is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Etiquette = Tiny Ethics.
One of the youngish women (teens? early 20s?) in my building is seemingly permanently mad at me now for telling her she is loud. It�s one of those situations where the real content of what I said can never be expressed because it can�t be heard. She�s a young woman living with her mother and some other siblings somewhere upstairs from me. She gets home from work or something after midnight on some nights, like Monday and Thursday, I think. And then she talks on her cellphone loudly in the reverberating first floor hallway, where there are five apartments. Mine is the furthest away from where she stands, and still it is as if she is standing in my living room screaming�I am not exaggerating. Maybe she doesn�t know how amazingly loud it is? Maybe she thinks the doors keep the noise out? Anyway, usually I just ignore it even though it is almost impossible to ignore. But one night when I was already in bed and she was keeping me from sleeping, I opened the door to my apartment and told her that she was being really loud. She quieted down a little, like the amount of difference between a thespian projecting her voice and person intent on being heard. But she mostly didn�t care. I don�t really know why I bothered. It�s not like I thought she would care, given her age and the very fact of the habitual yelling-in-the-hallway-outside-other-people�s-apartments-after-midnight thing. After her phonecall that night she stomped up the stairs, after yelling down the hall that I�m a stupid bitch. It�s not a success story.
I�m not writing about it to complain. It�s just life in a city, after all. Our cities are what we make of them, and this is one huge part of what we have made of them. The main reason I�m writing about it is that it�s a case-in-point of a communication that can�t succeed. I was hoping that if I put a tired face and pajamas in front of her, she might get squeezed out of that dome of solipsism that so protects young (and not only young) people from awareness of how their actions affect others. But all she could hear was me insulting her by calling her loud. And what will I say the next time she yells at me for calling her loud? Will I say: �Well, I�m sorry for our misunderstanding, but I really thought that if you saw how tired I was, and that you were keeping me from sleeping, and that there are four other apartments even closer to where you were standing, that you might realize that what you were doing was thoughtless and rude.� No I won�t say that, because how could someone who will continually yell at me for calling her loud ever hear that over the sound of her own voice?
That�s not some self-satisfied ending on my part, though. Because there is so much going on in that lack of communication that can�t be covered by one person�s description of the event. Part of what happened is inevitably my fault or, better, my failure to speak in a way that could be heard as other than hostile (I see that now, even though everything I did was done in polite form� my politeness has class and race attached to it, which is part of the problem, the problem that we�re supposed to leave unspoken here in the US), or simply the fate of two people of really different backgrounds trying to communicate, especially when one of them is a teenager, and the other one is tired.
The failure of civility in cities isn�t simply about lack of politeness. It�s about difference, and in particular it�s about different groups having different ethical standards, different ideas about what correct behavior is�and failing to consider what those differences mean: sometimes what seems rude isn't meant as rude. Politeness is not universal, and there�s no reason it should be. Etiquette is culturally relative, and in this case �cultures� can be religions or ethnicities but they can also be chosen affiliations or even a small group of friends. There are ways of speaking that are fine with my friends that are not fine elsewhere (like referring to a woman�s breasts as a HOT RACK**�that�s praise not harassment�and so on). We all fail when we don�t try to imagine other people�s ideas. And even when we do, we all fail part of the time because our imaginations can only go so far.
However. Sometimes what other people do just is thoughtless and rude. Like when someone takes up three seats on a crowded subway train because she doesn�t want her shopping bags to sit on the floor, and there are tired old people standing nearby. At moments like that, I feel like, even if standards of politeness cannot be universal, some forms of judgment about civility are and should be universal.
Just the tiniest bit of thought given to how to live together with other people makes a huge difference.
**Of course, if Marilyn or Evany tells me my rack looks hot, it�s really different from when some random construction worker does. But there�s nothing shocking about that: we all know that words mean different things coming from different speakers and that what is OK to say varies according to relationship. However�and this is just more evidence of how acceptable language varies from place to place�when it comes to referring to breasts, �rack� is just funny. But �tits� is gross. And that�s one of many reasons why I don�t go around talking to strangers about their body parts.
12:18 a.m. - April 23, 2008
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