I just ironed a shirt for the first time in my entire life. (Yelling downstairs to Mom the whole time...HOW MUCH WATER ARE YOU SPOSEDTA SPRITZ? WHAT PART DO YOU DO FIRST?)

They told us to dress up for Congress tomorrow...the director of my branch of the NGO is testifying at a hearing on the EPA, and the whole office is going. The last two days (my first two days) were a whirlwind of getting stuff ready. Preparing the written testimony, delivering it to the Hill, figuring out what to say for the oral testimony (I sat in on the meeting today where they tweaked it until it resonated the way they wanted), conference calling with fellow witnesses...My job was to research some of the witnesses on the other side, especially what they say about political interference with science in policymaking. Found something particularly juicy where one of them ripped into the report the NGO just published on low morale and censorship of EPA scientists.

It's been pretty hard to write, or even think about writing. In a way I wish I had documented my re-entry, but in a way I really couldn't have. My last few days in Russia, I remember feeling like I was parachuting back into my own culture again, and I could see the ground rushing toward me and knew that when I landed the impact would leave me doing painful bumpy somersaults for a while. It's taken me about this long to come to a rest, dust myself off, and take stock of the damage. Nothing's broken, but I don't think I could have written when I was bouncing around. I don't know where my voice would have been coming from. I can't think of another way to put it.

Hi from Шереметьево, Sheremetevo, airport. My plane takes off for JFK in about an hour, then on to DC. The past week or so I was planning on sitting down and scouring university websites (UMD, CMU, CU-Boulder...Berkeley said no) to prep for my visits, but I ended up spending a lot of time with friends instead. I must have been really wierd company because my brain is in about 16 different places

Natasha and I threw a party on Saturday, which turned out to be really fun. A ton of people showed up. It was great to see people meeting each other and exchanging phone numbers and whatnot. I think I got asked 3 or 4 times if someone (usually Natasha) was single. It wound down after 6 am, when our neighbors couldn't take it anymore and cut off our mutual electricity. Crafty.

I just got a text message from Katya..."Rhubarb,hi!:-)how are you,are you in the airport yet?aren't you late like Roman? [who missed his plane to Thailand a couple weeks ago] :-)Rhubarb,your are brave and your russian friends with you for ever!!!Happy journey!" Shit now I'm crying in the middle of the goddam airport. Time to go to the gate.

Reverse culture shock moment #1: I just got off the phone with Mom. We were talking about my visit to Colorado next week (?!) She asked if I was going to rent a car, since with some companies you only have to be 24...but wait, she said, I guess that's still a few weeks before your birthday. My first thought was no problem, I'll just bribe them. Picture me at the Hertz counter..."Is there anything I can do to...help with this process?" *idly fingers purse-zipper*

I just cleaned out all my teaching stuff. I threw out most of it--the old lesson plans, the discussion questions on little squares of paper, cut-out pictures of people from magazines (adjective order...grey Italian wool scarf, not wool grey Italian scarf), the handout for the last day of class when I made apple pie and they had to put the verbs in the recipe (mix, chop, stir, bake...), my abstract-noun cards (guy on a ladder peering into the distance, ballerina in a parking lot, Boris Yeltsin's funeral, woman with baby, heightwise lineup of all the James Bonds, campsite...which one of these is courage? leadership? risk? responsibility? choice? violence? time? why?).

I saved a couple lesson plans. Soon I'll be amused at how well I once understood modal verbs of deduction or the difference between defining and non-defining relative clauses. I also saved my jotted notes for when I told a story about my Tibet trip to introduce phrases of mixed-baggedness (although, however, in spite, on the other hand, even though, despite...), and the plan for one of my first lessons, with everyone's name at the top in the order they were sitting...ANDREY VERA VADIM ELENA ARTUR MIKHAIL ELEONORA KOSTYA.

It's kind of sad to throw out all that work from the past year (paper recycling? ha), not that I regret for a second leaving the job.

