Close encounters of the repeated kind

Back in my youth (which wasn't that long ago, I'll have you know), I saw a bit on Saturday Night Live or some other comedy show about what to do when you keep encountering the same person over and over again during the course of a day or several days, like a co-worker you always see in the hall. It starts to become awkward. Do you keep saying "hi"? Do you try to come up with something new to say each time? Do you start making observational comments about how funny it is that you keep seeing each other? Do you just stare straight ahead and ignore the person? In the bit I saw, one of the characters started trying to avoid those encounters by taking alternate routes, altering his timing, and so forth. He finally ended up crawling along the wall on the outside of the building in an attempt to avoid yet another encounter in the hall, and he fell to his death. (It was funnier than I'm making it sound.)

I'm starting to feel that way with my daily commute. Being me, I have a pretty regular routine for getting to and from work each day. I usually take the same train, the same bus, etc. Unfortunately, I have co-workers who have some of the same routines, so I'm always bumping into them and trying to come up with new topics of conversation. This is a real struggle for someone like me. Other than immediate and extended family, there are only eight people in the whole world who don't make me at least a little bit nervous in a one-on-one conversation that doesn't have a preassigned topic. (I counted.) I like my co-workers, but I'm running out of things to say to them.

What's an introvert to do? There's always the weather, but I mentally kick myself whenever I find myself lapsing into that easy and trite fallback topic. There's the "what are you doing for the weekend" question, but I usually don't have an very interesting answer. ("Going to church for three hours" doesn't quite cut it.) One thing that works around here is to ask about where they're next planning to travel in Europe or elsewhere. That's good for a little while, but then I start to run the risk of asking the same question I asked someone a couple of weeks earlier, only to have them remind me that we already discussed that. You can sometimes talk about kids, but your kids are never as interesting to other people as they are to you, and again, there's the risk that you start telling the same stories over and over.

You know, for all the talk in Europe of banning or not banning burqas, maybe there's something to be said for having something that allows one to escape into a little cocoon during the morning commute. In the United States, we call those "cars." Maybe it's time for me to move back . . . .