A bit more procrastination
So, tonight I was supposed to dance some blues. I did not, though, for it having been too many years since I've haunted the halls of a music building implied that it wouls be a wise idea to accept an invitation to attend a piano recital. The girl can really play, so it was time well spent. This was preceded by another notice I received to get over to the business school ASAP for free food (which was both delicious and accompanied by a mini multi-national cultural arts show), where I ran into an alum of the dance society and the university who is now working in the building. Fun times, though that's another person who expects me to organize salsa outings. I swear, why people assume I should put together events for their entertainment is beyond me, especially someone I haven't seen in long enough that I'd kinda forgotten about her.
The piano recital was nice, although I was falling asleep at times since my body is finally expressing its opinion about the random schedule I've kept since the holiday break (seeing two weeks worth of sunrises is ok, if you normally awake before the sun comes up). Afterwards, in lieu of blues dancing I spent quite a bit of time visiting with someone I met a while back when she first came here. Eventually she declared a state of non-interest, but we still hang out and talk once or twice a month, long flowing conversations in which we jump around covering theology, theoretical romance (the only kind to discuss when each party in the conversation is chronically single), anime (watching anime is how we met), her roommies' odd habits, her odd habits. We know quite a bit about each other's family habits. Tonight we covered the evolution of conversational topics with parents as one ages, such as how my dad will admit that, irregardless of being diabetic, a tall frosty mug of beer still looks good sometimes, or how it is that my family came to be Baptist -- fleeing north before Pancho Villa, my mother's (great?) grandparents ended up in EP and sought out the best non-Catholic church possible, eventually ending up Baptist. These aren't exactly the sorts of things you talk about with your parents when you're 10, or even 15 oftentimes, so it's eye-opening and humanizing to start discussing the things that you and your parents wouldn't or couldn't discuss before. When parents start treating you as an adult, it's inexplicably more natural to start treating them as normal people, and that redirects the conversational enterprise in surprising and occasionally startling directions.
However, our conversations are so good in part because the girl and I easily fall into certain patterns and hit selected topics almost inevitably. At some point I noticed this and have been making an official effort to avoid hitting these -- it seems slightly obsessive to talk about someone's love life when you're not part of it, and we're hitting the fringes of what she's studied theologically in pretty much every conversation now. I shall have to work a bit more at coming up with grist for the mill. And continue to wonder how it is that unavailability can be largely irrelevant to how much you enjoy someone's company. That's friendship for you, I suppose.
The piano recital was nice, although I was falling asleep at times since my body is finally expressing its opinion about the random schedule I've kept since the holiday break (seeing two weeks worth of sunrises is ok, if you normally awake before the sun comes up). Afterwards, in lieu of blues dancing I spent quite a bit of time visiting with someone I met a while back when she first came here. Eventually she declared a state of non-interest, but we still hang out and talk once or twice a month, long flowing conversations in which we jump around covering theology, theoretical romance (the only kind to discuss when each party in the conversation is chronically single), anime (watching anime is how we met), her roommies' odd habits, her odd habits. We know quite a bit about each other's family habits. Tonight we covered the evolution of conversational topics with parents as one ages, such as how my dad will admit that, irregardless of being diabetic, a tall frosty mug of beer still looks good sometimes, or how it is that my family came to be Baptist -- fleeing north before Pancho Villa, my mother's (great?) grandparents ended up in EP and sought out the best non-Catholic church possible, eventually ending up Baptist. These aren't exactly the sorts of things you talk about with your parents when you're 10, or even 15 oftentimes, so it's eye-opening and humanizing to start discussing the things that you and your parents wouldn't or couldn't discuss before. When parents start treating you as an adult, it's inexplicably more natural to start treating them as normal people, and that redirects the conversational enterprise in surprising and occasionally startling directions.
However, our conversations are so good in part because the girl and I easily fall into certain patterns and hit selected topics almost inevitably. At some point I noticed this and have been making an official effort to avoid hitting these -- it seems slightly obsessive to talk about someone's love life when you're not part of it, and we're hitting the fringes of what she's studied theologically in pretty much every conversation now. I shall have to work a bit more at coming up with grist for the mill. And continue to wonder how it is that unavailability can be largely irrelevant to how much you enjoy someone's company. That's friendship for you, I suppose.