Conversations: Had and Overheard
I always feel a tinge of sadness when I’m not able to remember a funny joke I’d heard earlier in the day or an insightful piece of advice offered to me. It’s an incredibly frustrating feeling to forget something you heard that you know is important, but just can’t seem to recall. This is why I developed, for better and worse, the habit of writing down conversations I hear as soon as I can, sometimes even in real time.
To me, a good conversation is a work of art. Your voice is your paintbrush and verbal language is your medium. I’ve heard people casually string together sentences that could rival the depth and beauty of a Walt Whitman poem. Speech between humans is probably our most impressive trait as a species, but we so often ignore the aesthetic value of conversation and instead focus on the practical communication aspect of it. While we obviously need conversation as a day-to-day tool to navigate the world, I’ve always been more interested in the literary value of people’s conversations. It seemed like such a waste when I would hear (or say) something really thoughtful and interesting and then forget it, never being able to revisit it.
However, by being so concerned with the artistry of conversations, I’ve run the risk of sounding more like a movie character than a real person. Sometimes I catch myself saying things for posterity rather than because I really mean them. This line between conversing for communication’s sake and conversing in the hopes of hearing/saying something fascinating is a difficult one for me to balance. Obviously, most of our conversations aren’t going to be elegant haikus, but that’s ok. In fact, it can even underscore the depth of the more meaningful exchanges. That isn’t to say that a conversation can’t be both functional and beautiful. Sometimes you can even find beauty in the functionality of an exchange, and vice versa.
To me, conversation appears to be our most potent tool in trying to reconcile our individual experiences of reality into a unified reality. It is how we define the world around us, by applying words with agreed meanings to the things we see. Like Freire says, “Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world”.
Because conversations are more than purely verbal exchanges (there are gestures, facial expressions, and general context that can help facilitate communication), it can be hard to capture the exact meaning and nature of a conversation. When I’m able to transcribe a conversation accurately though, I can instantly transport myself back in time to where and who I was when I first heard it. Not only is it interesting for me to re-experience these conversations, it’s also interesting trying to figure out what it was about a particular conversation that piqued my interest in the first place.
Below are some of the conversations that I’ve participated in, overheard, or maybe just imagined:
August, 2019:
I’m leaving a county fair in Colorado, walking towards the parking lot, two young kids walking in front of us:
Kid 1: What was your best day ever?
Kid 2: Everyday.
Kid 1: No, I mean if you had to choose just one.
Kid 2: This day.
Kid 1: For real? That’s dope.
September, 2016:
I’m sitting in my school’s library during lunch, working on some homework. A couple tables down, two kids from my World History class are being spoken at by this lanky Russian kid, Andrei, who is obsessed with tanks and classical warfare. One of them steps away, leaving this girl that I vaguely know stranded with Andrei, who I could hear was still lecturing about the use of the machine gun in World War 1. I try to tune it out, but soon she walks over to my table and asks:
Her: Hi, can you pretend like you know me?
Me: Uhh, sure. Why, is he…
Her: Yeah he’s going on a rant that I lost track of like 10 minutes ago.
Me: Yeah he tends to do those. He was in my Art class last year and he would quite literally go on for hours about the heroic war adventures of Russian generals.
Her: Yeah I don’t know what he’s even talking about. *Looks down at the homework I was doing* Oh here, I can just help you with this. Mmm, you did number 4 right, most people got that one wrong.
Me: Yeah I just don’t know what to put for question 6…
*The bell rings and we head to class, continuing the conversation down the halls*
October, 2018:
20 something man and woman sitting across from me on the metro:
Woman: Can I ask you something? It’s been on my mind for like, literally 3 weeks. Why do you always wear purple. I swear to god it’s the only color I ever see you wear.
Man: …It’s just a color I identify with on a molecular level.
Woman: You’re really strange.
April, 2016:
Me and a friend watching tv in his basement after school:
Friend: Dude, wait. Ohhhhh man. I just realized something crazy.
Me: What?
Friend: So, if all the players on a baseball field were invisible, the game would be pretty much the same.
Me: What?
Friend: Yeah, think about it. All that really needs to happen is one guy throws a ball and another guy swings at it. They don’t actually have to see the other players to do that.
Me: Yeah… it’d probably be more exciting too. You wouldn’t know if the ball was gonna be caught until it gets to the ground, people would be crashing into each other all the time, it would definitely be more interesting to watch.
Friend: We just figured out how to make baseball fun. It’s really that simple.
For whatever reason, these conversations struck me as worth remembering and nearly every time I go back and read them, I have a different theory as to why. My interpretation changes over time, but the conversations stay the same.
Freire, Paulo, and Donaldo P. Macedo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2005.
Linklater, Richard, director. Before Sunset. 1999.
