Embracing the Bittersweet Joy of Impermanence

Nothing particularly profound today, just a compilation of recent thoughts, words, and images.

The natural light from the sun in the last part of each day is when light and color are often their most vivid. The angle through the atmosphere combined with longer shadows have led photographers and artists to call it "the magic hour."

The sunlight near the end of the year seems to be the most wonderful. All the more precious for its growing rarity combined with the abundance of autumn leaves and other fall colors make it often feel like the magic season.

I recently shared this picture with the following caption.

October 22 . . . 85 degrees . . . October 22 . . . 85 degrees . . . yes, that's where we are, right in the middle of this picture, stuck between seasons . . . 

Then shared it again on a work chat in response to the teambuilding question, Are you enjoying any fall or Halloween books, TV shows, or movies right now? followed by:

I don't really go for proper horror, which is why I'm posting pictures, because I'm not consuming anything for the season right now. However, I do like things dark and twisty of a couple of different varieties, which I'll offer in two links:

• Creepy and unsettling - Book List: What Did I Just Read? - I seem to enjoy books that fill me with confusion and existential dread - just like life, except the comfort of pretend. Unusual or experimental writing, unreliable narrators or narrators in unreliable situations, strange and off-kilter or simply unique. Often creepy. These are some I have particularly enjoyed.
• True horror - Book: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming - It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible.

But to me fall is all about embracing the bittersweet joy of cool weather, encroaching darkness, and the ephemeral beauty all around, a sad happiness on the threshold of the stark coldness of winter. Life made all the sweeter due to being confronted by its impermanence. It has an ambivalent, liminal quality. And I love it.

 

It is a season best spent outside.

“To love nature and to hate humanity is illogical. Humanity is part of the whole. To truly love the world is also to love human ingenuity and playfulness. Nature does not need to be cleansed of human artifacts to be beautiful or coherent. Yes, we should be less greedy, untidy, wasteful, and shortsighted. But let us not turn responsibility into self-hatred. Our biggest failing is, after all, lack of compassion for the world. Including ourselves.”

“We crave rich variegations of light. Too much time in one ambience, and we long for something new. Perhaps this explains the sensory ennui of those who live under unchanging skies. The monotony of blank sunny skies or of an endless cloud ceiling deprives us of the visual diversity we desire.”

 -- from The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell

A screenshot of thumbnails of the pictures I took during my hike at the park on Monday:

[Younger, age 9] walks into the room, angry and exasperated.

"Is [Older, age 10] pushing all of your buttons?"

"I don't have any buttons to push. I have levers to flick. And [Older] is flicking all of them."

What results when you have parents with pedantic, contrarian, sarcastic tendencies. It comes out even in the midst of fighting with your brother while being nagged by your parents to stop fighting and get ready for school. Mornings at our house.

In place of Rock, Paper, Scissors, [Younger] has created Slash-and-Burn, Voodoo Magic, Horns based on his favorite BattleBots machines. Sawblaze beats Minotaur; Minotaur beats Witch Doctor; Witch Doctor beats Sawblaze.

I like this article.

What Adults Forget About Friendship

Many adults do away with the unhurried hangouts and imaginative play that make youthful friendships so vibrant. Though friendships naturally evolve as we grow up, they don’t need to lose that vitality. Continuing to embrace a childlike approach to friendship into adulthood can make for connections that are essentially ageless. . . . 

Kids’ time together is often dedicated to play. For many children, all they need to entertain themselves is shared space, the right companions, and their imagination. But this is not just a pastime; it’s a vulnerable way to connect with someone, Jeffrey Parker, a psychology professor at the University of Alabama, told me. After analyzing more than a decade’s worth of recorded conversations between children and their friends, Parker noticed a common dynamic: If one kid introduces an unexpected idea, the other must riff to make it work. Doing this with a new playmate is a “high-risk strategy”—maybe they’ll shut you down—but when your ideas mesh, you get to invent something new together.

Spending so much creative time together can produce intense ties. . . . 

Kids’ overarching approach to friendship: Keep one another company for large stretches of time without a preset agenda. . . . 

Parker, the psychology professor, told me he’d find it hard to call up a friend and say “Wanna go throw some stones in the river?” because he senses that adult get-togethers should have a clear purpose. “We know what to expect of something like a dinner party,” Liming said. But, especially with someone new, just hanging out is more confusing. “There’s this open feeling about, well, how long is it going to take? And what are we going to do? And what am I supposed to wear?”

This pursuit of efficiency and the safety of following norms can come at the cost of pleasure. Liming told me that an efficiency mindset risks making friendships feel transactional, as if each meeting should be “worth it.” But squeezing hangouts into short, infrequent slots is unlikely to feel fulfilling. If you haven’t seen each other in a while, focusing on catching up is natural. Ticking through life’s headlines, however, can feel like exchanging memos, whereas joint adventures create memories—the foundation of close friendship. As the sociologist Eric Klinenberg told The Atlantic, “You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time.”

Even if more adults were willing to ask friends to skip rocks or loll on the couch, our grown-up minds can sap the improvisational fun from these gatherings. To enjoy the rewards of play, you have to take risks, but adults are often too consumed by self-consciousness to run with someone’s silly idea, let alone suggest one. . . . 

This summer, adults flocked to theaters dressed in suits and fedoras or in fluorescent outfits for doubleheader screenings of Barbie and Oppenheimer. It’s a recent, popular example of adults embracing fun with friends, though there are plenty of others, whether Dungeons and Dragons groups or elaborate fantasy-football leagues. Clearly, adults don’t completely stop creatively connecting with friends. The challenge lies in foregrounding play and inefficiency, making these features of hanging out more common.

Of course, I appreciate the call-out for D&D.

Pursuit of efficiency and the safety of following norms can come at the cost of pleasure.

[Younger] told me the other night that he hates Einstein because Einstein is so overrated and gets solo credit for all these ideas that were joint projects, and everyone else who contributed gets forgotten.

He also told me he already knows everything in this book due to his nightly habit of watching episodes of PBS's Nova.

A thought of my own.

The Subatomic world is Movement and Space

Subatomic . . .  a world smaller than an Atom

Molecules are made of Atoms

Cells are made of Molecules

All Living Beings are made of Cells

Bacteria are the smallest Living Beings

Bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea, and other microorganisms are part of the microbiome of the Human Body

Humans are part of the microbiome of the Earth

The Earth is part of the microbiome of the Milky Way Galaxy

The Galaxy is part of the microbiome of the Universe

The Universe is Movement and Space

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Galagog

n. the state of being simultaneously entranced and unsettled by the vastness of the cosmos, which makes your deepest concerns feel laughably quaint, yet vanishingly rare.

