TL;DR Nah, there's really no way for me to summarize without sounding like a giant bigot, which I may or may not be depending on a) what time it is and b) who you talk to about it. See below.
I'm gonna start out with one of those famous disclaimers no one will believe: I don't actually have any particular issue with the various denominations in the LGBT(etc.) community, hereafter referred to generally as "queer" people for concision, and there are a lot of reasons for that. Firstly, I'm Christian, so really I'm not supposed to have issues with people in general, and even if I do I'm meant to go "meh!" and accept it. Regardless of that, I also do my best to be a calm and amiable person, and remain open-minded to the unfamiliar. I don't know everything, and it would be a dull life if I did.
Also, if we're being harshly, coldly pragmatic about it... we're just simply not talking about that many people, numerically. Hatred of the queer community is, from my perspective, a lot like racism directed at Inuit people or a modern crusade launched against Tenriism. With all the things in the world there are to be upset about, picking a tiny demographic's preferences/identities to rage over has always been a little mystifying to me.
All that being laid out, let's put on our shoulder-length gloves and plunge right into the sour bit. There are a few different trends circulating, and I want to talk about each of them (that I can remember).
First is my personal one, from day-to-day mundane social interactions, and is more a personal bugaboo than any broader social issue. The pattern goes like this: I meet a person (God spare us all), and introductions happen as normal, and they add "I am of [queer category goes here]." I have some reaction to the effect of "oh! Okay :D" and continue bouncing on through my day, being a dumb bear as I am.
The problem is, my fellow Millennials are usually saying these things to me and expecting a reaction, and my total lack of response is unnerving to them. People my age are, broadly speaking, terrified of meeting people, and so we sally out facts about ourselves trying to seem interesting and exciting. When someone reacts the way I do, taking what they say as a given and exhibiting no real reaction, I think we young people tend to read that as a dismissal, or as a concealed judgment of some kind. I also think that's a damn stupid way to read people, but I'm obviously just a tiny bit biased in favor of my own viewpoint on how I react to things.
That leads me into a question: why the hell am I being told this on an initial meeting, anyway? The standard "name, year, major" introduction is extremely boring, but it's also highly functional and, best of all, concise. Your name is a handle I can refer to you by, your year (and, by inference, your age) and what you elected to focus your education on give me some insight into what stage of life you're in, and what you like, and so on. The category you like to place yourself in with regard to gender identity tells me basically nothing about you specifically, other than that you might be interested in gender politics (which, when you think about it, basically everyone with a gender has an interest in by definition, so... not the most informative). It's a bit like pointing out your hair color; yeah, congratulations, you have a characteristic. Even if you colored it in a specific way to elicit a reaction, I've just really got nothing much to say about it. Nothing negative, nothing positive; that's just the way it is, which I thought was the point of the related rights movement (to be normalized and accepted).
Speaking of the LGBT(etc.) rights movement, that brings me to the next trend I've noticed: a great many people are drawing comparisons between this civil rights movement with THE Civil Rights Movement. I'm not gonna dwell on this long, but I'll leave you with a one-line input (which is a bitter pill, and especially bitter so soon after that horrible bullshit over in Orlando):
Y'all have absolutely experienced repression, violence, anger and discrimination, and a great many tragedies have struck members of the LGBTQ community, but let's not delude ourselves, shall we?
Thirdly, I've also seen a great many posts recently about exclusivity in the LGBTQ community. Titles include quippy one-liners like "8 Reasons We Don't Trust Straight People," "6 Things Straight Allies Need to Understand before Coming to Pride," and lots of other isolationist foolery in that vane. Again, you can see how this is a problem without my belaboring the point, but let me feed you this one: gender's not meant to be a club you're in, and everyone else is excluded from. I'm not going to make a club for cis-gendered white Christian men, partially because one already exists, and it's less a club than a Klub, see?
This is all an extremely long-winded setup for what I think about the issue of gender in our society, especially as it regards young people: it's "cool." Gender politics in general and the specific place and treatment of LGBTQ people in our society are some of the hottest topics in academic discussion at the moment, and it's natural to want a little slice of that social spotlight, I suppose. I just worry that the way we're starting to popularize and sensationalize LGBTQ people is ultimately going to become counterproductive. They're just ghosts driving meat-suits like anybody else, and I think the ultimate goal of the LGBTQ rights movement should be acceptance and normality, a world where one can freely make a statement like "I'm a gay man!" or "I'm a trans woman!" or any other identity and be safe and respected. We shouldn't be pursuing a world where we glorify LGBTQ people, or where we turn them into a sideshow sensation the way we're starting to now.
I apologize for the big blocks of text; my brain is made of molasses today. As always, share this wherever, and with whomever you please. If you liked it, or even if you didn't, leave me a comment or drop me the proverbial note at breakingberkeley@gmail.com. I do love the feedback. C:
P.S. I didn't talk about this up in the post, but a personal note: if your identity can't be explained to me in ten words or less, there's a decent chance it's not a useful way for you to identify yourself. Not that it's invalid, or that you can't identify that way or anything like that, but I would advise you to examine some of the terminology you use to explain "how it be," as they say. I also know that the creation of new vocabulary to adequately describe the range of LGBTQ people is currently underway, but... bear with me. Keep it simple, so we can all talk plainly together.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Friday, June 24, 2016
Human Composites
TL;DR I'm awkward, for sure, but there is a reason of sorts.
This one isn't about me tilting out over social interaction, I promise! Also, despite the title, this isn't content you'd find on a site about the Illuminati and everything. It's actually just an insight into the way I think, as far as I'm aware of it. You might equivalently call it "the degenerate ravings of a frothing lunatic," but I don't mind either way.
The basic premise is this: people are divided into discrete, cleanly separable categories in my mind and experience. These little boxes nest together according to type and size. If I can abuse the allegory, there's a big cylinder labeled "Family," inside which are smaller cylinders marked with people's names, and so on. There's also a big rectangle labeled "Friends," inside which nest many different boxes of friends (groups of people, loosely speaking). This is a kindergarten-level way to describe it, but I think you get the gist.
In case I was sounding too sane for you, the patterning of this next part gets a little bit Star Trek: Voyager. The containers for people are separable and fit within one another, but the people themselves are a little complicated. To avoid getting any more ridiculous than I absolutely have to, I'm going to say that people as I think of them are best modeled as functions of position on the axes defined by different categories, and let you figure out what that means.
I'm messin' witcha. The way people work in my mind really is like a position function, but let me explain in a way that makes sense. I just mean people have some properties of mathematical functions, in the sense that they have distinguishable shape, domains over which they're defined, specific amounts of their domains in each of many different categories, and in some cases points where the function goes "we don't play that" and returns an undefined value.
