Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

So today I saw a link to this thing, which is more business-brain than I'd usually be interested in but this seemed so apropos for where my thoughts have been lately.

It starts with a vague anecdote about "a small group of leaders" gathering most of their people for two days of talking about "big changes to their organisation's mission."

The writer goes on, "These leaders were talkers. At the end of the second day of this, they were amped up and excited about the plans that had been hashed out." She contrasts these "talkers" with "writers":

The writers were on the whole befuddled and exhausted; they weren‘t sure what had been decided on, and when they tried to reflect on all that talking, it was a blur. They could feel the energy of the room was such that something exciting had happened but they didn‘t quite know what to think of it. They were uncertain if they had made themselves clear; they were uncertain of what they had wanted to make clear. They wondered if they were missing something, but they couldn‘t articulate what it was. They too sent thanks and thumbs up emojis, but they went home with a vague sense of dread.

I feel so seen here.

I do still think all the stuff I talked about yesterday plays a part too: disability, gender, race, class... But some of it is just personality or extro-/introversion or whatever too. There's more to it than this talker/writer binary (which the author does problematize a little too) but I do think this is a really interesting frame for me to use about work.

She says

In most orgs, talkers are overrepresented among the leadership [because] most of our models for leadership—meetings, town halls, presentations, interviews—privilege talkers...

The result is that a great many orgs have talkers at the top and writers down below, but because power obscures difference, the talkers are very rarely aware of this setup.

Power obscures difference is definitely one of the things I was fumbling around and spilling much more metaphorical ink trying and failing to say! Having such a succinct way to state something so prevalent in my life would already made this essay valuable to me, even if nothing else about it was.

The essay goes on with advice about what to do with this binary, but for me it was enough to stop here and just bask in having a situation I have been struggling to describe be explained so precisely.

What the leaders I observed did was optimize for their own mode of thinking.... In the course of that optimization, they effectively disenfranchised most of the writers among them. They left a lot of good brain power and potential alignment on the floor, and they didn‘t even realize it was there as they stepped over it on the way out the door.

I saw this because the author shared it on Mastodon, and I replied with my profuse thanks and one additional thought: I said "I'm frustrated at the ableism that's present in a talker-led society, even in groups that are for disabled people. And also, the talker ideal is less suitable without mitigations we rarely have in the ongoing global pandemic, so that's a disability justice issue as well." She called it "an astute observation," so that feels good anyway!

I'm reading a book called Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives, which diffrentcolours bought at the queer bookstore the other week.

I'm really enjoying it but I can't read it too quickly, some of these little poems and essays are hitting hard! (It's not the most fun emotional catharsis I could have had today, but I definitely needed some after the last three days and this is what was available.) Mostly they make me want to write my own essay though.

Mine couldn't help but be about disability too. For all I love how intersectional it is in these two dimensions, and it's centering the experiences of people who aren't white, I haven't heard anything about disability yet which surprises me a little now that I'm halfway through the book.

I finished both The Republic of Pirates and A Prayer for the Crown Shy before I got out of bed this morning. Feels good to finish library books early when I know other people are waiting for them, as is the case with both of these.

And my hold of Legends & Lattes turned up yesterday, so I started that this evening.

I also had another hold appear today, I thought it was another audiobook (just because, I now realize, I've been reading all audiobooks lately) but it's an ebook so I've actually got to use my eyes! Weird!

There's a meme going around again, where people are answering five questions from their friends and then giving the first five people to ask five questions of their own.

I'm not sure how I'm going to be for thinking up questions for commenters, but I've accumulated ten questions so thought I would try to answer them.

First, from annofowlshire:

1. What brand (food or otherwise) do you miss most from the US?

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2. How did Gary get his name?

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3. Which book (or other media) has had the most impact on you?

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4. With Twitter imploding everyone is talking about Mastodon now. You're really the only person I knew to use it before now. What do you like about it?

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5. Do you find your 365 posts project to be helpful or a chore?

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And, from jesse_the_k:

1. How did Gary the Wonder Dog come into your life?

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2. Given how you enjoy touring history-made-tangible, is there a tangible monument you want to leave behind?

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3. Have you been able to deploy Arabic knowledge lately?

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4. Tell me about something you treasure that's older than you.

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5. Tell me about your first baseball game -- have you ever played?

