Я не понедельник

2008-05-06T19:41:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-04-24T20:18:00.001-07:00

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.

2008-03-09T23:59:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-03-03T13:38:00.000-08:00

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*

2008-03-02T13:02:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-02-18T00:11:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-02-13T09:53:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-02-08T08:38:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-02-04T13:09:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-02-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-01-30T07:14:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-01-28T06:44:00.001-08:00

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.'

2008-01-27T03:18:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-01-26T00:03:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-01-21T07:30:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-01-18T10:16:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-01-14T04:28:00.001-08:00

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.

2008-01-13T09:03:00.001-08:00

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.

2008-01-08T10:35:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-01-06T11:49:00.000-08:00

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.

2007-12-25T14:09:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-21T15:44:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

2007-12-09T13:36:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

2007-12-09T11:13:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

2007-12-05T01:30:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-11-28T03:42:00.000-08:00

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

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

2007-11-22T15:36:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-22T13:48:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

2007-11-17T15:19:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

2007-11-17T05:16:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-11-11T12:55:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

2007-11-05T13:52:00.000-08:00

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

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

2007-11-03T05:43:00.000-07:00

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

2007-11-02T15:43:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-10-26T12:44:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-24T13:38:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-19T00:21:00.001-07:00

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

2007-10-18T14:57:00.000-07:00

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?

2007-10-15T04:47:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-11T07:06:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-10T03:14:00.001-07:00

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.

2007-10-03T03:56:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-10-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-09-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

W, thanks for the link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-09-28T11:38:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-09-25T12:55:00.001-07:00

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

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

2007-09-21T15:08:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-09-21T14:37:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

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

Dear [Mr. Ed],

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

Expats:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science ideas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best,

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

2007-09-12T03:05:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

2007-09-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

2007-09-09T08:09:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

2007-09-06T10:49:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

2007-09-06T07:07:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-05T10:41:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

2007-09-05T04:23:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

2007-08-29T02:42:00.000-07:00

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

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

2007-08-28T10:56:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-08-14T06:26:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-08-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

2007-07-30T12:24:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

2007-07-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

2007-07-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

2007-07-27T03:13:00.001-07:00

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

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

Hahahahahaha*snort*

2007-07-27T01:34:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose My Own Adventure

2007-07-26T15:01:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-07-26T06:54:00.000-07:00

Tuesday afternoon:

I entered the teacher's room during the break midway through my Intermediate class, and saw Green Pepper vegging out (har) in his Hawaiian shirt. "Oh," he said, "we were just discussing your future with my class." For a moment I thought he and his class were sitting around wondering what I'll be when I grow up, but he meant that he and the administration were talking about how long I'd have his class for. The original plan was that I'd give his class back that evening, so I was about to go home and call it a day--turns out I'm teaching them for another 2 weeks, just nobody thought to tell me. (It's better for the language school that way, because it keeps my contract full--if they give the extra hours to GP they have to pay him overtime, because he allegedly works 40 office-hours per week *stifled cough*). After GP told me that, he was all sighs and eyebrow-raises and "oh, I'm not sure how long they [the class] will tolerate this, they'll be wanting me back..."

Tuesday evening:

I walk out of a bathroom stall and wash my hands, one of Green Pepper's (/my) students is there also.

Her: "Hi, so you're teaching another class tonight?"
Me: "No, actually I'm still with your class, I think until--"
Her: *grin* *fist pump* "Yessssss!"

2007-07-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

Kiosks are one of the best things about living in Moscow. They're open 24-hours, and spaced so frequently that from any given kiosk you can usually see 2 or 3 more. They're free-standing, usually bright yellow, and about the size of a mailtruck in the States. Samples of everything they sell are packed in the window, which takes up the entire top half of the kiosk's front side. About a third of the window is alcohol--different kinds of beer (Бочка mostly, the biggest Russian brand), and other more colorful drinks (gin-and-tonic-in-a-can, "Alco-pops," Hooch, Jaguar, something called Juzz (you can guess what people call that)). There's a huge selection of cigarettes, all the usual kinds of soda, juice, a few different chocolate bars, and all sorts of fascinatingly-flavored potato chips (crab, caviar, cheese), and boxes of cookies and crackers. The bottom of the window displays a little collection of meat/cheese/mushroom pies (food-poisoning roulette, but delicious), sandwiches, and mini-pizzas. A couple small, round, bar-height tables are out front.

