In which speaking is unexpectedly fraught
Jan. 9th, 2015 02:01 amYesterday, the phrase "I will take away your urinal, FOR EQUALITY!!!" happened, over lunch. ( Context: jokes about baby-as-sportsball, with gender-essentialist assumptions. ) So that wandered into a vaguely trollish discussion of men's and women's sports categories, and how clearly the only possible form that true equality could take would be to abolish all differences and give everyone the same shot-put. At which point I threatened Purple's bathrooms, and we got into a high-level discussion of the mechanics of people who haven't got an attached hose using a wall-mounted urinal to pee into.
I started the day with too much caffeine.
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kaberett linked http://stimmyabby.tumblr.com/post/94491284337/i-have-access-to-speech-at-least-85-of-the-time in the past week-ish, and it has made me think many thoughts.
In particular, I am deeply thankful that at some point around the age of 19 or 20, I was able to identify the fact that I was capable of spontaneous, unplanned chatting to untrusted strangers in a textual format, and reroute that channel of communication to also be duplicated in speech if I felt like it. (I also remember what made me gain a fear of public speaking; suffice to say that I started out as an effervescent and outgoing child when in my element and it was a routine childhood humiliation that squashed a good deal of that before encountering my peers in public school flattened much of the rest of my public face.)
Later, I spent a few years with one member of the Collective having little access to speech and uneven access to communication at all. That was ... interesting.
All this is to say that this morning when I hadn't eaten enough breakfast to fuel the 100mg of caffeine all the way until lunchtime, my speech was crashing pretty bad right along with my blood sugar as I tried to figure out what I could eat in the cafeteria. (When that happens, there are some things which no longer are food.) I was the unlucky person behind the person who got the last of the chicken skewers in the grill line, so it was burrito time. Fortunately the guy knows my usual burrito order pretty well, and I was capable of specifying to avoid the peppers, ask which meat was least spicy, and say no tomatoes. But by the time I paid and got my drink, I was down to emergency communication only.
The table was Purple and Lennon Glasses Guy this time, and I sat down at the end, where the napkins usually are. They weren't, this time. Purple and Lennon Glasses Guy were engaged in a nice deep conversation about file systems and storage errors: something I could appreciate but not really contribute to. That was just as well, as one thing I really hate is wanting to contribute to a conversation but not being able to jump in. (Extra acknowledgement to Shawn here, who absolutely fucking mastered the art of not letting me have a word in edgewise, berating me for interrupting him, and in general being a shitty conversationalist who traumatized the fuck out of me.) I realized that at this point in my blood sugar, actually mustering the words "Hey, can someone pass me the napkins?" was not going to happen, and that I would also be entirely miserable with the weight of history behind needing the thing and not being able to ask for the thing, plus the general discomfort of handling a potentially drippy burrito without a goddamn napkin.
So I tapped Purple on the nearest arm. He stopped talking immediately and gave me his full attention. I gestured to the basket of napkins. He picked one up and handed it to me. I signed "Thank you." He gave some form (I'm not sure whether it was spoken or gestured) of "You're welcome", and then resumed the file system/storage conversation with Lennon Glasses Guy.
It was okay for me to need things. It was okay for me to be imperfect in how I asked for them. Nobody yelled at me. Nobody told me how wrong I was. Nobody said that I was interrupting or that my need had been insufficient, or told me I could have got up to get one myself. I updated Twitter as a way to keep from actually bursting out crying over nothing.
I could feel my energy and brain coming back as I ate the burrito. It was a really, really tasty burrito, with the cheese melted perfectly into the rice with the juice from the slow-cooked beef. So good. Purple mentioned a file system which did not react particularly well to storage errors, which had made some people he knew particularly unhappy and spend a few years attempting to recover the data. "So if it gets corrupted, you're..." He trailed off.
"Fucked," I finished for him.
"You do realize that saying 'fucked' goes less distance than signing 'fucked'?" Purple teased, under the impression that I'd been signing out of a slightly misguided impulse at discretion, rather than it being the best avenue of communication available.
My communication improved as the burrito hit my system, so I was reasonably talkative again by the end of lunch, and filled my role as The One With The Internet On Their Phone and looked up whether or not a particular file system with reasonable speed and data preservation attributes was available for Debian (it was). I explained to Purple that my speech had crashed due to blood sugar, earlier, thus the various signing.
