Frabjous Times

My college friend Ian from Chicago came to midtown Manhattan for a conference so we made plans to meet up one evening. Our original plan was to go to Teany but their hours were a poor fit. Old Zagat’s suggested a Thai place on 46th and 8th so we triangulated thataway. Instead got sidetracked to a tapas place called Meson Sevilla where we settled down with a few small plates of vegetarian and non-vegetarian dishes and a good supply of sweet, sweet sangria.

Subjects of conversation: work, absent friends and acquaintances we hope to meet, varied health woes, family health woes, pets’ health woes, blind-alley careers, books we’ve read and those we intend to read, follies of child-naming, movies we’ve seen theatrically, movies on TV captured via Tivo, the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood, places we have visited and those we plan to revisit, business trips, vulnerabilities of supposedly private data stores, the unpredictability of vocational success, absent wives, relationship troubles of friends and family, the search for immortality, deficiencies of PDF as a document exchange standard, blogs and those who read them to excess, Windows, Unix, and Linux compared and contrasted, long, long road trips, architectural excrescences, a dead professor, the comparative attractions of Copenhagen, Paris, and Vienna, intolerance for fermented barleywater,the presumed biochemical incompatibility of chimeric unions between species, the dish more properly, but perplexingly seldom, named “Beijing duck,” the horrors of local politics, old, dead programming languages and the habits they lead one into, aging eyes, aging parents. I accounted for my absence from AIM and Y! Messenger, which I intend to change.

We found our way back out on the teeming streets of New York and headed down to the Port Authority bus terminal where I caught the 11:00 back to Dumont.