SKIMBS

Friendliness is close to godliness, groundhogs lie, and other things we already know

Embracing the dogma of an endlessly reincarnating groundhog whose track record is measly at best (39% accuracy) doesn’t necessarily suggest that we credulously believe it’s the same goddamn marmot year after year, but instead that we carry a tacit understanding of ritual as good enough to get us through the winter. Punxsutawney Phil was wrong this year, though. Spring came early, and with it comes new rituals: men pretend to read outside, women break up with their boyfriends, I thank God for the spring showers clearing away the snow streaks off my car; most importantly, we all get some new material for the quintessential, all-too-hated art of small talk.

There’s no good reason not to talk about the weather. Maybe it’s Southern comfort: an obsession with grease to make food taste better, to make conversation slide down smoother. If our lives are so atomized we can’t jump at common ground with a stranger, how the hell are we gonna embark on the socialist utopian groundwork laid by our fore fathered Instagram story infographics, and how the hell are we gonna make friends? These are questions I ask myself not to fortify my self-righteousness as Girl Who Can’t Shut Up Sometimes but instead to ease my discomfort when it’s Awkward At The Function.

Small talk is easy. If you’re nervous, repeat what works. When Vandy beat Bama last fall, I found an opening line for my whole Monday (those smarmy little nerds bucked with vengeance, huh?). And when my peers floundered trying to drum up football vocabulary (I am in library school), we moved on to weather. The breeze is so lovely today. I walked to campus and now I have blisters, but your shoes seem really sensible, so please tell me they cost less than a hundred bucks? All morning I’ve imagined I’m guest starring in an early season of Gilmore Girls, and it’s all because of the trees.

Fall was nice, and spring came early, but the Midwestern winter was a stubborn old bitch with something to prove. I was told repeatedly “it’s really not too bad this year” and “Illinois doesn’t really get snow,” so I would twirl my hair with my index finger and say that “you don’t get it, haha, I’m from Tennessee,” which is cute when I’m not drinking and we’re already getting along well. Everyone here is polite and often kind, but they don’t like small talk like I do. I joke to my dentist about being a broke grad student who really is totally fine with over-the-counter dupes while he waves a form in my face for a bite splint fitting. We talk over each other, and eventually he sticks his fingers in my mouth to shut me up.¹

What may seem interminable to some is really just a reciprocal transfer of niceties, a check-in for how someone fares under universal conditions. My last summer in LA (Lower Alabama) smothered. At work I asked “inside or outside?” only to be laughed at by families that had never known life above Mobile County; even they wouldn’t dare eat outside after mid-morning, so the umbrellas remained ever drawn and I cut the patio server, always pleased to be discharged from the tyrannical humidity. But nevertheless, we persisted: I asked and they answered, everyone chuckled, and someone would compliment someone’s shoes until we all felt good and warm enough to carry on with the original interaction and find an appropriately air-conditioned table.

A distaste for pitiless cold is sometimes all I can get out of my new neighbors and coworkers. I work at the library, so it’s obviously a quiet bunch if you don’t count the old guy obsessed with unrealistic plot armor in Christopher Nolan movies (“this episode was brought to you by the suspension of disbelief!”). You know the type. I talk to him anyway.

One small talk naysayer told me he’d rather discuss things that matter, like what constitutes existence and whether art is redemptive in a politically fractured world, as if either of these topics are more important than what your favorite movie is. As if the small things don’t make up our days and thus, our lives. As if your coffee order doesn’t say more about you than your take on moral dubiousness (no one cares, dubious naysayer).

Small talk leads to long talk, and this is how we make enemies and friends. I found a real small-to-long truther outside the show last night. Why I left the building remains a mystery. Maybe the band sucked? Maybe I had to call Catherine and tell her something really juicy? These things happen, after all. Either way, I ended up on the bench, and so did Marvin. If, dear reader, you are my mother reading this, don’t panic! I carry pepper spray in my purse and a litany of off-putting behaviors at the tip of my tongue. If danger arises, I hiss and scream and begin circuitous rants about how the sulfurous odor of a boiled egg butchers the dignity of a righteous chicken until eventually, strange men leave me alone.

