I’ve said before that I hate small talk but it would be more accurate to say that I hate the lack of anything else but small talk. I can make small talk. I make small talk with the checkers at Wal-mart and other people with whom I will probably never spend more than five minutes at a time. That’s what small talk is for but after the first three minutes or so one should move on to real conversation.

There was an episode of Star Trek: TNG that I’ve always found highly annoying. It was the episode titled Starship Mine. The senior officers are all horrified at having to attend a reception hosted by a Cmdr Hutchinson. We are led to believe that this is because he drives everyone crazy with small talk. They manage to steer Hutchinson and Data together and the two make wonderful conversation about scientific and cultural trivia of various worlds but the other officers of the Enterprise just stare at them in puzzlement. One of them, Riker I think, says something like, “How long can two people talk about nothing?” In fact, Hutchinson and Data are the only people at the party who are talking about anything. Why don’t I ever meet people like that?

Well, actually, I don’t meet many people at all anymore but I used to and ninety-nine percent of them were small talkers. And of course I’m not talking about family. When you get together with family there’s always something to talk about - catching up, reminiscing - and some of it might resemble small talk but it’s not the same thing at all. Small talk has never annoyed me a lot but I’ve always found it a little sad that most people never go beyond that. What does annoy me sometimes is the idle chatter of strangers. I’ll be waiting in a long line, for example, and the person next to me will decide to chat me up but she (or he) won’t say much of anything, just chatter about the weather, how much she hates waiting in line, etc. If they’re not going to actually say something I wish they would just leave me alone with my own mind because what’s inside my head is always more interesting than the weather.