#5: Don't try to replace the awkward silence with forced conversation, it will almost always backfire on you and make you wish for a time when your foot was not in your mouth.
#4: Know that the most painful of conversations will happen when you meet another kindred soul. But if identified early enough, you can cut off all desperate attempts and revel in comfortable silence that only people who understand each other can share.
#3: Resign to the Fates and accept the fact that labels like "too much attitude" and "snooty" are going to be attached to you, despite your best efforts. Explain where you can, ignore where necessary, flip the bird where it gets too much.
#2: Quit explaining to your best friends that making conversation is very difficult for you as they will not stop believing that the side of you that they can't get to shut up is the only side you have.
#1: Take comfort in the fact that some times, some very rare times, when you have your nose buried pointedly in a book, someone will hesitantly strike up a conversation that you don't want to get involved in. But because of their interest in what you are reading, it will be one of those epic conversations that you only read about, the ones that you will remember for all your life, verbatim, right down to the last details and quirks. These are the conversations that make it worth enduring a lifetime of awkward silences and foot-in-mouth dialogues for.
I use giant headphones so I don't have to talk to other human beings - and they're giant, so they won't have the excuse of "Oh, I didn't see you were listening to music". In the unlikely event I do make eye contact with someone, I turn away and search for something, anything to stare at - even if it is a random point in space.
ReplyDeleteForced conversation is the worst. I have said some pretty embarrassing stuff while trying to fill the silence :\
There was convo I tried to have in lift which went like
ReplyDelete"how many kids do you have"
4, she said
"Wow", I said totally shocked at the thought of that. And then realized how rude it sounded. I made up with even mute lame embarrassing dialogues. That was it. After that no forced conversations.
I do occasionally chat up with random people at the office. This is after living a life of "stuck up" and "awkward" tags.
I had few book conversations like that... beautiful times :)