Yesterday, several people at my new job walked up to me and introduced themselves. I thought maybe they mistook me for the person who received the giant bottle of Patron (it's sitting on my desk next to a box of wine...). Then the same thing happened today. Who are these people?! I don't have to work with them. What do they want from me?!

And then I realized...I'm not in LA anymore, Land of No Eye Contact and Parallel Universes.

I've worked at agencies for weeks without so much as a nod from the person sitting next to me, a few feet away, and yet, living in another world. I came to accept that that, in this Darwinian work culture, extraneous people were no more than possible objects of collision, like plants or walls. Names came way too later, after I'd gotten used to the nicknames (Goatee and Hip Rock T-Shirts Man), or after I'd been forced into a person's Circle of Immediate Reality, like people thrown in an elevator together. Everything else is a blur. There are exceptions, but generally speaking the first few weeks or months of working in a new place is a time of invisibility. You may be gone a few weeks later. You're expendable. You're in Corporate America.

But my commute takes me outside of LA and into the midwest (aka, Orange County).

Just for today, I'm realizing what a callous bitch I've become.