We were talking about meeting people because it was hot — well, quite warm; if you want to see hot, just wait for the future, which will be tense, as in future tense.

(Of course, nobody these days knows what the future tense is, which is why we get such would-be sentences as “We will be having a party. Come stopping by. Lol.”)

We were talking about meeting people because we didn’t want to talk about  Bowe Bergdahl or the mess in Iraq (which no one saw coming, outside of all of us war critics in 2002) or the death of Tony Gwynn (you look up “class act” in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of Tony Gwynn).

We were talking about meeting people when Virginia said, How did you meet your girlfriends? And I cleverly said, I don’t know (although I have to admit it came out more like I dunno.)

These days, of course, lots of people meet lots of other presumed people online, because that way, there are none of those awkward pauses in conversation that occur in our so-called real life. That’s the theory, anyway. Of course, gravity is just theory.

Probably in the future, virtual meeting is the only way humans will meet, because who would risk a real-life meeting and catching whatever dread disease is rampant that week or that day or that hour? (Not to talk about climate change or Hawkeye football or other modern myths.)

But at least, between virtual meetings, in the future, they’ll also have chatbots to chatbot them up. (Thank you, Eugene Goostman. Or maybe nyet. Or mabe not nyet. So many maybes in this world.)

So what do you think about Bowe Bergdahl? Virginia said. Don’t you think his parents are a little weird?

Well, according to all the Republicans, they’re more than a little weird. I mean, his father speaks Pashto and has this long beard, so that makes him a member of the Taliban, the GOP cries, screams, whatever.

The 2013 Red Sox had long beards — so, they were members of the Taliban? Probably a great number of them vote Republican.

But what I really think makes Bowe Bergdahl’s parents weird is that they don’t know how to spell “Beau.”

Of course, Republicans believe that Bergdahl is a traitor and his parents are worse. Or maybe (so many maybes in this world) it’s vice versa.

But you have to remember that Republicans are a bit weird, to be polite. Take House Republicans; they have voted 16,162 times (give or take a time) to rescind Obamacare, knowing full well that the Senate will never go along with that. Not to mention that President Obama would veto any such bill that somehow managed to get to his desk. (He’d probably veto it before it physically landed on his desk.)

Perhaps House GOPers were hoping for a Gravity sequel in which space debris zap out of the sky and demolish the Senate side of the Capitol, rendering the senators’ vote inconsequential at best.

And buried at worst, which is where a lot of conservatives would like to see Senate voting.

But what I find most curious about the Bergdahl affair — if that’s what it is — is that Republicans pushed Obama for years to get Bergdahl back. And once Obama did, it was wrong. Huh?

The price was too high, the GOP screaming loop says. Those five Taliban prisoners were top commanders.

Curious. The former top prosecutor at Guantánamo says he had never heard of them. So it sounds as if they were top Taliban commanders in theory only. (Yes, I know; gravity is “just” a theory, too.)

Yikes.

Could we go back to talking about meeting people?