Reading: The Secret History, even though at this point I think I won't crack the 100-book mark this year.

15 November 2002: With a tuft on the end

A friend came back to town to defend (successfully) and we had dinner afterward. As I chatted with JJM in the vestibule before we were seated, I heard RDC tell the friend that I had recently gone to San Francisco to "meet them all." Or something. It turned out that our friend had turned up my pages while looking for RDC--he'd found my nicknames. In uninitiated meatspace, I prefer to pretend these pages don't exist. BDB was complimentary, anyway.

One attendee is pathologically shy and so not only does she not have much to say to me, I have, unusually for me, correspondingly little to say to her. The only time I heard her speak throughout the entire meal is when swearing came up. She asserted that "fuck" is an acronym. I flatly contradicted that then collected myself and receded. She, a doctoral candidate in English, proceeded to explain (to one person, her maximum; or--just perhaps--my incredulity made a hostile audience) how it stands for "finding unlawful carnal knowledge." Meanwhile my eyes rolled back in my head and I wished I could sit on my tongue (hmm) as well as my hands, and quietly opined to someone else how fucking specious that misinformation is, for fuck's fucking sake, as if people could spell enough to derive an acronym (a word form that barely existed before the last century) back before Angles or Saxons or Jutes or whoever or their ancestors who first mouthed the word or its ancestor even had a written fucking language, as if such an honorable old Germanic word would have a fucking Latin root (carnal) in it long before the fucking Roman Empire penetrated that far fucking north.

I think that's one of those instances of harsh judgmentalism my sister criticizes in me. I can live with it.

A table adjoining ours had one totally geeky guy and four babes at it. They weren't supermodels, but they had that perfect shoulder-length blonde hair and so forth, whereas he, in a Beatles cut, took of his sweater to reveal a Yoohoo chocolate drink t-shirt. The kind of geek I shall always find endearing and for whose more pathetic brother in college I was a magnet, but still, superficially, an imbalanced table. Eventually I leaned forward to SPM and asked, "So tell me how the geek over there has the four babes."
He had noticed this himself and said, "In one word? Clydesdale."
I cracked up. "Do you think we should go over and ask?"
He continued, "No, really, in a very Clydesdale way, with a tuft at the end."