^{Has life gotten boring?}

<sup>"I’ve felt like everyone and everything that I know has been really superficial and shallow before," I said. "It comes and goes in phases, though, and I haven't really felt like that in a long time." I realized that I stopped feeling that way when she came into my life, because it was almost as if a new substance and sense of reality had been applied to everything that I knew, and everything that I saw was suddenly full of more... depth, texture; like a deeper gloss coat had been applied to a finer grain of wood, when the sunlight strikes the surface in such a way that it looks golden, when previously there had only been pressboard and plastic.

"I felt like that every day. I’d wake up and go to work in a cubicle after slamming a couple of cups of coffee. I’d spend as much time in the car as I did sleeping, and the highlight of my day was prime time television. Sure, I had a great dental and medical plan, and I had to use it all of the time because I was always feeling unhealthy. I was always making myself sick, probably because I was so bored with living. I needed a change. I’d watch TV and see things that I absolutely had to have, useless things that were completely irrelevant to my daily life, but for some reason I felt compelled to own them." He paused, running his hand over the fabric of the door handle beside him. 

I could see that Hunter had thought about it a lot, and I remembered a time when I dwelled on things just like what he was saying, but since a reason to change had come along for me, none of those kind of issues had mattered as much anymore. Maybe he was a lot closer to reality than I was, because of that, because being in love is like wearing really thick glasses, and everything is fuzzy, distorted, and prone to giving you butterflies in your stomach. You run into a lot of walls, but you don't really mind, because it's kind of funny.</sup>