This is all fairly clean and clinical, and makes me sound a little like a machine, but I can verify this is not the case by two statements: a) there's more to it and b) machines work much better than my mind.
The complicating factor is that the functions are defined within the space of the categories I mentioned, but are discontinuous and defined in multiple categories at the same time. Those categories themselves are multidimensional and mobile, and you can easily see how it becomes a damn mess in here in short order.
Let's go through an example to confuse you further, dear reader. I often find myself hanging out with couples (third son, third wheel, as one does), in the specific case where I know both members of the couple.
Now, in this setting, I'm not actually with two people; rather, I'm hanging out with a minimum of three. There's Person A and Person B (the two people who constitute the couple) and a third composite entity representing the couple itself, which is its own different function layered onto the other two. This is really true for any combination of two or more people, but I find the situation of a couple is the most pronounced, easily comprehensible example. Two people they may be, but their individual functions are coupled by a third, higher-order function representing the dynamic between them.
I have a history of visiting with my friends one-on-one or two at a time, and I imagine you can see why. It's not that I don't like going to parties and seeing all my friends, or anything like that, but with how complex the individual function of each person is, and the additional complexity that arises in even a simple situation like the couple, the geometry becomes explosive after about five or so people.
Another example explaining why I occasionally behave so spasmodically, if you please. I made two friends in high school named Laney and Tory respectively, who are in extraordinarily different categories, though they do have their similarities. Laney's a dancer and artistic type where Tory is into chemistry and computers, and they were in disparate friend groups for the most part. Tory, as you might assume, was more in the clique with me and the other disembodied brains, where Laney was friends with a tight-knit group of cool kids (I don't mean that negatively; they were "cool kids" and also actually cool kids). Tory is an ardent socialist, and as far as I know Laney's not much interested in politics. You get the picture; these two functions are totally different shapes, exist in wholly different spaces, and even where they overlap their values are completely different. For the visual people out there, they're colors that don't match at all. (Tory is red, obviously.)
Everything was peachy, then, having figured the two of them out (with some projections and inference on my part, as I do) and sorted them into appropriate separable tubes, until I was made privy to an interesting fact about these two.
Tory and Laney are siblings.
Damn it.
To this day, anytime I see these two together, my mind seizes very briefly and spits out a dial tone while it reboots and corrects for the association. Say you were a neurotically organized cook, keeping everything in exactly the same places for efficiency, to the degree that your organization became autonomic, and then one day all the spices in your rack decided to spontaneously shift one slot over to the right. That sensation, best described as "...uh?," is a fair approximation for what I experience when I see two (or more) people in some unexpected configuration.
Now, it might sound to the reader as if I'm condemning people for being in association with one another, or even for being siblings, but I want to be clear that that specifically isn't what I mean. I love hanging out with couples specifically because of the added layer of complexity; I enjoy being made aware of the architectural silliness of my own mind, and learning to understand how I interact with these big complex composites of people.
Similarly, the momentary disconnection of my logic coils when I see Laney and Tory as a sibling unit is not a particularly unpleasant experience for me. It's like opening the file you keep pictures of bees in and finding a picture of a yellow jacket. (Why I have a mental file of pictures of bees is my own business.) It's not that it's "wrong;" a yellow jacket is just another member of Order Hymenoptera, and in many ways a very similar insect to a bee, it just isn't necessarily what I was expecting based on the file's (incorrect) labeling. Laney and Tory are an extremely cute pair of siblings (IT'S TRUE, TORY, SHUT UP), and are individually dear people; my mechanical mind-graph just didn't project them as a unit at first, if that makes sense.
Anyway, this has been a more personal post, and also a bit more pretentious than normal (if this were an anthropology paper I could title it Autoethnography: A Study of Dissonance between Category and Differential Realities, because ppppbbbbttt). As before, feel free to show people if it's interesting or if you're (God forbid) trying to describe/explain me to someone. I also adore feedback, so leave a comment (or an email to breakingberkeley@gmail.com if you're disinclined to public appearance, which I obviously understand). Ilá al-liqāʾ, everybody C:
This one isn't about me tilting out over social interaction, I promise! Also, despite the title, this isn't content you'd find on a site about the Illuminati and everything. It's actually just an insight into the way I think, as far as I'm aware of it. You might equivalently call it "the degenerate ravings of a frothing lunatic," but I don't mind either way.
The basic premise is this: people are divided into discrete, cleanly separable categories in my mind and experience. These little boxes nest together according to type and size. If I can abuse the allegory, there's a big cylinder labeled "Family," inside which are smaller cylinders marked with people's names, and so on. There's also a big rectangle labeled "Friends," inside which nest many different boxes of friends (groups of people, loosely speaking). This is a kindergarten-level way to describe it, but I think you get the gist.
In case I was sounding too sane for you, the patterning of this next part gets a little bit Star Trek: Voyager. The containers for people are separable and fit within one another, but the people themselves are a little complicated. To avoid getting any more ridiculous than I absolutely have to, I'm going to say that people as I think of them are best modeled as functions of position on the axes defined by different categories, and let you figure out what that means.
I'm messin' witcha. The way people work in my mind really is like a position function, but let me explain in a way that makes sense. I just mean people have some properties of mathematical functions, in the sense that they have distinguishable shape, domains over which they're defined, specific amounts of their domains in each of many different categories, and in some cases points where the function goes "we don't play that" and returns an undefined value.
This is all fairly clean and clinical, and makes me sound a little like a machine, but I can verify this is not the case by two statements: a) there's more to it and b) machines work much better than my mind.
The complicating factor is that the functions are defined within the space of the categories I mentioned, but are discontinuous and defined in multiple categories at the same time. Those categories themselves are multidimensional and mobile, and you can easily see how it becomes a damn mess in here in short order.
Let's go through an example to confuse you further, dear reader. I often find myself hanging out with couples (third son, third wheel, as one does), in the specific case where I know both members of the couple.
Now, in this setting, I'm not actually with two people; rather, I'm hanging out with a minimum of three. There's Person A and Person B (the two people who constitute the couple) and a third composite entity representing the couple itself, which is its own different function layered onto the other two. This is really true for any combination of two or more people, but I find the situation of a couple is the most pronounced, easily comprehensible example. Two people they may be, but their individual functions are coupled by a third, higher-order function representing the dynamic between them.
I have a history of visiting with my friends one-on-one or two at a time, and I imagine you can see why. It's not that I don't like going to parties and seeing all my friends, or anything like that, but with how complex the individual function of each person is, and the additional complexity that arises in even a simple situation like the couple, the geometry becomes explosive after about five or so people.
