There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet

[grammargirl]

Hey discountsatori, did you know that if you type "j. alfred prufrock" laurie into google, this is the 15th hit that comes up? Amazing the things you can discover while bored at work.

---

I discovered something interesting about myself last night. B. and I were sitting on my bed talking about something or other (the theory was that he'd come over and keep me company while I was cleaning and throwing things away and whatnot, but that didn't so much happen, for obvious reasons) when I heard Aubrey's phone ring in the other room--and within maybe ten seconds of conversation, I could tell she was talking to Sam the Music Snob completely based on her tone of voice. I've always found it fascinating how people change depending on who they're addressing, the way that tone of voice and vocabulary and even pretty basic personality traits are mutable based on audience. It's particularly interesting to me because, to the best of my knowledge, it's not true of me at all. My personality stays the same whether I'm with B. or my mom, BossPaul or Haley. Now obviously, there are things that I could say to, say, Haley that I'd never say to my boss ("Bitch, please!" comes immediately to mind...), but I really don't think there are different Melanies that change according to situation/context/audience/etc. I wish I could explain this better--it really did make a lot more sense to me at like 2AM--but I suspect that this is a pretty unusual character trait. What do you guys think?

Comments

[redgreenblue.livejournal.com]

Hey discountsatori, did you know that if you type "j. alfred prufrock" laurie into google, this is the 15th hit that comes up?

I remember that page! Talk about the things we leave behind....I hope there aren't any of my old pages of mine floating around like that.

[gooroo.livejournal.com]

I think you may not be as slick as you think. From the tone of voice and the thoughts that are expressed I can nearly always tell who my wife is talking with on the phone. The longer you're together, the easier it becomes.

[discountsatori.livejournal.com]

Goshdarnit, I will never be able to escape my Internet past! I can't even delete those old Prodigy files because the account and the entire online service died years and years ago. I am doomed to have people finding my highschoolish writings forever! Oy. Thanks for alerting me to that.

On voices: if it's someone I know well, I can usually tell who they're talking to on the phone. There are always slight differences in voice and tone and choice of words. I'm the master of being able to do this with my mom -- I always can tell who she's talking to. Adam said once that when I'm on the phone, he can always tell when I'm talking to one of my friends vs. a family member. I'm more sardonic with my friends, and more sincere-sounding with my family.

[grammargirl.livejournal.com]

Bonus points for the use of the word "goshdarnit."

That's weird that Prodigy's untimely demise froze your files forever in google-able limbo. When my old Geocities account from roughly the same era as "Zen and the Art of Psychoanalysis" (called, if I recall correctly, "Silent All These Years," because I was nothing if not a pretentious teenager) died, as far as I've been able to tell all of my highschoolish writings disappeared into the void, praise be.

Hmm. That was some sentence construction right there.

[chronicfreetime.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That was some sentence construction right there.

Too much DFW :P

[grammargirl.livejournal.com]

Oh man, you have no idea. I tend to kind of absorb other people's writing styles anyway if I'm exposed to them enough, but with DFW it's just kind of out of control.

[chronicfreetime.livejournal.com]

OK, but if it turns out that I need an MD and idiomatic knowledge of French to make sense of your journal, I'm going to defriend you :P