Our kiosk is run by a 30-something woman with all gold teeth. She's friendly with the English teachers, who buy rounds of beer and packs of cigarettes (which cost a dollar...if you smoke a little bit in the US or England, you smoke a lot here. I'm trying to resist entirely) and speak varying degrees of crappy Russian. Aubergine is protective of her once it gets late and the drunken assholes come out, although most of the trouble Aubergine perceives is at least half-created by himself (fair enough though, the cops stole his phone when he was drunk a couple weeks ago).

A weeknight usually finds a few of the teachers around a kiosk-table enjoying a post-work Бочка or five. Aubergine, Celery, and Artichoke are the regulars (Apple too, before she left). Starfruit and a few other girls who just got evening classes are hanging out there more and more. I stick around once or twice a week, but it's getting kind of old.

2007-07-19T11:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight was my last night covering Green Pepper's FCE class. We started by going over the homework, a recent New York Times article on how sushi has been perverted for the American market (sushi is huge in Moscow) with fifteen words blanked out (exorbitant, pact, fraternizing, globs, depletion...I gave them a separate sheet with the words and parts of speech in random order. They could unfold the sheet to see the definitions too, if they got stuck. I used the same thing for Aubergine's advanced class the other day. I had them do it in class, which was a bad idea because it took forever and people got bored. I knew I should have given it for homework, but there was a little devil on my shoulder saying "This could fill LOADS of time.")

After talking in groups about the article and everybody's opinions on sushi, we did some stuff with abstract nouns in relative clauses (the way in which..., cases where..., situations where..., reasons why...), then finished up with a surprisingly rousing game of team scrabble. It was neck and neck for a while, but then Irina, Tatiana, and Mariana put an "x" on a triple-word-score adjacent to an "e" and an "o," for "ex" and "ox" and a total of 54 points. Killer. Ksenya and other Irina almost countered fabulously with "exorbitant" across the bottom (I let students have 10 letters instead of 7). I think there was some fishing in the bag going on with that one though. Plus it didn't quite fit on the board.

At the end of class they thanked me and said the lessons had been interesting. I was trying not to feel inadequate comparing my four months of teaching experience with Green Pepper's decades, but when I think about it, my estimation of my own teachers definitely wasn't correllated to age and experience. I thought Mr. Ryan and Ms. Reinthaler were equally great high school math teachers, even though she was 50 and he was 26 and once commented that watching her teach was "like watching Babe Ruth." Ms. Reinthaler could explain calculus so clearly that you wondered why you hadn't thought of it yourself, but Mr. Ryan had a wonderful spark that came, I think, from being so close to his own process of discovery. (I guess I can't exactly compare myself to that because our subject matter is so different, but I'm discovering how to teach and experimenting with things and not taking it for granted that I can go in there and wing it and they'll be happy, and I think they appreciate that.)

And there's the danger, as Artichoke put it, of aging as a teacher and "getting used to people having to listen to you." He thinks that's why Green Pepper relates to people how he does. Artichoke and I went over to GP's for a glass of wine on laundry night a few weeks ago, GP got going on something, and Artichoke and I pretty much listened for an hour or so. ("That man could talk the ears off a donkey" -'Choke, once we left) There must be a personality-type that's prone to that (Pear has been teaching just as long, but hasn't succumbed to that). GP reminds me a lot of one of my college professors (thankfully only one) who had been teaching for decades and felt the same sort of entitlement to fill your head with whatever. (For some reason it was only me that minded him, other people thought he was jovial or something).

My Tuesday and Thursday nights are freed up now that GP gets his class back, which is nice. Noon to 2:15 and that's it.

