Yesterday evening, while walking home from my volunteer job (Who me? Volunteer? Actually, yes. With children! Sort of.) and expending all my attention and energy into crafting a flawlessly clever text to a friend who had suffered a moderate-but-not-legitimately-tragic misfortune, a man made eye contact (as best he could, given that I was glued to my phone's 1" by 2.5" screen) and said "Excuse me." Then he said it again, so I looked up because obviously he was talking to me. Obviously, because my neighborhood is pretty much a ghost town after dark (but in the safe-feeling way, like my childhood cul-de-sac was empty after dinner time), and also obviously because strangers love to stop me on the street and ask bizarrely specific directions to places they aren't even close to. I have no idea why I am the target for this phenomenon.

So I look up and smile, because he's an older man who obviously needs my direction-giving services. And then he says, again, "Excuse me," and then "I was wondering if there's any place around here that sells pussy?"

Which, among other things, indicated that he really was lost because (especially given the recent reduction in corporate expense accounts and the number of folks who have them), my neighborhood doesn't even have a place that sells pizza after 10:30pm.