old songs

Nick and I were having dinner this evening, a much-needed dinner on my part after a rather insular weekend spent recuperating from both a nasty cold and a disconcerting social encounter. Our talk ranged from the books we are reading or not reading to the stories we are writing or not writing, from the usual boring old library gossip to all the different selves every one of us embodies and the myriad ways these varied selves, both intuitively and contradictively, interact with all the different parts of the world around us.

Then it occurred to us that the bar we were in seemed to think it was 80's night, and we spent the next hour rhapsodizing over or savagely criticizing the ensuing aural onslaught, from A-Ha's Take On Me (slandered, though with appreciation for the video) to Cutting Crew's (I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight (resoundingly condemned) to John Waite's Missing You (praised, with reservations). I scoffed at his adolescent adoration of Dream Theater and he mocked my pre-teen love for Whitney Houston's How Will I Know ("I'm askin' you 'cause you know about these things!").

Eventually it was time to pay up, make our way through the cold to the subway, and head downtown and uptown respectively, in preparation for yet another workday tomorrow.

Strange to think it's only Monday.