"Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses." - Proverbs 27:6
"Whoever says to the wicked, 'You are in the right,' will be cursed by peoples, abhorred by nations, but those who rebuke the wicked will have delight, and a good blessing will come upon them. Whoever gives an honest answer kisses the lips." - Proverbs 24:24-26
My summary: speaking up for the truth is better and more loving than staying silent or lying to spare someone's feelings. I remind myself because a few nights ago I delivered some honest and direct feedback to a near-stranger (I'll call her M) about her behavior. For this post, I mingle all the following kinds of things: speaking up for the truth, boundary-setting, criticism, saying, "no" to a request, and honestly saying, "here's how your behavior (negatively) affected me."
I know what it feels like to have someone level with you when you're not used to it. It hurts. It can feel embarrassing and/or make you angry. (I certainly think that turned out to be the case for M. She also told me I had been rude.) Yet I'm glad to have pushed (or to have been pushed) through by being spoken to honestly, because it's made my life more productive and more pleasant. There's freedom and safety when people are respectfully straight-up with you. In my younger and more insecure days, I feared corrective criticism, thinking it meant a loss of love. Turns out the opposite is true. Where criticism is offered in love, it is safe to keep risking failure and become your best self, which is the business of living. When someone thinks you can do better, you're motivated to improve. I may not have been close to M, but my response was a blend of love for both of us: making sure her irritating behavior didn't continue around me (caring for myself) and letting her know how she was being received (seeking the best for her). I won't go into much more detail, but my intentions were all good. I knew there was a risk she'd be hurt, but my desire was to help her, not to harm her, and given the available information, I thought the potential benefit outweighed the risk. I acted knowing that in the course of my life I once hated negative feedback and later felt grateful for it.
Times I've set a boundary or said no to someone despite temptation to say what they wanted to hear created a short time of pain followed by an endless time of relief. Times I said what the other person wanted to hear when it wasn't true or didn't reflect what I wanted created a moment of relief followed by an extended time of feeling trapped in a worsening problem. In retrospect, it's extremely easy to see the better choice, yet in the moment it's still tempting to tell a white lie. But lying to spare feelings creates a second problem. The original one, serious enough you lied, hasn't disappeared, and now that you've lied, you'll either die without having come clean or face the music at some point and have to deal with it in an exaggerated form.
This article pointed me to some romantically-inspired statistics that support this idea. Dr. Hannah Fry of University College London delved into the "mathematics of love," and was surprised to find that, "couples who have a ‘low negativity threshold’ – or in other words complain about things that annoy them readily... are less likely to trouble the divorce courts. Dr. Fry said: ‘I thought that a high threshold of negativity, where you let things go on and let your partner 'be themselves', would be more successful. But the exact opposite is true. The couples who end up doing best have a really low negativity threshold. When things bother them they speak up immediately and don’t let small things spill out of control.’"
She learned about the negativity threshold from the work of Dr. John Gottman, a marriage and family therapist who has conducted extensive research. This particular study lasted for years. "Looking at the negativity threshold helped the researchers predict which couples would get divorced with an impressive 90 per cent accuracy. The researchers compared 'repairing' problems in a marriage to treating a small scratch early, which is better for your health than dealing with it when it has become badly infected."
TV show characters lie to spare feelings every couple of minutes (at least on the shows I watch)! This is probably because such behavior inevitably creates tension and drama, which advances a plot, but in real life it's not funny to have massive relational and professional problems, so I try to use them as cautionary tales instead of models.
The "bring it up when it's small" approach has been effective for me when I manage to use it. I tell myself, "if they're mad, they'll get over it, and if they don't, they might not be in a place to have a healthy relationship right now: good to know." M chose to end contact with me, and when she did I literally said "hallelujah" aloud (don't worry, it was over text, so she didn't hear me). In other words, that outcome was a gain, not a loss. The good options were change or parting ways. Change seemed unlikely but possible. The only negative outcome would be no change and no parting of the ways. Other recent "no"s have protected me from a pushy Facebook friendship and from giving time and money to a cause I couldn't support. These little situations were awkward, but now register as small blips in my memory. I doubt if I'd caved and said "yes" I'd feel the same now.
In case my celebration of saying no sounds negative, I want to emphasize that the reason for saying no is to serve the big yeses in life: yes to living authentically, yes to healthy relationships, yes to free time and rest, yes to self-esteem and self-trust. You can't get to these yeses without some serious no action!
Sunday 26 June 2016
Tuesday 21 June 2016
Ways to Know People
Strange that I can tell which one of my parents is coming up the stairs just by the pattern of footfalls, but they still remain so unknown to me in other ways.
This weekend we three were sitting around my smallish white Ikea table after breakfast. I'd made them some fake Larabars, which I brought out on a tray. My father complained that they were yellow and only tasted one at my insistence. "What flavor is this?" he demanded before taking a bite.
"Try to guess," I replied. "It's something familiar." I thought he liked carrot cake, but I didn't have any specific memory to validate this.
"You're telling me I am familiar with whatever makes these yellow?"
"First of all, they're orange, and second of all, yes."
"He won't be able to guess without more clues," put in my mother.
"Why not?" I asked.
"It's not in his personality."
I had no idea how to connect those dots, but trusted to the accumulated wisdom of their marriage and offered the giveaway clue as he took his second bite. After identifying the flavor, he casually said he didn't like quizzes about food. Clearly, my mom had known that. I didn't know how she knew, or how I didn't know it, since I love to orchestrate moments of discovery and must have asked him to guess other foods before.
