“Many of us think of our lives as boringly normal, while others live the high life. Take a step back, and take a look at your life as an outsider might. Now, tell us at least six unique, exciting, or just plain odd things about yourself.”

Odd things? Odd things that won’t lead to me being fired, hunted, or driven from the village by an angry mob wielding torches and pitchforks?

Nope. I keep my oddities to myself. The last thing I want to do is give my enemies any more ammunition than they need to make my life difficult. Perhaps it’s one point that I have enemies. They may not think of themselves in that capacity but I certainly do. So I won’t be itemizing my strange.

The people who know me, and know me well, which is to say, none of my coworkers at least to start with, already have a good understanding of all my strange specialness. I’ve given up on my work peers, it’s been too long, there has been too much unpleasantness, and frankly the level of honesty required for me to share with them anything that would normally be in this particular PAD post just isn’t proper for a professional relationship. I value my coworkers not knowing about me about as much as me pretending that once work is done they cease existing.

So, you can imagine just how mindbendingly awkward it is for me when I spy one of my coworkers out there, in the real world, like at the supermarket or the movies, or any place that isn’t Walwood Hall, Westerns campus, or the Roadhouse. The last time I ran into a coworker was at Chocolatea and I stuffed my head behind my MacBook and concentrated on that as hard as I could, and the possibility of the awkwardness passed me by. Not quite unlike the Angel of Death moving through biblical Egypt. 🙂

I’m glad that *my* supermarket is on *my* side of town. Everyone I work with lives elsewhere. And yes, I would rather drive out of my way to avoid an adjacent supermarket if it means I can totally avoid running into coworkers. It’s a very special form of awkwardness. It’s goofy and unpleasant and squicky. The last time, for example, I was in the West Main Meijers  was last week and I was more concerned with getting out quickly and not running into coworkers than I was finding what I was looking for or even checking out. Another reason why I never go there… beyond the fact that it’s laid out backwards. 🙂

So, there we are. 🙂 No.