Life is a funny set of social circles. I'm a part of no fewer than five "tribes"... each of which are fully independent social worlds in which I interact. I've tried mixing the people from each from time to time, to no avail. There's not really a point in it, I finally realized... these groups are fun as they are. I occasionally cross pollinate single individuals, but generally speaking, they're all strangely incompatible.

Tonight on deck was the crowd of collegiate folks. They all sort of flock together, and somehow I ended up making friends with a handful of them. The thing that they really illustrate to me is that- young men are unpleasant, generally speaking. They tend to be so egotistical and macho and busy trying to impress women that they can't just be guys and hang out. I used to trust women implicitly and fear men- and that's come a long way, and possibly even flipped the other way in recent years- but the 20-30 year old male demographic is excluded from that. I am not a dick to you. I'm not trying to take your women. I don't care which of us has the biggest penis. Just be cool. Bitch, be cool!

These guys are all engineering majors and offshoots of such. I met a new guy tonight who said, "I take it you're one of the engineers?" He's studying meteorology so we talked about that some. I told a couple of the people there I'm closer friends with that I'm going back to school... it's a funny contrast. Of course to them, there's sort of an, "Oh, cool," response. Big fucking deal, really. That'd be like a college student saying to me, "I just got a real job." Good news, sure, but nothing special.

The mildly depressing part is that these guys are all at least partially through their doctoral or masters degrees. Meh. When I'm sad and just trying to pass Spanish 202, I'll cuddle with my 401(k) account to get through the night.