Why do we even try to understand each other?

Today I was eating ravioli florentine in my office and poking around the internet (for the record, exploding dog) when the receptionist walked in with some papers for me, and her attention was caught. I mean, exploding dog is pretty eye-catching, after all. And she asked, and I explained, and she sort of shook her head a little, not in a gosh-you're-such-a-freak way -- such looks are not entirely unknown to me -- more a gosh-how-can-I-possibly-process-all-this-information way, and said, "you know stuff on the internet I've never even seen." And setting aside for the moment the idea that exploding dog is an extremely popular website and lots of people know all about it, I realized that she was right, and that the reverse was true also, that there are more things in her internet than are dreamt of in mine. And that our lives are like that too, we are isolated like blown bubbles, floating around in our individual spaces, occasionally hooking up at some point but only touching along the one flat plane, still separate even when we're connected, and I got all weirded out and had to quietly chug a diet Coke and eat some carrot sticks and try to GET A GRIP.

I'm still kind of working on that.