On my sister's first night home, over dinner, my dad asked if any of us had some funny stories. Me being me, I offered up some gossip involving an old high school classmate that we are all too familiar with. This piece of gossip wasn't particularly happy nor productive — it was basically gossip for the sake of gossip. My sister, being my sister, was rather disapproving of this seemingly vitriol turn of the conversation at the dinner table. She told me and my dad both off (while my mom happily ate in purposely oblivious silence on her side of the table), and so we deliberately changed the course of the discussion shortly thereafter.
While I completely understand my sister's distaste for such topics, and yes, I think it's reasonable, I disagree. Here's why.
Last semester, I took a course on religion and happiness, and one of the subjects we visited was community. Gossip, we discovered, was in fact a source of bonding for many communities, no matter the size.
Throughout the rest of the semester, and to this day, I've found that to be very true. Gossip is often looked down on and seen as a negative — the rumor mill, people say with scorn. But it really doesn't have to be that way.
I know how information spreads. You tell one person in the deepest confidence, and then that person tells another individual in the deepest confidence, and before you know it, everyone and their mother is all up in your business. At Rice especially, a school so small that it seems any person on campus will have at least six mutual friends with any other given person, gossip seems to spread like wildfire (excuse the cliché).
Last semester and this semester especially, my suite and a select other individual formed a particular "girl talk" group. We would update each other on our own lives briefly, and then inform one another about any juicy happenings across campus (though considering we were all from the same residential college, our information was usually pretty insulated). We became particularly close this way, and without it, I think it's safe to say we would not be at the level of comfort with each other as we are now. The thing is, even with my suitemates, people I live with and should see every day, if we don't have a reason to actually spend time together outside of just coming into our shared living space out of necessity, we won't. We're just too busy. So this girl talk, besides enriching our otherwise very boring and relatively stable lives (thankful for that, actually) with some trivial tidbits, also kept us updated with each other outside of an academic context.
Gossip can bring together familiars and unfamiliars alike, uniting around nosiness about strangers. When your life is boring, drama can be fun!
I for one used to get in a tizzy whenever I thought someone out there knew my business. But frankly, who gives a crap anymore? Who cares, seriously? Obviously it depends on the other people directly involved with you, but for the most part, it really just matters what you think about the situation and what you do about it. it affects you if you allow it to. Cheesy, I know, but honestly, true.
You make it a bigger deal by trying to be cagey, and by caring so much about who knows what. And so it becomes a two-way street. Maybe take a page out of your gossippy self's book, and be a little more lax with your personal dealings. Life will be so much easier that way.
