Over the past week, I have been speaking entirely with people I don’t know. You might be familiar with how these chats normally unfold, like the one you had with the cashier who checked you out at the grocery store, or with the guy who wouldn’t stop checking you out at the bar. They can be about where you’re coming from, national politics, some fresh gossip, a local event, or really nothing. The one trait that ties them together, though, is that they’re ultimately purposeless. Since there is no preexisting relationship between you and this happenstance stranger, and the possibility of any future interaction is uncertain at best, the conversation bounces along without any particular goal.

Bronislaw Malinowski called them phatic communions, an interaction that derives its meaning from the goodwill it engenders, and not necessarily from the information it is communicating.

All of my recent conversations have been in this mode because I’ve been traveling from coast to coast investigating my options for graduate school. The process for each school entails flying into an unfamiliar area, being picked up by someone in the graduate department, and then handed off between various community members that are relevant to my decision. Being a friendly sort of person, I have ended up having hundreds of these odd little talks at every junction of my travels. And after being exposed to such a large sample size, I noticed some patterns emerging.

It’s much more about them than it is about you. I sat next to a middle-aged man from San Bernadino on a short flight between Denver and Los Angeles. All I really wanted to do was complain about the set of paradoxes created by very fat people using the airport conveyor belts. “How do they stay on the right, if they take up the entire aisle?” This led back around to the typical topic of where I was going, and that I study religion. Unfortunately for the book I was going to read on that flight, he was a very convinced Pentecostal who imagined that I would be interested in what it felt like to speak in tongues. For the most part, people seem to be intensely interested in themselves, and you are always the perfect person to bear witness to their fascinating lives.

It’s much more about you than it is about them. When I was negotiating my seat to Providence with the other passengers confused by Southwest’s “open seating” policy, I ran into a young lady who was attending Northwestern. We began a somewhat stereotypical conversation about the Democratic primary, with a ceremonial lauding of the newly invigorated youth and the presentation of the laurels to Sen. Obama. That is, until I tipped my hand that I was not necessarily a partisan on the issue. “Thank God,” she said, “I feel like the Obamastapo are everywhere in Chicago.” She happened to be something like a Republican, but had grown accustomed to walking on eggshells for the sake of pleasant encounters. She was accommodating the conversation to me.

Culture changes everything. When I was fishing around for my iPod (which I now refer to as stranger-be-gone) my affiliation to our university was noticed by a man from Michigan. “The people out here in Boston are jerks.” Meaning, the people out there in the Big Ten are not jerks. I happened to agree, and he explained, “They’ll bite your head off if you say hello.” This was a strong assessment of the New England vibrations I had been feeling. And likewise people in California are laid-back, and in the Midwest they’re congenial. For whatever reason, our cultures go a long way in determining how we deal with other people.

So what is the point of printing 700 and some-odd words about small talk? At some point during my trip, I realized what close relatives these conversations were to the columns I write for you. I don’t imagine you keep good track of what I’ve said in the past, and so I could really be anyone as you start to read my columns. You fill in the blanks about who I am based on a set of standard categories, and you get a completely different message depending on where you’re coming from. But that’s fine, because we both get something out of it and it’s nice to be social from time to time.

Justin is a senior in religious studies. He is glad to be back in Champaign.