I met someone for breakfast in Newtown and, shortly after ordering, an old lady came in, purchased two bags of potato chips and sat by the door eating them.  She would ask us how we were doing and without a pause say “fine”.  After three such encounters, we moved to Starbucks and ran into her on the way there where she had a new bag of potato chips and again told us how we were doing.  On the way out and back to our cars, we encountered her again where she had acquired a fourth bag of potato chips and did us the service of having our smalltalk for us.

At least she didn’t call me “sexy legs”.

I previously purchased only private label/store brands from eBay to save money but after running into problems with their inferior quality purchased two pairs of Polo shorts marked as New Without Tags (NWOT).  I received them today and felt like a bit of a Philistine as I couldn’t tell if the shorts had actually been used.  The ends of the cargo tabs were frayed, the pockets were rubbed in and the webbing was a bit gnarly, but the tell-tale sign of fat-man-abuse of a damaged crotch and stretch marks at the knees weren’t present.  They also smelled somewhere between sweat sock and springtime baby rain or some equally dumb smell.  The front left pocket contained a small scrap of white paper that had a large 14 written in permanent marker.  Either the seller’s trying to fake inspection or the inspectors are damn poor.

The shorts thing really isn’t sinking in to the Temple Folk.  At Neshaminy, everyone knew, that simple.  They knew it wasn’t for a particular reason, I wasn’t being macho, I just didn’t like pants.  The extent of this oddity came today when I was walking to class near and one legged man in a wheelchair wearing one of those ridiculous jester ski hats and most people were looking at me.

So it has begun. Now is the “aren’t you cold wearing shorts?” season.  Having done so for 10 years I take it in stride.  I plan on adding section with a running list of my responses and it will start with today:  “Aren’t you cold?” “No, my hatred of people who insist on the Dvorak keyboard layout keeps me warm”.