Pretending it's a whiz kid's world

It is completely unsurprising that I spent 20 minutes or so after work sitting around a diner, having breakfast with a couple of coworkers. Several of us get together pretty frequently at the same diner to exchange gossip, compare notes, and kvetch about how pointless it is to even learn the names of new staff, these days, until they've worked a program for at least a month.

This morning I was sitting, picking at a bowl of oatmeal, facing a big window. I was bathed in cold sunlight, trying to ignore an irritating head cold that is likely to turn into a full blown sinus infection at some point in the near future. This older guy was talking about a kid who used to horde spoons, who had, in fact, an entire bureau drawer full of spoons one day when staff searched his room. The other guy at the table was on deck with his own anecdote that he was itching to tell, and I was in the hole, but not really paying very close attention. Say that I was half paying attention. The other half of my brain had a bit of Teenage Wildlife stuck on repeat, and was worrying about whether Bowie was being anti-Semitic when he called Gary Numan a "broken nosed mogul."

Then all at once there was silence and both my friends were looking at me expectantly. From where I was sitting, I could see several huge trees with uniformly yellow leaves. All the leaves on the ground out front that I could see were also yellow, and a couple of trees along the road outside also looked yellow. It reminded me of that scene in Love and Death where Woody Allen has his character, who has spent his entire life in rural Russia, describe the afterlife as something like "Wheat. Lots of wheat. Really really tremendous amounts of wheat."

It was pretty clear I was expected to say something, so I mumbled "Yellow. Such a yellow fall. Yellower than I can remember." Now this is a terrible thing to say when people are trying to have a conversation. You can't really affirm or deny yellow. You can't support yellow nor dissent from yellow. You can't compare this yellow to other shades of yellow you've seen....at least not in any practical sense that would keep the conversation moving forward. It's pretty much a conversation killer.

The old guy squinted at me and said "What'd you say?"

"I said 'Yellow'."

"Oh yeah? Well I say you're yellow, pardner."