Still waters run deep. I know this to be true, and while creating and maintaining conversation is a skill of mine, it is equally true that not everyone is good at this skill.

Lately I've been on the dating circuit, and have met a wide array of interesting chaps. Some have been quite conversant, but there has been a gnawing at my viscera that something's not quite right with them...and I've learned the hard way to listen to my viscera on such matters. Some have been, well, perhaps overly reflective; definitely they're trying to think before they speak, which is always a good behavior. But to take it to the level that you don't really participate in a conversation on an active level, and instead just react to a question or a statement at a minimal level, it gets, well, weird.

Recently I met up with one such deep thinker for an afternoon. He displayed an interest in me: leaning into the conversation, always looking right at me with wide eyes, with a relaxed yet interested expression on his face. Yet getting him to elaborate on himself, his life, or even general thoughts on life was damned near impossible. And while I'm a talkative gal, I am highly capable of waiting for the other person to initiate another line of discussion...and yet every time I would do that with this gentleman (and others like him), they just sit there, waiting, hoping that I'll bring up something that they can comment briefly on. At a couple of times I just looked right back of him...and became unnerved by the unyielding and very intense gaze; this cold chill ran up my spine, and the viscera were cranking up again.

I can't quite be cold enough to drop these types of guys at the blink of an eye, and I'm sure that they figure out that I was expecting a bit more. Nice guys, the lot of them, but just not interesting to me.

On the other hand, I had a dream last night that I was dating a professional hockey player, and he was teaching me how to maneuver the puck on the ice. I'm positive that's a metaphor for something