two group conversations & conversations in general

My favourite thing today were two very different back-to-back conversations with groups of people. After Lauren's (excellent!) talk tonight at Carleton a bunch of people went to Paddy's and it reminded me of the basic pleasure of talking to people in a group about random shared things: why there are no longer any truly eccentric profs (Lauren's apt observation), how many Victorian novels a student will read in a semester without complaining, and variations on losing one's glasses, among other things. I had to leave early to return to documentary movie night at our house (due to a scheduling glitch on my part, the two events overlapped) and I arrived just in time for the discussion about the documentary. This was a very different group conversation about politics, the insidiousness of corporations, the way that all of the documentaries we watch always seem to arrive at Dick Cheney as the bad guy who started it all (Joel's observation), the genre of spelling bee documentaries (and Chris's incredulity: there's a genre for that?), and the question of why we never seem to watch "happy" documentaries (except for those spelling bee documentaries).

And in terms of conversations in general, many many people on the list noted good conversations in their list of five favourite things. Which is a heartening thing.