I have one of those faces that invite strangers (quite often really crazy ones) to talk and share things with me. I repeatedly  find myself in conversations that I shouldn’t be in while riding the subway. I’m always the one on the plane that ends up next to the chatty business man from Kansas city. I know way more information about random strangers than anyone should have to know.

When I lived downtown this started to become a serious problem, and in order to combat it I decided to become crazier than my public. I would frequently walk around Rittenhouse square having random conversations, some times quite heated ones with no one in particular. I found that, not only did people stop sharing stuff but they also stopped asking me for change – it was a win win. At one point I bought a pair of cheap ear buds ( I was much too poor to get the accompanying iPod) and I would walk around town pretending to listen to music but really just singing whatever popped into my head.

But, it’s been five years since we bought our house and moved to a neighborhood. I try hard to curb my crazy here and I have stopped talking out loud to myself – well for the most part. The point is I’m out of practice because this past Friday my  husband and I had a rare opportunity to go out on date night, it doesn’t happen often so we decided to head downtown and make a night out of it. In an effort to spice things we decided to go somewhere new and different, you know instead of for wings at Moriartie’s.

We ended up at a great new sushi place, well I assume it was new, it wasn’t there five years ago. Sitting at the sushi bar trying to decipher the menu the guy next to me leans over and says, “you look confused is this your first time?”Shoot I thought, here we go again… and thus ensued a conversation with John and his partner Mark who insisted we skip the soup, have a salad and get exactly what they had for dinner. Five years ago I would have done something to deter their unwanted suggestions – you know like meowing like a cat or yelling “honey badger don’t give a shit!” but I didn’t. I listened to how much they loved this restaurant and let them place our entire dinner order for us.

After the best freaking sushi we’ve had in a long long time – Jason looks over at me and says, “I’m so glad you still got it.”

Duh.