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Home > Archive > Feb 14, 2008

Throwing Eggs at Buttered Tunas
By Sharon May
Managing Editor
I think I have a problem talking too much. To myself.
The other day, I was pushing my shopping basket in the grocery store and looked up to find a shopper staring at me and warily edging away. Blushing, I realized why. I was mumbling, "Battery-powered bananas eat spinach and use toilet paper."
I don't blame him for his alarm. But it was just my mnemonic device for remembering to buy batteries, bananas, spinach and toilet paper. I make up such unforgettable lines to recall what I need at the store. It's more fun than using a shopping list.
I guess I shouldn't be reciting them aloud. Especially to myself.
Certainly, I'm not the only one who talks to herself. But my hunch is, most people just murmur a self-reproach every now and then, like, "Way to go, squirrel-for-brains."
But I carry on whole conversations with myself, with questions, answers, and anecdotal asides. Actors do this all the time, of course, and dramatists call it an interior monologue. But psychiatrists refer to the phenomenon by its more clinical term – loony.
Of course, some men claim we women talk just to hear ourselves talk. Or maybe it's our insatiable need to be listened to – even if it has to be by ourselves. Especially during football season.
Of course, men, too, have a need to express themselves, but they often release it in other ways, mainly through well-timed flatulence – like in a closed car.
If more of us talked to ourselves instead of to each other, though, we’d all get along a lot better. After all, when you talk to yourself, there’s little room for misunderstanding. In all my self-chatting, I’ve never screeched at myself, “And just WHAT do you mean by that!” Neither do I respond to my own voice by staring in the mirror blankly like a drowsy cow. Nope, when you talk to yourself, you're never ignored, interrupted or derided – unless you’re a masochist. And you never have to apologize to yourself for saying the wrong thing, either.
I admit I've probably done more self-conversing than the norm simply because I’ve spent more time living solo than any other person in the state of Utah not incarcerated in solitary confinement. If I don't talk to myself, my oral language skills could suffer, and my vocal chords could permanently shrivel until all I can do is croak and point.
So if you catch me at the market chanting "Shampoo the eggs and throw them at buttered tunas," don't panic. It's just me, giving my vocal chords a workout and remembering to buy shampoo, eggs, butter and tuna.
When you live by yourself, though, not only can you talk to yourself without anyone catching you and questioning your IQ with a raised eyebrow, but you can get away with a lot of behaviors that wouldn’t be considered particularly “ladylike.”
For example, you can pick meat from your back molars with a corn holder. You can free your nasal cavity of crusties whenever you want – and not just in the car at a red light, when, apparently, nobody can see you doing it.
When you live alone, you can wear your favorite ratty Bon Jovi T-shirt for three days and scratch anywhere, any time. And you can eat ice cream from the carton – the entire half-gallon – without having to lie that the ice cream went bad and you had to dump it down the sink. Or that the hamster ate it.
You can get away with your stupid mistakes, too. Like my ingenious idea to dry my freshly rinsed spinach with my blow dryer. Nobody saw me on my hands and knees in the living room picking up scattered spinach leaves or peeling them off the walls.
And when I get a foot caught in my jeans while trying to put them on and splat to the floor, I thank heaven nobody was there to see my clumsy pratfall. Or yell at me for hammering 36 nail holes into the wall, trying to hang a picture straight.
Although I have a lot to say to myself after idiocies like these, I don't have to hear anyone else castigate me. And then, I can go to the store to buy something sweet to make me feel better.
So just ignore me reciting "Chip the ice cream from the cookies, Ding Dong" and move away from the freezer. Or I'll throw buttered tunas at you. 

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