Category: Humor

How We Saved an Alien Species: The Untold Story

RilalyLeave a comment

“It was a fact-finding mission,” Ty Tabor told a Congressional Committee devoted to finding out what happened during supposed alien invasion. “We were never on the brink of war or in the midst of an invasion,” Tabor added with a condescending tone. “It was a desperate mission, on their part, to see how we reacted to combat. I mean no disrespect for those who lost their lives in the combat that erupted, but these were brief skirmishes that resulted in some unfortunate death for both humans and aliens. They could’ve annihilated us with their advanced weaponry, and the genetics they designed specially for battle, but they didn’t. With all due respect to you and Congress, we should devote the rest of these hearings on why they didn’t wipe out the human race when they could’ve.“

As Tabor suggested, Earth wasn’t the first planet the aliens visited, and it wasn’t the last, but as we will detail in due course it turned out to be the most informative for them. They used one little nugget they discovered in their battles with Earthlings to save their small, resource-rich planet from constant war and possible extinction.

They proved to us that they’re generations ahead of us in gene manipulation, because the constant invasions they experienced over the the course of generations forced them to use their advancements in science and math to build the ultimate warriors that we witnessed on the battlefield. They sorted out their gene code to make their warriors run faster, and their hands operate faster and quicker. They’re now genetically designed to think quicker on the battlefield, and their methods of destruction are far more creative and devastating. The scientists from their species messed around with their gene code until they created more intelligent mathematicians and engineers to help their species create better weapons, and they monkeyed around with genetics, until they created beings who could go longer stretches without food and water.

War became a way of life for them, as the other alien species set down upon their planet for its resources. The young warriors we witnessed, and most of their species knew nothing but war for the whole of their lives. War and population replacement were their two primary concerns for so long that the only evidence of peace on their planet existed in their history books.

The moment after they developed a genetic superiority of some form, the invaders would capture a carcass and copy their genetic manipulations. Before long, the battles between alien species involved one genetically altered warrior against another, and the results of these battles ended up a 50/50 proposition, or what we might call a coin flip.

When they sent envoys to Earth, they found that we were largely inferior on the battlefield. When they stole our carcasses for study, they also found our genetic codes inferior. As we all know, not all of their battles on Earth were successful. We won some, but they won a whole lot more. When their alien counsel questioned their scientists and engineers, the scientists and engineers theorized that total annihilation of the human population would prove difficult if not impossible? Again, this wasn’t their primary directive, but the alien council wanted to know how the scientists and engineers came to this conclusion.

“It has nothing to do with any form of inferiority on our part,” one scientist theorized. “We are superior to them in every way that we can determine, save for one. Perhaps. If you want to call it that.” The alien council pressed the scientist on this topic. “I want to stress that this is but a theory, and I do not know if it is a superiority or an inferiority, but we found that humans have a greater desire to live than our superior warriors do. They do not do what is necessary to win a battle, most of the time, but their crafty solutions on the battlefield were informed by their desperation to keep living. Our warriors, again superior in every other way, did their jobs, but we found that most of them didn’t do what was necessary to survive. That difference proved to be the humans only advantage on the battlefield.”

“Why?” an alien council member asked.

“We’ve asked ourselves this many times,” the scientist said. “In preparation for my testimony today, my teams and I developed a number of complex answers that we thought our warriors could use against our enemies, but for every answer, we developed about ten more questions. The one answer we developed, which arrived as a recurring theme that no one noticed until someone did, might be the simplest answer but the most complex one for us to implement is that humans just seem to enjoy elements of life, and life in general, more than we do.”

The alien council was not satisfied with that answer and most of them rejected it for the record, and one even wanted it stricken from the record. After the scientist left the boardroom, one member of the alien council said, “The idea that we don’t want to consider what our esteemed scientists found should make it the one idea we consider most.”

The council brought in a number of the surviving warriors who saw action on Earth. The council wanted to focus on those who weren’t as successful to find out why. Most of them were so embarrassed by their failures that they wouldn’t admit, or didn’t know, why they were not completely successful. Their answers were so situational that they did not prove useful to the council.

The council finally brought in their most successful commander who won over 90% of his battles, yet they wanted to know why the commander thought his troops weren’t 100% successful.

In their interrogation, the council was careful to avoid any questions that might embarrass the commander, and they did not want to influence his answers with any of the answers they received prior to him taking to the floor. They wanted honest appraisals of the human beings to use for future manipulations of their species’ gene codes.

