We had our house dinner, for which I did not prepare a second cake, and followed it up with a game of Balderdash. For those who aren't familiar, this game involves making up definitions/descriptions for a particular obscure word/date/movie/etc. that is listed on a Balderdash card and trying to pick out the correct definition from amongst the definitions made up by your opponents. If some sucker picks your definition as the real one, you get a point.

There is nobody more fun to play Balderdash with than Aaron, who provided the following definitions for us on Friday:

"Medical term for a Taco Bell induced catotonic state."

"Frank Wills: Now known as Francesca No-Willy, the first successful male-to-female transexual ... and, I might add, what a rack."

"Roy Scherer: Who cares who the fuck he is, but when you say his last name use a throaty voice, stick your tongue in your cheek, flip your hair, and scream, 'WOOOO!!'"

What I think there really ought to be a word for is that embarrassing situation where you're caught absentmindedly staring at a stranger. This happens to me all the time. My mind wanders and, when I snap to it, I suddenly realize that I've been making extended eye-contact with some lady who is now extremely uncomfortable and asking her waitress if she can switch tables. What's worse is when my mind wanders to a topic that compels me to look around for something specific. For instance, last week on the Path Train, I, for some odd reason, started thinking back to the day in high school biology when Mrs. Hoffman used earlobe shape as an example in her lesson about dominant and recessive genes. I started glancing at the earlobes of the people around me and then tried to remember what my own earlobes look like. Cut to five minutes later, when I suddenly snap out of my earlobe fixation to realize that there are at least three commuters looking worriedly in my direction. They don't know that I'm just innocently trying to recall some basic science principles; they only know that some crazy lady has been staring at them while feeling up her own earlobes. I've made them uncomfortable.

What I would love to do in these situations is just shout out one or two words to describe what was actually going on in my head, so as to alleviate their fears and, at the same time, defend myself against their silent accusations of weirdness. But there isn't a verb or a noun for this kind of behavior, so I always end up either (a) keeping my mouth shut and letting people think I'm a weirdo or (b) blurting out something like, "Oh, gosh, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to stare at you. I was just looking at your earlobes." Then two people get off the train at the next stop while the third licks his lips and stares at me for the entire rest of my trip, making ME uncomfortable. I guess what goes around, comes around.