No Talking Tuesday Year End Wrap Up
End of Year Three

Click here for summery and origins.

Click here for end of year two.

Click here for end of year one.



Impressions of year three

The third year of my no talking Tuesdays has come and gone with fewer insights and revelations. I feel like I’ve hit my stride with the experiment and it’s become a part of my routine in much the same way brushing my teeth or cutting my fingernails has. As a result it’s reseeded a bit into the backdrop of my life. I’m not entirely sure if that’s a good or bad thing. Part of me wants to keep pushing boundaries with it and take on new challenges that extend it’s principles in untested ways. Another side of me sees the calm sustained note the experiments has hit as an indication that the beneficial aspects have fully integrated into my being and that I can simply enjoy having made it through the break-in period and relax a bit.

In the third year I have consistently shied away from social interactions on Tuesday, and that I rarely ever use my notepad to communicate anymore. Perhaps the most palpable change is that I have lost the impulse to fight for airtime in conversation. I’ve drifted towards listening in a way that suggests quite absorption. When I do express my ideas they are almost always couched in abstract terms that separate them from myself, and present them as notes and observations, detailed, and thoroughly examined, offered for consideration. In other words conversation has become less a kinetic fencing match, and more of a research lab of ideas. I’ve become almost loath to any form of small talk that attempts to relate menial anecdote or explain dry bullet points of someone’s past or experience.
This is awkward at parties when I’m likely to stare blankly at someone talking about what they study at school and how they plan to spend spring break, and if I do talk, I’m more likely to ask: “Do you have really violent dreams?” instead of “So where are you from?”

Anyway, the third year has been calm and routine, has made me a social outcast with my inability to see the merit in small talk and lack of compulsion to “chit chat” as it were.
No rule revisions for the fourth year.