From galaxy, a gravitationally bound system of millions of stars + agog, awestruck. Pronounced “gal-uh-gawg.”

 . . . think globally, act locally?

On my drive to school a recent morning with the boys:

[Older]: "Ugh, our neighbor put his big 'Trump' banner back up."

Me: "Yeah, he did, and that's okay. We want to be able to put up the signs we like, so we want him to be able to put up the signs he likes."

[Older]: "What matters is that everyone has the right to have their own beliefs, even if we don't like them."

Me: "Exactly. We want people to be allowed to be different than us. That's what's most important."

It was interesting working the main desk at the library on Saturday, watching a multitude of people come in for our first day as an advanced voting location. Many were eager and friendly, excited for the opportunity to vote. Some were tentative and unsure, like they were anxious about the experience. And some looked like they were braced for a fight, ready to assert themselves in the face of expected hostility. Needless to say, all they encountered was welcoming hospitality.

Speaking of libraries and welcoming hospitality . . . 

Despite Leaner Times, Wichita Stays the Course on Libraries

After a period in which libraries were labeled as obsolete, there’s growing agreement that they play a vital role in the community. 

Past budget cuts led to closures and the consolidation of library services, but as libraries continue to evolve, city leaders have recognized the vital role that they play. 

As more people start to see them as essential for education, public safety and access to information, libraries are seeing an influx of capital spending. The recent push to complete the Wichita Public Library’s long-term building plans underscores this shift. . . . 

Along with each budget document, the City Council adopts a Capital Improvement Program, laying out infrastructure goals for the next decade. This year’s plan put a focus on crime prevention, including how libraries can improve community health.

Quality of life improvements provided by places such as the library can help decrease crime, according to the Capital Improvement Plan. 

A study by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency based in Washington, found libraries are “positively associated with multiple dimensions of social well-being – in particular, community health, school effectiveness, institutional connection and cultural opportunity.”

Wichita libraries have embraced their status as a “third place,” a space outside of work or home.  Third places have been recognized as boosting community health and reducing loneliness in young adults. 

“What I love about what’s happening with the libraries is they’re trying to expand who they can reach and how they can improve safety in the community,” Hirsh says. “Libraries can be used to help people that might be seeing cuts in other parts of their lives.”

Connection.

Speaking of the looming presidential election, I shared this the other day on Facebook.

"A Vast and Permanent Underclass"

In his book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Colin Woodward writes about the founding of the American colonies that became the southern states and the philosophies driving their economic systems, a heritage we still see clearly today:

"From the outset this was a society of a few haves and a great many have-nots. At the top a small cadre of increasingly wealthy plantation owners quickly came to dominate the economic and political affairs of the colony. At the bottom was an army of bound laborers who were effectively without political rights; they were expected to do as they were told and could be subjected to corporal punishment if they did not. It was a pattern that would carry on well into the twentieth century. . . . 

"Whether highborn or self-made, the great planters had an extremely conservative vision for the future of their new country: they wished to re-create the genteel manor life of rural England in the New World. . . . 

"The Greek and Roman political philosophy embraced by Tidewater gentry assumed the opposite: most humans were born into bondage. Liberty was something that was granted and was thus a privilege, not a right. Some people were permitted many liberties, others had very few, and many had none at all. The Roman republic was one in which only a handful of people had the full privileges of speech (senators, magistrates), a minority had the right to vote on what their superiors had decided (citizens), and most people had no say at all (slaves). Liberties were valuable because most people did not have them and were thought meaningless without the presence of a hierarchy. For the Greeks and Romans there was no contradiction between republicanism and slavery, liberty and bondage. This was the political philosophy embraced and jealously guarded by Tidewater’s leaders, whose highborn families saw themselves as descendants not of the “common” Anglo-Saxons, but rather of their aristocratic Norman conquerors. It was a philosophical divide with racial overtones and one that would later drive American’s nations into all-out war with one another. . . .

"While they were passionate in defending their liberties, it would never have occurred to them that those liberties might be shared with their subjects. "I am an aristocrat," Virginian John Randolph would explain decades after the American Revolution. "I love liberty; I hate equality."

"While the gentry enjoyed ever-greater liberties—including leisure (liberty from work) and independence (liberty from the control of others)—those at the bottom of the hierarchy had progressively fewer. Tidewater’s semifeudal model required a vast and permanent underclass to play the role of serfs, on whose toil the entire system depended."

See more at America, Know Thyself (Part 1 of 3)

I was reminded of that this morning reading the latest from Heather Cox Richardson about the competing economic visions of the two candidates running for president. She delves into the history of the country, how things developed after the founding that Woodward describes:

"Trump has indicated his determination to take the nation’s economy back to that of the 1890s, back to a time when capital was concentrated among a few industrialists and financiers. This world fits the idea of modern Republicans that the government should work to protect the economic power of those on the “supply side” of the economy with the expectation that they will be able to invest more efficiently in the market than if they were regulated by government or their money taken by taxation. 

"Trump has said he thinks the word “tariff” is as beautiful as “love” or “faith” and has frequently praised President William McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, for leading the U.S. to become, he says, the wealthiest it ever was. Trump attributes that wealth to tariffs, but unlike leaders in the 1890s, Trump refuses to acknowledge that tariffs do not bring in money from other countries. The cost of tariffs is borne by American consumers. 

"The industrialists and Republican lawmakers who pushed high tariffs in the 1890s were quite open that tariffs are a tax on ordinary Americans. In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World complained about the McKinley Tariff that raised average tariffs to 49.5%. “Under the McKinley Act the people are paying taxes of nearly $20,000,000 and a much larger sum in bounties to Carnegie, Phipps & Co., and their fellows, for the alleged purpose of benefiting the wage-earners,” it wrote, even as the powerful companies slashed wages.

"Today, on CNBC’s Squawk Box, senior economics reporter Steve Liesman noted that the conservative American Enterprise Institute has called out Trump’s proposed tariffs as a tax hike on American consumers of as much as $3.9 trillion. 

"Together with Trump’s promise to make deep cuts or even to end income taxes on the wealthy and corporations, his economic plan will dramatically shift the burden of supporting the country from the very wealthy to average Americans, precisely the way the U.S. economy worked until 1913, when the revenue act of that year lowered tariffs and replaced the lost income with an income tax."

Letters from an American: October 22, 2024

I'm trying not to think about the election because it induces crippling anxiety, so I'll say no more for now.

I don't remember what prompted the thought, but the other day I told someone one of the things that confirms I'm truly white is that the cologne I've found meshes best with my body's natural chemistry is the scent Banana Republic: Classic. The company whose very name says "these are the clothes and items of colonialism."

