Tuesday, November 11, 2008

What I plan for this site every weekend, and what invariably never happens during the week itself, is a smooth, clockwork process that produces Tuesday’s and Thursday’s posts well in advance. It always happens Sunday afternoon at the library or the local Border’s, according to the scene in my mind, on the medium I value most: pen and crinkled scrap paper, later transposed effortlessly to a text file. The actual ritual is far, far different, usually beginning with the startled realization that, truly, the clock reads 11:36 PM on the night of, followed by a hasty login into Blogger. And then, as the great white void begins to expand before me in Word format, there’s a sinking feeling of dismay over a loss of what to discuss.

But tonight will be easy because I want to talk about conversation, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. For me, silence is most comfortable, a communicative state in which I may seem engaged with inner dialogue or, as far as you’re concerned, be completely mute. You can imagine how small talk would contrast directly with this, and it’s a skill I admire–the ability to weave much out of seemingly nothing. I simply can’t picture a reality wherein I’d ever give a care about the weather in your neck of the woods, catastrophic natural phenomena aside, without coming off as blatantly disingenuous.

Silence, however, can’t be the only course charted, so the question quickly turns to how to fill the space. When I first started paying real attention to how people converse, back in college, I remember sitting in absolute wonderment during a few lunches, listening as everyone rushed to get their own point into the pot. It was a gloriously noisy pile-up, what I later decided to call the “bumper sticker” approach to conversation. That’s really the extent of the interaction, after all: slapping viewpoints out there, with no regard for feedback, before driving into the sunset. There’s just no give-and-take.

Even when there is give-and-take, arguably the next evolutionary step for conversation, there’s also a chance of coming off as rehearsed. I remember interviewing candidates in my previous gig, for instance, and thinking, “Yeah, read that question on Monster.com too.” Obviously I’m guilty of staging discussions as well, and what suffers in this case is original thought. How I currently regard conversation is that the better ones cannot be planned, which is difficult for someone who revels in doing so. Speeches, of course, may benefit from a more deliberate approach. But conversation is its own animal. Certainly you can have your tools handy–your questions, your solutions, your hypotheticals, your conundrums–but the words seem to flow best in the moment.