Carrie Bradshaw in Paris

For the moment, things are quiet here in Moscow. No, scratch that. Things have been quiet for quite a while for me. But with only twenty days to go until I board an airplane for New York, I am definitely in wind-down mode.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to say goodbye--or rather, didn't get a chance to say goodbye--to Gulia, my banker student. I had known for some time that she would be going on maternity leave and thus ending her lessons, but her actual cancellation of them was rather abrupt. At our last meeting, she brought me up to her office, then proceeded to leave me there while she went off to attend the birthday party of someone I gathered was a bigwig in her bank. Forty-five minutes into what would have been an hour-and-a-half lesson, I figured she wasn't likely to return and that, even if she did, there wasn't much I could teach her in so little time. So I left her a polite note saying that I was going home.

The day of what would have been our next lesson, I got a text message from my school's office that she had cancelled her remaining lessons with me, because of her maternity leave. I really can't blame her for doing so--I'm sure a bank executive must have a million things to do in the week before she goes on a maternity leave--but I do wish I'd had a real chance to say goodbye. It may sound bitter to say so, but after having worked with her for over four months, I felt I deserved at least that much.

The whole episode has made me realize something about my inillustrious (unillustrious?) career to date. And that is, namely, how typical this is of what I've done--or more aptly, not done--again and again in my working life. If I had to compare the situation to anything I've read or seen in films or on television, the closest thing I could compare it to is the finale of the show I love to hate.

Yes, I would be forced to compare myself to Carrie Bradshaw. There, I said it. And now, having said it, I can go vomit into my toilet at the thought that I am anything like this woman.

For those of you who have not (yet) suffered through six seasons of Sarah Jessica Parker and the schnoz that ate Staten Island, what happens in the finale of Sex and the City is this:

Having fallen in love with a Russian artist (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov, of all people), Carrie Bradshaw decides to accept his offer to go and live with him in Paris. Not surprisingly, Little Miss Charge Card expects her life there to be a perfect fairy tale. Instead, it becomes a perfect nightmare at her "perfect" boyfriend turns into a perfect heel, leaving her alone in hotel rooms while he goes out and hobnobs with his art crowd and, in one instance, takes her with him to some kind of gala opening only to deposit her on a sofa near the entrance and promptly forget about her.

Again and again in six years of what has passed for my professional life, I have found myself in just this kind of situation, and I've never known what to do about it. In both of my stints as a legal assistant, I worked for people who couldn't quite figure out what to do with me and so just left me to dangle. I've had more than my share of prospective employers who did the same thing, post-interview. And then here in Russia there have been the business client students here in Russia who, almost without exception, have done the same thing at one time or another. Even the ones I've liked, and who seemed to like me, have at times left me alone for half an hour or more while they attended to early-morning phone calls and e-mails, walked out of class early because of an urgent incoming text message, or interrupted our lesson to talk to their wife.

Whatever else comes of this program at the University of Pennsylvania, I at least hope it will get me off of that sofa and into the gala of life.