Met with W and J and this guy named Alex tonight at Blue Nile. Fabulous little jazzy coffee shop I'll have to visit again when it's not so friggin hot inside.

*grins* It's almost certain to happen. I'm excited. Nervous, but totally excited. I'm not sure what I bring to the table but I helped W meet Alex and that was just killer awesome to watch them banter back and forth over jazz, movies, poetry and so on. And everyone around was like Yes! This Needs to Happen! Here's What We Do!

Alex, as it happens, was fixing to be a freshman at Tulane University. He got to spend less than a day in what would otherwise have been his new home of New Orleans as he landed right when the suggestion of evacuation was going out. He and a friend left most of their worldly belongings, rented a car and ran off to Houston a half a step ahead of Katrina. With a rueful smile he'll tell you all the things he cared about are now under water. (he's getting everything transferred to UCLA as Tulane has cancelled its coming semester. He will be one of four students getting treated to a darned near complimentary start to a college career as a Katrina evacuee.)

I've always been a teensy tiny bit paranoid. Wary that people might lying as part of one huge conspiracy to make me look stupid. Think 1984. "We've always been at war with Eastasia." In part I consume news at such an uncommon rate so that I can catch inconsistencies if they ever turn up. In practice it usually means that inconsistencies confuse me, not that they make me think a-yup, that's Big Brother, right there. But I do have my little moments of totally crackheadedness as I'm driving to work where I wonder if it's all a big kurffufel designed to make me look foolish as I invest in caring about something that may never have existed in the first place.

"I don't believe in it anyway."
"What?"
"England."
"Just a conspiracy of cartographers you mean?"
--Rosencrantz & Guidenstern are Dead
--Tom Stoppard

But they're for real. And in short order the show will be for real. *happy shiver*