But Marvin wanted to chat, and I already had Catherine on speakerphone, so we did. At one point Marvin said something vaguely political and wholly inaccurate. I gave him a look, he gave me a look, I said “no, Marvin!” and Marvin shrugged. “It’s true.” You know when your childhood dog humps someone’s leg and everything you’ve ever considered immutable and good about the world shatters into a million little pieces? I’m not great at metaphors. Five minutes into my newfound friendship with Marvin, he revealed his MAGA tendencies.

We talked anyway. I did my best to change his mind given my drunken circumstances (no one over the age of 19 should ever drink a Truly Unruly, but we all have to live with our choices). But that ostensibly incontrovertible immigration propaganda had wormed its way into the canals of Marvin’s mind, and no amount of congeniality could steer him away. When Megha and Ashley found me outside, they tried their best with Marvin. Catherine provided commentary via speakerphone. Marvin wouldn’t budge.

But even when Marvin would drop some erroneous fact about stealing jobs and look at us like he had just blown our minds (like, what do you want me to say? call the dogs to piss on the fire! we can all go home!), I couldn’t help but enjoy my time on the bench with this Donald Trump dick sucker. I know that’s wrong, but it’s in my bones. I love to talk. I wage war with keeping to myself and lose sorely. Because at the end of the day, weird little conversations with strangers are how I avoid loneliness.²

Joan Didion couldn’t small talk. It’s what makes her elegant, wise, and ultimately an asshole when she visited the South and penned her experience in the now-published notebook, South and West. She couldn’t small talk because she was sensible. She observed. She found frivolity and lethargy and murk in the Deep South. She knew more about agribusiness and the impact of concave coastlines on real estate than the slow-mouthed racists. She purchased a Confederate beach towel because it was funny and eventually her daughter inexplicably preferred to use it. I hated reading it. I hated that I hated it. I stared at my Good Reads profile for a good long while deciding between 2 stars and no rating at all (not one of my 28 Good Reads friends noticed but these judgements are important work). But I also fall privy to reductionist bullshit because like Joan, I am a bit of an asshole, and also because it’s easier that way.

I don’t wanna reduce this city or state or region to my judgements about propensity for quick conversation. At the end of the day, the Midwestern strangers I’ve met and friendships I’ve built have saved me from loneliness during a cold, hard winter. In February, I slid on the ice, one foot over my head, like I stepped on a goddamn banana peel. After weeks of carefully tip-toeing the ice in my boots, terrified of slips or slides, the worst had happened. I hit the ground, and I got the fuck up. No one saw me (when a girl hits the pavement and no one is around to hear it, does she make a sound?). I practically ran to Ashley’s house to tell her about my Looney Tunes fall. “When you’re going through it,” she said, “everything feels poetic.” I was so glad I had someone to tell.

And maybe that’s why I treasured my time with Marvin. To sit and talk about something so frustrating and futile and bigger than all of us, to be glad I have someone to talk to, despite it all. We didn’t change Marvin’s mind, but we gave him the time of day, and that sticks with people more than argument. Perhaps this is my ritual, and it’s how I will always make it through the winter.

And as we all know, like gravity and sunrises and laundry, winter will come again. Rituals will be built upon and broken. The co-op will stop selling pomegranate wine, I will fall on my ass, men will feign literacy, and women will break up with their boyfriends. When the homeless man asks if my clothes from the night before are my clothes for church, I will say yes, because whether or not he’s making fun of my whorish get-up, it’s nice to pretend to be devoted to something. Loneliness, stripped of its mythology, is a need for devotion. So even when some Illinoisians remain impenetrable as artichokes, I will poke and prod, I will tell them the groundhog saw its shadow, and despite the 61% chance he got it wrong, we will talk about it.

1. There is no sexual tension in a dentist’s office, only accusations of gum disease and frankly, pure barbarity. ↩︎
2. I have an abortion joke that’s failed twice now, which you might think would drill into my tiny little head that it’s time to let that one go (my head is actually too big for my body and I feel strongly about this), but I’m actually starting to think abortion jokes are only funny in states where you can’t get them. Yes, yes, I have a superiority complex about most things I say and do. This must shock you, dear reader of my personal essay. ↩︎