Awkward Conversations and Stifled Laughter

For those who are curious by nature, pretty much every conversation is going to be from the get go or become after a seemingly normal and comfortable start… awkward.

At some point you, the naturally curious one, will ask a stupid question, make a dumb remark, say something idiotic to a cleverer-than-thou other who would never think to ask, say or make a remark like that, they never put their foot in their mouth, colour outside of the communication lines, and always speak what others want to hear because they’ve studied, practised and rehearsed it until they’re masters of the saying nothing while appearing to say something…

they can talk forever without going anywhere, taking you on an expensive carriage ride through the park, with frills and bells, in a circle to and from the same spot… and you’ll thank them for being so kind and good as to take you nowhere and charge you an arm and a leg for it (you didn’t need those because you were being taken for a ride).

But you, the naturally curious one, don’t do that because there’s a glitch in your software, weird wiring in the brain, some quirk which expects things like chats with people to go somewhere other than where they started…

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and others won’t thank you for the ride you offer because you didn’t charge them enough for it so that it would have value for them (if they have to pay for it they’ll work hard to invent a value for it – the more you charge them the more they’ll think it’s worth spinning it to be worth something) but instead made it a free for all which is exactly what it becomes once they see that while you started in front of the Plaza hotel when you drop them off they have no idea where they are (you’re in Borneo… they don’t know where that is and neither do you although your curious nature will soon have you finding out all about it)… and the cute, ordinary, and very bored of the concrete and tarmac rigmarole horse is a Komodo dragon (do they have those in Borneo?) and the carriage is a bunch of no frills or bells recycled retro junk glued together with spit (which I suppose could sound like it’s all frills and bells when it moves, clank, clink…) which has yet to be approved as ‘trendy’…

you’re the kind of TV series which actually wants its characters to grow, learn, evolve, from their exchanges and experiences rather than wipe themselves clean after each episode, rewind themselves after a play and press repeat on the same story and persona… you’re the kind of TV series which wants the drama to resolve itself, for characters to actually talk with each other than at each other, to listen and hear and for the messages to sink in instead of going on and on in a loop-de-loop becoming more and more of a soap opera circle of hell where people don’t say anything to each other but gossip behind each others’ backs, grumble to themselves, turning a simple paper cut (which admittedly hurts for weeks) into a festering maggot farm…. you’re the kind of TV series which gets cancelled after airing only a few episodes (and even Netflix, now it’s trying to be like everyone else, won’t touch you).

And you’ll offend, upset, piss off, and generally cause a mess of misunderstandings (especially if you try to tidy it up before it has reached maximum mass of mess) with your faux pas, your wrong-doing-saying, your was it something I said!?

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I’m an expert of the awkward conversation (nope I don’t charge for lessons or sell my expertise, please be warned, it’s all for free!)… but I should probably not say that, not out loud, as it will… make people envy me, be jealous, attract haterz and… no… you’re just not allowed to say you’re an ‘expert’ without credentials (bits of paper with an official seal or something like that) to back that up, and there’s no university which sells… I mean awards… you credentials for that. Not yet anyway… or that I know of…

Was it something I said… – that’s my motto, mantra, my mea culpa… I used to use it so often, after everything I said, and do the contortionist yoga moves inside and out which go with it… that I figured it was time for my character in the TV series of life to grow, evolve, etc… but no matter what I did after lessons learned this just kept happening, so:

a – I wasn’t learning the lessons even though I told myself that I was (but can I rely on what I say to myself if what I say is such a problematic problemo?

b – the problem wasn’t that I wasn’t learning from the lessons, the problem was that what I learned from those lessons wasn’t what I was supposed to learn from them

c – diyddiyd (also known as diddy-wa-diddy… for those who want to know, it’s one of those anacronyms like miay, dotw, byob (to collect your tears in)… puzzles to be figured out using grey cells or google with the only prize being a momentary ego boost of aha gotcha!)

But what about the stifled laughter… did I hear you not ask at all?

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The most common stifled laughter not heard yet still caught by the ear is:

a – the mockery you think others are indulging in when you’ve said something stupid, dumb, idiotic, wrong, something you were not supposed to say, etc… the laughter shared by all those who repressed, suppressed, and controlled themselves not to do what you did, those who could resist the urge get to laugh at those who weren’t as superior as they were (good for them, rah, rah, sis boom bah! or whatever…)

b – is tinnitus. I once went on a long distance flight with a head cold (because my germs wanted to spread and that’s one way for them to do it), and for the rest of the year my head was all bells ringing for me. I was lucky it finally cleared up… some people live with this condition and it’s no laughing matter (the sound does drown out the voices of others and you do have to strain to hear anything beyond it… so who is getting the last laugh).

c – what you do when the tears dry up.

Learning to laugh at yourself and the mess you make every time you open your mouth and do that thing known as communicating some thought, opinion, idea, question… sharing your view with those whom you mistakenly think actually want to interact rather than follow a script (which has you not saying what you just said to them)… is kind of necessary, that kind of necessity which breeds stuff, invents things, and so on…

These days the stifled laughter is usually me laughing at myself and something I’ve had the… temerity, audacity, dumbfuckery, to say even though I probably knew I shouldn’t have said that I should have said this instead, but… yolo, carpe diem with curly fries…

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Where is this all coming from… and where is it going to?

