micro conversations

[thanate]

I've been contemplating micro conversations-- the kind you have with the checker at the grocery store or waitstaff at a restaurant; complete strangers who are sharing space and possibly nominal goals with you for a few moments. Obviously the first thing that stands out is that having someone small and cute around wildly skews the average interaction towards children, though I still get people who want to tell me about my hair. I lost count of how many people have told us about another child who sucked on his or her middle two fingers after five or six, and that was a while ago. I'm constantly asked for her name (um, aren't we socialized not to share that?) and/or age, and some people just skip talking to me and talk to her instead, which is also a bit creepy.

But beyond that, there are also the weird little bits that make it clear that you're tracking parallel universes with the person you're talking to: the waitress who assures you, "Oh, no that's not weird at all!" as if she expects you to be worried what she (or the universe at large) thought about what you'd like to eat; or the use of "that was totally my fault" instead of "I'm sorry." (These things do not actually mean the same thing.)

I feel like there is characterization potential in the tension between the not-quite-sensible thing that the stranger says to you and the reaction to it; possibly something a little more subtle than that thing ursulav just put up, but possibly in the same family.

Comments

[dragonvyxn.livejournal.com]

one of the reasons i like to dress the muffin in boy or girl clothes is so that i can analyze the difference in the micro-conversations that we end up having. i did this at the dog training conference and found that we got less interactions overall when she was a boy, but her running around/play behaviors were better accepted and commented on more in a positive way (i thought) than when she was dressed as a girl. as for the asking of age/name, we don't get asked her name a lot, age is asked more, but generally by folks who also have kids or grandkids (they then immediately share their little one's age). i guess people with kids assume that we're all in this together and thus that we must have some degree of familiarity that may or may not really exist...