Talking, I guess.
I’ve been struggling to figure out how to go about writing this… and I’ll be honest with you… I still don’t know. So be prepared for a bunch of loosely connected thoughts. Cause god forbid I do some editing after writing a draft or anything.
I hate talking about myself. The actual act of talking, I mean. Or well… the act of just going on about myself, as some people seem to be able to do so easily. The question I hate the most in the world: “so tell me something about yourself.” For one, it’s not even a question. And two… you want some random fact? you want to know about my childhood? what exactly do you want to know?
As you can imagine… I’m _awesome_ on first dates. :P
The fact that I don’t like to talk about myself has led a few people that I consider close friends to ask me if I have self-esteem problems. I find it quite humorous actually that someone would ask me that. I’m not even kidding when I say that basically every morning, before I even step out of my apartment I think to myself “fuck I’m awesome.” I really like me.
If someone asks me a direct question, I’ll try to answer it as best I can. I find that most people ask questions for which they don’t care about the answer though. So I try to be as succinct as possible. ”So what do you do?” ”Well, I write Mac and iPhone software.” I think this property makes me a very forgettable person, because I’m always re-meeting people whom I’ve met before, but they don’t remember me. I’ve met the IDFusion CEO’s mother like 4 times now (it’s a company of 14 people, come on), and I’ve been there for 2.5 years, and I still get “are you new here?”
Every now and again I’ll meet someone who actually seems to give a damn about the answers to questions they ask me. For some reason this always surprises me. ”I remember last time you said you were working on blah… how’s that going?” I mean, if it’s something who SHOULD know this, like say a co-worker and that blah is Component Y of System Z that they’ll be interacting with, then well.. that’s just expected. If it’s someone who really has no stake in the goings on of my life, and especially in blah, then it hits me as a surprise. These people I like talking to, and try to be more verbose with.
Conversely, I have a really hard time talking to someone when I’m not interested in what they’re saying. I really can’t fake interest. But if I’m interested, then I’m storing pretty much every answer to questions I ask into near-permanent memory (unless it has to do with dates, or names, those get jettisoned… my brain’s indexer for those doesn’t work :P ).
But with all of this… I have to say… one of my favorite things to do is to have a good conversation with someone. A conversation with substance. It doesn’t happen terribly often, and I’m willing to take some of the blame for that, but I think it’s really unfortunate.
And I feel like an idiot, but it’s taken me this long to finally figure out what’s the key to getting comments enabled on a post in tumblr. It has to end with a question mark. So umm… uhhh… yeah?