Coming from – blogging…

blogging is awesome, particularly when you just do it without any goal in mind – as in you’re not trying to be the most popular blogger with the most likes and the most followers (this is easy to manipulate, many guides, how-to’s, will show and tell you how to do this), or a writer seeking an audience, or a somebody known for doing something, etc, but it can be a slippery slope going up and coming down without a level to let you know whether you’re going up or down, tipping this way or that (I sometimes use a level when doing DIY… but it’s more fun and more challenging when I don’t, ah, the shits and giggles, curses and recriminations…. which leads to more s&g’s).

if you blog the way that I do… a la sbambera (I don’t know if I’ve spelled that correctly, probably not, as I’ve never seen it written just heard it… it basically means willy-nilly, random, wanderwegging without a map, going walkabout…)… open-ended… things can still get awkward and may make you wish you had a plan and were more closed off…

as haphazard as I can be with the way I do this blog… I do monitor comments, and before they appear they have to be ‘approved’… I approve most comments – if I’m free to say and do as I please (within reason), so should you.

Even those comments which disagree with me and with which I disagree tend to get approved (in life I have found that disagreement is sometimes a threshold for personal movement from stuck to not as stuck as you once were),

even when I think the commentor sounds like they’re a narcissist… and there are telltale signs, often subtle, often not subtle at all (those who say they are narcissists in their comment tend to prove to be less narcissistic than those who are convinced they’re anything but that, particularly the ones who say something along the lines of “we the non-narcissists are superior” as that is a v. narcissistic attitude… at least when it comes to what they say within their comments and what they do once they’ve been given access to comment on my blog).

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Recently I had someone momentarily monopolise one of my posts about narcissists – this happens occasionally, and usually it subsides, they get bored, move on, discard something they once were obsessed with because it has served its purpose for them, they’ve found a new toy (which they always do if they are a narcissist… even if they are not a narcissist, humans flit from flower to flower…). I tend to wait them out rather than try any other tactic (such as blocking them, unapproving what I once approved).

I did reply to one of this particular person’s comments, I thought my reply was fairly tame considering what I could have said if I’d gone all out and just blurted what I really thought (I can be less me sometimes), and they told me to shut up and butt out on my own blog (I gave them the benefit of the ‘they probably didn’t realise they were speaking to the ‘owner’ of the blog who could block them and their rhetoric at a pissy whim).

I’ve been in the company of narcissists since I was a babe, and while my Id (primal me) wanted to rip their throat out with my bare teeth (and having grown up with narcissists I’ve been trained to do this narc-style – the fact that I don’t do this as often as I could… well, that’s something only I know and take pride or solace or whatever in),

and my ego was okay with watching my Id do that and then tut-tut such violence and primal out of control behaviour,

my super-ego (that tiny bit of a human which is kind of coolly above the rest of human nature) said ‘No’… ride it out, wait, and see… let yourself learn and give others the chance to learn too – not expecting that commentor to learn anything, which they won’t if they’re a narcissist, but others who read the post and read the comments on posts like that (which I always tend to do when I read these sort of posts are on other blogs… as the comments are sometimes more interesting than the post itself…) might see what I sometimes see…

that the people who say they aren’t narcissists are often the narcissists, that those who call for the hardest measures against narcissists are often narcissists… and that those they accuse of being narcissists aren’t always narcissists but they’re you, they’re me (if I’m not a narcissist), they’re the non-narcissists,

and the non-narcissists do need to be mindful of being lead astray when we’re hurting, in pain, feeling victimised…

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That person who knows how to say to you exactly what you want to hear, who tells you what you want to hear when you want to hear it… they usually also know what you don’t want to hear (as it is part of knowing what you do want to hear), and if they are of the narcissistic type they will bring that out when you’re not giving them the reward they expected after they worked so hard to tell you what you wanted when you wanted it.

The pied piper is going to want to get paid at some point for the tune they played just for you which you enjoyed so much… but you never discussed the price and that might prove to be an issue (one far worse that the one their tune provided solace for).

Going to – someone recently shared a story with me about a love gone wrong and asked me to provide them with ammunition of sorts against a once loved one.

I get it, you’re hurt, everything hurts, pain is amplified and what was once good becomes bad… who was once a hero becomes a villain and you’re looking for support to confirm the villainy of the villain (whereas once you might have looked for similar support to confrim the heroics of the hero).

But we do have to consider that if someone we loved is now all these terrible things which we now say that they are… what does that say about us and our nature, that we loved someone like that – and is that the real issue? How could we, who we consider to be all things good, fall for someone who we consider to be all things bad? What does that say about us?

When my mother tells me that my father is the worst monster in the universe… what is she telling me about me, her child with him, is she saying that I am half of the worst monster in the universe? Luckily for me both my parents did that so I was in no doubt as to what I was… (I may be stifling some kind of laughter here)…

While pondering both comment experiences and the residue with which they left me personally (even though I have learned to not take interactions in the comments on my blog personally as… well I, as the blogger, often don’t really exist as a person, I’m a place where someone else shares something while seeking something) I wandered onto this post:

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excerpt from Elsa Elsa: Mars – Pluto Opposition 2017 / Hitting Curveballs by Caitlin

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and I thought it was curious that they felt the need to explain what ‘love’ means…

that’s rather awkward, after all, don’t we all know what love is…

but on reflection the explanation is definitely needed because while we all use the word, we use it so often, about everything and everyone, we don’t always mean the same thing when we use it, each time we use it…

sometimes we aren’t referring to love at all when we talk about love…

or at least we may be talking about narcissistic love which is… always subject to terms and conditions, to censorship and control, power issues, shut up and butt out, say what I want to hear and don’t bother me with what you need to express, I did all of this for you and now you have to give me what is my due, etc…

Anyways…

we could all use some more of that other kind of love, the one which is open to and goes beyond our own ambitions for it, and it’s sort of strange that Mars and Pluto would be the ones to show us how to do it…

sometimes we learn things in a topsy turvy kind of manner…

by finding out what something isn’t… before we figure out what it is.

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What say you? Share whatever you want to share, interpret my questions anyway you would like… let your curious nature show and tell!