I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m bad at conversation, but I certainly wouldn’t say I’m good at it. I’ve known people who are really good at anecdotes and I am not one of those people. They really seem to enjoy telling stories and know how to do it well. I, on the other hand, consider oration a constant struggle to hide how easily I trip over words or get lost in meandering tangents.

I could probably get better with practice, I’m sure, but then we come to my second problem: I bore myself. It’s true that even in my purposefully boring life I still do things (or have things happen to me) which could be amusing when retold, but here is a fact: The more often I talk about something, the more it bores. And this doesn’t just apply to the anecdotes either. The default thing people talk about when meeting people is jobs, right? Well, (ignoring how much I hate my job to keep the example easy) I quickly grew tired of telling people what I do for a living. But when I found out my actual title (Nighttime Post Press Production Supervisor) I enjoyed working that in when they asked (always sure to include the fact that for years I didn’t know my own title), but soon I tired of that one too. The hypothetical person I am speaking with would find this information new, but to me it has become tired. If you’re not, like, one of the first three people I’m talking to about something, the odds are that I have lost all excitement for it, and that’s bound to hurt the quality of my conversation. (From the other side, I really don’t enjoy if a person is talking to me about something they’ve told me before. I assume that since they don’t tire of their anecdotes, they probably keep them in rotation, so when they forget that I’ve heard it, out it comes again. I guess it’s fine if I’m only hearing it for the second or third time, but I’ve had people repeat the same things to me more often than that and it grows weary.)

Related to that, I can’t be bothered to fill everyone in on the details I need for my anecdotes and stuff. I already know what I do for a living, so when I want to tell someone about something that happened at work, for example the time I lost a fingernail because I got a hand caught in a machine (all anecdotes are about injuries, right?), I go off the idea as soon as I realize that I would actually explain what I do, what the machines are like, and how I used to have a fingernail. All that is taken for granted by me, and thus bores me (see above). So the result is either a weak telling of the anecdote and the details, a telling of the anecdote that suffers from lack of details, or just skipping it altogether. Thus, the more often I see and speak to a person or the more common knowledge that person has on a subject, the surer my footing on the cliffs of speech (metaphorically). And this also carries over to other things. At a couple of the jobs I’ve had I’ve been made to train other people. I hate that. I hate having to go over that stuff. Specifically because it is work, it is such a routine that it goes way beyond a story I’ve told a few times. It’s something I’ve done daily for a depressing number of days and talking or thinking about it just makes it so much worse. I will never enjoy training someone unless they already know everything I’m supposed to tell them.

I do, however, consider myself a good listener. Apart from that bit about people repeating themselves, I like hearing what people have to say (that may be why the repeating themselves bit is so annoying). This, of course, places the burden of the conversation upon my hypothetical conversing partner, which (with some exceptions for people who don’t mind carrying the conversation) again weakens the whole thing. And that’s why the best of all options for me is the be in a larger group of people having a conversation. I get to listen to the back-and-forth and chime in if, at any point, I actually have something I think could be interesting. Of course, there is the constant threat of people who will take my silence as a bad thing and try to directly bring me in. I’m sure their intentions are good (trying to make me feel like part of the group, as if that has ever been a PDR goal), but it just brings me back to the awkward attempt the get my brain to catch up with my mouth of a regular conversation, only now I’ve got a bigger audience.

So there you have it. Another look into the workings of my finicky hermit of a mind. I can and do enjoy talking with people under the right circumstances, but those are some pretty specific circumstances. Otherwise, why can’t we just enjoy the silence together, eh?

Anyway, that is just talking. With written conversations, I have more time to deal with my sentences and sort my thoughts. Sure there are the pitfalls of typos, forgetting words, overuse of parentheses, and all that, but generally I can get my points across much easier. And when I’m tired, I tend to just ramble on and on and on. Like this has been.

Why can’t I get to sleep? I’m totally tired. Come on, body! You’re supposed to know how to cover this part.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I have to use the Comedy Network website to watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report because, residing as I do in Canada, the sites that actually belong to the show are blocked here. Now, this annoys me in all kinds of ways: Whenever someone on the Internet links to a clip from one of those shows, they’re gonna link to the real sites, so I can pretty much never follow a link discussing the content. And even if I were bother to try to find the same clip on the Comedy Network site, their library is very much incomplete. There is no way at all for me to go back to the clips from way back in like 2000 or whenever when Colbert/Carell gave us amazing gold all the time. And also sometimes they seem to delay putting up the previous night’s shows for hours after the normal time

But I’m used to that. I’ve had to put up with that all the time. But what really bugs me is the way that the player on the Comedy Network doesn’t seem very good. It always takes a long time to load, but I’m willing to assume that that is in part the fault of my computer (though I rarely have that problem with things like YouTube…), and plus, for all I know the same problem would occur on the actual sites, so I can’t complain. But these last couple days the Comedy Network site has been even worse, often resetting every forty seconds making it pretty much impossible to watch the shows. And I know this time that it isn’t my laptop’s fault.

