incommunicado

Day-to-day life is rife with little land mines for nervous people like me. I find it fascinating that I can get so worked up over stuff that I don’t care much about. I wonder if this is what happens when analytical people are too lazy: we train a cold gaze within that was designed only for the world without. It's enough to make a person feel weird about anything...or everything.

Or maybe we just make shit up. I really don’t know.

In any case, it doesn’t take much to trigger a flare-up of what T once called my “social disease,” a diagnosis she delivered after I said I might prefer to communicate with people by writing on a notepad instead of talking. (I was joking, but that doesn’t mean she was wrong.)

Luckily, there are a few people I talk with who don’t make me want to reach for the notepad. Even so, for the most part, I hate talking on the phone. It makes me uneasy. Sometimes I say the most peculiar things, and I’m troubled when I can’t erase them.

I recently noticed that I pace whenever I’m on the phone. Isn’t that odd? Literally, I walk back and forth throughout my conversations, no matter who is on the other end.

Still, some phone calls are easier than others. Phone chemistry is an interesting thing. I hate talking to some of my best friends on the phone, even when we’re just making plans for later that night. There is something about making a call that stresses me out.

Then again, I have a few friends with whom I can talk on the phone for hours. After much analysis, I believe that my ideal phone partner has to be willing to talk about nothing, sort of like an episode of Seinfeld. (I really like to talk about nothing. You should know, given that you read my blog.) Often, I worry that I am like a character in an Oscar Wilde play—a shallow person full of pretty, clever talk. Sometimes I think I’m not shallow; others I think my words are not pretty or clever. That must mean I am perfectly balanced! :-) :-)

(Speaking of which, is there anything more unbalanced than emoticons? Every time I get one of those e-mails, I assume its author is crazed.)

I also enjoy crisis calls, which is when one person has a crisis that the other person tries to work through. But who doesn’t? Crises are compelling, even when they make us pace. This is also why I like television.

Anyway, after discussing the phone-torture phenomenon with a few friends, I discovered that there are others like me. V doesn’t like talking on the phone for any reason. A prefers agenda calls—he can’t stand to talk on the phone unless he has an objective that can be achieved within 1-3 minutes. Usually, he prefers texting, which is, of course, okay with me.