2007-07-17T11:45:00.000-07:00

Aubergine and Green Pepper are both on vacation, so I'm covering one of each of their classes. This is my third, and last, week with Green Pepper's group. I was kind of worried about taking over for him--he's had this class for about 3 years, and they love him. I sat in on half a lesson before he left, and it was pretty much him having a slow, drawn-out conversation with the 3 or 4 (out of 6) students who were paying attention at any given time. (He got about 15 minutes out of a drawing on the whiteboard of an oblong-shape with a smiley face on a sofa, trying to get the class to guess "couch potato.") They adore him, though, and have really warmed to the old-British-man-and-his-foibles thing.

I can't give a personality-driven lessons where I go into the classroom and assume that the students are interested in [holy shit i just saw a shooting star from my balcony] whatever I feel like ruminating about. That works for people like Green Pepper (and, most astoundingly, Onion), who have constant faith in their ability to entertain any group of people you give them, but I need more material. I feel guilty unless I'm trying to teach them something. I try to keep things fun, and I'll go along with interesting tangents, but I get uncomfortable unless the lesson has a certain pace (I know I go too fast...Aubergine observed me and told me to let the students think more. He also told me I'm a "real" teacher, not a professional foreigner).

Today with Green Pepper's class (they're FCE, an exam-preparation course, but nobody's really planning on taking it...it's just an excuse to hang out with GP) I brought in my laptop with a podcast of NPR's story of the day from Sunday. It was about the Cringe Readings, an event at a Brooklyn bar where people stand up and share their awful teenage journal-entries and poetry. (It's here if you feel like listening to it...7 min long http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11989043 ) I started off by writing some questions on the board (Do you keep a diary? Did you keep a diary when you were younger? If not, do you wish you had? If so, are you embarassed about what you wrote? What does the verb "cringe" mean? Where is Brooklyn?) and having them talk in pairs. I listened in on the conversations to correct mistakes, provide vocabulary, chat. Then I told them a little about NPR (after a little thought they guessed what it stood for), and introduced them to the idea of the Cringe Readings. I handed out a sheet with tricky phrases and vocab (the whole nine yards, geek, soak up the shame, shudder of recognition), and we listened to the program. I had them summarize the gist of the program, and what different people shared at the event, and we went through the list of phrases. Then we listened to it again, and they talked in pairs about Why do people go to the Cringe Readings? Would you go? Would you share anything? What?

I know I aimed it a little high, and some of them were frustrated by the quick American accents and volume of new phrases, but they thought the topic was interesting and got a kick out of hearing something real. It was interesting for me that no one in Green Pepper's class (or my own class that did this yesterday), said they'd share something at a similar event. People said they'd tell these stories to their close friends, or a psychologist, but never to a room full of strangers. It's private, they felt, and they wouldn't want people to think ill of them. I think you'd find a lot more Americans willing to share things. Maybe we're more into group therapy, maybe we want to prove we're cooler than our former selves, maybe we just think self-deprecation is funnier.

I might do an NPR review of the Harry Potter movie next. It's especially tempting because the reviewer describes the Ministry of Magic newspaper as "Pravda-like."

2007-07-14T10:43:00.000-07:00

I bought a round-trip plane ticket to Beijing, August 4-25. My friend Tyler had emailed me on my birthday a couple months ago and asked if I wanted to go to Tibet with him, his brother, and a couple friends this summer.

Tyler was on my geology thesis-research program in Montana the summer before senior year. He's quiet, but it's nothing-to-prove quiet instead of shy-quiet. He barely said a word the first few days of the program, when most of the others were sorting out who they were going to be friends with or getting together and one-upping each other with tales of sex and alcohol. When there's something interesting or important to say, though, he says it. Some mornings he would get up early and go fly-fishing alone (we were near Bozeman, a couple hours south of River-Runs-Through-It country).

When the program ended, we dropped his car off in Bozeman and drove Mom's Prius up to Glacier National Park. We both wanted to see it and thought hey, we're in Montana anyway, might as well (partly the result of warped east-coaster logic...distance-wise, that's about like saying "hey, we're in New York anyway, might as well see DC").