I recently enjoyed reading Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe. Here's my review.

I'm not arguing for some facile idea of "positive images," though such a desire, not mine, certainly does index power. I am arguing for reading and watching critically, acknowledging the desire to see Black lives in all their complexity, and knowing the complex representational terrains in which we move and on which we struggle. (from Note 58)

It's only in recent years that the word "normalize" has become a part of my vocabulary as its use has trended in media and discourse. "Normalize" as in "to allow or encourage (something considered extreme or taboo) to become viewed as normal" (Merriam-Webster) and "to start to consider something as normal, or to make something start to be considered as normal" (Cambridge Dictionary). I'm pretty sure Sharpe never uses the word "normalize" in this book, but it in many ways describes her endeavor in writing it.

I've often heard The Cosby Show, that 80s staple I grew up on, described as significant because it was revolutionary in its mainstream portrayal of a Black family as, well, mainstream. Its representation of "Blackness" worked to "normalize" Blackness. It showed that "Black people" were just like the rest of us.

However.

White people are always extended grace--and the grammar of the profoundly human. They are the human. (from Note 61)

With one little phrase, I just negated any framing of Black as normal. "Just like the rest of us." Us. My phrasing indicates that "us" does not include Black people. The default human, the universal "normal," is white. Black is somehow different. Other. Lesser.

In this collection of 248 "notes," Sharpe explores that dynamic. Exposes all the ways, like my turn of phrase, that our cultures makes Blackness different, other, and lesser. Makes Blackness not ordinary. And illustrates ordinary life as a Black person living in such a culture. It is a book about representation and perception and cultural power. How racism rests in all the little, everyday, "ordinary" moments that "otherize" Blackness.

Note 190
A positioning tool

It is July 2020, many long months into the pandemic, and in the US already over 100,000 people have died.

My friend S and her family are in Western Massachusetts. S tells me that she is working in her garden when a young whiteman approaches her. He is clearly lost. He wants directions. But white supremacy is gyrocompass. White supremacy is GPS. Whiteness is property. So first, he asks her if the house belongs to her.

Some of the "notes" are anecdotes like this one. Many are recollections from Sharpe's life. Some are a single sentence while others are academic essays that go for pages; see the excellent Beauty Is a Method for a prime example. Prominent throughout is art in its many forms, written and visual and performing and more. Who they represent. How they represent. Who they assume is the generic, "ordinary" audience--and, necessarily, who is not. Who do these works intend "us" to identify with? Who do they "normalize?"

Note 25

Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure.

Because those enterprises assume the perspective of the perpetrators and inherently reinforce the victims as "other." And because victims often experience them as reliving the trauma.

Note 43
We are called to different things

What if the project that white people took up was to locate each of the white people who appear in the crowds of those lynchings, those who posed for photographs and those others who appear in the background? What if their project was to identify them and their families and to link their present circumstances to the before of those photographs and the after? That is, what if the work was to draw a line or to map new or continued wealth, accumulation of property and status, access to education and health to those mass murders--a Legacy of Lynching Participants database--that would join the past and the present in the same ways that the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project laid bare the "slave owners"--their strategies of accumulation of wealth and power, evasion and disavowal, that have continued into the present.

The demand is uneven. We are called to different things.

What if white visitors to a memorial to the victims of lynchings were met with the enlarged photographs of faces of those white people who were participant in and witness to that terror then and now?

What if they had to face themselves?

Might that not be a different endeavor? Might that not hit a different note?

Each note offers its own bit of insight and analysis, shares perspective and a bit of the experience of being Black. Together they accumulate and layer and build into something extraordinary.

Note 242

I write these ordinary things to detail the everyday sonic and haptic vocabularies of living life under these brutal regimes.

Extraordinary.

And a few extra quotes I marked, because, well, you know.

There was a time when I would answer people's questions largely with quotations from plays, novels, poems, and nonfiction works. What I wanted to say had already been said and said better than I could have hoped to say it myself.

-----

There are many books that produced in me a feeling I needed or wanted to feel. Some of them are books that I love, and others are not. But love is beside the point. What these books share is that they produced in me the feeling that I needed.

-----

Books--poetry, fiction, nonfiction, theory, memoir, biography, mysteries, plays--have always helped me locate myself, tethered me, helped me to make sense of the world and to act in it. I know that books have saved me. By which I mean that books always give me a place to land in difficult times. They show me Black worlds of making and possibility.

Gotta love the book love.

Finally, a poem.

Eric Kocher

PASSENGER DECK

Now we are on the ferry we flew to drive to,

Its enormous engines vibrating

 

Every molecule, spreading out,

A family of ducks getting out of the way.

 

My wife claims there are fish jumping,

But every time I look up

 

They are gone, or she is lying.

I have become suspicious of my pursuit

 

Of remoteness, of seeking out places far away

And difficult to get to,

 

Places with fewer people, more trees.

I am suspicious

 

Because I know it’s at least somewhat

Insincere, that I very deeply need other people

 

Around me to feel safe, to feel important,

That part of my departure is the performance

 

Of departure, the making of the image of one.

This departure is certainly

 

Not about being alone.

My wife and I are here as a way of being

 

Even more together than we normally are,

Or maybe being together

 

In a way that we used to be all the time

Before our daughter was born.

 

Her birth made us closer, for sure,

It made our little story seem

 

Impossibly big and important,

Like we were conducting the soundtrack

 

To our daughter’s grand entrance

To being with other people, to being with herself.

 

But it also made certain parts of ourselves

And each other seem far away,

 

Like one of those distant places

I am always interested in going.

 

I tell my wife that, of all the places

On the planet, the place I want most to be

 

Is the North Pole, that I feel the Arctic calling me

As if from inside of a dream.

 

A smaller boat passes by and I’m surprised

When we are unmoved

 

By its little wake, that the waves,

Regardless of their size,

 

Should rock us, however gently.

But now we are on this gigantic boat

 

Looking for those people we used to be,

Trying to remember them without erasing

 

Each other, without erasing

The people that they have become

 

And all the ways they are growing still.

We also came here looking for whales,

 

I should add, that we bought tickets from people

Who promised we would see them.

 

And now that we are out here looking

For ourselves among them,

 

I have no idea why. Or, maybe,

I’m worried what might happen if they see me.

 

—from Sky Mall

2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

Looking for those people we used to be, trying to remember them without erasing each other, without erasing the people that they have become, and all the ways they are growing still.

Hide Armor

Sometimes I'll glance down from an engaging activity to notice with surprise a trail of blood on my arm or leg, no memory of hurting myself.

