On Thursday night, Susan and I went out to dinner with our friends Richard and John. Richard, a fellow consultant and one of Susan's best pals, had been instrumental in helping both of us get well-paying writing contracts with the faceless monolith of the U.S. Government, and we took them to dinner as a token of thanks. Richard does substantial consulting for one particular agency, where he is paid ludicrous sums of money to suffer fools gladly.

Richard and John have been together for seven years, and own a house together. After all that togetherness, they've just managed to achieve a grudging acceptance from John's family of Missouri socialites, and horrified rejection from Richard's fundamentalist Tennessee redneck parents. Richard had just sent his parents a letter about this situation, which he let me read out loud. It was a typewritten explosion of bitter estrangement mixed with childish hope that his family might somehow try to come to terms with the fact that their son loved another man. I was a little surprised to see something so plaintively honest coming from Richard, who cloaks himself in irony and affects perpetual disdain for the world around him.

We took them to a new restaurant in downtown DC, and who did we sit down next to but Chelsea fucking Clinton! We played it very cool, but inside I found myself very excited at this brush with fame. She was with a young, goateed fellow who was heavily utilizing first-date body language -- one arm slung over the back of the chair, etc. It was really rather laughable, and we all agreed that Chelsea could do much better. Then, Richard went to the bathroom and got a clear look at the young woman's face, and discovered it was not Chelsea Clinton at all. We were very disappointed.

I had a very interesting discussion with John, a pediatric critical care doctor, about the nature of working in a life-and-death field. I miss my days as an Emergency Medical Technician, when a good day at work meant I'd held a life in my hands and kept death away from it. I loved being near the bare bones of human existence, seeing the faint and rare glow of life stripped of its many cloaks and guises. It wasn't always a joyful occupation: I believe it sometimes made me callous and detached from the details of everyday life, and I found myself fighting an occasional desensitization to the pain of patients and their families. Yet the compulsion to return there, to go back and lend a hand at the scene of a constantly-unfolding human disaster, is very strong.

Later, when I went downstairs to the bathroom, I passed an "Employees Only" door and happened to hear a few moments of a furious argument between staff members inside. A large key ring was dangling from the door, and in a sudden larcenous impulse, I snatched it. I walked on into the men's room to examine my stolen goods. Several keys of various sizes hung off the ring, doubtless fitting the storerooms and other nooks of the restaurant. It occurred to me that I had no need or interest in these items. It was like the wave of compulsion had moved on without me, so I decided to leave the keys in the bathroom. On leaving the men's room, however, I could hear the argument still raging behind closed doors. Something about this made me reconsider my decision for a moment, as if the restaurant was invested with such bad karma that it would be appropriate to lift their keys for my own amusement. But the sensation passed, and I continued upstairs.

Back at the table, I explained why I was gone for some long. My dinner companions promptly assaulted my morals. They found it simply inconceivable that I had merely answered some call within me to snag the keys and keep walking, and I was unable to explain the overwhelming urge that had seemed so rational only moments earlier. I found it similarly impossible to understand how they could be free of such passing immoral impulses.