Different Than Other Years

The day, that is. In that my apartment hasn't burned down, and I haven't decided to move to the other side of the country. Thankfully, a relatively uneventful March 31st for a change. The only other semi-interesting thing of note which happened today is yet another in a long litany of character flaws, the fault for which I place squarely on the shoulders of my parents.

I went out to the wall o' mailboxes today to get the mail. I saw that someone had left their keys in their mailbox. I looked around, but inside my brain the personalities were already bickering even though the outcome was predetermined. The antisocial, anti-samaritan, apathetic, anti-unfeathered-biped in me just wanted to leave them there. Not my keys = I don't care. Screw the idiot who didn't know they were missing their keys. I mean, how the hell can you close and lock your mailbox and not take your keys with you?

Despite all my efforts to nurture this aspect of myself, it keeps losing these internal struggles.

I took the keys out and walked over to the corresponding apartment whilst my internal sociopath kept ranting and raving at having lost another argument. I knocked on the door, and it was answered by Hume Cronyn's father. I explained twice that I found the keys, once to him and once to his equally ancient wife. They both thanked me, he shook my hand, and I left.

I guess when you're someone who goes to great lengths to keep face-to-face human interaction to its barest minimum, it could have been worse. I mean... they could have been nudists. But you would have known about that by now, as you would've heard me screaming.

Roaming Out West

We saw something interesting the other day. An older man, sitting on the median at an intersection. He was 60-ish, thin wispy white hair, no shirt but wearing an orange reflective vest, khaki pants, and sandals. He had a piece of cardboard upon which were scribbled in his finest Sharpie penmanship something about how he was both homeless and hungry, and his god would bless those who gave him money. (For reasons I have yet to figure out, but that's not the point of my ramble.) He was seated, and hunched over. Not from weakness, hunger, or overwrought despair at his lot in life as you might think from the words on his sign. He was slouched, as he was talking on his friggin cell phone. Granted, I'm assuming he was talking to a human and hadn't just picked up a discarded cell phone and was finally engaging in a less obvious communication with the voices in his head. I guess that's possible, but the posture was a partial attempt to block the noises of traffic. Something not really necessary when the voices are internal. Which leads to a more puzzling question: do you have to pay roaming charges when you're talking on a cell phone to the voices in your head? Sure, they sound close, but if they're extra-dimensional, that would add up to a hefty phone bill at the end of the month.