Transcript

Who Ya Talkin To? · Wanzology

Who Ya Talkin To Hey there. Welcome to your Wednesday. It's Wednesday, y'all. And that means it's another episode of WANZOLOGY! How ya doin? Still here huh? Still breathing? If you're listening to this, I hate to break it to ya, you're alive and I'm glad! This, this living stuff is not easy. It is definitely not easy and getting old, hey, hey that is NOT for the squeamish. Not at all. Oh, well, I hope you and yours are tolerating and getting through, getting by and getting yours!! This week, I want to talk about who you talk to? Who do you talk to? I just got off the phone with a friend. He's actually a friend of one of my sons, and we talked for an hour and 40 minutes about this, that and the other, and every time we get done and they're going to end the conversation, he says the same thing, “I learn so much when I talk to you!”, and I'm like, who? Who are you talking about? What? I don't know what you mean. It's like having another kid talking to this guy is like having another son and there are some things that he's not that well versed in and I, you know, that's because he's younger and that are experiences he hasn't gotten to yet. But I thought it was interesting that we had such a long conversation. And I don't remember the last time I had a long conversation on the phone with a guy about life in general. What's going on, how you gonna handle it, that sort of thing. That's not in a male's wheelhouse when it comes to discussion. It doesn't have anything to do with handicap or batting average or, yeah, it's very interesting and as you get older, speaking from my own experience, getting older as a guy, it's like you have less and less contact with friends, not just guy friends, lady friends, nieces, nephews, cousins, grandkids. Now I have three teenage grandkids…never hear from them. Now if I reach out to him. Well, that's only about a 20% chance I'll hear back from'em. They're busy and I get it! I get it! I remember I didn't have the internet and at their age I was in the wind! I was moving! Always had to be somewhere, always going someplace. So I get it. But I wanted you to think about for a second is who do you talk to when you have something that's stuck in your craw? When you have a splinter in your mind that you can't pull out an itch in your brain, you can't scratch, who do you talk to about it? When weird things come up in your life, who is that bestie of the same sex that you talk to? Don't have one? I never thought I had one till I realized I just got off the phone with one and I actually have three or four, I just don't talk to them that often. If you're a woman, this may seem like a silly ass subject because you have lots of girlfriends to talk to, but there's one or two who know everything. And with guys, there's like one. maybe. I bet for women it's circumstantial. If it has to do with a work environment issue, you talk to one person. If it has to do with an interpersonal relationship with another woman, you talk to another person. If it's about your intimate relationships with your significant other, well then. There's only one person to talk to. Who do you have? How many people do you have that know at least some of your inner workings? I have three. What comes to mind is there are three people in my life, one female, two male, and they know everything about me. I have no problem telling them everything. And the female, we've had our relationship going on for, geez, better than 12 years. 10, 12 years, maybe more, maybe 13, I think we're up to 13 now. We dated for a while and I couldn't in good conscience date, someone that I wasn't going to fall in love with and care about. I cared about them because I was getting input, feedback, questions, answers from someone with a completely different perspective than I had. And I'm not saying that I was using that person, 'cause granted, it went both ways. Both of us were coming out of really, really damaging relationships when we met and I knew that I had a lot of work to do, I knew that I had to be honest about how I felt. What would it be like if I were in her place? For me, that was, ugh. I couldn't do that to another person. I couldn't put someone through all the trappings of, I like you and I'm sharing intimate details with you, I'm being vulnerable, but no, I don't love you. That didn't work for me. I kind of wanted to be in love, but this was something different. I hadn't had a, I didn't, I had not had a best friend that I could talk about anything with male or female for a long time, and this person had questions that I hadn't thought of and was very honest in how her replies changed my thinking, gave me a different perspective. We're still friends today. We don't talk as much as we used to, but when we talk, we talk All the ladies know what that means. Guys are like, yeah…so! But what about you? What are the criteria that you have for someone that you would trust to talk about your quote unquote ‘stuff’? The inner workings. All that messy, messy, messy garbage that makes you wonder why you're doing stuff. Have you learned the lesson? Are you gonna do this again? Have we been here before? Those kind of conversations that you have with yourself, but you just need someone outside to bounce them off of so that you know, or at least can get some idea, that you're not crazy. Who is that person for you and how did you find them? How did you find them? My female bestie. I was minding my own business, watching friends of mine in a band play, and she walked up and asked me to dance and I was like, “Nah, I'm not really into dancing.”, and she like talked me into it 'cause it was like a shaming thing. “Well, I can see you over