what you can't learn
There's a tall, lanky guy at the cash register. Charismatic. You can tell by the way he carries himself with a slight lean against the counter, oversized vintage tee, loose, 5-inch inseam shorts, tastefully contrasting forest green brimmed hat. The way his words effortlessly flow out of his mouth, enveloping the polite cashier with a sensuous cloak of carefully selected sentences that cascade into a smile.
I envy that guy. I mean, I'm not terrible at carrying conversation myself. I ask the right questions at the right times. Nod and smile. Make an effort to vacuum up their words into my brain. But I wouldn't say I'm inherently charismatic or anything. I still have a faint awkwardness that inadvertently pokes its wary head out every now and then. Stumbling, stilted speech, a little stutter in the corner, nervous laughter slanting into the air. Pieces that I've stuffed away into my knapsack of personality, quirks acquired from always being the last kid in the school library. Or maybe it's from spending too much time playing MMOs, Starcraft, League, carving my eyes into a myopic wasteland and filling my mouth with quicksand. I've done my best to hide these aberrations as much as possible over the years, but you can't always erase every part of your past it seems.
It gets especially bad if by some strange force of nature I encounter someone who I boost up onto an invisible pedestal so that despite us facing eye-to-eye at the table, I'm looking up at a towering figure. The type of people that you crave respect from, that either by your doing or theirs, makes you want to satisfy or appease them — to make yourself worthy in their presence. I've encountered a good amount of people like this over the years, especially as I entered bigger leagues that contain many personas with intense, piercing gazes. Some faces you meet and you know they're sizing you up, gauging if you are worth the twenty-five minutes you've scheduled into their life. That's when these social inadequacies contained in me burst forth.
So this guy is really talking off the cashier's ear. Their conversation is no longer about coffee on the menu, I'm certain. I can see in their eyes that they've whisked away into some dazzling marble palace in their heads where only the two of them exist.
I say this with complete sincerity: I respect small talk, and especially the people who can deftly navigate it. I'm pretty bad at small talk — and not in the sense of those people who say I hate small talk, give me a deep discussion or it's not worth my time — I just don't think it comes naturally. Being able to dance through any sort of small social interaction with grace and tact is impressive to me.
In many places, it's a dying art. Commuters donning their bulky headphones, AirPods cemented into eardrums. Facial expressions that scream don't you dare say a word to me becoming all-too-common. Although, could be I'm just spending the bulk of my time fluttering about in downtowns of dense, urban jungles.
I admire my friends who can do this. When I walk around with them, they encounter strangers at a clothing pop-up or while taking a brief pit stop at a farmer's market and before I realize it they're meeting up for coffee next week and getting invited to a grand-opening event for a new restaurant. Those who transcend this mortal realm of sociality, attaining a god-like status of cordial superpowers to play a quick game of hop-scotch on a convivial obstacle course with glancing smiles and light conversation. They're somehow winning the fight of a battle that’s stacked against them, fueled by siloing powers of tech and screens and going in between places by yourself in metal containers that preserve a culture where you have no desire to interact with the human beings to your left and right.
Then, they enter the ring. A blur of motion instantly unfolds. A dazzling right hook of complimenting a Toro y Moi tour shirt, an immaculately placed left blow of perfectly timed self-deprecation. KO.
Hey, we should exchange info!
Another repair to make on my ever-growing list of self-fixes. I want to be there, to effortlessly flow in and out of faces and people and to do it well, to do it warmly. And maybe, just maybe, by chance one day it'll happen.
There's something mystical about traits you can't learn in a class or a paid course or reading a book. Tacit knowledge acquired through the rigors of pure experience, or an innate savviness hammered in through upbringing or personality. It could be something as simple as speaking to strangers with a masterful level of social aptitude, but with all illusive abilities that seem straightforward there's a million moving parts strung together without a passing thought. The light strikes our eyes and words stream through our ears all the same, yet the outcomes are so far different.
Some of these things, this understanding of the unseen and what cannot be articulated, is what you don't realize you've acquired until long after it’s over. It all seems so complicated until it's not, when the games you've been playing and the interactions you're having are the ones that once seemed so foreign, so arcane and indecipherable that you can't even see them, smaller than the tiniest speck on a sprawling desert that you incessantly trawl through to triage what you know and don't. And then one day, just as you're about to drop off the precipice, it aligns, and it's so simple, and you've been doing it all along.