While sitting on the black office chair in cubby #3, 7th floor, of the Dartmouth library, I noticed that another person logged onto the Google Mail, besides me, who I hadn’t held a conversation with in quite a while. I continued idly sitting in said office chair in said cubby on said 7th floor staring at said buddy list, wondering if this person was waiting for me to initiate first contact. Perhaps, after returning home following a long night of soul-searching in a quaint park which maps would indicate is 1.35 miles from his/her house, during which time he/she uttered the words “goodness,” “heart,” and “new direction” a sum-total of 43 times (the exact quantities of each difficult to recall), he/she had returned to his/her office chair in the hopes that perhaps his/her close friend might be open to a discussion of matters of deep personal and emotional importance, yet due to a long absence of discussion of such topics, was concerned about burdening me with said discussion. I waited, and as the time went by with said person still seated at said office chair on said Google Mail, I became more and more convinced that I was analytically in the right. Yet, a second scenario passed through my mind in which, after a night of festivities that could only be described as “tremendously life-affirming” and/or “sufficiently bacchic” he/she had decided to check his/her email in the hopes of finding a note from one of the many Nigerian businesspeople still vainly attempting to share a potentially lost fortune with a (very) lucky American who might or might not, through an interesting and unknown lineage which itself could be the topic of a novel by Bill Bryson, be related to said Nigerian businessperson’s contact. Instead, finding a message from his/her future college roommate about the “cute” or “chill” furniture that would grace the floors and desks of this otherwise blandly decorated future paradise of study and awkward sexual contact, he/she sat at his/her computer deciphering the positives and negatives of this arrangement (perhaps even assisted by an Excel spreadsheet, but it would be tremendously presumptive of me to presume said spreadsheet’s existence). Had I, during this time, interrupted with an unexpected (and, nearly certainly, un-desired) greeting, he/she might have felt I had intruded upon his/her moment of quiet reflection and been so rattled that he/she decided that his/her originally high feelings in regards to me had been forever tainted by this momentary transgression and he/she would find it necessary to go so far as to remove me from his/her telephone directory and go invisible whenever he/she went online and noticed me also online. So I did nothing, and this is what I thought about.
