You know what’s hard sometimes? Just keeping a conversation going. A lot of times, I don’t know what to talk about. Especially if I’m talking to someone that I haven’t spent a lot of time with recently.

This might be me overanalyzing things again, but if you look at conversation topics, seems like there are only a few kinds:
- things in the common history between you and me
- things about you (how are you? what have you been doing recently? what do you think about this?)
- things about me (I did this recently. Here’s what I think about this.)
- incidental things (hey look, there’s a funny sign on the side of the road. ha ha.)

Seems like there’s only so much you can do in a conversation. Run through these four categories, and then what? But if I look at the most socially adept people, the people I strive to be like in social situations, they never have problems. They never just stand there dumbly until someone else says something.

You can just run the “things about you” forever- just keep latching on to things the other person says and asking questions about that. This can be fun sometimes. Sometimes, though, the other person just doesn’t give you enough to work with. It’s like trying to improv in a scene where the other person just accepts. (and nobody raises the goddamn stakes, for those of you who love that dumb phrase)

Oh well- there’s no easy solution, right? And it’s probably one of those problems that’s only a problem the more you think about it. So I’ll ignore it until it comes up again.

Hey, by the way, I just saw the Crucible (by Quantum Theatre) and it was pretty sweet! And, as the title of this post says, I’m excited about this year! Two years ago, I was excited, but scared, to start college. Now I’m all jazzed up about all the rest of the things, besides college: TA’ing, studying abroad, jobs next year, what I’ll do senior year, and the future! The difference is that now I’m not as apprehensive about it– all this stuff I’m setting out to do, I know I’ll be able to do it. If only all of life were so easy!