How much do you lie?  How often do you choose to be dishonest over the alternative?  How many times do you choose words that are expected over what you really want to say?  I still remember the first time I was taught the term “white lie”.  It seemed that one too many times I’d answered the question “how are you?” as though it had a greater distance from its rhetorical purpose and my dad taught me a quick fix alternative.
“Fine thanks”.

Not great, not good, not sick, not average, just fine.  A word with just enough hint of reluctance to block the conversational path and force the flow of pleasantries into an alternative channel.  It’s not that you’re trying to end the conversation altogether, just that these introductory pleasantries are merely a traditional dance that must be undertaken before moving on to less predictable subjects.

Often I wish I could apply the Wadsworth Constant to these conversations, skipping forward to the 30% mark as though our paths had as much free will as a Youtube video.  How great it is to be able to bypass these often tedious pleasantries in order to spend more time with the unexpected.  “How dry do things you place in bins marked ‘Dry Recyclables’ really need to be?”.  It’s a valid question, and one that can take a conversation in any number of directions, but alas to begin a conversation at this point will likely catch your partner’s mind unprepared thus rendering the question inappropriate and weird rather than an attempt at bypassing the boring.  All too often unprepared matters like this will be swatted away with one of the following two lines of thought, and here’s why they’re both a pile of shit:

“It’s an inside joke that I don’t get.  It’s a bit rude that they’ve brought it up in front of me, but I’ll just wait it out until they talk about something I can possibly know something about”.

I know plenty of people of do this (particularly as so many of my friends are IT geeks).  There are an abundance of quotes, running jokes or memes that people use to create an artificial “us and them” bond which substitutes the need for real wit or humour.  However life is far more enjoyable to assume each in-joke surreal.  If the person’s not a dick, they’ll go with you on it and you can have an in-joke of your own, but if not, then it’s an easy way to identify a dick.  Win win.

“Weird”.

In this case, the idea of an inside joke has not even been entertained, and instead, the outsider has decided to classify the whole thing as exceptional, strange or weird in order to solidify the fact that the problem lies with the person who made the original comment.  This is the refuge or the unimaginative, the boring and the pointless.  This approach shows no open-mindedness, no spirit of joy or exploration, just a defacto way of dismissing anything misunderstood.  To be called weird is an insult, but feel not bad yourself, just have pity on the hollow empty life the name-caller must live.  Have pity on them for they are done with learning.  They have experienced enough to know how not to shit on their own lips or drink from all available sources of liquids.

TL;DR: Everyone at work went to the pub at lunch time and forgot to invite me, so I tried to comfort myself with words.

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