Or perhaps I'll first notice a smear of blood on something I've touched before then realizing I've been bleeding. Maybe I'll find a bruise with no knowledge of the injury that must have occurred a few days prior.

I'm not a particularly careful person. I've come to expect some measure of bumping into things as I navigate tight spaces, of getting scratched as I brush against bushes and plants and artificial environments. It's so commonplace I don't notice when it happens. Small injuries so normal I tune them out, ignore the bits of pain and discomfort enough they never reach my awareness. Though I haven't made a conscious choice to be oblivious, I am.

Many sensations I might experience, I don't.

In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed. . . . Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don't hurt?¹

Having no sense of smell is often a blessing.

I don't mind changing diapers. (Can't tell when a diaper needs changing, but can easily get rid of it once alerted to the need.) I'm happy to be stuck with litter box duty. (Not aware that our house smells disgustingly of cat, but I'll clean up after the felines.) Taking out the trash is no big deal. (Have to check with others to determine whether something is still safely food or has aged into waste, but once needed I'll toss it without issue.)

My wife is a supertaster. She needs her food flavors subtle and soft, and many common foods are too much for her. The ability impacts her olfactory sense as well. Her nose knows. The slightest odors overwhelm her.

Even as a child, before I knew what other options existed, I knew I found the food of my central plains farm communities boring and bland. The few ethnic restaurants we'd sporadically sample thrilled me. Once I discovered Tabasco sauce, I begged my mom to always have some in stock. I need my flavors strong and robust. Even when I could still smell them. I wanted all the flavors, as vibrantly as possible.

A college roommate once told me he could tell early on a date when he was going to "get lucky" because he could smell his date's arousal. That is an experience I've never known. I had a sense of smell, just not that sensitive. I used to know when a skunk was near. Couldn't stand the smell of mildew. Found trips to the landfill awful.

How quickly each feeling starts to fade as you recalibrate your expectations. Maybe that’s why your childhood could feel so intense, because you were steadily burning your way through a roster of firsts. The more you repeat an experience, the less you feel its impact, almost as if your brain is gradually tuning out the world.²

Growing up on the plains of Kansas, we took most of our vacations in the mountains of Colorado. That destination was close enough to reach with a one-day drive and provided a complete change of environment and scenery. I have vivid memories of first stepping out of the car after arriving and inhaling, savoring the smell. That smell was how I knew I was somewhere else. The crisp, clean, less humid air; the coniferous trees and the aspens; the altitude--I'm not entirely sure what exactly created that scent I experienced nowhere else, but it was pervasive and ubiquitous. It was an emotion. It was the smell of awe, grandeur, vacation, relaxation, escape. Elsewhere. Of magic.

I don't know what magic smells like anymore.

I could swim before I could walk. I jumped off the high-dive at 18 months. My parents directed a wilderness camp each summer, and nearly every day included swimming in the camp pool. The water was a second home for me. I competed on swim team through the end of high school and enjoyed swimming in triathlons as a pre-parenting adult.

Bleach has always been one of my favorite smells. A laundry room. Bathroom cleaners. They offer the scent of chlorinated swimming pools. They smell like the refreshment of diving into a cool pool on a hot, sunny day. Of floating weightless, graceful, eyes and ears dampened to fully focus on skin and muscles and proprioception. It is the happiest of smells.

Swimming pools aren't quite so much my happy place as they used to be.

Sometimes you reach a point when you can’t feel anything at all, just a ringing in your ears.²

My parents and doctors always said our family had "hay fever." We sniffled and sneezed, had itchy eyes, kept tissues handy. It was a fact of life. As an adult, I was diagnosed in more technical language with chronic sinusitis and allergic rhinitis and similar. I've had more sinus infections than I can count. Too many courses of antibiotics. In recent years things have improved due to allergy shots and two sinus surgeries, but too late to save my sense of smell. It gradually faded until there was nothing left.

The "smell disorder" of the complete inability to detect odors is Anosmia. The absence of the sense of smell.

I haven't smelled anything in nearly fifteen years.

The world is more dull than it used to be. Less vivid. Less emotional. I think, perhaps, less joyful.

Less.

It's easier now to be detached.

Allergy shots are more properly known as allergen immunotherapy, also known as desensitization or hypo-sensitization. Immunotherapy involves exposing people to larger and larger amounts of allergens in an attempt to change the immune system's response.³

Desensitization.

You wish you could look around with fresh eyes, and feel things just as powerfully as you did when you felt them for the first time.²

I reference my Mennonite heritage somewhat frequently on this blog, as that background has strongly shaped who I am. (See here for a good example.) One of the veins of belief I would describe--though perhaps not articulate completely according dogma--is the calling to be a community apart. Based in the wish for life to be "on Earth as it is in Heaven," yet acknowledging the immensity of such a task. It starts with creating smaller pockets of faithful communities instead of engaging the main power structures. It is a withdrawal from common society, changing oneself and immediate surroundings instead of all of the earth. Creating new ways of being outside of the system, not reforming the system.

Last post I referenced an article, and I think this post has emerged out of further contemplation on it. Here's the relevant portion of the post:

This article resonates, both because it reflects my personal values but also takes the time to validate the authenticity and allure of Quietism, which I often feel on the verge of.

Everyday Philosophy: Is It Better to Debate People or Shrug and Drink Wine?

At its core, quietism means retreating from the active pursuit of truth or intellectual engagement, promoting instead a kind of serene acceptance of the world as it is. Quietism walks the thin line between apathy and calm. It still cares about the world and its people but tends to let everyone go their own way, focusing only on meditation, contemplation, and quietude. . . . 

It might be a philosopher’s fancy, but the entire point of discussing ideas with other people is to clarify those ideas and, we hope, move one step closer to something like the truth.

Your convictions are fine, and you might feel noble, but it is not the philosopher’s quest. Quietism is a form of capitulation. It’s giving up on working together to improve our ideas. . . . 

However calm and appealing the gallic shrug of quietism might seem, I do believe that we have to still engage with other people about almost all matters. This isn’t to say that we should always be looking for a debate, but I think we need to have them sometimes.

I take a "don't sweat the small stuff" and "pick your battles approach," responding to many things with quietism so I have the energy and capacity to properly engage with the really important things.

I constantly deliberate whether the detachment I aim for is a way of maintaining healthy perspective on the importance of events and my ability to influence them or if it is capitulation, a world-avoiding, life-sapping apathy.

Quietism means retreating from the active pursuit of truth or intellectual engagement, promoting instead a kind of serene acceptance of the world as it is. Quietism walks the thin line between apathy and calm. It still cares about the world and its people but tends to let everyone go their own way, focusing only on meditation, contemplation, and quietude.⁴

Often I'm not sure of the difference between serenity and apathy.