Another example explaining why I occasionally behave so spasmodically, if you please. I made two friends in high school named Laney and Tory respectively, who are in extraordinarily different categories, though they do have their similarities. Laney's a dancer and artistic type where Tory is into chemistry and computers, and they were in disparate friend groups for the most part. Tory, as you might assume, was more in the clique with me and the other disembodied brains, where Laney was friends with a tight-knit group of cool kids (I don't mean that negatively; they were "cool kids" and also actually cool kids). Tory is an ardent socialist, and as far as I know Laney's not much interested in politics. You get the picture; these two functions are totally different shapes, exist in wholly different spaces, and even where they overlap their values are completely different. For the visual people out there, they're colors that don't match at all. (Tory is red, obviously.)
Everything was peachy, then, having figured the two of them out (with some projections and inference on my part, as I do) and sorted them into appropriate separable tubes, until I was made privy to an interesting fact about these two.
Tory and Laney are siblings.
Damn it.
To this day, anytime I see these two together, my mind seizes very briefly and spits out a dial tone while it reboots and corrects for the association. Say you were a neurotically organized cook, keeping everything in exactly the same places for efficiency, to the degree that your organization became autonomic, and then one day all the spices in your rack decided to spontaneously shift one slot over to the right. That sensation, best described as "...uh?," is a fair approximation for what I experience when I see two (or more) people in some unexpected configuration.
Now, it might sound to the reader as if I'm condemning people for being in association with one another, or even for being siblings, but I want to be clear that that specifically isn't what I mean. I love hanging out with couples specifically because of the added layer of complexity; I enjoy being made aware of the architectural silliness of my own mind, and learning to understand how I interact with these big complex composites of people.
Similarly, the momentary disconnection of my logic coils when I see Laney and Tory as a sibling unit is not a particularly unpleasant experience for me. It's like opening the file you keep pictures of bees in and finding a picture of a yellow jacket. (Why I have a mental file of pictures of bees is my own business.) It's not that it's "wrong;" a yellow jacket is just another member of Order Hymenoptera, and in many ways a very similar insect to a bee, it just isn't necessarily what I was expecting based on the file's (incorrect) labeling. Laney and Tory are an extremely cute pair of siblings (IT'S TRUE, TORY, SHUT UP), and are individually dear people; my mechanical mind-graph just didn't project them as a unit at first, if that makes sense.
Anyway, this has been a more personal post, and also a bit more pretentious than normal (if this were an anthropology paper I could title it Autoethnography: A Study of Dissonance between Category and Differential Realities, because ppppbbbbttt). As before, feel free to show people if it's interesting or if you're (God forbid) trying to describe/explain me to someone. I also adore feedback, so leave a comment (or an email to breakingberkeley@gmail.com if you're disinclined to public appearance, which I obviously understand). Ilá al-liqāʾ, everybody C:
Jellyfish (Young People These Days)
Note: As a biologist, I'm aware about 50% of people insist these are called sea jellies and 50% refuse to call them anything but jellyfish. I admit I don't care, because "jellyfish" is easier to say and sounds better for a title.
TL;DR Too many people are turning into jellyfish, and Iencourage beg you not to be one.
If you either know me personally or read this here blog regularly (especially the most recent batch of posts), you've probably figured out that social interaction isn't exactly my forte. I'm a deeply depressive and highly anxious person, which is admittedly not the optimal set of stats for interacting with something as complicated as people. Having made it clear I'm bad at social interaction, I'm now going to rip into people at large over how bad they are at it. Hypocrisy status: acknowledged.
As a personal aside: given how little I enjoy interacting with the bulk of people, and how much time I spend by myself, if I do become your friend and make an effort to maintain that connection, you should both a) consider yourself one of a special, chosen few (because you are) and b) appreciate it, for lack of better verbiage. It's significant, maaaaan.
Now, all of that out of the way, I'm noticing an increasingly cnidarian pattern in the way people interact with me and with one another. Jellies behave in the following way: they drift indecisively on the current, occasionally powering themselves to approach and aggregate with other similar jellies. They spend the duration of their (sometimes extremely protracted) lifespan doing, basically, as little as possible, as far as real action. They even eat passively, trailing nets of tentacles behind them and waiting for something to stumble into their sticky trap, at which point they reflexively fire venomous stingers into the unfortunate passer-by and very slowly digest it.
Anatomically, it also bears mentioning that jellyfish have no brain, no spine, a single hole used as both mouth and anus, no heart, no well-defined guts, and very little muscle. That being said, guts and muscles have very limited practical applications in a society like ours, so I'll deal with the other things.
Let's deal with "no brain" first, because it's easy. To quote my dear ma: "The problem with you young people is you're always waiting for a better deal." My mother and I disagree on a great many things, but I think on this point she's entirely correct. People my age tend to be pretty spontaneous by nature, and that's fine; not everybody needs to plan everything as exactingly as I do, because God knows I'd live longer if I lightened up a little bit.
That being said, someone ought to have told us all by now that being spontaneous and being flaky are two extremely different phenomena. Spontaneous people text you at 11 P.M. asking if you want to go for a night drive to look at stars. Flaky people agree in advance to go on the aforementioned drive, and then as the time approaches, they become suddenly so busy that they simply can't text you at all. Then the moment is passed, you sit all dressed up with no where to go for a while, and the next afternoon you get a text that says "oh my god sorryyyyy i got so busyyyy :/." If you don't want to do something, you should just tell people explicitly. It's all right to change your mind; believe me, I've just explicitly told people "depression is eating my soul, and I don't want to move" to cancel plans before. It's okay.
Summary: commit, and if you must un-commit, just do it.
"No spine" is a related issue with young people (as it should be, as another part of the central nervous system). In summary, people my age tend to talk a big game and play very little, if at all. The number of people I've had threaten me with physical violence of some kind over the past few years is a) already ridiculous and b) extremely likely to increase as a function of time, but the harassment always stops, instantly, the moment I stop being polite and bring it to an actual moment of confrontation.
It's the same situation as the infamous Political Discussion. Young people in congregation tend to espouse whatever political attitude they have at the moment, but when challenged we rapidly backpedal and adopt a more "reasonable" or "moderate" stance, just for the sake of avoiding confrontation and tension in our group. Similarly, I suppose it's easier to tell someone you're going to beat them up than actually try and do it, especially if that someone turns out to be a over foot taller and eighty or so lean pounds heavier than you are. This sounds fairly horrible, but it's gotten to the point where I want someone to carry through on their threats and actually attack me, solely so I can crush them against the pavement and obtain some form of closure and catharsis, as warped and empty as it might ultimately be.
