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.