I’ve lived in a concrete cube sans running water in rural Uganda, on top of a French restaurant called La Fontaine that was neither in France nor near a fountain, in a five-bedroom house in Lawrence, KS known for activism and weekly dirty literature readings and in an apartment in St. Petersburg with a marble bidet.

I’ve worked as a freelance web designer for projects in the United States and Africa, an educational tour guide and a math teacher. As a teenager I manned a French fry station at a fast food behemoth for three months, something statistics say one out of every ten Americans does at some point in his or her life. If that’s true, I saved nine of my countrypeople.

Mikhail Gorbachev once told me I look like his granddaughter.