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It happens in the handshake. They say their name, you say yours, and somewhere between the sound leaving their mouth and reaching the part of your brain that retains things, it just evaporates. Gone. And you knew immediately — you felt it go — but by then you’d already said “great to meet you” and moved on and the window for asking again closed in about four seconds and you didn’t take it.

Now you’re in a conversation with a person whose name you do not know and will never comfortably be able to ask for again. The first five minutes are the window. After that it gets weird. After twenty minutes it’s impossible. After you’ve had lunch together it’s a secret you’ll carry to the grave or until a situation arises naturally where someone else says their name out loud and you can act like you knew the whole time.

The strategies people develop for this are elaborate and mostly doomed. You can introduce them to a third person and hope the third person asks for their name — but this requires having a third person available on demand. You can look for a name tag, a credit card, a phone screen. You can ask how they spell it, which only works for names that could plausibly have multiple spellings, and even then “how do you spell that” to someone named Dave is a choice. You can just never use their name at all and hope the relationship never requires it, which works until you have to introduce them to someone and stand there gesturing vaguely

while your eyes scream for help.

The real reason this happens, I think, is that introductions are cognitively overloaded moments. You’re managing your own name, your handshake, your eye contact, your opening line, your first impression, the read you’re doing on the other person — and somewhere in all that, their name just doesn’t get saved. It’s not rudeness. It’s a resource allocation problem. You were busy being a person and the name didn’t make the cut.

I’ve started just asking immediately. “I’m so sorry, I already lost it — what was your name again?” People are always fine with it. The terror of asking is so much larger than the actual event. But I still feel it every time. The name leaves and the panic arrives right behind it, right on schedule, every single time.

Someone pointed out Helvetica to me when I was about nineteen and ruined the entire built environment. It’s everywhere. Airport signs, government forms, the side of ambulances, the logo of your bank, the menu at the place you’ve been going to for years. I walk through cities now and I can’t stop reading the walls — not the words, the letterforms. The kerning. The weight. Something that used to be invisible is now the loudest thing in the room and I did not ask for this and I cannot give it back.

This happens with a lot of things but fonts are particularly brutal because there is no environment safe from them. Books, screens, packaging, tattoos, the side of a truck that cuts you off on the highway. Every surface that has ever had a human decision made about it has a font on it and now you see the decision every time. You see that someone chose this. You see whether they chose well.

The ones that bother me most are the ones that are almost right. Comic Sans gets a lot of grief and sure, fine, but at least it’s honest about what it is. The truly offensive fonts are the ones used by businesses that wanted to seem premium and picked something with thin strokes and wide spacing and called it a day. A slightly-off luxury font on a strip mall laser hair removal place. The gap between the aspiration and the execution sitting right there in the letterforms, visible to anyone who knows how to look, invisible to everyone else.

I’ve been told this makes me annoying at restaurants. I think that’s fair. There’s something insufferable about caring about a thing most people have correctly decided not to care about. But I also think there’s something genuinely interesting in the fact that every piece of type you’ve ever read was a choice — someone sat somewhere and picked this shape for these letters and decided it was right — and almost nobody ever thinks about that. The choices are everywhere and they’re invisible and they work on you anyway.

Anyway. If you don’t know what Futura looks like I’m genuinely a little jealous of you. You still have so much world left.

You pull into the parking lot and realize you cannot account for the last twelve minutes. Not in a alarming way — you weren’t asleep, you didn’t black out, nothing happened. You just weren’t there. Your hands were on the wheel, your eyes were on the road, your foot found the brake at every light. The car did everything correctly. You were just somewhere else entirely, thinking about something you can’t even remember now, and your body drove without you.

Scientists call it highway hypnosis and they say it’s normal, which is both reassuring and deeply unsettling. The brain automates familiar routes so thoroughly that conscious attention becomes optional. You’ve driven this road enough times that your nervous system has it memorized — every turn, every merge, every pothole you swerve around without deciding to. You are not needed for this. You can go think about something else. The car will handle it.