I'm not sure how to delineate the different realms of knowing another person, with their unclear borders, but I'm sure that one of them can only be reached in the presence of love. Love as a willingness to put yourself aside and see the other person as they are, not as what you are. I have been arrested in my ability to know a specific family member by a lack of love for them. They're older than me and I think they should know how to treat people better. While the "should" thoughts are present, I'm distracted and miss out on clearly seeing what's already there.
There's physical, everyday knowing of coworkers, teammates, family members, whether you feel you love them or not. It's why I could match the backs of the legs of my cross-country teammates with their faces and somehow knew what everyone's feet looked like on my soccer teams. It allows us to distinguish the voice of each person we know, even when we know so many people.
It takes wisdom to balance a person's self-revelation with your observations. It isn't always true that no one knows you better than you know yourself. Perhaps on balance that is the case, but humans have an incredible capacity for denial (I know this intimately from both sides) or ignorance and have a funhouse-warped view of themselves unless others weigh in honestly. Someone wisely observed that there are things a stranger spots about you in 30 seconds that you could go your whole life not realizing about yourself.
So self-revelation is not the whole picture, but there is a pocket of emotional and inner truth that can only be accessed and shared with the world by its possessor. This means our ability to know another is in some way limited by that person's level of self-awareness. I have known multiple people who could not be connected with on a deeper emotional level than they accessed "on their own time." These were shallow relationships despite plenty of the other forms of knowing. No matter what strategies you employ, no matter how vulnerable you make yourself, connecting (by definition, mutual) can only be as deep as the shallowest or most inhibited person involved.
Lastly, Real People. This is a difficult concept to articulate. Over the years, some friends have reacted to my lengthy explanation with recognition, though they hadn't had words for it. One such friend lived in the same small community as I. We stayed up late one night listing and discussing people and found we had almost complete overlap (though she was more charitable than I) as to who the Real People around us were. I concluded that Real People was a real thing.
What are Real People? I offer these general guidelines:
1. Real People are able to understand how others might feel, and incorporate this into their speech and action. Usually a person who will speak at length about themself without posing any questions to you is not a Real Person.
2. They don't hold you at arm's length. They don't necessarily divulge every detail of their lives, or even much at all in terms of personal plans or information, but they are willing to admit to being happy or sad or hungry and they let you be things too, without automatically trying to talk you out of it.
3. Real People seem more alive and present than other people. They don't automatically try to edit their emotions out of a situation; they understand that emotions are the situation. Would "emotionally intelligent" be interchangeable with "Real"? I think not. A therapist, during a session with a client, would not be a Real Person except in flickers. Counseling is too arm's-length and one-sided, even if the counselor is healthy and emotionally intelligent. Also, I've known and heard of people who could identify emotion in others but not experience it themselves, and that is not how Real People act.
4. The shortest definition I can give is that Real People get it. Understanding this definition is a litmus test of sorts. If despite hearing the descriptions listed above, a lengthy definition of "it" is needed, that can indicate the person might not get it. Perhaps a trait of Real People is comprehending the concept of Real People. This is the least sure guideline on the list, because language use differs from person to person. I've known some Real People from other countries with varying levels of English ability. However, a person's way of using language often reveals if they're a Real Person or not. I can't articulate how--this is one of those aspects that's hardest to explain, so it didn't get its own bullet point. Anyway, if someone's grasp of English is weaker, it can take longer to discover that they're Real, since they may talk like they're not.
A world without Real People would be suffocating and depressing on the level of--and I don't say this lightly--inducing suicidal thoughts. In my childhood, Real People were rare, Real adults almost nonexistent from my vantage, but I was lucky to find some in the form of peers, and they gave me hope that I wasn't alone in the world. I've since become more lenient. I haven't thought about Real People in a while; I no longer divide the world so starkly. I acknowledge the meanness inherent in this term, and of course all people deserve always to be treated as people. Yet not everyone is able or willing to engage authentically with the world and with others. And those who hold back their authentic engagement, I think, can't be truly known.
This weekend we three were sitting around my smallish white Ikea table after breakfast. I'd made them some fake Larabars, which I brought out on a tray. My father complained that they were yellow and only tasted one at my insistence. "What flavor is this?" he demanded before taking a bite.
"Try to guess," I replied. "It's something familiar." I thought he liked carrot cake, but I didn't have any specific memory to validate this.
"You're telling me I am familiar with whatever makes these yellow?"
"First of all, they're orange, and second of all, yes."
"He won't be able to guess without more clues," put in my mother.
"Why not?" I asked.
"It's not in his personality."
I had no idea how to connect those dots, but trusted to the accumulated wisdom of their marriage and offered the giveaway clue as he took his second bite. After identifying the flavor, he casually said he didn't like quizzes about food. Clearly, my mom had known that. I didn't know how she knew, or how I didn't know it, since I love to orchestrate moments of discovery and must have asked him to guess other foods before.
I'm not sure how to delineate the different realms of knowing another person, with their unclear borders, but I'm sure that one of them can only be reached in the presence of love. Love as a willingness to put yourself aside and see the other person as they are, not as what you are. I have been arrested in my ability to know a specific family member by a lack of love for them. They're older than me and I think they should know how to treat people better. While the "should" thoughts are present, I'm distracted and miss out on clearly seeing what's already there.
