My husband and I often have disagreements as to which of us is the more over-detailed when it comes to telling stories. We're both story tellers, we love the parts of our life that give light to where we've been and what makes us what we are, and above all we love to laugh. If you've been around either of us we've probably each told you the same stories a few times, sorry about that.
As science goes, my husband is way worse at over-detailing and over-tangenting his stories than I am, and you can't argue science. Sometimes, it drives me nuts! I mean, why is it necessary to give a history, a backstory and a three minute anecdote to tell me why you prefer peanuts to cashews? I mean it doesn't, right? And after it happened a few weeks ago, I really started paying attention to the way people tell stories and give information.
When I was younger my mom would ask me about something and I would give her a really long drawn out answer, mainly because I loved to talk and she would get this look in her eye that essentially said "mmhmmm, mmhmmm, are you seriously still answering?" This is not an insulting observation about my mother, she was at the time and remains one of the hardest working women I have ever known. She raised four kids, none of whom currently have felony records (hoorazies), she has a masters degree and about a million letters behind her name, she and my dad fostered kids for ten years because they are simply good people and she can cook like nobody's business. All that's to say, my mom is awesome at about all thing, except idle chatter. (I also cannot comment on her origami skills)
There are way worse things to not get a gold medal in, I actually think they probably award medals for being excellent at not engaging in idle chatter. Both my parents are information gatherers, not pursuers of trivial things. They are part of a generation that asked questions and expected answers that were facts, numbers or yes or no. If it was your job to know something and you gave an answer, people trusted that you were telling the truth and your area of expertise denoted, well, your expertise. But not us, not Generation "Why." We are skeptical and second guessing everyone from doctors to pastors to mothers and I would like to blame fifth grade.
Yup, that's right, fifth grade is the reason we annoy our parents' generation and each other so dang much. In fifth grade, our country's rather homogenous educational system, we all started learning about how to write a paper. We were instructed that in order to tell a story, whether it was fiction or not, we had to have specific information to make it worth reading. And first and foremost we needed a dreaded thesis statement.
We had to tell our reader in the first three sentences what it was we were going to tell them. We had to sum up what the paper was about in the first 30 words, and you wonder why Twitter is so popular. And it's not like those thesis statements ended in fifth grade after we learned them the way cursive handwriting or long division did. No, we continued down the thesis thoroughfare long into college. We were assured that this would impress future bosses with our ability to tell them what we were going to tell them in a few short sentences but then we could ramble for three pages about that statement being equally impressive the whole time. We need to make sure you know that we know what we're talking about. We preempt the inevitable "why?" with all the facts and answers we can think of so you don't have to bother asking. In the end, we've created a people who don't bother asking because of the amount of time the answers take, leaving them sorry they asked.
Now, I'm not advocating for ignorance. I listen to the news every day on my way to and from work not because it's happy but I think knowledge connects you to the big world we live in. I'm also not saying that the brevity of previous generations couldn't be thrown in once in a while for a good old tangent. I guess, what I'm saying after all these paragraphs, is it is hard to live between information overload and a quick answer. "News" isn't a once a day occurrence any more, it is a constant stream of information that uses the term quite loosely. And we feed on it so when someone asks us why we have all the answers.
I hope that my son learns to trust professionals to give him an honest answer, one he doesn't feel he has to double check with wikipedia and WebMD. I hope that I have the courage to use an actual answer more than "because I said so" when he asks me "why" but I also hope he trusts me enough that "because I said so" is also a justifiable answer. And I hope when he has to write his first thesis statement it goes something like "The reason my parents are the best ever is because they tell great stories."
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