The commander started out situational, explaining why he thought they were successful in some locations and unsuccessful in others, but he mentioned that he thought some people in a very specific location had a greater will to survive than others did in other locations. When he concluded, a council member focused in on that idea of their greater will to survive, an idea the commander only mentioned in passing.

“They do have a will to live that surpasses any species we’ve encountered,” the commander said in an unprompted repetition of what the scientist said. “As opposed to most of the captured combatants I have witnessed throughout my career, most humans gave up whatever we wanted to know when we tortured them. We regarded this as a weakness at first, but we came to appreciate how much they wanted to survive.

“When we asked them why they wanted to survive so badly, some spoke of wanting to see their offspring grow to be adult humans, others spoke about enjoying their freedom, and some spoke of enjoying their lives in some sort of philosophical fashion.”

The alien council found those answers so esoteric that they struggled to understand how could use them. They brought in another commander who echoed many of the answers of the first, but he added:

“We captured one male who called himself Ty Gabor. Ty Gabor refused to give up any secrets that he knew,” the second commander said. “We killed Ty Gabor over twenty times in the most painful ways we’ve developed. We removed his limbs and his sensitive reproductive parts, and we damaged and repaired his mind so many times that we thought he would give up, but this man wouldn’t give up any information. In our after-torture interrogations, we found that he was willing to withstand this torture if he thought it meant that his nation and his world would live for one more day. We suspected, based on our precedents, that the primary reason he was holding out was for his offspring. So, we located his daughter and his son, and we killed them in front of him in one of the procedures he knew firsthand, he told us everything we needed to know with the hope that we would bring them back to life, as we did him. When we asked him why he held out so long, he talked about those offspring, but he also mentioned silly things, such as wanting to see a painting one more time, he said something about wanting to taste an animal called a ribeye one more time, and he said he missed hearing music after such a long incarceration.”

“What is a ribeye?” one of the council members asked.

“It is a species that they feed and maintain specifically to eat,” the second commander said. The commander then went down other roads, discussing some of the tactical maneuvers the humans used to thwart total annihilation that the council might be able to use in future battles, but one of the council members cut him off.

“Describe for us why you think eating this ribeye is something he enjoyed so much that that he wanted to continue life.”

“To be quite honest we did not expect the council to focus on this so much,” the commander said, rifling through his notes, “but Ty Gabor said, oh, here it is, he said that he enjoyed eating this animal so much that he experienced what he called euphoria, which he basically described a heightened emotional reaction. Our interrogator noted that he got so emotional about the ribeye that he cried, but it should be noted how long he spent in isolation, how many times we tortured and killed him, and how many times his mind was altered and repaired.

“We did notice,” the second commander continued, reading from the notes of various other interrogators, “that when we killed our captives’ children, took their limbs and ruined their minds so much that we thought we took away their will to live, our analysis showed that their minds switched to the smaller things, like the paintings, the music and the ribeye. One of them hoped that we might set him free so he could run in an open field with flowers in it. Some of them talked about doing a sporting event again, creating something artistic, and experiencing a heightened level of fondness that they have with another they call love.

“The human beings are not strong in mental or physical ways,” the commander concluded, “but they do not give up hope, and that does prove to be a strength in its own regard.”

Going forward, the alien council focused the rest of their interviews on the idea of this ribeye in conjunction with the human’s unusual propensity to desperately want to live. The problem the council had with the humans’ desire for freedom, and their desire to continue living for their offspring was that the aliens genetically altered those codes out of their warriors. It would take them a generation to correct that error, and they might lose many battles, or their planet, in the interim. They decided they might use all of the information long term, but they needed a quick fix too, and they decided that the ribeyes might provide them this.

“Humans need food to sustain life,” one of the council leaders suggested after the interviews were done, and they discussed the data their people found, “but we do too. The difference is that humans appear to enjoy eating food so much that it adds to their quality of life. Is it possible that we might give our warriors a small edge by giving them a quality of food that is better than our adversary’s and that their desire to eat more of it might lead them to want to live longer and thus increase their win percentage in battle?”

