I find this funny. Almost everyone talks to people every day, and many of us also write emails and text messages and author other types of communication, such as letters, post cards, blog posts or speeches. And yet, it’s really hard to say just the right thing. And even when you say all the right things and make a lot of sense, the listening party could be filtering the information in some peculiar way, and may give you that look that suggests you have horns or tentacles or something.

Talky talk

Happy talk, keep talking happy talk,
Talk about things you’d like to do,
You gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?
— Bloody Mary, South Pacific

Communication can be so funny sometimes. I mean both “funny ha-ha” and “funny strange.” (Note: If you are not a native English speaker, “funny ha-ha” and “funny strange” are common idiomatic expressions that may not make sense even to those who use them. But I digress.)

The thing that’s funny about communication is that the way you talk, and the outcome of it, is completely different depending on the scenario and people involved. For example, everything changes based on factors such as the following:

1. Who you’re communicating with. It could be a casual acquaintance, a backstabbing co-worker who farts, someone who ran their cart into your leg at the grocery store, or a neighbor whose dandelions ritually throw seeds onto your lawn.
2. What you’re communicating about. For example, if you’re asking someone out on a date, there is a completely different set of factors for success than if you’re negotiating a deal, asking to borrow money, or telling someone they have deadly halitosis.
3. The goals of the individuals involved. You might have a goal to tell your friend about your gout problem, for example, but your friend may have a goal to avoid hearing it. Or one person in a relationship might want to discuss a problematic issue and come to a mutually-beneficial conclusion, while the other person might want to smite their partner down like an adversary and win.

And sometimes there are communication snafus where two perfectly intelligent people are trying to talk to one another in a perfectly sensible way, and for some reason no one can fathom, it all just goes ka-blooey.

The other day I had a text message conversation with my sister, who so graciously offered to host my family for Easter dinner. It went something like this:

Me: “Looking forward to Easter dinner! It will be all five of us. Just confirming: I’m bringing appetizers, wine and juice.” (Those are the things she asked me to bring, so I knew it wouldn’t come as a surprise. But it had been a few days, and I wanted to make sure she knew I hadn’t forgotten.)

Sis: “Great! We have a little extra juice, so there should be plenty.”

Me: (Thinking: Um, did she just say they have extra juice? Did she miss the part where I said I’m bringing juice?) “You asked me to bring the juice.”

Sis: “Yes, I know I did. But we also have some juice.”

Me: ”Okay, do you still want me to bring mine?”

Sis: ”Yes. We have some appetizers and wine as well. Let’s say 5:30.”

Me: (Thinking: Okay, I’m bringing juice, appetizers and wine, and they are hosting the whole meal but will also supply juice, appetizers and wine. And by the way, I bought the big juice bottles at Costco and could probably serve everyone in our zip code. But it’s cool.) “I’m not really following, but 5:30 works great.”

Sis: “If we have extra it won’t be an issue.”

Me: … (<–That’s me typing something, erasing over it and typing something else. But I’m laughing so hard I can’t finish the text message, because it’s exactly as if she is speaking Martian and I can only understand Swahili.)

Finally we talked by phone to get it all straightened out, which was great because in fact only one of us thought the whole thing was hilarious and it was not her. And I realized something. Somewhere under the talk of food and drink and whether there was enough or too much, my beloved sis was really dealing with a lot of life stress at that moment, and in fact our text conversation had very little to do with juice, appetizers or wine. She didn’t need me picking apart the semantics of her text messages or laughing at our inability to settle on how much juice was enough. She just needed a hug.

And that’s the other funny thing about communication. You can be talking about things that are not at all the things you’re talking about.

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