Yesterday Роман and Катя and I went to Donskoy Monastery after our lesson. We got off at the Шаболовская metro stop (right by the Shukhov Tower, a radio tower I wanted to see because it's made of stacked segments of hyperboloids of revolution), and wandered for a while until we got to the Monastery. We went into the church first, which I was glad for because I was freezing. The dull gold and soft colors of the icons, and the smell and crackle of melting beeswax give it a kinder atmosphere than most.

We walked through the cemetery where famous writers, opera singers, politicians, intellectuals, and their families are buried under a great heterogeneity of statues, monuments with shellacked photos, obelisks, and less descript markers. We found Pushkin's uncle and grandmother, and the 20th-century comedienne Роман wanted to see, then went to a coffee shop to warm up.

We were talking, switching back and forth between languages, and Роман said wait, what's the difference between accept and except? I said accept is where you take something that someone gives you, and except is кроме. He said oh, I always confused those two, and 'expect.'

I said what gets me in Russian is the verbs of motion--приехала, уехала, поехала, объехала, проехала, выехала, вехала, доехала, заехала... Роман laughed because how could anyone mix up words that are so cleary different. He said I should do a comedy show where I sit there and am confused about Russian and say things like "вообше кошмар!" (kind of slang that means 'general nightmare!'...Роман about died when I came out with it earlier in the day. Think I picked it up from him.)

Russian verbs remind me of this toy I had when I was little. It was a cylinder, but hexagonal instead of circular. There were animals painted lengthwise on each side, and you could dial the cylinder so you got a fish head with a lizard back with tiger feet and a monkey tail or something. With Russian verbs, first you start with the prefix: у- if you're leaving, при- if you're arriving, по- if you're setting off, об- if you're going around something, про- if you're passing by or traversing the entire length of something, вы- if you're exiting, в- if you're entering, до- if you're finally arriving to, за- if you're just stopping by, пере- if you're crossing, под- if you're approaching, and от- if you're pulling away from. Once you've chosen that, you decide if you're walking, running, flying, going by transport, carrying, carrying by transport, or leading by the hand. Flying? Okay. Is it happening now/a continuing process (летать), or is it a completed action in the past or future (лететь)? Now you're almost there, just decide the time and pronoun. God help you if it's irregular. You finally end up with я скоро улечу из Москвы (soon I'm flying out of Moscow--turtle head, bat wings, polar bear feet), or он переходит дорогу (He's crossing the street--eagle head, fish scales, pig trotters). Of course if you're Russian your brain just pieces together all the Frankenverbs for you.

Natasha and I ended up making it to Sochi. She ordered the tickets on Friday and I picked them up at the ticket office, since I was in the city center. The sign on the door said 'open 9:00-20:00 daily, no breaks,' but I entered to find someone clicking around on a computer behind a hand-lettered sign that said 'lunch, 13:00-14:00.' It was 13:30. I said hello, she told me it was lunch break, I said something along the lines of "but the door spoke no lunch," and facing the prospect me, with my strange accent and riddle-speak, plopped irritably for half an hour in the dishlike plastic chair in front of her desk, she relented and issued me the tickets.

We flew out of Домодедово, Domodedovo, where Natasha used to work at the Duty Free. From the train, she pointed out her old apartment in Domodedovo city, the customs headquarters (until recently, controlled by the Georgian mafia...deciding what enters and leaves Russia is really lucrative), and the staff parking lot where one winter she found her car missing and assumed it was stolen until the snow melted.

Figuring airports out is always harder with two people, especially when one of you is thinking "she knows what she's doing, she speaks the language" and the other one is thinking "she knows what she's doing, she travels a lot." We had had a too-leisurely coffee at one of the new cafes overlooking the tarmac (I could happily spend a day watching an airport go through its airport-motions), and ran to the gate to make final boarding (since when is it 40 minutes before the plane takes off?)

We landed in Sochi two hours later. The city's starting to see the first little tremors of Olympification (2014, in case you forgot the hoopla this summer), starting with the airport. Planes arrive in the new wing, a small and bright space-age fiberglass tennis-bubble made of little polygons. They still take off from the old wing, which is basically an exceptionally neglected and sprawling Greyhound station.

