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.