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I've been trying to catch up with my RSS reader the last couple days. ( Here's some stuff I've read. )

This is maybe the only baseball movie I really want to make diffrentcolours watch that we haven't watched yet -- just because it's not on streaming as far as I can tell -- and reading this about it just makes me want to watch it so much more! ( Read more... )

I like books and podcasts about "weird stuff," stories of aliens and ghosts and mysteries. I think I remember the one where I first learned the story of "Somerton man," known for where he died because his identity was impossible to figure out.

Public interest in the case remains significant for several reasons: the death occurred at a time of heightened international tensions following the beginning of the Cold War; the apparent involvement of a secret code; the possible use of an undetectable poison; and the inability of authorities to identify the dead man.

I learned all kinds of weird details from this story, about what it was like being an Australian nurse during WWII and that the direction of diagonal stripes on a tie could tell you something about where it was made. All these little facets of life, lovingly detailed, none of them adding up to an easy answer.

And now

This week Prof Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide claimed to have identified Somerton man as Carl “Charles” Webb, a 43-year old engineer from Melbourne who wrote poetry and “seems to be a bit of a loner”...archival records shed light on the seemingly mysterious facts of the case, revealing them to be “a sort of banal explanation”.

Even how they found out is kind of banal: DNA analysis of hairs from a plaster cast taken of the dead man's face, in hopes that he could be identified after his body had to be buried.

He'd gotten divorced, his ex-wife had moved to the area where he was found, he wrote poetry himself and what looked like an evocative code he'd written down turns out to maybe be names of racehorses he was betting on. He had a brother-in-law with a name that appeared on the label of some of his clothes.

He wasn't a Russian spy or the father of a child vaguely connected to this story. He was...just some guy.

Many years ago, when we were talking about From Hell, (the comic, not the movie) Andrew told me about someone who was around at the time of Jack the Ripper (maybe a cop?) who when asked who he thought Jack was, said "just some cunt." Sorry for those who don't like the language but I think that's why the phrase stuck in my head for all these years: it feels vicious and dismissive. We want everything to be meaningful but sometimes weird horrible shit just happens to people. It makes me think of that You're Wrong About episode on the Dyatlov Pass:

Sarah and Blair do consider aliens and yeti and all the rest of the usual theories, but they consider them just for their likelihood but also what appeal they might have for people, what comfort do they bring to those who hear the stories. The incident is treated like a modern folk tale, which really is what it has become (and why I've always been drawn to it, grisly death has never appealed to me), so they look at what it tells us. So not just "is it more likely that animals ate some soft tissue of the face of one person after they were dead or that those bits were removed in torture before a mysterious murder," but "is it actually more comforting to think that nature did this, without malice or cruelty, than that humans did it with those things?" Is it more likely that the radiation on their clothes came from thorium in their camping lantern than that it came from secret nuclear tests, is it worse to live in a world of Cold War deception or one where dangerous elements were routinely used in consumer products?

I think the version of those questions here is, is it better to imagine that someone was a spy or the father of an illicit child than to believe that some people don't have friends or family to identify them when they die? That's a very comforting belief I think. It's sad to think of the people who die unnoticed or unidentified.

But at the same time...I don't know, I think there's something wonderful in all the attention that has been paid to every little thing known about this man. His cigarettes, the thread in his mended clothes, the poetry book he had a scrap of in his pocket. All these little details seem like they could be so powerful and meaningful...and if he's just a normal person than we as normal people also live lives that can be powerful and meaningful.

Reading this reminded me somehow of the time Andrew and I were in London, near Oxford Street, eating lunch at an Italian restaurant, and I was wearing a black camisole under another shirt. One of the straps on the cami broke, and it was bugging me and I didn't want to wear it the rest of the day, it was old and cheap and I didn't think I could fix it. So I just took it off and left it in the garbage can of the bathroom in that restaurant. And somehow I thought about how I'd bought that cami when I was in college years earlier, it came from Target in Alexandria Minnesota, and I used to wear it as pajamas, and etc.etc. And I had no idea when I'd bought it that it'd end its useful life this way, so far away and years later. I don't think it's as easy to identify where clothes some from now as it was with Somerton Man in the late 40s, but I did think at the time about how weird it would seem to anyone happening across the disintegrating shirt if they knew the trip it'd taken to end up where it did.

Our possessions can tell weird stories about us, because these things don't matter. None of them helped identify this man (if indeed he has been identified); only his hair has done that. Most of his belongings don't have a good explanation: why did he have clothes or thread that were unusual in Australia at the time? DNA can find out his name but can't answer those questions for us. I think we just have to be content with the answer that all our lives are rich tapestries, and they don't have to be perfectly explainable puzzle-box clues to be beautiful.

