conversations
You are viewing stuff tagged with conversations.
You are viewing stuff tagged with conversations.
“George, you’re sitting on my application for licensure in the state of Minnesota.”
“Meow.”
“What if it gets wrinkled?”
“Meow.”
“Ok, fine.”
Here’s a problem I have: I fear disagreement. Just in the past month, I finally realized how desperately I try to center all my conversations around agreement. Think back to any conversation I’ve had with you — I was subconsciously aiming at agreement. Then, there are times when I consciously aim at agreement: I’ll make a semi-strong statement, and the person with whom I’m speaking will disagree. Inevitably, I’ll do a series of linguistic backflips and contortions to align our just-stated viewpoints.
Mykala: “Did you know that giraffes have the largest heart of any land animal?”
Alex: “No, I did not know that… I suppose they have to get all that blood up into their heads.”
Mykala: “I think it’s because they are so high up and can see everything, they are more compassionate.”
I leapt over a leg press machine so I could quickly move to another part of the weight room floor.
“How old are you, man?”
A random guy at the gym, one who I’ve talked to only once before, surprised me with his question.
After laughing for a bit to regain my composure, I answered: “I’m 26.” Twenty-six, I thought. That sounds… old. I’m over halfway through my twenties. That was quick.
Are you more interested in being right, or understanding?
People avoid discussing religion or politics in polite company because those discussions cut through all the layers of pretense in which we shroud ourselves. These two topics, one focused on the divine and the other on the human, throw open the windows and shutters of a person’s mental house, allowing all the neighbors to scrutinize another’s deepest secrets, thoughts and prejudices. So, religion and politics are a wonderful way to quickly understand a person’s true character. My understanding is that this is not the purpose of polite conversation.
When I was little young fellow, I loved to go to the car wash with my Dad. On bitterly cold days, we’d sit in the line-up for a car wash, listening to Car Talk on NPR. At the high-intensity air-dryer at the end of the wash, I looked at the windshield wipers fluttering in the wind. I still my remember my stupid little joke that I thought was so funny at 7 years old: “It looks just like a nervous bride on her wedding day!”
Implicature is when you suggest an idea by what you say, but your words don’t have to be taken that way. And, well, I guess there’s a whole field of linguistics where people structure how we talk with one another into ordered rules. For example, Gricean maxims deal with assumptions about your conversational partner: that their contributions are relevant, clear, true, and that they aren’t too long-winded in responses. However, the rules still work when we choose to break (flout) them:
The University Recreation Center supplies the facilities for a variety of sporting events throughout the year. This past weekend, it hosted the 2010 USA Racquetball Junior Olympic Racquetball Championships. So, it’s not unusual to run into scampering quorums of teenagers who aren’t quite old enough for college. I had an encounter with one such group when leaving the Rec Center on Sunday.
Mykala and I made a quick list of things we did in 2009. Here are my notes from our conversation:
THINGS WE DID THIS YEAR
Got married
Went to Hawaii
Survived 5 semesters of school (combined)
Moved in together
First married Christmas
Camped
Bought a real tree
Attended a cat funeral
Mykala: “Maui onion rings with banana ketchup!”
Alex: “Sounds delicious!”
Mykala: “Sounds like a toot storm.”
St. Thomas recently relaxed their admissions policy. This has resulted in swelling class sizes… but apparently an average reduction in the qualification level of undergraduates. You see, I overheard this today in the weight room at St. Thomas:
Guy 1: Dude, are you going on spring break? Like, Fort Myers or something?
Guy 2: Psh — does the sun set?
Guy 1: What? … … … Oh, right.
I’ve written before about my extensive internal dialogue and my propensity to replay social scenes in my head, looking for ways I could have said the right thing. Shockingly, this character trait comes in handy sometimes, as recently evidenced at Lifetime Fitness. I was taking the weights off a bar on a squat rack, and I realized I did not have enough space for the remaining plates. To my left, a woman was using another squat rack, which had room for the plates.
Weight lifting can be monotonous … but there are always those moments of sparkling dialogue.
Guy 2: So, what did you do Sunday night?
Guy 1: Yeah, I ended up watching 8 Below.
Guy 3: Hey - that snowboarding movie, right?
G1: Umm … no. But there is a lot of snow involved. It’s about sled dogs.
G2: Oh oh - that’s that movie with Cuba Gooding, Jr. in it!
G1: Uhh … no. Cuba Gooding Jr?! What? It stars that worthless actor …
G3: Oh yeah, yeah -
G2: Paul Walker!
G1: Yeah, Paul Walker.
G3: “You’re not double clutching like a good little boy …”
G2: Wait a second. What were you doing watching 8 Below?
G1: It was actually pretty good.
G3: Are you gay?
G1: No. And now I want a husky.
Ever overheard conversations that make you sad to share the distinction of humanity with the individuals conversing? How about the ones that make you wish you didn’t have ears? I thought so. Well, on the way to dinner this evening, I was treated to a doozy. As two St. Thomas girls walked south, their paths briefly intersected my own …
Thank you, Saint Thomas, for such scholarly surroundings:
Girl 1: So I was talking to her and she was, like, being such a bitch!
Girl 2: Yeah?
G1: Yeah she’s all like “Stop being such a space-case.”
G2: Really? A space-case?
G1: And yeah, then she was all …
G2: Did you say ‘space-case’?
G1: Yeah.
G2: Is that even a word?
G1: I made it up.
G2: Oh, you and your words.
Me: I got off the phone with you after leaving the gym and started jogging across Lot H … you know sometimes you just get that feeling where you want to start running suddenly?
Mykala: … No, not really.
Me: Well, I got that feeling, so I started running and immediately almost fell over on recently-frozen ice.
My: laughs
Me: Yeah but it gets better. I continued to run more cautiously and then got owned by another patch of ice just before the edge of the parking lot.
My: So you fell over?
Me: No, if I had been in the NFL, the play would still be going.
My: disappointed Oh.
Ryan: Yeah, I guess things are going pretty well between the two of them, he went to visit her down in Iowa last time I went.
Me: Oh, so he went down to Cedar Rapids?
Ryan: Uh, no.
Mykala: You know, all of Iowa is not Cedar Rapids.
Me: That may be true, but all I’ve ever heard of is cheap gas and Cedar Rapids down there. So, I am lead to believe otherwise: whenever my dad goes down to Iowa, he goes to Cedar Rapids, and the last time I was there, it was a lot of corn, and 93 cent-a-gallon-gas in the middle of the corn’ness.
R/Mykala: …