We bummed around for a couple days near the lakes, then packed light backpacks and covered 48 miles in 48 hours (we ran the last 2 to make it in time). There was a spectacular thunderstorm the last day. While I was thinking 'Cool, I love thunderstorms,' Tyler, perfectly calmly, says "I'm gonna walk about 50 yards behind you so in case one of us gets struck, we both don't, ok?"

He's completely devoid of that contrived self-definition that so many guys (and girls, but differently) our age try to pull that goes something like "I'm cool and ballsy and experienced and this is what I need to say and do to make you think that." He unpretentiously does what he likes, learns what he needs to know in order to do it, and has memories of batshit-crazy thunderstorms where getting struck by lightning was an intensely real possibility. I love being around him.

We drove back to Bozeman, completely exhausted, blistered feet hanging out the window, and picked up his car and parted ways somewhere near Yellowstone. That was the last I saw of him, except when our whole geology group briefly reassembled for presentations in the middle of senior year.

When we exchanged emails a couple months ago, I told him I'm definitely not in 48 mile, 48 hour shape. He said no prob, he and his friends were planning on a pretty laid-back trip. I was in touch with him again last week after I found out I could go. He forwarded me a string of emails between him and his friends. They're talking Everest base camp. Ummm time to start running more. I'm already the party-crashing girl (Tyler's the only one of the 4 guys I've met, and I didn't realize how much planning had already happened before I got on board), damned if I'm the slow one.

I'm beyond excited though. Three weeks from today.

2007-07-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

Oh, Jesus. Starfruit. Where to start. Over the last ten years, she picked up (and dropped) a nasty drug habit, joined a cult that involved gang-rape and cat sacrifice, spent time in jail, worked as a phone sex operator, and watched her father Brian go to New Zealand and come back a woman (Brianne, a sherriff in Texas, is now America's highest-ranking non-elected transsexual government official). She's very open and nonchalant about all of it. She's my age.

She's overweight, loud, and wears lots of makeup. Something about our senses of humor coincides perfectly, and we have a lot of fun when we're around each other. It reminds me a little of my relationship with Erin (a devout Catholic on her way to becoming an environmental lawyer.)

Starfruit and I are going out tonight, at least that's the plan. She thinks we complement each other well, physically and personality-wise, and she has a point (not that I'm really looking to pick up anybody, or maybe that's part of the complement). I'm kind of sleepy and have a big week ahead, so I wouldn't mind an early night, but we'll see what happens.

2007-07-13T06:18:00.000-07:00

Being fed up with Brit boys with baggage, American girls not on my wavelength, only talking to Russians in class, and the departure of most of the teachers I had gotten close to, I went to hospitalityclub.org. It's a website full of profiles of people who are willing to host travelers/need places to stay themselves/want to meet people from elsewhere. The (honor-system) deal is you have to host for about as many nights as you stay with people. (I used it a lot when I was traveling around Europe, and now owe a TON of nights of putting people up (haven't broached the subject to Plum yet). I met tons of great people in the places I visited--art students in Hungary, psychology students in Krakow, Harry/Andy/Simone in Vienna, Tina in Belgrade--plus it was nice not to pay for hostels.)

There are about 2000 people registered on the site in Moscow. I poked around it for a bit, found a few cool-sounding women in their 20s (and one 64-year-old American woman who has been here for 16 years and sounds awesome), and sent them messages that said hi I'm Rhubarb, I'm from Washington, I've been here a few months teaching English and I'd like to meet more people, want to get coffee sometime?

Ира wrote back and said sure, let's go to this outdoor photo exhibit near the Чеховская metro (Чехов being Chekhov, the writer). The булвар, the tree-lined pedestrian-street-within-a-bigger-street, was lined with beautiful nature photographs by an artist named Steve Bloom (or Стев Блум, as the plaques said). Ира and I perused about half of it, stopping the longest at the antarctic shots of penguins and polar bears. A generator failed, the exhibition went dark, and we headed for an outdoor cafe in the Эрмитаж Park.

Ира's been living here about 3 years. She was born in Siberia (as were many people here) but her family moved south a few years later. She taught English for a while in her hometown after she finished school.

