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.

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.

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.

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

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

Hahahahahaha*snort*

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

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.)

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!"

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.