The thing that gets me is how often this happens on the drives that matter most. Not road trips, not new routes — those keep you present because they have to. It’s the drives you’ve done a thousand times. The commute. The route to your parents’ house. The way to the grocery store you’ve been going to for six years. The more meaningful the destination in your life, the more likely you are to arrive there with no idea how you got there.

There’s a version of this that happens with whole stretches of life too, not just drives. You look up and a year has passed and you were present for all of it technically but you couldn’t tell someone what happened in March. The routine automated itself. You were somewhere else. You arrived anyway.

I don’t think the lesson is to be more mindful or whatever. I think it’s just one of the stranger features of having a brain — that it will quietly take the wheel when it thinks it knows where you’re going, and usually it’s right, and occasionally you end up at your old apartment from three years ago because you were thinking too hard about something and your body went home on its own terms.

That one has happened to me twice. The apartment is a CVS now. My body still doesn’t know.

Admit it. Someone said something and your brain wasn’t fully online yet — you were half somewhere else, in a thought, in a noise — and the words landed but didn’t register. So you said “what?” And then, in the half second before they repeated themselves, the sentence assembled itself in your head from the pieces that had been sitting there waiting. By the time they started talking again you already knew. You nodded along anyway. You said “what” to a sentence you had already heard.

This happens to me constantly and I’ve never once admitted it in the moment. The social cost of saying “actually wait, I got it” mid-repeat feels too high. They’re already halfway through saying it again. You can’t stop them now. So you listen to it a second time, this time with full comprehension you already had, and do a performance of receiving new information. You react at the right moment. You nod. You say “oh yeah.” The system works.

What I find fascinating is that this means “what” often isn’t a question at all. It’s a stall. A reflex. A little social placeholder that says “I am not ready yet, give me a moment, I will catch up.” The brain heard the sound but needed a beat to parse it, and “what” is the sound you make during that beat. It’s punctuation, not a request.

The same thing happens with “huh?” and “sorry?” and the British “pardon?” which has always sounded to me like a word that buys slightly more time than “what” — more syllables, more ceremony, enough space for a small sentence to fully arrive. Different cultures have calibrated their stall words differently and I think that says something real about the pace of conversation each culture expects.

The truly skilled version of this is when you say “what” and then, before they can repeat themselves, you answer the question. You heard it. You just needed the “what” to buy enough time to formulate the response. So you ask them to repeat it and then preempt the repetition with the answer. This is either very impressive or mildly insane depending on how you look at it.

Anyway. What?

There’s a container back there. You know the one. It’s been there long enough that you’ve stopped really seeing it — it’s just part of the fridge now, like the shelf itself, like the light. You put it there with full intentions. You were going to eat it for lunch. You were going to be the kind of person who eats their leftovers for lunch, who doesn’t waste food, who has it together enough to plan one meal ahead. The container had faith in you. You have let the container down.

The specific tragedy of leftovers is that they represent optimism at the moment of cooking. You made too much on purpose. You were thinking about future you, doing something kind for them, setting them up for an easy tomorrow. Future you was supposed to be grateful. Instead future you opened the fridge, looked at the container, thought “not today,” and made a sandwich. Did this three more times. And now here we are.

The cruelest part is the uncertainty about when exactly it crossed the line. For the first two days it was fine, genuinely fine, you could have eaten it anytime. Day three was still probably okay. Day four you started to wonder. By day five the window had closed but you hadn’t thrown it out yet because throwing it out means admitting the window closed, means confronting the gap between who you were on cooking night and who you actually turned out to be the rest of the week.

So it stays. It stays until it becomes undeniable, until there’s a smell or a color that removes all ambiguity and makes the decision for you. In a weird way that’s almost a relief. The container finally lets you off the hook. You didn’t fail to eat the leftovers — you just waited until they became trash, which is a different thing, somehow.

