You type fast for a grungy bird

Last night after class (the last one for a few days, thanks to Russian independence day), I went to Safir with Artichoke, Apple, Celery, Apricot and her boyfriend, and some of Celery's students (Celery was the first to duck out, of course.) The conversation was pretty typical. Artichoke and Celery egged each other on into an increasingly graphic conversation about sex, Apple threw in occasional snide comments, Apricot and I glazed a bit, then Artichoke got self-conscious and set about redeeming himself by talking about something intellectual, jokingly at first but then more involved. I took the bait and argued, this time, that pure mathematics isn't just a physicist's toolbox, that it can anticipate advancements in physics (when Euclid's parallel postulate couldn't be proved, leading to the discovery of spherical and hyperbolic space, nobody had a clue that maybe the universe was spherical or hyperbolic, right?). Unfortunately I don't have Artichoke's skill in talking about math so that normal people are still interested in it, so Artichoke's and my conversation splintered off from the other 4.

Afterwards, Artichoke and Apple and I went to the kiosk. We met some Russian guy who Artichoke knows because the guy used to work at Vogsal, a restaurant really close to school. The four of us went back to my place (Plum's still off visiting Cabbage's family, yesssss), drank champagne, listened to my deliciously shitty iTunes collection. The Russian guy (can't for the life of me remember his name) left and it was the 3 of us.

All night Artichoke told me how unfathomable I was. Usually he can get a decent read on people within about a week of meeting them, he said, but it's been two months with me and he doesn't have a clue. He says I have no modus operandi. I only vaguely understand what he means by that--something along the lines of me not putting up a front, for better or for worse, when I relate to people. He would ask me Who are you?, I would tell him I was Rhubarb and that's about all there is to it, he'd be horribly unsatisfied and tell me to just start confessing things, and I'd have no idea how to respond. Apparently he finds me fascinating and frustrating, which I already strongly suspected, and which explains his frequent bizarreness towards me. I feel like I have something in common with him that I don't have with anyone else here, and maybe that's what enables both of us to perceive that there's a lot going on under each other's surface.

Apple went to sleep and Artichoke dragged me into the kitchen and poured me another glass of champagne. He asked me what I thought of T, his girlfriend (one of my ex-students--not sure if she'll be a major enough player to warrant a fruit). I was non-committal, which is honestly how I feel. I have nothing at all against her, but she's too socially well-honed to be all that interesting. When pressed, I told him I preferred people with more substance. He told me to elaborate and said "one person's substance is another's baseball fan," which I thought was a cool insight. I defined substance as an abiding interest and passion for something outside of oneself, he looked amused by that judgement of T, and I felt kind of chagrined because it really wasn't my intention to bash her.

At one point he was looking through my iTunes, found Born in the USA, tried to play it, saw that it need a password, and called me over to type it. I sat down next to him on the couch and typed away. His arm found its way around my waist by way of some semi-drunken, unconscious variation on the movie-theater yawn. He retracted it once it registered. iTunes crashed or some such, and I absentmindedly went to nytimes.com. "You type fast for a grungy bird," he said (bird's the British approximation of chick, as far as I can tell). I asked him if he thought those two were contradictory. To me, he might as well have said "You're tall for someone with blue eyes." Yes, I'm both of those...can you honestly not imagine them simultaneously characterizing someone?