What I said in my outside voice: “Hi, good to see you again.”

What I said inside my head: “Look me in the eye, not the lids”, while the woman, an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in some time, scrutinized the space between my pupils and brows…focused on my eyelids while she blathered peppy inane.

Sort of like I was draped like a Muslim woman, so that that was all of my face she would see.

Perhaps I had a speck of mascara clumped in the inner corner, or perhaps she was searching for evidence of a bleph..ectomy, however the heck you spell, the eyelid reduction job.

A bizarre incursion into my personal space, a fraudulently ridiculous foray to gain rapport – or the upper-hand? Who can figure such weirdness out?

I’ve worked with adults, teens, and toddlers ‘in the spectrum’, niggling direct eye contact from them as a foundation of good communication. While many looked at my lips, nose, or toward one of my ears, this conversational eye gaze was new to me. And seemed more blatantly weird. The efforts of this in the spectrum were fleetingly brief; hers was intense and prolonged, scanning like the search light in a hovering police helicopter.

Since she was merely an acquaintance who, in her rude scrutiny would never become a friend, I wouldn’t answer her unsubtle query, which hovered like one of the new drones near our heads.

And, I won’t tell you either, though you are my Constant Reader Friend?

“Age before Beauty” or “Beauty before Age”. Did you play that social game as a ‘tween?

Do you play plastic surgery scan games now, Ms. or Mr.Reader of a Certain Age, playing the same game, though with different stakes, now?

New Year 2015 resolution, please: be my friend, talk with me, and look me in the eye. Don’t waste your time searching for gossip in my life.