Trying to Fit Some Semblance of Interest Into An Otherwise Lackluster Day

Today was a day so much like so many other days. I woke up to someone offering to shovel the snow out of the driveway, which was like waking up to a day unlike any other day I've ever lived. Other than that, it was entirely normal and non-eventful, which I feel compelled to describe: I went to work, went on a field trip to downtown and back, complained a little, got some work done, came home, and made mini cheeseburgers and steamed broccoli. I thought about calling a friend I hadn't talked to in awhile, and she called me about 30 minutes after I thought about calling her. I was watching a show on TV about children who spend time in their childhood with no human contact whatsoever. It reminds me of a fiction book by Paul Auster I read about that very topic, about what would happen if we had no outside influences as our brain develops. I've noticed he's written at least two stories about long-term isolation. The scientists on the TV show tonight said the developing brain of a child shrinks if no one talks to the child. The language part of the brain suffers from atrophy. It never recovers. I wonder if that happens to us after childhood, that, as hermits, our brains transform themselves as they suffer from lack of human contact and isolation. I don't think it's quite the same, but I do believe it plants the seeds of madness. One of the men in one of Paul Auster's stories in The New York Trilogy ends up jumping off a bridge after he spent most of his life experimenting and studying about being cut off from everyone else.