so i pinky-swore to ali that i would meet more people. i had my first opportunity today, and i didn't seize it as i should. the problem is that naturally the wide variety of random people gets pruned down by physical appearance, which means that it gets pruned to attractive females in my age group. i encountered one today. i was in university hall waiting in line to (if only i had known!) be told that the bureaucrats have mangled my fee processing and that i was getting cut off from pay and reimbursement, when i glimpsed her through the door of the visitors' center. she was pretty, but not so pretty as to be suspicious.
perhaps the last comment deserves an explanation. in my experience, there's this class of people who are too pretty to be not suspicious, in the sense that they have wide-ranging appeal. quite simply, human aesthetics vary wildly -- if they didn't we wouldn't have such a wide range of human appearances, via natural selection, so the statement is almost tautological. it's extremely hard to believe that anyone would naturally have wide-ranging appeal, so it's a bit suspicious when one encounters someone who does. the only person who comes to mind is rachel mcgregor, this girl from my high school who went to harvard and whom i never saw there. and boy, is she suspicious. much like shrimp chips, she's flaky on the outside and insubstantial on the inside. but i digress.
so there i was, standing in the slowest-moving line of my life, which fortunately was only two people long. and i was concocting lies i could tell her. in a more positive light, i was letting my imagination run wild. i finally settled on going in afterwards and glancing at the directory (it's a large building) on the way past the elevators, and telling her that i'd just started working there and i was meeting other people. it was a reasonable thing to do. but then i heard the bad news about my pecuniary situation and i wasn't in the right mental state for it. and someone had gone into the center and she was talking to them. after i went to the math department, i came back to my car and considered going in again. but i chickened out.
i'm disappointed in myself, but at least i considered it. and next time maybe i'll go in. i have this pact, and i have this pact to myself as well to do one worthwhile thing every day. today might be math, or it might be creative writing. i haven't really decided yet.
the main problem is that i'm just not suave enough to really have opening lines. which is where the lies come in. if i can concoct an interesting story, i can get my foot in the door and who knows what it will lead to. maybe she'll mention something i'm interested in, or vice versa, and things will take off. but the problem is this in a nutshell: it wouldn't have been a first meeting that was condusive to effecting a second meeting. unless i came by again around lunchtime and asked her if she wanted to go to lunch.
i don't think i'm missing a huge deal. she had no obvious flaws from my vantage point, but i'm sure if i'd started talking to her i'd have been disappointed. but i had the hope, and i didn't pursue on it. the event in my life this is most similar to, i think, is when tania asked me to strip on that cold january morning and i didn't. i thought about it. maybe i should have done it. but that little level of inhibition was still hanging around, just as it was today with kate. (i actually have no idea what her name was. i paused just now and thought about it for a minute or two, and came up with kate.) i think this year at the winter meetings in san diego i'm going to prowl the halls for people. it should work well.
i should add a fourth worthwhile activity to my list of things from which i will do one every day: reading. but, like with the athletics and the writing and the math, it's not easy to dedfine the quantity i mean. i will trust my good faith in this respect.