Small Talk Is Vampiric

      I think I'm personable.  I think I get along well with others.  I outwardly accept most situations, even though sometimes someone throws a serious curveball and I'm ill prepared to mask my surprise.  Most of this may seem intangible so I'm prepared to back it up with examples.  But before the example backup, ask yourself how well you roll with the punches.  I guess it's not necessarily even punches I'm talking about, because that implies a hardship, and even though that's a portion of what I'm talking about, it's more frequent.  Ask yourself how well you can make someone feel that you relate to them.  How well do you put people at ease, allowing them to feel safe enough to give you a glimpse into their twisted lives?  I feel that I have, in some scope, refined an ability to do this.  It sounds sociopathic.  It sounds like social engineering or psy ops.  I suppose it is on its most basic level.  It's social guerrilla warfare, a manipulation of perception swayed in your favor to gain an insight not just anyone can gain.

     As a general rule, I'm not a "small talk" kind of person.  It's awkward and irrelevant.  Small talk is, at best, a disengenuous act of feigning compassion about someone else's concerns.  I'm more of a "say what you need and then let's shut the hell up" kind of person.  This may sound a bit harsh, and maybe I don't mean it quite as harsh as it seems to sound.  Basically, I want my conversations to stay relevant.  I have been known to tell people that I think their story is too long.  I can fake interest in brief sections of time.  But when someone's story drags on and on, I get antsy.  Gotta keep moving.  I liken it to someone telling me what they dreamed.  This is so irrelevant, it makes me want to cry vomit.  Yes, cry vomit, since it's so sad and nauseating at the same time.  What happened in your dream is pointless and holds no bearing on real life(I'll not get into a debate about psychic phenomena or future predictions from dreams, here).  Often, when someone is explaining their dream, it is an ill-constructed, plotless, weird recount of events that have no structure or climactic payoff.  They all end with "then I woke up."  There is no character development, and no plot line resolution.  Its a waste of time.  The only format in which dream recitation is acceptable to me is in two to three sentence explanations.  "I dreamt that you had a goats head, then we hunted you and ate you for dinner.  Pretty weird, huh?"  Quick, to the point, and a breath of fresh air.  So, I'm getting off the dream stump now, and back to what I'm trying to convey.

     Since I get bored with small talk and everyone seems to want to do it, I have no choice but to engage in it so I can fit under the societal umbrella of normal.  So I often play a game.  I roll with what people tell me.  I feign interest.  I ask follow up questions and I listen way more than I talk.  If you ever get a chance to watch two people engage in small talk, I recommend that you look at it through this prism:  Every intention that the two people have during the interaction is to twist the conversation into something meaningful and relevant to them.  It's a struggle for floor time, a struggle for each of them to keep the conversation about themselves, to gain control of the spotlight.  If I get stuck in a small talk situation(which is not that often, since I'm easily put off by it), I allow it to be about the other person.  I don't grapple for the focus.  It's interesting to me because it makes people really feel that I care.  But it's also exhausting because I am loading up on someone else's emotional baggage.  If I could come up with a way best to explain it, I would call it "emotional energy transference."  I am letting someone use me to unload their emotional energy and so I absorb it, making them feel better and me feel like I now have their emotional weight.  These people are energy vampires, off-loading their negative energy and corrupting my positive energy.  That's why I don't like to engage in it.  It's exhausting. 

     You'll find that when you don't wrestle for the focus in conversations, people will tell you way more than you expect to hear.  And also, your reaction will alert them as to wether they feel safe to continue or if they feel that they've said too much and back off.  I always try to handle whatever people tell me as normal and not too far off the beaten path, even when it is way outside the grid.  "Oh, you killed your girlfriend last night?  Hmmm.  Sounds reasonable.  How'd you do it?"  This makes them feel safe and they will continue, knowing now, that you are not judging and are sympathetic to their point of view.  

     So, I'm obviously and constantly thinking inwardly.  Outwardly, I accept what people tell me.  Inwardly, I'm thinking crazy thoughts about this killer I'm talking to and how I hope they don't kill me, and how can I get out of this conversation without getting kilt.  (Decided to use the vernacular of "killed."  I don't know, maybe now I'm getting bored with my own story)...

     So anyway, I guess this post is about holding a reaction to get more insight because it makes people feel more comfortable.  And I guess it's about how if I can avoid it, I will, but also, if I can't avoid it, I try to seem genuinely interested to build that trust to see how much I can get out of them.  Mostly it's about how bat-shit crazy my mind is, and how long conversations suck the life out of me.