Too Much Information

You know how everyone tends to accumulate little pockets of obscure knowledge and gathers them in the cheek-pockets of their brain like squirrels? And how these little bits of arcania have a mortifying tendency to tumble out, nut-like, during conversations where no one in the group is ready for all that person's trivia in their awesome glory?

Actually, I wouldn't know if that's how everyone is. I only know that it is how I am. For as long as I can remember, no one else but me has exhibited the awkward-making tendency of gushing trivia in the most inappropriate of settings.

Once, at lunch, a friend's passing comment about how much she liked spicy food had set me off. For the next 2 minutes (which is an excruciatingly long time in human trivia-gushing lightyears), I had held forth on how it was the capsaicin in the chili that she had actually craved, followed by a painfully detailed explanation of how capsaicin encourages mucous secretion and all kinds of wonderful things like that.

It's always the hardest part: weighing explaining something and risking making that person feeling condescended to, against not explaining it at all and leaving that person floundering in the incoming tide of information like hapless flotsam.

Whatever option you take, it usually ends with your friend pushing her sambal away. Which is to say that it never ends well. At best, your companion scrambles to un-glaze her eyes and reward you with a dumbfounded nod and head-tilt, the universal shorthand for "Gee, that's an interesting bit of information, but even as we speak, I am consigning what I just heard to the Gaping Maw of Oblivion in my brain, never to be spoken of again."

And so the both of you settle into an uncomfortable silence - acutely aware that on the two different spectrums of social aptitude and trivia retention, you are both placed on opposite ends, respectively.

Now, there is a gulf that you have created between yourself and your friend, and it was your big stupid brain that had cracked the initial fault-line.

Most days, I keep my Too Much Information-itis in check. I try to talk about shopping. Or shoes. Any sentence that begins in my mind with "Did you know that..." is immediately stomped on en route to my mouth.

Tonight, I realised that my TMI-itis might be contagious. We were leaving a Thai restaurant after dinner, the boyfriend and I, when we passed a couple sitting outside the restaurant with their incredibly gorgeous dog. Earlier in the evening, I had pointed out the dog from inside the restaurant and had guessed that it was a Samoyed, because Amy Chua - of Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother - had written about her pet Samoyeds and there had been photos.

So we'd passed the couple and I'd stopped to look longingly at the maybe-Samoyed. The boyfriend, being the more gregarious of the two of us, had made conversation, asking what sort of breed it was. "It's a Samoyed," said the male half of the couple, the sort of guy who worked out just so he could burst out of his shirt.

The Boyfriend (to me): Oh hey, you were right.

The Boyfriend (to Shirt-Bursting Male Half of Couple): That's the same sort of dog Amy Chua has.

SBMHC: (blank stare). Uh....what?

The Boyfriend: You know, Amy Chua. The Tiger Mother.

No one else could hear it but me. It was the cracking of a fault-line. I am a veteran receiver of the Blank Stare. Rock-climbers regularly stare death in the face. Me, I scale Mount Blank Stare every damn day.

SBMHC: Uh....

The Boyfriend (to me, desperately now): What's the name of the book?

I told SBMHC the name of the book, but really, I could see the Gaping Maw of Oblivion in his brain begin to open, and a gulf widening in the linoleum between us.

We finally extricated ourselves from the quicksand of a conversation, but not before the brawny chap began to wonder if we were Jehovah's Witnesses.

As we walked away, to console a bewildered boyfriend (who on earth doesn't read the Wall Street Journal or hasn't heard of Amy Chua?), I whispered, "Don't worry. He didn't look like the reading sort."

We'd giggled like dolphins - and the world suddenly seemed like a less lonely place.