There's physical, everyday knowing of coworkers, teammates, family members, whether you feel you love them or not. It's why I could match the backs of the legs of my cross-country teammates with their faces and somehow knew what everyone's feet looked like on my soccer teams. It allows us to distinguish the voice of each person we know, even when we know so many people.
It takes wisdom to balance a person's self-revelation with your observations. It isn't always true that no one knows you better than you know yourself. Perhaps on balance that is the case, but humans have an incredible capacity for denial (I know this intimately from both sides) or ignorance and have a funhouse-warped view of themselves unless others weigh in honestly. Someone wisely observed that there are things a stranger spots about you in 30 seconds that you could go your whole life not realizing about yourself.
So self-revelation is not the whole picture, but there is a pocket of emotional and inner truth that can only be accessed and shared with the world by its possessor. This means our ability to know another is in some way limited by that person's level of self-awareness. I have known multiple people who could not be connected with on a deeper emotional level than they accessed "on their own time." These were shallow relationships despite plenty of the other forms of knowing. No matter what strategies you employ, no matter how vulnerable you make yourself, connecting (by definition, mutual) can only be as deep as the shallowest or most inhibited person involved.
Lastly, Real People. This is a difficult concept to articulate. Over the years, some friends have reacted to my lengthy explanation with recognition, though they hadn't had words for it. One such friend lived in the same small community as I. We stayed up late one night listing and discussing people and found we had almost complete overlap (though she was more charitable than I) as to who the Real People around us were. I concluded that Real People was a real thing.
What are Real People? I offer these general guidelines:
1. Real People are able to understand how others might feel, and incorporate this into their speech and action. Usually a person who will speak at length about themself without posing any questions to you is not a Real Person.
2. They don't hold you at arm's length. They don't necessarily divulge every detail of their lives, or even much at all in terms of personal plans or information, but they are willing to admit to being happy or sad or hungry and they let you be things too, without automatically trying to talk you out of it.
3. Real People seem more alive and present than other people. They don't automatically try to edit their emotions out of a situation; they understand that emotions are the situation. Would "emotionally intelligent" be interchangeable with "Real"? I think not. A therapist, during a session with a client, would not be a Real Person except in flickers. Counseling is too arm's-length and one-sided, even if the counselor is healthy and emotionally intelligent. Also, I've known and heard of people who could identify emotion in others but not experience it themselves, and that is not how Real People act.
4. The shortest definition I can give is that Real People get it. Understanding this definition is a litmus test of sorts. If despite hearing the descriptions listed above, a lengthy definition of "it" is needed, that can indicate the person might not get it. Perhaps a trait of Real People is comprehending the concept of Real People. This is the least sure guideline on the list, because language use differs from person to person. I've known some Real People from other countries with varying levels of English ability. However, a person's way of using language often reveals if they're a Real Person or not. I can't articulate how--this is one of those aspects that's hardest to explain, so it didn't get its own bullet point. Anyway, if someone's grasp of English is weaker, it can take longer to discover that they're Real, since they may talk like they're not.
A world without Real People would be suffocating and depressing on the level of--and I don't say this lightly--inducing suicidal thoughts. In my childhood, Real People were rare, Real adults almost nonexistent from my vantage, but I was lucky to find some in the form of peers, and they gave me hope that I wasn't alone in the world. I've since become more lenient. I haven't thought about Real People in a while; I no longer divide the world so starkly. I acknowledge the meanness inherent in this term, and of course all people deserve always to be treated as people. Yet not everyone is able or willing to engage authentically with the world and with others. And those who hold back their authentic engagement, I think, can't be truly known.
Tuesday 14 June 2016
The Zootopian Agenda
Zootopia was fun and funny and entertaining. I recommend it, with a caution that there are some parts that would be super scary for little kids (like, scarier than Ursula getting huge in The Little Mermaid; about on par with that Jekyll and Hyde thing in The Pagemaster--not quite that bad but getting there).
Having said all that, I have to comment on its agenda. The film had a very clear one: that biology is immaterial (excuse the pun) when it comes to living the life you want and achieving your dreams. Spoiler alert: they had a rookie 2-pound bunny consistently outperform experienced 2,000-14,000-pound animals like rhinos, elephants, and cape buffalo in the field of law enforcement. While it is of course not impossible that a bunny could do that, the movie goes beyond "it happened one time and it was special" to emphasizing that it should be this way for all at all times, and biology is nothing but an old-fashioned state of mind that, if abolished, would usher in utopia. Wait, like, what? Do these moviemakers inhabit the physical world like the rest of us?
Because it was a movie, they were able to carefully craft the narrative such that the bunny's job never required her to do something she physically couldn't do; her brain won every battle for her. For instance, she hops off the backs of her classmates in police school to scale a wall she couldn't otherwise have any hope of surmounting. This impresses everyone (the teacher) rather than makes them ask, "What if the test had required her to climb the wall alone? Do ten police officers usually handle the same situation at the same time?"
I accept that movies are often unrealistic. It's damn hard to craft a believable story in a compressed space. Real life is way more boring, so you have to skip lots of parts in a story, which can make it seem "too easy." You have to partially shave off the inconvenient bits of reality to make your point. But this movie's flouting of reality is vast and noteworthy.
