Words of Weight

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I haven’t always been much of a talker. My brother is a talker. He talks to everyone. My brother and I were pretty close growing up so I’d often find myself listening to conversations he was having with whoever we were hanging out with at the time. If you’ve been sitting on the sideline, listening to a conversation for while, it becomes increasingly difficult to jump into it with every passing minute. After a while you start to think that “jumping in now is just going to be weird. People will look at me funny”. Well…that’s what I thought a lot of the time anyway and to go along with it I’d get nervous. I don’t know if this is something that people experience in general but I have had my fair share of speech related nervousness. It’s not a fun way to be…getting all jittery just thinking about saying something to someone.

In school we had to give speeches in front of the class. I used to get up and just stand there for a minute before telling the teacher sheepishly that I hadn’t prepared anything. In retrospect I got it very wrong since the embarrassment of preparing a speech and giving it ranks about 0.5 on a scale of one to ten, whereas that of standing in front of the class for a minute or two saying nothing ranks about 7.75. Eventually, at the suggestion of my mom I prepared a speech on the origins of Socks And/Or Stockings. It was daring…no-one else was giving speeches on socks. It was unique and even a little funny…socks are funny I guess. It pretty much cured me of the fear of speaking in public. I could go on a tangent here about the fear of failure and how it relates to this but I shan’t.

But real, live, one on one conversation still gives me a little bit of anxiety. On t.v. you get moms and daughters like the ones in The Gilmore Girls. Those two ladies are a couple of dictionaries trapped in women’s bodies. No-one in real life talks like these girls. At least no-one I know. We are mostly full of “umms” and “you knows?” and “likes”. Our conversations are a little less fluid than lava. Somehow by extracting the meaty bits, discarding the “umms” and “you knows” and reading the nuances of the body language of our co-talkers we manage to communicate.

Anyway… words are pretty important things. We say them all the time and rarely think much about their impact or what they really mean. We’ve all said things we wish we could take back. We’ve said things too soon. Sometimes we never say the things we should. This is a song about saying too much, too soon and receiving too little in return. It’s a relationship song. It’s about how some words, or maybe what those words represent, mean way too much to be encased in such small packages. At least one person has told me that they think the song is crap. I disagree strongly with that and I’m sure that there’s at least a few of you out there that think as I do.