I’ve started viewing the back of my fridge as a running autobiography. The things I bought with ambition and didn’t finish. The sauces I opened once. The half lemon wrapped in cling film that I was definitely going to use. It’s all in there, slowly becoming a record of the difference between the person I shop as and the person I actually am by Tuesday night.

Anyway. I’m ordering pizza tonight. The leftovers can wait.

Mine was something with the number 47 in it. I don’t remember choosing 47. I don’t have any particular relationship with 47. But at age eleven, faced with the demand to invent a name for myself on the internet, my brain produced that number with complete confidence and I typed it in without questioning it. Somewhere in a server that probably no longer exists, that username is still attached to a profile I made on a forum about a video game I don’t remember playing.

The first username is pure. Nobody had told you yet how to present yourself online. There was no personal brand, no awareness of how the name would look in a bio, no consideration of whether it was searchable or professional or consistent across platforms. You just needed a name and you picked one the way a kid picks a favorite color — immediately, instinctively, from some part of yourself that doesn’t explain its reasoning.

Some people went with their actual name and a number, which says something. Some went full fantasy — DragonSlayer, xXDarkness, some combination of their favorite character and a birth year that they now deeply regret being public. Some went weirdly abstract, like a word that meant something private to them at the time, a reference nobody else got, a little encrypted self-portrait. Those are the interesting ones.

What you named yourself when nobody was watching, before you understood that people would be watching, before you knew that the internet was a place where your choices followed you — that’s a time capsule. It’s a picture of who you were when you hadn’t yet learned to curate who you were. We spend a lot of the rest of our lives online trying to correct for it, sharpen it, make it legible. The first username just was.

I kind of miss that kid with the 47. He seemed very sure about it.

You know the distance. You’re walking through a door and there’s someone behind you, and they are just far enough away that holding it is technically a kindness but also requires them to slightly speed up to receive it. Not a jog.

Something worse than a jog — an apologetic power walk, a little shuffle-trot, accompanied by a face that is trying to communicate gratitude and embarrassment and “please don’t wait for me” all at once. You have put them in that position. You did this.

The calculus happens in about half a second and involves more variables than it should. How far away are they? How fast are they walking? Do they have their hands full? Are they elderly? Are they the kind of person who will jog slightly or the kind who will maintain pace and make you hold the door for a full uncomfortable six seconds? What is the social cost of letting it close versus the physical cost of the obligatory speedup you’re about to impose on a stranger?

And once you’ve committed — once you’ve made eye contact and grabbed the door and indicated that yes, you are holding this — there’s no exit. You’re in it. You stand there in the threshold with the door behind you and you smile in a way that is meant to say “take your time” but your face is also saying “please hurry” and both of you know it.

The “thank you” at the end is load-bearing. It has to land right. Too quiet and it feels ungrateful. Too enthusiastic and it’s weird given that you just held a door. Some people say nothing at all, which creates a rift that I personally carry for several minutes. You held the door. You stood there. You gave them a gift of minor inconvenience to yourself. A nod. Something. Anything.

The clean version — where someone is right behind you and you hold it and they catch it in one fluid motion and say thanks and it’s over in two seconds — is one of the small perfect transactions of public life. No awkwardness, no obligation, just two people briefly cooperating and moving on. It feels genuinely good when it works. Which is maybe why the broken version feels so bad by comparison.

The solution, I think, is to just let the door close if they’re more than eight feet away and accept that you’re a person who did that. Most people have already moved on. You’re the only one still thinking about it.

Every single one of them is at home. I know this before I even get to the checkout line. There’s a moment in every grocery trip — usually right around the pasta aisle — where I remember the bags exist, do a quick mental audit of where they are (home, car, no wait still home), and make the private decision to simply not think about it until it’s too late. Then it’s too late. Then I buy another one.

The bags accumulate like a symptom. I have the sturdy ones from Trader Joe’s, the flimsy ones from every other grocery store, the tote bags from bookshops, the ones with logos from companies I don’t remember interacting with, a canvas one that says something in French, two that came free with a magazine subscription I cancelled in 2021. None of them have ever been in my car at the same time as groceries.

