Hermits Are Us

Me and the Mister work from home, so before the Isolationism cement dries, we try to venture out into the world with all you people. You know, to keep it real.

Yesterday, the signs of Hermitism were felt when one of us got annoyed by the owner of a couple of dogs letting his rascals loose to run around in the tennis courts across the street. One of us (I won't mention his name) kept thinking 'Why is this guy just letting his dogs run around the tennis courts to bark and pee and poo? Are dogs even allowed on the courts?'

When control issues like these pervade your mind, you've spent too much time at home having it all your way and the only way to fix it is to assimilate back into the public. It was time to desensitize.

So we jumped into the car and headed out to Borders for some literary and musical perusal followed by Whole Foods to load up on extreme fat smashing food.

At one intersection out there, we saw some idiot - oops, I mean fellow human being - blocking a bunch of traffic resulting in much horn honking and belated middle-finger flipping. Not on our part, of course. We are too civilized.

While cruising the produce section at Whole Foods, we witnessed one lady chomping on plums. Plural, as in, more than one plum. I guess part of our problem is that we don't live in the moment. We often consider the long term which requires thinking about consequences of our actions. Naturally this line of thinking flows to thinking about other people's consequences - how else can we properly criticize and judge them?

So there we were, wondering how the she-masticater planned to pay for food that requires a weigh-in at the check-out stand. She didn't look like the kind of woman who regularly barfed up her food, so producing the proper weight of her plums wasn't an option. Would she shamelessly produce two pits and expect the checker to estimate it? Or would she surreptitiously insert the slimy centers in between random boxes in the pasta aisle? We just didn't know, but we nevertheless spent half our visit in the store discussing it.

Perhaps, we were unfair in our judgement of this poor starving woman. Perhaps plums aren't sold by weight and she would have simply opened her palm at the check-out stand to report the number of pits, returning them to the confines of her pocket, or better still, dropping them in a conveniently located garbage receptacle nearby but not before ensuring that she was charged for them.

Or maybe, she was a quality assurance specialist employed by Whole Foods whose memory is so outstanding that she does not require a clipboard but waits until she returns to her car to report her results.

In any event, we'd had enough of you people for one day and came home exhausted from our jaunt, plopped on the couch and checked out the OnDemand pilot episode of The Bionic Woman.