something truthful that he's thinking about, and about 10% is brilliant and insightful. I'm often in the crosshairs of his bullshit ("We all HATE you." "Rhubarb's got that alcoholic tendency." "Shut up, we don't like you THAT much" (on my birthday), and others I've lost track of). But then, he goes out of his way to help me learn Russian, help me plan my lessons, make sure I'm ok with other things, etc. Artichoke even told my FCE class when it was my birthday, and they brought me a cake. He's toned down the vicious variety of bullshit, I think, now that he's seen that he can't pick a fight with me and I don't want to compete with him. Lately his bullshit, of the 60% variety, has taken a different turn. ("Rhubarb, will you marry me?" "I like girls who speak softly and read books and use words like [some big word I had used earlier]"). I know I occupy an above-average portion of his mental space, I just don't know what with.

His girlfriend's one of my students. He's told me he's not in love with her, but she's crazy about him. She's really smart and motivated, but has a modus operandi (Artichoke's phrase) of being hypercritical and disdainful of everything. Once that drops, though, she's cool. I think he wishes he were in love with her. In a way I feel sorry for men whose incapacitating need for sex ties them to people they don't actually like all that much. Or maybe that's not even what's happening with him, I don't know.

Artichoke almost left the company a couple weeks ago. He was all ready to get on train to Helsinki to get his other visa, then Giant Midwestern Underground Fungus made him an offer he absolutely couldn't refuse, so he stayed. He was really torn. His friend started calling him Hamlet, which was (and perhaps continues to be) about the aptest thing ever. In all, I'm glad he stuck around. We're falling into a tenuous sort of friendship, and if someone's that interesting, I'll forgive him a lot.