Small Talk...

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that waiter thing could be easily a joke. they did similar joke with me too. they are living mostly on their own here in this corner of europe, nobody cares about what's going on here, they don't care about other world either. they have their own piece of ocean and they are happy, they don't need more. they are good in social interaction, though. yes, they do have this saudade culture but it comes from past when their relatives used to spend years on boat sailing around the earth. now, i didn't meet a single portuguese person who'd say that would like to spend some part of his/her life abroad. they are not typical latin country, but i would not go so far as calling them a nation of aspies.

I finally got my boyfriend to admit that small talk has absolutely no point-either that or he got tired of trying to get it to make sense to me, lol. He just says "it's nice to talk about nothing sometimes". He also says that after being around me this long, me not asking how his day went doesn't effect him as much as it used to-besides getting just used to it, he said he completely understands that it has no point and doesn't pertain to anything important at all... but he still tries and hopes I care at times, lol.

I think even our definition of "nothing" is different from the NTs'! I'll sometimes blab about certain cultural ideas or theories I have, and to me they often qualify as "nothing" because they're not terribly important to me emotionally or intellectually. But they're still somehow too "intellectual" to be considered fodder for smalltalk. Apparently appropriate smalltalk centers around the weather, sports scores, yardwork, neighborhood/work gossip, IRAs & 401Ks, problems with children/marriage, etc. Even health problems or psychological problems would be more interesting than these topics!! I usually can't even hope for a good conversation about a movie or book! I can't talk to NT women about food cos they're all on a diet, can't talk about kids cos I don't have any, can't talk about marriage problems cos NT women largely create these problems themselves and I often goof and tell them this....so I just pretty much have to stay quiet a lot!

BTW:
The comic originates from xkcd.
I think you should all read it, the guy has some pretty aspie-like insights

I dunno, I have a hard time distinguishing what is and what is not small talk. I never considered gossip to be, but I guess since it strikes up a conversation over nothing important it kind of falls in there... especially if it's like, fashion or celeb type stuff. When I say small talk, I'm thinking of things that absolutely have no point but really, I just hate talking about anything that isn't of any importance to me, lol.

I talk about things I see on court TV-trials and such, but that's only because they are interesting-I talk about how they figured it out more than the actual event, lol. But rarely does that hold anyone's interest either, lol.

For some reason if someone tells me how their day was, how they did on a test, every day things like this, I just kind of space out.

I do talk about my kids, but only to people I know, and I can't just talk about it, I overthink things a lot. One of my things lately has been figuring out why our house doesn't run smoothly-but I won't talk to people I don't know about it, lol, even if they are talking about my kids I still just say "yep" and walk off If my boyfriend mentions something about it, I'll start analyzing it instantly.

I've also recently got into investigating the point of it and had to explain asking someone "how are you?" is like a loaded question to me. I never know how they are going to answer and genuinely don't care, so I don't ask-when he told me it's nice to ask someone how they are, or that you respond saying you are "fine" just to be polite, I keep wondering-how is it POLITE to flat out lie and pretend you care, and how's it polite to say fine if you aren't exactly "fine". When I ask how someone is doing, which is very rare, I'm always wincing when they answer-it must be pretty obvious I don't really want to know, so why should I bother? lol. I just don't get it.

I love it!

At work when people say, 'how are you?' I often reply, 'Do you want the polite answer of good, or are you actually interested in how I am?'

lol, in high school notes I used to write "I would ask you how you are, but you're just going to say fine in your response and write me a book about it, so let's just skip that okay?"

Sometimes I answer 'good thankyou' accidently.

eg I was expecting them to say, 'Hello, how are you'.

But they asked another question. For example at work the other day:

Colleague: What time am I giving the lecture?
Me: Good thankyou.

I hardly ever actually know what someone says-if they ask my name I say I'm fine a lot of the time, lol. Especially at little get togethers that we have for the kiddos. Other people must think I'm the biggest weirdo ever-while they are having fun playing the games and such with the kids, me and my son get annoyed by decorations getting knocked down (even accidentally) and obsessing over whether or not I did a decent job on the cake and how the design could have been better-how hard it is for me to color something in with icing or try to freehand with it, etc. lol.

I like xkcd... I read all his comics (in one go), and I would be surprised if the guy wasn't on the spectrum. A couple of his cartoons are about how he walks on floors with black and white tiles, and other sort of "odd" behavoirs. Likewise, some of his work (map of the internet) is intricate and well-constructed.

Case in point:



Edit: I just realized that there's a secondary joke to this... 1453 is prime, so he can't factor it!