1.21.2014

Caught: Talking To Myself



My daughter asks me why I talk to myself.  I didn't know that I do.  She imitates me reading the recipe on the back of the Malt-O-Meal box.  But only when I'm cooking, I say.  With you.  No, she insists I do it even when I'm alone.  How can she know?  But it's true.  I find myself talking about one of my students to my image in the bathroom mirror.  I'm doing it right now, as a matter of fact, talking when no one is here, though reading aloud must fall into a separate category.  Yet, it's not strange to sing to yourself when alone.  Why?  Where's the difference?

What do you do when you find yourself invited to lunch where you know you don't fit in?  I order light and decide to think of it as a study for a future art project, a film perhaps, and this, the opening scene: A Hollywood handsome Midwestern man, crisp suit, a history in the trades, gelled, and square-jawed describes the karma of marketing.  You give a referral, you get a referral.  He's not used to telling stories, being more of a one-liner type of guy.  So, it isn't until he begins to tell the story, that he realizes he should have thought about what he was going to say.  Just because you got it down in your head, doesn't mean you can spontaneously transform it into the spoken word.  Practice is always needed.

Voila.

It was snowing.  But now it's stopped.  I migrate between my desk upstairs and the living room pellet stove turned up to 4.  No one is yet home and most likely I'm talking to myself, trying to figure out something or another about what I don't even know I don't know.








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