I scare myself sometimes. For example, the last entry on transient friendships. To some extent, that wasn’t an over-exaggeration; I really don’t care about certain people enough to want to talk to them right now. On the other hand though, I find that I am still perfectly capable of making small talk and being “cheery” these past couple of days … despite the more ugly side of the current thoughts running through my head.

Thus, on to a related subject … small talk and saying “how are you”. Many foreign/international students have told me about their confusion regarding the phrase “how are you?” What does it really mean, and why do we use it so often here in the States? I suppose in most other countries, asking “how are you?” is still genuine, and it is a sincere extension of the asker’s wish to know how one’s life is. We here in America, on the other hand, use it as a substitute for hello.

Countless small talks over the past few days have started with “so, how are you shan?” to which my response is always: cock my head for a couple of seconds as if I’m seriously pondering the question, followed by “I’m doing pretty well actually”, followed by an internal struggle of “do I let the beans out of the bag, or don’t I let the beans out of the bag.”

Really, my small talk partners have no intention of hearing everything that I have to say about “how I am doing today,” nor do I have any desire of telling him/her my whole life story. I have actually consciously tried to stop asking people “how are you?” in an effort to make some actual conversation instead of small talk. I hate it that I use a seemingly empty phrase. Most of the time however, no matter how hard I try, I find that it’s just too hard to find something else appropriate to say besides the idiomatic hello. Usually, when I start to sense that split second of potentially awkward silence, I avoid it at all costs and pick the easiest thing to say. So, how are you doing today?