Is the ability to change diapers without sensory overload and instinctual disgust worth the loss of joy at smelling Colorado and chlorine?

The kaleidoscope of your emotions spun wildly throughout the day, all of it intense.²

Does dampened outrage and anxiety mean dampened joy and meaning?

It is said of thrill seekers, those who sky dive and bungee jump, drive too fast and look for constant opportunities for adrenaline rush, that they crave overstimulation in response to desensitization. They are non-tasters, opposite of supertasters, and need extremes to feel anything.

I regularly write about my constant quest to find magic in the mundane, awe in the everyday. (See here for a recent example, and here.) I don't just write about it, I seek it. I crave it. A longing to find beauty and connection. To find stimulation. To feel awe. To feel.

To feel.

What does it mean to feel?

Hide armor is made from the tanned skin of particularly thick-hided beasts, stitched with either multiple overlapping layers of crude leather or exterior pieces of leather stuffed with padding or fur.⁵

Recently I was asked to provide an introduction to myself for a new team at work. A part of what I offered, descriptors not part of the biographical details, was:

Idealistic

Cynical

Unintentionally aloof

Available

Unintentionally aloof.

I'm happy with my own company, and I've never been much for small talk. I often struggle to make conversation. Lately it's been bothering me, not so much because I worry about awkwardness and lack of interaction with others, but because my internal dialogue seems to be similarly lacking. I not only struggle for things to say to others, but to myself. My thoughts are quieter, and I'm not sure if that is a sign of serenity and contentment or of boredom and empty-headedness. Perhaps I've become completely withdrawn and vacant.

You understood that this intensity wasn’t going to last.²

Perhaps my hide has grown too thick, if I can't even tell when I'm bleeding.

I don't want to be aloof from the experience of life.

Some words from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Etterath

n. the feeling of emptiness after a long and arduous process is finally complete—having finished school, recovered from surgery, or gone home at the end of your wedding—which leaves you relieved that it’s over but missing the stress that organized your life into a mission.

Norwegian etter, after + råtne, decay. Pronounced “et-er-rath.”

-----

Yu Yi

The Longing To Feel Things Intensely Again

The first note is always the loudest. The conductor snaps their baton, the strings slash their bows, and the symphony thunders to life before settling down into a reverberating hum.

So it is with every new experience. How quickly each feeling starts to fade as you recalibrate your expectations. Maybe that’s why your childhood could feel so intense, because you were steadily burning your way through a roster of firsts. The more you repeat an experience, the less you feel its impact, almost as if your brain is gradually tuning out the world.

But sometimes you reach a point when you can’t feel anything at all, just a ringing in your ears—until like Beethoven, you find yourself pounding the keys of your life, trying to make the ground thunder below your feet. It makes you wish you could look around with fresh eyes, and feel things just as powerfully as you did when you felt them for the first time.

When you were a kid, you could still get excited about things. You felt that pirate’s itch on the last day of school, the morning of your birthday, or the final turn toward your grandparents’ house. You could feel rich from the coins in your pocket or being offered a piece of gum. You remember how big the world used to be, how wandering into the next neighborhood felt like stepping into a foreign country. Adults swept over you like giants. Every rule was a decree, every sentence a life sentence.

Time moved differently then, if it moved at all, arriving in big scholastic chunks, and each arrival felt major. You’d start up the school year like a witness protection program, ready to be assigned new teachers, new skills, a new identity. In the summer, you could make an afternoon last all week long, riding bikes with friends or watching a trickle of water feel its way through the dirt. There were no phones buzzing in your pockets, no schedules, no hormones, no distractions—or maybe it was all distractions. Whatever it was, you tried to keep it going as long as you could, even after the streetlights turned on in the evening and you heard voices in the dark, already calling you home.

The kaleidoscope of your emotions spun wildly throughout the day, all of it intense. You could walk along howling or weeping or grinning like a goon. When you loved someone, you loved them openly and with abandon, squeezing hugs as hard as you could. When you found something funny, you could laugh so hard your diaphragm ached, your cheeks wet with tears, your temples throbbing. You could plunge into a book and come out gasping, stumble out of a movie looking at faces and colors differently, listen to a song on loop for weeks and feel it grab you by the throat every time. And you knew how to play, knew how to make your toys come alive in front of you, how to listen for their weird little voices.

But somehow, even then, a part of you understood that this intensity wasn’t going to last. There were moments late in childhood when you tried going back to play with your old favorite toys again, almost as a guilty pleasure, only to find you couldn’t do it anymore. They looked just the same, as you turned them over in your hands—but suddenly they felt like bits of fabric and molded plastic, with nothing left to say.

You’ll never feel same sense of peace you once felt, drifting off to sleep in the back seat of a car, only to find yourself teleported back into your own bed. You’ll never have friendships that occupy so much of your attention, spending hours together every day for months, which made even the slightest betrayal sting. You’ll never feel the mortifying terror of a middle- school bully or the heartrending agony of an unrequited crush. You should only hope that life never punches you in the gut the way it did then.

Still, every once in a while you catch yourself humming along to some silly pop song that once broke your heart at sixteen, trying to tap back into that feeling again. That was once your entire life. It was only a matter of time before the world took notice and turned down the volume.

The music is still in there somewhere, even if you can’t hear the notes. Besides, there’s some beauty left in echoes—in knowing you have a part to play and playing it well, in concert with those around you. And there are those rare moments when you can let yourself go, close your eyes and let your body move with the orchestra, the way that old trees swing back and forth in a windstorm.

You have to wonder what you’re missing, closing your eyes like that. No matter; keep playing. Play as well as you can, and let some other soul get swept away for a moment or two. Until like Beethoven, you look up from the keys and ask yourself, “Ist es nicht schön?”

“Is it not beautiful?”

Ancient Chinese 余忆 (yú yì), I remember. Compare the Mandarin 玉衣 (yù yī), jade suit. Before their burial, the corpses of Han dynasty royals were clothed in ceremonial garments made of jade—a stone believed to have preservative properties. Even then, thousands of years ago, people were trying to protect themselves from the ravages of time by becoming “jaded.” Pronounced “yoo yee.”

-----

Lisolia

n. the satisfaction of things worn down by time—broken-in baseball mitts, the shiny snout of a lucky bronze pig, or footprints ground deep into floorboards by generations of kneeling monks.

Italian liso, worn down, threadbare + oliato, oiled. Pronounced “lih-soh-lee-uh.”

The satisfaction of things worn down by time.

Broken-in. Rubbed smooth. Ground deep.

Worn down by time.

With satisfaction.