So, what I’m getting to here, is, if anyone ever scans the Internet looking for opinions on this, I want to be allowed to use the Daily Show and Colbert sites in Canada. C’mon, Comedy Network. If you’re going to make it illegal for me to watch the shows on their actual websites, can’t you at least try to not suck so bad?

In other news, I was awakened by the sound of jackhammering outside today. So that sucked.

Argh. My ear hurts again. This makes for the third such earache in as many years. Last time, it was the right ear. Now we’re the left ear this time, which is where we were two times ago. I don’t even get why it is happening. It felt fine as I was trying to get to sleep, but upon waking up, there it was, painfulness in the ear when I swallow or, for whatever reason, happen to press on my ear. And this time it doesn’t feel like there’s a big mass of pressure built up in the ear fluid or anything. This time it is just the painfulness. This leads me to believe that this is technically a different problem than the last two times, but the end result, the ear pain, remains intact. I can’t help but wonder if I didn’t, in my sleep, somehow scratch the inside of my ear. And if I did that, sleeptimes-PDR needs to wise up.

Why is it that I could have a pain in my hand or foot or something and not mind all that much, but once it is in one of my ears it occupies my every waking thought? Ear canals. More trouble than they’re worth? Someone needs to look into this.

Also, my spellcheck tells me that painfulness is a legitimate word. Sounds pretty clumsy to me. There are definitely easier ways to phrase a sentence than to use the word painfulness. But that is what makes English so fun.

Yesterday, Saturday, I was awakened after only a three hours sleep by two telemarketing-type calls. This was around Nine and Nine Thirty in the morning. I thought that even normal Day People liked to sleep in on Saturday mornings. Is that not too early for them to be calling? It completely messed me up in any case.

I did enjoy some of my unfortunate waking hours watching two discs worth of episodes of the sixth season of the Simpsons and it is nice to be reminded of just how awesome that show was back when it was awesome. It is hard to believe that those episodes were like a decade and a half old now. Seriously, they should be feeding that stuff to the new kids growing up today. By force if necessary.

And now, because I can, here’s a story:

There was an astronaut called Deke Manly who was always getting drunk and getting in fights with horses. Eventually none of the horses in town would even let him get close to them. The scientists who he worked with didn’t know about his drunken horsefighting, so when they happened to notice that, no matter what, horses would not come within twenty feet of Deke, they naturally assumed that Deke had some sort of horse-repelling field. As it turned out some horses had stolen a spaceship back in ’79 and colonized a planet where they were now massing their forces to return to Earth as conquerors. The scientists shot Deke into space and landed him on the Horse Planet figuring this would put the Horse Armies into disarray. Deke had no horse repelling field, so instead the horses just arrested him and threatened to kill him if Earth didn’t surrender. Earth didn’t surrender. For his last request Deke was given some booze and got so drunk that he had no problem taking on all the Horse colonists. After he’d clobbered all the Horses he didn’t know how to get home, so he brought all the Horses to the hospital and helped them get back to full health. Then they were all friends and the Horse Invasion of Earth was called off and Deke was finally cured of his drunken tendency to fight horses. The end.

I guess it is worth mentioning that I made it to payday without running out of food. On the weekend my mother made a turkey dinner and I took home some leftovers which lasted for two days after that. And I also ended up buying a pizza with credit that I shouldn’t be spending. And today I got groceries and I am only, practically, out of money again instead of actually out of money again.

Haiku!

Deliver the mail
and you will be my best friend.
I’m quite pro-Mail Man.

I did not realize how much I liked mail men. Go figure.

Anyway, in a continuation of my thoughts from last week, it is still Winter here. We’ve been getting snow regularly enough that there are actual snowbanks as tall as me, which was the exact sort of thing I remembered from my youth that I knew we weren’t getting as much of lately. While it is somewhat reassuring to have things “back to normal” after several years of Barely-Winters, I still prefer the Barely-Winters because they’re easier to get through. Heaven help me if I ever actually have to go through a Heavy-Winter. When I got home from work last night my street was blocked off so that what seemed to be an army of plows could get rid of all the snow built up. It’s nice to be on an important street instead of some rural one who is lucky to see a plow.

But in spite of the Winter, I was awakened early today by sweltering heat in my apartment as the sun beat down on my windows. I was all dehydrated. Sigh. I can’t wait until I’m old enough that I can complain constantly about the temperature without feeling like I’m too young to be doing so.