Natasha wanted to stay in one of the huge sanitoria on the Black Sea, so we spent the first couple hours wandering around those. She had heard that they were cheap and deserted and had hot springs, so both of us were all over it. The first one we went to was neo-Greek, sprawed out over acres, and creepy as hell in the dark. We didn't find anyone at reception there and managed to escape without being attacked by a cloud of vampire bats or something. The next couple places we went to were at least manned (or babushkied as the case may be), but it turns out you need a prescription just to get in the door. We were turned away by crotchety old ladies who couldn't believe we actually had the presumption to want to pay them to stay somewhere, took a marshrutka back into town, and ended up in Гостиница Москва, Hotel Moscow, the crappy behemoth in the center.

The next day we took a bus to Красная Поляна, the big ski resort in the Caucusus. The road climbs from the sea for a couple hours, past only forest, a giant braided stream, and a few bee farms here and there, until it gets to the smallish resort. (Natasha, knowing it's the winter playground of the Moscow glitterati, was surprised it wasn't cleaner and more developed. I can't imagine what it'll look like when Olympics construction begins in earnest). We tromped around for a while, enjoyed the mountain views, rented a blowup sled, managed not to harm innocent bystanders, and caught the bus back down.

The next day we caught a taxi and asked the guy to show us around the city for an hour or so (Natasha's into asking anybody and everybody for directions, where to eat, where to stay, what to do). He drove us into the nontouristy neighborhoods--steep streets lined with houses of cement, corrugated metal, and chain link, with a celebrity's dacha on the prime hilltop real estate. Most people who live there will be displaced into new apartment buildings to make way for Olympics construction. The cabby, Nikolai, took us back to the airport for our 9 pm flight back to Moscow. Natasha really liked the place and wanted to stay, mostly for the sea and the slower pace of life. I'm glad I saw it, but two days was enough.

Artichoke is interesting because he's torn. I barely see him anymore because I'm around the language school so rarely, but last night a group of us went out for one of the French teachers' birthdays. We left together because we were walking to the same metro stop. On the way, he said Kiosk beer? and I said sure, it's been a while.

The conversation meandered to expat life, and he said This is basically a man's city. I said Well it is and it isn't, if you're a man with certain sorts of weaknesses this place will find them and tear you apart, it's everywhere and it's sad. He looked down at beer number 6 or 7, a quiet night for him recently, and smiled a little to himself. I halfheartedly backpedaled until I saw he wasn't planning to get offended and shut down.

His girlfriend Tanya is driving him crazy. A couple months ago, he was saying how she gets up early to iron his socks, she keeps his apartment stocked with food, she says you go to bed early I'll wash the dishes...He could feel himself becoming more childlike and dependent on her, and he said That's the way to get any man, just make him useless. I remember I had ragged on him a lot that night so decided to hold the thought of not wanting a man who could be made useless.

Things are different now. He's sick of the babying, has realized he really wants more of an ally, and is more than willing to was the goddamn dishes at night, thank you very much. He's at the end of his rope, she can't understand why, she tries to take better care of him, and it snowballs. But he can't break up with her because he's Artichoke.

After we parted ways in the metro, he texted me:

Him: "Don't be mad at me!"
Me: "why on earth would i be mad at you"
Him: "dunno"
Me: "goodnight"
Him: "whatever"

(An hour later, when I figured I could plausibly pretend to be asleep: "You're one top bird.")

The "are you mad at me, why do you hate me" thing has lasted for all ten months I've been here. It started one night in Aubergine's club, when Artichoke told me that whenever he sees me he feels guilty ("You just make me want to repent, like...you're Jesus or something." (?)) I laughed it off and said that's ludicrous, and somewhere between that and "shut up" has been my response ever since. I guess if he needs reassurance that I don't hate him, I can give it to him, although it's strange.

As we stood out of the rain by the kiosk, a couple dyevushkas in knee-high boots, shiny pants, and cropped fur coats got out of a car. He looked at them and said What is it about those sour-faced Russian girls? I did my best sour-faced-Russian-girl face, and he said no, you don't have it in you. If he's propping me up as a foil to these Russian girls, that sheds some light on the guilt.

