Summer Shorts Vol. 4: I am sometimes horrible
500 words of confession
The Rules I’ve Made for Myself—
What: An essay that is exactly 500 words.
Why: I had the idea that limiting myself to 500 words would reduce the weird pressure I bring on myself about writing, while I’m busy with the final stages of releasing a book in October.
How: Intros and footnotes don’t count towards the 500. I write in a Google Doc and don’t cheat on the word count, and then I paste it into a Substack draft and add footnotes and the intro.
I saw a meme on Instagram the other day about a shop owner trying to make polite small talk with a customer who came in to her store. Hi welcome in! Good to see you. Let me know if I can help you find something! and all that. The customer sighed a deep heavy sigh and said Ugh I hate small talk.
“Oh me too,” the shop owner replied. “So what do you think happens when we die?”
The meme is funny because it’s real. We may hate small talk but what do you say when you’re in transactional spaces with other humans?
Summer Shorts Vol. 4 is about how I am sometimes horrible in those settings.
Places that aren’t designed to hold conversation, yet we try anyway:
Social Media
Coffee shops
The greeting area at church
The grocery check-out line
There is a clerk at the grocery store that I always try to avoid. The small talk is so small, the cliches so scripted. I don’t like the me that I am on the inside when I go through her line with a smile on my face and cliched responses to her canned questions and comments on my lips. Her repeated phrases and saccharine euphemisms only allow for like responses. She has some kind of an accent which, to her benefit, is charming. Something about her gives strong Laverne & Shirley vibes.
“Busy day today huh, honey? Oh look at all the goodies you found! You must be planning a big party, huh honey? You sure got some good stuff today. Oh everybody’s so busy. My, you got yourself a lot of eggs today, sweetie.”
Yes, busy. Yes, goodies. No party—this is my weekly shopping for my business. Yep, good stuff. Yep, busy. Yeah, the eggs.
I am a horrible person.
I try to find a different clerk, even if the line is longer. I get behind the people with carts overflowing like mine, with kids hanging off the sides like mine used to, with sweat beads holding strands of hair to their hot faces and their purse buried somewhere beneath the tomatoes and Cheerios and family pack of chicken thighs.
I’ll wait. It’s fine. I am more patient with chaos than with small talk1.
I don’t expect the grocery clerk to have a deep or enlightening conversation with me, but the script is so worn and thin and dutiful.
No, actually; I am being ungenerous.
I don’t think she is being dutiful with her script. I think she is delighted with the people who come through her line, and I have things to learn from her. Some customers she calls by name, not honey or sweetie. These people are regulars in her line and they choose her, and they minister to her and let her minister to them.
Meanwhile I’ve chosen the clerk who is silent and doesn’t even crack a smile, as if I have personally offended her somehow.
The chatty clerk has been at this a long time. I think she probably has some anxieties, maybe a neurodivergence that makes her most comfortable with a script, and she is doing fine at her job. She has figured out how to cope in a world, in a setting, that forces her to interact with a lot of people without ever having an actual conversation, and she has built relationships in that setting.
“Good conversation is life-giving: it inspires and ignites,” says Marilyn McEntyre.2 Some places are not designed to hold conversation but if I look at it another way, maybe all my interactions are in conversation with one another, scripted or not.
Tomorrow I shop again. One more chance to be a better person.3
I do think there is a valid point to small talk, even though it’s funny and cool to belittle it. We have to have something polite to say in circumstances when actual discussion is not possible. That makes us human, not robots. I am not great at this, but I try to have one real thing to comment on. Or I just smile real big and dumb and hope that brightens someone’s day.
Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, 2nd Edition. Pg. 89.
Alas, she wasn’t working. And also, full confession: I have written about this scenario before (link below) and committed to being a better person then, yet here I am still.
I don’t enjoy small talk on a typical day, but if it’s a day when hard things are right at the surface of life, it’s so much worse. “How’s your day going?” What are you supposed to say? “Terribly. I’ve already cried three times.”