She has unruly reddish-brown hair, artsy thick-rimmed glasses, and a quick laugh. She defies the Russian-girl stereotype of the done-up девушка on the prowl (девушка ("dyevushka") vaguely means "girl" or "young woman," and in some contexts has connotations of sexual availability (on second thought, maybe that's only expat usage)...it's also what you call the waitress (no "Hi I'm Tammy" nametags here), and what a stranger says on the street to get a woman's attention).

Ира has a job with a company that develops language-learning software. She used to work in marketing (she liked the people-aspect), but now her job is to find mistakes and usability issues in the software (she missed being exposed to languages). She might go back to teaching--the students loved her and she found it really rewarding. (With my teaching job, I sacrificed community and closeness for independence and more of a life outside the school, a choice I usually don't regret.)

We had a great conversation, lost track of time, bolted for the metro, and got there just after its 1 am closing. (Luckily cabs from the city center aren't too expensive...well, the official ones are, but the vast majority of "cabs" here are just people with cars). I hope I see her again soon. She might join my belly-dancing class.

2007-07-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

Summer is supposedly a slow time at the language school, but I have as many classes as ever. On Mondays and Wednesdays at noon I'm covering Aubergine's advanced class while he's on vacation (with his new girlfriend Надя, investment banker by day, stripper by night, razor sharp and fascinated by all things American). Mondays and Wednesdays at 7 I teach pre-advanced, a group I've had since I got here. Tuesdays and Thursdays, I teach intermediate at noon and I cover Green Pepper's FCE class at 7. All the weekday classes are two hours and fifteen minutes, with a break in between. My intermediate Saturday class ended last week, so they gave me a conversation class starting this Saturday at 11. Then I have my individual student, Елена, for an hour and a half. That adds up to 22.5 hours per week in the classroom.

The language school has a teacher-training program, where they hire you as an intern for $500 per month, give you three weeks of training, then give you a full course load. I took a different teacher-training class in January (in Krakow), so they considered me a full teacher right away and pay me $800 per month (plus a flat, which the interns get too). The Krakow class gave me a CELTA certificate (Cambridge English something something), which is usually the minimum qualification for getting hired anywhere if you don't have experience.

The CELTA course had a lot of acronyms, terms, flow-chart diagrams, and airy theory (what shape is your lesson?) that I've pretty much forgotten. It also had a lot of really useful nuts-and-bolts-type ideas about running a classroom--when to do things with the whole group and when to put the students in pairs, how to deal with reading and listening texts, what kinds of errors to correct and how to do it, the best order of different activities after you introduce new grammar and want the students to use it, presenting vocabulary in interesting ways. It also helped that the 10 of us taking the course got to see things from a student's perspective. One of the teacher-trainers started a lesson by playing a random excerpt from a scratchy, taped interview with Noam Chomsky and asking us to discuss it. I fell for it hook line and sinker and tried to say something intelligent, but it turned out she was showing us exactly how not to stage a listening task.

The CELTA is great for producing functional, fairly standardized English teachers, but I've found that so much of teaching (or teaching small language classes, perhaps) is reading your students and figuring out what you have in your personality that you can use to communicate all the different aspects of language to them. I was going to write about each of my classes but I'll do that later...it's 1 and I'm tired (and Tyler's calling from Australia tomorrow morning to talk about our trip to Tibet next month).

2007-07-08T06:10:00.001-07:00

Check this out: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/world/europe/08moscow.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Baked Beans and I saw a bunch of them downtown on Victory Day (May 9, when Russia celebrates the USSR's WWII victory, which people agree was pretty much singlehanded). They were teenaged, traveled in groups, and wore the same red t-shirts. BB said that many of them were from Siberia and were in Moscow for the first time, thanks to this organization Наши (Nashi).

It still amazes me how easy it is to be insulated from anything political. When I read the New York Times, it sounds as if Moscow is becoming more and more volatile, with constant demonstrations downtown and Russians falling into ranks for or against Putin. From what I see, though, ignoring politics is alarmingly easy, and almost universally done. Critical thought about government seems confined to celebrities like Gary Kasparov and Boris Berezovsky (the billionaire in London who says he's planning a violent revolution). Part of it, I'm sure, is that I'm just not looking in the right places, but nevertheless it's unsettling to read the Times and find it so different than what's apparent.

