An interview with Karen Grassle.

We ate dinner tonight at Cafe Lago, which is as good a place as any for a birthday lasagne. Man, I love that place. Better Italian food in Seattle may exist, but I sure haven't found it yet.

So I (finally) finished reading The Know-It-All and I can get on with my life. This was a fun book to read and it took me way too long to read it. The casualty of working too many hours. And feverish frenzies of Lost-watching. And trying to maintain a social life.

Well, maybe not the social life. I've been feeling pretty unsocial lately. I think it has something to do with the changing nature of my job. Now that I have to spend large parts of every day talking to people, spending time in meetings and time not officially in meetings but still somehow socially oriented time, meetings in sheep's clothing... well, I get to the end of the day and I don't feel like seeing people in the same way that I used to. It's not like it was in grad school, or even the year I spent writing between grad school and starting a Real Job, when I'd get to the end of a day feeling like I'd worked hard in solitude for most of my waking hours and I'd want someone to talk to, to process with, to interact or just generally be with. Now that I have to do all that more than I'd anticipated for, well, a living, I'm finding that my time is more preciously my time. And I'm protective of it. I don't want to share it.

It's almost certainly a phase. It always has been before. Long cycles of social and anti-social, not asocial but actively anti-social. I wonder what it looks like all graphed out, my last several years of work and play and work and play. It's cyclic, but how? My feeling is that the periods of anti-social usually last longer than the periods of social, but I wonder if that's really true.

This is sort of different. I'm not feeling anti-social so much as I'm feeling targetedly social. I want to spend time with some people and not others. How I feel surprises me.

I started this off intending to talk about A.J. Jacobs and his book. I have a feeling that he'd get the anti-social more than the social. Anyone who commits to reading all 33,000 pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and follows through knows a thing or two about being anti-social. On the other hand, the guy did interview Alex Trebek.