Baby it's cold outside

We were virtually snowed in for a week here. The city has 16 snow plows and they were all busy keeping downtown spic and span, apparently. Of course we live on the side of a hill. At the first hint of snowflakes, the city sent a guy out to put up the “SNOW CLOSURE” signs. Working from home is fine except that I don’t have a separate work space at home. So, now every time I sit down at my computer at home I feel like I’m supposed to be working. I find myself checking my work email and messing around with work stuff in another window while I’m playing video games. I have to stop that because it’s very tiring after a while to be at work 24/7.

I have been thinking quite a bit lately about identity. We human beings have a tendency to prefer to be around other people that are “like me.” That’s an interesting concept though, because how we see ourselves defines what attracts us to others. If our personal defining characteristic is, just for the sake of argument, the color of our skin, then the only people we will think of as “like me” are other people with similarly colored skin. So, theoretically another person could share our interests and hobbies, like the same kinds of foods, have the same favorite color and drive the same kind of car and still be considered “not like me” just because their skin had significantly different amounts of melanin in it.

But what really interests me is figuring out what my defining characteristic(s) is/are. Gaging by the people I find myself attracted to, I think I must see myself as skeptical, cynical with an ironic sense of humor. I guess I don’t define myself primarily by the startling lack of pigmentation in my skin.