Something I thought about today:

Finding someone in a crowd sucks if you’re not the kind of person who is good at finding someone in a crowd. You could be looking for your best friend. She could be directly in front of you; she could be wearing purple pants. But the sensory overload from the hundreds of people who are alarmingly not her is so great that your brain goes into the state where it can only make broken, grammatically inept shells of simple sentences.

Friend?

No can find best friend.

Friend with the pants.

Purple ones.

You implore yourself to look harder but you know you won’t be able to find her. You get frustrated.

I have this best friend. We’ll call her Kate mostly because her name actually is Kate. I feel like Kate could find me in a crowd pretty easily. I could be lurking in a corner as I often do. I could be wearing atrociously boring, nondescript colors as I often do. There could be a man off to my left with his hair on fire. Kate would find me.

I don’t know if the ability to find someone in a crowd has anything to do with intelligence. I don’t know if it’s an ability that can be learned. But I do know that the lack of this ability creates a kind of separation anxiety.

Person B: I have to go to the bathroom.

Person A: I’LL GO WITH YOU.

Person B: Do you even have to go to the bathroom?

Person A: *looks away*

Person B: Stay. You’ll be fine.

Person A: But…

Person B: I’ll be right back.

Person A: (almost shouting) But you know I won’t be able to find you!

Person B: I’ll find you.

Now that is trust.

Something I thought about today:

At work tonight the new kid Tim (tall, skater Tim who talks like *~this~*) explained to me that he was wearing a rubber band around his wrist because a teacher told him to snap it every time he thinks of a girl he’s trying to get over. Seriously. It was like I was looking at myself two years ago, only male and taller. I told him it wouldn’t work and that his wrist would balloon up from snapping it every 30 seconds.

Now, unrelated to this fact is that because we now I have Verizon at my house we now have all the channels of *~all the world~*. And because we now have the National Geographic Channel (aka Nat Geo, to all the cool peeps) (Amy, stick with this post) I’ve been addicted to Cesar Millan the Dog Whisperer.

Now, these two things are related only because after I watched Tim snap himself and wince approximately 30 times during only the first hour of work it made me think of Cesar. And his dog whispering. Because the wrist snapping is a means of behavior modification. And I feel like it’s similar to methods used to train dogs. But the problem for Tall Tim (and old me) is that we’re not dogs. We’re people. So why the fuck did one of the smartest people I’ve ever met instruct me to snap myself hundreds of times a day?

*Think of “Something I thought about today” as a new bi-weekly column. It won’t always be pretty and it certainly won’t always be profound. But it’ll be fun, dang it.