Monday 14 March 2016

Practicing the Pressure.

I met another new woman from the Shire today. That’s two in two days, which I think is probably a record. Fortunately, I liked this one so I didn’t have to feel bad about the encounter later.

Meeting new people is always a pressure for me because I can’t just talk to them as normal people do, I have to go straight into observation and instinctive analysis mode. I’m good at it too, and getting better. It’s surprising how many signals people give off without realising it in the course of an initial ten minute conversation, and they all get noted and interpreted. I was good at it twenty years ago; these days I’m as near infallible as makes no difference. I’m very rarely wrong – seriously, I’m not – and that’s a pressure. (How glad I am that there aren’t many things I’m good at.)

I’m particularly accurate with duplicitous people. The fake nature of their friendliness shines out like Rudolph’s nose in a frosty landscape. Same with any hint of the disingenuous, a facility I picked up early through being naïve and overly trusting.

Anyway, this wasn’t meant to be a trumpet-blowing exercise. It’s just that if I encounter today’s lady again, I shall be able to just talk to her like a normal person would. That doesn’t happen very often.

(I feel a post forming about the fateful night when I got the first inkling that my parents had been lying to me for years about the existence of Santa Claus. Wrong time of year, though. It can wait.)

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