The Art of Conversation or How to Say Nothing in As Many Words as Possible

I'm still feeling uninspired to write anything, but Snooze has given me a big kick to post an entry after my long sojourn of laziness, so I've decided to just engage in general cocktail talk. (Don't you just love that word? It conjures up such lurid sexual images).

I come from a family that believes in every moment, action, gesture, thought, etc. being a deeply significant one. We weren't permitted the luxury of waste at any level. So to sit around and chatter about topics lacking real substance was really considered insipid and generally useless. My dad used to hate going to faculty parties and the like because it meant that he might find himself trapped in some trivial conversation, and what was the point of that when he could be doing something truly important? We weren't really a family well-versed in communication of any kind (unless you counted yelling at each other in which case we were brilliant conversationalists).

I often tell my kids that if they can't say something nice to someone, to refrain from commenting at all. Growing up, the golden unspoken rule was "If you haven't anything intelligent to say, don't say anything at all". So I spent much of my younger years rehearsing the words in my head before uttering them, or in more instances than not, choking them back after judging them "too silly to say". I was a pretty silent child, who spent most of my time watching and listening to others, and while this sullen retentive attitude might have passed for good behaviour, I had the unfortunate occasional habit of blurting out attempted witticisms in the heat of the moment (a compulsion to which I still give in). My parents chastised me for my "slick tongue" and these outbursts effectively cancelled out my otherwise clean record of verbal abstinence.

As a teenager, I stuck out like a sore thumb in many social situations because I continued to adhere to the rule of refraining from the so-called mindless chitter chatter that most adolescent girls were prone to indulge in. I did remarkably well at my parents' dinner parties in which middle-aged academics were present, but quite honestly, when you're thirteen, you really don't consider it a compliment if a forty-something professor tells you how poised and mature you are; what you really want is for his cute teenage son to tumble at your feet in adoration and worship, and if you couldn't behave like any other normal pre-pubescent girl, how on earth were you going to accomplish this lofty goal??!!

I remember once how the love of my early teenage life was the unfortunate recipient of me phoning him up to treat him to endless silence, all because I would run through what I might say to him (eg. nice weather we're having) and then think to myself "No, no, I can't say that. That's not a deep and profound topic. Think, think of something else to say". Poor boy tried to keep up a running patter, but then inevitably would get so turned off that he'd finally find an excuse to hang up in a hurry. I realised many years later, that he would have been happy to listen to pretty much anything I'd said and would have volleyed back with comments of his own until we'd built ourselves up to a comfortable conversational level. The irony is that in my attempts to be brilliant, profound and interesting, I ended up instead being billed as stupid and boring.

Unfortunately, these kind of uncomfortable silences punctuated much of my adolescent and early post-adolescent years. I was just not well-versed in the art of cocktail talk, and I suffered from the mistaken belief that the world at large wanted to be treated to a constant deeply intellectual patter. What never occurred to me was that my intelligence might still shine through during the parentally-deemed inoccuous chit chat. I failed to realise that in the absence of having anything intelligent to say (which is nearly all the time), I can at least inquire after people's health and comment on the weather. There is a certain art, I think, in successfully pulling off cocktail chatter; if done correctly, it tends to put people at ease (unless you're my dad in which case the inanity of it all is simply enervating and irritating).

Many years later, I've become fairly well-versed in talking about seemingly nothing. After all, I've created an entire blog about pretty much nothing. But since some people have been clamouring for more, I guess the vacuity has provided them with some sort of amusement. Smoke and mirror, my friends, smoke and mirrors.