Make the Ones You Care About Feel Mysterious

In stories, trees are always angry.

The tumbleweed refused to tumble but was more than willing to prance.

The tortoise jumped into the lake with dreams of becoming a sea turtle.

They finished building the road they knew no one would ever use.

The memory we used to share is no longer coherent.

I'd always thought lightning was something only I could see.

I seem to enjoy books that fill me with confusion and existential dread - just like life, except the comfort of pretend.

I think I'm probably corrosive.

He will debate the matter with you until you decide to wash.

Walk the thin line between apathy and calm.

They didn't have city killers then.

Make the ones you care about feel mysterious.

I haven't had a muse for words lately. Sometimes that indicates I'm anxious or vexed or down, but I don't think it does this time. I've been moving positively along the continuum from apathetic toward engaged at work lately, and am generally busy and happy with the family. I've been working with my hands and taking pictures for a creative outlet instead of writing. I wouldn't say I've quite been content, but not driven to articulate frustration or escape with humor. All the usual worries are there--major election in a month, after all, and worsening hurricanes and such--but I've been sighing and detaching more.

So this post will be and odd and random collection of things that have caught my eye the past month, starting with the first sentence above, stolen from my listening of The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemison during my lunchtime walk today, the ones after from the Random Sentence Generator, with a few at the end taken from what follows. I had thought of doing something creative with them, but inspiration hasn't struck yet.

Speaking of random words, the other week I entertained myself during a slow moment at the library by going to "Philosophy" list of our new books webpage and arranged the first 25 titles into a poem. 

Understanding Consciousness

Devil's Contract

The Weirdness of the World

How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold

A Summer With Pascal

Hope for Cynics

Traveling Solo

You Don't Have to Do It Alone

First Love

Begetting

Beauty

Wonderstruck

Our Kindred Creatures

Should We Go Extinct?

The Occasional Human Sacrifice

Right Thing, Right Now

The Seven Generations and the Seven Grandfather Teachings

Hyperobjects

On Gaslighting

Being Philosophical

Perplexing Paradoxes

The Random Factor

Learning to Disagree

(Retrieved on Sep. 21)

On another day, just after finishing The Bride of the Tornado by James Kennedy, I decided to make a booklist:

What Did I Just Read?

I seem to enjoy books that fill me with confusion and existential dread - just like life, except the comfort of pretend. Unusual or experimental writing, unreliable narrators or narrators in unreliable situations, strange and off-kilter or simply unique. Often creepy. These are some I have particularly enjoyed.

I didn't add Bride of the Tornado to the list since I like Kennedy's Dare to Know even more, so here's what I wrote for my review:

Kennedy is a master of creepy, off-kilter, gnawing dread in this story of a teen girl in a middle-of-nowhere town on the plains that is constantly surrounded by tornadoes that almost seem sentient and predatory. Life in town revolves around avoiding the tornadoes and a nearly religious reverence for a boy who has the magical ability to fight and kill tornadoes. And the adults all seem to know things that the kids don't, things that make their behaviors sometimes feel cultish. It's immersive and atmospheric in a way that messes with your head.

These might really be my favorite kinds of books, I think.

A few days ago I shared this anecdote on Facebook:

Taking a walk break in the park behind the library. Noticed a guy walking by with his dog giving me a funny look. Realized he'd probably just overheard me making growling and coaxing sounds at a squirrel in the hopes of getting it to recreate a pose it had just struck so I could get a picture.

EDIT: This is the closest I got. It had turned fully toward me and advanced a couple of steps while maintaining direct eye contact, as though it hoped to intimidate me into retreating. Much different than the usual scurrying out of view. I was alternating between staying threatening and encouraging it to keep trying to scare me.

Someone responded perfectly (and accurately), That squirrel is giving solid "Come at me, bro" energy.

Speaking of Facebook, I reshared this meme with the lead: I think I'm probably corrosive.

Corrosive is one of the options from the NFPA 704, after all.

And that thought reminded me of this favorite quote:

“If things go badly for me tonight, I want you to stay with Mr. Wynter; he will pay you a decent wage.”

“Will he make me bathe?”

“No, he will debate the matter with you until you decide to wash.”

“Ah. One of those.”

― Eoin Colfer, Airman

Which I proudly claim as about me.

I said at the top I've been keeping busy making things with my hands. Here's something I posted to Facebook:

A couple of years ago I made staves of power for [Younger] (cat paw) and [Older] (dragon), and have recently finished ones for [Uncle] (owl) and me (nature).

When [Uncle] spent way too much money on a broom handle with cheap decorations at the Ren Fest last year, I said I would make him something much better. This summer I finally dug out the one I'd started a while back before losing my muse and finished it for myself, then got started on one for him. This morning I presented him with the finished product.

When people wanted more details, I shared the following elaboration:

I found sticks in the woods on my wanders. For the boys, two small cedars that had been recently cut to clear the trail and cast aside; for mine, a young tree that had just been broken off at the base due to weather or animals or hikers; for [Uncle]'s, a dead tree that had yet to fall over and start rotting (it broke off at the ground/roots when I tested it).

Growing up we had pocket knives and would whittle, but only to reduce and sharpen, never proper shaping or carving. So [Older]'s dragon was my first time carving something (with a cheap carving knife set from Amazon). I cut each of the scales, dug out the spiral of the shaft, etc.

Wrapped the handle area in leather cord, tied and glued the "magic items," stained and sealed. Cut a bit from an old flip-flop to glue to the bottom to save our floors.

[Younger]'s was similar and followed immediately after. Different colors and design and magic. The claws have broken due to rough use and I need to find something to glue in their place.

My nature one doesn't have much carving to it, but I wanted a bit more naturalistic and wild look. Attached are: a bit of horn for land animals; shells for water animals; feathers for air animals; a tiny "sword" from a flattened nail shape for metal; a rock for earth; a couple of acorns for trees (now just caps since the resin coating didn't preserve them as I'd hoped); and a few wood carvings I made: a ring, a key, and a disk. The shells came from the beach on our family trip to Maine. The rock came from the beach on our family trip to California. The acorns came from behind my library (workplace). The feathers I found on a walk at local park. It has a strap so I can hold it on my shoulder to be hands-free. And is lighter than the others since it's the only one I gave time to properly dry out before working. It's the most practical of the bunch (aside from the dangly bits).

