Why is he wearing sunglasses?

You know it's been raining for a long time when the sun hurts your eyes when it occasionally peeks out from behind the clouds for a couple of minutes.

It's been raining for a long time.

So why is that guy wearing sun glasses?

The chance of anything poking out from behind the clouds today is slim to none. The sky is a uniform shade of light grey - flood-fill grey if you are familiar with image software. That guy will not be attacked by any stray beams of light today.

He's looking around at everything and everyone. Looking everyone in the eye, it seems. So he's not blind. He's not trying to avoid being noticed. He's actually looking like he wants to be noticed. That's rather odd.

It seems like a good day to smoke some herbs, judging from the number of clouds of herb smoke I have gone through today on the sidewalks. That's an odd thing when it seems only elderly women are walking around out there... OK ladies, who has the pot?

So is the guy in the sunglasses having an interesting trip? Is that the reason for the sunglasses and the staring into stranger's eyes? So if he's walking quickly around all the streets smoking pot, does that qualify as exercise? Does the pot help make the flood-fill grey less depressing, more varied and interesting? Do dark sunglasses that make everything even darker help?

I think I need to run back to my home and sit by my full-spectrum light lamp. This is just all too odd.

Who is that?

Sometimes a situation or something I've read starts me thinking about characters for a story. This is one of them.

The Food Lurker

A magazine article I just read had suggestions for starting up conversations at a business conference. The first suggestion was to hang out around the food table and talk about the food as a conversation starter. There were suggestions on what to talk about after a conversation was started - asking what company the other person worked for, or asking what their job in the company was, and other ideas, but it made me shiver to think of someone who missed the part about having other things to say after the food conversation was over.

A character like this would probably be an introvert, a technical guy who works with computers and can be very succinct when instant messaging with the people he works with, but stumbles when talking on the phone or in person with them. He is probably in his 20s and hasn't managed to find a life partner yet - due in part to his lack of confidence when speaking - but has many friends that he instant messages with for hours on non-business topics.

What drove the food lurker to the business conference? Was he forced to go by a well-meaning boss that wanted him to get to know more people? Does he himself want to increase the number of people he knows? Does he want to learn something from the formal sessions? I think it may be a combination of all of these things. Unfortunately, he may succeed in learning something from the formal sessions (I've been to a lot of business conferences, and I know learning things from them does happen, but honestly, it's rare) but will he succeed in getting to know more people?

Now where does this story go?