blocking the plate

I went to a bar after work to watch the Giants game. Finally. All I ever wanted, all I ever needed was here in my amber ale, a cup of peanuts, a late October baseball game, and a noisy room full of unfamiliar faces. I intended to enjoy my tipple anonymously for the last three innings, then go home satisfied after the Giants had secured a World Series spot. Nobody talk to me, words are very unnecessary, I see nothing except Cody Ross's intriguing bald-head-with-full-beard style. Said my stern expression, my closed-up body language.

Bar was packed. I snagged a stool at an occupied table. Folks at the table - three middle-aged men and a middle-aged woman - were friendly and didn't seem to mind me joining. I settled in, jawed happily at my peanuts, and moved my eyes from one big-ass HDTV to another, trying to find the best view between the bodies of the bar's Silicon Valley worker/Stanford student clientele.

Then the woman chatted me up. I thought she was just being friendly because she identified something lost about me. She wanted to know my opinion about a San Francisco cabaret show. About Jackass 3D the Movie. About Borat. About the bartender. About the Phillies Phanatic. About non-native Californians. About Palo Alto High School. About Lockheed-Martin. About H.P. Lovecraft. About whether it was rude to check text messages while some chatty lady talked you up. (Guess whose thumbs were on whose phone when she said this.)

Half an hour into this, I realized that shouldn't feel guilty turning my attention back to the game even as she hooked me with these open-ended questions. I had thought at first how nice it was that she welcomed me, acted friendly, and wanted to know my opinion, and I felt obliged to give her all of my attention, until I realized that she was one of those people for whom talking is survival, and that she might die if she did not keep sounds coming out of her mouth, and that she talked to me not because I was interesting but because I was necessary, in the same way that people lost in the desert drink urine not because it is interesting but because it is necessary. I missed the f-bombing home run in the ninth inning because she was talking to me.

What clued me in to the selfishness of this woman's thirst for conversation was when she said something that made it clear that who I was had nothing to do with the conversation. She leaned in at one point to say, "Oh, those men. They're talking about signal-to-noise ratios or whatever, work stuff. Let's tune that out." For real, lady, you can't tell that a surly, articulate lezzie doesn't want to find camaraderie with you in acting like a bimbo? Once upon a time, I think when I was very very lonely, I thought talking to strangers was God's gift to human happiness, and I had often inane conversations with people I didn't know. Some conversations kept running because instead of stamping my foot and saying, "Sarah Palin thinks Africa is a country, you fucking redneck!" or "That huge SUV that is the object of all of your desires is one reason our youth are being blown apart in Iraq," I withheld my judgment and nodded my head as if what the person opposite me said made sense. I'm just a get-along, take-it-easy kind of person, I would think to myself, I'm learning a lot about the goodness in everybody by just being patient and overcoming my judgmentalness. Talk about insipid (and delusional, because deep down I still judged them) self-regard. I couldn't even identify when I was getting bored because I welcomed even the dullest sensations as reprieve from my horrible, insomniac loneliness. So I bit my tongue and withheld my judgment and pretended to see reason in beliefs I didn't agree with and had lots of very boring conversations and thought each one of them brought me closer to God.

Well, we are all God's children but some of God's children are imbeciles. It's taken me a while to admit this, and I don't know how to square it with the harmonious let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom persona I have cultivated on this blog in the last two years, but sorry, it's true. Some people are just not worth your time. I'm sure they are fine people who donate to charity and recycle and make their pets happy but I would rather just not know about it. Me from Chicago 2008 might have shrugged and said tp the woman, "Sure let's talk about something else," but I am thirty now, and as I have discussed below, being thirty means putting up with less shit, discriminating between productive and pointless uses of time, and feeling entitled to have my opinion considered. I did not want to swallow my bitchy smart-ass personality and pretend to be that insubstantial female who is confuddled by scientifrical words, for the sake of propelling a pointless conversation forward. So, I withdrew from the conversation, slowly, leaning away from the woman, keeping my eyes on the screen even during (ugh, why) credit card commercials, responding to her questions monosyllabically and only after a delay, until she returned to her husband and his colleagues' conversation about somebody's plush Cthulhu doll.

In writing this I see how passive I actually was. But I think that's fine. I didn't feel I needed to reject her more directly or make her feel bad; the important thing for me was just identifying when the costs of the conversation outweighed its value, and to stop burning up my energy on it when it happened. How come it took me thirty years to learn that not all experiences are good experiences? (I wrote a very similar sentence a year ago. I am apparently still learning.)

I still feel like a total a-hole.

And the Giants lost tonight. A major earthquake successfully delayed at least until Saturday's game.