Who do I know?

I talk to a lot of people. I make new friends easily and share pieces of my life. I hang out with people whose lives are complex and existed long before we were friends.

One of my favorite things about this is stories and names. When you are telling a story to someone you don’t know well, there’s a toss up between identifying them in relation to you (my best friend), offering the relationship and the name (my best friend, Whitney) or just offering the name (Whitney said...). And sometimes you have to make a fuller distinction with people you’re sure know about each other (you know, my friend, Danny. He went to Wooster and we met that one time because of music and we started talking again for reasons x y z) until you get the “ohhhh, right, that person.”

I have a tendency to talk about the same people frequently, and I switch off between the names and the relationships, only occasionally offering them at the same time. Basically my method is that I’ll try to make it obvious the first few times, then I’ll just use what’s easiest in the moment and you’ll figure it out.

I love watching how other people approach this as well. The times that they expect me to know who the name belongs to, and the times they think they need to explain, and the times they use the relationship only even when I probably know the name. The times when they’re going to use the name, and it doesn’t really matter if you know the relationship or not.

It’s just interesting to think about the level of familiarity we expect people to have with the cast of characters in our lives. I love putting the puzzle pieces together, and I love feeling like the other person thinks I’m close enough to know who they’re talking about or that I’ll figure it out. I love when they’re right. I love getting people up to speed on my MVP list quickly.