Day Date Flight Status Class City Time
Mon 10MAR DELTA 31 OK U LV MOSCOW 1110A
AR NYC-KENNEDY 245P
Mon 10MAR DELTA 5364* OK U LV NYC KENNEDY 620P
AR WAS-R REAGAN 802P

Hoo boy. I actually bought a return flight too, because for some reason round trip on Delta to DC is $600 and one way is $2500. Go figure. Hope they don't get after me for being a no-show on the return flight. Couldn't find anywhere on the website that said they would.

Spinach? Early dinner at JFK, March 10?

On Friday I left for Владимир (Vladimir), a smallish city about 3 hours outside Moscow where one of my college friends is teaching. I bought my train ticket at half past noon, but the train didn't leave until two, so I thought great I can have a leisurely lunch somewhere. Bad move. I got back to the station at quarter til, and the train was completely full. I walked the length of a couple cars, asking people next to empty seats, "можно?," and invariably got in response something whose letters sounded like "закрыто" and whose tone was unmistakably "fuck off." Soon I gave up and stood with my back against the window and my backpack balanced on my boots, off the muddy floor.

The heating in Russian trains (binary I bet), isn't made for the recent mild winters. Half an hour after we left, I was roasting. I didn't open the window for fear of the wrath of the babushki (cold air makes you sick, no matter how hot you are), so had to content myself with trying to absorb the coolness of the glass through my back. An hour and a half in, I finally got a seat.

Vladimir bears little resemblance to Moscow. The entire main street is walkable in 15 minutes. People are out strolling on the streets enjoying each other's company, not running to get somewhere or boozing by the kiosk. The restaurants are smaller, have more character, and are about half the price. Onion-domed churches (with snow sculptures out front...my favorite was a maze, which would be especially cool if you were 3 feet tall and couldn't see over the walls) look down on the frozen river.

The foreigner-celebrity effect, diluted by Moscow's growing worldliness and cosmopolitan(aity?), is full-on in Vladimir. My friend's enjoying it, and is frank about the draw of general ego-flattery. (I can't feel flattered when I see my reflection in people's eyes and it looks like Clinton or Hollywood or Mickey D's and not like me, but power to her if she's not that cynical). She's been there for a year and a half, and is thinking of staying for another academic year, but like a lot of twentysomething Americans here is being pressured by her parents to come home and get serious.

She's fairly integrated into life there. She speaks good Russian, plus she's helped build her small language school into somewhat of a community fixture. Part of me wonders if I should have chosen somewhere smaller and more personable, but while I was making the choice the megalopolis seemed the only way to go. There's safety in the variety of a city when you don't know what you're getting into.

I saw Lenin today. What's left of him, anyway. I left Роман and Катя's, and it was only noon so I headed down the gray line to the mausoleum in Red Square. I was kind of hungry, so I bought a ham-and-cheese pastry in the переход to Александровский Сад (Alexandrovsky Garden, just outside the Kremlin). The more I mulled over what I was about to see, the more I regretted the pastry.

Through an outdoor metal detector (my phone was checked carefully for any trace of a camera), around winding cordoned-off pathway next to the Kremlin wall, past a militsia man at every turn, into the squat stone building marked ЛЕНИН, then down a steep darkened staircase.

I had heard that the guards don't like it if you stop moving, so I ambled slowly past the glass case. I was a third of the way around before I reminded myself to really look at it, because it's counterintuitive just to stare at this person lying there. I was alone (except for 3 guards) for about a minute, then two other men came in. They stopped walking, so I did too.

The body's one step up from those life-size models of paleolithic people you see at the natural history museum, and only because it's recognizable as Lenin. It's the color of maple sugar candy and has a plasticky luster. His trademark mustache is subtly painted on, and his nose is preternaturally perky (think Michael Jackson, but more triangular in profile). His ears are the least reconstucted-looking--they're shriveled and a little sunken, both into his head and down towards the floor. He's wearing a black suit, swathed in red satin, and like everyone legendary is tinier than you'd expect.

A few seconds after we stopped one of the guards told us to "передите!" (I think), so the three of us finished our circuit around the case and climbed the stairs back into daylight.

