Overheard

          This overheard conversation took place between two girls at a restaurant. By the time I’d sat down, they were already eating and talking. I picked up in the middle of their conversation and tried to transcribe it as accurately as I could, though the restaurant got more and more noisy as time passed. One girl is speaker 1 and the other is speaker 2. The different sections indicate where a pause occurred in the conversation. 

1: Because it’s a business account, there’s like 30 something members on it or something. Anyways, he um- I’m sure there’s some way he pays half.

2: And then they paid the other half.

1: Yeah. She was just like “charge this to this number and this number

(unintelligible)

2: What did she do?

1: She just basically goofed around around all day. Like usual. 

2: Everyone else knows. Does Charlotte?

1: No.

(both laugh)

1: Can you imagine what he would have done if he had woken up to that?

2: Oh god, no. 

2: Tomorrow’s going to suck.

1: What do you have to do?

2: I have one class with 102 people in it, but he never takes attendance, so…

1: That’s great.

1: I’m so full, this stuff and the mac and cheese is like so rich.

(after both looking at their phones)

1: I need more pictures in here, I feel like I never take pictures

2: I take pictures but it’s never of anything interesting.

1: I took some yesterday on Taylor’s phone at the game but she’ll have to send them all to me, which is annoying. 

(unintelligible)

1: So when are you going to see him again?

2: Well, maybe next weekend I’ll go back. Kinda don’t want to. But I feel like I should, you know?

(unintelligible)

2: Next weekend I think I’m going home, so it could be then.

1: But you have to be careful, like you know what I mean?

2: Yeah

1: Yeah

(unintelligible)

1: I don’t know I felt like they wanted to go and talk to other people, and I didn’t want to butt in, you know what I mean?

2: Yeah. So they went to the game together?

1: No, they went to that tailgate.

2: Where?

1: Some girl’s house. I think she’s a Theta

(one girl shows the other a text message she received)

2: I feel like she texts me everyday.

1: She texted me yesterday and was like “Where are you? We’re at halftime” and I was like “….Okay” Because we all went to Amsterdam, that place on Gay and it was awkward because we’d already started and everything. She asked me to borrow a dress for tomorrow, and then she made me go find it and pick it out and everything and I was like “April, this is annoying” and she was like “I don’t know, I just don’t know” so…..

2: You don’t even really need like a perfect matching dress

1: Right, you just mix and match

1: I’m done, are you ready?

2: Yeah, we can go.

In most every conversation between two people, there is a dominant member and another who tends to initiates less and respond more. As I listened to this conversation I found myself speculating about the feelings of speaker 2, who spoke far less frequently and at shorter length than her friend. Was she nervous about this lunch and its conversation? Was she just tired, or shy, or preoccupied? Or did she really not have much to say about the topics raised? This led, in turn, to wondering about the feelings of the dominant speaker: did she fear she was monopolizing the conversation? Was she nervous too, and were her initiations an attempt to keep an awkward conversation going? It was difficult to gauge the “vibe” of this conversation from mere observation, a feature that requires membership in a conversation to truly determine. 

Like most casual conversations, this one stopped and started, moving from topic to topic in a mostly random way. Sometimes a topic was a  “non-starter,” not even producing a response from the other person. Occasionally the shift in topic was precipitated by some outside stimuli, like the food they were eating, or a message one speaker received on her phone, which led to gossip about the message’s sender. One challenge in writing accurate dialogue is to include these diversionary details, so the conversation doesn’t seem to be happening in a vacuum, but to keep them from diverting from the conversation’s main point, or aim. However, all literary dialogue is unrealistic to a certain extent, as real life conversations often meander aimlessly between subjects, with no aim or goal, and would thus be quite uninteresting to read. These two speakers obviously moved in the same social circles and had a history of acquaintance. Writing dialogue like this conversation, or even reading it, with its many references to people and places unknown to the reader, would require extensive knowledge of the subjects and their backgrounds before it could make any comprehensive sense.