"If you have nothing to say, say nothing" ~Mark Twain

So I was chatting about blogs this morning with a guy at my work. Well, not so much chatting as trying to get past him and back to my office as quickly as possible without being rude. You know the type: you say "Hi Mike! How's it going?" but you don't really care how it's going; you're just trying to be polite and friendly and adhere to the social norms that prove beyond a doubt that you are normal and definitely not antisocial. Which reminds me, did you know that, according to the American Psychiatric Association, Antisocial Personality disorder is diagnosed in 3% of all males and only 1% of all females? That hardly seems fair. Men are quite social. Picture a group of guys, for example, sitting up at a cabin for the weekend. Imagine all of the socializing that would go on! But anyway, social norms. Society has such strange rules and pressures. Nymph sometimes calls me insensitive because I do some things in social situations that are refreshingly honest... and yet eschewed for some reason. If somebody comes to my door to sell me something that I'm not interested in buying, it doesn't sway me at all if it's a one-armed Girl Scout trying to raise enough money to send her big brother to a country with absolute non-extradition laws -- the answer is still no. What would I do with a 16 oz. bottle of cleaner that's concentrated enough to clean every type of surface in my house for the next 10 years? And besides, what does the American Psychiatric Association know, anyway? I mean, for goodness' sake, aren't they the group that admitted a couple of years ago to accepting kickbacks and bribes from the pharmaceutical industry and directly leading to the over-use of medication and neglect of other traditional psychiatric treatment approaches? That doesn't sound like a company whose statistics can be trusted. For all I know, they probably took bribes from the ... whatever group it is that women are in ... to get that number down to 1%. And I know women are all in some support group, too -- don't try and tell me they're not. They have this, like, secret code they all have to learn that is completely unbreakable. Two women can be having a conversation right out in the open, in front of a man, and the man can even be an active participant in said conversation... and the women could be talking about something completely different that the man knows nothing about! Talk about antisocial. Sheesh. If there were two women included in our hypothetical weekend at the cabin, I can only imagine what would happen. They'd probably try and get everyone to talk about stuff, instead of happily socializing like they were before. That's just plain cruel and unusual.

So anyway, this guy Mike and I were talking about blogs and he said he won't start one because he never has anything to say, and nothing exciting ever happens to talk about.

I don't get that.