Feeling: shy
Listening to: Goovie - Queen Street Prophet
Reading/Watching: Smallville and Angel

One thing I despise is when you're standing in a line, or waiting outside a window in a semblance of a line (it's not actually a queue, but you know who got there after you), and everyone in the room is avoiding looking at each other as if leprosy has become an invisible disease communicable through eye contact, completely content, pretending everyone else doesn't exist, and then there's the one chirpy person determined to break the ice and make us all into a big band of funny, quirky, not-quite-in-a-recognizable-line buddies.

So when I walked up to the pharmacy in Eckerd to get my allergy prescription, a balding man standing in line before me gave me an affable smile, which I returned briefly before trying to look for the pharmacist guy.

As Drew will attest, I have a habit of waiting exactly five seconds, then calling out a tiny, squeaky, "Hello?" as if afraid of my own voice

The balding man in the sandals said, "Joe, there's a cute young lady out here looking for you."

I sent him a startled look, already feeling myself blush. Damn complexion.

"Were you not looking for him?" he continued, still smiling.

"Um, no... I mean, yes I was... just didn't realize I qualified as cute."

"Well, you're still a young lady, and one out of two isn't bad." He chuckled at his own joke. "Now me, I've been called a cute old man."

"One out of two..." I murmured. My smile was getting smaller and smaller, and my urge to just turn and run away was doing the inverse. Why can't people just stick to the rules, and remember the thing about the vision-contagious leprosy?

He crossed one foot over the other and leaned against the counter, still smiling and staring at me. "So do you live around here?"

I pretended an intense interest in the display of blood-test lancets for diabetics. Luckily, the pharmacist chose that moment to call him over.

I'm not quite sure what's wrong with me, why I'm incapable of small-talk. Part of me figures, I will probably never see that person in my entire life, so why put in the effort to get to know them better? If they're going to become a friend, they'll wander into my life again. I don't connect with anyone on first sight; it takes weeks of psychological gymnastics for me feel safe with someone (and by the way, bravo to all of you for sticking it out).

Plus, I couldn't shake the feeling that the guy was trying to flirt with me, which freaks me out more than anything (although it shouldn't, since the only humans of the masculine persuasion that openly flirt with me always seem to be old men, which is sad and scary and makes me excessively glad to have mon coeur, except some of the Dorks have said he writes like an old man, so is that significant? wow, this parenthese-bit has gone on for very long), really, because I'm dumb and secretly-shy, the kind of shy that people don't know about because it's too shy to even make its presence known.

...and yes, I did tag the other end of that sentence after the long side note just to make you go back and read the first half again and make sure it made sense.

But now. I am going to bed. Today, I got to hear my composition performed, which was fun. That dinky piano piece will never be the same.

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