Emotional Parapalegia! Yes!

Just came back from the grocery store. I hate when random people inadvertently out my weirdness. An enthusiastic and attractive college girl, along with her enthusiastic and attractive friends, were all competing in a photo scavenger hunt. One item on their list: a picture of her hugging a complete stranger. Decked out in my characteristic gray and olive, sporting a week's worth of facial scruff, I imagine I looked the archetype of the "complete stranger." Mine is a cultivated anonymity that I use to avoid gratuitous social contact such as this.

A "complete stranger!" I've never received a greater compliment in my life! In honor of "Derrida," a little deconstruction, perhaps? Start with the adjective "complete," it means "entire," "absolute," "total." No room for pansy-ass relativism there! Now the noun, the celebutaunte in our little sex-tape: "stranger." Dictionary defines as "an outsider," and "syn...queer." From the Middle English, which was from the Old French estrangier. Because you know the Saxons didn't know strange, or queer for that matter, until they met a Capetian.

Nevertheless.

I hate hugs. Any sort of non-sexual physical touch makes me shrink 20% in volume as I try to minimize the surface area of contact. Cold as "the Night's Plutonian shore!" quoth Edgar Allan. Even if not in danger of being touched, I still require at least a foot an a half buffer between me and the "Other." I have my own personal NORAD in my head jealously guarding personal airspace. Here I was at Defcon 4.

But I am not a misanthropist. And even though there is no hormonal reason for it, I can never say no to beautiful women. So I relented. Playing defense, I opened my arms slightly and at least not did not resist the embrace. She nestled in, while I could have lived and died in the time it took for the flash.

Wasn't so bad really. On an subatomic level, I could tell myself, we weren't really touching. We are, afterall, mostly empty space. Rutherford could have shot alpha particles clear through the both of us.

I'm a bit surprised that my high school physics is coming back to me. Mostly I remember giggling with Priya in the back row with a naughty Tesla coil...