.SOMETIMES RAW.

If there is any message I want you to take from this article, it is that befriending a parrot can be both frustrating and infinitely rewarding. And if there are two more messages to get from this article: buy my book “I Was Told There Would Be Cake” which will be released any day now, and just be happy – because you can be happy. There is so much bad news in the world right now and sometimes it is hard to see the positive side of things, but it is possible and there are things you can do to be happy. 

In the interest of full disclosure, I want you to know that I am not a spiritual adviser. Yes, it’s true that if my mother didn’t name me Daniela she was going to name me Deepak. But she didn’t and that is not the path I followed. And I would never want to mislead you by telling you that I have all the answers, because I don’t. I mean, I do know a lot. Like, A LOT a lot. I am very worldly. What’s that? No, I am not in Mensa or anything. But I could be. Obviously. I just don’t have time for all the paperwork. Or those meetings. Those are probably a drag. So, in conclusion, the only reason I am not in Mensa is because I don’t have time for the paperwork or the meetings. Moving on. 

I spend a lot of time listening to spiritual advisers and I have read a lot of books on the power of positive thinking. And I agree with what they say – it makes a big difference in your life when you stay positive. I am positive about this. It helps to surround yourself with positive people. No one likes to be around Negative Nellies. Try and spend more time with Positive Peters and Happy Helens.

Another thing you can do – and this is just off the top of my head – is read all my other books. I try to make it an escape from the things in life that are not so great. I keep it happy and positive and upbeat. Plus, it is much cheaper than a prescription with none of the negative side effects. 

It has been proven that when we are positive and happy, endorphins rush through our system. Now, I am no scientist, but I know what endorphins are. They are tiny, little magical elves that swim through your bloodstream and tell funny jokes to each other. When they reach your brain, you hear what they are saying and that boosts your health and happiness. “Knock, knock…. Who’s there? … Little endorphin…. Little endorphin who?… Little endorphin Annie.” And then the endorphins laugh, and then you laugh. See? It’s science. 

Don’t get me wrong. Everyone has good days and bad days. We are humans. We have emotions. In fact, I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have emotions. Have you ever met someone who says they have never had a bad day in their whole entire life? Don’t you want to poke them in the face? I don’t understand people like that. We all wake up on the wrong side of the bed some days. Some days we even wake up on the wrong side of our neighbour’s driveway because of a late night out and some confusion over strikingly similar front doors. My point is, life is about balance. The good and the bad. The highs and the lows. The piña and the colada. 

The thing everyone should realize is that the key to happiness is being happy by yourself and for yourself. If everything you have got stripped away – your home, your job, your family, your things, your favourite T-shirt with all the holes in it that you won’t throw away even though it reveals a large part of your stomach region – if you lost all of those things and you had to live in a cave all alone with absolutely nothing, you should still be happy. Happiness comes from within. You have the power to change your own mindset so that all the negative, horrible thoughts that try to invade your psyche are replaced with happy, positive, wonderful thoughts. 

I myself have made a conscious choice to not allow negative thoughts to even enter my mind. Is it hard? You bet it is. Negative thoughts are powerful. For example, if I didn’t make that commitment to myself to think positively all the time, I would probably start thinking about how scary it would be to live in a cave all alone with absolutely nothing. Because I mean, if I really think about the reality of that situation, it’s terrifying – to be trapped in a cave with all those bats flying around everywhere. And the spiders! There are probably literally millions and millions of spiders in caves. I don’t have anything against bats and spiders. Especially if they are happy living their lives all alone in caves. More power to them, I say. It’s just that it’s so dark in caves. I guess that goes without saying. They are caves. But once you really get inside, there is not even a hint or trace of light. Just little bat eyes darting around everywhere, waiting for you to turn your head so they can pounce on the back of your neck like a cheetah with bat wings. 

I am so scared of the dark. I usually leave the bathroom light on all night with the door slightly ajar (notice my Mensa-level vocabulary) just so there’s a strip of light. I know it wastes electricity but one time I woke up in a pitch-black room and thought for sure I had been kidnapped by cave dwellers who had taken me and my bed to their underground cave where they would train me to move like a dinosaur and only eat tree bark. Turns out I had an eye mask on, but that’s neither here nor there. My point is, I like a little bit of light. 

You know, there is probably a lot of moisture in caves, too, which would be bad for my hair. And all those sharp edges. I wouldn’t want to move. I would just sit in the cave all day long and think about how scared I was to be there. I am probably not gonna sleep tonight thinking about how I could easily end up trapped in a cave one day, surrounded by bats, spiders, water droplets, sharp edges, and complete and total darkness. 

What was I saying? Oh right – negative thoughts. Get rid of them! I did! You know what a wise person once said? “Why pay full price for  a sweater when you can steal it for free?” You know what another wise person once said? “Happiness is a journey, not a destination.” Amen, my friends!

