Single-Serving Friend

Narrator: Everywhere I travel, tiny life. Single-serving sugar, single-serving cream, single pat of butter. The microwave Cordon Bleu hobby kit. Shampoo-conditioner combos, sample-packaged mouthwash, tiny bars of soap. The people I meet on each flight? They're single-serving friends.

This is one of my favorites scenes in Fight Club (which is, oddly enough, one of my favorite movies...) and I experienced this today. Yesterday, on my way to meet Adrian for coffee (finally!), I discovered that my car battery was dead as a doornail. This was NOT what I needed on my last two and a half days at home, especially with everything else that was going on. This morning, I called AAA and they came over to jump my car and then install a new battery. The driver didn't have a new battery so we had to wait fifteen minutes or so to have one delivered. This is where things got awkward. He was an incredibly nice guy but he was a "single-serving friend". We exhausted discussion about the car and then just awkward silence. What do I say to him? What do we talk about? The weather? No one wants to talk about the weather. Do I ask him about himself or that borderline on creepy. Do I talk about myself? No, nobody wants to hear about me. Sports is always an option but there so many sports out there and he really didn't seem like a baseball or soccer guy. So do we talk about the NBA or NFL lockout? Yeah, like I know anything about those subjects. So we just sit there, two single-serving friends, in awkward silence.

It is going to be a weird day, I can already feel it.