For [Uncle]'s I learned to use the rotary tool (off-brand Dremel) [Spouse] got me for Christmas (or my birthday). That and experience/practice helped. I knew to start with a thicker stick so I'd have more ability to reduce to give it shape and dimension. I was able to go into more detail much more easily. He requested the owl and a more "wizardy" feel than my "druidy" one. [Older] and I made a trip to the store Third Planet for the "magic." I had thoughts and colors in mind, but didn't know what we'd get for sure until we saw what we could afford. We ended up with a lapis lazuli orb of power and some amethyst geode pieces to embed. The eyeball beads came from Michael's--I can't remember if amethyst or something similar. A grey stain, with some bits sanded after to get the brighter colors. Oiled and coated in polyurethane (like the rest).

This process is a nice distraction, a healthy obsession, and a flow-like meditation.

This article resonates, both because it reflects my personal values but also takes the time to validate the authenticity and allure of Quietism, which I often feel on the verge of.

Everyday Philosophy: Is It Better to Debate People or Shrug and Drink Wine?

At its core, quietism means retreating from the active pursuit of truth or intellectual engagement, promoting instead a kind of serene acceptance of the world as it is. Quietism walks the thin line between apathy and calm. It still cares about the world and its people but tends to let everyone go their own way, focusing only on meditation, contemplation, and quietude. . . . 

It might be a philosopher’s fancy, but the entire point of discussing ideas with other people is to clarify those ideas and, we hope, move one step closer to something like the truth.

Your convictions are fine, and you might feel noble, but it is not the philosopher’s quest. Quietism is a form of capitulation. It’s giving up on working together to improve our ideas. . . . 

However calm and appealing the gallic shrug of quietism might seem, I do believe that we have to still engage with other people about almost all matters. This isn’t to say that we should always be looking for a debate, but I think we need to have them sometimes.

I take a "don't sweat the small stuff" and "pick your battles approach," responding to many things with quietism so I have the energy and capacity to properly engage with the really important things.

Speaking of important things worth engaging in, I recently came a cross a video that is wonderful. Here's a link and a transcript of the slam poem.

Royce Mann, Age 14, "White Boy Privilege", Slam Poem

Dear women, I’m sorry.

Dear black people, I’m sorry.

Dear Asian-Americans, dear Native Americans, dear immigrants who come here seeking a better life, I’m sorry.

Dear everyone who isn’t a middle or upper-class white boy, I’m sorry.

I have started life in the top of the ladder while you were born on the first rung.

I say now that I would change places with you in an instant, but if given the opportunity, would I?

Probably not.

Because to be honest, being privileged is awesome. I’m not saying that you and me on different rungs of the ladder is how I want it to stay.

I’m not saying that any part of me has for a moment even liked it that way.

I’m just saying that I f—— love being privileged and I’m not ready to give that away. I love it because I can say ‘f——’ and not one of you is attributing that to the fact that everyone with my skin color has a dirty mouth.

I love it because I don’t have to spend an hour every morning putting on makeup to meet other people’s standards.

I love it because I can worry about what kind of food is on my plate instead of whether or not there will be food on my plate.

I love it because when I see a police officer I see someone who’s on my side.

To be honest I’m scared of what it would be like if i wasn’t on the top rung if the tables were turned and I didn’t have my white boy privilege safety blankie to protect me.

If I lived a life lit by what I lack, not what I have, if I lived a life in which when I failed, the world would say, ‘Told you so.’

If I lived the life that you live.

When I was born I had a success story already written for me.

You – you were given a pen and no paper.

I’ve always felt that that’s unfair but I’ve never dared to speak up because I’ve been too scared.

Well now I realize that there’s enough blankie to be shared. Everyone should have the privileges I have.

In fact they should be rights instead.

Everyone’s story should be written, so all they have to do is get it read.

Enough said.

No, not enough said.

It is embarrassing that we still live in a world in which we judge another person’s character by of the size of their paycheck, the color of their skin, or the type of chromosomes they have.

It is embarrassing that we tell our kids that it is not their personality, but instead those same chromosomes that get to dictate what color clothes they wear and how short they must cut their hair.

But most of all, it is embarrassing that we deny this. That we claim to live in an equal country and an equal world.

We say that women can vote. Well guess what: They can run a country, own a company, and throw a nasty curve ball as well. We just don’t give them the chance to.

I know it wasn’t us 8th-grade white boys who created this system, but we profit from it every day.

We don’t notice these privileges though, because they don’t come in the form of things we gain, but rather the lack of injustices that we endure.

Because of my gender, I can watch any sport on TV, and feel like that could be me one day.

Because of my race I can eat at a fancy restaurant without the wait staff expecting me to steal the silverware.

Thanks to my parents’ salary I go to a school that brings my dreams closer instead of pushing them away.

Dear white boys: I’m not sorry.

I don’t care if you think the feminists are taking over the world, that the Black Lives Matter movement has gotten a little too strong, because that’s bulls—.

I get that change can be scary, but equality shouldn’t be.

Hey white boys: It’s time to act like a woman. To be strong and make a difference. It’s time to let go of that fear.

It’s time to take that ladder and turn it into a bridge.

Transcript from the article Teen’s ‘White Boy Privilege’ Slam Poetry Goes Viral

He articulates it so well.

The hurricanes this past month had me revisiting this section of Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi (2010):

Whatever Nita thought of the scavenge opportunities, there was a lot of abandoned material spread out before them, and if Nailer understood correctly, this was just Orleans II. There was also the original New Orleans, and then there was Mississippi Metropolitan -aka MissMet-what had been originally envisioned as New Orleans III, before even the most ardent supporters of the drowned city gave up on the spectacularly bad luck enjoyed by places called "Orleans."

Some engineers had claimed it was possible to raise hurricane-resistant towers above Pontchartrain Bay, but the merchants and traders had had enough of the river mouth and the storms, and so left the drowned city to docks and deep-sea loading platforms and slums, while they migrated their wealth and homes and children to land that lay more comfortably above sea level.

MissMet was far away upriver and higher in elevation and armored against cyclones and hurricanes as none of the others had been, a city designed from the ground up to avoid the pitfalls of their earlier optimism, a place for swanks that Nailer had heard was paved in gold and where gleaming walls and guards and wire kept the rest of the chaff away.

At one time in the past, New Orleans had meant many things, had meant jazz and Creole and the pulse of life, had meant Mardi Gras and parties and abandon, had meant creeping luxurious green decay. Now it meant only one thing.

Loss.

More dead jungle ruins flashed past, an astonishing amount of wealth and materials left to rot and fall back to the green tangle of the trees and swamps.

"Why did they give up?" Nailer asked. "Sometimes people learn," Tool said. From that, Nailer took him to be saying that mostly people didn't. The wreckage of the twin dead cities was good evidence of just how slow the people of the Accelerated Age had been to accept their changing circumstances.

The train curved toward the hulking towers. The shambled outline of an ancient stadium showed beyond the spires of Orleans II, marking the beginning of the old city, the city proper for the drowned lands.

