Wherefore art thou, friend?
When I tell a story I have to use the name of the person i'm talking about. It doesn't seem odd when i type it here but a lot of people i've noticed don't like putting a name to things. I get the ambiguous, "So, my 'friend' "... It's probably to protect the names of the innocent but everytime I try it the word chokes in my mouth. Like I'm not being completely honest, deliberately holding back "the name"... Sure it might be, well you don't know who i'm talking about... but then how can they be like characters? They become, oh, so is that the friend who crashed into the parked car? Or, is that the woman who was crying?.... And it's followed by a yes, or no... and it's like i'm playing a memory game, purely anecdotal and not at all character building. And then I make up my mind to start using the friend clause with the friends who can't bother to use anything but the word friend... it's this weird, they're not letting me in feeling. Possibly irrational? Possibly true? And then when i tell a story and again, fail to use anything generic in the describing of them, they say, oh i have a friend that does that... but then stop and doesn't say anything else. So you have a "friend" do you? And they do "things"?
Guys do i have a problem? Why can't i let go of the name, analysis and character description. How can I be okay with generic story packaging? What are the 12 help steps here?
7 comments:
remain annoymous and at no point drop names..........
perhaps your "friends" don't want to be named to an unknown audience. I'm with you though, I like naming the person as it gives a solidity to the personality your describing or at a minimum it helps the listener flesh out who they think might belong to a name like that.
I like to use names, but then there's the expectation that the person you're talking to can keep them all straight. Of course, I'm always surprised at the way some people CAN keep them straight. Like when I'm talking to Pen and I say, "My boss" and she immediately says, "Boss's name?" And I'm like, "Oh, yeah. You know who this person is."
But I have to agree with you, M. Because I have all sorts of terrible tags for other people's "friends" like "The one that got arrested for stealing from the church?"
My college roommate and I do both, in part because we both have more than one friend with the same name. She's got pool-boy-John, and I've got Camp-Fire-Katie, among others.
Some of the stories just have to be "someone at work" or "my friend" though, because I can't expect other people to keep track of everyone in my life as well as theirs.
as long as you're telling stories about how awesome i am, feel free to use my name abundantly. if you're telling stories about how i slipped on dog poop or sneezed so hard i farted in public, kindly refer to me as "my friend." thank you. (btw, i have not done either of those things... in a long long time...)
ooh.
I like your thinking Sarah....
like "my car was dented while parked in front of my friend's house. " I think that is best for everyone.
We got an estimate to repair the damage caused by the branch falling on the truck: over $5000.
I'm right there with you! I have "friends" (who will remain nameless, simply because, well, we don't know each other and, thus, don't know each other's friends, unless they happen to be commenters on your blog, and then I know them perhaps by name and what can be gathered from comments, but still do not think you know my friends, but I digress. . .) At an attempt to be more specific, my college roommate would tell stories about her "sister" and I'd always stop her and ask which one, because she has two and I know them both by name, so please use names! And I agree it is annoying to have to ask "the one that did x or the one that did y?" and try to keep it straight by stringing together past stories and descriptors rather than having one name to catalog them under.
The times I do NOT like when someone uses my name, though, is when they are directly addressing me; because it usually comes off as condescending, i.e. "I already told you this story, Andria!" ugh. that really irks me.
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