Phrases in Common

I should start out by mentioning that there's a new link over in the Elsewhere section and I strongly recommend clicking upon it.

Someday I'll actually get around to writing about Cleansed, and it will either be the greatest thing I've ever written or something like "It's been a long time" which at the time was a significant step for me and afterwards I look back on as being quaint but ultimately mostly wrongheaded. For the time being, though, I'm not writing about Cleansed, just one particular line.

Cleansed would have been my second creative collaboration with the girl, although since she was acting this time and had been directing the previous time it would have been less of a collaboration and more of an odd coincidence that we both happened to be creatively involved in the same thing at the same time. But leaving aside the delicacies of that distinction, it did provide an opportunity for me to be in the same place that she was on a couple of occasions and notice the same odd niggling feeling that had occurred once or twice the previous quarter during Pullman Car Hiawatha

(One could call that feeling a crush. The exact details of why I didn't recognize it are long and would probably bore you.)

and it occurred to me at the time that perhaps the logical way to address this was to have dinner together.

I remember the exact table we ate at, too. Considering Thayer Dining Hall from the air, facing down and west, it looks something like this:

H   THE PAVILION
O           
M                 F          
E                 O          
P                 O          
L                 D          
A
T E       C O U R T       

with an odd dining area in the corner between the Pavilion and Food Court, where she and I sat at a small table up against a sort of half wall with fake plants and wooden lattice work. I don't remember what she ate but I'm fairly confident I had seasoned pita bread and spinach leaves with hummus, which was one of my more favorite things to eat when I remembered that I could get it.

There is a scene in Cleansed in which one of the characters, Robin, is learning to write and another of the characters, named Grace and played by the girl, is teaching him with the underlying point being that Robin has a puppy-like affection for Grace and Grace is too much in love with her quite probably deceased brother to be able to return it. Near the end of the scene a third character, Tinker, enters and picks up Robin's paper (on which he has written "flower" to describe Grace) and after asking "fuck is that?" burns it. A lot of lines in Cleansed have that very clipped very clean feeling as if everything unnecessary or even possibly superfluous has been cut out of them, and it can give some of the lines a dark humor where you know it's not funny but you laugh anyway. I don't remember anything else we talked about.

On the way out (through Food Court if you're looking back at my diagram) there were a couple of tables with colored paper tablecloths and a TV set that was playing something involving a rather ridiculous character (possibly involving feathers and a crown) doing something equally ridiculous (possibly involving buckets) and after walking past it the girl and I, at remarkably close to the same time, turned to each other and said "fuck is that?" and then burst out laughing. Then we went back to our respective homes and for over a year didn't see each other except for the occasional hurried greeting in the street when we both had places to go and things to do, and then we started dating. But, if you asked me, I'd probably tell you that it started back in the Thayer lobby during the winter of Cleansed and it just took me a while to get things straight in my head.