“We have survived this long by focusing on the larger ideas,” one of the other council members added at the tail end of the meeting. “We have better knowledge and technology, but we basically built robots to protect us. We erased the genetic codes that promote emotion. Now, I am not saying that was wrong, because we would not be here if our warriors knew fear and were overcome by feelings of pain, but by erasing their emotions we might have accidentally erased many of the details that drive the humans to some success in battle. The humans from Earth taught us a great deal about values and principles and desire and all of the messy details of existence that we worked so hard to erase. We can give our current warriors ribeyes, but we should probably reset some of the genetic codes that promote feelings about genetic offspring, spouses, and the general sense of family, their nations, and our world to give them something to fight for and survive for, as the humans have.”

The simple experiment of allowing their warriors to eat ribeye proved so successful for the aliens in the short term, because their warriors reacted in the manner they hoped, but even more than that, their adversaries couldn’t figure out how these aliens were winning such a high percentage of their battles. The adversaries studied the alien carcasses and scanned for the modifications of their genes. They couldn’t find anything of course, and they sought complex answers that drove them away from the simple answer the aliens derived from their skirmishes with the humans. The problem for the alien council was that there were a limited number of ribeyes on Earth that they found humans called cows, and that the ribeye was but a piece of that cow. They decided that they wouldn’t steal all of the humans’ cows, so they began capturing select bulls and cows to create their own. The next problem that arose was that the warriors suggested that the reward of eating ribeye diminished over time. The aliens sent more enjoys down to Earth to study the human digestive tract for other dietary choices they could offer their warriors. By probing the anuses of the humans, the aliens found that some humans enjoyed eating an animal called pork more than the cow, and others enjoyed eating a bird called chicken. They implemented these animals into their warriors’ diets, and they added all of the various plants they found in the humans’ digestive tracts. The surprising results suggested that not only did the warriors want to survive their battles more often, but their overall health improved, and their life expectancy increased.

The alien council’s suggestions proved so successful for so long that their adversaries simply gave up trying to conquer their planet, and this resulted in an unprecedented level and length of peace and prosperity on their planet. This peace and prosperity lasted so long that the generations of aliens who followed only knew war through history books. This presented the alien species with new problems, as they found that when their citizens weren’t living every day in fear of war, they focused their unhappiness on other things, and for this future alien councils found that they could not turn to Earthlings for answers.

Transmissions from the Outer Rim

RilalyLeave a comment

“I know you’re going to consider me a spoiled Notre Americano, but I’ve decided I’m done trying to convince people that I have a diverse, worldly palate,” Zachary said. “I haven’t tried too hard to this point, to be completely honest. When we went to the most ethnic place my girlfriend could think up, I ordered the least ethnic item on the menu, and I quietly loathed every bite. I’ve tried to eat ethnic Chinese and Mexican food, and I’ve tried to say I enjoy it, just so I could say it, but I’m old now, and I’ve passed the finish line on that whole subject. I’m not just a meat and potatoes guy, but when I venture out from those inner circles, I prefer the Americanized, Anglo versions of what we might call foreign food.”  

“A food xenophobe is what you are,” Xavier said. 

“Call me whatever you want,” Zachary said. “I’m done pretending.”

“You’ve never been the worldliest fella,” William said.

“I’ll take those charges. I have a very xenophobic palate,” Zachary said. “But I fear the insomnia brought on by explosive diarrhea.”

“Did you have to add the modifier explosive?” Xavier asked. “Was that absolutely mandatory for your description? What’s the difference between explosive and other non-combustible forms of diarrhea?”

“It’s like pain,” William added. “Doctors ask us to scale our pain. On a scale of one to ten, how bad is your pain? I’d like to talk to a family physician to find out how many patients “off the chart” their pain with an answer like 55. My guess is most doctors try to rein that in for a more direct reading by asking them to remain within the parameters of our pain scale, but most patients are so dramatic and narcissistic that they can’t stay realistic . “I’m telling you Dawg, it’s a 55.”

“Pain charting cannot capture the pain I’ve experienced here Dr. Moreau,” Xavier added. “I’m experiencing a level of pain that might be foreign to the ideas you’ve learned in western medicine.”

“I think I can only talk about explosive diarrhea with someone who’s gone through the experience,” Zachary added. “It’s like old faithful blowing out the hole.”

“You can confide in me blowhole brutha,” Xavier said. “Been there dung that.”

“You’re lucky nothing explosive came out your hoo hoo,” Willam said.

“What exactly is a hoo hoo?” Zachary asked.

“The hoo hoo and the hee hee both make me wee wee.” William said.

