I had a fun two-hour long adventure at the bank today that culminated, oddly enough, in my bank teller calling up my health insurance company on the phone to change the account information they had on file for me while I sat across from him with my legs splayed out in a pose of defiance, feeling like he was my mother.

Sometimes I find myself absentmindedly scratching my nose or my cheek or my forehead, which is innocuous enough, but then someone comes out to shake my hand and suddenly I view myself completely differently: did I look like I was picking my nose or picking a zit? Should I shake his hand? Which is ruder, shaking someone's hand after you look like you've been picking your nose, even if you haven't been, or refusing a handshake that someone is offering, even if to your now warped mind it looks like they're offering it grudgingly?

This is how my meeting with the bank teller began, and it turned out I had a series of impossible questions that flummoxed him and made him stutter out conflicting answers paired with quick episodes of popping around the corner to ask questions of other tellers, and when he was telling me something, he would lean forward and steeple his index fingers and look deeply into my face: I am trustworthy. I am trustworthy. Well, no, you are creepy.

Well, no, he was nervous, as I found out later when, you know how sometimes being in a frustrating, impossible situation with a stranger brings the two of you closer? Especially when it involves corporate idiocy and bureacratic mumbo-jumbo to grumble about together? Especially if, over the course of this frustrating situation, someone's Windows XP crashes/gives the blue screen of death/gives incomprehensible error messages?

Here is the human condition: the human condition is being made to feel powerless by machines we have created and choose to use.

As it got more and more complicated and ridiculous, we caught each other grinning tiny grins of amazement. He knew that I was thinking that he was incompetent at first and instead of getting more nervous, he said, "I was like, 'she's thinking that I don't know what I'm doing and it's just...'"

That, saying it, always works better than pretending we can't read body language. Now you've said it, and I can say that I was thinking that, but I'm not thinking it anymore. Let's always talk about what is happening right now, as we talk about it (what's happening right now, as we talk about it, what's happening...). Right now I am typing in a brown box with a black rubber band around my wrist thinking that this entry has descended into madness for my five or so readers. I am thinking that it sounds like I am trying to make a banal event in my day into something deep and meaningful, which was not my intent, except to make the blanket statement that sometimes frustrating situations make temporary friends out of strangers, even initially hostile strangers, but I already said that, didn't I? I was also trying to say that I like it when people acknowledge the underlying obviousness in conversations that are (up until that point) pregnant with obvious awkwardness. Let's do that from now on, okay?

I'll start: this is getting awkward.