Summary: do it m8 u wont.
Jellyfish, as mentioned above, use a single orifice as both their in- and out-port. As heavy-handed as the allegory is, I'll discard it for clarity: people my age are talkin' all that good shit. This relates to the issue of spinelessness, but is specifically verbal: young people will expound at great length about a person's less praiseworthy features... but only if said person isn't there to hear them or argue their own case. That feeds back into the confrontation issue, but how about this: we'll just have the confrontation, and argue, and be tense for five seconds, and then be friends after as normal. The gorillas have it figured out, so I think we bipeds can manage it. How is that restraining order coming, anyway? Still fictional? Oh, good, I'd hate to make somebody come serve it to me, in person, as is required. (common_statement.exe is now opening 455 new windows...)
Summary: "You was poppin' all that good shit a second ago!" -Colonel H. Stinkmeaner, The Boondocks.
The "no heart" point is at least a little more positive. To put it succinctly, I've noticed the majority of people my age, overwhelmingly, simply aren't comfortable with displays of emotion, either their own or others. This one is at least partially my fault, in fairness; I maintain a stony, dead mask of a face most times, and I don't particularly say anything deep unless I've gotten to know someone fairly well, so I understand how people might be taken aback. The obvious exception is when they're drunk, at which point all types of things become acceptable, but that's an entirely different problem for another post.
This one's a simple fix, too: tell 'em, as Soulja Boy taught us. Somebody makes you uncomfortable, tell 'em. I'm kind of spamming on about a theme with these last few posts, but in all seriousness, the number of problems in the world that could be solved by clear and honest communication is... I mean, most of them, really.
As an aside, I don't remember when emotion became something to be afraid of. It was sometime recent, for sure, because I was always the sensitive kid, and that was okay at the time. I don't know; lemme know what you think, dear reader.
Summary: don't be an awkward robot.
That's all I've got for you today. Let me know what you think (my email's listed on the profile page, if you can find it), and show this to your friends if you'd like, so they can be upset with me as well. Stinging me isn't entirely a jellyfish-like thing to do, so don't worry. :P
Edit: The email wasn't displaying, because I'm a monkey! It's breakingberkeley@gmail.com. Surprising, I know.
P.S. For that single, solitary, heroic individual who checks this blog without fail on a daily basis, make yourself known. I feel like I ought to get you a mug or something for your commitment.
TL;DR Too many people are turning into jellyfish, and I
If you either know me personally or read this here blog regularly (especially the most recent batch of posts), you've probably figured out that social interaction isn't exactly my forte. I'm a deeply depressive and highly anxious person, which is admittedly not the optimal set of stats for interacting with something as complicated as people. Having made it clear I'm bad at social interaction, I'm now going to rip into people at large over how bad they are at it. Hypocrisy status: acknowledged.
As a personal aside: given how little I enjoy interacting with the bulk of people, and how much time I spend by myself, if I do become your friend and make an effort to maintain that connection, you should both a) consider yourself one of a special, chosen few (because you are) and b) appreciate it, for lack of better verbiage. It's significant, maaaaan.
Now, all of that out of the way, I'm noticing an increasingly cnidarian pattern in the way people interact with me and with one another. Jellies behave in the following way: they drift indecisively on the current, occasionally powering themselves to approach and aggregate with other similar jellies. They spend the duration of their (sometimes extremely protracted) lifespan doing, basically, as little as possible, as far as real action. They even eat passively, trailing nets of tentacles behind them and waiting for something to stumble into their sticky trap, at which point they reflexively fire venomous stingers into the unfortunate passer-by and very slowly digest it.
Anatomically, it also bears mentioning that jellyfish have no brain, no spine, a single hole used as both mouth and anus, no heart, no well-defined guts, and very little muscle. That being said, guts and muscles have very limited practical applications in a society like ours, so I'll deal with the other things.
Let's deal with "no brain" first, because it's easy. To quote my dear ma: "The problem with you young people is you're always waiting for a better deal." My mother and I disagree on a great many things, but I think on this point she's entirely correct. People my age tend to be pretty spontaneous by nature, and that's fine; not everybody needs to plan everything as exactingly as I do, because God knows I'd live longer if I lightened up a little bit.
That being said, someone ought to have told us all by now that being spontaneous and being flaky are two extremely different phenomena. Spontaneous people text you at 11 P.M. asking if you want to go for a night drive to look at stars. Flaky people agree in advance to go on the aforementioned drive, and then as the time approaches, they become suddenly so busy that they simply can't text you at all. Then the moment is passed, you sit all dressed up with no where to go for a while, and the next afternoon you get a text that says "oh my god sorryyyyy i got so busyyyy :/." If you don't want to do something, you should just tell people explicitly. It's all right to change your mind; believe me, I've just explicitly told people "depression is eating my soul, and I don't want to move" to cancel plans before. It's okay.
Summary: commit, and if you must un-commit, just do it.
"No spine" is a related issue with young people (as it should be, as another part of the central nervous system). In summary, people my age tend to talk a big game and play very little, if at all. The number of people I've had threaten me with physical violence of some kind over the past few years is a) already ridiculous and b) extremely likely to increase as a function of time, but the harassment always stops, instantly, the moment I stop being polite and bring it to an actual moment of confrontation.
It's the same situation as the infamous Political Discussion. Young people in congregation tend to espouse whatever political attitude they have at the moment, but when challenged we rapidly backpedal and adopt a more "reasonable" or "moderate" stance, just for the sake of avoiding confrontation and tension in our group. Similarly, I suppose it's easier to tell someone you're going to beat them up than actually try and do it, especially if that someone turns out to be a over foot taller and eighty or so lean pounds heavier than you are. This sounds fairly horrible, but it's gotten to the point where I want someone to carry through on their threats and actually attack me, solely so I can crush them against the pavement and obtain some form of closure and catharsis, as warped and empty as it might ultimately be.
Summary: do it m8 u wont.
Jellyfish, as mentioned above, use a single orifice as both their in- and out-port. As heavy-handed as the allegory is, I'll discard it for clarity: people my age are talkin' all that good shit. This relates to the issue of spinelessness, but is specifically verbal: young people will expound at great length about a person's less praiseworthy features... but only if said person isn't there to hear them or argue their own case. That feeds back into the confrontation issue, but how about this: we'll just have the confrontation, and argue, and be tense for five seconds, and then be friends after as normal. The gorillas have it figured out, so I think we bipeds can manage it. How is that restraining order coming, anyway? Still fictional? Oh, good, I'd hate to make somebody come serve it to me, in person, as is required. (common_statement.exe is now opening 455 new windows...)
