#802 X-Small Talk

Global warming must be due to friction. The world is heating up because it’s changing so fast. I worry about some of the changes though. Like the increase in violence and the disappearance of small talk.
The other day I was reminded how violent our society had become. I heard a girl say someone had hit on her. Sometimes women come by me at social events and pop me one on the shoulder in what I assume is a flirtatious manner.
Is that what they mean when they say, “hitting on someone”?
Then I realized, they’re talking about what we used to call making a pass at someone. As in, he got so drunk at the Christmas party, he “made a pass at her”.
Now we would say he got so drunk he “hit on her”.
See? Even our casual imagery is violent.
And then there’s small talk. My dad and I love each other, but disagree on most things political. I like to get my news from a variety of free-range sources, he likes to have all his filtered and homogenized through the talk show spin machines.
He thinks they’re the four apostles. But instead of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it’s Michael, Bill, Rush and Sean.
So, in order to have conversations, we’ve constructed a carefully nuanced small talk pathway. You know, talk about what your doctor said, or retirement, or talk about the weather.
Now, it’s harder and harder not to stumble in a conversational pothole filled with politics. We don’t talk about retirement or we’ll go plummeting into the pit of doom of social security.
And we can’t talk about medical stuff anymore without talking about Medicare and prescription drugs and the cost for all of it. He’s horribly effected financially by the negative aspects of our health care system, but terrified of the bugaboo of socialized medicine, which he thinks “Universal Health Care” is a code word for.
That left us with using the safest small talk gambit on the planet—talking about the weather.
Then came global warming...
America, ya gotta love it.