9. Familiarity and Green Smoothies

And this is a vague area, but boring things don’t have any familiarity.

Familiarity.

Right. The three of us don’t have to be formal with each other, we can just say, “You’re being dumb.”

Uh-huh.

In situations like that, you exchange a lot. You can go back and forth about heavy topics and long-winded matters and stuff about burnt bits of yakisoba. But without familiarity, it’s like, “Sorry if it sounds rude, but...”

Yeah, uh-huh. (laughs)

Yes, that’s right.

That limits what you can pass on. Familiarity increases the flow of traffic. The more you can toss all kinds of things back and forth, the more fruitful it will be. It will spread.

I see.

As for why I think that, I’ve really been into green smoothies recently. You put fruit and vegetables in the mixer - vrrrrrt! - and drink them.

Uh-huh.

Huh.

I may get tired of them before long, but I’ve been drinking them for about a month now.

Mm-hmm.

Oh.

To make those green smoothies, every morning I mix them - vrrrrrt! - and something surprised me. You don’t have to peel kiwi. You do have to cut off the bit on each end, though. I just put them in, skin and all.

With the peel.

Oh...

You can just toss in apples and ginger as they are, too. Supposedly that’s true for oranges, too, but for some reason I peel those.

(laughs)

(laughs)

But disregard oranges. What I want to say is that the feeling when you toss in kiwi, peel and all, and later you get this thick smoothie, that feeling when you’re just tossing stuff in is...familiarity?

(laughs)

Because of that familiar feeling of tossing everything in, I can make a green smoothie every morning. If I had to peel every kiwi and every apple, I probably wouldn’t do it.

(chuckles)

But when I peel an orange, I feel like the green smoothie becomes a stranger.

Uh-huh. (laughs)

It lacks familiarity.

Exactly. And by habit, I take off the white stringy bits from bananas. If I were the mixer, I’d want to say, “I’ll take that, too, you know!”

In other words, if meetings or ideas have an air of familiarity, you can speak unreservedly, and that’ll make it interesting.

Yes, that’s it!

Uh-huh... (laughs)

We’re familiar with each other, so I can say this, but if I knew so little about you that I had to say things like, “Nintendo has always been in Kyoto, hasn’t it?” then we wouldn’t be talking about things like green smoothies!

(laughs)