1.04 Books, Life Often Overrides Desperate Yearning. Hopelessness of Tepidity

I haven't really established a base of friends or acquaintances here. Cal expounded upon the virtues of comradeship and company earlier this evening when he called me, but I have never felt the need to connect with new people. When I do meet somebody, it is always meaningful; I have read their book or seen their artwork or discovered their company when attending a conference either in the flesh or on the electric waves of my machine. I meet individuals as people that I would enjoy spending time with to the exclusion of others; I don't cleave to others in a strange desparation to prevent my own exclusion.

I highly doubt that I could meet anyone outside of my workplace here that could be eligible. I don't want to sound snobbish, but if there is one true thing about this town, it is that Canberrans keep to themselves. The intellectuals at the think-tanks here keep within their own faculties, within their own disciplines, sometimes even within their own sub-specialisation. Their are clubs and societies for every known interest and personality... provided that you have the fortune to meet one of their members at the right time.

But that merely brings me back to the manner in which I enjoy making company; either by serendipitous accidents of space and time, or by a lucky coincidence of interest.

Do I indeed sound standoffish? I apologise. Cal has made me feel in an entirely illogical way that somehow my habit of not visiting dance clubs - although I have heard that in Canberra they are merely drink-and-stumble clubs - is antisocial. Bah. Bah Humbug! We all know that the true connections of the human spirit lie in abstract ideas and not in physical realities. We wouldn't be using this medium as a point of contact if we did not.

I think that this hot weather is making me irritable. I'm going back to my book; it will distract me from the weather and draw me back into a world which is, surprisingly enough, all about guns, germs, and steel. I am enjoying it, though I feel that a deeper look into anthropological and prehistorical journals would expand greatly beyond the content that Diamond has seen fit to include in his work. After all, it is a popular science book. Popular biological anthropology, of all things. It can't be well researched or thought out. Perhaps I have merely become disillusioned under the effects of all the others I have read, and this book will be a salvation of faith in some small way.