Small-Talk

 

By Kevin Sanders

Let me give you a scenario. After a ridiculous amount of pressure, mostly along the lines of, ‘but you never come out with MY friends’, or, ‘you are so antisocial!’, you have buckled. And thus, you have done something very stupid. You have agreed to go out with your girlfriends friends.

You don’t know any of these people, and it’s quite clear that you have nothing in common with them. So you already feel out of place. Worse, they are doing NOTHING to integrate you into the conversation, as if your very presence is merely a hindrance to be ignored at all costs, so as not to drag them down into your pit of loneliness and despair. So, you’re sat at the end of the table, staring into your double Jack as if looking for an escape route, and there they are, talking about whether or not Jimmy Axewound got off with his tutor, Steve, or that time that Rebecca Cuntchops got thrown out of the bar because she hugged a bouncer and then puked on his shoes. You don’t know Jimmy, you don’t know Rebecca, and you sure as hell don’t know Tutor Steve. So stories of their vomit-induced stupidity do nothing to amuse you. Rather, everybody’s incessant giggling and general in-jokeyness is pissing you the fuck off. And yet you sit there, out of your depth and with the assertion that if you hear one more, ‘do you remember when…’ you are going to flip over the table and eat somebody’s FACE. But, hey, thank God your girlfriend is here, so that you can look to her for comfort, perhaps a little hand-squeeze intended to reassure yourself that, by God, you do still exist.

It’s at this exact moment that she see’s a friend at the bar, and get’s up to stand with him and buy a drink. For ten minutes.

Now you are stuck with Billy Cockface, Betty Shitforbrains and Brian Fagweasel. You look at them. They look at you. The pressure is on. You know they WANT something, whether it be a witty joke, or a clever observation, or just some mindless banter. But right now, mindless banter might as well be the Deflationary fucking Theory of Truth, because you can’t think of a damn thing to say. The silence is deafening. Their eyes are searching you, STUDYING you; you know what they are thinking. You’re weird. You’re strange. You’re not one of us.

And they are RIGHT. You’re NOT one of them. You don’t even want to be here with these fucking personality-less zombie mother-fuckers. You hate them and you hate anybody who looks like them. You trying to discuss anything with them would be like Richard Dawkins and the Pope having tea and biscuits. You want to punch Brian Fagweasel in the face for looking like a small Swedish girl, and yet looking down on YOU. Fuck it, you want to lock the door and burn the bastard bar down just so that you never have to encounter any of these people on an off-chance ever again. If you had a time-machine, you would use it to go back in time and throw contraception at their mothers until she got the fucking point. You… you… ARRRGH!

But those EYES! The pressure! All you can think is, ‘I must say something to make me look even slightly normal! Anything to redeem me in their eyes… maybe I can say something so intelligent and witty that they ACCEPT ME! Yes! That’s it! Maybe I can impress them so much that they hoist me onto their shoulders and carry me out of this bar as their new champion of WORDS! MAYBE THEY WILL CROWN ME THE SOCIAL KING!!!

And so, you open your mouth… and say….

‘………..yurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmmmm, izza bit nippy innit?’

And so, we enter the ridiculous world of small-talk. The art of having to say things to people you’d rather not talk to. Because, let’s not fool ourselves, that is what it is. Small-talk is reserved for people you don’t want to have long-talk with. People not worthy of a full conversation. People that you would RATHER NOT WASTE TIME ON.

Small-talk is part of this global cancer that we call, ‘seeming nice.’ Because everybody these days has to ‘seem nice’. Everyone has to pretend to be friendly and sociable. But it’s this same need to ‘seem nice’ that puts you in this situation that makes you feel uncomfortable, isn’t it? Here’s how it works. You see somebody walking down the street, you say ‘hiiiii!’. You’re thinking, ‘shit. What the FUCK do I have to say to this person!’ And then you stand around and talk regardless, about things you couldn’t give a monkey’s jizz about. You have no in-depth thoughts about the weather, and yet here you stand, like Michael fucking Fish, saying, ‘looks like rain’.

And what are you risking at the expense of ‘seeming nice’, and talking about things that are duller to you than drinking dishwater off of a freshly painted wall? LOOKING FAKE. And somehow, that’s worse. ‘He wasn’t interested at all, he just wanted to be on his way. He’s so fake!’ So, apparently, whilst you were talking about liquid precipitation, you didn’t seem CONVINCINGLY FUCKING INTERESTED!

So now, we have established that you are running this dangerous slalom of pretending to care and not LOOKING like you are merely pretending. So now, all for the sake of being sociable, you are required to put on an Oscar winning performance so that they forget that this is inconsequential small-talk, and actually become somewhat involved in your ideas and theories on condensation. BUT WAIT! If you look too interested, you are running two highly severe risks.