2007-07-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

Hello from my brand new notebook...Plum and I picked up our paychecks this morning (by "paycheck" I mean "large suspicious stack of roubles"), then she came with me to the computer store. After much deliberation (Me: "Well this one has 20 more gigs of hard drive space and a built in webcam but this one can write DVDs but I don't think I'll really use that plus it weighs a fifth of a kilogram more and the sheet says this is the same size but I think it looks bigger do you think it looks bigger?" Plum: "Maybe...Do you really need that much hard drive space? Look, this one has bluetooth."...20 minutes later...Me: "This one's pretty." Plum: "Yeah. Yeah that's important. You want something you want to look at." Me: "And the screen lights up." Plum: "Yes, yes it does...") I picked an Acer PC.

We brought it home and spent the last 3 hours trying to connect it to the internet (Windows Vista is horridly confusing, especially when everything's in Russian). We bumbled through about a dozen different error messages and finally got it connected. I'm really grateful to her for sticking it out with me. Without her I'd still be lost in the Russian-English dictionary, or back at the store telling the guy something like "I can't in internet, maybe you help?"

Best of all, the screen lights up, the battery lasts more than 3 minutes, and I can turn it off secure in the knowledge it'll turn back on again! Yessss.

2007-07-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

There's a ping-pong table in the teacher's room. Actually it's a normal, elliptical wooden table with a little net strung across it. Artichoke, Aubergine, and I are dead-evenly matched.

From across the table, Aubergine looks like an exceptionally flexible marionette learning to dance on its own. His limbs look weightless as he bounces into position and softly slices the ball securely into the middle of my half of the table. The substance of his game is a bit monotonous, but the style is remarkable. It's like watching a particularly languid Iggy Pop performance.

Artichoke is mercurial. He'll hit the net six times in a row, then produce a string of unreturnable shots with deadly spin. He's more strategic and versatile than Aubergine, and I get winded trying to keep up. If I can hang on, though, he often ends up defeating himself.

I'm straightforward. I don't bother with spin. partly because I don't have the skill and partly because I don't find it relevant. If I can return Artichoke's shots, his own spin comes back and bites him. My shots are solid and direct and land around the edges, except when I hit it off the table to no one.

2007-07-02T12:44:00.000-07:00

My head's back in my teaching, thankfully. I have back-to-back lessons on Mondays and Wednesdays (4:15 to 9:15, with a half-hour break in between), first a pre-intermediate class then a pre-advanced class. It's a long time to focus, but I'd rather have that than a split shift.

My pre-advanced class went really well tonight. It's a nice group, all my age or a little older (or I assume they're older than me because they're married, which is frequently a bad assumption). Everyone speaks at about the same level, makes similar grammar mistakes, is unfamiliar with the same sets of vocabulary words...and then there's Котя.

Котя speaks English almost as well as I do, and has analyzed the language more meticulously than I probably ever will (except when trying to keep up with his questions on the spot). He's taking the class to make his English sound more natural--he already knows the grammar and nearly all the vocabulary from the book we use. When I pose questions to the class, he's almost always the first to answer, and often acts like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

It's hard not to teach to him. For the first couple weeks after he joined the class, that's what I found myself doing--answering, as best I could, all of his obscure questions and feeding the class vocabulary words (homogenous, rarefied, scrutinize) that are fairly superfluous to everyone but him. I've since gotten better about putting off some of his questions and slowing down the class for the sake of everyone else, even if it frustrates him.

He wasn't there today, which is part of the reason why the class went so well. I really like him as a person--he poses interesting questions, is genuinely kind (if a little impatient), and deeply into science (another pitfall-trap of tangents I have to avoid)--but his gravitational pull in the class is hard to handle.

2007-07-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

The desk lamp shorted out (I knocked it over again, the bulb broke, I replaced it, something in the base of the lamp lit up (curious), there was an infernal plasticky smell, and that was that) so I'm typing this with a flashlight in my teeth. Five more days until new computer.

