The Blog I Never Use

I bet that this will come as a shock to you:¡ I talk too much. Especially when I'm nervous or when there is silence to fill. I talk and talk and smile and talk and eat and talk and walk and talk (but usually not on the phone).

This has caused many problems for me:

In the Sixth Grade, my teacher (the same teacher Rebecca Marie had) told me that I was lying because I said that my Grand Father worked on the Nautilus. He thought that I was talking about Captain Nemo's ship, because he interrupted me before I got to that part. I was very embarrised, but I still talked into silence.

There have been a thousand times that I wished that I had shut up and hour before, but, as Ron White says, "I had the right to remain silent, but I didn't have the ability." Usually those times were the product of feeling like I was "on stage," like I was supposed to entertain or inform.

Now, I don't suppose that would be so bad, but I have often forgotten to say something that I intended to say, or something I thought was unimportant or assumed, and left the wrong impression (as Lisa and Arwen know from blogworld), and then what can you do? You either try to solve the misunderstanding or you let it go. I nearly always choose the wrong one with sometimes terrible (for me) results.

For instance, let me just tell you that shame is the thing I dred most in life. I don't mind being insulted for the sake of humor, (as long as people don't make it clear that they think it is true) and I'm willing to return the favor when someone jokingly insults me, but if it is serious, or only half joking, I choke on the shame for years.

Case in point: five or six years ago, I explained an event that had happened ten years before, to a very good friend who was involved in one part of it, but I left out the explanation for a part of that situation with which she was very familiar. Well, to make a long story short, the year before last she made some "funny" comment about me lying a lot: I still haven't quite recovered, but I didn't feel like I could talk without giving away just how upset I was, and we were in a restaurant, so I didn't want to cry, so, I just left my (now reduced to average-level) friend thinking that I was okay being called a compulsive liar and that I agreed with it.

Oh well, I do lie occasionally, but, believe it or not, I'm usually telling the truth, I just don't explain enough, usually because I think people already know the parts I've left out, or because those parts aren't important enough to me to make it into the story. Someone that most of you know, who has never really cared for me, once attacked me for repeating something that I heard as a "fun fact" on a kids' cartoon show (because I tought it was funny), that a duck's quack doesn't echo. I even said that I didn't know if it was true, but that is evidently not good enough. Sorry.

This tendancy to talk too much, though, has also helped me out several times too. Once in Jr High, we had to give five-minute speeches in the style of commercials, for any type of item, with at least one prop. As Chris Bello did his commercial for "Colon Cleanser" an actual product that he had found in Costco (I think), I realized that my speech was supposed to follow Chris' immediately, and I had NOTHING planned. So I thought, "one prop . . ." and looked through my pockets and in my book bag . . . my wallet. "What can I do with a wallet that will be visual enough?"

In the end, I remembered my mom joking that, with the rate at which Rockey movies were coming out, eventually they were going to have Rockey 75: Rockey Battles Geriatrics." Well, I couldn't remember the word Geriatrics, so I did a commercial for "Rockey 75: Rockey's battle with Alsheimers," in which Rockey (played by me) kept losing his wallet, even though it was in his hand most of the time. At the end of my five full minutes of sight gags, Mrs. Peterson said, "Now class, that is how to plan a presentation. It's obvious that he worked on that and practiced it several times before he got up there today."

Similarly, in college I had to give a presentation for cultural anthropology. I discovered years ago that if I overplan I don't do as well, so I bought props (mostly fruit) and I learned as much about the ethnographic details as I could. About ten minutes before the presentation, I finally figured out the angle that I wanted to take on it. Again, the teacher (Stan) held it up as the proper way to do a presentation.

Here I'll omit the story about winning a scholarship prize without scripting or practice (when I did poorly the year that I practiced too much).

So, I hate that I talk too much, and I apologise to all of you for talking your ears off when I'm nervous or "on stage," but I am also kind of glad that I can give good presentations without too much prep. Please forgive me when I sound like Pedanto, or when I don't think to include the right details in the story or when I am just telling a story that I think is funny.