I’m convinced that there are just some people that are incompatible for phone conversation. My friend called me tonight to set up a tennis match. Either our phones are always connected poorly through the network, or we have no conversational rhythm whatsoever. I think it’s the latter because sometimes the same thing happens in person. Anyway, he’ll say something like “How’s it going?”, but he’ll pause just long enough for me to start the exact same question. We then stutter-stop our words and the pattern continues with just about every sentence. Saying goodbye is the worst, though, because we don’t seem to know quite how to do it. He’ll say, “OK that sounds good.” And I’ll say, “Alright, I’ll see you at 3:00pm tomorrow.” You know, just to confirm the time and date. And then instead of saying goodbye, he’ll say, “Alright.” So then I feel compelled to say something else to close the conversation. And the cycle continues. Eventually one of us awkwardly forces the exchange to a halt and I end up feeling like I offended him.
Who knows; he may not even notice anything. But that’s my job! To notice the small things.
This weekend was really quite exciting. Matt and I had some people over, not exactly planned, but it was a blessing in disguise because while I was looking for my flip flops at 1am I discovered that our apartment had been infiltrated by a bat. We ran around like lunatics for about 5 minutes as the bat circled downstairs and then it disappeared back upstairs where I sleep. So that was comforting. After our drunk friends left, dragging with them their friend who had passed out in our bathroom, we called it a night and I went up to the bat cave to sleep.
The next day I called Adam the maintenance guy. I told him that our refridgerator was on the fritz and that we had a bat on the loose. He address the first issue and then we went bat hunting. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find it so he said to just call him if we found it and he would try to kill it. *Disclaimer: Killing bats in Madison is illegal.* Two minutes after he left, the bat reappeared on our kitchen floor, writhing around with a broken wing. And neither I nor Matt had the guts to kill the poor bastard, so I called Adam and told him to come back. In the end, Adam killed the bat with my tennis racquet, which will be enough of a reminder for many days to come.
1 Comment
September 4, 2008 at 5:16 pm
how ironic. the same tennis racquet that caused you anxiety over who killed the conversation was also used to kill a bat. that sporting good is a death machine. perhaps you should stick to team sports, where grunting is preferred to speaking.