Censored

I'll try to keep this brief, as brevity appears to be in. Last night I went to see "Good Night and Good Luck" with Vanessa, Mike, and Christoph. We enjoyed ourselves, went to get drinks and dessert, and came home to have kir royales (the champagne I bought for Reza and Yorgo was never consumed). Everything was fine until about 3:30 in the morning. In a four-person dynamic, there's room for a lot of variety in the distribution of conversation. But at some point, two people are going to break off and have their own charged dialogue. Or so you think. I don't even know why I'm blogging about this, because it reflects so poorly on me. But a major point of this is to keep you (my friends, who I hope will laugh rather than pity me) updated on my life, and that includes both the most wonderful and miserable moments, right? Well, this is a bad one.

Anyway, I guess I was pretty tipsy, but Mike and I were talking for what seemed like hours. Only he wasn't talking -- I was chattering and chattering incessantly, getting deeper into my internal dialogue and spewing it all out, imagining that he was interested and engaged. But he wasn't. And he expressly stated that he wasn't. In a nice way. But in a candid way. What do you do when someone tells you that you talk too much? I'm sure there's an elegant way to handle such situations, but I sure didn't execute it. I wasn't drunk - just tipsy - so the whole weight of his words crashed onto me and I suddenly felt paralyzed with shame. The worst part is that I like Mike and knew that his presence was totally necessary to the whole experience; it's not as if I just carry on long conversations with myself. Sometimes alcohol and intimate company stimulate me to such a great extent that I start unloading all my thoughts. Which is cripplingly embarrassing. I just panicked and started scrolling back through all my previous conversations in Princeton, wondering if I've just been boring everyone I meet and imagining that they like me. It's horrible to have to question whether those moments of perceived connection are in fact one-sided, that people are too polite to tell you to shut the fuck up.

I hope this was a good thing, but I don't know. I'm really upset. I rarely get told off by people I don't know straight to my face. What do you do when someone points out the fact that you drone on too much? God forbid you open your mouth again.

The thing is, I'm not angry or upset with Mike. He made a good analogy -- he plays jazz in a trio, and commented that conversation works with similar parameters: you never want one soloist to dominate too long, because the rest of the group will get resentful and you lose all harmony. So I suppose this makes me that extra trumpet sequence that nobody wanted to hear. Vanessa, of course, responded by saying that if you're a really good improviser, you will be able to merge seamlessly into someone else's solo and establish a balance, you won't need a space to make your presence heard or felt. Which is also a good point.

But I wonder if my fear of loneliness here has prompted me to forget the rudiments of good conversation. Have I stopped being a good listener, and have I forgotten what it means to have an audience to whom you're responsible? Have I become totally self-absorbed and self-indulgent, and is this an innate character flaw or can it be remedied? How do you remedy an inability to converse? Because all I want to do is to shrink into a hole somewhere and never emerge, which isn't the right thing to do. But what's the alternative: observing myself during all my exchanges with other people and orchestrating a dialogue that's more evenly balanced? How do you know how to restrain yourself when you're in the moment? If I can't, does it make me socially inept?

Anyway, there isn't anything left to say. To any of you who have felt shortchanged by me, felt that I wasn't interested in hearing your part of the conversation, I'm so sorry. I never meant to make anyone feel anything less than charming and wonderful. Maybe I've grown so sensitive to my own needs and forgotten how to respond to those of others, but I don't know what to do about it. Except that now I'm incredibly self-conscious. But I am sorry. I hate the idea that I've fucked things up, and I seem to do it so often now -- whether at work or personally. Sometime it's best to just be silent.