Summary: "You was poppin' all that good shit a second ago!" -Colonel H. Stinkmeaner, The Boondocks.
The "no heart" point is at least a little more positive. To put it succinctly, I've noticed the majority of people my age, overwhelmingly, simply aren't comfortable with displays of emotion, either their own or others. This one is at least partially my fault, in fairness; I maintain a stony, dead mask of a face most times, and I don't particularly say anything deep unless I've gotten to know someone fairly well, so I understand how people might be taken aback. The obvious exception is when they're drunk, at which point all types of things become acceptable, but that's an entirely different problem for another post.
This one's a simple fix, too: tell 'em, as Soulja Boy taught us. Somebody makes you uncomfortable, tell 'em. I'm kind of spamming on about a theme with these last few posts, but in all seriousness, the number of problems in the world that could be solved by clear and honest communication is... I mean, most of them, really.
As an aside, I don't remember when emotion became something to be afraid of. It was sometime recent, for sure, because I was always the sensitive kid, and that was okay at the time. I don't know; lemme know what you think, dear reader.
Summary: don't be an awkward robot.
That's all I've got for you today. Let me know what you think (my email's listed on the profile page, if you can find it), and show this to your friends if you'd like, so they can be upset with me as well. Stinging me isn't entirely a jellyfish-like thing to do, so don't worry. :P
Edit: The email wasn't displaying, because I'm a monkey! It's breakingberkeley@gmail.com. Surprising, I know.
P.S. For that single, solitary, heroic individual who checks this blog without fail on a daily basis, make yourself known. I feel like I ought to get you a mug or something for your commitment.
Sunday, June 5, 2016
Class Review: Anthropology 114
TL;DR 10/10 class content taught by a 6/10 professor assisted by 2/10 grad students, with 1/10 organization and clarity.
Hey, it's another class review! It's only been... almost my entire undergraduate career since the last one. Nailin' it, coach.
There are a few things I should clarify about this class before I write anything in particular on the subject: first, I took this class last semester (Spring 2016), so it's a recent event, and I did indeed get an A in it, so my complaints aren't just vinegar poured out because I'm bitter about bad grades. As far as why I'm taking the class in general, I'm a biologist who's considering picking up a minor in anthropology, for reasons that I would tell you if I knew them.
If you don't want to read the whole review, I'm just going to summarize and say that this is a very good class, and one you absolutely shouldn't take if you're anything like me. That probably sounds like a damn fool opinion, but that is indeed the most concise version of my opinion on the matter.
So, diving into the details, this is an upper-division anthropology class called History of Anthropological Thought, the title implying that it's a sort of greatest-hits approach to the history of anthropology. This isn't totally wrong; the stated purpose of the class, once you get into it, is to understand the various key movements and moments in anthropology's development as a discipline, as well as the important reversals and transition in how people thought in terms of theory. We read some of the classic racist armchair anthropologists of the late 1800s, and then went through the Boasian shift to radical empiricism, then through Radcliffe-Brown and the other morphs of structuralism, and into Geertz, and blah, blah, blah.
This sounds, in this cursory sort of summary, like a simple history class when I describe it, designed to orient the contemporary students of anthropology (who are to be discussed further down and later on) so they know where the "classical" ideas came from, who the big figures are, and so on. Anthropology, in one definition, is the science of comparative common sense, so it stands to reason we'd want to figure out where our own current common sense came from, so to speak.
I'm not convinced I have the vocabulary or the time and space to properly articulate how this worked, but that... simply isn't what happened in the class. We said we were doing that a great deal, and I did absorb a vastly greater knowledge of anthropology than I had before, but I can't honestly say that this exercise in historical understanding was the point of the course. I hear your immediate question, and I can only answer you that I don't truly know what the point was.
Lecture for this class was a damn mess, which annoyed the scientist portions of my brain and didn't really bother the part where I actually live. Professor Joyce simply stood and talked about things for the whole 90-minute lecture, which wasn't nearly as bad as it sounded; she is a vastly experienced expert in her specific field and in anthropology in general, and she's really a rather entertaining public speaker. Additionally, she tells good stories, and good stories from anthropology are usually completely ridiculous, so bonus points for that.
The difficulty is that, in an uncomfortably mercenary, cutthroat kind of way, I'm not necessarily around at lecture just to hear someone's interesting, insightful ideas, interesting and insightful though they may be. There is some degree to which I need to hear "know this" and "this was an aside for the interested members of the audience" for the sake of taking an exam and being engaged with course content, and we simply didn't have any of that, which was more than a little nerve-wracking.
"Nerve-wracking" and exam preparation lead nicely to the next point about this class: no one actually appeared to know precisely what was going on in the class at any given moment. I could belabor this point, but I'll try and keep it short. Organizationally, this class had two separate reading lists (one for lecture and one for section) and two separate pages on bCourses (the same deal). This is only slightly confusing, but allow me to elaborate: there were days when my section met (and I needed to present on things I'd read), but neither reading list was actually pertinent to what my GSI meant to talk with us about that day. Also, my GSI just kind of didn't add me to the bCourses page for the section, where I'm meant to be posting short writing assignments about the aforementioned things, and it took us almost a month to get to the point where she realized what had happened. Not knowing what assignments are due on which day: not so solid.
On the note of the organizational ephemerality of this class, we had a term paper for which we needed to analyze the work of a living member of UC Berkeley's anthropology department. I chose "analyze" specifically, because this is what the prompt said: "the final paper should analytically relate the work of the approved subject to the material covered in the course." For those who don't know or don't care, there are supposedly three levels of writing: descriptive, where you simply realize the facts about something; analysis, where you compare two or more things as abstractions, and synthesis, where you produce your own entirely new material. It's a uselessly muddy model because all the categories draw mutually on one another, but whatever.
The point is that we were meant to write at the level of analysis, meaning we take the contemporary anthropologist's work, hold it up against their predecessors, and go "Oh! These two lines of thought are similar (though not necessarily derived from one another)" and "If we use this author to understand it, this means this!" for 6 to 8 pages, which is what I did. I'm good at that, because... it's easy.
The difficulty came when I submitted an early draft of my paper to see if I was exempt from our final (which is a stupid concept and pissed me off for a whole other set of reasons, but steady on), and received the feedback.
Firstly, this was an A- paper, and I needed an A for the exemption. "I'll take that," I thought. "It's an early draft and I rushed a bit, so let's see what was said." The feedback was, summarizing, "you did too much reading of [your subject] through this course rather than answering the question: what does [your subject] think anthropology is and should be?"
