Articles in “Strange Conversations”

In which we discuss my ambitious plans to pin-tuck a taffeta skirt by hand:

NICK: You’re doing well so far.
ME: I haven’t even started!
(Pause)
NICK: I am Nick from the future. I have caused a causality inversion by coming here. I must leave now.
ME: That’s one possibility. Or you’re just not listening to me.
NICK: I don’t really listen to anyone! My head is too full of stuff! It’s like a cacophony.
ME: Your head is full of nothing. It’s like an echo chamber.
NICK: That’s a bit harsh!
ME: So is not listening to me.
NICK: It’s not that I don’t want to . . .

ME: It’s oranges and apples, hon.
NICK: Oranges and apples are not the only fruit.
ME: No. If they were, you wouldn’t be able to sex the cherry.
NICK: Well played.
ME: I thought so.

At the shopping centre, early Sunday morning. (Well, earylish. 9:30am counts as early on a Sunday.)

ME: It’s really weird here. Why are there only three other cars here? Where’s everybody else?
NICK: Dunno.
ME: Oh no!
NICK: What?!
ME: Zombie apocalypse.
NICK: It’s possible.
(Long pause, in which we examine all the convenient hiding places nearby.)
ME: Look, that man’s going in!
NICK: Well, we’ll watch and see if he gets eaten.
(We watch. He makes it through the automatic doors safely.)
ME: Maybe they don’t attack until you’re well inside?
NICK: We’ll keep watching, just in case.
ME: He’s looking at us! Try and look as though we’re not waiting for him to get eaten by a zombie!

In which we discuss why something I crave hasn’t yet been downloaded.

NICK: I’ve just turned the programme back on.
ME: Oh, so that’s why it’s taken twelve thousand years to download.
NICK: I respond to your demands for bandwidth!
ME: I don’t recall demanding bandwidth in the last week and a half.
NICK: I’m simply trying to be deciduous.
ME: Seriously?
NICK: Well, how do you pronounce that word?
ME: Assiduous?
NICK: No, it starts with a “j”.
ME: Judicious?
NICK: That’s it.
ME: “Deciduous” means you’ve shed all your leaves.
NICK: I know perfectly well what it means, thank you. I just don’t know how to pronounce it.

(Note: it has taken me twice as long as normal to type this, because I can’t stop laughing.)

House-cleaning strange conversation:

NICK: I found the bag that the bags go in.
ME: Good-oh. Pop it on that chair, would you? Because all the bags are on that chair, for reasons that escape me.
NICK: They escape everyone, Treena.
ME: They shouldn’t escape you, the architect of the reasons.
NICK: I think you’ve fallen into the authorial fallacy there.
ME: Don’t you “authorial fallacy” me!

Enter NICK, the hero.

NICK: Well, I have saved one of the big blue bowls from smashing.
ME: Oh, good.
NICK: Amazing reflexes. You should have seen me. I was incredible.

Tableaux.

Curtain falls.

Nick prepares for Father’s Day, for which he’d promised to do all the prep himself, since I’m marking:

ME: Can you give the bathroom benches a quick wipe over with the bathroom spray?
NICK: Already have.
ME: Really? I can’t smell the eucalyptus and mint.
NICK: Oh, I didn’t use the spray.
ME: Then what did you use?
NICK: I guess I can do that.
ME: But what did you use?!

I guess I’ll never know.

(Conversational silence.)

NICK: Ah, woman as an object of exchange in homosocial relations.
ME: Pardon?
NICK: This song. [“Jessie’s Girl,” for the record.]
ME: But she’s not an object of exchange. There’s no exchange.
NICK: I guess it’s pre-text.
ME: You know, I’m really just trying to mark, here.
NICK: Oh, sorry, babe.

(Conversational silence.)

NICK (standing up and stretching): Creaking. Creaking but not yet leaking.
ME: Pardon?
NICK: Hee.
ME: Okay, two questions. Firstly, do you often leak in the study?
NICK: No.
ME: Good. Secondly, is there a high chance that you’ll leak in the near future?
NICK: Probably not.
ME: Then why the “not yet leaking”?
NICK: It’s my way of saying I’m old but I’m not yet out of the game.
ME: You’re 33.
NICK: True.

NICK: Will you stop laughing?
ME: No. You tried to get your pants on, missed, and fell over. What’s not to laugh at?
NICK: I also hurt my finger a bit.

ME: Are you playing a Zerg character?
NICK: Well, yes.
ME: This is shameful!
NICK: What is?
ME: First you never manage to keep up an adequate supply of minerals, which, frankly, is not something I look for in a man. And now you’re a Zerg!
NICK: That needs to be a strange conversation.
ME: As though I’d share my shame with the world.

When you’ve been grass-widowed by Starcraft 2, you need to make your own fun.

So I took my car in for a service and I said to the mechanic, “If you find anything extravagantly wrong with it, give me a ring before you fix it, okay?”

He said he would.

One courtesy bus, one ordinary bus, and an hour later, I get home, make myself a cup of coffee, and settle down to check my e-mails when the phone rings.

It’s the mechanic.

He says to me, “We were checking over the car and we found mumble, mumble, mumble. Would you like us to fix that?”

And I think, “Oh, no. I wasn’t actually listening to him; I was checking my e-mails.”

But I don’t want to admit that I wasn’t listening, so I come up with a cunning plan. This way, I’ll find out what he was saying before I commit to expensive car repairs, but I won’t have to admit that I wasn’t listening to him.

So I say, “Can you just remind me what that part does?”

And he says, “Those are the things that clean your windshield off when it rains.”

ME: I seem to spend a lot of time worrying. I think it’s because I’m not very bright.
NICK: You’re plenty bright. I’ve seen your brain.
ME: No, I’m a moron.
NICK: Treen, if that was true, you wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about your intellect.
ME: The Internet? I hardly spend any time worrying about the Internet.

I guess that answers that question.

ME: Now you have me humming the Doctor’s theme!
NICK: Well, that’s no bad thing, surely?
ME: Unlike your Scots accent, no.
NICK: What Scots accent?
ME: Sorry, I thought you’d said, “that’s nae bad thing.” But you must have just slipped on the syllable.
NICK: There was a banana skin right underneath it.
ME: I see.
NICK: There’s no rest for the syllabant.
ME: Sibilant?
NICK: Bugger.

ME: I suppose I should get back to the folding of laundry. So, so boring.
NICK: Ah well.
ME: Also?
NICK: Yes?
ME: Don’t think I didn’t notice that you left a bottle of tomato sauce on the bookcase.
NICK: Well, it started out as tomato juice, but, well, time makes fools of us all.
ME: Yes. You do realise, don’t you that, tomato sauce is not to tomato juice as yoghurt is to milk?
NICK: I did know that. And furthermore I was fairly sure you’d point that out too. So you’ve really fallen into my trap, there.
ME: Yes, clearly you win this round.