"...yes? Uh—you can tell Cricket that I was not under the impression you had."

"I did tell him I was pretty sure you remembered when I showed up in the proceedings, I think it's metonymy for it being hard to tell how salient you want the whole, ankle bracelet situation, to be? I'm probably missing something but I get mixed messages about whether we want that to come up constantly all the time over phrases like 'your home' or if we do not want that come up constantly all the time over things like whether it would be appropriate to worry about my feelings about you wanting to be by yourself in it."

Blink. 

Blink blink. 

"Uh."

Blink. 

"Can the answer be 'yes'?"

"...it wasn't a yes or no question?"

"Sorry, I mean, uh. It seemed to me like your preferred answer is that it should come up never so I guess that's where I thought I was going now but I'm confused by your confusion?"

"I can work with either? - which is not me being hypervigilant about managing my own emotions, just a completely normal amount of vigilant about that."

"...sure, you can work with either, I can work with either. Is 'can work with' the parameter we'll be using, then?"

"Man, I try to save my social capital for things that matter to me somewhat more than whether we bring it up or work around it, like talking to me when I'm backlashed. In a perfect world it would come up whenever it came up and we would simply be normal about it but that's kind of hard to operationalize."

"...you're backlashed right now."

"And you're talking to me! Which I appreciate and will continue to appreciate basically whatever the content might be."

"So I'm confused by what you mean by 'save social capital'."

"If you did not want to talk to me I would spend some social capital with some other person on the phone! I have spent lo these many years accumulating the ability to do this. I try not to be too demanding of people and spread it out among lots of them and stuff and to this end do not try too hard to get my way about things of less urgency."

"...you... model yourself as spending social capital when you express this kind of preference to me?" What kind of insanity...?

"I mean, or worse, considering the thing that we might or might not choose to never mention again."

Is he making fun of Jaeha? Does he actually not get it?

"Regardless of whether we mention it it's still—true? And an immediate consequence of it being true is that the concept of you having social capital that you can meaningfully spend related to me is kind of insane?"

"When I talk about social capital I'm thinking about - patience and goodwill, not about - forms of cooperativeness that do not accompany those things."

"That is what I had in mind also."

"You are... presumably... capable of experiencing patience and goodwill or of conversely not experiencing those things, so I might have more or less of them in the bank with you at any given time?"

"I'm really not sure what you want me to say, here."

"I don't have a script for you to follow? I'm just confused by the idea that it's incoherent that I would worry about spending down your patience and goodwill."

He's really gonna make Jaeha say it, huh.

"...Traceless, you could send me to prison with a phone call. I will be trying to please you regardless of whether you have—patience and goodwill in the bank with me."

"- yes but I don't suck as a person so I would like to exceed the standard of 'on balance preferable to prison probably'."

"Sure, that's not very hard, but it doesn't really go through a—gauge of how much patience and goodwill I feel. You're not gonna, what, ask me one too many favours and then I'll be like, yeah I guess prison is better actually?"

"Right, my desire to exceed that standard is not about the fact that otherwise you'll leave."

"—I get that. But 'being pleasant to be around' and 'spending some social resource' are entirely different things? And, you know, if there is a resource to be spent, then being unpleasant spends it, sure, but—what is the consequence you're envisioning, here, if you run low on patience and goodwill in the Jaeha bank? What would you be using them for otherwise?"