is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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on not going to funkytown.
In the kind of irony that happens to you when you�re writing a section called �Communication� in a chapter called �Hearing� that begins with anecdotes about the ironies that get expressed when hearers hear something other than what a speaker intends, I learned something about my own wedding plans yesterday. I learned that, because I have been to so few weddings in my life (and the weddings I have been to have tended to be quirky or not-normative), I don�t even know what the expectations are that I have frustrated by planning a wedding in the way that I have. Ha.
So, as I was sitting at my desk, struggling to figure out how best to convey what is inescapably fraught in human communication (communication is not the same as knowledge, can never have the level of certainty of a fact, and so on), I suddenly found myself engaged in a 2-hour clarificatory discussion about what the details of the wedding weekend are with people who, I thought, had more of the details than anyone else involved. It was funny!
And it freaked me out a bit, in a temporary way, given that I thought I had communicated all the details in various formats at different times. So of course I went back and checked to see if I had. And I had. But it�s also true that I had never just laid out a simple timeline where everything was clear and all info was gathered into one place. And anyway it soon became clear that the difficulty was less in whether or not I had provided details and more in the fact that Gus and I decided to get married at a non-standard time in a non-standard way. (Tiny wedding in our backyard on a weekday afternoon, with a dinner later that night at a hotel, followed the next day by a larger party on a weekend evening. That�s exactly what we want so that�s exactly what we planned, but it is, I�ve learned, just atypical enough to cause confusion no matter what we do.) So on some level it doesn�t matter that the invitations and the emails say what we�ll be doing. We have to make it more explicit because we�re breaking with the expected form. I know that now.
Again, it�s funny. At some point my sister (who had been observing the group conversation which was conducted in a private facebook group) wrote me an email to ask whether I was getting ready to take anyone to funkytown (which is a code�with a hilarious backstory�for slipping into the kind of terrifying rage my father tended to muster all too easily when we were growing up) and I said no, really, not at all, and then I realized something else.
I tend to credit my conversion to relatively rage-free existence to philosophy, in particular to a combination of Levinas and Nietzsche that really taught me something about patience and also about the sources of anger (it�s mostly the self rather than other people). It worked so well on me (over time. It takes time and work to change the self.) that I now don�t even feel rage very often (whereas for a long time I would still feel a lot of it but direct it elsewhere). Of course it still slips out sometimes. You can�t actually kill something like that in yourself (I don�t think). But it tends to slip out when it needs to, like when something truly enraging happens. (But let�s just admit that when I do get angry, it is scary, because of where I learned how to do it. Stauffers can muster some scary anger. However, if you are so used to anger that you are not overly frightened by it, such rage can also be funny, like the time my dad got really angry at the drawer full of Tupperware and it was hilarious instead of scary because I was a full-fledged adult by then, and so was he.) My rage also sometimes slips out in a milder form when it would be better if it stayed more under wraps. But those moments tend to be when I�m, for instance, in a committee meeting and someone is bullying someone else or being grossly unfair and I truly cannot stop myself from committing a verbal smackdown. Sure, in a moment like that maybe it would be better to be diplomatic (because I know enough about persuasion to understand that fear and rage don�t tend to work very well) but, well, I don�t regret that I can�t stomach such behavior.
But that�s not what I learned. This latest funny lesson in the uncertainties of communication revealed to me that it is also teaching that has made me patient (ha, even though there are of course moments when I feel truly impatient while I�m am doing it). Teaching has made me patient in lots of ways, but here�s a main one. When you teach, you just can�t believe that communication is transparent. It is made clear to you on a fairly constant basis that even when you speak carefully and with purpose after having given a lot of thought to how best to make a point, people will sometimes hear something other than what you thought you said. That is a human truth. And here�s the big point: it doesn�t mean that the speaker or the hearer made a mistake. I did my best. The students (at least some of them) did their best. And yet they heard something other than what I said. And so we enter into further conversation, to clarify and consult with each other, and come up with better shared truths.
So I sent out some clarifying emails to the people participating in various parts of the wedding. And that probably took care of things. But I may also need to do some reminding later on, because another part of this is that, unlike a college classroom, email and social media are like attention-diffusion machines, and so people just don�t retain information that isn�t totally necessary to their daily functioning. It�s a survival technique.
8:54 a.m. - May 07, 2013
Seedpod - 2013-06-11 15:41:59
It's been so long since I've walked down the once noisy halls of Diaryland. It was good to peek in your room and read something that reminded me of why I loved writing diary entries (and reading them).
It's a nostalgic place for me now. *cue David Bowie singing Golden Years* I feel like the children in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe when they are told they might return to Narnia one day but not via the wardrobe.
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