How's life today?

Have you ever thought, I should make an attempt to talk to (insert person you interact with but don’t actually talk to, like a grocery store cashier or bus driver)? Did you decide to make small talk with them by asking, “How’s it going?” or “How are you?” Was their verbal response, “Fine” or “Good, you?” but their body language sounded more like, “Move it along, nothing to see here.”

I’ve been thinking about this dilemma for a while, wondering how I can avoid too much awkwardness, but also get an actual answer instead of a programmed response.

Sidenote: I’ve been thinking about this situation a lot because I volunteer at a needle exchange.

Sidenote again: For those of you who don’t know, a needle exchange is a public health program that provides injection drug users with free clean needles. In Portland, heroin is the drug of choice, and there’s a lot of Hep C and HIV carriers walking around, so we’re trying to reduce the transmission of these diseases. We’re also secretly trying to get everybody addicted to heroin, but do us a favor and don’t tell the needle exchange haters. Just kidding.

Basically, here’s what happens: my volunteer buddy and I sit in a room chatting until a client walks in, counts out their dirty needles, drops them off in a biohazard bin, we swap them out for clean needles, ask their age, and they go on with their day. Repeat for about 200 clients, and that’s a day in the life.

I’m all about the needle exchange kool-aid, but not because of its hotly debated public health benefits. I love it because it provides a safe-haven for people who have been told by society that they are failures and useless.

“But Ken!”, you might be thinking, “Don’t drug users deserve to be shit on by society because they made a bad choice?” That can be argued, of course. But as someone who has had to make a choice before, I think it’s hard to make the right choice all the time, or even a right choice. It’s even harder when it feels like nobody cares about your decision or their consequences.

Having just one person be nice to you, even if it’s only for a short two-minute interaction, can snap you back into a totally shifted view of reality. I know lots of times I find myself feeling alone in the lab, grinding out a gel-running-pipetting-tissue-harvesting session, completely forgetting that people exist. Then, I’ll take a break to get coffee, the barista will be nice to me, and it stupidly feels like a total shock to the system, “Whoa, I forgot that people exist in the world, and that people can be nice. Well, I guess I should be nice too.”

But it’s hard to make people feel cared for, right? Especially in such a robotic interaction like our needle exchange where the regulars have the routine down and are in out and within a minute.

I recently got some fantastic advice: to ask the question, “How’s life today?” This was a huge breakthrough for me.

I’ve been testing this question out at the needle exchange, at Trader Joe’s, and people definitely gave me a more personal response to: “How’s life today?” One of our needle exchange regulars that I’ve started to establish some rapport with replied with a pained twang in his voice, “It’s been tough today.. but thanks a lot for asking man. How’s your’s?” It was a small victory, but it made my day.

Anyways, that’s what I’ve been thinking about for the past week.

from ken

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