Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Dear Mr. John Darnielle:

Thank you for a lovely concert. Are you sure you weren't one of my lab students 10-12 years ago? You don't look like any particular one of them, just a representative of the type. In any case, well done. Thanks also to your band.

Fondly,
mrissa

Dear audience at the concert of Mr. John Darnielle:

Okay, look. I know some of you are apparently new. I know that in the cave in which you were raised, all entertainment came with mute, pause, and fast-forward buttons. But here in adultland, we have this thing called live shows where both the performers and the fellow audience members are fellow human beings. This time even the opening act qualified as a fellow human being! It's astonishing! What does this mean? It means:

If the venue has a very small number of seats off to one side, approaching those seats to ask, "Are these reserved/taken?" is quite reasonable (and thanks to the vast majority of people who handled that as polite members of society). Sneering, "Are these for special people?" at the people already seated in them is not quite the same thing. It is already such a special experience to require assistance to get into the concert at all, to worry whether one's needed accommodations will be handled gracefully despite one's calling in advance (they were), and to have one's particular special condition exacerbated by the decadent overindulgence of sitting in dark halls two nights in a row. What I really need to make the experience complete is your open resentment that I have been permitted something so flagrantly self-indulgent as a chair. Then when we indicate that it's because of disability, what I need even more is for you to recoil as though I have whipped out graphic pictures of some surgery or internal organ. Thanks ever so.

Do not answer your damn cell phone. If it rings during a quiet moment in the music, your course of action is to look extremely sheepish and mute it or turn it off, as you should have done at the start of the show. If they call for which you are waiting is truly life and death important, please stand close to the doors so you can duck out into the lobby to answer it.

If you are taking pictures, do not turn your flash up to "everybody take your iodine, there's been a nuclear event" level. I live with one photographer and see quite a bit of some others socially, and so I am pretty sure that this is not necessary. And if it was necessary, it might be a sign that you should just not try to get that picture.

This is a rock show. One of the things that means is dynamic variation. You can pretty well guarantee that there will be a loud bit at some point, and then there is a loud bit, you can say things to your companion in a loudish conversational voice. You can rummage around in the purse you have apparently filled entirely with cellophane. You can make impatient little noises with your water bottle. What you should not do is to perform these irritating little acts compulsively when the music is having quiet, contemplative/emotional moments. If something in your purse is that important and takes two full songs to find, perhaps you should go out to the lobby, where there is better lighting. Or perhaps you should stand closer to the individuals in one of the paragraphs adjacent to you, as they were augmenting the lighting on a fairly regular basis.

If you must light up and stay lit up for the entire concert (which, frankly, I doubt is quite as imperative as you seemed to find it), do us all a favor and spring for the good pot. "But Mris," you may be saying, "you do not smoke pot. How do you know which is the good pot?" I have said this before, but since some people are, as I said, apparently new, I will repeat it. In fact, this is general advice from Auntie mrissa, applicable to sweaters and roommates and cupcakes and quarter-scale reproductions of the SF-MoMA porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and his chimp as well as to weed: things that smell like burning unwashed ass are bad. You do not want them.

If you wish to be in full control of which songs you hear at which times, I have some wonderful news for you! It is now possible to purchase a number of devices that facilitate this behavior. You can, for example, use a CD player. You can use a music player on your computer or on a portable device. You can even, should you be inclined, make cassette tapes and fast-forward or rewind them as you desire. If that is not retro enough for you, some bars feature machines into which you may feed money for this purpose. However, this is not the jukebox option. That being the case, will you please permit the performers to perform more than one song before you begin shouting the names of their one or two most popular pieces? (Or any others. But especially those.) They arrived for this event aware that their engagement in this venue was for the purposes of providing music. They have therefore given some thought to music they know or might remember some of, and if they don't say, "So what d'you want to hear?" or otherwise seem to be flailing, let them play. If the show appears to be winding down, you may then express your enthusiasm for the performers' one or two most popular songs if those have not been played, and if you feel that they may be unaware of which pieces catch your particular individual fancy and the particular individual fancy of every other person who has ever heard of this band. But give the poor musicians at least a few minutes to get settled in onstage before you shatter their illusion that you might be here for more than just the one three-minute song.

I'm so glad we've cleared all that up.

Sternly,
mrissa

Not everybody who has a mobility disability uses a wheelchair.

Not everybody who has a hearing disability uses ASL.

Not everybody who has a vision disability is completely without sight.

Not everybody who has a disability has it permanently.

Not everybody who has a disability knows how permanent it is going to be.

Not everybody who has a disability has it to the same extent every single hour of every single day.

Not everybody who has a disability is able to keep doing everything through it.

