Beyond Words

There are some people out there who just love to talk. They talk about the weather. They talk about themselves. They talk in order to fill the empty air when they're next to someone. My boss is notorious for his constant gab gab gabbing and I don't think I can survive another gab fest. We'll be in the car going to a client's house and he'll see something and start talking about it. Last week, we saw a car speeding and he went on to tell me about how he saw something on the news about speeding...

My brain has a built-in failsafe for situations like that. It's something I like to call "The Ennui Filter." When I catch one of the warning signs, like my boss saying "There was this thing on the news...," I instantly go into banality combat mode. My body is still there in the moment, but my mind is transferred to a safe place to avoid being turned into mush by senseless drivel. The safe place that I chose for this situation was a musical number set in a roller rink with me singing with a glittery microphone and people rollerskating around me. I'd heard "Xanadu" earlier that morning, so it was still fresh in my mind. Once I imagined myself as Stan Laurel, trying to get a piano up a flight of stairs with my friend Ollie.

After the music ends, I tune back in and I still find my boss talking about speeding. He'd gone into an anecdote about people getting pulled over for speeding and how he wasn't speeding so he didn't get pulled over. At this point, I mentally chastise myself for not thinking of a longer song. I couldn't tell him to shut the fuck up, so I just stared out the window. Then he asked me why I wasn't talking, so I explained to him that I am not a talker.

There was nothing that I could say that would explain it correctly. Sometimes people just don't like to talk a lot. I don't feel the need to fill the quiet space with pedantic chatter that the other person doesn't care about. I'm not afraid of silence. So now my boss thinks I'm a super asshole because I don't talk a lot. He said that I have problems communicating. I had to practice a lot of self control to keep from reading him right there in the car. Even a first year psychology student could see that he has issues about the whole talking thing.

I feel that there's a point where too many words can ruin communication. There's so much more to communicating than talking. There's body language, facial expressions, and even choice in clothes that we wear. I once had a conversation with a good friend of mine where I said one word and he knew what I was talking about. He said a word and I knew what he was talking about. THAT'S communication. The irony is that he's now a radio announcer in San Diego. Go fig!