Five more weeks. About the same distance away as the beginning of my Italy trip. It's going to fly. My weekends are already pretty much full--next weekend I'm visiting my college friend who's teaching a few hours away in Владимир (Vladimir), then Natasha and I are going to Сочи (Sochi, the site of the 2014 winter olympics) because we found cheap tickets on Aeroflot, then we're having sort of a going-away party for me and another American who's leaving, then I'm going to Kiev to see Seeded Grapes, then it's March and I'm heading out. I wish time would slow down a little, not that I'd want to extend my stay here much longer.

I feel like I've reached some sort of point of diminishing returns, where I've learned most of what I can without committing myself to staying for the long haul and letting it change me in ways that I'm not sure I want. A real go at repatriation would be a long road of carving out a place for myself and becoming either more Russian in my outlook or miserable. Some expats can stay and not become either, but I don't think I could. For some reason all the people I'm thinking of (my two editors for example) aren't ones I'd want to emulate. Maybe being a little unhinged helps you stay happily in your own detatched bubble. Maybe I'm confusing cause and effect.

Incidentally I've stopped getting hit on. Наташа says she notices that too, with herself. Sometimes you exude a liveliness and openness and interest in everything that makes people want to talk to you, and sometimes you don't. I'm not lamenting that at all, it's just something I've noticed as the reality of being in a place but not of it, and the struggle of communication, starts to wear down my receptivity and I turn inward a little more.

I'm torn between the desires to see everything and do everything I possibly can, and to sit at home and stare a wall and try to process it all while I'm still here. When I'm home, I listen to Dire Straits' 'Brothers in Arms' over and over. Not sure why, though I do like the line 'we have just one world, but we live in different ones.'

Андрей (Andrei) came back from Чечня (Chechnya) with the uncanny ability to stare at a point three feet in front of his face regardless of chaos around him. He and Natasha were slowly breaking up in November when I moved in. Slowly, at least, until he disappeared for a couple weeks, as Наташа (Natasha) says he does sometimes.

She packed up his things and hitchhiked to the militsia (police) quarters where he lives. (When I've talked about hailing cabs before, what I really meant was hitchhiking. About a fifth of the cars on the road at any given time will pull over and take you where you want to go for few dollars, if it's not too far out of their way). The guy who stopped was young and good-looking with a really nice car, and he waited for Наташа when she dropped off the parcel of Андрей's things. She said Андрей's friends at the station connected the dots too much and nodded their heads and looked at the floor when she asked them to make sure he got the parcel.

He called her again last week, after ignoring all her calls and text messages to see if he got his things. He came over last week on one of the nights I was teaching late, and Наташа cooked him a dinner of meatballs with onions and bread. For some reason he said he couldn't look at food, and Natasha's ulcers have forced her onto a month-long diet of basically yogurt and oatmeal, so I had a pretty nice dinner when I got back.

He's a little younger than me, which makes him 7 or 8 years younger than Наташа. I've only really met him once, when I came to Наташа's for the first time. Obviously she had no idea who would walk in her door and wanted someone else around (she's lived with a girl who used to pilfer stuff and flounce around in her underwear when her boyfriend was over, she's been stalked from prison by a guy who somehow got her picture from an ex (when he was released, he camped out near the entrance of her apartment, forcing her to take a few days off work and hide), she used to rent an apartment from a woman who was sure she was a prostitute (and eventually kicked her out) because of her Ukranian accent and miniskirt, she lived for a month in the office of the Domodedovo airport's duty free shop...when I wrote and said hi I'm Rhubarb I saw your ad for a flatmate I'm 23 and American and cats are fine by me can we meet, she remained prepared for anything).

Андрей seemed mild and genuinely kind when I met him, but he speaks minimal English so our conversation was limited to my Russian. Наташа describes him as ascetic, never buying new clothes if the old ones will do and only eating about once a day. He's in Moscow alone, like a lot of young people, having grown up a couple days away by train. He had an uncle he was close to, but since he died there's no one outside the militsia he really listens to or looks up to. His salary is barely enough to live on, but he gets occasional handouts from the older, more established officers as is the tradition. (It's also a tradition for these guys to hit up Moscow's huge population of unregistered foreigners for bribes...when Наташа still had a Ukranian passport, it was basically a constant tax for her. Once she was even dragged into a room and told to dance, but luckily she has nerves of steel and knows how not to take bullshit).

