the menagerie

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

18: Essayist

Text is my most comfortable medium. It's certainly where I've put most of the points into my skills. And there's more than enough material in the archives, if you want to go have a look at other pieces of writing that I've done. Most of the time, I'm engaged in the essayist's form, although probably not formal or informal or styled enough to be a regular newspaper columnist, or some nationally-syndicated pundit. For one thing, about the only thing that someone can be a pundit about on the kinds of deadlines that newspaper columnists have is the news or politics, and you see that I can only manage it every so often. At best. I am the infrequent contributor to the discourse, and I would like to believe that my infrequency allows me to do something more than have a hot take and shout it into the aether as swiftly as possible, so that mine is the one that gets re-shared endlessly across all the social media platforms before someone else can have the same thought and post theirs.

Plus, weren't we all supposed to have pivoted to video a long time ago? The hot take in the microblogging form is certainly alive and well, and especially in places where the algorithm rewards that kind of behavior, and especially that kind of behavior if it originates from people who are trying to make their takes as antisocial as possible, so that they will be "engaged" with by others, because in that world, all heat is good heat, regardless of whether it's X-Pac heat or not. Pictures and short videos are the spaces where we receive all kinds of hot takes now, only some of them provided by people with journalism classes, or with the appropriate expertise to be knowledgeable and correct about what they speak of. Which is not to be crass and say that only the finest experts should be platformed, because I also think the finest satirists should be, as well, and those who are good at making us laugh at jokes that don't require you to be a racist, classist, sexist, misogynist, or otherwise punch down at people instead of punching up. Bill Gates getting a pie in the face? Spread it far and wide. Some elected official or influencer trying to tell me that the real cause of my problems is that we let women get out of the kitchen? Obliterate it, from both my timeline and from the platform, if you please. I know, however, that platforms continue to believe that their best options are to promote the people who get all the eyeballs, because the point is not to have content that is anything other than what will draw wyes to the advertisements that come with the content. Or ears, in the case of podcasts. If we had decided to do something more sustainable than capitalism and advertising, we would just have people doing things, secure in their ability to have a good life while doing the things they want to do, whether that's art or otherwise. (Sure, you can incentivize work that people don't normally like to do by making it possible to have a better life with that, but nobody should be a starving artist in a world where there's enough for everyone to live comfortably.)

That, and I claim very little expertise on most matters, and one of the chief requirements of being someone who makes their living on hot takes is to believe yourself an expert in all things such that you don't need to do much more than do a surface reading of something and declare you have it solved. (And, if you turn out to be wrong about that, to not acknowledge it and simply have new hot takes to provide to others.) It is not possible for me to inhabit that kind of space without doing significant damage to myself. Or that damage already has to have been done to me to get me to be that kind of reckless and brash about it all. I don't like it, and I don't want to encourage that in myself.

Just today, as I was helping someone at my job, and explaining that we don't have audible alarms for when computers are about to sign you out for inactivity because we don't want to contribute to the cacophony, the same noise that the person was indirectly complaining about, that person looked at me and asked me if I was a writer. "Not professionally," I said. (Yes, I've had my writing published, and yes, I have been paid for some of those essays and/or received contributor's copies gratis for it. No, I'm not a professional.) The person asked me what a cacophony was, and then if it was close to shenanigans. I said no, shenanigans is more like actions and deeds done, cacophony is related to sound. "But you do a lot of writing, I'll bet," the person said, before walking away. Now wrong, certainly, but that felt like I was being dissed for pulling out the silver-dollar words from my vocabulary.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have caught flak in my early years when perfection failed to manifest. I have also repeatedly caught flak from others in those years for earnestly trying to do well at my schoolwork, and also for being someone who wasn't afraid to show off their smarts. (Why would I be? I'm white, going through parochial and then public education, and because I'm sufficiently middle-class as well, I am already aiming for the university education. It's to my advantage to demonstrate my knowledge.) The usual form of the complaint is a variation on "Stop making the rest of us look stupid." The other form is a variation on "Okay, suck-up. Stop being a teacher's pet." When people talk about anti-intellectualism in the culture of the States, this is what they're talking about: our politics, priorities, and peers are consistently putting the message in our head that there is an upper limit to the level of intelligence any person should display, and showing more than the amount you've been allotted is a fast way for a thresher to come by and try to cut the tall flower down to size. As with everything in the States, of course, the amount of intelligence you're allowed to show is dependent on your perceived race, gender, and level of success at capitalism. Which is why rich cis white men without two brain cells to rub together and make a spark are hailed as visionary and successful businessmen with Big Important Opinions, who deserve their oversized salaries because of their great intellects, and who are clearly good candidates to be leaders of industry and politics, while a Black girl who could do the equivalent of Neo fighting Agent Smith one-handed against all of them together is treated as unable to understand even the most basic of concepts, except when she's supposedly scamming the welfare system and taking away money from the proper and deserving white poor. There's real cultural issues around showcasing the ability and willingness to learn, because that's often classified as "acting white." While there's obviously some amount of that necessary to survive, and to learn how to code-switch, the pervasive and racist stereotypes of all not-white people mean that someone genuinely showcasing their intellect as a person of color becomes the "articulate, well-spoken" exception to the racist stereotype, no matter how many intellectually savvy people of color there are around this stereotype-enforcing white person given the power to shape reality according to their prejudices!