Let me break that down for you so it’s easy to understand. Happiness is a journey. This means that happiness is like a long car ride. Let’s say you are in a car and you are driving to Hawaii. Sure, it seems like Hawaii, your destination, is going to be the happiness part. But really, the car ride is the happiness part because of all the fun games you can play in the car and all the stops you can make at beautiful public toilet areas, not to mention how fun it would be to be in the car with three young kids for hours and hours. Be happy on your journey to Hawaii so that once you get there you can be miserable. Wait. I don’t know if that’s right. 

However you choose to live your life, just try to enjoy it as much as you can. Fill yourself with joy. (Not the dishwashing liquid.) And accept what life throws at you and what you cannot change – the good, the bad, the ugly, the awkward, the fun, the boring, the sweet, the weird, the sour, the salty, the ripe, the unripe…. I am sorry, I have to be right back. I just got really hungry. 

I’m afraid of small talk. Someone had to say it. “How’s work?… It’s been forever… This weather…” You’ve heard it all before. The traumatic aeon held captive in the chair of a loquacious hairdresser; the slow motion car-crash that follows eye contact with a one-night-stand at the supermarket; family Christmas. I’m sure you’ve all survived similarly wince-inducing “chatty” ordeals, but my god – it’s been touch and go.

Luckily, a concerned colleague sent me some Harvard research suggesting that my aversion to small talk might be due to asking the wrong questions. Apparently, instead of settling for trite, tried-and-tested classics like “What do you do?” I should opt for more searching openers – ones that explore contexts beyond the familiar arena of pub chat fodder. So in the spirit of adventure, I went cold turkey and cut small talk out of my life. 

My first step was drawing up a list of small talk reflexes to be banished.

1. ‘It’s been forever’

While this is often (unfortunately) not literally true, you have no other option than to agree, and then invariably overcompensate by forming elaborate plans to hang out every day for the following decade. “Forever?” It’s probably been about three weeks, and we didn’t have much to say to each other that time either. 

2. ‘How’s work?’

Surely work is the last thing anyone should be thinking or talking about in social small talk. That anyone would want to spend their fleeting leisure time fixating on the details of this labour is insane to me. Oh, but you’re passionate about management consultancy? Good for you.

3. ‘The weather…’

A favoured staple of the English conversational diet. Although meteorological observations are inoffensive, it’s hard to avoid conversation collapsing into a harrowing re-run of a French oral exam e.g. During le weekend, do you also play football with your friends in the park?

4. ‘How are you?’

The cheek, the nerve, the gall, the audacity and the aggressiveness. What a terrifyingly intimate question. It reliably triggers paroxysms of anxiety, non-committal non-verbal grunts, and a search for the closest fire escape. Everyone will be relieved if you just say, “Yeah, not too bad,” which can reliably be interpreted as anywhere between euphoric and suicidal.

5. ‘Been busy?” / “What time are you on till?’

It’s genuinely impossible to ask a taxi driver either of these questions without the following up with the other. And so begins 45 minutes of feigned sympathy with the cabbie’s increasingly problematic political takes. You’ll remember your headphones next time.

As you might imagine, my list of banned phrases got quite long, and involved several shopping trips to the murky mind-palace of small talk misery… I shall spare you both the boredom and the second-hand trauma.

My next challenge: Replace the forbidden small talk crutches, with the questions (somewhat questionably) scientifically assessed to make me “better liked by conversation partners”. Yipee. 

The Harvard Business Review kindly provided several examples from a psychologist to get the ball rolling. Unbound, I was finally emerging from Plato’s cave of small talk superficiality, and striding straight to work to test my new lines.

1. ‘What excites you right now?’

Not a great start. Maybe it was in my delivery. Maybe the wink was a bad idea. The wink was definitely a bad idea. Attempting this one again and receiving a confused answer realted to the weather – mission aborted. But according to the Harvard shrink, this question “gives others the ability to give with a work-related answer, or talk about their kids, or their new boat, or basically anything that excites them”. As very few of my friends have kids, none own boats and only a couple would admit they have ever been excited, I started to suspect that this study might not have been road teted in a pub.  

2. ‘What are you looking forward to?’

Invariably this resulted in my conversation partner asking whether they were looking especially sad. “No, you don’t look sad, I just want to know what you’re looking forward to.” This wasn’t a great hit either – it gives slightly unhinged “I Can Save You” Energy, apparently. I tried to explain that they could just tell me about their weekend plans, but the damage was already done. 

3. ‘Where did you grow up?’

Ask this anyone under 23 and they will respond blankly that they grew up “at home, I guess”. Ask this anyone over 23 and they think you are trying to commit credit card fraud.

4. ‘Is there a charitable cause you support?’

Jesus wept. This was met by widespread suspicion that I was about to shake them down for a donation of some sort. The more I protested I just wanted to know if they supported a charity, the less they believed me. Someone asked me if I was a Quaker, prompting a performatively longer coughing period. *cough cough

5. ‘Who is your favourite superhero?’

