Fine...

It’s funny how people generally don’t say exactly what they mean, making it extremely difficult for the Zog to survive in the modern hostel ecosystem.
Take for instance the statement
“I am fine.”
When followed by the confirmatory smile, you assume it is safe to crack a joke or two and move on. Well darling, welcome to the strange and terrible land of conversational cryptography. I am fine doesn’t mean exactly that. It can mean anything but that.
The range of meanings it can assume include “I feel like shit and you’re responsible”,
“I need to drink my HOD’s blood”, “Why are you wearing the same shirt as I am bitch?” or worst yet, “My crush since first year won’t look at me though he has had a string of girl friends since.”
Once you figure out which of the above it is, you are on the high road to successful inter-personal relationships.
So how do you go about it? Was that question for me?...em…like I told you if I were any good I wouldn’t be writing this down. The thing is, there is no surefire technique. The Gods have conspired against me. The only available method, it seems, is that of trial and error.
Ohhh I’ve dreaded the term since my math teacher first introduced it in elementary school. It was like even Mathematics, the Science of preciseness, didn’t have the answers to some questions. You just couldn’t plug some problems into concrete formulae and wish them away. You had to assume…postulate…theorize…stuff that was best left to Pythagoras and his cronies, not small, insignificant, blundering…you.
Another thing I have an unreasonable fear of, for exactly the same reasons is scale-up. The laws that apply to a small system don’t apply to a larger one because of the chaos the system accumulates with size. You toil and toss and bleed to arrive at something to explain the crap you’ve been doing in lab 8 to 8, and then, somebody tells you it’s absolutely useless if you actually wanted to mass-produce something, they’re an exercise in futility that will make a brief appearance on your grade card, only.
Now imagine the horror of scaling up an imprecise technique like trial and error from the most precise art of mathematics to the most chaotic sphere of human conversation. It is the material nightmares are made of.
Lemme add, once you decide to try something out, the outcome makes all future attempts futile.
If for instance you react to “I am fine” with “Your HOD is a rat” and if you’re wrong you might get
1. Really screwed if her HOD has anything to do with your department
2. Lose a friend if she’s HOD’s puppy material
3. Lose a semester if HOD’s promoted anytime soon
If you react with “Sorry he’s still not interested in you”, and again blooper! Made a mistake
1. She’ll say, “Thank you for reminding me just when I got over him.”
2. Or “So pleased to have a boyfriend huh? So you keep pushin it down other ppls throats huh?” Ouch!
3. “Booohooo! You’re so nasty, I know I’m not pretty but I thought you were my friend”
So like moi said it’s not easy. So how do you decide? I do the “Eeny meeny miny mo…”
Which sorta explains why I’m so ant-social. If you can think of a better way please cue me in.