Андрей showed up again yesterday. Наташа made him dinner, then he passed out in front of the tv and left this morning (I didn't see him, because I got home from Holly's Australia Day party at 2 and left again to teach at 8). Наташа thinks he genuinely wants to be friends, plus the police station isn't the most pleasant place to spend all his time. He's not expressive enough to tell her any of this, but he did ask if he could come around to hang out more often.

The cuffs on his jacket are frayed, and she told him he has to get a new one. She jokes that she's the mother for her ex-boyfriends, but it's barely a joke. The situation feels strange to me, but I think she's strong enough that she's gotten past the point where it would be rough on her emotionally and can just see him as someone who really needs someone.

I met Роман (Roman) in early September, when he was the only man out of the 10 or so students in my Monday/Wednesday morning class. He always wore a trim little fedora-like hat, small round glasses, blue sweatshirt, and jeans. He’s compact, in both movement and stature, and gels his short blonde hair into a point in the middle.

I teach him and Катя (Katya, another student from the class) privately now, at his apartment in Отрадое (a few stops north on the gray line, where Blueberry used to live). It’s a hike—I leave at 8 to make it there by 9:30. His apartment, on the 13th floor overlooking a power plant, is a tad smaller than the one I shared with Plum. You go in the entryway, and straight ahead is the kitchen, and on the left is the bedroomlivingroomstudy. It looks like all the other Moscow apartments that haven’t changed since they were built in the mid-20th century.

Роман spends most nights away from home, working as an event host. He was busy constantly in December, emceeing corporate parties and New Years bashes. He gets a lot of wedding receptions, and the occasional ten-year-old birthday party. He’s showed me the DVD he distributes to promote himself—people playing party games and having a hilarious time, him saying a few words on behalf of the host. He also has a glossy album of studio photos of himself (posing as a magician with a big top hat, or a rock star with an electric guitar, always with the trademark hair-point). He enjoys what he’s doing for now, but his dream is to open a bakery/sex shop. I’m not sure if that’s one store or two.

The first time I came over I met his boyfriend Виталий (Vitaly), introduced to me as his “good friend,” which made me wonder how he learned that that’s what you say in English so that people who want to get it will and people who don’t won’t. Виталий works for a pharmaceutical company and is definitely the more prosaic of the two. Роман showed me an album of their vacation photos from Greece (apparently all taken by Виталий, half of them Роман posing in an electric blue speedo). James, I showed him the Italy photos you put on Facebook, and Ash, he said just by looking at you he could tell you were a genuinely kind person.

He and Катя and I finish the lesson, and I usually stay for a cup of coffee and half-English/half-Russian chat. He seems kind of lonely, in that way of people who are outgoing and constantly around others, but always expected to perform and rarely able to let go and express themselves how they want. Perhaps ironically, for sure annoyingly, when we’re together because of how we know each other that feeling just shifts towards me.

Have you seen the movie Labyrinth, starring David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, and an embarrassment of Jim Henson creations? If you’ve known me for long enough I’ve probably made you watch it.

There’s a scene where Sarah (Connelly), trekking through the Goblin City to rescue her baby brother, bites into a poisoned peach the Goblin King (Bowie) gave her. She passes out and finds herself at a costume ball full of goblins, where she dances with eye-linered, blonde-wigged Bowie (taking himself quite seriously), then a clock strikes midnight and she wakes up in her own bedroom as if nothing had happened. She wonders if she just dreamt the whole thing, then she notices something out of place here, something missing there…the illusion shatters completely when the architect of her pseudo-room barges in from the outside goblin-world and asks how she likes it.

