There's a bit of micro-culture Elisa and I have based on when she was going to college in Ohio and sharing an apartment with her sister.

In many ways they are very different people. Elisa is friendly enough, but Angela is a total social animal. Parachute her into some hostile wilderness - Athens, Ga., say - and she'll not only get by, she'll meet a bunch of people and, within a week, have them organized into some kind of babysitting coop cum fair trade coffee and book club.

Apparently at one point back at OU, Angela came storming in, all worked up because, and I paraphrase hearsay here, "I'm always the one that goes out and does the work to bring friends in, and you just SIT THERE!"

I have no idea what that could have been about, but it's funny, so it gets referred to from time to time.

Well, here in Vancouver, we've both kind of been parachuted into strange territory, and neither of us is especially extroverted. But I'm in an unusual situation in that I've been dumped into a new experience with 14 other people, all of whom are also going through something new and bizzare, and then had a couple days of exercises meant precisely to break the ice and turn us into a team.

Elisa doesn't have this. She doesn't have a job. Her classes don't start until July. She's been going slowly mad here. And it's not as though I've met anybody that wasn't in my class.

So Elisa went out and found some people on a web group for lost newcomers to Vancouver, and Friday night we went down to Granville Island and had drinks with people from all over the planet. An Australian who works for his family's company that does something having to do with clothing production. Not fashion design per se, and I don't think they actually run factories, but they help designers optimize their stuff for the production process.

And there was a British guy who used to work in documentary production for the BBC - there's someone to network with - and a woman from Vancouver who's lived overseas so long that now she's come back and can't find her way around. So we hung out at a very crowded patio bar, had drinks and tapas, and had a spendid time in general.

Now I have a cold.

The two are probably not related, but my head's swimming a bit. And tomorrow my first short script is due for workshopping. Ah, I'll live. I'll just sound funny.