So, as it stands at the authorial moment, I'm one point off getting exempted from an exam I no longer feel any sort of inclination to take (the organizational horrors had gotten me quite tilted by this point), and the feedback is, essentially, "revise your paper so as to answer the prompt less and answer this largely unrelated question that we've never mentioned to you, verbally or in a document, and you're off the hook."
I was more confused and vaguely annoyed than anything else, so I quoted the relevant bits of the email and sent another to my GSI, asking for some help interpreting what it was I should actually do. The GSI is a pro at this, after all, and I'm an amateur who wandered in from the bio buildings.
My interactions with the faculty here are usually nothing but pleasant (they like people who turn in their work, as it turns out), or at the very worst cold and polite, so understand what it means when I say boy I dun fucked up now.
The email I got back, while professionally worded (it always is with these people), was the single most scathing piece of communication I've ever gotten from someone who wasn't actively threatening me with violence. "It's not our job to interpret feedback," "it's not our job to ease your anxieties," and various other sentences explaining what an anthropology GSI's job was and was not ensued, informing me in no uncertain terms that I was totally out of line, and also totally out of luck. Apparently my email wasn't professionally worded enough, leading to the famous "I encourage you to use more professional language when addressing your instructors." "We're not doing it, and kindly piss off for asking," in short.
I sat staring at that email for a moment, in the pressure cooker of dead week with all the prior problems of this class stewing around in my head (my poor eyelashes suffered mightily under the fist of nervous trichotillomania this time around), wondering what to do. Having reached a conclusion, I opened Microsoft Word, added a one-sentence disclaimer to my paper that said, basically, "I'm doing analysis," and then went to Asha Tea House (the best) to get something sweet and caffeinated so I wouldn't be quite so inclined to eat the anthropology faculty.
This is, in short, the problem with this course, or at least the version I took. As a student, you have to perform at some unspecified level,understanding and absorbing a large volume of content which may or may not become relevant for the "learning exercise" of the examinations. If you ask Professor Joyce about it, she'll maintain that the exams are for learning, cite some research on learning, and mention a largely unrelated theorist who wrote something interesting on a subject that's entered her mind. If you ask a GSI they'll immediately shit on you, because they did research in South Africa, and they are busy doing important smart people things, which you as a filthy undergrad peasant wouldn't know a thing about. Also, there are three of them, but they don't talk to each other and don't pay attention in lecture, so good luck finding anything out even if they deign to answer you (which they most often didn't).
That having been said, this class wasn't actually difficult, in the end. I got out with an A on my transcript and didn't even have to take that last exam. Was I bewildered by this result? Yes. Was it something I understood how to repeat after I did it? Yes. Did it feel like I'd just been mercy-euthanized when I saw the final email? Also yes, as it turns out.
Humanity at large (and especially members of the more traditional scientific disciplines) look down on anthropology as a field for various reasons, but the main ones I hear are "it's easy because you can just make things up," "it's not quantitative or precise enough to be a real science," "it's pure theory and not materially applicable," and things of that nature. Personality-wise, the most common gripe is, generally, "everyone thinks they're incredibly smart and/or the department is full of snooty academics."
Faculty who taught Anthropology 114 last semester, please stop proving us all so firmly, unpleasantly right.
P.S. Feel free to show this to people as always; it gives me the giggles when people read my blog, and I turn the color of ketchup when they enjoy it. That being said, if you know me personally I would appreciate if you didn't, by some weird mechanism, connect this with me, and then with the faculty members in question. I don't want it to be a strange, tense, or awkward situation, and frankly I don't feel inclined to talk to them any more for the moment, a sentiment which I'm sure they reciprocate.
Hey, it's another class review! It's only been... almost my entire undergraduate career since the last one. Nailin' it, coach.
There are a few things I should clarify about this class before I write anything in particular on the subject: first, I took this class last semester (Spring 2016), so it's a recent event, and I did indeed get an A in it, so my complaints aren't just vinegar poured out because I'm bitter about bad grades. As far as why I'm taking the class in general, I'm a biologist who's considering picking up a minor in anthropology, for reasons that I would tell you if I knew them.
If you don't want to read the whole review, I'm just going to summarize and say that this is a very good class, and one you absolutely shouldn't take if you're anything like me. That probably sounds like a damn fool opinion, but that is indeed the most concise version of my opinion on the matter.
So, diving into the details, this is an upper-division anthropology class called History of Anthropological Thought, the title implying that it's a sort of greatest-hits approach to the history of anthropology. This isn't totally wrong; the stated purpose of the class, once you get into it, is to understand the various key movements and moments in anthropology's development as a discipline, as well as the important reversals and transition in how people thought in terms of theory. We read some of the classic racist armchair anthropologists of the late 1800s, and then went through the Boasian shift to radical empiricism, then through Radcliffe-Brown and the other morphs of structuralism, and into Geertz, and blah, blah, blah.
This sounds, in this cursory sort of summary, like a simple history class when I describe it, designed to orient the contemporary students of anthropology (who are to be discussed further down and later on) so they know where the "classical" ideas came from, who the big figures are, and so on. Anthropology, in one definition, is the science of comparative common sense, so it stands to reason we'd want to figure out where our own current common sense came from, so to speak.
I'm not convinced I have the vocabulary or the time and space to properly articulate how this worked, but that... simply isn't what happened in the class. We said we were doing that a great deal, and I did absorb a vastly greater knowledge of anthropology than I had before, but I can't honestly say that this exercise in historical understanding was the point of the course. I hear your immediate question, and I can only answer you that I don't truly know what the point was.
Lecture for this class was a damn mess, which annoyed the scientist portions of my brain and didn't really bother the part where I actually live. Professor Joyce simply stood and talked about things for the whole 90-minute lecture, which wasn't nearly as bad as it sounded; she is a vastly experienced expert in her specific field and in anthropology in general, and she's really a rather entertaining public speaker. Additionally, she tells good stories, and good stories from anthropology are usually completely ridiculous, so bonus points for that.
The difficulty is that, in an uncomfortably mercenary, cutthroat kind of way, I'm not necessarily around at lecture just to hear someone's interesting, insightful ideas, interesting and insightful though they may be. There is some degree to which I need to hear "know this" and "this was an aside for the interested members of the audience" for the sake of taking an exam and being engaged with course content, and we simply didn't have any of that, which was more than a little nerve-wracking.