"Oh, so it wasn't that it was a boring conversation!"
Indeed not. I learn a lot when Purple holds forth about deep tech stuff, and yesterday my position as Smart But Uninitiated One had been held up as a valuable resource -- I have the capacity to learn technical things equal to any of the engineers, but my pre-existing education in the field is pretty much that of a 10-years-out-of-date new college graduate. So I can read the screed of Unit Test Jesus and ask sensible questions ("not" and "now" are a really common typo, especially for certain classes of dyslexia; that one can fuck up an entire paragraph), and I'm not necessarily bringing pre-existing knowledge to it. Plus I'm good at writing.
Team meeting was a half-hour, and answering questions about The New State of Things.
I took my ice cream and my phone out to the fire pit, and got started on setting up the latest Fucking New App on my phone. The phone part of it was all right. When I got back to my desktop was where the "fun" started. I swear I am going to have to get myself some kind of Linux virtual machine so I can swear adequately about some of the fucking software they are trying to foist off on us.
There were no owls audible in the parking lot when we got out there. Purple speculated that they might not have been from around here, and somehow that made him think of owls living in cardboard boxes. I asked, quite practically, how they were expected to take the cardboard boxes with them when they were flying. He hadn't the foggiest, and told me to ask the owls. (Don't make me come out of this box.)
I was exhausted and my knees were ouchy. Purple is getting good at lip-reading it when I say "motherfucker" due to various forms of pain. The care with which he treats me when I am feeling unwell always reminds me of how he is not a careless asshole normally. (Unlike some dudes I have known.) And I am reminded that my strength is not a threat to Purple. If I do something awesome, he is pleased. If I do something awesome that he didn't realize I could do, he is surprised and pleased: his friend can do this nifty thing! I am not tempted to play down my accomplishments in order to soothe his ego. I am not tempted to play up my vulnerabilities to inspire protection or gentle treatment. I am rarely tempted to play down my vulnerabilities to avoid ill consequence.
( Read more... )
I was chatting with StPatience a bit tonight, and I said something about Comcast, and she reframed it. I don't, actually, have very much of a "home life". (Internet socialization aside.) I suspect I would be much more dissatisfied about this if I didn't look forward to lunch at Purple's table, saying good morning to #cupcake and my team, and most days having a good chat with Purple in the parking lot before going home...
I started the day with too much caffeine.
kaberett linked http://stimmyabby.tumblr.com/post/94491284337/i-have-access-to-speech-at-least-85-of-the-time in the past week-ish, and it has made me think many thoughts. In particular, I am deeply thankful that at some point around the age of 19 or 20, I was able to identify the fact that I was capable of spontaneous, unplanned chatting to untrusted strangers in a textual format, and reroute that channel of communication to also be duplicated in speech if I felt like it. (I also remember what made me gain a fear of public speaking; suffice to say that I started out as an effervescent and outgoing child when in my element and it was a routine childhood humiliation that squashed a good deal of that before encountering my peers in public school flattened much of the rest of my public face.)
Later, I spent a few years with one member of the Collective having little access to speech and uneven access to communication at all. That was ... interesting.
All this is to say that this morning when I hadn't eaten enough breakfast to fuel the 100mg of caffeine all the way until lunchtime, my speech was crashing pretty bad right along with my blood sugar as I tried to figure out what I could eat in the cafeteria. (When that happens, there are some things which no longer are food.) I was the unlucky person behind the person who got the last of the chicken skewers in the grill line, so it was burrito time. Fortunately the guy knows my usual burrito order pretty well, and I was capable of specifying to avoid the peppers, ask which meat was least spicy, and say no tomatoes. But by the time I paid and got my drink, I was down to emergency communication only.
The table was Purple and Lennon Glasses Guy this time, and I sat down at the end, where the napkins usually are. They weren't, this time. Purple and Lennon Glasses Guy were engaged in a nice deep conversation about file systems and storage errors: something I could appreciate but not really contribute to. That was just as well, as one thing I really hate is wanting to contribute to a conversation but not being able to jump in. (Extra acknowledgement to Shawn here, who absolutely fucking mastered the art of not letting me have a word in edgewise, berating me for interrupting him, and in general being a shitty conversationalist who traumatized the fuck out of me.) I realized that at this point in my blood sugar, actually mustering the words "Hey, can someone pass me the napkins?" was not going to happen, and that I would also be entirely miserable with the weight of history behind needing the thing and not being able to ask for the thing, plus the general discomfort of handling a potentially drippy burrito without a goddamn napkin.
