People,

There's a lot you assume about a person just by looking at them. Today on the T I was standing across from a well dressed, albeit slightly disheveled, middle-aged guy with a guitar. He had his guitar in a leather gig bag that had obviously seen some use and his face was lined enough that you could tell he'd done some hard living at one point or another. Altogether, my impression was that this was a reformed wildman who had established a solid middle class life but still valued art and refused to completely settle down. In other words, a guy I'd probably get along with.

Then he threw the whole impression to hell. I noticed that he kept looking at his hands and finally realized that he had small handwritten squares of paper in them. He kept looking at them and sorting through them and eventually started to look pretty agitated. Who reads a bunch of tiny notes to themselves on the train? Creepy, right? Anyway, I quickly revised my opinion and decided that this dude was a somehow well put together homeless crazy and that he had tasted human blood before.

I was happy with this impression until he dropped one of his notes to Satan and I saw that it was actually a chess puzzle from the paper. Just as quickly my opinion reverted back to "settled down wildman" and I became embarrassed by my presumption.

Of course this all leads to the larger question of what it says about me that all I do on the train is stand in judgment of other people. Send your thoughts on the matter to joe@fooledbyapril.com.