I would have liked more sleep, but I woke up at 6 this morning.

So I watched TV (I watched four episodes of Ms. Marvel which is so much television for me, especially now that I can't really watch it at all on work days (this morning I still was relying on audio description much more than I'd usually expect to).

And I finished one library book (A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers, holy shit that was good) and read about a third of another, admittedly a short one (The Teeth of Joe Gould by Jill Lepore, a book that is about the longest book ever written (maybe, unless it wasn't written at all but it probably at least sort of was...).

And after all that, diffrentcolours and mother_bones did LFTs again. Hers is still positive, which is no surprise to her -- she says she feels okay now except for a cough that sounds nasty but apparently just happens to her any time she gets any virus -- and diffrentcolours's was negative which was a great surprise to him. As he was trying not to get too excited about the lack of a line showing up while he waited out the timer he'd set, he told me "If this is negative I'll do another one," and then he said "If the second one's negative..." and I had no idea about how he was planning to end that sentence but when he did I answered so quickly I probably would've sounded like I was expecting it: "...do you wanna go to the pub?"

"Yes." It was a beautiful day, I'd just been enjoying sitting in the sunny garden while the temp is still in the low 70s (it's gonna be one hundred goddam Fahrenheit degrees on Tuesday and only a few cooler on Monday) and it seemed like a great time to go sit in a pub beer garden.

He was hit by a lot of emotions and a lot of overwhelm and a lot of lingering tiredness so we didn't go crazy but we did have two nice pints (in my case, of the terribly named but tasty pale bitter Youth On A T-Shirt) and stopped on the way home for the kind of provisions, beer and snacks, that I hadn't felt up to replenishing on my own this week.

We got celebratory takeaway, from Tokyo Noodle, yum, and watched a documentary about whisky, which made me want some whisky, so I drink some of the Talisker diffrentcolours bought on Skye when he was there recently, and drank that while we watched another documentary about Robert Johnson -- I teased D that his still-addled brain had finally gotten down to the level for TV viewing that mine is always at, heh -- which left me very sentimental about my teenage relationship to his music, and got us talking about how differently music is perceived by someone like Keith Richards (who was interviewed for this) than it is by the youth of today, who have so much more access to so much more rock (and blues, and everything) music than even existed never mind was easy to know about than previous generations, and to what extent that's good or bad because surely it's both.

It was nice to have a halfway abstract conversation, it was nice to be eating and watching TV all in the same room (Gary loved it, and fell asleep contentedly in a chair after his efforts to get me to go to bed with him at eight o'clock proved fruitless) after twelve days of not doing those things.

I can't even say that I didn't know what I had till it was gone, I absolutely did know, I appreciated it all along, and I am so goddam grateful to have it back.

I'm reading Elsa Sjunneson's Being Seen now and hoo boy. I love it but I'm having to read it in like little sips. It's a lot if you're blind and from a similar background (she's only a couple of years younger than me, she's from the U.S. which means she grew up with similar schools and access to the built environment and legal protections, and we're both white).

I'm hearing and she's Deafblind, and our lives differ all other ways (except we're both bi; a sighted bi friend who also got this book from the library said she fell in love with Elsa a little when she talked about passing as straight when she's bi as an example of problematic passing): I envy her the solo sports (ballet, swimming, aikido) that helped her acquire the kind of positive relationship with her body that I really lacked as a kid (and, uh, still most of the time now). But I had a less fraught time learning to use a white cane because I don't have other disabilities or health conditions complicating things. And so on.

Anyway, there's more than enough similarities that, for example this morning I read "From early in my educational career, I was told that changing the rules for me wouldn't be fair to the other children" and I had to stop the book. I kinda wanted to go lie down! Ha. Because I hadn't thought of that in years but I also heard that all through school. An echo of old trauma washed over me: the weight of feeling that I was unavoidably too much, knowing (though I couldn't have articulated this at the time) that I couldn't expect to be as important as the other kids.

I kept listening to it on my walk to work but wondered if this was a good idea when I almost started to cry, heh.

It's such a gift that she's reading the audiobook herself too. The sentence before the one I just quoted: "When you're mainstreamed, there is immense pressure to confirm." And after she says "mainstreamed" there's this little sigh of a type I don't remember hearing in a non-fiction audiobook: no drama to it, it's very real and feels inescapable, like there's no way she could think about the topic of this sentence without that sigh.

It's a moment any other disabled person can recognize. Maybe we've had that specific experience (I did!) but even if not we're all gonna have sighed like that.