on conversation

You are all guinea pigs. I'm sorry, but this is true. Some of you mean a lot to me, I do my best to honestly engage with people, I do, but there is a part of my brain that I cannot stop. It is looking for ideas and phrases and the rhythms of speech that can be divorced from context and filtered through a microphone.

This might make me maddening to have a conversation with, I couldn't particularly say. In the Caste of Killers podcast last week, we touched on this briefly: how people might hear something that came up organically in your act later and feel used. But that's how it is, we don't try to pick the bones of social interaction like scavengers. We're just following instinct at a certain point.

If anything I think it's lead me to value open and honest conversation even more, to realize when I need to be serious, when someone isn't in the mood to be entertained. Now I'm at a point when I look for people to have meaningful debates with- I've even been antagonizing the high schoolers I supervise at my part time job with fundamental debates about the nature of religion and politics.

It's just that, with that part never shutting off, it's the simplest thing to switch from one mode to another, to widen or narrow the mind's lens and dance with my thoughts accordingly. It's the effort to resist being frivolous for the sake of laughter, to cheapen relationships by never really leaving the stage, that I'm hoping I avoid.

Because the meaningful things are often the funniest- it's just that we can't force ourselves to get there. Let's get a drink sometime and just talk instead.