“There is no hee hee,” Zachary corrected. “There’s a hoo hoo, but if we follow the grammatical gender words in the Spanish and Italian languages, the hee hee you talk about is actually a hoo ha. An ‘A’ is used in feminine words and the ‘O’ is used in masculine words.”

“But, if we follow modern political prescriptions for linguistics of those languages, shouldn’t we refer to them as the hohinx?”   

“The point I’m trying to make here is I didn’t just wake up and decide that I no longer enjoy ethnic food,” Zachary said. “It’s after decades of my enteric brain and my central brain battling over what food I should eat. I never wanted to eat ethnic food, but I joined in on the whole experience parade. The whole “you have to try everything once” crowd carries you to the “I love Thai, Vietnamese, or whatever the food of the day is” prescription to worldly that we’re required to follow into the in-crowd. I ate it, so I could tell people I just ate it. It’s something we say to impress our friends and make new ones. How many things do we do, so we can say we did it? “What did you eat again? Wow, you’re a lot more adventurous than I thought.” Yep, put it in my mouth and chewed it up is what I did. Please think more of me for that, because I didn’t enjoy it, and I’ll probably never do it again. I have to get as much mileage out of this as I can. Some people might genuinely enjoy ethnic food, but they talk about it so much that I think they’re trying to convince themselves they enjoy it. You enjoy Thai? Really? Or, do you enjoy the Americanized version? The exotic, ethnic food I tried was at a restaurant with a grill in the center of table. We cooked it ourselves. I put it back on the grill about three times, because I didn’t think I cooked it long enough. The woman I was with said I overcooked it. The only reason I did was because it tasted like a latex glove to me.”

***

“I don’t know if modern TV represents young people well, but all I see them do now is give us the bird. In the intros of the characters of a reality show, a mother complained that her daughter was so out of control. “She’s too opinionated,” the mother complained. It was obvious how much that characterization meant to the producers of the show, because they cut to the daughter in iso, with rock music playing in her background and hot rocking graphics around her image as she lifts her middle finger in defiance. What was she defying? As with most teenagers, she probably knows as much about substantive defiance as we did in our misinformed and malformed youth. The bird is not an opinion in and of itself. If she starts with the bird I have no problem with it, until she uses it as punctuation for the end of her rebellious statement. All she did was give us a bird sandwich without saying anything in between.” 

“And we all know that most birds don’t have much meat on them,” William added.

“We’re all about short cuts now,” Xavier said. “We have buttons to like and dislike, and we have emoticons. The idea of full expression is not only dying, it’s unnecessary. We just flip them the bird, and the discussion is over.”

***

“I had a shortcut conversation between two hep cats,” William continued. “They had it all figured out, as hep cats do. They knew I had no idea what they were going on about, and they enjoyed it. The two of them were good looking young men with fine hairdos and fashionable duds, and they spoke with a hep cat lexicon. I stood in the middle, a man without a hairdo, and a contrast to their hep cat world. I was the old man who didn’t speak their language. I was the normal shirt-wearing fella in between, trying to figure them out. I played right into it, as I have too many times in my life. I realized halfway through that we were all playing roles, all three of us were characters in a short, illustrative skit. Their questions were all leading questions that guided me deeper into their dark forest. I answered. They laughed. Well, it wasn’t a laugh so much as a condescending chuckle. You know the laugh I know the laugh. No matter what age we are, we’re all freshman in high school trying learn how to hold our arms when we stand around. They didn’t really know each other intimately, and they didn’t know me any better. No, this was a hep cat conversation with two of them trying to define themselves as know-somethings by using me as their definition, and they enjoyed watching me flop around on shore.”

“You should’ve flipped them off,” Xavier said. 

“They were pretending to know what it’s all about,” Zachary said. “The ones who talk rarely know the walk. What’s it about? I don’t know, and either do you, so we mimic those who think they do. And who thinks they know more about what it is than actors in movies. They have the force of a screenwriter’s research behind them, a director’s framing, and a supporting cast. So, we mimic their situations and statements, until our supporting cast believes in us as much as we believed the dialog of screenwriters.

