small talk

We all have certain things that we hate and find completely and utterly annoying. For me, one of those things is small talk with people I could not give a rat's ass about, like co-workers or neighbors (small talk is a very typical American habit. In Eastern Europe you can avoid this unpleasantry by giving that person an evil eye or condemning them to hell. In Somalia, you can feed that person to a pack of hungry lions or people)

There is always that awkward moment upon encountering that said person and making a forced eye contact, when I feel obliged to break the daunting silence in fear of being considered rude or unwelcoming. There is always that wonderment of who is going to start talking first (usually its the other person), always followed by a severely pointless question or comment like: "Its nice outside, isn't it?" which always makes me want to answer: "I'll be darned! I had no idea, since I was locked up in a cage for the past few days and did not just walk in here behind you from the parking lot".

But, alas, I have to hold my forked tongue and say something like: "Yeah, I hope it stays this way for a while", secretely wishing to drink a cup of bleach for emmitting such cheesiness. This usually is followed by a smile and mutual forgetting of each other's existance until the next day, when we can share our meteorological opinions once more.

If the pest happens to be your coworker, and you happen to be next to that person for an extended period of time, the conversation might grow into a pretencious inquiry of what each of us did this past weekend, pretending to care to find out what exactly it was. Ofcourse the answer has to also be pretentious and fake to underline your stability and normalcy, like: "I had a picnic in the park" or "I went to see a movie with my friends", since saying "I watched my neighbors through binoculars", "I downloaded every porn site on the net", or "I smoked a whole bag of weed" would be considered too truthful and perhaps inappropriate. I am sure even Jeffrey Dahmer's response to that question wasn't "I was stuffing human body parts in my fridge to munch on them later." Also it would mean that you actually took their question seriously and took time to think of an answer.

This whole thing is usually acknowledged by something like: "Awesome", or "That sounds like fun", which would probably be the same response even if you said that last weekend you had your legs ran over by a freight train and afterwards they were stolen by hungry coyotes.

If you are lucky, this small talk might be aborted right there and those parties would continue minding their business and feeling content for taking time to get their own presence acknowledged. However, if you are the unlucky one and that person happens to recently have attended a wedding shower/baby shower/any other kind of shower and has pictures to back it up, you might get stuck in a third circle of hel...small talk, which requires looking at each picture, trying not to vomit and pretend to enjoy the visuals.

This is that nauseating time when you have to be sickeningly sweet and keep yourself from sayin: "Wow, that dress makes you look really hideous, and so does your face", or "Is that a baby, or a roadkill possum with no tail?", or "Wow, there are more douchebags in this picture than in a hooker's bathroom cabinet!"

To sum things up, I really despise this brief period of time when I have to rape my brain and strip myself of my dignity for several minutes in order to prove myself remotely likeable or to boost somebody's already enormous ego. Bweech!