"Nerve-wracking" and exam preparation lead nicely to the next point about this class: no one actually appeared to know precisely what was going on in the class at any given moment. I could belabor this point, but I'll try and keep it short. Organizationally, this class had two separate reading lists (one for lecture and one for section) and two separate pages on bCourses (the same deal). This is only slightly confusing, but allow me to elaborate: there were days when my section met (and I needed to present on things I'd read), but neither reading list was actually pertinent to what my GSI meant to talk with us about that day. Also, my GSI just kind of didn't add me to the bCourses page for the section, where I'm meant to be posting short writing assignments about the aforementioned things, and it took us almost a month to get to the point where she realized what had happened. Not knowing what assignments are due on which day: not so solid.
On the note of the organizational ephemerality of this class, we had a term paper for which we needed to analyze the work of a living member of UC Berkeley's anthropology department. I chose "analyze" specifically, because this is what the prompt said: "the final paper should analytically relate the work of the approved subject to the material covered in the course." For those who don't know or don't care, there are supposedly three levels of writing: descriptive, where you simply realize the facts about something; analysis, where you compare two or more things as abstractions, and synthesis, where you produce your own entirely new material. It's a uselessly muddy model because all the categories draw mutually on one another, but whatever.
The point is that we were meant to write at the level of analysis, meaning we take the contemporary anthropologist's work, hold it up against their predecessors, and go "Oh! These two lines of thought are similar (though not necessarily derived from one another)" and "If we use this author to understand it, this means this!" for 6 to 8 pages, which is what I did. I'm good at that, because... it's easy.
The difficulty came when I submitted an early draft of my paper to see if I was exempt from our final (which is a stupid concept and pissed me off for a whole other set of reasons, but steady on), and received the feedback.
Firstly, this was an A- paper, and I needed an A for the exemption. "I'll take that," I thought. "It's an early draft and I rushed a bit, so let's see what was said." The feedback was, summarizing, "you did too much reading of [your subject] through this course rather than answering the question: what does [your subject] think anthropology is and should be?"
So, as it stands at the authorial moment, I'm one point off getting exempted from an exam I no longer feel any sort of inclination to take (the organizational horrors had gotten me quite tilted by this point), and the feedback is, essentially, "revise your paper so as to answer the prompt less and answer this largely unrelated question that we've never mentioned to you, verbally or in a document, and you're off the hook."
I was more confused and vaguely annoyed than anything else, so I quoted the relevant bits of the email and sent another to my GSI, asking for some help interpreting what it was I should actually do. The GSI is a pro at this, after all, and I'm an amateur who wandered in from the bio buildings.
My interactions with the faculty here are usually nothing but pleasant (they like people who turn in their work, as it turns out), or at the very worst cold and polite, so understand what it means when I say boy I dun fucked up now.
The email I got back, while professionally worded (it always is with these people), was the single most scathing piece of communication I've ever gotten from someone who wasn't actively threatening me with violence. "It's not our job to interpret feedback," "it's not our job to ease your anxieties," and various other sentences explaining what an anthropology GSI's job was and was not ensued, informing me in no uncertain terms that I was totally out of line, and also totally out of luck. Apparently my email wasn't professionally worded enough, leading to the famous "I encourage you to use more professional language when addressing your instructors." "We're not doing it, and kindly piss off for asking," in short.
I sat staring at that email for a moment, in the pressure cooker of dead week with all the prior problems of this class stewing around in my head (my poor eyelashes suffered mightily under the fist of nervous trichotillomania this time around), wondering what to do. Having reached a conclusion, I opened Microsoft Word, added a one-sentence disclaimer to my paper that said, basically, "I'm doing analysis," and then went to Asha Tea House (the best) to get something sweet and caffeinated so I wouldn't be quite so inclined to eat the anthropology faculty.
This is, in short, the problem with this course, or at least the version I took. As a student, you have to perform at some unspecified level,understanding and absorbing a large volume of content which may or may not become relevant for the "learning exercise" of the examinations. If you ask Professor Joyce about it, she'll maintain that the exams are for learning, cite some research on learning, and mention a largely unrelated theorist who wrote something interesting on a subject that's entered her mind. If you ask a GSI they'll immediately shit on you, because they did research in South Africa, and they are busy doing important smart people things, which you as a filthy undergrad peasant wouldn't know a thing about. Also, there are three of them, but they don't talk to each other and don't pay attention in lecture, so good luck finding anything out even if they deign to answer you (which they most often didn't).
That having been said, this class wasn't actually difficult, in the end. I got out with an A on my transcript and didn't even have to take that last exam. Was I bewildered by this result? Yes. Was it something I understood how to repeat after I did it? Yes. Did it feel like I'd just been mercy-euthanized when I saw the final email? Also yes, as it turns out.
Humanity at large (and especially members of the more traditional scientific disciplines) look down on anthropology as a field for various reasons, but the main ones I hear are "it's easy because you can just make things up," "it's not quantitative or precise enough to be a real science," "it's pure theory and not materially applicable," and things of that nature. Personality-wise, the most common gripe is, generally, "everyone thinks they're incredibly smart and/or the department is full of snooty academics."
Faculty who taught Anthropology 114 last semester, please stop proving us all so firmly, unpleasantly right.
P.S. Feel free to show this to people as always; it gives me the giggles when people read my blog, and I turn the color of ketchup when they enjoy it. That being said, if you know me personally I would appreciate if you didn't, by some weird mechanism, connect this with me, and then with the faculty members in question. I don't want it to be a strange, tense, or awkward situation, and frankly I don't feel inclined to talk to them any more for the moment, a sentiment which I'm sure they reciprocate.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Straight Dealin'
TL;DR Don't mess with people. It doesn't help.
Something's been bothering me a great deal recently, by which I mean for roughly the last two years or so. To put it concisely: people are shady as hell, and it's infuriating.
I myself am guilty of this, so let's get that immediately out of the way; I'm not claiming by any means to be the patron saint of social interaction. Those of you who know me personally know that I range between compulsive bluntness and neurotic sarcasm, without a great deal of a middle ground, and clear communication is not necessarily my strong suit most of the time.
That being said, I absolutely cannot stand passive-aggressive non-communication. I don't really know how this got started, but I'm assuming both that it's not a unique feature of privileged white people (because that just isn't that many people, really) and that it has a great deal to do with our progressive dehumanizing detachment in the digital age (yadda yadda, more on that some other time). To be specific, I don't mean the normal vanilla interactions I have with people, because those are lovely. I'm specifically talking about what happens when I've had difficulties with people.
The phenomenon goes like this: I say something, and there is no response. For clarity, I don't necessarily mean nothing is said. If something is said (or more often typed), it usually reads something along the lines of "haha everything is cool!" or something to that effect. Now, this is in a situation where I plainly know that everything is not, in fact, cool, because we've had some sort of a falling out. This is never a declaration that a situation has been resolved.