Not everybody who has a disability finds they can't do what they wanted to do because of it.

Not everybody who has a disability is visible to the casual observer as disabled.

Not everybody who has a disability can accept the kind of help that will make you feel good and not cause you any trouble.

Not everybody who has a disability is impaired in their ability to assess their own needs and communicate them to you. Ask. Listen to the answers.

Hey, look, everybody! It's the angriest day of the year! I should just not read commentary by people I don't already know and like on July 20. Uff da.

I wasn't there, so I want to know: when did it become teenagers' fault that we don't have a more robust space program? Seriously, it's a great strategy. Now that I'm 11 years (okay, okay: 10 years and 359 days) from the last year in which I could be considered a teenager, I'm really coming to appreciate it. I don't have to own up to my choices as a voter! I don't have to acknowledge where my own charitable contributions or volunteer time or lack of same are going! Instead of it being partly my fault for having a variety of political and social concerns and making choices based on balance there, I can simply blame the only people in our society who could not possibly have played a part in creating the situation. Hey, thanks, people who reached adulthood before me! You thought this one out really well! And teenagers are so used to being blamed for things their little brother or that jerk in their second period class did, what's one more? I mean, it's kind of a big one more. But they're already so irresponsible for not getting the jobs our system doesn't have for them--and selfish and small-minded for worrying about paying for college instead of Dreaming Big Dreams the way we did when college was cheaper--so it's sort of like a training program for taking the space-related blame. Neat how that works out.

The only drawback I'm seeing here is that I am young enough that I will never be able to claim, as some people shooting their mouths off today seem to feel they are able to, that the Apollo program was created of my inchoate childhood or teenage longings. See, I thought it was created of engineering. But I see now that that would make any lacks in current space programs the fault of people who decide how to fund engineers and for which projects, rather than the fault of kids these days not dreaming big enough. So clearly that doesn't work. Probably it's my own fault for aiming my inchoate teenage longings at getting out of the school system I was (of course) fully teenage-responsible for creating. Let that be a lesson, teenagers! Stick close to your desks, and never go to sea, and you all may be rulers of the Space Navy. Do not attempt to escape the system personally! We need that dream fuel to create space programs without funding engineers! Dream harder! But never for yourselves, because that would put you back in the wrong! Where you are anyway! Great deal, huh?

Well. There's my quota of exclamation marks for the year. And a serious and non-sarcastic thanks to those of you who were alive 40 years ago and manage to remember a great feat of engineering without casting aspersions on those who never had the chance to see anything similar.

Hurrah for a decent night of sleep! Finally. First one since we left for California. Still more wobbly than my current norm during the days, still finding PT exercises more difficult than usual, but sleep! Sleep is something. Something good, even. Highly recommended, sleep. All the best people do it from time to time.

And it was just in time for markgritter's birthday, too. Good timing, sleep! I tried telling some of our friends that we were not having a birthday party for markgritter this year, and one of our friends (who shall remain dlandon) thought I meant we were not having a birthday party, we were just having this totally casual thing with cake where people brought presents and stuff. And everybody else present thought this was not just a totally reasonable interpretation but the totally reasonable interpretation. I love how we've gotten these people to the point where "we're not having a party" doesn't really compute, and they get ready to come to our not-a-party. Which will have lots of fruit and cheese and cake. That's training one's friends well, that is.

(Seriously, though. No party. Maybe a random we-like-Mark party later, when we're feeling a bit steadier on our feet.)

(Do not pity him. He gets tapas.)

One of the odd things about being mired in vertigo and PT for this long is that my sense of time is off. Another is that I am distrusting my control of tone in a lot of interpersonal interactions. I verbally rolled my eyes at an old friend today online, and I felt sure that my friend would cope and verbally roll their eyes back, because we've gone round and round on this general issue before, and nobody has taken their marbles and gone home yet. (That would require either of us to find our marbles, possibly. But I digress.) But when something hurts my feelings or upsets me in the last few months, I've been really unsure that I will be able to bring it up in a fair and reasonable way (as opposed to, "You hurt my feelings and I have verrrrrrrtigooooooo, waaaaaaaaah"), so I've been keeping my mouth shut instead of being quiet and polite and firm about stuff like that. This is perhaps suboptimal on all counts, as I'm pretty sure my near and dear (and even my distant but cordial) are not keen on increased likelihood of touching unknown sore spots in the same spot multiple times. I'm also aware that by bringing it up as a general problem in an lj entry -- even though it is a general problem and not specifically that greykev has been going around telling people that my feet smell like elephant farts and I'm trying to weasel out of facing him about it -- I may be making people nervous about talking to me at all, which is the last thing I want. Uff da. Sometimes a sense of social/conversational fair play is a bit oppressive.

