Conversations

The past three months have been quite busy, what with hosting a conference at my university, teaching and the usual end of semester stuff, a grant review panel and then writing a grant of my own. So here it is, July Fourth almost, and I am looking forward to some mental down time.

The grant that I just submitted was interesting, for several reasons. One was that it required me to talk to a lot of people that I did not know - either by email or by phone. Now talking has never been one of my strengths - particularly when it involves people that I do not know. When I was a kid, for example, I hated to talk on the phone and would avoid it at all costs. I absolutely hated those fundraiser type of activities, in which the kid (me) was supposed to sell candy bars (or whatever) to neighbours, friends and relatives. This should have been an easy thing for me to excell at - as there was certainly an abundance of relatives in the immediate vicinity of where we lived that I could call on. But I was terrified of calling them up. I would get incredibly tongue-tied and not be able to get past the word "hello". And calling up girls just to talk to them or, heaven forbid, ask them out for a date? Not on your life!

I've overcome this, to a large extent. One trick that I've learned is to jot down the things that I want to talk about, so that I don't forget them should the conversation take a different turn than I expected. And during my formative years as a faculty member, I put myself in charge of ordering (usually by telephone) the supplies and reagents for my lab. Nothing like a little forced practice. And I can be pretty persuasive over the phone - in all the conversations that I had to initiate for the grant that I was writing, I had no difficulty persuading the listener to go along with my proposal.

But still, I find that keeping track of the conversations was mentally exhausting - whether the conversations were by email or by phone. I still find that I have to prepare for the conversations - that I have to think about exactly what to say, how to say it, and how the other person is likely to respond. I don't know why the ability to hold a conversation does not come naturally to me, so I write it down to yet another Aspergian trait.

So, that is one reason for my extended absence from posting. Spending a lot of mental energy in email and phone conversations to achieve an external goal, I did not have much left to devote to converting my inner thoughts into electrons. But am looking forward to enjoying the rest of the summer - and maybe even getting some work done in the lab!