Significance Redux

The other day* I was talking to an acquaintance who shall remain nameless, who was himself talking about an acquaintance of his, who shall remain nameless, but for narratively important reasons will be identified as a woman who lives a slight but significant distance away from him, who will be coming up to visit in the near future. Or, was going to visit in the near future, I have no idea whether this visit took place yet, I wasn't paying that much attention to the dates or, really, the conversation. Regardless, he says to me something along the lines of "she's talked to me every day this week about how excited he is to visit. What do you think that means?"

What do you think that means. Let us, "ironically" enough, discuss what that means. Well, in this instance, it meant 'Tell me what I want to hear, please,' and I responded by saying that it probably means she's dreading the visit and also thinks you're ugly. I do not, generally, cotton to telling people what they want to hear. But more to the point, it means that the speaker is obsessing over significance. Why is this?

And let me be more specific, this isn't about obvious significances in actions. This isn't asking if someone is sad because they're crying, or angry because they're punching homeless people in the face. This isn't even 'is she flirting with me', which is not an unreasonable question. This is 'does her mentioning that she's excited to see me, her friend, mean that she likes me and possibly wants to do sweaty things with me'. The answer, of course, is that it doesn't mean anything of the sort, because that's not how human interaction works. People say things because they mean them, not because they're trying to push forth a secret agenda. I don't know about you out there, but if I thought that every single flip of the hair that anybody made carried with it complex and hidden meanings, I would first be insanely curious about the secret conversations about me, and then I'd be insanely nervous about the messages I might be sending without even knowing it.

As it stands, this acquaintance is a shameless gossip, and shamefully self-involved. Now, he has not moved on, as I would have, to being creeped out by the level of manipulation that people are ostensibly projecting, but he's also an idiot. And these three factors (nosy, egotistical, stupid) rather aptly define, well, every single Junior High School student in the world, just about, whether they admit to it or not. However, they are but younglings... they have an excuse. They have this sudden new gender to worry about, and they have no idea how people actually work. But you would think, in eight years, this nameless acquaintance would get over himself, and recognize that sometimes people just do things!

Stay tuned for the next episode of 'Out-of-my-Ass Analysis', when I'll discuss what I like to call 'the comforting "because"'.

*My father has a habit of using the phrase 'the other day' to mean not so much 'the day before yesterday' but 'some point in the past before yesterday but after the planet developed an atmosphere capable of supporting life as we know it'. I approve of this usage, and use it henceforth.