Conversations with Friends

On talking

When I was a kid, I thought being an adult was going to be exactly like Dawson’s Creek. My intellectual friends and I would psychoanalyze every single feeling we had which would make them heavy, important and weighty. It wasn’t just talking about crushes, it was a way to make our feelings matter by building a philosophy out of the everyday!

Then I grew up.

People do not have conversations like that. Most people don’t even listen to what each other is saying. I even find myself zoning out while someone is talking to formulate the brilliant thing I am going to say next (a Dawson move, I’ll admit). At NYU, most conversations felt like a competition of who could tell the funniest joke, escalating the bit until there was nothing left to say and we awkwardly excused ourselves. After college, this evolved into a competition on who had the better life, who was more successful in their career, who had the perfect significant other (all me). “With this promotion, Kate,” people say, “I will be able to buy the 1.2 million dollar studio bungalow in Silver Lake. My financial manager says it’s totally doable, and with the promotion I will have four direct reports.” What is there to say to this? “Cool?” Can I have your Netflix password? When are we going to talk about how our small everyday failures and triumphs have a deep, philosophical meaning?

I think what I miss most about my early 20s, when I would regularly drink tall boys with my friends on a Tuesday, is conversation for the simple pleasure of it. When I drink today, I often text my friends, trying to recreate the kind of meandering conversations I thought adulthood would revolve around, and wake up the next day ashamed that I even texted anything, and even more ashamed when I’m met with silence or a “Sorry I’m doing something really, amazingly fun right now” text. It’s humiliating but being alive is generally pretty humiliating.

Conversations are now gameified. What can I get out of this interaction? In Los Angeles, I’ve had people walk away from me at bars mid conversation when they realized I couldn’t do anything for their script, I just wanted to hear about it. The self help industrial complex is a multibillion dollar industry that applauds this behavior. Keep your eye on the prize! Protect your peace! Manifest your destiny! You can only focus on your actions, so don’t worry about what other people think! In small doses, these are all nice mantras to aid in a healthy outlook, but when taken to the extreme, it turns people into self-obsessed monsters. It also makes for shit conversation. I’m sorry I can’t get you a job, I really can’t do anything about the permit to expand your living room, would you like to talk about the most recent episode of The Pitt? Oh, you don’t watch TV, you just do pilates and eat a high-protein diet. The body is a temple, etc.

I see an alarming number of social media posts about how people think reading novels is dumb, when you could be reading self help books or, I don’t know, trading bitcoin, or lifting weights. Storytelling has been a part of human nature since the dawn of time but, I guess meal prepping, creatine, and hustling is more “useful” than reading a novel for pleasure. Maybe that’s the problem, everybody is trying to make sure that no time is wasted, that their time is maximized, and everything is a goal to be CRUSHED. This doesn’t leave time to sit out on the deck with friends, smoking cigarettes, and shooting the shit.

Other things of note:

• My handyman says the concrete ceiling in my living room is slowly falling down and that the previous owners hid this by painting over it. The reason for the sinking concrete roof might be termites. He said this will be insanely expensive to fix because of tarrifs. I thought with my first book advance, I would get a hot tub, but sadly it’s going to be a working ceiling. Boring and stupid. I hate owning a house.

• The dog unlocked the front gate and went next door where he ate all of Maurice’s (the neighbor’s yard cat) food, then the neighbor wrangled Laz and locked him in her backyard so he wouldn’t run off, which was extremely kind of her. I felt so bad that I gave her three Bath & Body Works products. She said she didn’t want me to replce Maurice’s food. Maurice IS fat for a cat that lives outside.

• In Dawson’s Creek, I just watched the episode where Joey is in a beauty paegant and Dawson finally notices her romantically because she is wearing a dress. She says, what the fuck, it’s only lipstick, tomorrow I will wear normal clothes to school, he is like no, you’re different now! You came out of your shell! I also yell at people when they say I look nice in a dress and I think that insecurity can be traced back to watching this episode when I was eleven years old.

• The Dunkin Donuts drive-thru guy always says “God bless you” to me while he hands me my Strawberry Daydream Refresher, but today he got my order wrong and didn’t bless me. Did he curse me? The Dunkin is surrounded by hundreds of live chickens.

• I saw an influencer on Instagram barefoot running through a meadow and my friend told me that mild fetish content juices the algorithm. Is this true? The picture below is about how I’m resolved to read The Aeneid, it’s not a picture of my feet.

Was this column useful for you? Did it inspire you to hit the gym? How is your stock portfolio now that you have read this? How about that person talking shit about you? You know about them, right? Have you forgiven them or told them you hate them?