Judy the bunny had a lot to offer the police squad, but that doesn't mean that she was equal in every way to all the stronger animals, with no differences, as the movie implied. We all have different strengths and weaknesses (yes, often based on biology), so working as a team we can achieve a lot more. In this case, the police force needed brute strength as well as passion and smarts.
Biology is a real thing. It matters, sometimes on a small scale and sometimes on a large one. It's wonderful to tell children to pursue their dreams, even if they seem far-fetched. But rising above one's circumstances or biology is different than denying or ignoring one's circumstances/biology. Zootopia does the latter, and that's why I'm concerned.
A tragic example of what happens when we tell children they can be and do whatever they want unconditionally, no questions asked, is the story of Jessica Dubroff. She's the 7-year-old whose parents never taught her the word "no." She had 35 hours of flight training when, upon the suggestion of her father, she decided to become the youngest person to fly across the North American continent. Great emphasis was placed by both her parents on the fact that she chose this for herself. Here's a mention of her biology from Time Magazine: the "Federal Aviation Administration... permitted a 4-ft. 2-in., 55-lb. seven-year-old whose feet did not reach the rudder pedals to fly an airplane across the country." Tragically, Jessica didn't reach her goal. She died in a crash that also claimed the lives of her father and her flight instructor. Famously, her mother said she had no regrets, emphasizing her daughter's freedom of choice as an American. Time's take: "Many wondered whether the freedom to pursue personal identity had been pushed too far."
Asserting that biology is a real thing feels oddly risky in our day and age. Then again, maybe it felt that way in 1996 as well (the year of Jessica's flight) and I was not old enough to know it. It reminds me of the Emperor's New Clothes story. It involves a lot of group pretending to arrive at and stay at the conclusion that the physical world doesn't matter, is nothing but an inconvenience on the road to human self-realization. As it relates to Jessica: "The hype of the whole enterprise, in retrospect, seems reckless. Let us tick off the deceptions that everyone involved pretended were true: the trip was Jessica's idea; she was doing it for the joy of flying; she was truly piloting the plane; it was safe; she wasn't scared. For the most part, the public played along with this game, for it is easier not to question the received platitudes." I won't go into the full list of topics these sentences could apply to. I'll simply say that ideologies like the one blatantly promoted in Zootopia push us to pretend certain things are true. It's still easier (and more politically correct) not to question them. May we as adults encourage the children in our lives to participate in reality as it is, even when our aim is to rise above where it finds us now. Even if that means a conversation on the way home from Zootopia.
Having said all that, I have to comment on its agenda. The film had a very clear one: that biology is immaterial (excuse the pun) when it comes to living the life you want and achieving your dreams. Spoiler alert: they had a rookie 2-pound bunny consistently outperform experienced 2,000-14,000-pound animals like rhinos, elephants, and cape buffalo in the field of law enforcement. While it is of course not impossible that a bunny could do that, the movie goes beyond "it happened one time and it was special" to emphasizing that it should be this way for all at all times, and biology is nothing but an old-fashioned state of mind that, if abolished, would usher in utopia. Wait, like, what? Do these moviemakers inhabit the physical world like the rest of us?
Because it was a movie, they were able to carefully craft the narrative such that the bunny's job never required her to do something she physically couldn't do; her brain won every battle for her. For instance, she hops off the backs of her classmates in police school to scale a wall she couldn't otherwise have any hope of surmounting. This impresses everyone (the teacher) rather than makes them ask, "What if the test had required her to climb the wall alone? Do ten police officers usually handle the same situation at the same time?"
I accept that movies are often unrealistic. It's damn hard to craft a believable story in a compressed space. Real life is way more boring, so you have to skip lots of parts in a story, which can make it seem "too easy." You have to partially shave off the inconvenient bits of reality to make your point. But this movie's flouting of reality is vast and noteworthy.
Judy the bunny had a lot to offer the police squad, but that doesn't mean that she was equal in every way to all the stronger animals, with no differences, as the movie implied. We all have different strengths and weaknesses (yes, often based on biology), so working as a team we can achieve a lot more. In this case, the police force needed brute strength as well as passion and smarts.
Biology is a real thing. It matters, sometimes on a small scale and sometimes on a large one. It's wonderful to tell children to pursue their dreams, even if they seem far-fetched. But rising above one's circumstances or biology is different than denying or ignoring one's circumstances/biology. Zootopia does the latter, and that's why I'm concerned.
A tragic example of what happens when we tell children they can be and do whatever they want unconditionally, no questions asked, is the story of Jessica Dubroff. She's the 7-year-old whose parents never taught her the word "no." She had 35 hours of flight training when, upon the suggestion of her father, she decided to become the youngest person to fly across the North American continent. Great emphasis was placed by both her parents on the fact that she chose this for herself. Here's a mention of her biology from Time Magazine: the "Federal Aviation Administration... permitted a 4-ft. 2-in., 55-lb. seven-year-old whose feet did not reach the rudder pedals to fly an airplane across the country." Tragically, Jessica didn't reach her goal. She died in a crash that also claimed the lives of her father and her flight instructor. Famously, her mother said she had no regrets, emphasizing her daughter's freedom of choice as an American. Time's take: "Many wondered whether the freedom to pursue personal identity had been pushed too far."
Saturday 11 June 2016
Writing with your Path
"I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world." - Mother Teresa
I'm not sure how to attribute this cartoon; I've seen it a few places:
The bottom one looks like a recording of a heartbeat. In comparison, the top one looks like the flatline that means death. The top image is boring. The bottom reminds me of the ups and downs of handwriting. Something with personality. A path much more interesting to write, read, and live.
