“What’s new” is the question that punishes a normal week the hardest, because it sounds like it wants a headline and most weeks do not have one. You do not need an actual headline. You need a reply that treats an ordinary stretch of life as material instead of a failure to report something. Below … Read more
Someone asks how’s it going and most people freeze for half a second, then default to “good, you” like it’s the only sentence they know. There is a better way to handle it, and it does not require sounding clever, it just requires picking a line that matches your actual day instead of your autopilot. … Read more
“I’m fine” is not always a lie. Sometimes it is just a sentence with nowhere left to go. After nine years of watching people answer that question on autopilot, usually behind a bar where the real answer came out twenty minutes later anyway, I started keeping track of what people actually meant when they said … Read more
Someone asks how you are, and your brain goes blank exactly when you wanted to sound interesting. This breaks down funny answers to “How are you?” based on who’s actually asking, because the line that works on a close friend falls flat on a coworker, and the one that’s safe for a coworker reads as … Read more
Someone asks how you are, and the four or five different versions of that question all want something slightly different back. I have spent enough years behind a bar to know that “how are you” and “what’s up” and “are you okay” are not the same question wearing different outfits, even though most people answer … Read more
Someone asks how was your night and most people answer with one flat word that closes the conversation instead of opening it. The fix is not lying about your night, it is picking the one true detail that actually makes it worth answering. What follows is organized by what actually happened, a boring night, a … Read more
A good morning text from someone you actually like turns two ordinary words into a small emergency. I have watched people stare at their phone for ten minutes over something that should take ten seconds, usually because they think the reply has to either commit to something or sound clever enough to frame. It does … Read more
I have watched a joke that killed at the bar die instantly the second someone tried to send the same energy through a text. This is about why that happens and how to be funny over text without sounding like you copied a line off a forum. The short version is that texting humor runs … Read more