Do We Know Each Other?

 

The houseguest we have over now and then is visiting again, and she has major FOMO, or Fear Of Missing Out, as all dogs do. To be fair, so do lots of humans (Exhibit #1 is myself), but with humans, FOMO is about fun, or what they call craic in Irish (pronounced "crack.") I truly believe with dogs their FOMO is all about food. "You're getting up? You're going into another room? You're going to eat something without me, aren't you? I knew it!!" Though dogs like craic (and weirdly, so does spellcheck), so maybe they also are afraid fun will be had behind their backs. On some level, we aren't that different than dogs, at least simple people like me. We like food, and we like fun, and we hate to miss out on either.

I have this weird problem where lots of people look familiar, but most of the time when I ask a random stranger if we know each other, they say I don't look familiar to them. One time a woman did agree that I looked familiar, and I even knew her first name, but we never did figure out how we knew each other. I have learned to stop asking random strangers if we know each other, but last summer I was introduced to a young couple, and the man said we had already met. I admitted that I didn't remember that, but I did remember meeting his girlfriend. She took real umbrage at that and insisted we had never met before, so I tried to defuse the situation by asking how they had met, but she was hostile about that question too, so I just gave up and hoped I never had to see her again. And I haven't, but not long ago I saw one of the grad students in our department, whom I hadn't seen since before COVID started, and I realized that they looked very similar, so that was who I was thinking of. Oddly, this grad student is also a prickly person, so I tend to avoid her too. Hey - maybe they secretly ARE the same annoying person! After all, I have never seen them in the same place at the same time...

Famous Hat