An odd thing happened to me today.
After electronics lab, I went to get some coffee at the little cafe in the new engineering building on campus. As I was standing in line, a girl came up to me, and asked if this was the line. I said yes, unfortunately, and being lunch time, there was a bit of a rush. She said she just needed some coffee, and I agreed that this was a an important goal.
She was a pretty girl, freshman-ish, almost completely forgettable, interchangeable with 3/4 of the female undergraduate population, but for two things: she had bright blue eyes and wore a shirt rather lower than you normally see on such a cold day. She shivered a bit, as if to underline the exposure of bare skin.
Then the odd thing happened. Quite out of the blue, she made some comment about the class she had finished with, and asked me if I was just out of class too. Oblivious to the natural order of things, she was proceeding to engage me in conversation. This is the first time I can remember, in my entire long and storied career at OSU, that someone on campus has actively pursued a social conversation with me that wasn’t directly related to some assignment we had in common. I am not sure why this is so.
I was a bit taken aback, and as I tried to find my footing in this disorienting turn of affairs, I made some feeble conversational efforts in return. She seemed quite nice, cheery and even vaguely interested in my obviously alien schedule of physics classes. We doctored our coffees with sugar and cream together. Unsure of the proper ettiquette, and still unbalanced by the whole situation, I bade her good day and took my leave, feeling like I was missing something important.
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