Episode summary
A month of chaos, a homemade spicy-ketchup habit, and a long-overdue phone call. Tayvin on the homophone that trips up learners (ketchup versus catch up) and the friendship gap worth closing.
T.E.A. Time is hosted by English teacher Tayvin Bayless. Read the full transcript.
Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. For those of you listening for the first time, thank you for joining me today. I hope you find something useful to take away from this episode. For my returning listeners, it’s good to have you here again with me. Have you ever reconnected with a friend after a while away? What did you talk about?
I love eggs. They are so versatile. You can cook them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They go well with sweet flavors, spicy flavors, and savory flavors. They’re delicious on their own, but they also serve as an essential ingredient in many of the most delicious baking recipes. They’re also a great source of protein and fat. One of my favorite ways to eat eggs is over a bowl of rice, with cheese and spicy ketchup. I’m pretty sure you can find ketchup all over the world, but for those of you who are unfamiliar, ketchup is a sauce made from a mix of tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, and other spices for flavor. Spicy ketchup is my homemade concoction, made with regular ketchup and a large amount of hot sauce. I make my version with a ratio that would probably alarm a doctor, more hot sauce than ketchup really, just enough ketchup left to keep it from technically being hot sauce. It makes my mouth water just thinking about it.
You may be wondering why I’m talking about ketchup. That’s because it’s today’s phrase. Not ketchup, one word. But catch up. Two words. Catch up.
Before we go any further, let me clear something up: though they may sound the same, ketchup, the sauce, and catch up, the phrase, have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Ketchup most likely traces back to a fermented fish sauce from southern China, carried west by Malay traders centuries before it became the tomato-based sauce beloved by Americans today. “Catch up” started out somewhere completely different: a literal image of catching someone ahead of you and pulling yourself up to where they are, the same pace, the same point in the road. By the mid-1800s, English speakers had stretched that image to cover anything you’d fallen behind on: work, sleep, news, a friendship. Different sources put the exact date a little differently, but they all agree on the general shape of the story: a literal chase that slowly turned into a metaphor for anything you’d left behind.
To catch up simply means to close a gap between where you are and where you would like to be. And today, there was a pretty big gap I wanted to close.
As I’m sure you’re all aware by now, I’ve been rather busy for the last month. We went house hunting in Indiana for a week and a half. Nothing’s decided yet, it’s still very much a maybe, but maybes like that take real time and energy even before anything’s settled. I created a website, podcast, and YouTube channel. That last one alone ate up an entire day I hadn’t planned for, the kind of day where you look up and the sun’s already gone down. I got sick. And I’ve, for the most part, continued teaching at my regular schedule on top of everything else. When it rains, it pours, and this month it absolutely poured. All of that has meant that I haven’t had the time to reach out to one of my closest friends for over a month.
I have a friend named Jarom. If you listened to episode 9, then you already heard a bit about him. Jarom and I met when I moved to Utah. We weren’t fast friends. In fact, for the first few months he really didn’t like me. I know that because he told me so. But we ended up in the same book club together, and soon after that became close friends. We were in musicals together. We made silly home videos together. We were in a band and multiple a cappella groups together. I remember when he first got into beatboxing, making kinda sad fake drum noises and accidentally spitting all over the place. Now he’s doing it professionally. We were also on our high school tennis team together for four years, and were even roommates in college. We’ve shared the ups and downs of adolescence and adulthood together, the triumphs of academic and career success, the heartbreaks and loss of failed relationships. After 16 years, we’re still friends, and I expect that we will continue to be friends for many decades to come.
Since moving to Texas, we’ve kept in frequent contact with each other. We typically talk on the phone about once a week, although there are times when we might talk on the phone 3 or 4 times in one week, especially when there are big and exciting things going on. A new job, a health scare, or just an unexpectedly long layover at an airport with nothing better to do, any of those will get the phone ringing. All of that is to say, while it’s not unprecedented, it is unusual for us to go over a month without talking.
Today, after I finished up my morning and afternoon lessons, I gave Jarom a call. It was great to catch up. I went out to get a soda from the Wendy’s near our apartment, sat down in their dine-in area, and chatted with him for about an hour and a half as I sipped on a variety of endlessly refillable sodas. We didn’t plan out what to talk about. We never do. Somehow we covered his new job search, turning my podcasts to video, the surprising truth of one of the most profitable movies of all time, and a few complaints about American taxes. None of it was important. All of it felt like exactly what I needed.
Let’s go back to that phrase: catch up. The clearest way to think about catch up is to picture a gap, and the phrase as the act of closing it.
Think of a race. One runner pulls ahead, and now there’s literal space between her and the runner behind. Maybe she hears footsteps getting closer behind her, maybe she doesn’t even notice until it’s almost too late, either way, the whole drama of that moment is just two people and the shrinking distance between them. That second runner has to catch up: run faster, close the physical distance, until the gap disappears.
Now picture something less physical. You’ve got a work project that was due yesterday, and you haven’t started it. Maybe your manager has already asked about it twice, in that polite tone that means they’re not actually feeling polite anymore. There’s a gap there too, between where the project actually is and where it’s supposed to be. You catch up on your work, closing that gap one task at a time.
Then there’s the version I lived through today. Jarom and I usually talk weekly. A month of silence between two people who are used to staying close creates its own kind of gap, a relationship gap. So today, we caught up: an hour and a half on the phone, refillable sodas at a Wendy’s, no agenda, just closing the distance.
There’s a fourth version almost everyone’s used too: catch up on sleep. After a few rough nights, you’re behind on something you can’t even see, rest, and the weekend becomes your chance to close that gap as well. You don’t look any different on the outside, but everything takes just a little more effort than it should.
All four of those, the race, the work, the sleep, and the friendship, follow the same shape: there’s a gap, and to catch up is to close it. The only thing that changes is what’s sitting on the other side of it: a runner, a deadline, a few missed hours of rest, or a person you love.
So here’s something to sit with: think about a gap you have right now, something or someone you’ve fallen behind on. You don’t have to close the whole thing today. Grab a drink, sit down with your computer or your phone, and take a small step towards closing that gap.
That’s what today was, for me: closing a gap I didn’t even realize had gotten so wide. Trying your best to be where you want to be, and in the case of relationships, the place you want to be is wherever the other person is. I cherish the chance to catch up with Jarom on our usually weekly phone calls. It’s a moment where I get to be close to someone I’ve shared so much of my life with, even when, especially when, we’re talking about absolutely nothing important. The conversation ends eventually. We hang up, and go back to moving in different directions, him in Utah, me in Texas, both of us busy in our own ways. But I know that soon enough, we’ll catch up again. That’s really all catching up ever is, proof that the gap was never permanent, just temporary, and always worth the trouble of closing.
And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.
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