If you leave me alone in a room with someone for 2+ hours, there is a 93% chance that I will be asked the “What are you thinking about” question, even by people who by most social conventions don’t know me well enough to non-awkwardly ask. Sometimes it might just be a polite conversation-starter but most of the time I can tell that it is phrased slightly accusatorily, such that something about my face has indicated to them that there is an electric storm taking place inside my skull—one that, presumably, they should know about. I haven’t had this empirically verified, but if you surveyed the askers I’d bet they’d tell you that I had an expression emblematic of needing to poop. (Which makes sense.)
What am I thinking about? It’s a good question. So good, in fact, that my answer is often terribly disappointing to the asker. So disappointing, in fact, that I’ve considering developing a handy mental list of profound topics so that I can make it seem like I’m not hiding anything or being disingenuous.
“What are you thinking about, Ju$tn?”
Well, person, something you said earlier about how nice the weather has been lately really tipped me off. It reminded me that weather patterns, as reliable and predictable as they may at the surface seem, are really just like everything else in life: messy. If a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia can cause gale force winds in Scranton, then the only reason why weather patterns are “predictable” is because they are so slow-moving that it takes 3 or 4 days for them to play out, which I take to mean that we are stuck in this terrifyingly unpredictable and uncontrollable universe where “predictability” and “control” are comforting illusions that we employ for psychological safety up to the point in time that slow-moving doom shows itself.
Also, I was thinking that I need to poop.
And with that I make my exit, leaving them feeling something like satisfied.
The problem with such a strategy is that it would be personally unsatisfying, because it isn’t exactly factually accurate. Most of the time I am not consciously mingling with my thoughts, at least not in a way that can be translated neatly into words. Just like I do most of my moving on autopilot, so too do I do most of my thinking. Asking what I’m thinking about is often like asking why I’m tapping my foot—I probably didn’t realize I was tapping my foot and even if I did, putting into words why I was tapping my foot would be an exercise in horseshittery.
And then for the small subset of thoughts with which I am consciously mingling and reasonably able to translate them into words, it is often so embarrassingly mundane or weird that I refuse to let it be known that the “electric storm” face was merely because I was wondering whether ranch or blue cheese dressing is going to accompany my lunchtime carrots.
The truth is that it is almost impossible for me to do any kind of profound thinking within the confines of my skull. I can do it just fine in writing, but that almost doesn’t count because I never know what’s going to come out of my writing. Writing is not, as we so often misbelieve, reproducing thoughts on paper. Writing (for me) is starting with a tiny blip of inspiration and then building on it with reactions, and reactions to those reactions, and so forth. And then of course there is the crucial step of polishing, deleting, and re-arranging to get something like coherence. The end result is probably more surprising to me than it is to you.
And I suspect that the surprisingness of my thought-translations (= words) is a big part of the reason why I am so oppressively quiet around some people. I’ve deduced that if I judge you to be intimidatingly smart, judgy, intolerant of incoherence, easily offendable, or nice – or if I don’t have enough information to know whether you are or are not these things – then you’re probably not going to get much more than two to three word responses out of me, and that’s because if I don’t know what words are going to come out of me, then how can I be sure that my words won’t end up sounding dumb or incoherent or boring or mean? With writing I at least have a backspace key. It’s the everpresent ego issue, yes, but there is also the slightly less narcissistic reason of not wanting to hog the conversational ball by holding it until I finally stumble upon a phrasing that suits me.
(As usual, I’m left in the awkward position of the last paragraph being almost completely unrelated to the first, and I’ve got to try to somehow wrap this up into a coherent assembly. This is the biggest creative challenge I face most days. It’s kind of exciting though, isn’t it? Can’t you feel the excitement? I think we need some silverware to go along with this tension. OK, here goes.)
I’ve concluded that if other people operate pretty much like I do then those who are able to effectively answer the “What are you thinking about” question are either incredibly smart or incredibly stupid because to be able to effectively translate thoughts into words requires either (a) enough brilliance to have some kind of omniscience over your mind, or (b) enough stupidity to be completely unaware of how dumb you sound.
