my dilemma

so i've really taken to heart the fact that i'm in school and am surrounded by people. i know that sounds strange. but for the first couple of years of law school i was in my own world. part of it was the commuting, part of it was the figuring out how to survive, and part of it was the fact that my life outside of law school was full.

so all those things have changed now, and i have classes with several people over and over, and i'm actually getting to know them. i've taken to hanging out after class with them at the bars. i'm not really a drinker, so i'm the girl that sits there with water or a coke, but i'm there all the same.

it's been really fun--it's fun to get to know people, to see them outside of class, to listen to their stories. but i find that i am really terrible about small talk. i don't do things that create small talk topics. i might watch movies & tv, but that's about it, and i don't really care to talk about it.

all i ever want to talk about are things that are important to me. i'd talk about school, i'd talk about spiritual things, i'd talk about justice. honestly i really like to problem-solve, so my favorite conversations are analytical conversations. but i think that only 2 percent of the world's population are really interested in conversations like that.

truth is, i really want to get to know my classmates, and to do that, i have to talk about shallow things for a while. because the normal person does not just open up about everything quickly--it just doesn't happen. somehow there's this period of time where you have to talk about nothing before you can start to talk about something.

so i've got to work on finding some more nothing-topics to talk about. there's got to be some intermediate topics out there--things that would be semi-interesting to me but that wouldn't freak people out. because right now i'm mainly just going and listening to people. and i don't mind that, except that then they aren't really getting to know me either.

so that's my dilemma.