Applied to a sheet of paper to write a story, a pencil might wonder, "why all the back and forth?" not realizing that that is how letters are formed. It would probably feel very jerky and awkward: "Do you even know what you're doing, writer? Why am I being bumped around so much? Can we make this any smoother?" Even in the smoothest cursive, a writer must cross t's and dot i's. Maybe letters are the repeated rituals of our days. Sipping water. Checking a phone. Driving to work. Walking from room to room. Cooking. Eating. Laundry. More cooking. It takes a lot of repeated occurrences of these to make a life, to make a story. It wouldn't be a very long or interesting story if no letter could be reused.
Maybe that left edge of the paper is our fresh start every morning. We are progressing, even when all the early mornings begin to blend and feel the same. Even when we seem to stand still or go backwards, it's always a new starting point; regression isn't possible. Jerky movements are par for the course, not a sign of trouble. Sudden, uncomfortable detours are exactly where they belong, making t's and i's, f's and j's. Life wouldn't make sense without them.
Are we more like pens than pencils? Our actions are indelible. Either way, there's a limit to how much we will write with our lives. Whether by ink or wood, the remainder of our lives shrinks daily, little by little. We are dulled by regular life until something painful occurs that sharpens us once again to press into the paper more. Either way, the writing instrument can't be aware of the full story on its own. It's bumped and jostled around, moving too fast to get a clear picture of its surroundings. A higher perspective is needed to see that something is coming together, even if we're only able to fathom our paragraph in a book too large to comprehend.
I'm not sure how to attribute this cartoon; I've seen it a few places:
The bottom one looks like a recording of a heartbeat. In comparison, the top one looks like the flatline that means death. The top image is boring. The bottom reminds me of the ups and downs of handwriting. Something with personality. A path much more interesting to write, read, and live.
Applied to a sheet of paper to write a story, a pencil might wonder, "why all the back and forth?" not realizing that that is how letters are formed. It would probably feel very jerky and awkward: "Do you even know what you're doing, writer? Why am I being bumped around so much? Can we make this any smoother?" Even in the smoothest cursive, a writer must cross t's and dot i's. Maybe letters are the repeated rituals of our days. Sipping water. Checking a phone. Driving to work. Walking from room to room. Cooking. Eating. Laundry. More cooking. It takes a lot of repeated occurrences of these to make a life, to make a story. It wouldn't be a very long or interesting story if no letter could be reused.
Maybe that left edge of the paper is our fresh start every morning. We are progressing, even when all the early mornings begin to blend and feel the same. Even when we seem to stand still or go backwards, it's always a new starting point; regression isn't possible. Jerky movements are par for the course, not a sign of trouble. Sudden, uncomfortable detours are exactly where they belong, making t's and i's, f's and j's. Life wouldn't make sense without them.
Are we more like pens than pencils? Our actions are indelible. Either way, there's a limit to how much we will write with our lives. Whether by ink or wood, the remainder of our lives shrinks daily, little by little. We are dulled by regular life until something painful occurs that sharpens us once again to press into the paper more. Either way, the writing instrument can't be aware of the full story on its own. It's bumped and jostled around, moving too fast to get a clear picture of its surroundings. A higher perspective is needed to see that something is coming together, even if we're only able to fathom our paragraph in a book too large to comprehend.
Tuesday 7 June 2016
Bench.
Maybe it's all the teen dystopian fiction I've been reading lately, but I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for the present ordinariness. To simply sit in this ten-bench park, free and alive, unhunted, fearlessly showing my unfamous face in public. Exchanging smiles with a cool-looking guy with dyed gray hair over tight gray pants and a gray sweater. Being ignored by an Asian girl with a tough, disengaged face. I project my own memories onto her expression, decide she's in a hurry and perhaps feeling too fragile to risk a smile or warmth going unreturned, so she doesn't even bother with a glance.
A man walks his red bike past me in a whiff of cigarette scent. How do his black jeans stay on? I don't see a belt. They gather around his thighs. Above them I see defined cheeks clad in green fabric festooned with shamrocks. He and his friend respond to a shout-out from the two men who have been talking in the park since before I arrived: Red Basketball Shorts and "I'm Kind of a Big Deal." Irish or his pal, I can't tell which, can't stop to talk because he is going to get a job application, despite the open skepticism of IKBD as to his destination.
I'm not as grateful as I want to be for this life I get to live. I should be daily kissing my dirty floors in thanks that I no longer scrub toilets three-plus times a week. Back when cleaning was my job, my more-than-full-time job, I think I thought I'd be thankful every day to have moved on. Maybe I was, for a week or two.
Red Basketball Shorts and "I'm Kind of a Big Deal" (that's what his black shirt says in red letters) raise their voices, interrupting my thoughts. They're complaining incredulously about some bitch, some situation having to do with coffee or creamer or both.
The Asian girl from earlier walks back from the way she came. I now notice that her hair is long, red and blonde. She wears neat jorts and a khaki backpack nearly the size of her torso.
"I saw her titties once," I don't dare turn my head as I flick my eyes to try to tell who said this. How I wish I could hear them better! Whose titties?
Bees are... pollinating... the clovers in the grass to my left, though whatever's happening down there looks too personal for this park. There's a normal-looking fuzzy yellow one and a littler red guy that almost looks more like a wasp. A teenage bee? A preteen bee in his awkward phase?
