Feeling: mysterious
Listening to: Tori Amos - Liquid Diamonds
Reading/Watching: Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman - Pamela Aidan

Today my mind returned to a conversation I had last week, while my cousin Marie was visiting.

Outside an ice cream shop called Brindle's, Bri, Marie and I were sitting after seeing The Life Aquatic and noticed a guy from our Honors year who'd graduated last year, standing twenty feet away outside a book store.

Normally this would not be a big "whoopdie" moment, but this was James: a guy that was notoriously reserved for four years of college, despite my secret (and unsuccessful) plan of charming him into revealing what makes him tick.

Bri and I whispered about whether we should say hi, whether we should leave him alone, whether he'd pretend to not see us even if we did say hi (last year at the senior banquet I told him of my failed secret mission and he said "I like being quiet and withdrawn, it's my modus operandum."), when suddenly she waved and called out his name, and not only did he smile and wave back, but he walked over (leaving the man he had been conversing with to follow behind him), and chatted amiably with us.

After twenty minutes or so, when I was beginning to realize that he wasn't looking for a convenient excuse to sneak away, his friend took off, and James pulled up a chair to talk further.

It was astounding. I found him fascinating before, when he was the shy guy who sat in the general middle of the class, speaking once every few weeks, and coming out with some of the most startling observations when he did. I think of those brainy, reserved types as a sort of complicated origami to be studied and unfolded, to find out how it came to be in its present shape. They often become the most rewarding friends (and occasionally they turn out to be Miller, but hey, you can't win 'em all...), and can have the most interesting things to say about life that most people don't take the time to notice.

Now, James was graduated from college, and teaching to fund his master's degree, and apparently a semester of teaching has been good for him, because he was downright social. We talked until my raspberry truffle gelato was a puddle in its cup. I felt a bit bad for Marie, since she didn't know him and therefore couldn't participate in the conversation as readily, but Bri and I were so caught up in talking to him that we completely lost track of time and finally said good night when Brindle's began to close.

Talking to him makes me wish I'd seen more foreign films (he's a movie buff, and I only got into obscure movies within the past few years), and I still want to read Gravity's Rainbow, the book he wrote his thesis on, even though we had some serious disagreements about Plath and Faulkner (I like the first and tend to roll my eyes at the second, while he is one of those people who thinks of The Bear as one of the top 10 Great American Novels). Basically he's one of those people who can make me feel smart and dumb at the same time, which, inexplicably, I completely love.

I wonder whether I'll undergo a similar metamorphosis once I begin teaching, unbend a bit and become less smalltalk-phobic. Or perhaps such vast transformations only occur in the mysterious-origami types.

I wonder if anyone has ever considered me the mysterious origami type. Somehow (with my bad habit of blurting out oddball schizotypal things at the drop of a hat) I severely doubt it.

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