at the dinner party

I can't hear very well. It's a long tale involving a wall-mounted telephone and an American poet on his way to Israel. If you sit beside me at the dinner table you'll have to understand that I'll make up my own story for whatever you say to me.

A, a Frenchman, moving back to France and J, his good friend, is moving with him. He's closed his restaurant in SF, run off by The Presidio, and she just quit her job with Kaiser. They've bought a place in the south near the Italian border.

S and B are going to Amsterdam. They have a friend there with a houseboat on the canal. B's an ex-journalist who got into pr and made good money. S started her own business, counselling "people with resources" who think they want to make a change in their lives," are "dealing with questions of legacy."

A challenges S's position that there are universal archetypes, deep traits human beings share no matter if they're white or black, Muslim or Jewish etc.

A gets quite excited, particularly about the differences between men and women. 

S acts out a small drama: imagine two people sitting beside one another on a plane, one right-handed, one left. Airline food is served, tray tables come down. The two people pick up their forks at the same time. Right elbow knocks left elbow. Neither are wrong, each is doing what comes naturally. Once the conflict is initiated, they have choices among several paths of resolution. One is to laugh, to agree that airline food is bad and stop eating.

Everyone agrees it's a good story. Communication between people is paramount. I want to say that the most important communication is the self to the self, that the self is the most difficiult person to get along with, to get to know, but I don't because I'm not sure I've heard everything said in the exhange between A and S.

Everyone at the table has been everywhere, except me. I've been to a lot of places, but not everywhere. B won't go to Asia again or Africa. "Europe's the place" for B--Paris, Barcelona, Venice, Amsterdam. J is "excited" to be leaving San Francisco to live in France, but at the same time it's "a scary time" in her life.