RBS and IKBD have turned on rap music and changed their topic of conversation to Jeffrey Dahmer. The louder one of them says, "fuck that," a few times. Fuck what?, I think. Right away, as if he heard me: "Fuck you, bitch." The one with the titties? I chance another glance from behind my sunglasses. I notice that RBS wears royal blue Nike socks over his red-laced black shoes.
A man in a green Subway T-shirt walks by them carrying a bag of food. His pants are black, drooping, his butt fully exposed. Red shiny shorts. Maybe he's glad to be off work. I imagine him stepping into the parking lot at the end of his shift, tugging them down, breathing a sigh of relief and comfort. I don't suppose they let him assemble and serve sandwiches in that condition, but what do I know?
Many people have exercised past me with varying degrees of speed and athletic style. They run because they want to and not because they are being chased, or have to get somewhere quickly.
I peek back at the conversing men. IKBD wears ripped and faded jeans with holes in the knees. He drinks from a can that's mostly covered by a brown paper bag. RBS has on a black backpack and a light baseball cap. He smokes a cigarette. The bench beside them holds another backpack and two more beverages.
As I left my apartment to come here, I thought, "thank God." For what, I didn't have specifically in mind. The fine, fair weather, I suppose. "Thank God." The glorious sunlight. "Thank God." Like a compulsion, the anti-anxiety, the feeling of anxiety disappearing step by step: "Thank God thank God thank God."
Suddenly I find RBS and IKBD have mobilized without my noticing. They make it a quarter of a way around the circle that is the park, now both wearing backpacks. They stop and talk some more. IKBD makes what appears to be an obscene hand gesture, then moves his body in a way that's familiar to me from the days I used to play the Sims. I've never seen a human do this. A full-body side-to-side waggle ending with a hip bump to the side. Continuing forward, he throws his can bag into the trash and the two take off down the sidewalk together.
Now I'm alone at the park, and the sound of the wind is not better than their profanity-laced indecipherable chatter. I didn't have an agenda for my park-time that they could ruin. They enhanced it, really. My objective was to be here, and I am. Just me and the countless cars streaming by. The joggers.
This one's a marathoner unless he stole that Flying Pig shirt. He checks his watch, as I haven't seen any others do. He means business, I invent. He has a bald spot and probably a busy life, some pre-teen-ish kids and a wife. He runs the park's circle and goes back the way he came, as also no one has before him. He doesn't have hours to kill on this, so he's honed his route for maximum efficiency. Tuesdays are quick jaunt runs. He's the anti-me. No one's waiting for me at home. I could've jogged today but actively opted not to so I wouldn't have to wash my hair. My shorts, my athleticism, are hiding under a pretty dress instead of out for all to see.
My secret Spandex protect me from this black metal bench. It's warm enough, but visibly unwashed. Cast by DuMor. Inc. Is that a pun? What else do they make besides benches?
On my way home I pass two mulberry bushes. My rapture at the first one is kind of short-lived as I don't see many ripe berries. The second one is busting with them, and I don't hesitate. For the past two years I have waited too long, figuring they'd be around all summer. Now I realize the window is short. The fingers on my free hand are purple before I remember the keys at the bottom of my off-white tote bag. I walk back the last block with both hands palms up, fingers curled: one full of berries, one just stained. A man calls to me from his van, "Mulberries?" I pause a quick second before replying, "Yeah!" with a smile. I think about the low profile I keep with strange men. Then I realize that is the only word anyone's spoken to me in person all day.
A man walks his red bike past me in a whiff of cigarette scent. How do his black jeans stay on? I don't see a belt. They gather around his thighs. Above them I see defined cheeks clad in green fabric festooned with shamrocks. He and his friend respond to a shout-out from the two men who have been talking in the park since before I arrived: Red Basketball Shorts and "I'm Kind of a Big Deal." Irish or his pal, I can't tell which, can't stop to talk because he is going to get a job application, despite the open skepticism of IKBD as to his destination.
I'm not as grateful as I want to be for this life I get to live. I should be daily kissing my dirty floors in thanks that I no longer scrub toilets three-plus times a week. Back when cleaning was my job, my more-than-full-time job, I think I thought I'd be thankful every day to have moved on. Maybe I was, for a week or two.
Red Basketball Shorts and "I'm Kind of a Big Deal" (that's what his black shirt says in red letters) raise their voices, interrupting my thoughts. They're complaining incredulously about some bitch, some situation having to do with coffee or creamer or both.
The Asian girl from earlier walks back from the way she came. I now notice that her hair is long, red and blonde. She wears neat jorts and a khaki backpack nearly the size of her torso.
"I saw her titties once," I don't dare turn my head as I flick my eyes to try to tell who said this. How I wish I could hear them better! Whose titties?
Bees are... pollinating... the clovers in the grass to my left, though whatever's happening down there looks too personal for this park. There's a normal-looking fuzzy yellow one and a littler red guy that almost looks more like a wasp. A teenage bee? A preteen bee in his awkward phase?
RBS and IKBD have turned on rap music and changed their topic of conversation to Jeffrey Dahmer. The louder one of them says, "fuck that," a few times. Fuck what?, I think. Right away, as if he heard me: "Fuck you, bitch." The one with the titties? I chance another glance from behind my sunglasses. I notice that RBS wears royal blue Nike socks over his red-laced black shoes.
