I’m the last person who should be saying, hey, don’t talk with your hands. If I actually had to say, “Hey, don’t talk with your hands,” I’m sure I couldn’t say it without waving my hands around in circles like a flight attendant or a castaway trying to flag down a rescue plane. In fact, I don’t think I could utter two coherent words if I were forced to sit on my hands.
When you talk with your hands you look like your molesting the air around you, sticking your fingers in holes and around forbidden curves. Often the air around you is the air around me, and my air doesn’t appreciate it.
In the span of a short sentence you always manage to find and fondle an inanimate object with your right hand while your left hand is pinching an invisible nipple in the air in front of my face. I’m not sure why I don’t stop you right away, why I don’t slap your hand away from the trembling, imagined breast. There has to be some provision in the employee handbook that gives me the power to say, hey, look, you make me uncomfortable when you take advantage of the air like that.
