One night when I was in college I was hanging out in someone's dorm room and we all started telling jokes, meaning not just the random, had-to-be-there kind of cracking each other up but the reciting of actual structured narrative setup-punchline kind of jokes you might read in a book of jokes. (If you're the kind of person who reads joke books. Which I totally was as a youngster.) It turned out that I had a staggering number of these kinds of jokes stored away in my cluttered headspace and it gradually shifted from everyone trading jokes to me just spouting off one joke after another after another. I don't think anyone found this either endearing or amusing, not even me, but once I got started I couldn't seem to stop and I was vaguely curious how long I could keep it going. The answer turned out to be "way too long and just shy of unforgivably so" and I believe it was not too long after that I began to give serious thought to my borderline neurotic fear of long silences and learned to make peace with shutting the hell up more as a result of being mindful of what I was saying in the first place.
I bring this up because not only is it once again Random Anecdote Friday but it is also once again a Friday on which I'm planning on ditching work a little early and on which I don't have a ton of news to report or overthinking to share, which lately has led to the ol' blog going dark for lack of content. Does this post address and solve that problem, or simply use more words to accomplish the same end result as posting nothing at all? The determination is left as an exercise for the reader.
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