(applicable other days as well)

1. It turns out that legality is not the only standard of behavior required in civilized circles. If pointing out that you have broken no laws is all it takes for your circle of acquaintance to approve of your behavior, you need a better circle of acquaintance. This is true of presidential candidates, of Harry Potter RPGers, and of any other circle you care to name: it being legal to do something does not make it kind, tasteful, interesting, or a dozen other things that a person might wish it to be.

2. Until nanotechnology progresses further than it has to date, neither soaps nor linens are traps for the young or unwary guest, nor should they be treated as such. If you don't want someone washing their hands with something, don't put it in a soap dish by the sink. If you don't want someone drying their hands on something, don't hang it on a towel bar in the bathroom or set it on the bathroom counter conveniently close by if guests are on their way. If you suspect that you have left something unsuitable in the bathroom because your guests have caught you unawares, for heaven's sake dart in and check.

3. If someone is clinging to someone else's arm in a public place, please consider that she may not be doing it for affection's sake, and do not attempt to bully her into letting go. Your failure condition if you navigate around her is that you may have given leeway to someone who is fluttery with new romance: not necessary, certainly, but not catastrophic. Whereas your failure condition if you attempt to bull through her is that you may cause great inconvenience and further suffering to someone for whom walking around in an ordinary fashion is already more difficult than she would like it to be; anticipation of this problem may keep her from useful or enjoyable activities when she's having a difficult day. If you feel the need, you may glare discouragingly in case she's doing it for fun, because by this point she does not give the proverbial rodent's hindquarters what you think as long as you don't try to knock her down.

So why was I asking about compliments again earlier today?

Well. Someone called Nameseeker was asking, in the comments to my post about Minicon and the "Geek, Be Not Ashamed" panel, what I'd recommend to someone going through a bad high school experience. What would help with that situation? It's a good question. It's one I've been thinking about. And a week from tomorrow I'll be part of Career Day at a local high school, and so while I'm hoping that it's a good one, not the really toxic atmosphere some of them are, it's got me thinking about that. And sure, like the man says, escape is a prisoner's first duty -- but nobody screws up high school so badly that they're still a sophomore at 47. So there's escape, but there's also the consideration of how to do it so that you'll be functional later. How to get free of it without chewing your leg off, so to speak. Not always easy.

Compliments were a major weapon at my high school. The barbed compliment, the sarcastic compliment, the compliment that turns on someone else present, the compliment that's supposed to erase months or years of ill-treatment...and then the complimenter can turn to others and say, "I was just trying to be nice." There was one girl at my high school -- which was, in case you hadn't heard by now, a pretty nasty one, although there were several salvageable experiences from it -- who was clearly trying to be nice by her own standards. She wanted to be known as a nice person. She also wanted to be "popular," in the high school sense of being in an in-crowd. And it did not occur to this kid that people would set the value of her attempted niceness much higher if she didn't spend her time with some of the meanest people in the school. If the sort of people who would kick handicapped kids in their leg braces and make fun of the kids who could barely speak a sentence didn't get a free pass from her on their behavior.

So I guess my first piece of advice for people trying to endure a toxic high school is to recognize that other people are having to live with the toxicity as well, and to be as kind as you can manage. Other people may not notice it. But it'll be something you know about yourself. You don't have to be indefinitely kind to people who are mean to you, but it might be useful to give people more than one chance; if they're used to hearing, "Is that a good book?" with derisive snickers behind it, they may not be prepared to take it as a serious and congenial discussion question the first time around.

(This is not the same thing as being as nice as you can manage. Nice is a club you can give other people to beat you with. Nice conforms to local standards, particularly for girls. "Nice" may prevent you from taking a good swing at the guy who kicked the girl in her leg braces. "Kind," on the other hand, may well tell you to go for it; sticking up for others can be very kind and well-remembered years later.)

This was meant to be a longer post, but with work on fiction and the ever-popular vertigo troubles, it's taken me this long just to get a start on it. So I'll try to do more later on the same theme, because I think it's unfortunately important.

I don't want to talk about the vertigo, but it's been no fun the last several days, so it's kind of taking a lot of attention, for something I don't want to talk about. A friend had to cancel tea with me today, which is good, because now I can pretend I wouldn't have been too dizzy to do it; it's on her. Um. Simple declarative sentence mode, I guess. It's cold. This Finnish history book is poorly copy-edited. I like cucumbers. My dog is nice.