Apple leaves tomorrow. I said goodbye to her last night, as she , Kiwi, Stringbean (recently arrived), and Carrot got in a taxi to go to Aubergine's, and Apricot, her boyfriend, and I got in another one to go home (they live near Artichoke, and my place was on the way). It was 2 and I was ready for bed.

We had been drinking in a beer-tent just outside the Kremlin walls. Kiwi had chosen it, as a way to make Apple do something touristy before she left (in the year and a half she's been here, she went to a museum...once...she thinks...) Apple says that to her, going places and teaching is "just a job." She likes the lifestyle of moving around between foreign cities, and has been doing it for about 5 years (first Ireland, then Indonesia, then here). Traveling doesn't excite her any more.

I can't figure out what the draw is. To me, it sounds kind of empty to bounce around indefinitely, make friends and leave, not pay much attention to the language or culture. I think she enjoys teaching, though. And she's good at it. She also feels as though there's not much waiting for her back in New Zealand.

Even though she's only been here 18 months, she's pretty indispensible at the language school. She's consistently sunny, calm, and competent, a personality that's a magnet for responsibility. She was starting to feel taken advantage of, which is part of the reason she left. If she stuck around, come September the school would be expecting her to train interns for 14 hours a day.

I'll miss her. She was fun to be around, not in the keep-me-on-my-toes way of Artichoke and Aubergine (or even Strawberry), but in an easier, less complicated sort of way. She said herself, when Artichoke and I were spiraling into one of our nerd-rants, that she doesn't know a thing about physics but she can tell a good story. I enjoyed relating to her through stories rather than analysis all the time.

She's headed to Austria to be a nanny for her brother's infant son. She's not planning on coming back, but people frequently say that then show up again (just like people say they're leaving, and stay another 3 years), who knows.

My teeth hurt. Can't wait to drive this computer off a cliff.

2007-06-29T12:13:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-06-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-06-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-06-16T14:47:00.000-07:00

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)

2007-06-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-06-13T02:57:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-10T12:07:00.001-07:00

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?

2007-06-08T01:00:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-06-04T12:42:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-03T01:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-05-30T02:38:00.000-07:00

Just got back from belly-dancing lessons at Mango's. I was the only one there besides the instructor, Кристина, a very kind, patient, cute, plumpish woman a few years older than me. She was great and it was really fun. I'm way too skinny to look anything but awkward doing it but oh well.

I stopped at the market on the way back to pick up some fruits and veggies, and I definitely got propositioned by Salim the Fruit and Nut Man ("You are beautiful, I want to be your boyfriend, do you like sex?"). Um, there's someone else. A hundred grams of cashews please. He's cool though, really. He's from one of the K-stans, I forget which, and he learned English at university in Egypt. Not sure how he ended up here. He helps me out with Russian and gives me free dried pineapple sometimes...about a week ago I bought some raisins from him, made raisin bars, brought him a few, and a few days later he invited himself over to learn how to make them. I was evasive and held out the naive hope that maybe he just wanted to be friends, but I guess not. Kind of frustrating.

last couple days

2007-05-29T14:09:00.001-07:00

My (James') computer is finally back from the shop, and internet has decided to work again. Bonus!

On Sunday, Plum and Cabbage and I drove down to Подольск for the day. We stopped on the way to see the new apartment complex where Cabbage is moving next year. He's going to keep his job in Moscow apparently even though it's a bit of a schlep. Plum says he's not pressuring her to move in with him yet, though he has convinced her to come visit Mom for the weekend, which is a bit of a deal.

The day was gorgeous, and it was cool just sitting there in the car watching the Russian countryside go by. I'm still struck by the oldness of the houses and the standard-issue Продукты that line the streets. Those buildings have seen so much history, but at the same time they make me wonder exactly how much peoples' lives have changed in recent years once you get beyond the major cities.