The system fails at a very specific point: the transfer. You unpack the bags after shopping, put the food away, and then the bags just sit there on the counter looking used and slightly sad. At some point you move them to a chair. Then a drawer. Then a closet shelf that is specifically for bags now. Then you leave for the store without them. The cycle is airtight.

I’ve tried the thing where you put them straight back in the car after unpacking. It worked twice. On the third time I was in a hurry and now there are two bags in my car and thirty-eight in the house and I still bought plastic bags last week because I forgot the two were in the car.

What I find hard to accept is that this is apparently just who I am. I care about the environment in a general, sincere way. I think about the future. I compost sometimes. And yet there is a gap between the person I am at home, surrounded by bags, and the person I am at the grocery store, bagless and slightly guilty, that no amount of intention has been able to close.

I bought another bag today. It’s a good one. Very sturdy. It’s on my kitchen counter right now.

I’m always early. Not by choice exactly — it’s more of a compulsion, an anxiety that disguises itself as punctuality.

I’d rather sit alone in a parking lot for twelve minutes than walk into a room already in progress. So I arrive first, find a seat, and then just exist there while the place slowly fills in around me, a ghost at my own event.

The weird part is the in-between time. You’re there but the thing hasn’t started. Nobody to talk to yet, nothing to do, no role to play. You just sit and watch the door and do that thing where you take your phone out, look at it, put it away, take it out again thirty seconds later as if something might have changed. Nothing has changed. You’ve been there for four minutes.

There’s also a social tax that comes with being first. When the second person arrives, the burden of greeting them falls entirely on you. You’re the one with context — you’ve been watching the door, you saw them come in, you’re the welcoming committee of one. They can look around and ease in. You have to perform having been there.

Late people have it easier in this specific way. They walk into a room that’s already warm, already mid-sentence, already a thing. They slot in. Nobody’s watching the door anymore. The social structure has formed without them and they just join it. Being late is almost ergonomic if you can stomach the guilt, which a lot of people apparently can.

The people I find most interesting are the ones who are exactly on time. Not a minute early, not a minute late. That takes a kind of confidence I don’t have — a belief that the world will hold for you, that you don’t need to pre-arrive and survey the territory before committing to being present. They just show up when the thing starts, as if that’s a normal thing to do. Which I guess it is.

Anyway I’ve been sitting in this coffee shop for twenty minutes waiting for a friend who isn’t late yet.

There’s a version of your favorite album that you’ll never get back. The version where you were hearing it for the first time, in some specific context you didn’t know you were recording.

A drive, a summer, a particular year of your life that hadn’t revealed itself as a particular year yet. Music doesn’t really live in the speakers. It lives in whatever was happening when you heard it.

I have songs that are permanently about people who have nothing to do with the song. The artist wrote it about something completely unrelated to my life and now it belongs to a Tuesday in 2011 and a person I no longer talk to and a drive I can still feel in my chest if the intro hits right. The song didn’t do that. I did. But I can’t undo it.

What’s strange is how involuntary it is. You don’t choose which songs get loaded with meaning. Some of them you played hundreds of times on purpose, deliberately, and they stayed clean. Others got ambushed — background noise at a party, something a stranger was playing, a TV show you half-watched — and now they’re wrecked in the best or worst way. The ones you tried to make meaningful rarely are. The ones you weren’t paying attention to got in anyway.

There’s probably something in there about how memory actually works — that it’s not about effort or intention but about emotional state, about what was open at the time. A song that catches you when you’re raw or young or in the middle of something gets written into you differently than one you approach deliberately as a music appreciator with opinions.

I wonder sometimes what songs are getting stamped right now, today, without my noticing. Something playing in the background while I’m distracted, while I’m in the middle of something I don’t yet know matters. In a few years it’ll come on somewhere and I’ll know exactly where I was and I won’t be able to explain it to anyone.

That’s the thing about music. It’s always taking notes.