Meeting people is easy.

Prof. Daniel Solove used to teach at my law school. Now he plays with toys.

I've found that the process of organizing my life into static, unalterable sentences open for public comment has left me with a simple conclusion: I make much more sense on paper. Some people make sense as soon as you meet them; I am not one of those people.

This is not to say that I'm too complex or antisocial or halitosized to be capable of making a good first impression. It's just that I haven't learned how yet. I like to think that I'm implanting some kind of a good-first-impression germ with each person I meet that will develop into an incurable case of full-blown, retroactive good-first-impression-itis about three days later, but we all like to hope for the best, don't we? Yes, we do.

Here's a story--mostly true and only tangentially related to the subject of this blawg--that should be read in a soothing, wryly self-aware voice on NPR by an overeducated masochist:

I was at this wedding a few years ago where the town drunk (no, really: the town drunk) wouldn't leave me alone until I played the blues for him. No, I told him, I don't play the blues at weddings. Isn't there anything else I could play for you? There wasn't. By now enough people had been drinking for enough time that I could probably get away with it, so I resigned myself to the inevitable and waved him over to the piano.

His improvised lyrics were awful. But he was good. Really good. Hunger, pain, lust, loss; everything you would suspect was hiding deep in the soul of a drunken, wrecked, gin-blossomed failure. So remember, kids: nobody sings the blues like the town drunk.

There's a lesson in there somewhere.

For someone.