Lately I seem to making the aquaintance of more and more specimens of the undifferentiated gender. By which I mean men, mostly, but men that seem to have an xxy chomosome set up, such that, with a little push, they might easily be women. I don't mean gay men. The three I met over the course of this weekend were all straight, as far as I know. One was married, one seemed to have a girl friend and one seemed to be trying to get one. Only all three were as fem as can be.

One was a man fairly well known in his field of acoustical engineering, and he was having a party in a building he owned, where he cleared out the furniture on one floor and made it into a gallery space for a friend's art. So the space was pretty nice, with exposed brick and fancy glass walls and stuff, and the art was bad, but he was wearing outrageous glasses, which were squares and looked totally impractical. And he was going on at great length about the Maldives, which is where he was headed. Nice enough guy, but he introduced his wife, who was a thin, severe former dancer type, I was struck that he seemed so estrogen heavy. It is hard to say why precisely, but if he had mentioned that he was a transgender post op, I would hardly have been surprised.

Then, at another event, I met another guy, who, minus the arty glasses and Maldivian talk, fit almost the same bill. A little soft looking, like he was made of Angel Food cake, and a vibe that sort of said "I am an undifferentiated gender". And I say this even though I saw him in action trying to pick up some ladies, by dancing with them.

That was a party that not only had dancing at it, but also a hot tub out back. Even though President Bush derided American Taliban John Walker Lind as being part of a cabal of wine-drinking hot tubbers who populate Northern California, I haven't actually encountered many actual hot tubs out here. But at this party I not only saw a hot tub, but a gentleman, who seemed quite drunk to me, introduced himself and almost immediately told me, apropos of nothing in particular, that he and his wife used their hot tub every night. He was, in other words, a drunken hot tubber. And drunk from drinking sangria, which, plus or minus a few ingredients like apples and white rum, is basically wine. So perhaps I must conclude that two and half years into my soujourn here, I have at last made it into the kernel. No one mentioned anything about being in favor of Jihad, but I was probably half way there.