People often ask me, or I can tell from the puzzled looks on their faces that they're wondering, What goes on in your head?
To partially answer this question, I've provided snippets of interactions I've had recently that prompted me to retreat into my own brain and ponder things.
Tonight my step-dad showed me a car he was looking at online, one that I pointed out cost more than my college education.
"Well... it's 400 horsepower."
"Did you just compare the value of this car to the value of my college education?"
"Yep...I mean not just any car. This one is 400 horsepower."
I wonder what "horsepower" even means, as it's a word I've never cared enough to think about before tonight. Does this mean a car with 400 horsepower has the capacity to move at 400 times the speed of a horse? That it would take the strength of 400 horses to move this car? I decide no on the second theory, as people often have to push dying cars to the side of the road and usually don't have 400 horses to help them accomplish this. It must be the first theory, I decide. If I google it and get a boring answer that doesn't support my theory, I'll be disappointed, so I've decided not to.
In making some cooking plans, I started to google a question, to the effect of Is such and such brand of something or other vegan.
After typing the word "is," I see that google has already generated a list of questions I might intend to type.
Is facebook down?
Is Beyonce pregnant?
Is Lady Gaga a man?
Is Mariah Carey pregnant?
I tried to imagine caring about the answers to any of those questions, except of course the facebook one. I immediately checked to see whether I could log into facebook, and with a sigh of relief when I successfully did, I closed out the site anyway and returned to cooking plans.
I became a big fat introvert when some distant relatives came to stay for the holidays. One of them, a woman who commented on how I'm such an adult since she last saw me, (I'm not convinced we've actually ever met before today) prides herself on seeing how many consecutive sentences she can utter before having to stop for a breath. While I know I am occasionally guilty of doing this myself (my record is 2.7 minutes without having to breathe), when others do it I sort of want to crawl into a hole and die.
So when my grandma (no, not the Mormon one) asked if I wanted a glass of wine at 4pm, I replied "Yes, please!!" and sipped a smooth red wine (one that's likely far out of my price range when my family isn't footing the bill) while mentally drowning out her ramble about democrats ruining the world. I fantasized about a future holiday spent with an unknown future significant other and their well-adjusted, gay-friendly, anti-racist family - who perhaps also start drinking delicious wine at 4pm.
This evening I was accused by my grandma of not following my vegan diet when I used chocolate chips to make cookies.
"Milk is just something the Europeans put in our chocolate to water it down for us and keep the good stuff for themselves," I explained, "like the English did when they sent us beer."
"Is that true?" she asked.
"Basically. I mean... pretty much.These are semi-sweet chocolate chips. They have cocoa and sugar... but they're not processed with milk. You just have to know the right brands to buy."
A quick taste-test passed my chocolate-addicted grandmother's test, and I wonder how it is that a chocolate fiend like her never realized that milk chocolate ISN'T the good stuff, and if any of the stuff I just claimed had any partial truth to it.
My eavesdropping step-father looked at his beer, undoubtedly pondering whether he should head to England for a better pint.
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