It’s something of a similar feeling in a Moscow McDonalds. When I walk in, before I focus my eyes too intensely, I have the eerie sensation that I’m back at an I-95 rest stop, or about to watch my brother put away half the Dollar Menu on our way back from bowling. Same sterile, pastel interior, same uniformed teenagers, same American pop music, same pictures on the menu…then things start to seem off. Once you get close enough to the menu, you see that it’s in Cyrillic—sounded out, it's just like an American menu with a bad Russian accent (Beeg Mak…Cheeken Boorger…Cheeken Naggats…MakFloory). Everyone’s in less of a hurry, from the staff (come on, dude, I’ve got a tram to catch), to the families who sit down and linger over a meal like it’s that kind of restaurant. The cars in line for the drive-thru are nondescript Жигули s or small, snowdirty foreign cars, not minivans and SUVs.

I always order a large coffee, большое кофе. Кофе looks like it should sound just like “coffee” (ф is an f), but it doesn’t. When I get to the front of the line, I think here we go. I start by asking for “kuo-fee,” the guy behind the counter says “Что?,” I say “kuo-fyeh?,” he looks at me like I’ve just ordered an elephant steak, I say “coffee?” and by that time he’s concentrating hard enough that he knows what I mean, so he says “Кофе?,” somewhere in between everything I’ve just tried to say. I mumble "спасибо," pay my 36 rubles, and make a run for the tram stop.

The editor (unstable, not sleazy) comes back from Houston next week. It's been quiet at the magazine, without her manufacturing crises and having conniptions through her headset. Upstairs it's just me, Лена (Lena), Ягмур (Yagmur), and Владимир (Vladimir), with Александр (Aleksandr), Пётр (Pyotr), and the new receptionist down below. The other layout guy besides Пётр, the one who used to fire darts into the board by my desk with deadly accuracy, got fired. He was pretty clearly losing his motivation and butting heads with the editor a lot, and according to Лена and Александр she ended up acting frosty towards him until he quit.

Владимир, a journalist, is new. He worked for the magazine before, but had trouble with alcoholism a couple years ago and either quit or was fired. The editor re-hired him about a month ago. He's about 60 (or maybe he's in his 40s, Russia's hard on men), seems kind and softspoken, but has the obnoxious habit of wandering over to Лена's desk (I sit between them) and chattering in a monotone about nothing, as far as I can tell when I understand it. Лена humors him, as her eyes flick between him and the article she's working on, and he stands in front of her desk and gabs away. For some reason it irritates me more than it does her.

Лена and Александр and I go to lunch every day around 2. I overdosed on the greasy meat and potatoes, so now I just get soup and bread. Our most animated conversations are about the editor. For the first month or so that I worked there, the two were really diplomatic, but now they let loose. The common refrain of the micromanaged, screwing up by doing what we're told. Александр even warned the lunch ladies. "You know the crazy American woman? Not this one, the other crazy American woman. Yeah, she's our boss. She's coming back next week." Crazy is сумашедший, sumashyedshiy, I learned it last week.

I run every other day, out the door of my apartment building, across the street, and onto the paved path that follows the forested bank of the Moskva River to the bridge that connects Strogino, my "island," to the city center. It's a flat, straight, half-hour round trip. The path is a favorite of parents and kids, especially now that it's sledding season. Toddlers, bundled up until they're spherical, sled down the icy slope to the frozen river. If the temperature drops low enough, the snow squeaks under my feet like styrofoam and the plastic sleds get stuck, stranding the kid halfway down the hill. Snippets of conversation drift over to me, and it's still kind of a thrill to understand them ("But you said four more times!!" "Then hurry, it's getting dark out.")

Occasionally I see other runners, mostly overweight men in polyester tracksuits. Old women with calf-length fur coats amble by in pairs or trios, and often scold me with "Girl! Aren't you cold?" Natasha's friend's daughter, a bright and fun 12-year-old who adorably crammed her English lessons before she came to our apartment, also heckled me as I walked out the door. "You look weird. I can tell you're not Russian. Aren't you cold? I think you're gonna get sick." Regardless of the stares it's nice to run outside among the trees again.

