It’s after four in the afternoon of my snow day, and I’m getting cabin fever. The walls are closing in around me. I spent the past ten minutes talking to sock puppets. Okay, that’s all a lie. I went to town to buy ingredients to make meatloaf. I feels it’s the perfect meal for a cold winter’s night, and frankly I’m sick of chili.

But while I sat here playing on my computer, scrolling through a few introvert-oriented Facebook pages, I had a thought. I’m an introvert. The thought of spending time with people exhausts me. I take my lunches alone when I’m at work, just so I can recuperate and face another half day dealing with customers and co-workers. That’s one reason writing appeals to me. It’s largely a solitary activity.

Here’s what I was thinking. I live in a small town of less than a thousand, where everyone pretty much knows everyone else, if not by name at least by appearance. I want to move to a large metropolitan city of well over a million. On the face of it, that sounds silly. One thousand is a lot less than one million+ people, why would I want to make that move?

Simple. It’s easy to be alone in a crowd where no one knows me. I can get lost in the crowd and mind my business. I’m a lot less likely to run into people I know and would rather avoid than I would in a much smaller town. What’s worse, I run into people here that recognize me, greet me by name, and I have no idea who they are. It’s embarrassing.

Just a cabin-fever induced thought from the mind of a man who’s about to make meatloaf. And mashed potatoes. I’m not a savage.