I Hate Small Talk

“Yeah, er, I had to dismember that guy with a trowel. What have you been up to?”

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Small talk, get it? Because he’s a small child who is presumably talking on that telephone. It was the best I could come up with, OK?

There’s a video by Cracked: After Hours that asks what cliché features of television and film could make useful loophole superpowers – like knowing that whenever you turned on the news, the headline would be of great importance to your personal situation, or being able to recall any event with perfect clarity by means of a flashback.¹ Convenient as these would be, my favourite item on the list was knowing that every conversation you had was going to somehow advance the plot of your life, or be revealed later on to have been of some great significance. Wouldn’t it be nice to do away with all that pointless small talk?

The trouble is that I tend to just work my way through a set repertoire of questions and answers that keep the conversation rumbling along on a really very shallow level. I inquire after the nature of someone’s day, or weekend, or whatever the most recent holiday period was; he or she makes some vague comment to the effect that it was a reasonably positive experience, and inquires after mine, to which I offer a similarly banal reply. Conversations are so much more enjoyable and valuable when the subject matter is something of great interest or importance to at least one of the parties involved, and yet it’s such hard work pushing them onto that kind of territory; too often they never actually leave Small Talk Land before they are brought to an end.

Of course, an exit visa from Small Talk Land is theoretically very easily obtainable; all one has to do is put a bit of thought into answering such questions as, “How’s your week been?” and “Any plans for the weekend?” and “So how are you?” honestly. But such answers are unexpected, and transgress the parameters of what’s socially acceptable. Let me give some examples:

“How are you?”

“Currently, fairly thrilled to be having this conversation, because I secretly really fancy you.”

Hmm. Maybe not. Try this:

“How are you?”

“Kind of in pain. The second day of my period is always the worst for cramps.”²

That’s a fairly sure-fire way of making your addressee uncomfortable. Or what about this:

“How are you?”

“Sad. It occurs to me that you’re one of my favourite people in the world, and yet, as things stand, I’m forced to believe that you’re spiritually dead and destined for an eternity separated from God and everything that’s good in existence. Do you know how much that utterly breaks my heart? I was crying about it just now.”³

Yeah … somehow that’s not really an acceptable answer either. And so I don’t offer it, even when it’s true. In fact, usually when I answer the question, “How are you?” I’ve already said something positive without having really thought about it, and moved immediately on to echoing the question right back again, in an odd sort of determination not to be rude. And so neither of us breaks past this superficial level of conversation, unless one of us has the audacity to challenge the other on her answer: “Really? You don’t sound too sure you’re all right,” or similar.

And my request is this: please do. Please challenge me. Please make me think about what I’m saying and work up the energy to drag myself out of the dull, dissatisfying comfort of Small Talk Land. And please do your part too. Please ignore that advice someone once gave you, though I don’t doubt it was in good faith, that the way to create a good conversation is to do nothing but ask questions: how am I supposed to strengthen my connection with you if the traffic is only one way? Please tell me about the things you care about. I’m interested, because if you’re interested you make it interesting – and if I care enough to be having this conversation, I care enough to listen to what you really want to talk to me about.

I’m not suggesting that we all start responding to “How are you?” with the kinds of responses I gave above; that would be taking things a bit far. Nor am I criticising people for asking me how I am; there’s nothing wrong with the question itself, only the way I habitually give so little thought to my answer. What I am suggesting is that we all try to have deeper conversations more often. Those are, after all, the ones we remember. Those are the ones that advance the plotlines that tie our lives together. And I don’t think I can be the only person who craves something more substantial than small talk as social nourishment. The mindless asking and answering of the same typical questions will, I anticipate, be a difficult habit to break. But, all the same, shall we try?

Footnotes

¹ Here it is, and with a playlist of other episodes on the side too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pMvzYZx2h0&list=PL5CC44F2C10A8415C&index=9.

² I read once that bananas ease period pain, but, based on personal experience, I’m fairly sure they don’t. What you really want is a heated wheat bag, a comfy bed, and a sufficiently distracting film, but unfortunately you usually have Things To Do that prevent you from indulging in such. YouTube saimasmileslike is hilarious on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AehFZHkClTc.

³ Look, I dislike the doctrine of hell as much as the next twenty-first-century Christian, but honestly, Jesus goes on about it so much that I really don’t see a way round believing it. Try Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43; Luke 16:19-31; John 5:25-29; and Revelation 20:11-15, as a few random examples; here’s the Matthew chapter to get you started: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+13&version=ESVUK. And then recall John 3:16 or Romans 5:1-11 or whatever that passage is for you that never seems to lose its ability to push you to your knees in sheer amazement and thankfulness at the bewildering depth and brilliance of God’s mercy in placing his dearly beloved Son under the punishment you deserved. Jesus went through hell so we didn’t have to. God be praised.

Harry Plot-Flaw: The Permanent Sticking Charm

“We’ve been trying to get her down for a month but we think she put a Permanent Sticking Charm on the back of the canvas. Let’s get downstairs, quick, before they all wake up again.”

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2003)

 

Look, I’ve started re-using pictures from previous posts. Not that you would most likely have noticed if I hadn’t pointed that out ... *ahem*.

As carefully and intricately crafted as the Harry Potter stories are, any series introducing a magic system as extensive as Rowling’s is bound to end up with a few inconsistencies and implausibilities – and any series as widely-read and well-beloved is bound to end up being scrutinised for such flaws to a phenomenally thorough degree. The possibilities offered by the Time-Turner are one particularly well-trodden field with regard to this,¹ though I feel obliged to point out that Rowling favours the time-travel system whereby the time traveller is unable to actually change the past² – so any attempt to pre-emptively kill Voldemort or even stop either of his reigns of terror would be doomed to fail from the start. Still, one problematic aspect of the Harry Potter magic system that I have not yet seen explored is the Permanent Sticking Charm.

