Well, my clever plan to study last night came off with only a few hitches. Chuck had a somewhat rough day, so dinner got started mildly late -- but pasta cooks fast, so it didn't really throw us off. Jim showed up for food around 1830, and I had an amusing time watching him and Chuck get used to each other. Jim is stunningly introverted in most cases, and Chuck is flamboyant when he's feeling shy, so it could have gone any number of ways. To my great delight they settled into comfortable conversation pretty much immediately. I'm smug, since I've been telling them both for weeks that they'll like each other.

After dinner there was some scattered conversation, and next thing I knew it was 2000 and I hadn't started studying yet. We said goodbye to Chuck and went to Room16. I sat in the living room and did massive amounts of homework while listening to Hair. Jim checked his email, then spent a long time fussing with the television in order to get things set up to take best advantage of the newly installed cable. It was pleasantly sedate, and I managed to get quite a bit done despite degenerating into discussion several times.

Czr came home from work at some frighteningly late hour, so I put away my homework and chatted with him a while. The three of us watched a tiny bit of some bad mummy movie and admired the cable setup. Eventually I bundled all my stuff back together and went home, to sleep not nearly enough and wake up to the energetic strains of Electric Blues.

One of the things Jim and I talked about was my coffee date with Ceej, which is scheduled for tomorrow evening in Palo Alto. I'm somewhat nervous about it. Are we going to have a real conversation? Or are we going to end up pretending that we haven't been reading each other's journals for the last six months? After all, I know stuff about her that I wouldn't if she was just some keen person from Usenet. How can I ignore that?

I brought this up to Jim, who laughed and murmured something about a lack of pretensions. It is sort of funny, as my inability to ignore what I know has caused much of the angst of the last few weeks. (Said angst has been tamed, thank you, and I now know where in my life everything fits. For the moment.) My rational mind knows that Ceej isn't going to expect me to behave in some formal fashion -- but I'm still worried. But just a little.

I haven't talked about books in a while. During Thanksgiving I read John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless, which was an absolutely incredibly coming-of-age novel. The plot was nothing unusual -- your typical 'kids do something forbidden' -- but the writing had a beautiful texture, and the layered tension really sucked me into the story. I reccomend it highly to anyone who likes to think.

I've also been reading a lot about the sixties -- this is entirely due to my newfound fascination with Hair. I've nearly finished a very thick and judgemental book from 1971 titled Coming Apart, the author of which I've momentarily forgotten. It has a good amount of detail, but the writing is both dated and biased. When I get tired of wading through it I switch to the book of Dick Atcheson's essays (written from 1966-1970), which are also very dated but much more amusing. I really ought to do a websearch on him and see if I can find traces. So far, at least, he seems like an neat guy.

Last night I read Pop Culture by Asa Berger, a book from the early 70's which claims to be an analysis of then-current popular culture. It was pretty bad, although it did say some amusing things about comic books and the generation gap that I'm glad to have read. The book lost major points for being so badly typeset I almost couldn't read it -- three-inch margin at the top of the page, none at the bottom, and the paragraphs were justified in such a fashion as to leave all the blank space at the left. Pretty nightmareish, all in all.

Why is that when people talk about Hair they never mention the incredibly nihilistic ending? Let the sunshine in? Hah.