Conversation for Dummies

For years, my conversational skills stunk. I tried to be more outgoing, but unless someone fit into my target knitch* group, I had a difficult time communicating. I still have a tendency to clam up or prattle on. When it comes to chattin’ up the men folk, I’ve been as articulate as a mime for as long as I can remember. This is something I have put painstaking efforts into improving.

In my early twenties, I remember Googling advice on the subject. I was an awful conversationalist. Talking about myself was all I was capable of. I never knew how to lead a conversation, or ask questions without sounding like I was rattling off a qualification questionnaire. After ridiculous amounts of practice, and throwing myself to the wolves on multiple occasions, eventually I felt somewhat confident.

Then, as a confidant gabber, I met Dave. If I had been a conversationalist in training, then Dave…well…Dave was a conversationalist in need of electroshock therapy. Fearing my worst habits would come back, within moments of meeting him, I went into overachiever mode. This is a small scale song-and-dance routine I pull out every once in a great while. I kick overachiever mode ass. I go “on” and I don’t stop until the fat lady sings…which usually means I’ve cranked up the radio and am on the way home, decompressing from overachiever mode. Unfortunately, overachiever mode is exhausting. Over achiever socializing kills me, and is only for desperate situations. It’s an act.

Dave was late for our little date. He asked me out, but asked to meet on a Sunday afternoon, and left the location open – but not the time. Dave needed until at least two p.m., as he apparently likes to sleep in. Lunch was obviously behind us and dinner too far ahead. I would never, ever, EVER admit that at two p.m., on a Sunday, I can occasionally be found perched atop a bar stool, sulking about the imminence of Monday...so drinks were obviously out, too. Coffee, it was.

I met Dave at a Starbucks. With the prevalence of Starbucks franchises, this felt slightly more personal than McDonald’s, but Dave certainly wasn’t scoring points for creativity or originality. Our date was also slipping in the quality department, because he was rather late. Eleven minutes late, but who’s counting? As I self-consciously sat and sipped, I thought about Starbucks and strip malls. We lived at separate ends of a county, Dave and I. Already, I resented driving to strip-mall heaven, the general “in between our places” area to meet up for our first date. I also grew increasingly itchy about the “late” factor.

Dave eventually arrived. I was starting to feel bad about my “late” irritation and was letting it go – I’m a stickler for punctuality. Eleven minutes isn’t all that late. However, I noticed he did not look for me when he walked in. He didn’t really look at anything, actually. In his elastic-waist leather jacket, he marched to the counter and ordered a small hot chocolate. Then he stood and stared at his twiddling thumbs while it was prepared. Not. Looking. Anywhere.

At this point I started feeling bad for Dave. I recognized all these darling awkward moments as moments from my past, before I enrolled in self-guided social boot camp and decided it was sink or swim time. This period started a few years after I began working for a new company…and realized no one talked to me. I didn’t talk to them, so this wasn’t their fault. Sure, most of them were older than I was. Sure, we had little in common. Still, I needed to start at least acknowledging the presence of others, because instead of coming off as someone a little shy, I was coming off as an uptight bitch. Kind of like Dave, who one part of me wanted to call “ASSHHOLE!” and the other part of me wanted to hug.

That was the only point in our date where I thought about hugging Dave. He finally plopped down in a chair across from me and said “hi,” at 2:15 p.m. I tried to talk to him. I tried to like him. I tried to figure out who he was. While we (meaning I) talked, I questioned my literary skills. Dave, if memory and internet profile served me correctly, was a year younger than I was. He looked like a man in his early forties. He had a college degree, but he looked like a beaten down factory worker. Something about his face screamed “I eat LOTS of meat and my mom makes vegetables out of a can, smothered in Velveeta!” Yes, he lived with his parents. It wasn’t a temporary or transitional situation, either. Why was I out with this person? He asked, that was why. I said I would give anyone who asked me out a chance. I was doing this because every person I had chosen to date, in the past, had been a disappointment. I needed to loosen up.

Embracing anything I could about Dave – because after all, I was supposed to be giving people a chance – I asked him about traveling. The only person he had mentioned (other than his parents) was his best friend, who lived in Oregon with his wife. Having taken a bus through Portland once, I had found it to be a beautiful, green city. That trip was also in the late nineties, so it was a city filled with Doc Martens, hats with big flowers, coffee, and singer-songwriter types. All of these are things I am rather fond of. Perhaps he had been to Portland!

“No, it’s really expensive.”

YOU LIVE WITH YOUR PARENTS! If I worked full time, and lived with my parents, I would be visiting my best pal in Portland multiple times a year. I would even purchase souvenirs for my parents. As it turns out, Dave was saving up funds to buy a house. Since I happen to love talking real estate, I decided to pick Dave’s brain. Unfortunately, he and I did not agree on what constituted an exciting place to live. While I preferred old neighborhoods with a little character and classic charm, Dave loved everything about new construction and the outer ring suburbs. After all, everyone he knew lived there, and by everyone, I think we may have been talking about his two closest pals - mom and dad.

Since he seemed rather attached to his parents, I tried swinging the conversation to family related topics. Then we/I chatted about pets. He didn’t know if he really liked pets. He’s never been allowed to have one. Oh my. I chattered on for a bit and Dave, sweating like he’d run a marathon, chugged his hot chocolate in massive gulps. Perhaps the heat was killing him, a combination of nerves and cocoa under his outerwear. Dave cracked and started talking, but started talking about…all the other women he’d met on his dating website! He admitted he had been on the site for a few years, and had never really dated anyone he’d met. He did like meeting people.

I asked him about other places he liked to go. He had never heard of the restaurants I mentioned, he wasn’t a drinker so he hated bars, and when I mentioned movies he came up with…

“I don’t go to the movies, they’re kind of expensive.”

That was it for me. Life isn’t free, but it’s worth it. I cannot believe that this cheap, socially inept man was bothering to spend a decent amount of cash on a dating website. I had acknowledged that my social skills were terrible, and I had worked on fixing them. He had, admittedly, been working on finding a lady friend for years, and was obviously not changing anything about his life to make room for that sort of commitment. I was done. As Dave sucked on his disposable coffee mug until the sides caved in, I politely shook his hand. He smiled (for the third time in thirty minutes), and I left. After working my conversational skills to the max, I settled out of overachiever mode and drove home – completely exhausted. I may have picked up a six pack along the way.

The six pack was from a microbrewery.

It was expensive, and I shared it with a friend.

I’m a lucky gal.

*Whilst looking up the proper spelling of “knitch,” because Microsoft Word does not accept the proper spelling, I looked at the synonyms. “Knitch” can be defined by the word fagot, that’s right people, fagot, with one “g.” Do YOU know what a fagot is? Well, I think I once explored the world of “fagots” in a high school Earth Science class…and not in some ridiculous, “I kissed a girl” high school lesbian scenario. I THINK we talked about fagots during some discussion pertaining to rocks. Having gone to a really, really fancy high school, Earth Science was taught by a substitute teacher who had a degree in art. We did a lot of artsy renderings…perhaps, even, of fagots, which have nothing to do with rocks, as far as I can tell. Anywho, to make myself clear, a fagot is a bunch of stuff bundled together, with intention of using this bundle for fuel. That, my friends, is the definition of a fagot.