"How are you?" Loaded question. I never know what people wish to hear. In my all too literal world if I inquire the how of you, I actually wish to know the truth. Lay down the tracks of your tears or confess a delightful story of debauchery or just give me the skinny on whatever feelings you are experiencing right this second. I want the lowdown even if it becomes a smackdown.
I suspect that in this, as in most things, most folks are not like me. Como talle vous has become the new hey, yo, 'sup, hiya, silent nod. A response is required as it is a question, but the correct answer is fine, good, swell, great, never been better. Which is cool if those things are true. But when they are not I, for one, feel cheated.
And I feel like I am cheating when I simply say "Great!" if I am not in fact anything of the sort. But is that what you want to hear? I don't mean that I would emotionally vomit all over you when I am all too aware that your inquiring mind probably doesn't really want to know "how" I am, that responses like pissed on and pissed off or horny and hungry or thrilled to the gills with the business of livin' or broke as a joke are not going to go over too well.
Because then we would need to have the dreaded "conversation" and thus be forced for a time--a few minutes, an hour, a lifetime--to pretend that we are people who give a crap about each other and in this workaday world who has time for that? This is why some genius invented Twitter, so that one needn't practice the art of conversation. No more tea and sympathy or great big laughs together--just you making a statement to cyberland that no one has to address.
Lucky for me, I rarely tweet and instead use my PC time to compose erratic and increasingly silly blogs to blather about my so-called life, thus allowing me to answer my own how are you for myself. Right now, how I am is kicked in the head with a bad headache. I am mystified and not a little put out that I rather tanked an audition and was not given a chance to redeem myself when tanking aside I was still probably better than anyone else in the room. I am annoyed that I knew the latter was a likely outcome of going on said audition and so also knew I should have stayed the hell home in the first place. I am restless in the night and I am restless in the day and I find myself overwhelmed by how dire my circumstances are at present. I am not scared. I am vaguely and constantly terrified. I am missing certain someones more than I can even say and I am not even sure why it is I miss them all so. I am curious as to where all my friends are at the moment. I am wasting time writing this moronic story when I should be cleaning my slovenly hovel. I am kind of slutty. I am very very very very tired of being right about the things I am right about. I am quite dry-eyed. I am dehydrated. I am bored.
And so after all that purging--thus now I see why no one ever really wants a true answer to the social nicety we throw out there as casually as we do everything else nowadays. The weight of the world is enough to bear on one's own. So let's just keep how I am right this second between us. Not that anyone is asking to know.
:)
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