stories
I was at a party last night discussing the phenomenon of rehearsed personal stories. We all have them, they’re the stories about yourself and your life that you’ve told enough to know which ones work and which ones don’t, which ones are funny, which ones make you sound like an asshole and in what situations that might be okay, etc. You tell them while getting to know people, usually at parties. You tell them to amuse strangers. You get good at them because a lot of people ask the same questions when they’re making conversation, and I’ve found that it’s helpful to work a little bit on the answers to frequently asked questions because, hey, who wants to be the boring guy at the party?
I realized that living in New York has honed my roster of rehearsed personal stories by quite a bit, if only because a lot of the questions I’m asked now relate directly to my moving to New York, and I’ve had to tell those stories quite a few times now.
Anyhow. This all struck me quite suddenly during a phone call with my parents, I was talking to my Dad and he asked how my Christmas went. I responded with a perky, “It was good! It was fun!” then proceeded to tell the story of my week in Florida. Then my Mom picked up a line and asked how it went and I repeated the same “It was good! It was fun!”, with enough similarity to the first performance that my Dad actually said, “Well, I’ve heard this already” and hung up.