There were three things I wanted to mention, though, sort of policy-ish things, because I am stern and mean and no fun at all:

1) Political speech is not socially privileged with me. If you are a jerk to groups of people in the name of politics, I'm not going to enjoy that any more than if you were a jerk to them in the name of anything else, all the way down to frisbee golf or macramé. I will not have a political affiliation test for remaining on my friendslist, and I understand that political speech can get pretty intense. I would like to say that I'd never de-friend someone for their politics, but of course there are political positions that are way beyond the pale. But in general, within much of current American political discourse, I won't de-friend people for their politics. I will de-friend them for being a jerk about their politics, even if I agree with the particular position. Ideally this will not come up because everyone will treat everyone else like human beings except for Politician X, who obviously doesn't deserve it.

2) I don't promote things in this lj unless I actually genuinely like them. It's really no good writing to me to ask me to promote, say, a kind of onion rings, because I don't eat onion rings, ever, so it doesn't matter how good your onion rings are. If, on the other hand, I eat your sweet potato fries and they're really good, you don't have to ask, because I will rave about them on my own, no problem. I like good sweet potato fries. Sending me free stuff in case I like it is fine. Specifically asking me to shill for you for something I haven't even tried: not fine. I can stand a certain amount of targeted advertisement, but skipping advertising to me and moving right on to asking me to advertise for you? Not gonna happen, so save your pixels.

3) If I send you an unpublished manuscript, either for critique purposes or as a friendly thing, like I did for Christmas '06, I would really prefer that you not show it around to other people without asking me first. And I would really prefer that you not forward the pixels to people without asking me first. This is not about who has a right to what or lawsuits or anything like that. This is me asking nicely, saying, I would find it more congenial if you refrained. I would find it more civil. And I would more likely feel friendly the next time I was doing a friendly thing. If I'm still trying to sell a story, I'd prefer that there not be any real question about whether it's been published before, and I'd prefer that I know which editors have seen it, more or less. The stories I'm willing to have distributed hither, thither, and yon are linked right here for your reading pleasure and your second cousin's college roommate's co-worker's reading pleasure. Again, I know that once a story has left my hands, I don't control it. So I'm not saying, "YOU CAN'T." I'm saying, "Please don't."

The thing is, sometimes you don't notice that someone has moved categories from "friend" to "former friend" until you look up and realize it happened years ago -- not as a figure of speech but actual years ago -- and you didn't notice. They do something that would have deeply hurt your feelings, that would probably have provoked real live tears, if they'd done it years ago, and the shrug you give isn't even the hurt-but-coping, what're-you-gonna-do kind. It's the shrug that really, honestly doesn't care, because there are so many better things occupying your time and attention.

So it's not sad in the sense of feelings being hurt, and it's not even sad in the sense of having lost a friend. Because it was years ago, and the news has just reached you, far too late to make any difference, like a concert poster for a band that broke up decades ago and two of the members are already dead. It's a memory of something that might have been sad once, but it didn't work out that way, and now here you are. The ground would have shaken beneath your feet years ago, and now you seem to be on another planet.

I think relativistic speeds of travel will not be nearly the emotional revolution we sometimes might imagine them to be.

I haven't read very much of lj this morning; I'm pretty busy with markgritter's grandpa arriving tomorrow. But there's one experience I wanted to mention in light of a suggestion I came across:

I spent two summers doing research in physics as an undergrad, with the NSF's REU programs. For one of them, I was the only woman out of eight students. This is about the national ratio of female physics undergrads to the total population, or was when I was an undergrad, and while I haven't followed Physics Today as obsessively, I believe it's similar now.

In all honesty, I was at least as intelligent and at least as talented and at least as enthusiastic about physics as any of the guys there, and obviously smarter(/etc.) than at least a few. But I spent all summer fighting the assumption that I was not as competent as they were, not just because I was a woman but because we all knew that institutions would go out of their way not to have single-gender programs. The default assumption was not that they took the top eight students who applied, but that they took the top seven students who applied, and then the top female applicant to round things out to fit the statistics. The rest of them could be there as physics students. Knowledge or assumption of a quota system made sure that I had to be there as a woman -- even if I'd been their top applicant of the year.

If speculative fiction magazines announced that they were having set-aside spots for women writers in their issues, I would get myself a genderless pseudonym if I didn't decide to stop submitting to those magazines completely. I will be damned if I'm ever going through that again if I can help it. And I wish it on no one else, either. It was absolutely miserable. A quota system means that your work always has to be twice as good as anybody else's to demonstrate that it was good enough to begin with. Hell with that. Categorically and absolutely: I am not. Going. Back.

Okay, one more time, people:

Sometimes the problem is not that we don't understand each other.

Sometimes the problem is that we understand each other and disagree.

Sometimes the problem is that we understand each other and disagree, and one or more of us is an asshole.

Additional "understanding" is not going to solve that type of problem.