inBOIL

Recently I've been asked this question (on more than one occasion) and it got me thinking. It seems it's almost exclusively asked by women of men, and that the sexes have completely different views of it.

Women: Why do you ask this question? How do you hope a man will respond? What kind of responses do you get, and what's your reaction to those responses?

Men: What do you think of this question? How do you respond when asked what you're thinking, and why? Do you ever ask this question?


When I'm asked what I'm thinking, I'm usually not thinking about anything. I'm just relaxing, and the questions comes as an intrusion. I have to fire up the speech recognition brain cells to process the question, then fire up the putting-thoughts-into-words brain cells to respond. The fact that I have to un-relax for something so trivial seriously harshes my mellow. My response is always "nothing." Even when I'm thinking about something, it's either something I don't feel comfortable sharing, something so trivial or complex that it's not worth the effort of translating it into words, or some train of thought that I don't want to interrupt by explaining.

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And you believe Bush and the liberals and divorced parents and gays and blacks and the Christian right and fossil fuels and Xbox are all to blame, meanwhile you yourselves create an ad where your kid hits you in the head with a baseball and you don't understand the message that the problem is you.