When I first meet someone…

I sometimes find myself having a conversation with someone, but while they’re talking, I drift away from the conversation -but only if its safe to do so.  You can always tell when the time is right to start drifting, you know yourself.

Some people like to talk and talkers will always find listeners. More often than not, I prefer to listen than to talk, yera, I wouldn’t be much of a talker really…

When I meet someone for the first time, or the first few times, I like when they talk because it allows me to ‘take them in’.  I’d say they think I am listening to them and sometimes I am, but sometimes I am not! …and they are fooled, because I go through the appropriate motions; I am still nodding and responding and laughing and smiling in all the right places.

Things get a little difficult when I meet a like minded creature and when I do, I start talking – only because I feel as though there would be silence if I didn’t, so I am somewhat forced into the talking role, which feels uncomfortable at first but once I get into it, I’m capable of a bit of waffling. I will talk about anything when I am in those situations.  Anything to fill that gap.

Today I was in a three way conversation. They are the best for this kind of thing because you can easily slip out of the conversation to have a little ’sniff around’.  Dogs have been doing this ever since they were dogs and they do it much more openly; there are no social graces with dogs and that’s why I love them.  When a dog encounters another dog, they have a good ol’ sniff.

They fill up their senses and gather all the information they need.  They then make a judgement based on this and don’t have any qualms about it; they will either hump the other dog or lay into him

I make those judgements too, but in more subtle ways.  I have to do it the human way,  I wait until the person is in full flow and then I look at their eyes and how their face moves as they talk, their hair, their clothes, their shoes, their hands…the list is endless but I make a judgement as snappy as a dog.

Anyway, this particular conversation I was having today was with a tall skinny man and a swarthy twenty something girl. The girl was rabbiting on and I took to studying the tall skinny man, keeping the twenty year old girl for another time. The tall skinny man will probably be in my life for a while, in fact both of them will be if things go according to how I think they’ll go, but you can never tell – I could be knocked down by a bus tomorrow, but anyway, this man, he had an unusual shaped head.  It was attached to his neck where you wouldn’t imagine it to be attached. Who ever made him, must have been distracted just as they were positioning his head onto his neck.  While he was talking to me, I was imagining how I would re-position his head given the chance…  Isn’t that awful?