This is not a Phone Conversation

“Brian, Brian!”

“What’s up Trung?”

“Guess what I read on Tumblr today!”

“Ugh, this better not be about ‘saggin’ spelled backwards.”

“No it’s not.”

“Ok, what’s it about?”

“Are you ready?”

“Yeah.”

“Get this: There’s a ‘lie’ in ‘believe,’ ‘over’ in ‘lover,’ ‘end’ in ‘friend,’ ‘us’ in ‘trust,’ and ‘if’ in ‘life.’”

“First of all, you’re really behind on Tumblr. I read that like in April, and now it’s mid-July. Second, all of that shit is stupid.”

“What?! Don’t you think it’s crazy?”

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Yes it does. ‘Lie’ in ‘believe’? That’s like describing one of your philosophies!”

“Have you ever heard of apophenia?”

“A what?”

“Apophenia. It’s like a psychological kind of phenomenon where we people find meaning and patterns in random events that don’t really have any kind of meaning or patterns. People survive freak accidents so they think the hand of God must have come to intervene when really, they were just really lucky. Someone’s clothes all turn pink in the laundry, and he thinks it’s a message from his dead girlfriend whose favorite color was pink, but really, that shit happens in the laundry all the fucking time. And like this, ‘lie’ in ‘believe’? It’s a coincidence.”

“Oh my god Brian, why can’t you see the art in this?”

“What art? There’s no art in it. Someone just decided to compile a list of words that happened to have other words in them, and those words happened to be words that everyone could relate to. Is there any meaning in the fact that ‘tart’ is in ‘start’ or ‘pies’ is in ‘spies’?”

“Brian, for once can’t you just appreciate what’s presented right before you? You’re the type that would actually look at a painting of a pipe and say, ‘This is not a pipe; it’s a painting.’ You always have to go through this convoluted thought process where you logically deconstruct everything until it loses all its meaning, and not only does it lose its meaning, but it loses its enjoyment and entertainment value. You’re just left bored and without any kind of imagination. Nothing in your life excites you.”

“There’s stuff that excites me, but it just has to have meaning. What’s the point of appreciating something if in reality, it doesn’t mean anything? Y’know, if you take ‘lie’ and ‘believe’ and translate them to French, then you’ll realize that there’s no meaning. Because really, is there a ‘mensonge’ in ‘croire’? No, there fucking isn’t.”

“Well, ‘lie’ being in ‘believe’ might not have any inherent meaning, but you can give it meaning. I could write a piece of spoken word about it. In English.”

“Ugh, you and your spoken word. So melodramatic.”

“And of course, you can’t appreciate the art in things like spoken word. Y’know, we were like this too when we were together. You always acted on your convoluted form of logic and rationale, and I acted on feelings and morale. Each of our ways of thinking had its pros and cons—”

“Look, it’s 2 AM and I would like to go to sleep. Can we just say that I win this debate? I go with the logical way of thinking, and that’s the kind of thinking that makes the world go around.”

“Who says? Emotions and feelings make the world go around. And you know you’re not going to go asleep. You’re going to be chatting with your sex buddies.”

“I don’t have sex buddies—anymore—and yes, I am going to sleep. G’night Trung. Have fun teaching at Breakthrough tomorrow.”

“Alright, fine, g’night. Loser.”