I am having lunch with an East Indian colleague tomorrow!!!

I am happy beyond belief.

I have worked very hard (in my mind) towards expanding my range of acceptance: viewing many more people as viable sexual partners.

I think I may not go beyond East India and into Vietnam/China/Japan etc. because those cultures are much more foreign to me (after all, as my current partner pointed out, the group of languages is called Indo-European for a reason), and it is too hard to me to see men from those countries as sexually attractive, but at least I am fine with the prospect of dating an East Indian man.

And, I have kept running into him for months. He has the most amazing smile. I mean... warmth itself. And a warm, bright twinkle dances in his brown eyes. He is tall and very skinny and slightly stooped (as is often the case with tall, skinny guys). His face is very skinny, too: narrow and bony. Just altogether skinny, in everything.

So he would always smile when bumping into me on the stairs and in hallways, until a few days ago I actually stopped to learn his name. So he told me his name, and of course I did not get it - to me it was just a random string of sounds that made no sense. So I lowered my head and started reading his badge. Well, a very long string of characters for the first name and a very long string of characters for the last name. I tried to commit the last name to memory. I then realized that I might have been crossing personal boundaries reading the badge so close to his body (crotch, to be precise), so I stopped. I forgot to look him up on the intranet when I got to my desk, and by the time I remembered, I had no recollection of his last name whatsoever. The company is big - so, I thought, no luck, but oh well.

And, today he stops me downstairs and calls me by my name (which at least is very simple and common and not a string of random characters, but still - how does he know?). And, he asks if I still commute by bike. I stopped commuting by bike in Dec. He remembers. And, says that he sent me an IM invite. So he knows both first and last name. Interesting... interesting...

Then we have been IM'ing, and he wanted me to tell him if he was using too much of my time, and I said no you are not, not at all, etc. etc. general pleasantries, a lunch tomorrow, and, the biggest thing: he is moving to another team, in another building (it is a big campus) tomorrow. So he approached me on his last day in my building.

And, his IM's are in British English ("programme", "theatre", etc. - this is how I learned English, but I dropped spelling this way years ago) so I wondered why, and - he is just basically fresh from India - only one year into living in the States. So not even an assimilated East Indian guy, but a recent import.

I will try to be extra nice. I mean, I like him a lot, so I should be able to be extra nice without trying...