“What’s the difference between a star and an artist?” Zachary continued. “Most celebrities are stars, nothing more than vehicles of light. It’s their job in life to make their stock profitable. If they go out for a bite to eat, they know they have to give huge tips to the servers who talk, it helps the value of their stock. There have been numerous genuinely intriguing characters in the history of cinema however. Marlon Brando, for example, displayed a dynamic personality, and he didn’t seem like the type who said what he was supposed to say. He seemed like a genuine person who happened to be one of the biggest stars in the world. I didn’t know half of what he was talking about, and I think he thought he was far more intelligent than he was, but he seemed like a very curious, observant person. He seemed to genuinely want to know how it all worked. Elvis Presley, on the other hand, was a star. You can tell me that he was bullied into doing what Colonel Tom Parker wanted him to do, but it seems to me he was easily bullied. I’ve heard people say he wanted to be Brando and James Dean, but I’m guessing that Parker told him you’ve not going to get there until you have box office, and those arthouse scripts aren’t going to get you there. Elvis wanted to be a star, and say what you want about the career-defining movies he did, almost all of them made money, and they made him a huge star. I liked Elvis. He had a preternatural charisma about him, a natural animal magnetism and an incredible voice. He seemed blessed with these attributes, but we don’t know how hard he worked at it. He put out some quality material, but he didn’t write his own music, and most of the movies he was in don’t hold up well. He was a star and Brando was an intriguing artist.”

“How many intriguing artists have been outshined by stars?” Xavier asked. 

“Exactly, but as I said, Brando wasn’t half as smart as he thought he was, as evidenced by the fact that controversial ideas seduced him,” Zachary said. “He was the type who thought controversial ideas made him appear smarter, worldlier, and so controversial that we wouldn’t view him as commodity. He might have genuinely believed what he said, and I’m not saying he was wrong, but if he were alive today, and I was afforded the chance to speak to him, I would say just because your ideas are controversial doesn’t mean they’re true. How many good ideas have been rejected, because they were too common, and so fundamental to good and honest living? They’re not all lies concocted by the establishment to keep us quiet.” 

“But, if everyone knows these ideas, where’s the juice?” Xavier asked.

“True. I guess my greater point is just because it’s negative doesn’t always mean it’s true.”

“Too many people focus on what it’s not,” Zachary said. “It’s not true that … they say, but how about we focus more of our energy on what it is? They don’t tell us what it is, because they don’t want to be wrong. Even Marlon Brando, who sat in the throne at one time, never had the courage to try to predict what it was all about. He devoted most of ramblings on what it’s not.”

***

“Someone, and for the life of me I can’t remember who, said that heaven didn’t exist until we created it,” William added. “It’s such a far-fetched idea that it’s intriguing. They said we created, through some kind of mass subconscious, consciousness, the ultimate reward for good living. We needed the hope, the focus, and the idea that it’s all for something. An extension of this far-fetched idea is that if we can physically create everything from our homes, to a McDonald’s franchise to skyscrapers, why can’t we create an equally impressive structure with our minds? The theory suggests that if there never was a reward for good living, we should probably create it.” 

“And we believed it so much that we manifested its creation,” Zachary said. “I have heard the theory.” 

“If that’s true, I’ve created a manifestation of another world of normalcy, so I can sit on the outer rim. Millions claw at one another for the center of absolute normalcy, and I use them as leverage to keep my position on the outer rim.”

“You’ve already created that world,” Xavier said. “Trust me.” 

Conquering Casual Conversation

RilalyLeave a comment

“Talk,” is one of the many pieces of advice I would give my younger self if I could go back in time, “and not every conversation has to involve deep, impactful, and important subjects. Some of the times, you just talk for the pure enjoyment of talking to people. Listeners don’t have to be cool or beautiful either. They can be old, young, smart, dumb, boring and fascinating. Talk about matters consequential and inconsequential. If we talk long enough, we might find, we just might find, that the boring are far more interesting than the interesting.”

The musicians told me to avoid the “chitter-chatter, chitter,-chatter, chitter-chatter ‘bout schmatta, schmatta, schmatta”. The movies told me to be the quiet, mysterious type everyone looks to for reaction. They told me if I wanted elusive charisma, I should be silent.

“Don’t listen to them,” The Ghost of Present Rilaly would whisper into my ear. “Silence doesn’t make you look cool. Silence makes you look silent.” Silence lands you in the corner of the room not knowing what to do with your hands. No one remembers you when you are silent.

There’s a reason former athletes and the beautiful are silent. They don’t have a lot to offer.