We spent most of the day by the river, just lounging around and reading and munching on picnic-food purchased from the Spar below our apartment. There were a few other families there, but for the most part it was pretty quiet. For some reason the landscape looked like it couldn't possibly be in America. I'm not sure if it was the scale of the river, the flatness of the landscape, the type of vegetation, the quality of light, or what, but it was distinct from anything I'd seen before.

The night before, some of the teachers went out to celebrate Pawpaw and Baked Beans' birthdays. I'm a huge fan of Baked Beans, I don't mean anything derrogatory by the nickname, just that he's comforting and palatable and rather distinctly British. We went to the Depeche Mode bar, kind of by Mayakovskaya. It was fun...I adored the music of course. A few of us danced. I've never seen anyone dance like Lychee. I was kind of afraid to get in her way. Plum said Lychee once told her that she felt like she had a choice between being invisible and being weird, so she chose the latter. Now her way of relating to people (especially when Beach was over (college people can have their old names)) is to dominate conversations with unconvincing BS and demand to be filled in on everyone else's partially completed conversations. I don't mean to be as harsh as that sounds, I like her when it's just the two of us, but around other people her self-conscious weirdness is kind of impenetrable. I want to say hey, accept invisibility, then your actions will speak for themselves and people will admire your self-containedness and you'll no longer be invisible. Or something. She's moving to Krgyzstan soon. I'm sure I misspelled that.

I'm halfway through The Perversion of Knowledge, by Vadim Birstein. It's about all the terrible things scientists were made to do under the Soviet regime. Parts of it are interesting, like the details of the organization of the academies and their relationship with the government. There's also this great quote from one of the leading Soviet, um, evolutionary biologists...let's see if I can find it..."There is not, and cannot be, a class society in any plant or animal species. Therefore, there is not, and cannot be, here class struggle, though it might be called, in biology, intraspecies competition...All intraspecies relationships among individuals...are directed toward the securing of the existence and thriving of a species and this means, towards the increasing of the number of individuals of a species." (Lysenko) Wow. A lot of the book, though, is just a catalogue of all the prisoners poisoned by the Communists, which is less interesting.

Tomorrow I'll email Terry and see if he can put me in touch with the Environment, Science, and Technology department of the American Embassy so I can beg them for an internship. Tomorrow.

2007-05-25T12:39:00.000-07:00

I'm scared of losing my English. Having to think about grammar rules day in and day out is starting to make me see my language not as something living that I can manipulate however I want, but as something static and dead with laws you can apply paint-by-numbers style to more or less convey your ideas. It's amazing how much of a leap it is from having a working proficiency in a language to using it with any sort of nuance. I doubt I'll ever get there in a foreign language...appreciation of nuance maybe but production no.

Last night I went over to Aubergine's to do my laundry. He lives in an huge block-of-flats complex near Medvedkovo, all the way at the end of the red line. He called a couple of his DJ friends while we were on the metro to see if they wanted to come hang out and drink, but to my relief they didn't. I don't know how he keeps the pace of life he does, or why he can't stand to be alone with himself. We spent a couple hours hanging out in his kitchen and talking. He reminds me a little of Alex S-C from the Cove, minus the misanthropy and plus some style. What I mean by the Alex comparison is that he really concerns himself with making sure people are okay, and he has the uncanny ability to draw out my innermost thoughts whenever we have a conversation more than about 10 minutes long. Next year he's going to be the Director of Studies for the school for all of Moscow, so he'll be teaching a tad and doing lots of observations and, as he put it, making sure everyone's okay. Plum thinks they gave him that job because with his drinking and all they can't trust him with a ton of responsibility, and she's probably at least partially right.

This afternoon I went to see a movie with Peach and her friend. The theater was by Novokuznyetskaya, and is one of the few with Russian subtitles rather than dubbing. The movie was called The Science of Dreams. It was about a guy who moved back to Paris to live with his mother after his father died of cancer (I've lost all perspective on how that should affect someone). He has bizarre dreams that often start while he's awake and fade in and out of his actual life...the dream sequences were visually really cool. Lots of paper cut-out animation and bizarre coloration.

Plum and Cabbage are back in her room, after going out to buy noodles. She looked like she had been crying when they went out but now I hear laughter. Hope she's okay.