Ravings of a Textual Deviant

One evening, Ed and I were hanging around the house, trying to decide what to have for dinner. “What do you want?” I asked. It seemed a safe enough question at the time. “I don’t know,” Ed replied.

“Well, what sounds good?” Sometimes Ed responds well to this prompt, but not that night. “Nothing in particular,” was his answer. So, I fell back to my own method of making this particular decision. “Let’s open the fridge and stare at what’s in it until something looks good,” I suggested.

“That won’t work,” Ed asserted. This threw me–what does he mean it won’t work? Staring into the fridge (or, alternately, the pantry) always works for me. I had to know, “Why not?”

“Because you’re a gatherer,” Ed told me. “You can visually take inventory of the entire contents of the fridge in a couple of seconds. I’m a hunter–I’m not going to see anything that’s not moving.”

This isn’t the first time Ed has used his own particular interpretation of evolutionary pyschology to explain his behavior. One morning, during the time when we were packing up to move from the Apartment of Avocado Doom into our house, Ed stopped for a few moments and stared at a pile of stuff waiting to be boxed up. He blinked a few times and kept looking at it.

“I’m going to pack that today,” I told him. “I have a box for it and everything.”

Slowly, his gaze settled on me. “It’s too early for me to be thinking about that,” he said. “I’m just trying to figure out if it’s food or dangerous.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2003 at 11:25 am and is filed under Hunters and Gatherers, The Ed Files. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.