I had a tiresome dialogue on a long train ride yesterday where I
found myself being sidetracked on irrelevancies in what originally
seemed like it’d be an engaging conversation.
Throughout the course of this unfortunately lengthy conversation (it
was a 6 hour train ride), this man repeatedly ignored points I’d made,
talked over me, and argued with me over the most tangential points to
our primary conversation subject.

The tragedy to me was that the conversation had started off with the
possibility of being truly engrossing, only for my seatmate to
repeatedly divert us to arguing over semantics like the definition of
the word ‘training’ (which didn’t even matter; we could’ve used any
other word if we had different definitions for what constitutes
training and what doesn’t, but my interlocutor couldn’t let it go).
The funny thing was that
repeatedly throughout this conversation, this fellow brought up wanting
to trade numbers with me, to meet up with me again and bring me along
to some free class he was attending, and other things of that nature;
and he kept offering me food he had with him and even bought me a
bottled water off the drink cart when it came by and I wasn’t present
(and I didn’t have any small bills to pay him back for it). The entire
time he kept telling me I could pay him back the next time I saw him,
which only made me grate my teeth more.
I felt like a pretty girl being hounded by a really nice but really
clueless and annoying guy. I kept hoping someone was going to come
along and save me. Because it was a packed train ride, there wasn’t
anywhere else I could escape to, either (though in retrospect I suppose
I could’ve snuck off to the meal car; didn’t think of it). Eventually I
was able to let this conversation die long enough for me to fall
into a nap and be free.
It occurred to me that this man probably does this with everyone; he
enters into these alienating conversations with people, tries to
lecture them, ignores any indication that they may know as much or more
about a subject than he does, and gets sidetracked on irrelevancies.
And that can happen to anyone who’s reasonably educated and passionate
about a subject from time to time; I’m sometimes (on rare occasions)
guilty of
this myself, too.
Yet, had this fellow known the value of talking less, instead of struggling so
mightily to be heard and to be right,
he wouldn’t have needed to resort to bribery and manipulation to try to
coax me into meeting him.
He could’ve simply given me the chance to talk a little bit, and
genuinely
engaged with me instead.