What could you talk about for thirty minutes with absolutely no prep?
My answer:
Lolll, probably a lot of things. I once asked you a similar question about what topic you would give a lecture on to five thousands people if you had only fifteen minutes to prepare for it. What I didn’t say in that post is that, while I’m generally not one for peopling, I have, kind of paradoxically perhaps, often found public speaking to be less challenging than actual interaction with a group of people. Probably because, when just speaking to people, you can prepare yourself better, including all the possible worst case scenarios, and there’s some kind of script so I know what to actually do. The challenging aspect of that lecture scenario would be that I never actually spoke to a crowd THAT huge, so it could feel rather intimidating in a way, and also that I would have such a short time to prepare for that lecture, which would make me feel very insecure about its quality. But like I wrote in that post, I could still talk about something that’s more based on my views/opinions, rather than raw facts, and there is some decent chance that it could go not too badly. I’d just have to pray that my Xanax would kick in on time. 😀
There are a lot of things that I’m interested in long-term, But just plain talking is a lot less pressuring than a lecture, so it could be even easier, though it would also depend on other things like how large that group of people would be and whether this would be more of a both-sided interaction or Bibiel monologuing, because if it were to be a two-sided talk, I’d do better in a smaller group of people. And I’ve also written about it several times before that my brain can be quite unpredictable when it comes to socialising, more so I guess than with simple social anxiety with a clear specific trigger(s), because sometimes I might have no problem having a convo with a total stranger and they will end up considering me very outgoing or even sometimes “charismatic”, whereas another time I feel cripplingly self-conscious around my own Mother, whom I live with every single day and most of the time my anxiety when interacting with Mum is at my baseline level or above. Sometimes I can spend half an hour with people and not say a single word, whereas other times I get logorrhoea that’s almost as powerful as my late friend Jacek’s, about whom I always jokingly said that he could talk people to death if he wanted. 😀 I sometimes just seem to have very little active control over which Bibiel kicks in when, perhaps because I can’t see very much rhyme or reason to the way it works.
Aside from that though, given that just talking is a lot less pressuring than a spontaneous lecture, I think I would have quite a wide range of topics to choose from and bore my interlocutors/listeners with. People that have ever lived with me for any extended period of time know that I can go on for ages about my fazas and anything related, especially during a peak, so much so at times that they think I’m an extrovert, or for others I am overwhelming aka “too colourful”. 😀 Generally as much as I like to bottle up any so-called “negative” feelings, I’ve always found it difficult to keep stuff that I feel excited or enthusiastic about inside. If I can’t talk about it without feeling like I might be bothering people, I will write pages about it in my personal diary. Same applies if I happen to be in some very interesting but temporary rabbit hole at a given time. And there are quite a lot of things that I’m strongly interested in long-term, be it “my” languages and language overall, all the name-nerdy stuff, all things folklore etc. So, because there’s so much to choose from, I’m afraid I can’t really tell you one single thing that I could talk about for thirty minutes. I think I would either choose something that would be of some interest to the folks that I’d be talking with/to, or if I wouldn’t be familiar with them beforehand then go with my most intense obsession at the time of having such talk, but then right now I have a few strong interests going on at once, so it still would be hard to choose one. So, if all else fails and I couldn’t make up my mind, or if I’d have to talk to some totally random people and wouldn’t want to exhibit my personal and quite intense stuff to them very much, there’s always the safe small talk topic of Misha which has saved me numerous times in social situations, particularly when Misha himself is present. I could definitely talk for thirty minutes about Misha.
How about you? 🙂
My Inner MishMash 