Through the Wire

For the better part of last week, I've been sitting on Skype and harassing friends to join me. Outfitted with my Snowball microphone, I just sit around recording every conversation possible. During the day, some of my friends are always on and around so we just start chatting it up and when anyone else is free, they hop in for a bit. I've woken up at the crack of noon just to hop onto Skype. Yes, it even gets me out of bed.

I've become such an anti-phone person over the years but Skype has returned conversation to my life. It's not the video aspect, as we're rarely engaged in vchatting, but being able to multi-task while talking. I don't feel like I'm trapped on a phone, connected to a disembodied voice that I'm trying to get rid of. Skyping is really just like hanging out.

Plus, "Skyping" seems to be a different form of communication. There's no "What're you up to? How are you doing?" bits. (Yawn.) On Skype, it's just bam, right into the topic matter and then some debriefing afterwards. Having the specter of a record button hanging over everything makes the conversations more directed and thus, purposeful and entertaining.

I've found myself talking to friends for hours. An hour and a half this past Sunday about living and dating in Manhattan. Two hours about sports, competition, and Jeremy Lin. An hour about short films and film festivals. Four rambly hours where we tried to figure out where our lives were headed. Forty minutes on gossip and people with inflated senses of self. An ongoing "interviews about boba" segment. A nice chunk of time comparing notes on extreme night owling. The list goes on.

Most of the stuff isn't podcasteable of course, because it's pretty boring listening to random people talk, but I love having the recordings for posterity. Nothing's better than re-listening to a conversation from months ago, because it's so easy to forget what you talked about. The specifics, the nuances.

I'd record every conversation I had if my hard drive was big enough. And, you know, people gave me permission. Sometimes I'll just queue up an old episode to hear friend's voices. That's always nice.

One listener did note that she felt like the podcasts leaned a little too much into narcissistic territory. I guess because I'm basically interviewing people I want them to talk about themselves as much as possible. The sort of topics I've tended to hedge toward -- interests, careers, hobbies, dating theories, social (life) injustices -- require an ability to talk at length about what is happening to "you" or what "your thoughts" are. After some consideration, I like that the talks are so subjective. I like hearing what my friends think about this or that.

Toward that end, I'd like to go even deeper into narcissism, on both my part and the guests, because sometimes people don't get to talk about themselves enough. So if you have some rants, or need to get something off your chest, or have haterade to spill, or have something interesting to impart to my listenership of ten people, please get on Skype and we'll chat it up. Maybe we'll even throw in some video and get really crazy.