Hiding from small talk

On January 6th I was innocently downloading music for free from soulseek, a pretty good downloading program for indie rock and other less mainstream stuff that works off other people's computers. Suddenly someone messaged me about recommendations for Nina Simone music. We ended up chatting for some time. He is from Greece and he was annoyed at the government's encouragement to get involved with the Olympics, amongst other things.

Since then I have been hesitant to go online on my soulseek account because I just don't feel like talking to him. I've been banished from my music download site. Noo!! I am just being silly becuase I'm sure there's a way to avoid being seen online but I'm not sure how to do it, and in order to find out I'll have to go back online.

Small talk is sometimes manageable but most times unpleasant. It's always the same garbage. Around here you ask "are you in school, what program, what year, where are you from, what are you going to do next year. Okay. Great.. well, nice to have met you". Abroad you meet other travellers and the conversations are more or less the same, though may include "how long have you been travelling, where else have you been, where are you going next", etc.

This summer I remember hitting a wall of ability to continue these types of conversations and just craving something more. Something! Where oh where could those somethings be?

That's part of the reason why reading other people's blogs is so interesting. You get to skip the bullshit and head right to what they are really thinking. Even if they're not really thinking it and are just concocting things to think about, at least they are sometimes interesting.