The Hermit Leaves the House

Yeah, I know, days without blogging. Well, let me remind you that blogging is not exactly a civic duty or anything. Perhaps, following my example, people who have nothing particular to say will simply—naahh, it'll never happen.

So anyway, I've been working hard but did actually leave the house now and then in the last few days. And I noticed things! Yes I did. I was walking across the supermarket parking lot and noticed droplets of water pattering on me, and felt a mild shock of recognition. It was raining! Glory be. I'd almost forgotten that precipitation was available in non-blizzard form.

Then the other night, I was at a business card exchange, ostensibly trying to drum up some business but really just being out in the world, amusing myself by seeing what my fellow humans had to say. These things are actually kind of fun, because the sensible people are doing exactly the same thing. You might indeed make a business connection, but if you're all driven and desperate and needy about it, ur doing it rong. It's like dating—you talk to folks, see what they do, how it's going, where they're from, what their hobbies are, this and that. Maybe you actually could help a few, whatever. You need to get out of the house or office or whatever now and then, anyway, it's good for you.

So it was the usual, lots of different folks. The nice thing about being a freelance writer is that people find it interesting and have ideas about what it's like and ask questions and so forth. If you sell office furniture, there's not many places for the conversation to go if people aren't in the market, but if you say you're a writer, they tell you about the novel they want to write or whatever. It's like if an actor went to a business card exchange. Nobody would give the actor any work, but they would ask questions, at least. One woman perked up when she saw I was a writer because she was a designer, and we're like cousins. So I'm talking to her, and I notice this bizarre thing: The right side of her eyes are a gray-green, the left side brown. Swear to God. One half this, the other that. I haven't seen that ever. Contacts? An incredibly rare genetic thing? I wanted to ask about it, was burning to, actually, but her husband was there too. He seemed like an amiable sort, but it just didn't seem like quite the thing to remark upon a woman's eye color with her husband standing three feet away, somehow. The soul of tact, that's me. But it was just one of the things I've noticed lately, out in the world.