“How do you know so much about such stupid stuff?” the beautiful might ask. If we’re bold enough to answer, they’ll say, “Huh, well I was much too busy getting busy in high school to learn about such nonsense.” If we’re then bold enough to remind them that high school was a long time ago, we’ll realize that that persona we tried so hard to attain didn’t accomplish half of what we thought it would. “You think everyone is looking at the guy shaking his head in the corner? Nobody remembers that. It might seem so pointless in the beginning, but developing the skills necessary to talk about absolute nonsense actually adds something to life.”

1) Learn how to be superficial. My best friend enjoyed talking to people. I found that so confusing that I was embarrassed to be around him at times. When he talked to a fella, I had no problem with it. When he started up a conversation with a young woman, I kind of envied it, but this guy would talk with old people about old people stuff. Their conversations were absolute nonsense. He didn’t care, and he was having one hell of a good time doing it. I thought he was a fraud, and when I called him out on it, do you want to know what he said? He had the audacity to say, “I was enjoying myself.”

“Where’s your integrity my man?” I asked him.

“I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “I just want to have a good time.”

“It goes against code,” I said, in whatever terminology I used at the time. He didn’t care. He didn’t tell me he didn’t care. He wanted to be cool, like Matt Dillon, and all that, but some part of him enjoyed the art of conversation so much that he couldn’t control himself. When some old man got angry about the cost of a Hershey’s chocolate bar, my friend turned to him and encouraged the rant. What? Why? When an old person starts in you’re supposed to walk away. When he first started doing it, I thought it was a bit. I thought he was trying to pull a thread on the old man to get him going. After numerous interactions of this sort, I realized my best friend was respectful and deferential. He just enjoyed talking to people of all stripes. He wasn’t smarter than me, and he wasn’t one of those types who knows a little bit of something about everything. He just knew how to talk to people. He learned how to put the important, artistic personae aside and tap into the superficial side to just talk to whomever happened to be near him in the moment.

It took me a long time to see that my friend might be onto something. It took a job where my employer forced me to engage with customers that I realized I could and should tap into my superficial side. I got all tied up in the shoe-gazing, grunge virtue that suggested you were all a bunch of fakes, and I was living real. As usual, when you accuse someone else of being fake too often, it’s usually because you are. I was a nice Midwestern kid trying to pretend like I was a Northwestern rock star. At that point in my life, I still believed that the artistic persona was an important one to maintain, but I learned to maintain that persona while tapping into a superficial side. I did that to remain an employee with high scores, but I learned to tap into that persona in my off work hours too, and I found that I had a lot more fun in life doing so.

2) Be confident. I know this is easier said than done. Most of us are insecure, and we all have moments when we’re not sure of ourselves. If most of us are unsure of ourselves, then most of us are unsure of ourselves. Unless our listener was an athlete or a beautiful woman in high school, chances are they’re as uncomfortable in their skin as we are. The trick is spotting it. I was on a date with an incredibly beautiful woman. I was as nervous and unsure of myself as ever. I pulled out of the parking lot and circled back. I wanted to back out. When I finally stood before her, she blushed. My confidence soared as I realized she was as nervous as I was. It taught me the simple and emboldening fact that most people are as nervous about meeting new people as we are. If we watch them long enough, we’ll spot it. It might be a blush, a stutter, or an uncomfortable look away, but everyone has a tic of some sort. If we’re observant, we’ll see something that informs us that most people are just as inferior as we are. They’re just normal people living normal lives, and they enjoy engaging in casual conversation.

3) Pretend to be interested in what they have to say. How often are we so interested in being interesting that we forget to be interested? Conversations are a two-way street, and if we’re able to convince them that we’re interested in what they have to say, we’ll receive a return on our investment. One of our favorite conversation topics is us, and when we show them we’re interested in them, they are going to be more interested in us. One of the keys to this is to avoid testing it out too early. If we begin speaking too early, their smile fades, they become distracted by anything and everything around them, and the minute we finish speaking, they start in again. Displaying an acute focus in what another person has to say is one key to making friends, but some might find our interest so intoxicating that they’ll want to compound it without a return on our investment. We can deal with that element later, if the two of us develop a sustained friendship, but if our goal is to make more friends, the key is to overwhelm them with interest.