The Charm is first mentioned in the fifth book, when Sirius explains to Harry that the team working on the refurbishment of number twelve, Grimmauld Place, has been unable to remove the portrait of his mother, who has a nasty habit of screaming pure-blood-supremacist abuse whenever she is disturbed, due to an assumed Permanent Sticking Charm on the back of the canvas. A brief while later in the same book, Fred and George Weasley offer to attach their brother Ron’s shiny new Prefect badge to his forehead using the same charm, in response to his undisguised revelling in his new position. The only other time the Charm is directly mentioned is in the seventh book, when Harry discovers that Sirius used the Charm to attach his posters and pictures to his bedroom walls so that his parents would not be able to remove them after he ran away. There is one further allusion in the sixth book, when it is revealed that the Muggle Prime Minister was unable to remove a certain painting in his office, despite employing the expertise of a builder.³

That’s all we get. And, I have to say, I feel it is an astonishingly undernourished corpus to work with, in view of the vast possibilities implied by such a thing as a Permanent Sticking Charm.

Firstly, the clue’s in the name: the Charm is permanent. It cannot be undone, by Muggle or magical methods. Considering the extreme inconvenience of having to put up with Mrs Black’s portrait, one tends to feel Sirius would have been prepared to go to pretty extreme lengths to remove it; he himself says he has no fondness for the house in Grimmauld Place, so he would presumably not object to, say, carving out the chunk of wall on which the portrait hung and disposing of it. It therefore seems as if the Charm prevents either of the objects stuck together with it from being destroyed in such a way as to separate them. This creates an array of fascinatingly problematic scenarios: what if, say, number twelve, Grimmauld Place, was burned down? Or what if it was demolished? Exactly how permanent does ‘Permanent’ mean?

Secondly, the Charm is evidently within the capabilities of your average underage wizard. Sirius successfully managed it several times before he ran away. Even Fred and George, who famously achieved only six Ordinary Wizarding Levels between them, had evidently been paying enough attention in class that Ron believed they would be able to follow through on their threat to Permanently Stick his prefect badge to his forehead, since he duly toned down his jubilation as a result of their making it.

And, if you stop and think about it, it’s really quite a threat. To never, for the rest of his whole life, be able to remove his prefect badge from his face, would undoubtedly cause Ron all sorts of problems. But this is a mild example. Imagine, for instance, being Permanently Stuck to the floor, or a piece of furniture, or another human being, even. All this makes me wonder why the Permanent Sticking Charm is even legal in the wizarding world. Surely as much damage could be done with it as with any of the Unforgivable Curses? Armed with the Permanent Sticking Charm alone, a wizard would be able to control (for instance, Permanently Sticking someone in one place, or to some item they would therefore have to follow everywhere), to torture (for instance, Permanently Sticking someone to something red-hot), and to kill (for instance, Permanently Sticking someone to a railway track, or simply a remote place with no friendly people about to provide such luxuries as food).

Now, there is some suggestion – on the Harry Potter Wikia, for instance – that there may be magical methods of actually reversing a Permanent Sticking Charm, on the basis that, if it really were irreversible, Sirius would have immediately given up trying to remove the portrait of his mother. However, noteworthy is the fact that Sirius never says he is certain that the portrait is attached with a Permanent Sticking Charm – it’s only a theory, in which case, the month of effort would presumably have been for the purpose of establishing that it genuinely was a Permanent Sticking Charm. Furthermore, with the talents of the whole of the Order of the Phoenix at his disposal, it seems unlikely that Sirius would not have been able to find someone capable of reversing the Charm, if such a thing were possible.

Thus, my argument stands: the Permanent Sticking Charm is an astonishingly powerful and apparently undifficult piece of magic, which ironically only ever seems to be employed for attaching pictures to walls. That it is capable of being used for other things is evident enough from Fred and George’s threat – unless this was another of their ruses, for which Ron was gullible enough to fall.

This might, in fact, be the neatest solution: yes, the Permanent Sticking Charm really is permanent, but it can only be used to attach pictures to walls, not, say, prefect badges to foreheads. It wouldn’t be the first time Fred and George perpetrated such a deception for the purpose of Ron’s humiliation – the spell to turn Scabbers yellow in …the Philosopher’s Stone springs to mind. Presumably nobody was kind enough to enlighten Ron about the true nature of a Permanent Sticking Charm, because they were all too much enjoying the effect the threat had on him.

Well, I set out with the intention of pointing out a plot flaw in the Harry Potter universe, and have ended up neatly explaining it away. You’re very welcome, J. K. Still, there remains the question of what would happen if the wall to which a picture was Permanently Stuck was destroyed.

At this point, you’re probably expecting me to make some kind of clever theological link. Well, terribly sorry, folks, but not this week: I am simply too tired for clever theological links right now. Although, with my brain in this state, it’s practically a certifiable miracle if the above made any kind of coherent sense at all, so maybe that counts…

Footnotes

¹ Try How It Should Have Ended’s take on the Harry Potter films for one particularly amusing example of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYWT5Q_R_w.

² Charlie McDonnell offers a helpful explanation of the two main time-travel systems used in fiction using the example of baking cookies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thry5mXld80. Time travel and baking – what more could one possibly want?

³ The article on the Permanent Sticking Charm on the Harry Potter Wikia, http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Permanent_Sticking_Charm, was a significant help in writing this paragraph, though the first two instances and the problems they present had already taken up determined residence in my long-term memory.