RISK 1) You’ll FREAK THEM OUT!

‘So, what have you been up to today?’
‘Oh, just a bit of gardening.’
‘OH REALLY, PRAY, TELL ME MORE!’

Now, you’ve gone too far. Now she’ll tell everybody you know that you’re a weirdo, or that you came onto her, or whatever. So now, for the sake of trying to ‘seem nice’, you now have the reputation of a weird pervert with an unhealthy interest in pruning.

RISK 2) They’ll think you actually are interested in anything they have to say, small-talk will turn into long-talk, and all of a sudden you have a friend you NEVER FUCKING WANTED TO TALK TO IN THE FIRST PLACE.

The fact is, nobody has perfected small talk. The people who have come closest? Mass murderers. Ted Bundy knew how to work small-talk well enough to get women to walk towards his car. Then he’d beat them with a tyre iron. Small talk has, therefore, gruesomely killed people. And you tell me small-talk isn’t evil!

But discounting the criminally insane, and somebody I shall return to later, nobody actually knows how to perfect small-talk. No sod knows where that perfect line of feigned interest is, and I’ll tell you why. Because NOTHING OF INTEREST, BY ITS VERY NATURE, IS EVER SAID IN SMALL TALK! The world has never been altered and changed in five seconds of exchanging pleasantaries! You can’t DO enough in five minutes to say anything substantial! So FUCK being nice. You know what I do now if I see somebody in the street who might potentially try to talk to me? Fake a seizure. Within fifteen minutes I’m in an ambulance, being driven far away from the bastard, and didn’t have to say a word to him! Totally worth it.

What happened to honesty being the best policy? What happened to not having to pretend to like people? FUCK IT. From here on in, if you don’t wanna talk to them, DON’T STOP AND TALK TO THEM. Nobody needs the pressures and annoyances of small-talk. You will only spend the conversation giving subtle hints that you don’t want to be there. Yawning. Slowly edging away. Checking your watch. Saying things like, ‘sure… well… I really ought to…’, and finally kicking the fucker in the lower regions and running like the fucking wind.

Obviously, I’m pretty goddamn bad at small-talk, and the reason is… I just don’t have the motivation to waste time ‘exchanging niceties.’ I don’t exchange niceties with my MOTHER. So why should Jamie Noface get the fucking privilege? In the time it takes A. Scientist to stand around prattling on about fuck all with some bitch he met at some party once, purely to look nice, he could be finding a cure for cancer. You selfish, small-talking bitch. People aren’t worth ‘stop and chats’.

But that’s not to say that I didn’t wonder if there wasn’t some kind of art to small talk that I didn’t understand. A reason that I am so bad at it. A gene, perhaps, that I was born without. Well, I had to research it, for you, my loyal… erm… reader. And I came across Bernardo J. Carducci, Ph.D. Now, rather than wasting his time battling AIDS or trying to dispel super bugs, our doc has kindly taken his time, and our tax-paying money, to write ten bullet points as to how to successfully SMALL TALK! Thank him for all his hard… erm… work… and vigorous… resea… what a cock.

Here’s his advice.

 

1) Do a little homework.

Here’s an actual fucking QUOTE from the article.

"As I drive to a party, I try to come up with two or three things to talk about in case the conversation runs dry," says Debra Fine, lecturer and author of The Fine Art of Small Talk. (SERIOUSLY!? - Kev) "If I've met the host before, I try to remember things about her, like her passion for skiing or a charity we're both involved in."

AH! That’s why I was never a success at small-talk! I didn’t realise the hours of EXTENSIVE RESEARCH that went into it! Apparently, the art of conversation lies in REVISION.

Look, let me make this simple. I don’t wanna talk about fucking skiing with the host. I have no interest in skiing. If small-talk is about having conversations about things that I don’t give a toss about, FUCK parties, I’ll stay at home and have conversations with myself about interesting and worthwhile stuff. Plus, I’m not gonna watch the bastard news to have something to talk about! Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think, ‘have you heard about the genocide in Rwanda’ is going to earn me many points as a party starter! And I don’t think any conversation should take WORK. That defeats, for me, the purpose of conversation. It’s not a chat if I feel like I should be getting scored on it. If you aint interesting enough to say something worthwhile without reading The Sun, hang yourself. And then hang yourself again for reading The Sun. The Sun sucks.

Oh, and when the FUCK would I ever be involved in Charity?! Do I SEEM charitable!? Fuck orphans. Orphans are gay.

 

2) Greet people appropriately.

Here I learned of another mistake I was making. Apparently, it’s NOT best to initiate a conversation with a girl by honking her left boob.

