Yesterday, I wrote a blog post while people were talking to me. I may or may not have written in complete sentences, but I can’t say because people are currently talking to me and some of them are cats. You may have differences of opinion with cats but on matters of grammar and punctuation, cats will not engage in disputes. They are right and you are made of meat.

This morning, I cross-posted yesterday’s sputtering hodge-podge to Brilliant@breakfast when I noticed the other writers have real lives and I don’t. Anyhoo, thing is I was at work at the time and if you can believe it people were talking to me about work and personal disasters and glaring at me because my bicycle was parked in the reading room and did anyone know where Tabby’s student worker went? Naturally, my syntax did not improve as I tacked on an ending that did not in any way show up the earlier writing. I am having this problem often these days: people are talking to me. What the hell am I doing wrong?

Yesterday, one of my co-workers casually remarked that Borders was going out of business so I could pick up a pile of books for my adorable grandchildren. This reminded me that the unnamed university’s anti-hunger project will call for presents for children and Toys For Tots will be asking in just a few months for unwrapped gifts, but these requests will come at a time when money will be tight. I don’t have children in school, but back-to-school sales will start in a matter of minutes. It dawned on me that if the anti-hunger project asked people to plan ahead and buy one sale item now for the project’s future maybe it would be easier to collect stuff later. So I called up the anti-hunger project’s new leader and expressed the unusual opinion that I had a wild idea. Get this: she called me back and talked for about half an hour straight. I’m not sure she took more than two or three breaths.

Maybe it was stupid of me, but I volunteered to put up posters and keep track of the unnamed university’s main library’s food collection bin. Today, I discovered the reason food hasn’t been collected from the bin all summer is that the two people who used to drag the bin down the street both retired. With a sinking feeling about the dozens of other donation boxes all over campus, I reported this to the project leader. You will not be surprised to hear that she did not answer me. I was, as you might suspect, surprised by the quiet.