Genre: Nonfiction / personal essay
Note: This essay was sent originally to paid subscribers three months ago; I’m re-posting it for free on the occasion of receiving the tattoo (!) discussed below. This newsletter exists to develop my skills as a writer, and paid subscribers receive new writing across a variety of genres weekly. Consider subscribing!
When I received my first vaccine shot in March, a single tear trailed cinematically down my cheek as the needle bit into my arm1—a tiny, physical manifestation of the eddy of emotions swirling inside in that climactic moment. Okay, not really. The emotions were real, yes, but I didn’t actually shed any tears. What actually happened is that after I sat down, I was feeling rather emotional, and so I was also thinking about the fact that I was feeling emotional, which prompted me to ask the woman administering the shots, “Have you had anyone get emotional? Like, tearing up or anything?” To which she replied, “No, not really... Mostly people are just happy.” Totally, I nodded. Weird, I thought. Feels like a significant moment, though, doesn’t it? Yes, definitely. Better explain yourself. “It just feels like a significant moment, is all,” I said. I wondered if others really were emotional and just didn’t show it or if I was the weirdo, then weighed whether I should verbalize that thought and decided against it. “Thank you,” I said. The whole scene played out in maybe 30 seconds.
That exchange is, for me, SOP. In fact, this kind of social interaction—the actual verbal communication along with my internal monologue—happens so frequently that I’ve come to think of it as a defining characteristic of both my psyche and my social self. I am still processing the following conversation with a physician assistant from a routine medical appointment a couple of weeks ago, for example (note that I was carrying a copy of Andy Weir’s new novel, Project Hail Mary):
PA: [Gesturing] “If you could just step up on the scale here… What’re we reading?”
Me: “What are we reading…” Does she really want to know? Maybe she’s a reader. But also, maybe she’s not? Does it matter? I suppose an easy thing would be to say “Oh, just a fun sci-fi book,” because it’s true, plus it would as they say put the ball back in her court AND have the added benefit of giving her the option to follow up if she’s truly interested, BUT… it’s by Andy Weir, and he wrote The Martian—which she’s almost certainly heard of, given that it was adapted into a blockbuster film starring Matt Damon. How much time has passed since she asked? How much what do they call it in broadcasting? Oh yeah, dead air! How much dead air is acceptable, anyway? Would any response at this point imperil the whole exchange? Nah, probably it’s fine… The latter option’s more interesting, go with that. “Oh, it’s the new book by Andy Weir… he’s the guy who wrote—
PA: [Interrupting] “Cool, you can go ahead and head into this room here…”
Me: “Cool.”
That is not an exaggeration. Doesn’t matter when or where they happen—these seemingly benign tête-à-têtes render me suspendedly animated in the moment and then interpersonally Monday morning quarterbacking later on, sometimes for months.2 Doctor’s office? Check. Grocery store checkout? Yup. Impromptu backyard chat with the new neighbor? You bet your ass. Even with friends and family. Maybe even especially with friends and family. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, trying to make sense of the whole business, and what I keep coming back to is… marbles.
There’s a viral video from a few years back that depicts a “marble machine” separating a huge collection of marbles via a (supposedly) random, Plinko-like process into inexplicably homogeneous color groupings:3
Now imagine you’re a physician assistant, say. Every week, you see tens or hundreds of patients, represented in this thought experiment by colored marbles. Each patient/marble is a real person, a unique snowflake, a complex and beautiful narrative incarnate. And although there are many paths your conversations with a patient/marble may take, they’ll inevitably wind up landing in one of like seven possible slots: The guy who talked about the rain they’re predicting for later this week (plink, plink, blue); the kid who was a bit of a pain to wrangle through the intake process (plink, plink, orange); the woman who comments on your appearance (plink, plink, green). And so on.
Or imagine you’re a barista at a coffee shop. Or a defense attorney. Or a nurse volunteering to administer coronavirus vaccines. Plink, plink. Our personal and professional lives are littered with uncomplicated conversations that slot neatly into predestined containers. Unless I’m an insane person, you can probably conjure an example or two yourself.
And listen, I totally get it. Probably the majority of folks are just looking to make it to dinnertime having made small talk that was easy both to give and to receive. Formulaic, like a flowchart. In and out. I’m not disparaging this impulse, either. Way back in the 1960s, etiquette and cookbook author Peg Bracken said that the foundation of good manners is “doing those things that let one remain at ease, of never putting another person on the spot, and of not making others uncomfortable.” And she’s right. Coming to understand the mechanics of small talk and developing relative proficiency at it benefits the Other as much as oneself, and probably more.
But what it boils down to is I don’t want to be any of the marble colors. I’m not interested in a conventional interaction that’s instantly forgettable save for its minuscule contribution to a data set of carbon-copy conversations. I want to be literally outside of the box, a new color defined by its inquisitiveness about the other colors. This impulse isn’t about me; it’s not that I want to be perceived as interesting or engaged or whatever. It’s about you. And the problem is that you are so much more—inconceivably more—than small talk could ever even remotely convey.
If all goes according to plan, in the coming months I’ll be getting a second long-awaited, custom Paul Soupiset tattoo on my forearm. Here’s the artwork:
The design4 is a (masterfully) rendered visualization of a passage from one of David Foster Wallace’s short stories with which I’ve long felt a deep connection:
“You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.”
— David Foster Wallace, Good Old Neon
There’s a whole universe back there! And we both know it even if for whatever reasons we pretend not to. What I’m getting at is: I want to tap into that. If we’re going to small talk, let’s have interesting small talk. By which I mean specifically let’s have a conversation about the conversation, about all the analogous conversations and what they reveal and how they make you feel. Let’s give each other a glimpse of the vast and varied galaxies behind the door. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine.
Meta-conversation is my go-to move, I think, because it’s the etiquette-based, “let one remain at ease” path to a more personal, less formulaic exchange; everyone has the capacity to talk about what they always talk about. But not everyone has the desire to talk about what they always talk about, maybe.
Maybe that’s the disconnect. What I’m trying to say is, This is an opportunity for us to have a deeper, more human interaction, however brief it may be, and the other person can’t or won’t go there, so instead what they say is “You can go ahead and head into this room here.” ✪
I elected to go non-dominant, FWIW.
It’s possible I’ll remember and dissect the “What’re we reading” physician assistant exchange for years, now that it’s digitally catalogued and (therefore) enduringly referenceable.
Couple of things: 1) The video is fake, as proved definitively by the Debunk King of YouTube himself, Captain Disillusion (srsly, smash that subscribe button), but that doesn’t alter the point I’m ultimately attempting to make, I don’t think. 2) The marble machine is modeled on a real-life device called a Galton board, invented in the nineteenth century by Sir Francis Galton to “demonstrate how a normal distribution is formed through the occurrence of multiple random events.” Unlike the colored marble video, what Galton boards actually do is visually produce an approximation of bell-shaped curve distribution. You can even snag yourself a working desk version for a mere $34.95.
ICYMI at the beginning of the post, here’s what the final product looks like.
Interesting read for me as a nurse that has conversations like this daily. I am interested in what patients are reading as I get great ideas for my future readings.
We talk a lot about weather, of course!
Its is interesting how busy we are and tend to make small talk while waiting for the computer to load, tests to come back, etc. and don't remember what they said.
Thanks for this article. BTW I shed tears when I got my first Covid Vaccine. It was a long awaited day. And I hate needles!