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May 08, 2005
My night out with Johanna
I had a great time last night, really great. Johanna and I went out dinner, coffee, and a movie, and I enjoyed her company so much I’m still smiling.
She called me yesterday around noon or so to ask if I wanted to see a movie. This took me by surprise, I’ll admit, but not entirely. I know she and Jon hang out almost every day, but with Jon in Europe now, I can imagine that Jo might be feeling his absence. Anyway, I was thrilled that she called and we made plans to get together later.
I had the inspiration later of asking her if she wanted to have sushi before the movie (which was to start at 7:20). Since we were going to the Tivoli (she wanted to see Kung Fu Hustle), I thought we could go to the Japanese restaurant across the street (I can’t remember its name right now). The thing is, though, I didn’t even have the idea until 6:00, and for fear that she’d be ready to go immediately, I showered first before calling her. She wasn’t ready immediately, and we didn’t get going until around 6:30.
Dinner was great. We ordered all ala carte sushi—eel, tuna, salman, yellowtail, St. Louis roll, other yummy stuff. Naturally it was delicious. But we didn’t get out of there in time; I had counted on the typical twenty minutes or so of pre-movie “entertainment”, but it seems the Tivoli only does about five such minutes, and we were twenty minutes late. The next show wasn’t for two hours, so we decided to get coffee in the Loop and sit outside, since it was such a beautiful day.
So we did. Coffee to go at Meshugga’s and then since their outside tables were all full, we walked down the street and found an empty table outside of Riddle’s. The wait staff insisted that we be paying customers if we were going to use their table, so we looked at the dessert menu—and they were serving rhubarb pie. *sigh* so nice.
And then finally the movie at 9:45. I’ll have to write more about the movie itself later; suffice it right now to say that it was the goofiest, funniest movies I’ve seen in a while. Truly absurd, but in a great way.
All this is by way of saying that Johanna and I were out until 11:30 or so, which amounts to five hours together, and it was fantastic. I’m so glad I had the idea for dinner, and I’m so glad we missed the first movie time, because it meant we got to keep talking. We talked almost non-stop for what must have been three hours.
I find Johanna easy to talk to, and I guess she must find it easy to talk to me, too. She says that in her social circles, she feels her young age a lot, as if she’s always the least worldly, knoweldgeable, or experienced person in the room. But I don’t see her that way at all. She seems really together, interesting, intelligent, and mature, and I don’t at all feel like we’re on different levels when we talk.
Brody has mentioned how many of the girls he meets aren’t what he calls “deep”, and while I think that connotes something different from what he intends, I tend to agree with him. It’s not just girls, of course, but Brody and I talk about girls a lot, so that’s the context in which it comes up. Anyway, his point is that many of the people he meets don’t seem to spend much time thinking about themselves or the world around them too deeply, that they’re satisfied with a shallow interpetation of what they observe, either because that’s as much as they’re capable of interpreting or because they simply don’t feel like putting forth the effort to dig deeper.
Johanna is deep in this sense. She’s very much interested in exploring not just what happens around her, but the reasons those things happen and the reasons for those reasons. She’s genuinely curious, and for its own sake. She’s genuinely capable of sincere self-examination, and she’s not shy at being honest about exploring her motivations. She’s an excellent conversational springboard—she puts forth interesting ideas that I really enjoy listening to, and those ideas inspire ideas of my own that I want to share.
Last night’s conversation was all over the place, as I suppose any three-hour conversation will be. We talked about our parents influences over our educational paths, we talked about the role of art in society, we talked about our own frustrations (well, mostly hers) with being a creative person in a culture that doesn’t necessarily value those contributions. We laughed and joked.
I just really had a great time.
Posted by alex at May 8, 2005 12:06 PM
Comments
To be clear: all the gushing above could make one think I’m crushing on Johanna. This is not the case, or at any rate if it were, I’m pretty sure I know better than to do anything about it (could I qualify that sentance any more?).
I called her last night to invite her over for dinner tonight — I’m gonna make samosas. She hasn’t called back yet, but of course it’s only 8:30am and besides, she has a show opening tomorrow. So I’m not expecting that she’ll be free. We’ll see, though.
Posted by: Alex at May 10, 2005 08:31 AM