Yesterday lunch: a peeve thwarted and a vaguely related theory. Beware of a sharp turn and an abrupt stop.

I bought some strawberry yogurt at Whole Foods to have for breakfasts. I got some organic, some fat free and some regular so I could compare and see what kind I'd like for future breakfast purchases. Yesterday morning, on the drive to work, Jill had one of my yogurts. Which is fine. Food is food, and our policy is that any food in the house is for anyone in the house, resident or no. And she even asked, which she didn't even have to do. So that's cool.

On the drive over to pick up Adam, the smell of yogurt filled the van as Jill stripped the foil lid off most of the way (so it wouldn't fall off and she didn't have to throw it away separately (a very responsible and considerate on-the-go packaging maintenance procedure, says I)) and stirred the lurking strawberry puree off of the bottom.

Now, I didn't say anything at the time, it would have been ridiculous and rude (this is going to sound a little absurd) but that kind of thing really bothers me. Not the eating in the car, or the smell of yogurt. I'm cool with that. It's the packaging. I don't have a lot of neuroses (the sound of people blowing their nose is one), but half-unwrapped food is probably my number one irrational pet peeve.

There is little in the world that grates on my nerves more than a cheeseburger half-wrapped in paper, or a popsicle with the wrapper pulled down, or a Chipotle burrito with the foil stripped around to show half of the thing. Or a yogurt's foil lid incompletely removed.

I know, I know. These eating techniques reduce the mess. And I'm a person the frequently finds mustard on my shirt. So you'd think I'd adhere to a culinary modus operendi including packaging-come-barrier, but no. I want my food out of its wrapper (a word I hate for some reason). I want my burrito laying on the foil not in it, my burger fully naked in my hands, and my popsicle accompanied on its journey to my mouth only by a wooden stick. I even pull the little paper cylinder off of ice cream cones.

Maybe it's a bizarre fear of biting into paper. Maybe it's that I don't like to take any unnecessary breaks from chowing down. Maybe I'm just weird. But I always, always, fully unwrap my food before I eat it. That sometimes means messy hands and more napkins (I also don't like used napkins, or especially Kleenexes, by the way). But I'm more willing to have half of the burrito innards in my hand than keep that thing under wraps. Ketchup, mustard and onions on my fingers? Sure, just as long as there's no wax paper on it when I'm eating.

So when yesterday, a beautiful day, even with the clouds, maybe because of the clouds, a great day for walking, on the 20 minute stroll down to Sonic for lunch, the food took so long to prepare that when it finally it came, I was forced to take burger in hand, water in the other, book in back pocket (Irresistible Revolution still) and start my trek back, I completely unwrapped my burger, and ate it as I walked. Dripping a wee bit o' mustard down my shirt in the process, as you might expect.

It's a funny thing, walking down 119th street from Renner (ish) to Ridgeview. They have nice, wide sidewalks, but the entire area is very clearly a non-pedestrian zone. I feel iconoclastic. I'm breaking the taboo. Lookit me, lookit me, I'm walking, I think. Same with the burger yesterday. Lookit me, lookit me, I'm walking with a burger and a cup with a straw. Ain't I crazy and stuff. Lookit.

That sort of desire for other people to see me walking is part of that whole interpersonal relationship theory that Don Miller writes about in the first third of Searching for God Knows What. How once upon a time people got continual exterior validation from God, and now we don't, due to that whole fall of man business, so we're always looking for external validation from somebody.

Even introverts are always looking for someone outside of ourselves to tell them who they are. When your mom or your teachers tell you not to care what other people think, they're kind of asking you to go against the very nature of being a person. Not that it's a good thing, per se, to always be concerned with what other people are thinking; it's just sort of who we are as people

I think the theory explains a lot of human behavior. That is, people are always trying to get someone else to validate their identity, to tell them that they're loved. They then act accordingly, to try to get someone else to tell them these things. It's why kids act up in school, and people get into bad relationships, and people try to be famous, why people tell jokes.

It's even part of why I write this blog.