One thing we covet more than being interesting is being funny. Some people aren’t funny, but if we want to be friends with them laughter is the best medicine. No matter how common or dumb their joke is, laugh. Laugh about how dumb their joke is if that’s what it takes. Laugh if they messed the joke up. They won’t know why we’re laughing if we do it right. If we do it right, we’ll find them coming up to us with their jokes over and over again. If we do it right often enough, we could become their go-to person with their jokes.

If you’re anything like me, when you meet someone new for the first time, you’re so insecure and nervous that the go-to is to try to be so over-the-top interesting and funny that you forget to be interested in what they have to say.  I write pretend we’re interested, because if we pretend well enough and long enough we might accidentally convince ourselves that we are interested.

4) Tell self-deprecating humor, but don’t overdo it. If something works, and self-deprecating humor almost always does, we have a tendency to do until it doesn’t. There is a tipping point, however, where we might accidentally affect their impression of us. Everyone loves the “But what do I know, I’m a dummy” conclusion to a provocative thought. If we do that too often, though, they might walk away thinking we’re dumb. Why wouldn’t they, it was the impression we gave them one too many times.

5) Find a Through Line. One of the many reasons the show Seinfeld was so popular is that nonsense is funny and fun. Some of the best friendships I have in life were based on nonsense. Example, Michael had a habit of making a drink face before he even reached for his can of soda. He reached out for the soda with an ‘O’ already on his face. He grabbed the bottle and inserted its contents into the ‘O’. I never knew we had a drink face, until I met Michael. I never thought about the proper timing of a drink face, until I met him.

“Michael, you need to wait until the drink is almost on your face before you make a drink ‘O’,” I said. “You make your drink faces way too early.”

“Women don’t like a man who makes a drink face too early,” Cole added. “It freaks them out.” A lifelong friendship between Cole and I was born that day.

Another friend and I loved the comedic stylings of Don Knotts, and we both hated caramel apples, because we hated the feeling of caramel on our nose. On that note, another bonding agent can be hating the same things. You both might hate beets, accidentally stepping in puddles, or people who make old man sounds when they sit. Whatever the case, there’s always some nonsense you can bond over. It’s your job to find it.

6a) Be a Great Listener. Some suggest that listening is a lost art. I’d argue that it never was. I’d argue that people in Aristotle’s era, Shakespeare’s, and every just about every dot in human history had the same complaint about human nature. “Nobody listens to anybody anymore.” Are you listening to people when you say that? I’ve been called a great listener in enough venues that I’m starting to think it’s true. I am fascinated by the people around me, and why they think what they do, and I have to tell you that it’s a great way to make friends. The one problem with being a great listener is when you’re known as a great listener, people don’t want you to talk. They much prefer that you listen to them, be fascinated with them, and find them funny. As I’ve written throughout this piece, those of us seeking to make friends will have to work through this in their own way, but if we lay the foundation of being a great listener people will be drawn to us.

6b) Ask Active Listening Questions. Asking active listening questions not only prompts the speaker to launch or continue, it makes them feel interesting. There are few things people enjoy more than an active listening question about the story they’re telling. The questions we ask are relative to their conversation, but some of the times, a simple “Why did you do that again?” can do wonders to show we’re not just following along and that we’re interested, but that we want to hear more. Some listening prompts might feel so obvious to be almost stupid, but soon after we drop them, the speaker picks the ball up and eagerly runs with it. As I wrote earlier, people love it when we make them feel interesting, and they might love being funny more, but the final leg of my version of making friends and influencing people might endear the speaker to you more than any other. If we phrase our question just so, it makes them feel like your resident expert on the subject in question. Active listening prompts not only shows that you’re listening it suggests that you trust that they know the truth of the matter.

These little tidbits seem so simple that they couldn’t possibly work, and they may not. As someone who has, at times, suffered from situational stage fright, because I wanted to be more entertaining, funnier than everyone else in the room, and so over-the-top everything else, I realized that I had a tendency to lock myself up by over-complicating the situation before me. Some of the times, these situations are complicated and tough to read, but some of the times they’re relatively simple. Getting a read on conversations can be similar to making reads in sports. Some of the times, depending on the level of competition, we can win a game all by ourselves, but most of the time, we damage our team’s chance of victory by trying to do too much. When we experience the latter, we learn to let the game come to us. It’s all confusing and situational, and the best advice, for anyone who asks the five questions regarding how to implement them, comes from the immortal lyrics from You’re the One that I Want by John Farrar, for the movie Grease: “Feel your way.”