Glass Half Empty

Iain M Banks defines an Outside Context Problem as the kind of problem "most civilisations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." This, while a fascinating definition (and a rather good book) is not the kind of OCP I intend to talk about (briefly) tonight.

Mine's more mundane, but similar in the way it causes the brain to briefly stop processing while it figures out what's going on, and why it's wrong. It's meeting a celebrity at the supermarket checkout, it's taking a holiday to LongWayAwayLand and ending up going to the same bar as your neighbour. It's doing something in one place, setting and headspace, and having someone or something from quite another suddenly turn up. In this case, it was getting on the bus while decaffeinated and having a brief, somewhat strange conversation with a perfectly nice young woman you later (quite a lot later) recognise as someone who works in the Engineering cafe, and with whom you're perfectly comfortable chatting when you (a) are in the right place and (b) remember who she is.

I have no idea how universal these experiences are, so I figured I'd write about it and see if anyone has anything to say.

The Glass: empty | NaBloPoMo: 10/30