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The Newsletter >
Can You Hear Me Talking to Myself Now?
April 14, 2010
“YaYa, why you talk you-self all time?” Zoe’s four-year old forehead attempted to form wrinkles as she pondered one of the great curiosities of life—adult insanity.
“What makes you think I’m by myself?” I distracted her with a bright, shiny lollipop.
Talking to myself is a way of life for me, providing a multitude of benefits and advantages. I cannot help it if society has not embraced the diversity that constitutes “talking to one’s own self” in a manner resembling Sally Fields playing Sybil. Society is a stuck up girl wearing chipped nail polish.
I talk to myself because I’m the best listener I know, and I’m smart enough to understand what I’m saying.
Sometimes when I’m talking to those people who come and eat my poorly prepared hamburger meat on the weekends, I can’t even finish a sentence, before they’re jumping all over what I’m saying with both feet and throwing their opinions around like people planning a revolution while standing next to a guillotine. It finally got so nutty I had to institute the Zern family conch shell policy.
It’s simple. If you’re holding the conch shell, you can talk. It’s a kind of “Lord of the Flies” thing. If you’re holding the conch shell everybody else has to zip it and listen. My husband brought the Queen Conch shell back from a diving trip to the Bahamas when he was a teenager and it was still legal to rape the oceans. That’s how old we are, so talking to myself is probably not as big or weird of a deal as I think.
Often I talk to myself to be able to hear how it’s all going to sound when I finally get an opportunity to talk to real humans or right some great societal wrong. For example I could say, “Listen, Smart Alec, if you put that parking ticket on my truck, I’m going to tear my clothes off and howl at the traffic light,” but that might come off sounding a bit over the top or even insane.
So I practice—out loud—to myself. I say, sometimes while looking in a mirror, “Oh my gracious, Campus Security Officer . . . um . . . (insert shy smile or grimace while looking at name tag) Fink, Officer Fink, I had no idea that this was a faculty parking area. I didn’t realize that sign, way down there behind that bush and around the corner blocked by that massive hump of dirt, applied to this area of the parking lot as well. Color me chagrined.”
Sometimes I give speeches and then give myself a standing ovation. It’s very gratifying.
Sometimes I practice what I would say on David Letterman, but don’t tell anybody.
A couple of times I’ve been able to say to myself what I wished I’d said that time, if I’d had a minute to think about what I was saying before I actually said it. You know what I’m saying?
Once, I told Napoleon off, but I don’t want to talk about it.
Finally, I got tired of telling myself clever anecdotes, which are short accounts of some interesting or humorous incident, and started to write them down, making me an anecdotist and not some crazy lady who wanders around her house wearing a frayed jeans vest and mumbling to herself.
Linda (Vests Have Handy Pockets) Zern
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