White Washed Interaction

It’s a task of great difficulty for me to figure out whether or not I’m being sincere in all situations. I’ll not go into all the things which upset me about this idea of being “fake,” but I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about: how are you? how's your family? are you okay? etc. It gets pretty old to me because it bothers me to even hear questions like those, much less say them. But, in the South, How are you? and Hi are perfect equals. It bothers me because I honestly know that I typically don’t really want to know the answer to what I’m asking. No, that doesn’t make me heartless or calloused. It actually makes me utterly truthful for admitting it.

By the way, did you catch what I just did twice?! Look at the last couple of sentences – do you see them? Of course you don’t because you are just as used to it as the next person. Why in the world would I need to use words honestly and actually? Taken literally, one could deduce that I had been writing only half truths and partial falsehoods until I added those words, and that the only reason that I wrote them was to somehow overcompensate for something I wasn’t sure you would believe, or even something I wasn’t sure I would, but I desperately wanted you to anyway.

The moment I hear key words and phrases like honestly, truthfully, to tell you the truth, actually, truth be told, and so on, I shut down. I’m either about to hear a load of crap or a load of unsure, and not knowing which and not wanting either, I stop listening.

I’ve said all this to say: I’ve become an ultra-stickler for real. I know that if I began to tell the average questioner the answer, the real answer, to how I feel, how my family is, or whether or not I’m okay, they would think I’m a bit strange or even psychotic.

Where am I going with this?

The other day I saw a child and his mother in a store. The kid was a bit unruly and I couldn’t help but wonder about the mother’s skills as a parent. The child was beyond annoying with loud cartoon sounding noises, endless questions, and constant grabbing. He had thrown three items out of his mother’s cart while they had been standing in line at the check-out lane.

I don’t know what caused her to finally snap, but as he was attempting to get out of the cart, something against which she had apparently already warned him, she grabbed him by the arm and did the mother whisper (you know, the one that is voiceless so as to be considered a whisper in technique, but loud enough to be quite audible for several feet) in his ear: is that how we taught you to act? You’d better start acting right or I’m going to tell your father!

At that point, I stopped feeling sorry for the mom. Yes, I realize that she could have been an overworked, underpaid, single mother of three, but I still lost respect. It has nothing to do with the arm grabbing because there were times when I sincerely wished that I could have had a simple arm-grabbing when I was younger. It also meant nothing to me that she could have deafened the boy with the loud whisper. Instead, I sighed wishing the boy could have been taught how to be instead of how to act.

Isn’t that the major paradox of our salesperson society? How do we switch gears so quickly and maintain any level of sincerity? It seems to me that we are so insecure, sometimes, that we feel like we need to sell people on the idea of us as if what was there wasn’t good enough. The actuallys, the truthfullys and all the others are simply examples of our acknowledgement that we live alone behind of wall of separation twenty-four hours a day. The result = public behavior.

It’s an entirely different register. We speak differently, smile differently, eat differently, drink differently and even sit differently. The things most people tell you in their living rooms, depending on how many times you have been there, will widen significantly from what they would have told you in an elevator. It happens in nearly every case of interaction between two or more people in a public environment. It’s even a joke when someone does something a little out of the ordinary to say something like you don’t get out much or we can’t take you anywhere.

There are a few people, however, who don’t seem to give a rip about the group etiquette. Of course, they’re judged, and deemed too smart or dumb to handle the rigors of human interaction. Some, of course, do it on purpose, and that gets on my nerves. It seems to me that doing it willfully defeats the purpose because you’re changing who you are in public in order for the public to notice. That does nothing. But, it’s the people who waive the pressures of the norm sub-consciously, naturally, without motive, who intrigue me. What’s the difference? The ones who do it naturally because that’s just who they are and what you see is what you get all the time, those guys are. They simply are. They were taught by their parents, or whomever raised them, how to be, how to live. The ones who switch register, whether to public etiquette or away from it, purposefully are actors; they were taught how to act. They are the ones who act out or act up; they act wrong and act right. It’s all an act, and, if privy to it, I don’t think anyone really likes that if they are being honest with themselves.