Stranger than fiction, or, um...WHAT?!

Saturday evening I attended a gathering on the upper west side. The hostess had made a point of inviting me and following up to make sure I was coming, saying that it would be good for me to get out and meet some pretty single girls.

I underestimated the fanciness of this party, though, and was pretty unenthusiastic to begin with, so I was feeling markedly out of place and more socially inept than usual when the hostess pulled me aside. "I have someone I want you to meet," she says," I think you two will have a lot to talk about." I suddenly find myself really self-conscious and uncomfortable, and I'm just about to say "I really can't do this" when she adds, "He's the New York correspondent for Al Jazeera."

Good lord did I get to have the best conversation ever! We talked about politics in the middle east and the United States, and he commended my mother for trying to learn Arabic. Apparently Al Jazeera is going to launch an English-language station, and we talked about the sorts of concessions that would have to be made to appease the resounding distrust and criticism of the current administration. With the deck already stacked against them, the station will certainly encounter a lot of difficulties getting approval and support here, if they intend to avoid having to stoop to the level of, say, Fox News.

We also talked a lot about Iran, and how even though most if not all of the governments of the middle east are strongly opposed to iran getting the bomb, much of the public sentiment within those countries illustrates a popular belief that such a development would be good and justified. With so much public opposition to any involvement that smacks of US imperialism, the European model of diplomacy might be the best option left. My contention, though, is that something will have to be done to restore the critics' (in which category one could rightly place the US) faith in diplomacy - as both Iran and North Korea have, in the past, used diplomacy as a way to buy time to continue developing nuclear arms.

I guess my point is that while I was wholly unsuited for the showy shindig, I ended up having a tremendously good and unexpectedly weird time anyway. Seriously, who hangs out at a party and talks politics with someone from Al Jazeera? I couldn't fake this stuff if I tried. New York is so strange...