Stripper

I am thinking about kinds of speech, and what they mean. I spend my days writing polite strategic emails and acceptance and rejection letters to people I will never see in person. This has not come easy to me, and after years of doing it, I still agonize over each communication. It is an interesting form because you have to completely disguise yourself. You learn to use words like "warmly" (actually, I am not usually daring enough to use that one) and sentences like "please let me know if I may be of further help" (which, after a few years, has now become the more brazenly casual "please let me know if you need anything else"). I wish all those people whose manuscripts I have had to reject as managing editor of a sociology journal knew how often I have been rejected in the poetry world, and with the same stingingly distant language--"I am writing regretfully to let you know that the judges for the ____ Prize have not selected you as the winner," "This does not meet our needs at this time." I wonder how I have ended up here in careful/discreet language land, spending my days on a computer. Why didn't I become a stripper or something more visceral?

Which brings me to my next dilemma: when people ask "how are you doing," I always feel like I say too much. I know I should just say "fine" and leave it at that, or think of some cute surface answer (a Tibetan coworker always quips, "I'm still alive")...but as much as I try to do that, something bursts out of me and then, depending on my audience, there is either a glossy, brittle silence until a more humorous topic is introduced (this happened today); or there is a genuine response that still may feel uncomfortable to me, like the person either feels sorry for me or is wishing I'd said something else. I feel like I am a stripper, verbally and I have had this problem all my life...starting at age 5 when I imparted sex-ed knowledge to everyone in kindergarten, everyone at swim lessons, etc. and told my grandparents that my mom was knocked up. At this point I feel like I may be defiling my private life by saying too much, or too many contradictory things, about it. I want language to be an agent of truth. I want people to tell me how the hell they are really doing (though not go on at length about goiters or nasal discharge or something, sure, no one wants to hear that for too long) and I want genuine connections to happen, but I feel like everything is such a social game. I keep deciding I should go on a kind of word-diet where I only say "safe" things that I will not later regret revealing or feel weird about, but much like real diets, they never work. Is something wrong with me, or is it the whole setup? Is there a culture I would be more at home in? Maybe my fellow Italians, when in Italy or certain neighborhoods in Jersey, are all inappropriately, wildly expressive to their coworkers too. Maybe there are places in Alaska where no one speaks for months (if so, I wish Sarah Palin would go there, NOW). None of this is helped by my head being full of snot right now (but I won't go on and describe it at length), so it is hard to think at all, let alone to monitor anything. Maybe one day we will all have self-censorship machines that will help us to always get the job and sex we are verbally angling for...

I don't necessarily think the problem is me (always), exactly, though I probably need to guard and respect myself more, in many ways, in this life where things can be misinterpreted. I also suspect many people hide what is really going on with them, and how they feel, until one day their life changes or breaks apart in a way that is unavoidably visible...and maybe these people think my life is fucked up because I talk honestly and confusedly about it, when really, it is quite normal.