January 30, 2009

I've tried for a few days to come up with something to say here, but the few ideas I have had have been pretty weak, and I couldn't come up with anything besides those. So that raises the question: What do you say when you have nothing to say?

Some people are pretty good at that, apparently. I have been involved in conversations where people have talked and talked without saying anything at all. It's a talent that I apparently don't have. Once I run out of things to say in the conversation, I'm pretty much done. Once they run out of things to say, they keep talking. How do they come up with all that?

Of course, you could always talk about the weather. That's always a hot topic. Or a cold one, depending on the weather. Complain about how hot it has been, or how cold it has been, or about how it keeps changing from hot to cold, or how we get too much rain, or how we haven't had any rain in the longest time. Or about how the weathermen never seem to get it right. Always something to talk about with the weather, because we always have weather.

Or if you have nothing to say, you could always tell a joke:
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Nobel.
Nobel who?
Nobel. That's why I knock.
I must admit that I swiped that one off a Quizno's kids meal. And if your jokes aren't any better than that, then you won't have to worry about what to say next.

You could always use the technique that the television news people use. If there's a big story and you don't know many details about it, just say what you know over and over again. And over and over and over. This is particularly useful if you are on one of the 24 hour cable news channels. On the day that airplane made an emergency landing in the Hudson River, the television at the restaurant we were eating at was on one of the news channels. And it was obvious that there wasn't much actual information that was known, because we heard the same facts and conjectures repeated often in the time we were there, all by the same anchor.

Or if you have nothing to say, then you could always say nothing. As in not saying anything at all. Maybe I should have tried that from the beginning.

Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore stand in awe of God. - Ecclesiastes 5:7

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