I’m a car wreck

This post over here at the weblog, got me thinking about my own paranoias when telling stories. In brief Kotsko hates himself when he tells a story twice to the same person, so he suggests that creating a kind of database to keep track of to whom he has told what stories. Obviously everyone should be cautious when telling stories; nobody wants to be thought of as a ‘story-repeater.’ His predicament got me thinking of another awkward, and sometimes unavoidable situation: when you have to tell a story to someone, but there is another person present that has already heard it. Sometimes when I’m talking to someone, I can completely wig out in my head – it’s a little strange because it seriously feels like I’m working on parallel planes of consciousness. (I’m sure I’m not the only one this happens too.) This is one of those situations. First I freak out because I convince myself that the person that has already heard my story probably doesn’t want to hear it again, but generally I can correct this by trying to re-focusing on the person that hasn’t herd it. Unfortunately the second wig out wrecks me. It occurs to me that the other person has herd my story already, and I may not tell the story the same way again – I worry I might emphasize something that I didn’t before, or even worse my mind will lapse completely and I’ll tell an almost completely different story. I couple this with enough knowledge of post structuralism to know that it is totally impossible for me to actually tell the same story again. So now before I’ve even finished to tell the original story, I’m frantically trying to justify to myself what I’ve gotten myself into, and I’m trying to piece together a justification to the persons listening should the discrepancy in my two accounts come up. By now I’ve spent so much time thinking about all this, that I’ve surely either drifted off into my own head and started mumbling intermittently, or I’ve managed to keep the dialogue going but it’s completely ran away with itself, and my greatest fears of telling a completely different story have been realized. Anyways I’m a car wreck. This is what majoring in sociology and philosophy does to you. Not only am I hyper aware of myself and others, but I approach it hyper-analytically. Sometimes I’m jealous of sociologists that can just care too much, or philosophers that can just think too much.