Overthunk

Last night*, I went to the gun store. It's newish, having appeared in the local shopping center next to the Target about six months ago. I'd been curious about it, but didn't have a reason to go, really. I own an inherited firearm, a cheap, crappy, tiny .22 with a pink plastic-inlaid handle that my mama passed on to me when she passed onto the next plane. I wasn't raised with guns, really, unless you count the fact that about the time I was 10 or 11 years old, my mother must've visited one of the pawn shops that weren't too far from my childhood home, and purchased a gun. Then another. And a third. I'm not sure why she felt she needed this diminutive arsenal, except that she was rather paranoid. (That's what comes of reading forests' worth of true crime pulp.) She drove around, for probably the last 25 years of her life, with a very likely loaded gun under the seat of her taupe Toyota Camry. Any attempt by me to convince her that this was dangerous f

Alright, I know primarily entertainment-oriented, free internet dating sites don't stand alongside Harvard and Yale as strongholds of hard-hitting, accurate, valid research, but a few weeks back OkCupid, that fun repository of all sorts of personal information that I hope they aren't selling to The Man for parts, had an ad running: "Don't Date a Tweeter!" Being a member of this much-maligned collective, I found my short-lived attention piqued. Why, pray tell?  Well, as it happens, according to this article : "Just as with their 140-character musings, Twitter users seem to end up in relationships that are bite-size. 'Twitter users have shorter relationships,' says Christian Rudder, the site's cofounder and editorial director. 'How much shorter? Maybe not a lot... but the difference is measurable and consistent.' " So, let's take a quick look at this with a sampling of nice, round ages. Approximating as close to exactly as poss