the lady in the car next to me appears to be giving herself a breast exam. strange.

i often glance at the cars next to me as i pull up to a traffic light. occasionally you'll get the nose picker. someone was telling me last week that they actually saw a guy pick it...and eat it. no, i know, it's really disgusting. but these people are out there. way out there. it's always weird getting caught looking. for the longest time, i would try to move my eyes, or act like i had actually been looking down at something on the passenger seat of my car. sometimes you do the turn to look, see that they are already looking, so you keep turning your head as if you actually meant to look at something behind you.

i stopped doing that about two years ago. i decided that it was much more fun to admit to your voyerism. let them know that you were checking to see if they were using the index or the middle finger to pick a prised one. it's toughest when it's a beautiful girl. i mean, i am definitely a coy one. but standing your ground creates this great rush. "yeah, i'm looking at you. does it freak you out?"

i'm not some guy out there trying to freak people out by staring at them in traffic. the habit actually goes way back to my early childhood. something about the switches in my brain. i often would catch myself staring at some inanimate object deep in random thought. when i snap to, i don't know how long i've been like that and most often i can't even remember what had me so entranced. we had several siamese cats when i was growing up. they are notorious for their ability to stare down their prey. their attention span is outstanding. i never lost a staring contest with my cat. once the cat even got freaked out and took off across the room with a loud "hiss."

there were times when friends thought i was catatonic or had lost consciousness and they would have to shake me out of a trance. it's not nearly that bad anymore. i've learned to recognize when i start to slip into some deep thought process that will distract me from my surroundings. this was a mandatory evolution i put upon myself when i realized that i could, on trips to houston from austin, drive up to 45 minutes with no recollection of how i had gotten to that point in my journey.

so now it's mostly just a hobby. something i do when i'm relaxed or tired. but at the lights, i'm just looking to see what's around me. who's around me actually. i look at the gentleman waiting to turn left and see my own vernon hardapple; some character that i've created to justify that man's existence in the car next to mine. he has his own world, completely separate from mine. or maybe he knows one of my friends' eighth grade teachers. i don't know. that's what's so amazing. i live in a town with one million, fifty-two thousand and three hundred other people, 50.9% of whom are women and 47.67% that are between the ages of 18 and 44. of this number, in the past two years, i've encountered personally roughly 3.5% of them at restaurants, stores, pumping gas, and waiting in line for the men's room at the xpo lounge. of all those people, i know the slightest details of the lives of maybe 40. everyone else is a totally different world that i know nothing about.
and that's just one town, in one state, in the us, which makes up something like 20% of the world's population. i like to think of statistics like these when i start thinking that i'll never find my perfect match. there's still alot of available women out there. it would just be a whole lot more convenient if she lived in the same town as me.

so i might look at the pretty girl across the intersection from me and wonder what her life has been like up to this point. what if we were to meet. would we have some common ground on which to build some sort of conversation? i would think that in most cases we would. and now, when i get caught looking at a cute girl in the jetta next to me, i smile. people really should smile more at strangers. maybe people like me wouldn't come across as freaks if everone just learned to smile more at their fellow man.

but i don't smile this time. it's dark out, and my tinted windows would really prevent her from recognizing any sort of expression on my face. which, right now, is one of slight disbelief. "what? is she? no. surely not. what's she doing with her....?" i really don't want to stare this time, so i turn away quickly. "i think that woman was feeling herself up," i think to myself. no. come on now, let's think about this logically. she was probably just doing a breast exam...in her car...at a traffic light?

that's a pretty stupid explaination.

well...do you have a better one?

maybe this is the beginning of one of those letters to playboy. maybe we should take another look.

i don't think we better had. pull forward a little more. there...that's good.

o, well, now i can't see at all.

that's the point. do you really think you're ready to reach that point in your life where you're writing letters to playboy that every man (and women) who reads it will say "certainly that couldn't have happened?"

i'm not sure. let me have another look.

no. the light's green. go.