Old Friends and Bad Transitions

Out of the blue, an old friend e-mailed me this week saying she would be coming through town. Always nice. We got together, ordered green tea lattes and got to chatting, having not seen each other in a year or two.

And an interesting thing happened - before we knew it we were spilling our guts about just about everything. She told me things she hadn't told her mother, lover or best friend yet. I told her things that had been stuck in my head for a long time that had yet to be articulated. We were never compatriots, more like really excellent and in sync acquaintances, but there we were, guts out, suffering the wind and cloudy weather and watching Highway 281.

We talked for about two hours about a multitude of subjects and the conversation came pretty easy. For me, that's nice because I don't have the easiest way with people anymore. I still have mad phone skills, but one on one I'm finding myself more awkward as I go on, which is odd. I'm starting to overthink when I should underthink and vice versa. It goes back a long ways and has culminated in some pretty embarrassing situations over the years, I'm afraid.

But it was a blast having the words come out and be witty and fun without worrying about what was next. It's a rare thing, but it's nice.

Since I'm rambling, ramble some more - One of my chief sins when it came to conversation early on in my adult life involved ranting. I'd take a subject and either beat a subject to death or take a subject and shoe horn it into another subject that I found interesting. What was fun was watching girls who thought I was witty grow into women who didn't find me interesting at all. The change was a harsh one if I remember right, and only after a few trips to the woodshed did I realize my style of conversation pegged me as either a well-meaning, over eager egotist or an egotistical idiot. Alcohol, I later found out, did not help the matter any.

Rejection of ones principal style of talking forces one to move into a professional line of speaking, not my forte. It's still not. But part of me is a good listener and I've found I can stumble through a conversation with most anyone by picking up on what interests them.

Today's conversation wasn't so much like that as two friends who spent a half hour reacquainting, and then spilling for another hour when we realized we probably didn't have a lot of time. It was fun to be carefree about talking for a minute before heading back to the land of too-slow tongues, dangling participles and mixed metaphors.