A man in a green Subway T-shirt walks by them carrying a bag of food. His pants are black, drooping, his butt fully exposed. Red shiny shorts. Maybe he's glad to be off work. I imagine him stepping into the parking lot at the end of his shift, tugging them down, breathing a sigh of relief and comfort. I don't suppose they let him assemble and serve sandwiches in that condition, but what do I know?
Many people have exercised past me with varying degrees of speed and athletic style. They run because they want to and not because they are being chased, or have to get somewhere quickly.
I peek back at the conversing men. IKBD wears ripped and faded jeans with holes in the knees. He drinks from a can that's mostly covered by a brown paper bag. RBS has on a black backpack and a light baseball cap. He smokes a cigarette. The bench beside them holds another backpack and two more beverages.
As I left my apartment to come here, I thought, "thank God." For what, I didn't have specifically in mind. The fine, fair weather, I suppose. "Thank God." The glorious sunlight. "Thank God." Like a compulsion, the anti-anxiety, the feeling of anxiety disappearing step by step: "Thank God thank God thank God."
Suddenly I find RBS and IKBD have mobilized without my noticing. They make it a quarter of a way around the circle that is the park, now both wearing backpacks. They stop and talk some more. IKBD makes what appears to be an obscene hand gesture, then moves his body in a way that's familiar to me from the days I used to play the Sims. I've never seen a human do this. A full-body side-to-side waggle ending with a hip bump to the side. Continuing forward, he throws his can bag into the trash and the two take off down the sidewalk together.
Now I'm alone at the park, and the sound of the wind is not better than their profanity-laced indecipherable chatter. I didn't have an agenda for my park-time that they could ruin. They enhanced it, really. My objective was to be here, and I am. Just me and the countless cars streaming by. The joggers.
This one's a marathoner unless he stole that Flying Pig shirt. He checks his watch, as I haven't seen any others do. He means business, I invent. He has a bald spot and probably a busy life, some pre-teen-ish kids and a wife. He runs the park's circle and goes back the way he came, as also no one has before him. He doesn't have hours to kill on this, so he's honed his route for maximum efficiency. Tuesdays are quick jaunt runs. He's the anti-me. No one's waiting for me at home. I could've jogged today but actively opted not to so I wouldn't have to wash my hair. My shorts, my athleticism, are hiding under a pretty dress instead of out for all to see.
My secret Spandex protect me from this black metal bench. It's warm enough, but visibly unwashed. Cast by DuMor. Inc. Is that a pun? What else do they make besides benches?
On my way home I pass two mulberry bushes. My rapture at the first one is kind of short-lived as I don't see many ripe berries. The second one is busting with them, and I don't hesitate. For the past two years I have waited too long, figuring they'd be around all summer. Now I realize the window is short. The fingers on my free hand are purple before I remember the keys at the bottom of my off-white tote bag. I walk back the last block with both hands palms up, fingers curled: one full of berries, one just stained. A man calls to me from his van, "Mulberries?" I pause a quick second before replying, "Yeah!" with a smile. I think about the low profile I keep with strange men. Then I realize that is the only word anyone's spoken to me in person all day.
Friday 3 June 2016
The Truth Takes Time
I collapsed on his white carpet, sweaty from a morning of walking miles in the city sun. I was too hot to do anything else. He approached me with a cold, damp washcloth, which he progressively put on my neck and my back and my legs while I giggled incredulously. He noticed when it got warm and refreshed it with cold water. He washed my feet with it. He brought me cold grapefruit and refilled my water glass when it started getting low. These are facts from years ago. He made me feel more beautiful and amazing than probably anyone else ever has in my life. That's a fact, too. A more relevant and contemporary fact is that this relationship was incredibly unhealthy and it needed to end. This last fact is supported by countless other factual vignettes, darker and deeper, separated from the washcloth in space and time by months or just hours, that are beyond the scope of this post.
I've been reflecting lately that a true statement doesn't exist in isolation. Reality is too large. One sentence can be true, but it cannot be 100 sentences; in each true sentence, 99 facets of fact are absent. "The truth takes time." "The years teach much that the days never know." "A single story is dangerous." A story or truth is on some level misleading if it not properly contextualized. A wise woman I look up to once pointed out, "Until you are in a relationship with anyone, you judge poorly who they are and what they represent."
I came across this idea again in an article sent to me by a friend, titled "How the Invention of the Alphabet Usurped Female Power in Society and Sparked the Rise of Patriarchy in Human Culture." Very worth reading. TL;DR: the alphabet and its resulting communications are direct/pointed, linear, analytical. These in contrast to image, which is simultaneous and holistic in its presentation of ideas. Men's thinking tending toward the former traits and women's toward the latter, women were disadvantaged when literacy arose and became the primary way to organize human thought/truths at a societal level. A pull-out quote: "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse," --Sophocles. This morning I came back to that thought in my own words and decided that's why we have the expression, "it seems too good to be true." I thought of all the new products and foods that have come out in the past few decades and their promises of a more convenient life. They certainly delivered on that promise, but a generation of thinking people have begun to ask, "at what cost?" and intentionally return to slower, messier living for the piles of fringe benefits it brings. Examples: home cooking, making your own [yogurt, almondmilk, bread, etc.], growing gardens, cloth diapers, simple homemade cleaning supplies, etc. Of course I don't want to abolish literacy (I feel like subtracting literacy from it would literally ruin my life), and neither does the author of the article, by any means, but its reminded me to remember the bigger picture.