Apparently, a good way to start small-talk is with a firm handshake. Why is this all so FORMAL? Was this study conducted by a Duke in the 1940’s? How am I going to go from a businesslike handshake seamlessly into, ‘did you see the match last night?’ without seeming like a pompous jerk? Fucking small-talk sucks.

Here’s another quote…

"If you've kissed someone before, remember to do it again, or they may feel shunned. And if you're greeting a husband and wife, kiss both, or it will look like you're picking a favorite."

I took this advice. My ex-girlfriend was not happy. Especially with the tongue. She was even more pissed when I locked tongues with her new boyfriend.

Since when did we kiss people on the cheek in this country? Am I alone here? Did I miss the ‘we’re all gonna turn into French stereotypes’ meeting? This advice sucks.

 

3) Remember names.

This seems like good advice, because that’s the WORST kind of small-talk. You know the kind I mean. Where somebody approaches you and says, ‘Hi! It’s been ages! How are you??’ And you say, ‘wow! I’m great, you?’ And all the time you are thinking, ‘who in the holiest of fucks are you?’. Well, here’s my advice. Stop worrying. If you have forgotten them, they probably aren’t worth remembering. You blotted them out for a reason. Respond with a hearty, ‘hey! I don’t know who you are, and if you continue to babble like a fucking idiot about NOTHING, I will beat you to death with my big fucking dick.’ Now, she knows that you don’t wanna talk, AND that you are a REAL man. You win, she loses, one more falls to the power of being honest over being a whiny, fake-ass, small talking bitch.

 

4) Don’t hold back.

Here’s a quote.

‘If asked what you do for a living, don't give the short answer, thereby forcing the other person to scramble for more questions. "Embellish your response," says Carducci.’

Erm… kinda defeats the object of small-talk if you are embellishing, doesn’t it? Nothing annoys me more than somebody who wont shut the fuck up. If I said to somebody mid-conversation, ‘so what do you do?’, and ten minutes later they were still talking, I’d be curled up in bed watching Dexter before they finally got round to, ‘so, basically, I’m a shelf-stacker at Tesco’s‘. Plus, what questions do you EXPECT me to scramble for? If you do something with your life that bores me shitless, say you ARE a shelf stacker at Tesco’s, I don’t wanna fucking talk to you anymore, you fucking troll. What, do you have any hilarious toilet-roll mishaps to regale me with? Have you cleaned up any interesting aisles today? Jesus H Christ.

On the other hand, if you DO do something interesting, I’ll be just fine.

‘So what do you do, Jewel’.
‘Oh, I’m a porn star.’
‘…okay… question one…’

Point made.

 

5) Draw the other person out.

Apparently, the key to being good at small talk is being good at pretending that you are interested in the pointless, meaningless and pretentious babble that the person you are talking to is droning on and on about until you lose focus completely and begin to hope and pray that a large asteroid crashes into the house right now and wipes out the entire population of Shit Creek or that the house is suddenly and viciously overcome by a vicious virus that starts by eating away at the eardrum and then slowly works it’s way into the brain where it chews through any semblance of meaning and reality and you can drift away into a lovely world in which this bitch fails to exist and you can die happy in the knowledge that you never have to listen to her pretentiously roll an R again and all is quiet forever and ever.

I’m not a big fan of the idea.

 

There are more, but fuck them. It’s all the same shit, about discussing the setting and shit. Look, here’s the tips you REALLY need on small-talk.

1) If you see some-one you don’t want to talk to, when they approach you, bite them right on the tip of the nose. They don’t seem to be very talkative after that.

2) If you DO get caught in small-talk, and you don’t wanna make an excuse to get away, start acting like a freak. Smell the persons hair, keep stepping towards them, reveal to them that you are quite interested in taxidermy, scratch your balls and say, ‘does this smell like Smokey Bacon to you’? If nobody ever talks to you again… WELL DONE! YOU HAVE FOREVER AVOIDED SMALL-TALK.

3) If you get into small-talk and you feel the conversation start to die, and you get that uncomfortable silence, stare up to the sky and say, ‘what’s that?!’ Then turn around and run. And then cut yourself for getting yourself into that position to begin with. Douche.

 

Small-talk is fake, ridiculous, and unnecessary. Small-talk is a means by which to seem like a decent person, when really, all you want to do is tell this babbling mother-fucker to piss off. And, most of all, small-talk is a waste of your time and mine. So do me a favour. Next time somebody on MSN has a conversation with you where they say, ‘hi’, ‘hows u’, and the worst, ‘what shall we talk about’, block them. The next time somebody you don’t give a shit about tries to converse with you, ignore them. And the next time somebody utters the phrase, ‘I’m a porn star’, send their number to kevinsanders@whyihateeverything.co.uk. I will know if you don’t. I WILL FUCKING KNOW.

I have been me. You love that.