No Cookies For You!

My husband is a very social person. He greets total strangers and occassionally will even engage them in active conversations. He makes friends with people he doesn’t know and has been known to INVITE PEOPLE TO OUR HOUSE, even if they are not related to us! This makes him, by my scale, somewhere between Mr. Rogers [who wants everyone to be his neighbor] and those people from We Are The World.

I am not so inclined. I tend not to believe that “it takes a village” but usually find the village very intrusive and would much rather avoid them whenever possible. I am Crazy Joe-that person who lives in the hut 25 miles away from the village and only goes to the village if there is an emergancy, and whom no one has seen in 15 years. I am part legend, part myth as far as my neighbors are concerned….I only exist because my husband tells them I do.

And he does. As soon as we get new neighbors my husband starts suggesting we “drop in and say hi”, which normally is recieved by much eye-rolling from me and results in him going alone to meet the new neighbors. This week it is WORSE because we have not only one but two new neighbors, which has caused the social part of my husbands brain to explode in excitement. There must have been an explosion in his brain, causing him brain damage, because that is the only way I can understand his suggestion that I make cookies so that we can go over there and meet both neighbors at the same time. [Which, I suppose, due to the layout of our apartment complex would be physically possible.]

To my husband, this is a social event. To me, it borders on lunacy. I would much rather observe them from a distance that prohibits conversation just long enough to gage whether or not they are serial killers or pervs. After that, I only go into the village for emergancies. I would have no problem going to my neighbors and telling them that their child [which I have keenly observed is theirs from a distance] is playing in a dangerous location, or if there were smoke billowing from their windows knocking to see if all was well and even calling 911 for them. However I do not want to know their name, their children’s names, their various pet’s names and species, what they fight with their husbands/wives/ex-husband/ex-wives/baby’s daddy about, how horrible their in-laws are, how much they hate their job, or that they are out of butter and would like some of mine. This is an excess of personal information sharing.

Cookies lead to the excess sharing of personal information.

That, and my oven has not been used in two months [because of paralysing morning sickness] and when I made mac-n-cheese today I almost burned my house down. That was just the stove top, I don’t want to know what will happen if I try to bake something….no, cookies are far too dangerous.

In fact, I am thinking of making code names for my family. I’ve been thinking about it anyway because I know that I will at some point have to reference them in some way on my blog and all I know about internet safety I learned from “To Catch A Predator”….which leads to paranoia about your personal information. From now on, my lovely husband will be The Man [he'll like that!] and our beautiful boy will get to keep Monkeypants. I, as always, will be Mommy M.

Oh and don’t worry all two of you who read my blog, my distain for sharing personal information and meeting new people extends only to people I have to meet in real life. I’m sure it means I have some sort of mental/emotional/social disease, but I have no problems sharing my stories with perfect strangers on the internet and being friendly back and forth. I am a proud and happy villager of the internet community….maybe it’s because I don’t have to bake you cookies.