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.