On Saturday evening, I accompanied Cecilia and friends to a jazz club in Oakland to see Shirley Horn, the legendary, aging singer. She's one of the few jazz vocalists I know and love. We had dinner together beforehand (that is myself, Cecilia and friends, not me and Yoshi) at the sushi restaurant adjoining the club. Sushi and jazz seems an odd combination; Yoshi, an old Japanese lady, still acts as the host for the restaurant, and I'd love to know her story. Colorful photos on the wall showed a younger Yoshi cavorting with colorful black men (I'm using the word "colorful" carefully here) - were they lovers, or simply visiting jazz greats, I don't know.

Reading my journals from my early twenties, I've refamiliarized myself with how shockingly awkward I used to be with people, and how endlessly self-searching I was about my social inadequacies. Yet even now at the ripe age of thirty-eight, I can still be reduced temporarily to that shadow of myself. It happened Saturday evening over dinner. I sat next to Cecilia's best friend Joelle, and opposite Xavier, a handsome French guy, with his boyfriend Tony. And I felt again a bit of the inadequacy that I used to feel so acutely. With Joelle and Xavier, both being French, and Joelle's twelve-year-old son and Cecilia both fluent in French, that often left Tony and I trying to make small talk. I felt so uninteresting, even though at my (more frequent) better moments I feel I'm an interesting, charming, alive person.

In the jazz room, as Shirley Horn sang, I felt instantly at peace with myself again. She really has no voice left to speak of. But she brings such soul and experience to the vocals that it was extraordinarly touching - transporting. And it was cute seeing Tony and Xavier pressing hands. It made me feel distinctly amorous, although I currently have no body to target with that kind of expression.

To my left, Joelle's son struggled to stay awake, and rested his head on the shoulder of Cecilia, who softly stroked his hair. I felt it must be nice to have such simple, uncomplicated love in your life. It's a side of myself I've never explored - feelings of tenderness for the young. (I'm not talking here about my tendency to hit on young men at the gym.) It gave me a thrill when Joelle's son would strike up conversation with me. He's going to be tall, and already has large feet, so we swapped war stories. I told him how I used to hate it when my mother would take me shopping in the men's department, telling everybody "Eeh, he's only fourteen you know!"

I'm on a flight to New York right now, relatively comfortably ensconced in an exit row besides a twenty-six year old gawky, intellectual Brit who's just landed an assistant professorship in math at Harvard. He reminds me so much of myself when I was in my early twenties. Though I was never as bright as he is. His thesis was on superstring theory and, knowing nothing about superstring theory, I told him how much cosmological theory has changed in the twenty years since I started my degree in physics and astronomy. He was polite enough to express surprise that I'd gone to school twenty years ago (as I was when I stopped to figure it out). Perhaps it was the fresh set of pimples that the recent stress about my trip has brought to my forehead.

Anyway, I'll only be in New York for twenty four hours, staying on posh Central Park South at the Hotel Intercontinental. They're flying me in to get drug-tested and finger-printed for the company I'll be working with for the next three or four months.

This Sunday, then, I'm relocating to New York through to the early part of Fall. It's come so suddenly, and, finally, as the pieces fell into place yesterday, I could allow myself to get excited about it. They accepted my requests of getting a one-bedroom, though they were stingy enough to try to save money by not having maid service. I managed to win that battle too, and even got them to include payment for use of the gym in the apartment building near Central Park, where I'll be living. It sounds like a nice place, with a balcony and those all important "granite counter tops".

Wow, what an adventure. New York for three months. It's not the type of thing that comes very often to you when you're in a nine-to-five software job like mine. A chance to reinvent myself perhaps. A chance to make new friends. I just hope they don't expect me to work fifteen-hour days. I've already told them the sorry story about my repetitive strain injury in both wrists, and how that will limit me to working eight hours a day. Physical complaints come in handy sometimes.