Reality always contains both shadow and light, so if something looks perfect upfront, your only safe assumption is that you don't yet know it in full. This goes for products as well as people. My story is longer than the first nine sentences of this post, though they could seem to paint a complete picture of a relationship (and I used to think they did). I try to remind myself the whole story whenever I'm tempted to tell only half, calling myself back from the edge when I villainize either of us. A true story can be a long story. It can have lots of sides. The truth takes patience.
I've been reflecting lately that a true statement doesn't exist in isolation. Reality is too large. One sentence can be true, but it cannot be 100 sentences; in each true sentence, 99 facets of fact are absent. "The truth takes time." "The years teach much that the days never know." "A single story is dangerous." A story or truth is on some level misleading if it not properly contextualized. A wise woman I look up to once pointed out, "Until you are in a relationship with anyone, you judge poorly who they are and what they represent."
I came across this idea again in an article sent to me by a friend, titled "How the Invention of the Alphabet Usurped Female Power in Society and Sparked the Rise of Patriarchy in Human Culture." Very worth reading. TL;DR: the alphabet and its resulting communications are direct/pointed, linear, analytical. These in contrast to image, which is simultaneous and holistic in its presentation of ideas. Men's thinking tending toward the former traits and women's toward the latter, women were disadvantaged when literacy arose and became the primary way to organize human thought/truths at a societal level. A pull-out quote: "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse," --Sophocles. This morning I came back to that thought in my own words and decided that's why we have the expression, "it seems too good to be true." I thought of all the new products and foods that have come out in the past few decades and their promises of a more convenient life. They certainly delivered on that promise, but a generation of thinking people have begun to ask, "at what cost?" and intentionally return to slower, messier living for the piles of fringe benefits it brings. Examples: home cooking, making your own [yogurt, almondmilk, bread, etc.], growing gardens, cloth diapers, simple homemade cleaning supplies, etc. Of course I don't want to abolish literacy (I feel like subtracting literacy from it would literally ruin my life), and neither does the author of the article, by any means, but its reminded me to remember the bigger picture.
Reality always contains both shadow and light, so if something looks perfect upfront, your only safe assumption is that you don't yet know it in full. This goes for products as well as people. My story is longer than the first nine sentences of this post, though they could seem to paint a complete picture of a relationship (and I used to think they did). I try to remind myself the whole story whenever I'm tempted to tell only half, calling myself back from the edge when I villainize either of us. A true story can be a long story. It can have lots of sides. The truth takes patience.
Wednesday 1 June 2016
Finding Facebook in Anna Karenina
I'm reading Anna Karenina for the first time and really enjoying it. Tolstoy is so insightful; his writing often resonates with my experience. Anna Karenina was written around 1875, and it contains this passage:
I cannot overstate how contemporary this feels to me as I read it.
Facebook's "trending" section daily overflows with stories of "offendedness." Taking offense is likely a human inevitability, but acceptable offense, as in the quote above, flows in one direction. Only one of the classes is called ridiculous; the other class is simply referred to as "real." The first class clearly offends the second, and if the reverse is true as well, no one cares, because the reigning narratives are written by the second class's point of view and presented as real, unbiased fact. Today as I confirmed the title of the trending section I happened to notice a very current case in point. The first story was about an airline apologizing to a passenger for asking her to cover up on a flight. I clicked through to a slew of outraged responses defending her clothing choice."A woman [should be] modest." What ridiculous, old-fashioned, stupid person would think anyone should be modest? Or would dare ask a person to do anything at all for the sake of those around them? The airplane was publicly called out for "slut-shaming" and will surely think twice before asking passengers to dress in a manner appropriate for being in public.
Not everyone thinks the same way as the "class of real people." Politically, America's largely divided into conservatives and liberals, which may loosely correspond to the classes in the quote, but there are plenty of different ideas out there. More and more, the "real" class's opinions are presented as neutral facts while the opinions of the others are considered outdated, unacceptable, and quite frankly, objectively speaking, ridiculous. Especially in today's Petersburg world of Facebook.
Facebook's "trending" section daily overflows with stories of "offendedness." Taking offense is likely a human inevitability, but acceptable offense, as in the quote above, flows in one direction. Only one of the classes is called ridiculous; the other class is simply referred to as "real." The first class clearly offends the second, and if the reverse is true as well, no one cares, because the reigning narratives are written by the second class's point of view and presented as real, unbiased fact. Today as I confirmed the title of the trending section I happened to notice a very current case in point. The first story was about an airline apologizing to a passenger for asking her to cover up on a flight. I clicked through to a slew of outraged responses defending her clothing choice."A woman [should be] modest." What ridiculous, old-fashioned, stupid person would think anyone should be modest? Or would dare ask a person to do anything at all for the sake of those around them? The airplane was publicly called out for "slut-shaming" and will surely think twice before asking passengers to dress in a manner appropriate for being in public.
Not everyone thinks the same way as the "class of real people." Politically, America's largely divided into conservatives and liberals, which may loosely correspond to the classes in the quote, but there are plenty of different ideas out there. More and more, the "real" class's opinions are presented as neutral facts while the opinions of the others are considered outdated, unacceptable, and quite frankly, objectively speaking, ridiculous. Especially in today's Petersburg world of Facebook.
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