I don’t know if I’m good at talking, but I do know I enjoy conversations. I like being challenged by ideas, and building little conversational castles together. Kind of like fluther, only in real time. I tend to enjoy talking with new people or people I haven’t seen in a long time more than people I spend a lot of time with. It’s the newness that interests me, I guess. Someone who knows me on a daily basis is much harder to talk to.
Cocktail parties are a bit weird. I might enjoy them, or I might not. There are a lot of factors that go into this. Sometimes, especially if I’m manic, I have no problem talking to anyone. I usually manage to find someone really interesting to talk to. Other times, I remain stuck with a not very interesting person because they are safe.
Like the other day there was a party for all the kids in my daughter’s class and their parents. The kids were upstairs and the parents down. I hung out with the fathers of my daughters two best friends. Go figure. They’re nice people, and I even knew one of them better than I knew any other parents, and I got to know the parents of the other girl who is closest to my daughter, which was nice, because I keep running into them, and I have no idea what their names are. Can anyone say awk—word?
Much as I enjoy conversation, I’m always worried that I’m going to say something inappropriate. I mean, that’s just the way my mind goes, and if I’m going to enjoy myself I have to say whatever comes to my mind. That’s my rule for fluther, in fact. I do not edit my thoughts. Whatever I think, I say. Well it’s bit different in real life. I can’t just say everything I think.
Or maybe I just worry too much. But I have little confidence—maybe because I have really fucked things up in the past when I let my mouth run without any driver, so to speak. If I’m comfortable with a crowd, I’ll talk a lot. If I don’t know people very well, not so much. I’m not so good with an audience who disagrees with me. I much prefer discussing things with a friendly audience.
I do like conversation very much. For a while, I belonged to a conversational salon. It was kind of like fluther, only with food. The host chose a topic, and we went around the circle to see what people’s experience with that topic was, and then opened up into a more free form conversation. We rarely had disputes, perhaps because of the format.
I don’t particularly enjoy debates. I can do it. I debated in high school. I’ve been selling ideas most of my life. But I don’t like it. The focus is on winning the argument, rather than sharing ideas. Making value judgments, such as whether you are good at talking is anathema. It’s irrelevant, because we aren’t competing. In any case, it’s for other people to say whether or not they enjoy talking with me. Not a whole lot of people do talk to me, so, in the marketplace of ideas, I’d have to say I’m not that popular. Perhaps that means I’m not very good at it, either. Maybe that’s why I prefer non-competitive situations, where I don’t have think about being good or bad.