So I tapped Purple on the nearest arm. He stopped talking immediately and gave me his full attention. I gestured to the basket of napkins. He picked one up and handed it to me. I signed "Thank you." He gave some form (I'm not sure whether it was spoken or gestured) of "You're welcome", and then resumed the file system/storage conversation with Lennon Glasses Guy.
It was okay for me to need things. It was okay for me to be imperfect in how I asked for them. Nobody yelled at me. Nobody told me how wrong I was. Nobody said that I was interrupting or that my need had been insufficient, or told me I could have got up to get one myself. I updated Twitter as a way to keep from actually bursting out crying over nothing.
I could feel my energy and brain coming back as I ate the burrito. It was a really, really tasty burrito, with the cheese melted perfectly into the rice with the juice from the slow-cooked beef. So good. Purple mentioned a file system which did not react particularly well to storage errors, which had made some people he knew particularly unhappy and spend a few years attempting to recover the data. "So if it gets corrupted, you're..." He trailed off.
"Fucked," I finished for him.
"You do realize that saying 'fucked' goes less distance than signing 'fucked'?" Purple teased, under the impression that I'd been signing out of a slightly misguided impulse at discretion, rather than it being the best avenue of communication available.
My communication improved as the burrito hit my system, so I was reasonably talkative again by the end of lunch, and filled my role as The One With The Internet On Their Phone and looked up whether or not a particular file system with reasonable speed and data preservation attributes was available for Debian (it was). I explained to Purple that my speech had crashed due to blood sugar, earlier, thus the various signing.
"Oh, so it wasn't that it was a boring conversation!"
Indeed not. I learn a lot when Purple holds forth about deep tech stuff, and yesterday my position as Smart But Uninitiated One had been held up as a valuable resource -- I have the capacity to learn technical things equal to any of the engineers, but my pre-existing education in the field is pretty much that of a 10-years-out-of-date new college graduate. So I can read the screed of Unit Test Jesus and ask sensible questions ("not" and "now" are a really common typo, especially for certain classes of dyslexia; that one can fuck up an entire paragraph), and I'm not necessarily bringing pre-existing knowledge to it. Plus I'm good at writing.
Team meeting was a half-hour, and answering questions about The New State of Things.
I took my ice cream and my phone out to the fire pit, and got started on setting up the latest Fucking New App on my phone. The phone part of it was all right. When I got back to my desktop was where the "fun" started. I swear I am going to have to get myself some kind of Linux virtual machine so I can swear adequately about some of the fucking software they are trying to foist off on us.
There were no owls audible in the parking lot when we got out there. Purple speculated that they might not have been from around here, and somehow that made him think of owls living in cardboard boxes. I asked, quite practically, how they were expected to take the cardboard boxes with them when they were flying. He hadn't the foggiest, and told me to ask the owls. (Don't make me come out of this box.)
I was exhausted and my knees were ouchy. Purple is getting good at lip-reading it when I say "motherfucker" due to various forms of pain. The care with which he treats me when I am feeling unwell always reminds me of how he is not a careless asshole normally. (Unlike some dudes I have known.) And I am reminded that my strength is not a threat to Purple. If I do something awesome, he is pleased. If I do something awesome that he didn't realize I could do, he is surprised and pleased: his friend can do this nifty thing! I am not tempted to play down my accomplishments in order to soothe his ego. I am not tempted to play up my vulnerabilities to inspire protection or gentle treatment. I am rarely tempted to play down my vulnerabilities to avoid ill consequence.
( Read more... )
I was chatting with StPatience a bit tonight, and I said something about Comcast, and she reframed it. I don't, actually, have very much of a "home life". (Internet socialization aside.) I suspect I would be much more dissatisfied about this if I didn't look forward to lunch at Purple's table, saying good morning to #cupcake and my team, and most days having a good chat with Purple in the parking lot before going home...
