Smallest Talk

Despite the common reaction of most women when they see a baby, they (babies) aren’t usually cute. If it’s their own child, women are deluded. If it’s someone else’s, they’re polite. However, the delusion to their own babies is a good thing. The fact that women are so heavily biased is simple nature, the result of our species evolution, and rightly so. Just think what would have happened to the human race if women were as objective as their male counterparts. Every time an ugly baby was born (a staggering 99% according to experts) they would have turned their backs on the helpless neonate uttering some heartless sentiment like “I’m not letting that mangy hairless ape suck on my crumb catchers.” We’d have never made it past the hunter-gatherer period of history. Mankind would have been wiped out, and the cause: maternal neglect. (NOTE: Crumb Catchers is what my mother-in-law calls breasts. I would have just given the female body it’s due respect and called them such, but I wanted the sentiment to come off as womanly as possible.) Speaking objectively, Babies are more like personified raisons: squirming, grunting, pooping raisons. Of course there are exceptions to this rule. My son Cash is one. My daughter, in infancy, not so much - she fit in the raison category, but Cash is the genuine article. It is not my intension to play favorites. I should say my daughter has developed surprisingly well and at just under two years of age has a wit and charm to rival most young adults. I only say this to illustrate the fact that I can be totally objective and not at all biased. So, although I can appreciate, on a purely phylogenic level, the subjectivity of women toward babies, it has been the cause of many redundantly annoying encounters, which brings me to my point.
Small talk has never been my strong suit, and the older I get the harder time I have hiding that fact. I think it is because small talk is such a surface level, insincere, culturally expected social interaction. That said, when you decide to bring a child into the world you have basically fated yourself to the same line of small talk every time your small child is with you in public.

“Oh my gosh, He is precious!” A passing stranger would say.
“He’s a she.”
“Of course she is. That explains the adorable bow in her hair.” [this is said with a squished up face, a high pitched voice, and a finger on the baby’s nose like she’s trying to get the baby to crap a Pez] “Where did you get it?”
“Well, when a man loves a woman sometimes their passions lead to…”
“I mean the bow.”
“Oh. I don’t know. Bed Bath & Bows. Or Bows Unlimited. I don’t know, my wife gets that stuff.”
“Well she is just precious.” The stranger says again.
“And now that we’ve come full circle I bid you good-bye.”

I should say that small talk is not one of those pet peeves that angers me (unless I’m talking to one of those non-closers who speaks in stream-of-thought like they’re brainstorming for a college term paper) so I don’t want to come off as cold and calloused. I know that it is just the result of nice people trying to show they care enough not to snub you or cross the street when they see you coming. I just wish that our culture had long ago established some way to show kindness without the exchange of meaningless tripe, especially when the tripe is blatant lies like my daughter is the cutest baby in the world. That’s sweet, but impossible. I mean, she has my genes. You can’t blow hot air up my butt and tell me it’s nice weather. Now, what the random passerby failed to notice is that my daughter learned sign language before she was a year old, can de-shell a walnut with her bare hands, and will probably go into zoology since she already knows all the animals and their corresponding sounds. Now that would have made a good conversation.