Friends,
I'm sorry about the delay. Last week I bought a really nerdy card game, and the late night hours when I normally blog have been spent trying to acquire more victory points than my friends.
Anyway, I think most of my Tangents fit into one of three categories:
a list or analysis of things from pop culture
a philosophical idea or lesson learned from a personal story
a foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe against something that annoys me
Today's Tangent is from category 3, but no worries-- I got my rabies shot (thanks, NBC, for your awesome PSAs).
The problem with pleasantries
Beside the fact that they're not pleasant enough to warrant that name
Most conversations start with Hello, Hey, or Hi. The h-word of choice is then immediately followed by a question, e.g.
How are you?
How's it going?
What's up?
What's going on?
The first two represent questions about quality of life, and the second two concern recent or interesting happenings. I will address both types, but my main issue is with the former.
Questions about how a person is doing just seem like stupid ways to start a conversation. Let's say I'm doing pretty terribly. The following will transpire:
Person: Hey man! How's it going?
Me: (It's going suckily. I've got 8 work things stressing me out, 3 relationships on the fritz, I'm having a bad hair day, new bills just arrived, I can't find my favorite t-shirt, my laptop crashed, I stepped in a puddle, and I have no plans this weekend. And diarrhea.) Good, thanks! How are you?
There's no option in most conversational settings to reveal how crappy we might be feeling. As I'm shaking hands with someone at a coffee shop, it just doesn't seem okay to reveal that I'd rather be at home on my couch and not have to move or think for the next 24 hours. And yet, I'm asked how I'm doing. "Pickle!!!"
The other type of opening questions aren't much better, mainly because no actual answer is expected. To ask someone "What's up?" is just another way of saying, "Please say 'Not much' and then begin our actual conversation." Were it an actual question, it would be difficult to address right at the outset of the conversation; I mean, a million things are going on, and filtering which ones are worth mentioning is too much mental strain for one moment. That's why we have the actual conversation, to bring up and discuss those things that are up.
A problem with no solution
To be fair, there definitely might be a solution. I just don't offer one here.
It seems to me that the only ways to break out of this pickle would be to stop asking these meaningless opening questions or to start answering them earnestly. But neither one seems feasible. They're so ingrained in me that I don't know if I could quit asking them. And I hate to say it, but on those rare occasions in which someone answers honestly about hurt and pain and discouragement, I can't help but think, "Dude, quit being such a Debbie Downer. We're in an Applebee's."
Other people try to circumvent the superficiality by asking, "How are you doing -- really?" But unless you're on the phone or alone somewhere, this just seems too emotionally invasive, especially for the very first thing said in a conversation.
Your turn
No funny small text this time.
What's up?
How's it going?
What's going on?
How are you?
But seriously, comments appreciated.
Jon
[
Part 1: At what time did people post happy birthday?]
[Part 3: What did people write on my wall for my birthday?]
This tangent, we move forward to the second installment of Facebook birthday analysis: who, exactly, posts on one's wall on shis birthday? You might be thinking, "I have my own birthday and my own facebook wall. Why would I need this study to answer that question?"
Well, let me answer your fictional thought-question with a question: Do you have the time or inclination to scour through dozens and dozens of posts and think through how many ridiculously non-friend people show up or from which eras of your life the people hail? Assuming you have a job or a life, your answer's probably "No." My answer, however, is "yes."
Enough guesswork Q&A. I give you the two questions of today's tangent, both of which look at the personnel of my online birthday:
1. How close to me were the people who wished me a happy birthday?
This is, I think, one of the most interesting and pressing questions in our whole study of Facebook b-days. There always seem to be people showing up on your wall once a year whose name is barely recognizable, or whose last real-life interaction with you was a violent blood feud.
To answer this question, I had to (somewhat morbidly) assign closeness categories to my wall posters. Everyone fell into one of the following categories:
Family: relatives through blood or marriage.
Friends: people who have a consistent, positive presence in my life and from whom a wall post on a different day of the year wouldn't seem strange.
Barely: this weird limbo exists for people who are distant acquaintances or people who were in my life years ago. A wall post from them on any other day would be odd.
None: these people have absolutely no part in my life, and their post to me, even on my birthday, is somewhat mystifying.
Well, it's a pretty even split between Friends and Family (48%) and... everyone else (52%). It really goes to show how powerful a force the Facebook Birthday is -- it can create a social interaction that would otherwise never be there.
One final interesting note on this is that one person who posted on my wall existed on shis own special level of "No relationship." This was a person (friend of a friend) with whom I have literally never had an in-person OR online interaction. How we became facebook friends in the first place is an enigma. How a birthday post came about might literally make my brain explode with mystery.
2. From which phase of my life did these well-wishers first know me?
They say high school will be the best years of your life. Then when you're going off to college, they hope you've forgotten that statement and tell you the next four years will be the best. Middle school, well, everyone pretty much concedes that's going to be a dramatic, hormonal disaster.
But when it comes time for the annual "crawl out of the woodworks" online fiesta, which era will represent? In my social network, there are three 4-year time spans that figured to make solid birthday contributions: high school, college, and "Pittsburgh" (the four years I've spent here in grad school and with my current ministry job). And here's what happened:
As you can see, the general rule was that the more recent the era, the greater its contribution. There's a logic to that, as these are people I've met, become facebook friends with, and interacted with more recently. So the relationship, as "distant" or "non-existent" as it might have been on the previous chart, is fresher.
The one meaningless but funny exception to this law of diminishing wall posts was the dreaded middle school. We must have really all tried to blot that crap out of our memories. Except for my perennial locker and homeroom neighbor Cherie. The alphabet has a funny way of affecting unimportant parts of your future.
Help build momentum for the dramatic conclusion
Next time we'll look at the most interesting topic -- what, exactly, did people post on my wall? Until then, please tangent with me:
What's been your experience with super-distant people or mortal enemies wishing you a happy birthday on facebook?
Was middle school as bad for you as it was for everybody else?
Jon
