To Quote Both Bronte And Skunks

Once there were two skunks named Out and In.
Whenever Out was Out, In was In
And whenever Out was In, In was Out...

Now that I am not at Tryst, I wish I were at Tryst. Actually, I don't, because Tryst is the sort of place where you have to wait 1/2 hour to get a glass of water, and by then you've already gotten up and gone to the counter yourself and just taken one.

But I wish I were somewhere.

Do you remember that sentence, from Jane Eyre? The one where she tires of her routine of eight years in a single afternoon? I feel a little like that. It's not that I'm tired of my job, because I love my job. It's not that I'm tired of doing Ashtanga every morning, because I love that too. But I'm starting to feel like I come home every evening and watch Hulu and eat dinner and check my Google Reader and go to bed. That's what I'm tired of.

(That whole thing about my "not having an evening routine" isn't true, btw. I come home. I shower, cook dinner, eat while watching Hulu, check the internets, maybe play some Super Famicom, and go to bed. That is teh lame.)

So I need somewhere to go.

Actually, finding somewhere to go is the easy part. Tomorrow Dalton Conley is giving a talk at Politics and Prose about his book Elsewhere, USA and I will go there. Today I went to Tryst and to the Farmers' Market and to the zoo. I also did two loads of laundry, one load of dishes, cooked meals for the entire week, packaged them in bento, and baked a loaf of bread. And wrote a short story and three blog posts. And hung out in Idle Time Books for a while.

Okay, let me rephrase this:

I need somewhere to go where I have to talk to other people. ^__^

Every time I go to Tryst or wherever I do kinda hope I will maybe talk to someone. If I didn't, I wouldn't bother putting on lip gloss or brushing my hair. But I don't know how to gracefully jump the chasm from "sitting next to six other people on a ratty coffeehouse sofa" to "starting a conversation that is enticing enough to draw their gaze away from their laptops, and to ensure that gaze is interested rather than murderous."

So--before you all jump with the suggestion--I spent some time this afternoon flipping through Meetup.com. Whenever I found a meetup group that looked interesting (like the cooking ones) I checked the stats on the previous meetups. There weren't a lot of repeat visitors. People would come to one meetup only and then quit the group. That didn't bode well for the success of the enterprise.

Still, I signed up to receive messages from a cooking group and a Scrabble group (Scrabble is fun, and more importantly, free), and tried to find a writing group but most of those seemed to be out of commission. (That was the other weird phenomena of Meetup.com. Groups would form, have three meetings, and die.) And then I thought about groups I would like to start, including:

• A cooking group which didn't require a $75 per-meeting fee; maybe one more like a potluck group where people brought dishes and talked about how they were made and then we talked about how they tasted and offered suggestions, or maybe a group where everyone learned how to cook by all trying to make the same recipe and comparing results

• A group for people who still play Super Famicom ^__^

• A group for people who want to listen to This American Life together on Saturday mornings and talk about it and maybe there would be food too

As you can see this is an impressive list.

Sigh. I still haven't put that "yoga happy hour" sign up on the wall of my Ashtanga studio. That might be an easy next step.

And I am going to hear Dalton Conley tomorrow. If all else, his book is about how we don't talk to one another anymore. ^__^