Today I was standing outside my apartment steps waiting for someone, when an old lady approached. Literally in the first minute of our meeting she told me she was from Rhinebeck, that her daughter was moving into the apartment that day, that she had taken the MetroNorth down and her daughter was supposed to meet her at the 1 train, that her daughter was late so she came via the Bx7, that she was seventy-seven, and that her daughter works in pyrotechnics on Broadway. It was a deluge of information in sixty seconds, which barely even scratched the surface of what else I learned in the following six minutes.

For me it was a surreal situation because it was the complete opposite of what I'd do. If I were her, I would not have spoken with me or even made some sort of eye contact. It's a combination of shyness and being raised in New York City. But sometimes I wonder what I lose from not chatting with people. For example, my dad's roommate Panay was really friendly. He met dad randomly at a bus stop and struck up a conversation about how he was having problems with his Filipino roommates mocking him for not being macho enough. Dad and him decided to move in together. Later on Panay's former coworker called him up when she first immigrated to America, looking for a temporary place to live. That woman was my mother, and the rest is history.

What kind of friendships and connections pass me by for keeping quiet? What kind of interesting situations do I miss for not being involved? And yet I can't help but imagine how much time I'd've wasted making small talk with people. All those books I didn't read on the train because I was chatting with some dude about how Riverside Park is looking better nowadays.

And the worst part is I never know how to end those conversations gracefully. It's usually something along the lines of, "Okay, bye!" and then fleeing as quickly as possible.