I've always had a problem with taking things a little too literally.

When I was little, I came home from school visibly upset, and crawled into my Dad's lap when he came home from work. "I don't want to have hot lunch anymore," I said with a quivering voice.

(SIDENOTE: I don't know about your school, but hot lunch was BIG STUFF for us, and a rare treat for me. My Mom usually made our lunches, and allowed us hot lunch only on special days. Those days were themed lunches related to holidays, with itms like pilgrim stuffing, shamrock peas, etc. It was a big deal for a first grader, plus you usually got chocolate milk).

"Why?" My parents asked.

"Because, today, " I said getting more and more upset, "They served Leprechaun stew!"

It would be nice to say that I've grown out of my literal sensibilities, but I haven't. And nowhere is this more obvious (or more painful) than in the dating scene. I am clueless to the subtle ways that men and women send and receive signals. You pretty much have to hit me on the head caveman-style for me to understand what is going on.

A while back, I was relaying an odd encounter I had in the grocery store to a friend. A man was standing next to me in the rice aisle, when he touched my shoulder, a bag of brown rice in his other hand. "Excuse me, do you know how you are supposed to cook this?" he said, motioning to the bag in his hand.

"Like other rice, I would suppose...boil water and steam it?" I said, thinking the directions might offer better advice than I ever could. Who doesn't know how to cook rice?

"Oh, right," he said, blinking at me. "Thank you." With that, he walked away.

"What an idiot," I told my friend as an end to the story. "No, YOU are the idiot," she said. Huh?

"He didn't care about the rice, you moron. Are you just book smart?"

"You try and read something else in everything," I said. "Why would he ask me how to cook rice, then?" "Hopeless!" she said.

I may be hopeless, but I was recently justified in the way I think in these situations. Now, I'm not into this too much, but the other day I attended a conference for work, and one of the sessions was determining your "True Colors," which is a watered down version of the Meyers-Briggs personality test. By determining your color and the colors of those around you, you are supposed to learn more effective ways to communicate based on their colors.

According to this process, I am a green with a strong secondary orange color. I won't bore you with what that means, except that it made sense, surprisingly.

As a sarcastic and jaded person, this True Colors seems silly in that horoscope, fortune-telling kind of way. But after reading the characteristics of "greens," I had to admit that some of it was dead-on.

In the sheet on communicating with greens, one of the tips said "don't read between the lines. When greens are asking for information, that's exactly what they are doing and nothing more."

So, sorry brown rice guy, my answer didn't mean "I'd rather eat that brown rice, bag and all before I would ever have a conversation with you." It really meant, "Steam the rice fella, and good luck with that."

CONFIDENTIAL TO M. IN MT: That said, I'm not a complete social moron. The sushi conversation did not go down like this:

HIM: "We should go and have sushi sometime."

ME: "I hate sushi."

It was more like this:

HIM: (Out of the blue) "Do you like sushi?"

ME: "No, I don't."

There is a difference, I swear!

I give up.