the conversational climax

Daily, let’s say I’ll come into contact with roughly 100 people, 50 of whom I will exchange words with. 35-40 of these people are maintenance – conversations of life maintenance (“is the washing machine working?”), academic maintenance (“did the experiment work?”), or social maintenance (aka pity, “why so sad?”). The remaining 10-15 are exploratory conversations or social experiments. I’d say about half of those are worth remembering for a week, and about 1% of those are memorable for a year. To be pleasant, I’d say maybe 30% of conversations somehow convert to blog fodder or otherwise contribute to my subconscious.

I imagine this breakdown isn’t particularly intriguing or unique to me – people are boring, and we compensate by forgetting these people and their conversations with us.

But how can you really be interesting if you can only have a few solid conversations a day? Think of it this way – if I were to write a sitcom and base it on my sparse vicarious life, it’d be UPN caliber at best. In order to truly sample life, you have to know profoundly dumb and misguided people. You need a Joey for every Chandler. I have no Joey’s, Phoebe’s, or Rachel’s. And instead, I have fucking millions of Ross.

Life is only going to get worse in this regard, unfortunately. Someday, I’m going to be old and have only one other person to speak to regularly: a wife that no doubt will be equally disappointed with the human condition. That’s not an audience! There is no room for schpeels on Jude Law with that! Until now, my standards for conversation have only gone up. But by my mid-30’s, the process of settling for godawful conversation will begin. I’ll be happy with the ‘small things’ like raising children, and will discuss the great school system in the suburb, and the “kids these days,” and the merits of expensive automobiles. Like it or not, in a few years you’ll not only be past your physical prime, you’ll be past your conversational climax.

So, two things to learn:

1. Choose wisely with the spouses you choose, because old age is boring enough without having to have to be spending it with someone that enjoys vacuuming.
2. Somehow this attrition of daily input needs to be slowed. Right now, there are only a few MIT friends remaining (most would say that’s my fault) and fewer high school friends. There is a heaping teaspoon of UCLA friends. And that’s about it. I need to start checking people's AIM profiles and remembering birthdays, so I actually get those wedding invitations in a few years.

Then, there’s always finding God. But then I’d be a crazy, a happy crazy no less.

See, when I say "more later," I mean it dammit.