My old friend Valerie from Oberlin is in town for a conference and we're meeting up tonight to catch the Buckminster Fuller play that everyone has been raving about. Valerie gets placed in the same category as Mark H. in Tucson in my life; an older, quasi-authority figure who amazes me and stuns me with the sheer quality of life and living that they bring to the table, but from whom I kept my distance because of the mere fact that they held positions of "authority". I actually have little idea what that means. She wasn't an authority figure at all, she was just . . . an adult? But she really wasn't (adult being a relative concept, I still don't feel like an "adult"). She was also a focal point for our political community at Oberlin (not that I was all that political. I was steeped in it, but I wasn't really active). She did good work, was passionate about her work, and we all loved her dearly.

The hard part of connecting with these really good, positive force people is that I tend to mask my darker side. Our conversations cut out the BS and get right to meaningful, substantive stuff, but once it gets to that level of discourse, it becomes a matter of me finessing my bottom line with descriptives like "existential" combined with "nihilistic". It's like a little dance. Either tap or soft shoe.