Sometimes you gotta talk it out

The other day I found myself explaining the differences between baking soda and baking powder to Skip, a two-year-old cat who sat on his favorite chair in the kitchen overseeing the assembly of what would become nearly inedible peanut-butter cookies. "While both are leavening agents," I told him, "baking soda has uses beyond the culinary – it's a deodorizer and a stain remover; it's a common ingredient in many toothpastes – whereas baking powder is used to make baked goods rise very quickly, without the need for acid to activate it." Skip, who at this point was giving himself what I like to call an "ass bath," could not care less. Even if he was focused on me and not his self-excavation, he couldn't understand a word I was saying. And of course I knew he couldn't, yet I went on talking.

But then I ran out of places to go. I realized that I didn't actually know, chemically speaking, what the differences are between the two; I was only able to parse out their purposes and utilities. And so I looked up what they're made of, their reactions with other substances, what actually happens once my sad blobs of dough are in the oven.

I'm not necessarily any better off for knowing these things (there's certainly no discernible difference in my ability to make cookies), but I wouldn't know them at all had I not decided to give a baking seminar to a cat one afternoon. And it's the talking that did it: if I tried to go through the same thought-process internally, sparing Skip the lecture, I don't think I would've ended up on the sodium bicarbonate Wikipedia page. I'd probably be distracted by how both of these products look a lot like cocaine, and I wonder what they use for fake cocaine on movie sets? You'd think any sort of powder would be pretty unpleasant going up an actor's nostrils? Maybe there's some trick to make it seem like it is? CGI? What about before CGI? They did a bunch of coke in Boogie Nights, right? And obviously Scarface?

It would go on like this for an embarrassing length of time, until something – a phone call, an oven timer, a siren outside – yanks me back into the physical world. And then I'd entirely forget what I was thinking about, turning my attention back to the cookies that are drying out by the second. But when you speak aloud, even to a creature with no grasp of human language, there's an obligation to have your words make sense; a responsibility to come to some sort of comprehensible conclusion. And if you can't, it's much easier to figure out what's missing or where to go next. When you're trapped in your own head, everything gets tangled and starts to snowball.

Maybe it's all really obvious, but think of instances where you've "talked through" a problem you're having, with a friend or family member. You're seeking advice and a fresh perspective. But then you'll come to a solution, one that had never occurred to you before, all on your own, without your confidant saying anything more than "uh-huh" or "I see." Perhaps you'd never really spelled it out before in logical, meaningful terms.

This would happen all the time in grad school: we'd be assigned some super heady post-structuralist theory or whatever that almost always made no sense upon a first read. In class, we'd focus on a sentence or two we could decipher and just start talking. What does it mean? What's interesting or compelling about it? What is it reminiscent of? Soon enough, we'd be on auto-pilot, piggy-backing off of each other's comments, raising interesting questions, straight-up disagreeing with something we couldn't comprehend an hour earlier. Now, as a writing tutor, I often find myself simply reading the instructions of an assignment aloud and seeing light-bulbs go off.

I'm aware that this post is effectively a 750-word ADD self-diagnosis, but I have a feeling a lot of folks have similar experiences that could be mitigated with just a little talkin'. I also fully endorse having prolonged, one-sided conversations with your pets. My understanding is that babies, up to a certain age, can play a similar role. Hell, you might learn a thing or two about, say, acid-base reactions and fermentation. Don't knock it till you try it.