Saturday, June 28, 2008

Image picking

I have an inkling there is some background process in our brain that is constantly rummaging through the endless stream of images collected via our peripheral vision. Like a thief picking through a poor college student's dorm room, it's trying to determine, out of a ton of meaningless chotchkies, what's even worth bringing home to the big boss.

toss....toss.....toss....WTF?!....toss...toss....hmmm, toss....toss...toss....bingo!

The other day, while walking past a food court, I spotted a middle-aged man and woman sitting and chatting. Just when this image was about to get chucked, the little thief-like-process noticed something interesting:

The woman was sporting a little round bandaid on the inside corner of her left eye.

Not super interesting, but interesting enough to put in a request for the collection of at least a one, quick, central vision snapshot (for further analysis, of course). I obliged, and as a result noticed something that piqued the big boss's curiosity:

Her conversation partner had the same kind of bandaid smack dab square in the middle of his forehead.

I started wondering. Did the injuries happen at the same time? Was there a sale on little round bandaids? Were the injuries similar, or were those the only kinds of bandaids they had on hand (ala "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.") Could it be that only one of them actually had an injury but was embarassed and the other, to make them feel better, placed a bandaid in an equally eye-catching location to say "here, now it won't just be you."

I hate that I'll never know. But I kind of love it, too.

1 comment:

Christian said...

I'm imagining that they had never met before. He had a small mole removed from his forehead. She was plucking her eyebrows when she lost her grip on the tweezers and almost dropped them in her eye.

He accidentally bumped into her in line at the pizza place, when he turned to look at a group of three children sprinting past at high speed. He apologized, but they were both so self-conscious about how they looked that they were both looking down at the ground. Each then though the other person had dropped something.

When each looked up, they were so happy to see someone else with a silly round band-aid that they both smiled. Seeing the other person smile, well, they though they were being hit on in a subtle way... so they had lunch together, and were getting to know one another.

It's kind of romantic, actually.

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