So anyway, I was listening to another podcast today when the app crashed on my iPhone. The funny thing is that I didn't even realize it for almost ten whole seconds. Why? Because I'd also been re-listening to some episode of The Mental Illness Happy Hour recently.
One remarkable thing Paul has done is turned a few moments of silence into something powerful. Whether it's when he or his interviewee can't quite come up with the right word immediately and need to reevaluate their emotion in order to choose the right one, when he's so shocked by something exceedingly painful or revelatory, or when it's clear that there is nothing to sufficient to say that will heal the wounds of an interviewee or listener whose email/survey he's just read. I hate to criticize him, but in a lot of the earlier episodes he had a bad habit of filling in "awkward silences" during interviews with jokes or other little comments. In later episodes, though, he has done what I believe is an excellent job of shutting up and letting those moments run their course. There are some times where you just are no words. And by putting these times on the air (or on the podcast, I guess) for everyone to listen to, he embraces the surrender to emotion we all need sometimes. It's okay to not know what to say.
Relatedly, there's a great piece of short fiction in the New Yorker called "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" by Jonathan Foer that I love. He comes up with a bunch of punctuation marks to convey different things he wishes he was able to with his family, all unspoken. I still tear up a little when I read it because I can relate so much. Here's a quote from it:
Anyway, Paul allowing these moments of silence -- though awkward, painful, or unbearable -- to remain is really admirable to me. There was one podcast where he joked about listeners getting fed up with the episode because of a long pause. In my opinion, listeners like that can just go suck a dick.[Black Square] The "willed silence mark" signifies an intentional silence, the conversational equivalent of building a wall over which you can't climb, through which you can't see, against which you break the bones of your hands and wrists. I often inflict willed silences upon my mother when she asks about my relationships with girls. Perhaps this is because I never have relationships with girls — only relations. It depresses me to think that I've never had sex with anyone who really loved me. Sometimes I wonder if having sex with a girl who doesn't love me is like felling a tree, alone, in a forest: No one hears about it; it didn't happen.
It ...