Italians seemed so…individual. When I saw a person, depending on how they dressed, smiled, gestured, carried themselves, I felt like I could tell something about their personality. With Americans, I take that ability for granted—I spent 22 years developing an internal social road-map of America, and roughly placing people in it, given little information, isn’t that difficult. (Artichoke and Blueberry and I were talking about this, in the context of how the teachers relate. Blueberry agreed that the Brits were a lot easier for her to place, and Artichoke saw the whole idea as a negative pigeonholing of people. I think he's wrong, it just gives you a framework so you don’t have to completely start from scratch when you meet someone.)

With Russians, I have very little to go on. By and large, people I meet have similar mannerisms, clothes, ambitions, leisure activities, tastes in food, and opinions (or lack of them) on the state of the world. For a while I assumed I just didn’t know what to look for, that Russians had their own entirely different set of distinguishing factors to which I was oblivious, but the overall sameness feels more profound than that. (Interestingly, Natasha, who's obviously much more attuned than me, locates difference between people in the choices they make rather than how they somehow are.)

It's a far cry from the America where I grew up, where everyone was a unique one-in-a-million pearl who had never before graced the face of the planet and never will again. Given that upbringing, talking about sameness feel like a criticism. It’s not, entirely. It’s pleasantly disarming when I meet people socially and they immediately they act like we’re friends. Russians assume you’re okay, because why wouldn’t you be. You don’t have to prove yourself like you do in the States, which aside from being a relief seems to prevent that painful and rather distinctly American tendency to try way too hard to be cool.

But it’s also kind of lonely. I can't get used to feeling so interchangeable. It’s also frustrating to feel like I don’t really know people, and to wonder if it’s the lack of value placed on individuality or my own inability to see.

I've spent the last couple days holed up with energy policy papers from Carnegie Mellon. One of their professors just got a giant grant for a carbon sequestration project, and he sent me the proposal. I like how the project will focus on everything from geology (where in the ground can you pump the CO2 so it'll stay put) to the infrastructure (how much new pipeline will you have to build to transport the CO2, or can you just use the huge network of natural gas pipelines already there) to the economics (can you sell the CO2 to anyone, like oil companies so they can squirt it into reservoirs to push more oil out) to legal issues (if you want to pump the CO2 deep under somebody's house can they complain, and can you claim subsurface space by eminent domain). I don't like how carbon sequestration seems to be a short-term stopgap, just until we stop burning coal (how the US still gets half its energy). My intuition is that I'd rather focus on something more far-reaching, like policy for developing and implementing technology that doesn't make so much carbon in the first place. I think CMU undershoots my idealism by the same small amount that Berkeley overshoots it, but I also think I'd be happy at either place. It's been nice how the CMU profs are encouraging and willing to talk about their research and interested in the CV I sent them. Berkeley are rock stars and ignore you until they decide if they like you. They also have half the acceptance rate.

Natasha's only made borscht twice, and just after the first time she finally got Russian citizenship, and after the second time her boyfriend got into the police academy he really wanted to go to. She promised me grad-school borscht in a couple weeks.

Back from Italy, ready to face my last 10 weeks in Moscow. I feel like I've returned to the Land of Too Much Chaos, from my blessed vacation in the Land of Too Little Chaos and will return in a couple months, Goldilockslike, to the just-right.

Yesterday I was in my old Novoslobodskaya neighborhood for bellydancing, so I paid a visit to Salim the Fruit and Nut Man. (I swear, his raisins are unmatched in all of Moscow). He was over the moon about Obama winning Iowa (so am I...I'm falling for the change-over-experience thing hook line and sinker. I also love how after the defeat a Hillary spokesman said she has "experience making change." Nice save, buddy.) Salim follows politics pretty closely and reads a lot, mostly independent newspapers (the Russian government has a stranglehold over TV, but print media is freeish) and books by Muslim political scholars. He made it halfway through a legal studies degree in Cairo, but left because prospects for graduates of a Muslim university are slim. Refusing to return home to Uzbekistan because of the political situation, he became a Russian citizen six years ago and took the job that presented itself. His English seems better every time I talk to him. Apparently he used to be pretty fluent, but now he never uses it. Occasionally I think I see flickers of the sort of depression you'd expect from someone with a pretty sizable surplus of intelligence and motivation beyond what their job demands, but the vast majority of the time he seems cheerful.