Making A List

It’s T minus 2 days until the Great Scandinavian Adventure. Today I’m making my packing lists. I just made the list of clothes to bring and was about it print it when I realized that I hadn’t put any pants on the list. What kind of bizarre psychological slip is that?

People are talking about their summer vacations around the office and when engaged I’m trying to steer those conversations toward what the other person is doing. If you ask enough questions and feign enough interest people are perfectly willing to go on about their own trips and not ask about yours. That’s a good thing because I’ve been irritated by the reaction I consistenly get from anyone at my office who finds out where I'm going. The reaction is inevitably a look or utter perplexity followed by the question “Why are you going there?” The last time it came from someone who was excitedly describing the minute details of the Nickelodeon cruise he was taking (“Character breakfasts for the kids!”) which sounded like a slow boat to hell to me but I smiled, nodded, asked questions and issued encouraging platitudes like “Oh, that’ll be great for the kids!”

Unfortunately my steering failed this time because the guy suddenly blurted “So, where are you going?”

Dammit.

“Sweden and Finland.”

The Reaction happened

I took a deep breath and soldiered on. “My grandmother came from Finland and my grandfather was from Sweden.”

“Oh, so you have relatives there?”

“None that I know of.”

Another look of confusion.

“I’m just curious to see where my maternal grandparents came from.”

“Oh.”

“Plus we’ll be getting around on these all day and all night cruises that have casinos on board and shopping and stuff.”

Right there something clicked with this guy because the confused look vaporized and was replaced by that expression that you get when you suddenly remember where you left your car keys.

Sensing that I had made a connection, I went on. “The days are really long up there right now. The sun won’t be going down until after 10 and coming back up at 4:30 or so.”

Now he was warming to my trip. Mention a vacation including casino gambling, shopping and sun to the average American and he’s on familiar ground. Moving away from expressing an interest in one’s European ancestry and a general curiosity to see different parts of the world is the smart social-business small-talk move. I had gotten him so comfortable he even offered a suggestion:

“Maybe you could look for the Northern Lights.”

“Yeah maybe.” I’m pretty sure that we’re in a bit of a lull in terms of solar magnetic activity right now but I wasn’t going to bring that up. Things were going too smoothly at this point.

“The daylight thing is interesting too. You know if you go to Aruba or some other place relatively close to the equator the days are around 12 hours long no matter what time of year it is.”

“That makes sense.”

Thankfully my conversation partner was one of those wear-the-cellphone-even-in-the-office types because at that moment his cell phone rang and ended our chat.

Since then I have successfully kept any trip conversations on the “so, what are you doing?” side and there are only two days to go until I leave. If I make it through that I just have to worry about having one or two decent stories to tell when I get back. Fortunately they probably won’t involve me having to buy pants overseas.

Wait, did I remember to put socks on the list?