here and you liked the music, you're, you're getting into it mouthing the words, why won't you just dance?” Well, I didn't have an answer, so we danced. And we danced some more. Band took a break, we talked, got to know each other a little bit, exchanged numbers, the next day had a conversation again, and it went for about an hour. She was getting to know me and I was getting to know her. Now, the progress of the relationship, it started to go into intimacy and it started to go down ‘that’ road. I call it the Aisle Of White. It started going down the Aisle Of White. The Aisle Of White, for me, is what they used to call courtship. You dated people to figure out who you got along with and who got along with you. If you found one person, then you stopped going out looking for other people, you just dated that one person and after a certain amount of time when you got really comfortable with each other, you started courting each other. That's the commitment part. Both of you start taking this long walk down that aisle, the Aisle Of White towards getting married. Back in the day, courtship was, this is the woman who I will make my bride and I'm gonna start doing this, and she has a dowry and I have an endowment and all this other stuff, right? It was very, very formal, but not anymore. Not anymore. Now it's convoluted and complicated. Now it's like if you meet somebody on Tinder, you give someone your phone number. If you answer when they call, you are now an exclusive dating item. You're not allowed to look at any other women 'cause you've been talking to her or whoever you're dating, and that's not cool. Nowhere in dating does it say anything about courting and in courting it says nothing about dating. Courtship comes after dating. It's become kind of this ‘bad juju’ thing. If you've dated for a while, more than one person, more than one person at a time, oh, that's frowned upon. I looked it up. I looked it up, and Wikipedia was telling me, dating is the process of getting to know someone by spending time with them. That's it. That's the meat. The other stuff is social constructs or whatever. The whole idea of dating someone is to get to know them. If you like the same type of movie, you go to the same type of movie together. If you like sushi, you go to sushi together. If one of you likes sunrises and the other one likes sunsets, that's gonna have to go to negotiation and it may not work out. You like cats, they would rather have a dog. You like reading the paper. They like watching cable news, mainstream media, and see no reason in the world that you would shop at either PCC or Trader Joe's, whereas you, well, they know you on a first name basis at both of them. Who do you talk to? And if you don't have that person to talk to, why don't you have that person to talk to? Any candidates? You should get one, maybe even two. That comforting feeling when you run into that person that you know you can have a conversation about anything with, who is that for you? Where are they? And if you have that person, what's the depth of quality? What's the quality of the conversation? I can go from the stupid, mundane, silly stuff all the way through quantum physics to the mysteries of life itself and everywhere in between. Life is about experiences. Each one of us though, we may have been through the same situation, the same circumstance, it hits us different and teaches us a different lesson. So talking to that other person who has had a similar experience or is curious about yours, who is that? Do you have one? Do you have that person? And if not, why, why not? It's not healthy to have a deep, intimate relationship with ‘yourself’ one word, but it is really good to have a deep, intimate relationship with your ‘self’, two words. Because that's where the sausage gets made inside of your head and heart and all the other organs in the gooey center of your body. That's where ‘you’ come from and your brain remembers all these things, and sometimes you feel a certain way and your stomach gets all butterfly ridden and you can't speak and, who do you talk to about those things? Who? And if you don't have that someone, why? I would highly recommend that you had at least one person. One person you could meet at a coffee shop and talk about everything and nothing at all. As human beings, we cannot help the fact that we are social. Even when we try to be alone, we try to be alone on like the subway or the bus or in our own car, but we're stuck in traffic on a freeway. We are communal communicators. So, take a little while and figure out who that person is and next time you talk to that person, ask them if they're the person you could say anything to. You could tell your deepest, darkest secrets to. Who is that person? And once you find them, cherish them, 'cause you just never know when they're going to say that thing you need to hear. And conversely, you never know when you're gonna say that thing that someone else needs to hear. It's very important. Cool!! Thanks for being here this week. Yeah, life is kinda ‘life’n’ and then maybe we'll talk about that next week, but I was really caught up in this conversation that I had. I thought I would share it on a level that was different than usual. Me asking you a question, not looking to hear an answer because you're not in this room, but I did want to give you a kernel, a grain, and whatever to think about. You probably already have ‘that’ person, and if you do, go back and reminisce about how you became those people to each other, right? We're out of time for now. Keep breathing, y'all!! Keep looking down at the grass and I will see you, well not see you, but you get it. I will see you next week!! Later!!