People say this sort of thing to me to avoid conflict, simply put. In recent years I've improved vastly as a person. I've become more able to express myself, more understanding and patient with others, much stronger and more comfortable with myself, and more honest with people. I'm much more outgoing with regard to strangers than I used to be, and with people I know, I present my case far more plainly recently.
The net effect of all these changes in my personality is that I have a much lower tolerance for limp-wristed spineless bullshit like this than I used to. Interacting with people in my age has become, in many cases, a gigantic slaughter of a guessing game in which I have to try and gauge what reaction a particular statement will elicit, and how to engineer the outcomes I want by fiddling with an endless number of tiny knobs and buttons.
I think this has a great deal to do with how we communicate with one another, or more specifically the means we use to do so. It's extraordinarily easy to shade people in the world of smart phones; if you want to communicate that you're ignoring somebody, all you have to do is poke their message so it shows as read, toss your hair defiantly over your shoulder and say nothing in response. After all, there's always someone else texting you these days, so it's easy to resolve conflicts by just not interacting with them.
If there's some better deal developing for you at the moment, you can ignore me. If I say something you don't like, you can ignore me. If, God forbid, I point out to you that you're doing this, you can... you guessed it, just go ahead and ignore me. This is a very effective strategy young people have developed for both delaying the inevitable and pissing off people who genuinely care the way I do.
I'm going to point out for the benefit of the audience that in face-to-face interaction this is impossible. You just simply can't pull this type of crap when you have a real, in-person conversation with me, not least because all the imponderabilia of true interaction are things I'm exceptionally good at seeing and understanding. (Most people have a truly atrocious poker face, as it turns out, but more on that some other time.) The muscles in your face twitch, and I know I've made a mistake. You shift around in your seat, and I know you're uncomfortable. These are things I can fix. I can't work with the blank nothingness and filtered wording of text-based messages.
I understand, obviously, that honesty can be difficult and nerve-wracking, especially if the truth is something unpleasant to say. I also understand that I'm 6'4" and a genuinely scary individual to many people, and I can be extremely intimidating without meaning to. That being said, I have the heart of a big dumb bear, and I care very sincerely about my friends and affiliates, and I'm not actually going to tear your arms off with my brain or anything like that.
This is getting to be quite a ramble, so I'll wrap up with this: if you don't want to see me, tell me so. If you want to insult me, do it. If you want to fight me, get in my face or sit the hell down. I'm a big guy, and I can take it, and any offense you deal me directly is going to heal in the twenty minutes it takes me to invent some new memory as to what actually happened. Take it from me and my long experience that it's much better to just rip the Band-Aid off and get it over with than to sit around for years on end thinking about this type of social foolery.
Something's been bothering me a great deal recently, by which I mean for roughly the last two years or so. To put it concisely: people are shady as hell, and it's infuriating.
I myself am guilty of this, so let's get that immediately out of the way; I'm not claiming by any means to be the patron saint of social interaction. Those of you who know me personally know that I range between compulsive bluntness and neurotic sarcasm, without a great deal of a middle ground, and clear communication is not necessarily my strong suit most of the time.
That being said, I absolutely cannot stand passive-aggressive non-communication. I don't really know how this got started, but I'm assuming both that it's not a unique feature of privileged white people (because that just isn't that many people, really) and that it has a great deal to do with our progressive dehumanizing detachment in the digital age (yadda yadda, more on that some other time). To be specific, I don't mean the normal vanilla interactions I have with people, because those are lovely. I'm specifically talking about what happens when I've had difficulties with people.
The phenomenon goes like this: I say something, and there is no response. For clarity, I don't necessarily mean nothing is said. If something is said (or more often typed), it usually reads something along the lines of "haha everything is cool!" or something to that effect. Now, this is in a situation where I plainly know that everything is not, in fact, cool, because we've had some sort of a falling out. This is never a declaration that a situation has been resolved.
People say this sort of thing to me to avoid conflict, simply put. In recent years I've improved vastly as a person. I've become more able to express myself, more understanding and patient with others, much stronger and more comfortable with myself, and more honest with people. I'm much more outgoing with regard to strangers than I used to be, and with people I know, I present my case far more plainly recently.
The net effect of all these changes in my personality is that I have a much lower tolerance for limp-wristed spineless bullshit like this than I used to. Interacting with people in my age has become, in many cases, a gigantic slaughter of a guessing game in which I have to try and gauge what reaction a particular statement will elicit, and how to engineer the outcomes I want by fiddling with an endless number of tiny knobs and buttons.
I think this has a great deal to do with how we communicate with one another, or more specifically the means we use to do so. It's extraordinarily easy to shade people in the world of smart phones; if you want to communicate that you're ignoring somebody, all you have to do is poke their message so it shows as read, toss your hair defiantly over your shoulder and say nothing in response. After all, there's always someone else texting you these days, so it's easy to resolve conflicts by just not interacting with them.
If there's some better deal developing for you at the moment, you can ignore me. If I say something you don't like, you can ignore me. If, God forbid, I point out to you that you're doing this, you can... you guessed it, just go ahead and ignore me. This is a very effective strategy young people have developed for both delaying the inevitable and pissing off people who genuinely care the way I do.
I'm going to point out for the benefit of the audience that in face-to-face interaction this is impossible. You just simply can't pull this type of crap when you have a real, in-person conversation with me, not least because all the imponderabilia of true interaction are things I'm exceptionally good at seeing and understanding. (Most people have a truly atrocious poker face, as it turns out, but more on that some other time.) The muscles in your face twitch, and I know I've made a mistake. You shift around in your seat, and I know you're uncomfortable. These are things I can fix. I can't work with the blank nothingness and filtered wording of text-based messages.
I understand, obviously, that honesty can be difficult and nerve-wracking, especially if the truth is something unpleasant to say. I also understand that I'm 6'4" and a genuinely scary individual to many people, and I can be extremely intimidating without meaning to. That being said, I have the heart of a big dumb bear, and I care very sincerely about my friends and affiliates, and I'm not actually going to tear your arms off with my brain or anything like that.
This is getting to be quite a ramble, so I'll wrap up with this: if you don't want to see me, tell me so. If you want to insult me, do it. If you want to fight me, get in my face or sit the hell down. I'm a big guy, and I can take it, and any offense you deal me directly is going to heal in the twenty minutes it takes me to invent some new memory as to what actually happened. Take it from me and my long experience that it's much better to just rip the Band-Aid off and get it over with than to sit around for years on end thinking about this type of social foolery.
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