Small talk

So, I have been back home for a few days now, and the combination of warmer weather, home-cooked food, LOTS of rest, and proper medication has helped a lot: I feel much better today and hope to have recovered fully within a few days. Then, sometime next week, I will begin to search for a new adventure.

With all this time in bed, I have had WAY too much time for thinking, and for some reason, I have been thinking a lot about the importance of smalltalk... I don't know if these thoughts will be interesting to any of you, but I am throwing them out anyway.

So... I first began thinking about smalltalk while I was in Mexico last summer. In the village where I worked, we would often have lunch with a local family, and there were also lots of other visits to people's homes for coffee, for dinner, for tortilla-making workshops-- you get the general idea. I made several of these visits with my friend Cesar, who is from the city of Puebla, only 3-4 hours away from the village we worked in. Now, by this time, I was fluent in Spanish and understood all of his conversations with people in Zoatecpan... yet, I found myself hard pressed to find topics for conversation myself. Sometime during those 7 weeks, I realized just how culturally defined smalltalk is. Maybe you can talk about the weather in England, but if you did it on a not out-of-the-ordinary day in Mexico, people might look at you funny ("duh, it's raining...so? It rains everyday"). I also had to learn that you are better off not asking someone for an onion to accompany your meal (onions are expensive, and not every house can afford them) but asking for chillies will only make them happy (everyone in Mexico has chillies at home, and they are usually amused/ pleased at your attempt to enjoy them). I guess the one universal theme is that you can always talk to mothers about how cute their kids are and inquire after all the details about their children... that works everywhere I have been! But in general, I realized that it was one thing to know the language and to be able to talk about academics or work or whatever... but to be able to make "meaningless" chit-chat, you had to be well informed about the culture you were in.

But now I am not thinking about the difficulties associated with smalltalk; I am thinking of its importance. As I sit down to write emails to my friends from different worlds, I am sometimes struck by how there's nothing to write about. And yet, while we were together at Soka, or in Mexico, or in Argentina, or even in Mongolia, we always had to talk of; there was never any effort involved (except the effort to make oneself understood in Mongolia!). We often talked for hours-- how many dinner conversations at SUA lasted until way after the cafeteria was closed and everyone had gone home? And how many times were Chris, Sarah and I up past 2 in the morning chatting in some cafe in Buenos Aires? So how can I have "nothing to write about" to the same people now?

Because so much of these conversations-- so much of what brought us together-- wasn't really any important conversation (there were those too, but fewer and further between). So much of it was just chit-chat. But that "just" is not intended to undermine its importance: that chit-chat has been the foundation of every friendship (let's face it: intense conversations are fun once in a while, but I would run like hell from someone with whom I had to have one every time we met!). But for some reason, I have imbibed this weird notion that one doesn't write about those things; only writes about "important" stuff. Maybe this comes from how letters took forever to reach the recipient: if I could only write 2 handwritten pages to you a month, then of course I would think of making them important! But in the age of email, it makes less sense. I miss the smalltalk. Its absence makes every email intense; so different from coming away from a most enjoyable chat not even entirely sure what you just talked about, only that it was fun.

And I guess, in a weird way, this blog entry was an attempt to do just that: talk about something that isn't necessarily meaningful but that you would probably have heard about if you had gone for a walk or a coffee with me today!