Casual Conversationalists Casually Converse

There's nothing in life more perplexing than casual social encounters. I would say that (at least) sixty percent of my insecurities stem from how people interpret the things I say. It’s bad enough that people are always misinterpreting my mood (because I seemingly cannot convey my actual psychological state), but I am also misspeaking to the point of obliterating any semblance of meaning in my sentences. A conversation with me will likely trail off in a series of unrelated and incoherent phrases, dissipating to the point that I just relent, giving up all together. The train of my mind is in constant flux, always speeding up and slowing to a stop, shifting gears and jumping rails, digressing and digressing and digressing until I’m not even on a track anymore; I’m traveling down some back road in the boondocks of my frontal lobe, and I’ve likely even forgotten what the conversation was about. In the same vein, I am unrivaled in my capacity to tell stories that are utterly devoid of any point whatsoever. I often begin a story that pops into my head—one which seems interesting enough at the time—and begin painting a picture of a moment or event for my friends, really building it up to a sense of expectation, a look of “this better be good because you’re babbling.” I build it up so much that I realize I have no idea where to end it, and I am going nowhere with a train of thought that has no peak or climax of any sort, so I just let it taper off like a song with no dénouement (you know, the songs that just play the chorus over and over again as they fade in volume because the songwriter had no idea how to wrap things up in an orderly manner (e.g. radar love)).

When I was a child, I would just make up an effective ending. If I got to the point that I realized my story wasn’t going anywhere, I would introduce a spaceship or a dinosaur or an army of ninjas, and my friends would all look at me skeptically, saying “that didn’t happen,” but I would just shake my head, emphatically claiming “yes it did!” Over time, I learned to stave this impulse because it caused distrust even in my more honest stories; so now, I continue my story until I realize that it is really, truly going nowhere. Then, I just apologize: usually, “I’m sorry, this story really has no point.” People have learned to accept it; they’ve learned to accept my neurotic babble as something utterly meaningless, and they just nod politely as I wear myself out and my mind freezes up. Then, they pat my shoulder and shake their heads as if to say, “Oh, Scott, what are we going to do with you?” It would be endearing if wasn’t so extremely annoying to everyone involved (including myself).

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I just can’t do “casual conversation.” I hate the moments of lazy mingling before an event or function, the unavoidable encounters with people I really don’t know, people who don’t actually want to hear my opinion on a subject, people who like to hear themselves talk. In these moments, people always revert to inane banter about the most irrelevant subjects, filling space and time with absolute nothingness. It drives me crazy. People talk and they talk and they talk, and (in a way) it’s similar to my story-telling fault in that it never means anything. When there's nothing relevant to talk about, we revert to sexual jokes or playful witticisms or just plain gratuitous self-indulgence. We look for opportunities to self-promote, always working at creating this image of ourselves that isn’t anything like who we really are. I feel like if we all really were honest with each other in these socially awkward moments, we’d say things like: “could you leave me alone,” or “just shut up already,” or “I realize that you see me as an opportunity to expand your social influence, but I really, truly have no power to improve your station in life, and unless you are really an exceptionally honest person, please do no shower me with deceitful, self-aggrandizing gibberish. I so damn tired of this; I’m tired of trying to make people like me.”