I have a secret to tell you: I have a urinary tract infection. When I told my housemate, Katie Walsh, she recalled her mother’s advice for her yeast infection: “Funnel yogurt into your vagina.” Since shoveling yogurt into my vagina wasn’t a viable option I instead rubbed yogurt all over my testicles. I think rubbing bacteria-coated gel (i.e. yogurt) onto one’s bacteria-infected genitals makes some kind of sick sense in the tradition of old wives’ tales.
Why are old wives’ tales passed on generation after generation? Sure, probably because some of them work (incidentally or psychosomatically?), but also because we’re chatterboxes. If there’s one universal in this world it’s that people like talking. And that’s especially true when it comes to talking about ourselves. This is why it’s so easy to commandeer a conversation, swerving it onto gossip’s well-worn tracks.
The rudimentary basics of gossip take almost no skill. I adopt a confessional tone, turn on my confidential ear, and success comes immediately. I tell a few details about myself, hang the carrot of indulgent self-centering conversations in front of their eyes, and the gossip pours out.
I will admit that I have gotten in trouble because of gossip, but it’s a result of my strange belief systems that make me fundamentally different from almost every other person I know: I do not believe in or have any secrets. At a basic level you are foreign to me because you have secrets. While I have noticed that you people have secrets, that there are things you’d rather keep under wraps, it doesn’t mean I get it. I mean, what’s wrong with you? I’ve never had a secret in my entire life.
Now, this doesn’t actually mean that I confess everything about myself to every being who passes my way—what it does mean though is that my secrets are my greatest resources. They are like weapons or tracking devices deployed and detonated in the midst of rich, eager-to-be-mined pockets of secrets.
I toss out a secret like a little smoke bomb, and once it erupts, the powerful gases coupled with my confessional, confidential tone make my friend incapable of resisting my charms.
I am not actually coercive or malicious, despite all my warlike descriptions. Yes, I’m taking advantage of people’s interest in talking about themselves, but it benefits us both. It’s symbiotic, I swear!
Take for example all the times my friends have crushes on people I know. I approach Joe and although we’re merely acquaintances I say to him: “How was your weekend?” “Good, and yours,” he naturally replies.
“It’s funny you ask! To be perfectly honest, I myself had a great weekend. I managed to finally make out with Sylvester. How about you, do you have your eye on anyone? It’s okay, you can tell me!”
The truth of the matter is that I’m honestly and obsessively interested in other people. As I am fond of saying, I’m already aware of my shit, my problems, those details of my life that you would call “secrets”; it’s other people’s business that is unknown. You’re the ones with information that will intrigue and inspire. If it takes confessing my stories, so be it. It’s a business transaction, and I charge no interest.
Before I finish, I need to get one thing straight: I am NOT a gossip—this word applies to the unprofessional and amateurish among us.
I prefer “Archivist.”
Everyone I meet and talk to is assigned a file inside my head: a large manila folder with Post-it notes (reminders of questions to ask), police reports (their friends’ 4-1-1 on the person), photos (incriminating and enlightening moments I’ve noticed at parties), and tapes (recordings of our conversations).
Like any good archivist, I have office hours, I close for business, and I only allow those with the proper security clearance access to my Confidential files. I’m a professional archivist.
A secret remains a secret if requested to remain so (there are of course multiple security levels). I also have the capacity of storing information as a Top Secret file—this type of security system is state-of-the-art, so advanced, so unbreachable, that even I forget the secret. Yes, encoded in my archives is the ability to erase the memory of the secret.
Gossips are unprofessional and low. I, on the other hand, am an archivist, trained at the Academy with skills beyond any normal Star magazine D-celeb reporter. I’m the real deal.
Keeping track of other people is my way of organizing, understanding, and maintaining my social network. “Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language” by Robin Dunbar totally backs me up. Language evolved as a way to keep track of our friends and family when they’re not around (i.e. gossip about them). In fact, conversation and information exchange are central to our society: they are its building blocks sustenance.
However, you’re gossips. I’m the archivist with top-level security clearance, owner of top-of-the-line secret-procuring devices, and professionally trained in the secret arts of gossip.
The Archive’s hours of operation are 10 p.m.-2 a.m. Wednesday through Saturday and by appointment.
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