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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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