stone 5: How Are You?

Yes, I do want to know.

I get that you doubt me. Experience has taught me to skim this question and offer up the expected responses:

“Good, and you?”, “Couldn’t be better!” and the more local one, “Ok la, coping”.

I did once attempt to actually answer the question, and started launching into some detail about what I was going through. The poor person looked at once flummoxed and frustrated.

Historically, this question has been asked for more than three hundred years, its earliest use traced to Anglo-Saxon origin and…