accidents happen

So, um, I accidentally went on a date last night.

No, it's worse: I think I accidentally went on a second date last night. In other words, I didn't realize the first, uh, date was actually a date. It wasn't until the end of the second date that I realized that these were 'dates', not just... I don't know, social encounters of some other persuasion.

The country is small enough, and the expat scene within Gabs miniscule enough, that social networks double back upon each other all the time. You can wind up hanging out with all kinds of people, if only because you both happen to be disconnected Americans floating around the weird social space of a country with a population smaller than some major American cities (Metropolis X, included).

So I wasn't thinking much of dinner. I wasn't even thinking much of being bought dinner. I assumed it was the ploy of feeding the poor grad student who then tells you what are hopefully interesting things about wherever it is you happen to be. It happens now and again that someone takes me out and I sing for my supper (though it's more often lunch). I drove; he got to drink without worrying about driving.

Dinner was mostly a conversation about the paper I gave this week which, by the end of the evening, made less sense than it had when we sat down. Then the post-dinner conversation went in some strange directions, and the next thing I knew, we were discussing what I'm going to gloss as contemporary modes of sexuality in Gabs. Sigh. OK, I can gloss it like that, but some of those questions were more personal than I was really expecting. The whole subtext -- and to be honest, some of the text -- of the conversation caught me very much off-guard.

I guess the upshot here is that I'm incredibly thick, but I really thought this was a purely intellectual, or even (given the age of the person in question) vaguely paternal interest. There are some people here, mostly academics, with whom I have exactly that kind of vaguely advisorial interaction, and that's what I was expecting.

God, am I glad to be leaving in a week.