Thursday, July 12, 2007

A word in edgewise

I never understood that saying, "trying to get a word in edgewise." I don't know who decided that you needed to add the "edgewise" to make people understand that you were trying to get a word in, but I'm not sure it was necessary.
As anyone who knows me will attest, I rarely let people get words in, edgewise or otherwise, especially on the phone. I realize that part of that is because I have phone-phobia (not like arachnophobia, totally different) and that if I keep talking, I'm in control. But I also think that I love to talk to people who think that what I say matters. The reason that I have to make this distinction (as opposed to just loving to talk) is my experience at "work" this last week. At King Soopers, I felt very connected with everyone right away. They asked about me and my background and school and hobbies and family, and conversation was a very comfortable part of the day. I knew that they would listen to whatever it was that I was saying and be interested. However, at Immanuel, it's been substantially more difficult to feel like I fit in and therefore more difficult to have conversation. So far, I've eaten lunch four days in a row with the same people and I think I've maybe spoken for a combined 5 minutes. That's about 2 1/2 hours of me not talking (it should be 2 hours, but I swear nobody in the working world has any sort of work ethic or integrity or awareness of time). The joy of conversation is completely lost on these people. They don't hardly talk with each other, who they've worked with every day for the past however many months or years. They just sit and eat the lunch and make an occasional comment about the weather or something else in the news and then back to silence. They certainly don't ask me anything about myself and after a few attempts, I've stopped asking about them. I never thought that I'd prefer silence to conversation, especially during a lunch break in an otherwise painfully boring day, but I do because their conversation is more painfully boring than the silence. Too late to make a long explanation short, but essentially I don't talk with these people because I don't feel like what I say matters.
Imagine the joy of being with someone day after day who enjoys hearing what you have to say. I once told my neighbor that I hate that I talk so much and that I know that God gave us two ears and one mouth and she said, "Michelle, if everybody listened twice as much as they talked, nobody would say anything. Somebody has to do the talking." And I think I'll do the talking. I just need to find people to talk to. Coco was a good ear tonight, just letting me have at it without interruption. And that, like pretty much everything else in my life, reminds me of how much I want to get married and love someone and be loved by someone so much that all these little things that matter to me will be fulfilled. But that's a blog for another time. Especially because Friends is on and if there's one thing I love to do more than talk, it's laugh.

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I reserve the right to make this blog as worthless to read as I feel like, and also to write as infrequently as I deem necessary. Just thought I'd let you know since I finally decided to share my blog.