Dead Air

I have been told that I talk too much. This bothers some people more than others, and some people don't seem to mind it at all. I don't know why I do it, it just comes natural to me. I'm content to shut up and listen as long as somebody else is talking but, when there is dead air, I feel compelled to fill it with something. Often, when I explain this to somebody, they respond that, with me in the group, nobody else can get a word in edgewise. I have tried keeping quiet, just to see how long it will take for somebody else to say something, and they eventually do, but I don't understand why it took them so long. This doesn't bother me as much as it used to when I was younger, I guess I have gotten used to it.

I seemed to remember that Crete was part of Greece, but I looked it up to be sure. Well, it's part of Greece now, but it wasn't always. People have been living on the island for 130,000 years, sometimes they were independent, sometimes they ruled other people, and sometimes other people ruled them. Crete, Illinois was likely named after the original Crete, maybe because it was settled by Cretans. I seemed to remember that the word "Cretan" was also used to describe a person who is lacking in certain social graces, so I looked that up too, just to be sure. Come to find out, that's a "cretin", named after the medical condition "cretinism", which is caused by hypothyroidism, and results in stunted physical and mental development.

It's funny, how you think you know something, and then you find out that it isn't what you think it is. That's probably because we learn by association and, if one thing is similar to another, we tend to put them both in the same mental pigeonhole, which can lead us to think of them a one and the same thing when they're not. Before the internet, one way to resolve something like that was to get a bunch of people talking about it. One guy says something, another guy disagrees, another guy puts his two cents in and, sooner of later, we get to the bottom of it. I don't get around much anymore, but my daughter tells me that it's not like that nowadays. If there is a disagreement, everybody whips out their mobile devices and starts punching buttons. The issue is resolved in a matter of minutes, and then they have to find something else to talk about. I wonder what they do with all that dead air.