Most of the talk was very very small, with the exception of my buddy from down under who never seemed to get any hangover of any kind, no matter how much alcolol he consumed. Lucky prick. Also, alcolol is not a typo. While most of the table had their heads in their hands, desperately yearning for the infusion of bacon and coffee to begin, he chattered away merrily. I hated him every morning after. Every fucking time. This was getting to be a habit.
Yeah, I did this a lot more than I should really care to admit. I was a regular social butterfly. Of course, I wasn't always like this, just like I knew I wouldn't always be like this. Even as I was ramping up a life that split my time between academia and alcohol, I knew that it was a temporary thing. A lifestyle that could only exist for a scattered handful of years before I got too old, too jaded, too responsible or just too bored with it. I knew from the very beginning that these experiences would eventually blend into something same-y and tasteless unless I was willing to make a further leap into a dirtier world than I ever had any desire to sample, let alone make it my home. I still wanted them, though. I'd always had a sneaking suspicion that life was holding out on me, and I was determined to pin social interaction down and wring some edification out of it. You can't really judge something unless you've made the effort to understand it.
No, I wasn't always like this. For a long time, I was just a good kid with too much time on his hands and nothing to really fill it with. We moved around a lot when because of my dad's job, so in grade six, when we landed in a little piss-ant town five klicks from ten klicks from the middle of nowhere, I figured, "Hell, we probably won't be here for more than a couple of years," and decided not to bother making nice with the locals and to just do my own thing.
Then we lived there for eight years. Oh, and in case you're counting, that's fifteen klicks from the middle of nowhere.
I was a smart kid, clearly a nerd, stuck in a town that belonged to sports and I didn't want to play. Eventually, I caved, tried out for the football team and made it, started drinking with all the other kids bored senseless from small town suburbia and the farms scattered around it, and made some semblance of a social life out of the whole dirty mess. But if you don't know this, either because you haven't gone through it yet, or because you were never on the wrong side of popular, it takes a while to get a feel for how to talk to people. New people, that is. In a small enough town, on a long enough time scale, everyone gets to know you and your conversational quirks, and as long as you're a good person at heart, they'll overlook a lot. Small towns are actually pretty neat that way. I didn't understand that at the time, but eventually it came to me.
When it comes to talking to new people, there's a whole set of body language cues that you have to learn to both put out and be receptive to. If you start young enough and try hard enough to fit in, this isn't something you need to actively learn, but if you've been standing on the outside looking in for most of your life, then you need to practice this. Basically, just start talking to people, any people, on any convenient pretext and pay some fucking attention. Watch how they react to you and to not only what you're saying, but how you're saying it. It makes all the difference in the world.
People always tell you to be yourself, but what they really mean is that you should be relaxed and not pretend that you have experiences you don't. That doesn't mean that you start talking to the pretty girl next to you in line about video games and computers unless she does first, because the odds are good that she won't be interested in that. "Be yourself" doesn't mean advertise your interests all the time, it means be honest, look for some common ground and try not to get nervous. When it comes to the opposite sex, be yourself means don't try to impress people and leave the pickup lines at home because as it turns out, the kindergarten approach works just fine. "Hi, my name is (insert here), what's your name?" And from there, you keep her talking about herself. People like to talk about themselves. But you don't just blast away with non-stop questions, you actually need to listen to the answers and genuinely care about what she's trying to say, if for no other reason than to have something else to use to keep the conversation going.
I keep saying She, but this advice works in any social situation, on any gender or age group, I should point that out.
With enough practice and attention, you develop a feel for conversations, how to ask questions that lead to more than one word answers, how to slip just enough of yourself into the wordplay that you make the other party feel like they got to know you a little. You might even learn how to be funny. But the trick is that there is no trick, just experience. You know how to get to Carnegie hall? Practice, man, practice. It'll start off painful and awkward, but keep at it, that'll change.
Hell of a tangent there, I believe I was waxing historical. I would have said nostalgic, but that would imply that I enjoyed my time there. Let me be clear: I could not wait to get out of that town. When high school was over, I went to university and did not look back. That being said, I did, eventually, try to enjoy myself while I was stuck there, because why not make the best of a bad situation? Just because you wouldn't have chosen something for yourself is not a reason for you to bitch and moan about it the whole time. That's childish. You bide your time, make the best of it, and then get the fuck out when the opportunity presents itself.
Because hell, even fifteen klicks from the middle of nowhere, there's fun to be had if you bother to look for it.
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