I wasn't THAT offended...

A couple weekends ago Meg and I were laughing in her living room over the absurdities of coworkers.

"...and she got STUCK in the bathroom!" I said.

Doubled over on the leather furniture, we gasped for air and she began telling me the latest horror story about her new supervisor, a man who appears to think that in the workplace a woman's job, regardless of her title, is to make his copies and clean his coffeepot.

"I hate that," I said. "You know what, he offends me."

"Oo, that's a new one," she said. (I liberally hate things, but am rarely declaratorily offended by them.) "Watch, he'll have a heart attack or something."

So my curse was born. Our conversation moved from coworkers to charitable donations contributed to local nonprofits by local businesses, and we swapped stories of the worst ones. We found we shared a resentment toward a certain pizza parlor who declined simple donations to nonprofit events. (It's perfectly within their right to do so, of course, but these particular folks were unnecessarily rude about it.)

"Yeah, they were horrible when I worked at the Center," I said. "You know what, that place offends me too."

So a couple of weeks passed, and I forgot about being offended, and wasn't offended by anything further, except a house down the road from Meg and Phillip which looks like the Wicked Witch of the East dropped the top half of a house on the ground and maliciously painted it purple.

Then yesterday as Meg and I rode with Josie into Mishawaka to visit the honorable Mssrs. Barnes and Noble, we pulled up at a stoplight and she gasped at the wreckage of a restaurant across the road.

"The pizza parlor burned down?" she said.

"Yeah, it was on the news a week ago or something," I said. "Total loss."

She turned to me. "Sarah..."

"Wait," I said. "Was that the same place I said offended me the other weekend?"

"Yes..." she said faintly.

We both stared at the blackened beams.

"Um," I said. "And you know, it was a weirdly specific fire." I pointed to the restaurant next to it, its walls not six feet from those of the former building. "The only thing that burned was the pizza parlor; that one just had some smoke smells inside. They commented on it on the news."

The light changed and we turned left and drove slowly past it.

"I wasn't that offended," I said.

"You scare me," she said.

We pulled silently into the Barnes and Noble parking lot, me hoping fervently that her boss wouldn't die and the purple house would remain standing.

As Meg shut off the engine and went to open her door, she turned to me and said, "Did I ever mention that I really, really like you?"

"Ha," I said.