"Stupid," Nailer muttered. Tool leaned close to hear his voice over the wind, and Nailer shouted in his ear, "They were damn stupid."

Tool shrugged. "No one expected Category Six hurricanes. They didn't have city killers then. The climate changed. The weather shifted. They did not anticipate well."

Nailer wondered at that idea. That no one could have understood that they would be the target of monthly hurricanes pinballing up the Mississippi Alley, gunning for anything that didn't have the sense to batten down, float, or go underground.

I don't think we're quite to "city killer" levels yet, but the damage is getting worse in new and unexpected ways.

This article caught my attention.

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

The student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to. . . . 

His students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. . . . 

For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.” . . . 

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text. . . . 

According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not. . . . 

I previously blogged about Maryanne Wolf's book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World in Introspection and Contemplation.

This article is fascinating.

We Should Take Awkwardness Less Personally, and More Seriously

Embarrassment happens when an individual commits a social gaffe; its characteristic facial and bodily expressions involve a kind of apology. Embarrassment is thus a kind of social repair. But awkwardness is different: it’s not something an individual causes, and it’s not something an individual can resolve on their own; it’s a social rupture. The failure involved in embarrassment is a failure to conform to existing norms. Awkwardness is different: it happens when we don’t have a social script to conform to. In other words, embarrassment happens when we violate socially prescribed scripts; awkwardness happens when we lack prescriptions to guide us.

People often feel like awkwardness is about them – that they are awkward, or not. But awkwardness is a collective production. More accurately, it’s a collective failure. Awkwardness is a kind of normative negative space, offering what Adam Kotsko calls ‘insight through breakdown’. It arises when people find themselves suddenly without a social script to guide them through an interaction or an event. The term ‘script’ carries associations of playacting, and that’s not a bad way to understand awkwardness. But the lesson of awkwardness is that, in the dramedy of life, we’re not just the actors, we’re the writers. . . . 

Social interaction is a kind of performance in which we occupy various roles. When a performance fails, the actor feels discredited – to use Goffman’s term, he loses ‘face’. Maybe he’s trying to play a role his audience won’t grant him (for example, a failed attempt to flirt, or a rejected marriage proposal) or he loses his composure and botches the performance. . . . 

The social cues by which we navigate the world range from the explicit – a dress code; the ‘no presents’ written on a party invitation – to the nearly imperceptible. . . . When two people land on different answers: awkward! . . . 

Awkwardness is fundamentally a kind of social disorientation. There’s a certain comfort in being able to socially situate oneself. That’s not to say that hierarchies are comfortable or beneficial for everyone – far from it. But even as social rejection and downranking hurt, there is a different kind of discomfort that comes along with being socially lost and disoriented, and this is the discomfort associated with awkwardness. . . . 

We should be wary of labelling others ‘awkward’. This gets awkwardness wrong – it’s not a personality or character trait, but something that emerges from social interactions. Awkwardness requires the presence of others: individuals aren’t awkward, interactions are. This might seem surprising: people often describe themselves (or others) as ‘awkward’, and it seems that some people do have more difficulty navigating social interactions than others. But there are practical as well as theoretical reasons for resisting the idea that awkwardness is an individual trait. The label ‘awkward’ is not as innocuous as it seems: it’s ambiguous, and it obscures more than it reveals. . . . 

Because awkwardness is often aversive, those perceived as causing it risk ostracism. Changing social norms and rituals isn’t easy; adopting new ones can be costly. The person whose presence reveals the inadequacy of the status quo thus presents a threat. For example, in a department where the men routinely take clients to a strip club after dinner, or tell sexually explicit jokes in meetings, the presence of women colleagues might make things awkward, as they are forced to confront the clash between their workplace rituals and professional norms. One option would be to accept this conflict as of their own making, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. But too often, it’s the presence of the women that is blamed: now it’s awkward to tell those jokes, because there are women here. Blame falls on those perceived as different for ‘making’ things awkward. In many cases, though, it was awkward all along: that awkwardness was just being borne by someone else, as they tried to conform to others’ expectations. . . . 

It’s worth paying more attention to when and where it arises, and be more willing to tackle it head-on. An unspoken expectation in many social interactions is that people already know how to navigate them. People avoid admitting social ignorance, and we are embarrassed by those who do, as if they’ve violated some unspoken social norm. But why should not knowing which pronoun, title or fork to use be any different from not knowing where the bathroom is, or what time the café opens? The reluctance to ask that social norms be made explicit reveals a deeper expectation: that social interaction should appear effortless. Awkwardness highlights the fact that our interactions are scripted. Its aversiveness shows the extent to which people prefer not to be reminded of this fact. . . . 

For people who are neurodivergent, who struggle with reading facial cues, or who find themselves in unfamiliar social settings, the world is full of rooms with unpredictable, unreachable infrastructure. Awkwardness is a reminder that social infrastructure exists and that it is not equally accessible to everyone. . . . 

When awkwardness is understood as an individual failure to fit in, the response is supposed to be: do better; conform; learn the script. But that’s not always possible. Nor is it always desirable. In some cases, those norms are not serving everyone – or anyone. . . . 

Awkwardness isn’t something an individual should, or even can, fix on their own. To view awkwardness as shameful, or embarrassing, is therefore not just a philosophical mistake but a practical one: it is to miss out on an opportunity to repair the social infrastructure. . . . 

But it’s important, too, to be mindful of who’s doing this work. Because awkwardness is felt as a form of social discomfort, it doesn’t attach to everyone equally. Social expectations of who does the work to make others feel comfortable – and correspondingly, who is held accountable when people feel uncomfortable – intersect with scripts around gender and social status. Women are often tasked with managing others’ moods and are expected to get along with others; this ‘emotional labour’ includes the work of repairing social interactions that become awkward. There’s a privilege in not worrying about others’ discomfort.

Don't be afraid to make social norms explicit--and question them where needed.

A poem of randomness.

Laura Tanenbaum

WHAT IF I CAUTIONED YOU

found poem, fundraising texts

Can I tell you about my family’s farm?

We stood together under a HUGE tent,

a bit longer than usual.

More butterflies than a freaking’ garden.

Is there anything I can say?

What if I told you,

or what if I reminded you,

or what if I cautioned,

Cruelty and chaos.

I can’t even begin to comprehend.

Revenge and retribution.

STOP

13 million 35 million, 5 now,

10 now, 20 before midnight, 109,201

Any another amount. Anything at all.

Last chance

STOP2END

 

—from Poets Respond

I love it.

And, of course, always be brave enough to make the ones you care about feel mysterious.

Randomly generated by Inspirobot.