Small Talk (for the geeks out here, notice that the space between the words and the capitalized T; for the non-geeks, please pardon the parenthetical tangent) and I have never been good friends. We never got comfortable with each other. There is always this awkwardness between Small Talk and I that just never seems to disperse. I guess it may be partially my fault, since I never practiced dancing with Small Talk often enough. So we never seemed to get the right rythm and are constant stepping on each others feet.

I’ve tried several times to re-acqaint Small Talk and I, but we never seem to get be able to get past the small talk. Alas, it’s a lost cause it seems. A vicious circle. We just weren’t meant to be.

Jest aside, I seriously find small talk to be quite cumbersome. I understand that it is just another tool to help people get to know each other, but for me it becomes more of a hurdle in getting to know someone since I never seem to know when to transition from small talk to something more substantive and really more meaningful. At one point I heard a quote (yeah another one, quotes seem to be a big thing with me don’t they?) Words are at best a poor means of communication. How true. Because in the intricacies of language and more so of socially acceptable language, etiquette and behavior, the real meaning, the directness and the initmacy of communication gets shrouded with a veil or words. Word which often don’t mean anything.

The worst question which hardly ever gets a candid answer in the English language is How are you?. How often has someone ever replied to that with anything more than the cliched Fine, thank you or an even worse okay? Everyone, including myself says how are you, but we don’t really even expect an answer any more. It’s more like saying hello and less like asking a question. So then my question is, how do you ask someone how they really are?

Since I’m cutting out the small talk for the night, I think I’ll end here and take Small Talk with me to join me in a silent dinner.

Yesterday, I went to see A Beautiful Mind. It’s an amazing movie, though I bet the book is better… and I nam now interested in reading the book as well. But that is not what this entry is about. This entry is about “reality.” The straw the broke the proverbial camel’s back in writing this entry was the movie though. Other things have been, my curiousity about dreams and picking up Freud’s On Dreams, recent movies that I saw (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, A Beautiful Mind) recent readings (Girl, Interrupted) – some of which have touched on the topic of Schizophrenia, reflection of my time spent in the Master of Software Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon working on a software harness to plug in different socio-economic models to predict relapse in Schizophrenic patients and so on.

The Mind is Fragile. Very fragile. It is also powerful. Very powerful. (Those statements are the subject of their own lengthy diatribe at some point in the future once my personal conditions for the statute of limitations on personal information has been met.) But what the movie last nigth and all the other things together have made me think about is just how easy it is for the mind to get confused. Just how easy it is for dreams to become real and reality to become dreams. Of course, all of this leads to the ultimate question of what is reality?

I do not remember my dreams. In fact for a long time I would make a conscious effort to not dream at all (don’t know if that is even possible) since that would mean that my brain is still going and I have a hard enough time getting it to stop thinking that to have to deal with the dreams part of it as well 🙂 But I can see how for some people the line between what they dreamt and what they sense while “awake” can become blurred. Where the conscious and the sub-conscious merge and the worlds collide leading to a state of utter confusion (IMHO).

Schizoprenia and other things which are classified as “mental disorders” (I have a relatively low opinion of the diagnoses in the field of mental disorders as specified in the DSM, since to me (those with more trained minds may be able to tell the difference better than I, this is only a personal opinion… ooh nested parentheses again, don’t you just love those!), some of them seem about as subjective and open ended as a horoscope!) are a scary thought. I’d draw the analogy to a leaky vessel (don’t take this negatively, it is simply an analogy). Stuff literally bleeds over from one world to another, from one reality to another. And I cannot begin to imagine what it is like, since that would be the realization of my worst fear – to not be able to think critically and discren between what is inside your head and simply a figment of an over-active mind/imagination and what manfests itselfs tangibly in the world as we and others around us perceive it.

Needless to say I’ve developed a new found respect for those who suffer from such illnesses and an even deeper respect for those who while suffering from such an illness can overcome the cacophony in their own minds to lead meaningful lives. Nothing striked the chord stronger than the triump of a person over circumstances that are otherwise futile.