Some philosophical twaddle to end the work week

Have you ever had a day in which you haven't had a single meaningful conversation or interaction? Doesn't it make you feel a bit like your reality is, I don't know, off? To clarify, I'm not having a mental breakdown, nor am I sliding into a funk. It's just been a weird day.

Since gas prices have momentarily dipped to a more tolerable level, I decided that this was the right day for driving 220 miles round trip to IKEA for the CD towers I've been meaning to get. I could have ordered them online, but the shipping costs and the hassle of having them delivered, likely when I would not be home, nixed that idea. So I got into the car at 9 this morning, drove to north of Cincinnati, made the purchase, and returned home by 1:15.

I forgot my cell phone for the trip. This wasn't a big deal since I'm not bombarded with calls, especially urgent ones, but I considered turning around to get it because what if my car breaks down, I get stranded, etc. Never mind that I may have never used a mobile phone in one of the few times that I've had vehicle trouble on the road. I didn't have that safety blanket. After a few miles I shrugged it off and zoned out as time vanished during all of the driving in the rain.

I came home and assembled the CD towers. Then I elected to head downtown to snag a cheap ticket for tonight's Columbus Blue Jackets-New York Rangers game. I stood in line for a good twenty minutes, got dinner, went to the game, and came home. Through all of this, I didn't have one significant interaction.

I don't mean that my days are ordinarily filled with at least one rigorous intellectual discussion of Proust or soul-baring conversation. (For the record, I've never read Proust, but he sounds like a good hoity-toity author for the purposes of this illustration.) In fact, it's the regular, mundane interactions with people you know that, in a weird way, sort of reinforce your existence. Brief exchanges with cashiers and such, not so much. Maybe what I mean is that the content in the communication doesn't matter as much as the shared history between the communicators.

I will grant that I may not be making any sense or am getting too philosophical. (This is precisely why I wasn't going to write about this, but lack of blogging fodder forced my hand.) It's just been an odd feeling to experience a day and not have anyone around who supports that perception of reality (and to know the next two will be similar). This seems to be one of the central questions of the ABC TV series Life on Mars, so I'll blame watching it for having me thinking about the matter and potentially sounding like a lunatic on here.