Social Interactio​ns for the Antisocial​: My New Mexico Adventures​, Volume 2

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Dear Everyone,

So here's the thing. You can travel all your life, but there are some things that you just can't possibly know about a place unless you put down some roots. But a very key component of Putting Down Some Roots is first overcoming Obstacle #1: Making Some Friends.

Now, this is not as easy as it sounds, at least for me. On one hand, there are people like Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat Pray Love fame), who explains her main talent for globetrotting thusly: "I can make friends with anything. If no one is around, I will make friends with a 10-foot wall of sheet rock" (or something like that. I don't actually have the book on me). I, notably, am nothing like this. I seriously envy people this talent: people like Elizabeth Gilbert, and my mom, and my brother, and my friend Kyra. Seriously: these people can make friends with anybody. After years of analysis, I have realized that this is because they just genuinely want to talk to people. They really want to know people's names and life stories and the names of their children and how they take care of the plants in their front yard. When a group of people from my grad school went to Costa Rica to do anthropological research, we dubbed my friend Kyra our Official Friend Maker. This is because, to all of our perpetual amazement and despite her admirable but often misguided attempts to conjugate Spanish verbs, she would just go up to people and start talking and soon we were all invited to a party at someone's house where their wife made us empanadas and we danced with all the children in the neighborhood all night. She had lovesick swains from one end of Guanacaste to the other, she knew everyone's name in town, and their children's names, and undoubtedly their dogs' and horses' names too. This is the kind of personality trait that makes a great anthropologist, a great traveler, a great networker, and just generally a person that people like. I do not have this trait.

The problem is, most of the time I just don't want to talk to people. I really, truly don't. I won't actually remember their names, I never know what to say about their life story, I'm SURE I won't remember the names of their children, and when it comes to their plants I'll probably just want to know the scientific names and taxonomic information, and they won't know, and then we'll all be uncomfortable. Honestly, social situations with people I don't really know just tend to make me antsy, and at the soonest possible moment I bolt for home. Secretly I am kind of a hermit. To my unending dismay, however - on those occasions when I stop to think about it - I have chosen a career path in which I am forced to talk to people all the time, in all kinds of contexts, from personal to professional to random food stalls on the streets of foreign countries. Not to mention the fact that I'm always moving around and, to avoid actually being a hermit, have to constantly make new friends. It's exhausting and causes me not an unsignificant amount of anxiety. But I can do it. How, you ask? Well, in the great tradition of social beings from bees to bonobos, I learn like all things learn: I imitate my mom.

Now, those of you who know my mom understand why this is a solid tactic. My mom is the hostess with the mostest. She is the arbiter of all questions of social etiquette, from how to set your table to how long after someone's wedding it is appropriate to send them presents. She can throw a party or seal a business deal with the same gracious goodwill and effortlessness (or let us say seeming effortlessness. If you have ever actually worked in real estate or helped prepare for a party at the Hawkes house, you know these things are anything but effortless). Although none of this comes naturally to me, after a lifetime of watching and learning, I can put on my mom's personality like a hat. And when I'm in a new place (or at a party, or doing research, or meeting new people, or pretty generally anytime I am forced to talk to anyone), this is what I do. In case you don't know my mom, are curious or in case I have completely lost you by now, here is the Roadmap to Success:

1. Smile. Do not stop smiling until your Social Interaction is over. If you cannot simultaneously Smile and Talk, practice.

2. Compliment. But here's the tricky part: it needs to be a sincere compliment. Mean it. If someone's shirt/jewelry/hair is some particularly horrifying shade of puce, compliment their nail polish/eye makeup/piercings/shoes. I actually compliment people's teeth with some regularity. Not because I’m searching for something to compliment, though. I just notice nice teeth.

3. Ask and remember their name, at least for the 2 minutes or so that your Social Interaction lasts. Bonus: Call them by their name just to prove that you remember it. For example, you could say: "Sterling, thank you so much for coming over and fixing my garbage disposal at 7pm. I really, really appreciate it." (you know, if someone named Sterling hypothetically interrupted you chopping vegetables for dinner in order to fix your sink, and then, while plumbing the terrifying depths of your drain with a plunger, said "Wow, you must be a really good cook. No one around here actually uses fresh vegetables." …Hypothetically).

4. Ask non-intrusive personal questions. You need not actually care what the answers are, but you should look and sound like you might care. The real reason for this step is that people like to talk about themselves, and they will think you are nice if you encourage them to do so.

5. Smile extra big.

6. SUCCESS.
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Here in Grants I have basically pursued this strategy unrelentingly since I arrived. I have, until further notice, ramped up my Charm Factor to 100% and set my compliment meter to Full Blandish (Fun Fact: few people can resist Full Blandish). Despite the fact that very few people I interact with seem to be my age or have anything like a life history I can relate to, I can now number my friends at Definitely a Couple and am even on social terms with a few of the people I work with (last night I declined to join them for Zumba class - I had yoga - but met up with them for a girl's movie night at The Switch, one of the two movies playing at the local theater, where admission is $5 and candy is $1. Cute movie, by the way). In sum: the Roadmap to Success. It works.

Well, it's late and this is already long, so I'm going to say goodnight without actually writing anything about Grants or my friends or anything, in fact, pertaining to New Mexico at all. Sorry about that. But I have this long meeting tomorrow (no, after Week 2 I am no closer to understanding my ambiguous task with the NPS, but…maybe by Week 3?), and then I'm going to Denver this weekend for my birthday! I decided sometime during Week 1 - before the Roadmap to Success had been fully implemented - that it would be unbearably depressing to spend my special 10/10/10 birthday in a town in the middle of nowhere with no friends, so I'm going to go up and spend my 25th with some of my best friends from Penn. Although I DID get invited to a barbecue this weekend! By my friend Michael who is a lifeguard at the pool where I swim, who worked as a manager at WalMart for 15 years (I have no idea how old he is, he looks 25 but must be at least 35) and always calls his wife "The Wife." (I'm also friends with the other lifeguard - a girl named BreAnn - but that Social Interaction is a whoooooooole other email). But anyway. I digress. More later. Adios!

Love!
Katie 😊

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