Hermitize — A Sibling Conversation

So, I was talking to my sister. Generally speaking, we were complaining to each other about our jobs. During the course of the conversation, I stated that I wanted to retire and become a hermit, which led to the creation of several new words. First was “hermitize,” meaning “to become a hermit,” and I explained to my sister that I was already taking steps down this path.

My sister was like, “No duh, that’s why you live in the middle of the woods. And here I thought you were still trying to channel that Madness song about our house.”

I explained to her that no, I was simply experiencing “hermitization,” a natural process which occurs when one grows weary of the nonsense that seems to define modern living. My sister suggested I was full of it, thinking that I was simply spreading some of what I’d stepped in earlier in the day before heading to my job.

This brought up the whole traumatic (traumatic because it’s so hard to do each day) issue of “dehermitizing” — leaving your hermit hole for any length of time, which for me involves getting up five days a week, doing a few chores around the house, and then driving about 30 miles to a job that doesn’t fell like it accomplishes much expect paying the onerous taxes and insurances that have become so ubiquitous. My sister suggested that maybe I’d been spending too much time studying the theory of de-evolution. To which I informed her that I was through being cool, and, after all, it was a beautiful world we lived in. She just shook her head, sighed, and stopped talking to me. I tried to explain, but we both had work duties that needed attention.