weekend

[paulhope]

The past five days or so have been one of those rare times in my life when my social life expands to the exclusion of all my concrete projects. It's been real good.

• Thursday: Jamie's (one of the three former Games House members working at ITA) birthday dinner. Now a distant but tasty memory.
• Friday: the convergence of a rogues gallery of interesting friends. The Aristides Connection, Evacuee Nick, Whitney Wood, and Whitney Wood's genetic half-brother Dan (son of Whitney's mother's identical twin sister.) Interesting since there was a representative of every major era of my life, none of whom knew each other before this summer (The AC and Nick had met at a bar night earlier, the AC and Whitney at a potluck.) We failed to get into an Haymarket bars due to Dan's being severly underage, despite his receding hairline. But en route I had an as-usual enthralling discussion with Whitney about the difference between explicit/declarative memory and implicit/procedural memory. This distinction is super cool! It's also, I thought, way relevant to arguments I've been having about meaning with hypothetical associationists (whatever they are) and post-structuralist Cristi about meaning. I had the revelation that in their view, all representations (which include all things capable of having semantic content) need to be consciously available, whereas I'm often talking about "concepts" as an implicit, unconscious mental structure. That may matter as I keep thinking about semantics (I feel I'm getting warmer...)
• Saturday: Nick slept on our couch that night so he didn't have to go home early and the next day invited me over to his house in the suburbs (Linfield (sp?)). It's been a while since I've been in a suburb, and it was interesting to watch the internal workings of another person's family. Nick is a friend who I've been in infrequent contact with over the years but am surprisingly comfortable around. He does not, in my opinion, get enough credit from our mutual friends. He had very informed and interesting things to say about Hezbollah (he's an Islamist sympathizer), Islam, and Sufi Islam in particular. He told me about the Conference of the Birds. This interest of his explained Nick's interest the previous night of Hindu pantheism, which Whitney Wood (who was raised Hindu) elucidated the previous night. Apparently Sufism is in some respects identically pantheistic.
  
  I returned that evening, only to go out into the urban outskirts of Boston (BC) to attend the birthday party of an old friend from highschool who I had not spoken to in years. It was a party of the hipster/indy variety. The music was Duran Duran and Jamiroquai. I had met three other people there before: this friend, another person from high school I hadn't spoken to in years and barely spoke to while there, and a third guy from high school I've bumped into several times this summer. I realized that I have nothing in common with this friend of mine, that in high school we had been connected through mutual friends and a similar sense of humor--form, not content. While proud of myself for not feeling overwhelmed by awkwardness--which is odd; I must have been charged with social confidence from thew previous night's success--I left after an hour, having made my cameo, for her sake and for the sake of demonstrating the permanency of friendship. Maybe some other occasion I'll get a chance to catch up on the years that have passed.

Fucking A! My left wrist hurts like a bitch! Fucking programming job. Time to stop.