Shh. I'm trying to not speak to you

I'm a bad conversationalist. Yesterday, on my way back from work, I sat next to this guy on the bus. It was a public bus filled, as is usually the case, with mostly blue-collar workers. I find blue collar workers to be quite the chatty bunch. This guy was of the working class, I could tell. He had the garb down to a damn tee. He wore two jackets, a beat-up brown scull cap with matching, equally ratty, brown scarf, and black nylon pants that looked like they'd been washed non-stop since the turn of the century. It was cold but he looked strangely over dressed.

He told me he liked my hoodie, this gray old thing I bought at Sears about 2 years ago and asked where I'd got it from. I wanted to tell him the truth, I really did. I wanted to tell him it was on sale at Sears and I only got it because it was the cheapest one there; instead I found myself thinking up a lie that would end the conversation. Don't get me wrong, I'm not snobby or anything like that, I just don't enjoy small talk very much. I'm no good at it. Besides, whats it good for anyway? I can do without small talk and I can certainly do without talking about my cheap gray Sears hooded jacket simply to pass time. I'm one of those introspective people who feel perfectly fine sitting alone at the back of a bus with their thoughts. Anyway, I told him someone gave it to me. Now thats a conversation dead-ender right there. Whats he going to do, ask me who?

You probably think I'm a snob anyway but that's not true at all. Thing is, right after I lied, I felt real bad about it but I couldn't even help myself. I'm so bad at small-talk; my mind just rolls over and plays dead every time I'm about to get into one. Well, after my mind decided to play dead and after I lied to **obfuscate** my mindlessness, he began telling me how nice my jacket looked. He kept saying "Man thats a really nice hoodie man". I thanked him but he still repeated it about 3 more times. I just hate it when people repeat themselves 3 goddam times when you heard them fine the first time. It makes me want to roll my eyes and walk away but I usually don't. I just stay there and nod and smile. I make myself sick. Then he pulled out his cellphone and showed me pictures of fucking Bentleys and fancy Mercedes and some other high-faluting cars. Can you believe that? I didn't even ask to see his damn cars and here he was giving me a virtual tour of his imagined garage via cellphone pictures. He kept saying "I like to do it big too, man" . Again, he said it like 3 times. That just drove me right to the edge of wretching up lunch all over his nylon pants. I wanted to move to another seat because I really hate it when people do bigheaded things like - show me pictures of their fucking cars on their cellphones. I wanted to change seats, but I didn't. I just sat there and said "thats cool man, that's really cool". I really make myself sick sometimes.

Well, that was really the end of it. We just sat there the entire ride until he got off. He never said another word to me but I knew he wanted to; I just knew he was hoping I'd say something about the weather or some irrelevant shit like that so we could get into it and small-talk our way to small-talk nirvana, but I didn't. It wasn't as though I was bursting at the seams with small-talk ideas. I suppose he figured I was a bad conversationalist or something. Maybe he just thought I was snobby. To tell you the truth, I don't care too much if he thought I was a big snob with a fancy hoodie. He's one of those people who says things like "when I get rich, I'm gonna buy me a garage full of Bentleys and Mercedes and some other high-faluting cars and take pictures of every one of them on my cellphone and show them to strangers I meet on the fucking bus". I hate those type of people and I'd love to snob them every chance I get.

Word of the day **obfuscate** - I'm trying to roid up my vocabulary. Maybe using words like this in pretentious ways like I did will help :-)