This one went down as well as you might’ve imagined: like a pint of warm phlegm. However, there was one American who genuinely opened up to this – cue a 15-minute conspiracy theory about a comic book creator called Jamie Hewlett who is secretly Banksy. Unfortunately, I suspect that a positive response from an American could be achieved with any of the questions on this list, limiting their use as data points in this particular sociological study.

Disheartened and having exhausted the psychologist’s suggestions, I started to wonder what the alternative to “small talk” actually looks like. Perhaps there are only two types of talk that can’t be deemed “small”: the emotionally draining and the pseudo-intellectual intolerable. On the former, there’s a time and a place for a deep chat about your feelings and spiritual wellbeing, but most of the time it feels toe-curlingly self-indulgent and is best saved for dogs, death-beds or paid professionals. 

Then there’s the other sort of “deep” conversation about the grand metaphysical themes of existence. (The horror, the horror.) A chat that’s likely to yield zero answers, but comes with a non-zero risk of inflicting paralysing existential boredom on both participants. Anyone who’s met that person at a party knows both of these “deep” options are quantumly worse than surface-level chats about the weather, football or literally anything else. 

But, my all time favorites are: ‘What are you reading?’ ‘Who is your favorite author?’ or ‘Which books can I find in your bookshelves?’

It appears I was too quick to judge small talk. Perhaps with my favorite questions, there’s a certain beauty in the preconscious verbal ping-pong that happens with these questions. People usually read. People care about books. And everyone else cares about the weather, and it changes all the time. In a nutshell, small talk is there for a reason – it has conventions, and conventions can be followed competently. Sure, small talk is cheap, but aren’t we all? And having endured this lengthy written testimony to the foolishness of deep talk, perhaps you too are convinced that small talk is the only talk worth talking. So, what are you reading?

Your dog takes a highly individualized approach to your care. Instead of saying your Vitamin D is low and suggesting you get more sun, your dog takes you on three walks a day. If you have insomnia, they’ll lay on your stomach and stare into your soul until you fall asleep every night for the next fifteen years. If you’re anemic, they’ll murder a squirrel and leave it under your pillow. Would Dr. L. do that? Didn’t think so.

Forget long wait times and running between offices to see specialists. Your dog only makes house calls. And they are available 24-7. If you have a high fever in the middle of the night, your dog will check your vitals every thirty minutes from the most scientifically advanced medical facility: under the couch.

Ask your doctor if they want to go to the park with you, and they’ll up your antidepressants and refer you to a therapist. Ask your dog, and they’ll spin around in circles and run to the door, no questions asked.

When your dog is your doctor, you’ll never go to the emergency room for a debilitating migraine and get sent home with two Aspirin and a huge bill. There are no unexpected costs because your dog doesn’t know what money is. Or bills. Instead of cash or card, they accept TreatPay, a simple behaviour-based exchange. You choose what you pay based on the quality of care and if they’ve been a good boy.

Rather than spending hours on the phone begging your insurance to cover life-saving care, your dog begs you to let him cover all treatment at 100 percent. Your dog is so opposed to private insurance he chewed and swallowed your insurance card, and you had to spend eight hundred euros to get his stomach pumped. That’s how committed your dog is to your health care.

Your doctor is always overbooked, but your dog has no other patients and no concept of time. They will never make you feel like a hypochondriac for scheduling a follow-up every time you have a stomachache. Has your gastroenterologist ever been so excited to see you that they peed on the floor? Probably not.

Your doctor needed eight years of school and a stethoscope to hear your irregular heartbeat. Your 20 kilo medical prodigy, doggie, hasn’t even graduated from PetSmart Puppy School, and they can detect your panic attack from the next room.

Most doctors only help you after you’re sick or injured, but your dog’s preventative care is more proactive. They nose out all health hazards, such as garbage trucks, the wind, metal sidewalk grates, and old ladies with shopping baskets on wheels. When was the last time your orthopedic surgeon dragged you half a block to avoid a collision with a kid on an electric scooter?

Your doctor doesn’t call you every so often to check-in. Your dog runs over to your desk every hour to see how work is going and lower your blood pressure by letting you scratch their neck.

Your dog will never minimize your symptoms or suggest it’s “all in your head.” When you cry out in pain, they howl back in sympathy. When you sneeze, they bark until the neighbors call the police.

Your dog loves you unconditionally for their entire life. They’ll follow you to the other side of your apartment and back just to rest their little head on your feet. When you’re sad, they roll over on their back and look at you upside-down like, “I’ll take my belly rub now,” because they know it makes you laugh. They are your family. Your doctor calls you Pamela even though your name is Daniela.

The only thing your dog can’t do to improve your health is prepare your taxes. For that, you’ll need a cat.