The freedom I have to be smart also often means that I tend to jump in on things faster than I should, rather than allowing my coworkers to demonstrate their obvious capability and smarts themselves, and only coming in when I have to be the heavy about something, or when I'm asked to join in. When I realize I've done it, I apologize, but I don't have to weigh the consequences of every word and action that I take to determine whether or not I will be in greater danger for having done so. There are times where I've had to be called in to take over something from a colleague of color because the person refused to believe that my entirely-capabale colleague knew anything about anything and would only accept that the white perceived-man could help them do what they were doing. But, magically, when I showed this person the thing that my colleague had been trying to show them for the last several minutes, they listened and it worked. And when they left, they left with a snide comment about how nobody else in the library knew what they were talking about. (I'd like to believe it says I've managed to clear one of the bars, at that moment, that I recognized that entire interaction, right form the jump of my colleague passing it off to me, that there was definitely racism involved here, and I didn't give any credence to the barb thrown in departure. Not in a "give me the cookies!" way, but as in "Congratulations, you've met the minimum. And now, the next moment of your life.")

Because words are my most comfortable medium, I also like to use them as much as possible, and the rarer and less-common ones, too. I'm afflicted by the mindset that wants to use the most specific word that I have in my lexicon to describe something. While you can use the widely-applicable form of the word and get meaning across, I want to also express nuance and shading with the words that I choose, so that you understand that I'm enraged rather than annoyed, or enraged rather than furious. Because text is devoid of the emotional and non-verbal context, I have to try and make up at least some of that with word choice. Which sometimes means I get sniped at by someone who feels like the use of those words is showing off, ostentatious ornamentation of language, silver-tongued threads and tailoring holding together brocade and silk meant to shout "Look at me! I have so many intellectual resources to spare that I can devote them to these frills, fringes, and embroidery of language!" Someone who sees themselves in simple, homespun shirt and trousers, fitting loosely but covering everything important, reacts to the finery with various emotions. If you spun a wheel with all the possible ways to take it on there, you might have to land on 00 to find a reaction that's not negative. Among people who also like to use words, it's not as much of an issue, and I would like to believe that people who come here to read these words, as I pontificate about things that I may or may not have the requisite experience and expertise in, also like words and their usage and some of the less-common ones showing up.

I think I helped a coworker this week regarding words and their meanings, when one of them used "in my hubris" with the thought of chia seeds expanding themselves beyond the jar that they had been put in for a touch. I joked "Well, I'm not entirely sure which god it was that you defied there, but if that's the way of things…" At which point, my coworker seemed confused, so I explained: Hubris has a connotation of excessive pride or arrogance, and often specifically, pride or arrogance toward gods or in defiance of them. At which point, my co-worker said they've used the word to mean poor planning. "Oh," I said. "I might use 'in my ignorance' there, then." And the co-worker thanked me for helping out, and it seemed genuine, so hopefully, hooray, lucky 10,000 about this particular thing?

Required schooling was hard for me not to demonstrate the fullness of my vocabulary and that desire to match up meaning. Plenty of people who would tell me to "talk normal" or even ask "Do you even swear?" as a way of shorthanding the question of "Do you know how to sound like a normal person?" Which, yes, I do know how to swear, and have since I was of age to recognize the power of certain words. Not, perhaps, with the skill that R. Lee Ermey had, but because I thought of it as an odd question, when I used one of those words, the others laughed and made fun of me because it sounded like a Jeopardy! response rather than someone who knew how to curse inventively or instinctively, whien it was "Yes, of course I know how to use those words, and I'm not using them right now." University was less of an issue, because all the people at university are nominally there to broaden their horizons and collect knowledge that will be helpful to them in whatever field they choose to work in. Graduate school was where I learned most of my High Librarian, which usually comes out when I'm ticked off about something. It's one of those quirks I have - in an environment where throwing bleepable, unprintable words about decisions or people is not permitted or would be a bad idea to do, my formal register ratchets up significantly. My most formal language is almost always my most aggravated language as well. And then the creativity starts to come out, turning what might otherwise be a single, emphatic and profane word into a razor-sharpened and beautifully-decorated iron fan to flutter in front of my face. Decisions are foolish, regrettable, ill-thought-out, and the people behind them may have trouble finding their own backsides with two hands, a map, and a flashlight. All in the service of whatever newest initiative has come our way. (Some of my coworkers have commented on the sharpness of some of my remarks, while also noting that despite my meaning being clear and pointy, I didn't say words that could be easily perceived as negative. Figured speech achieved, I guess.)

Creative High Librarian often comes out the most when I'm penning articles to submit for a publication, because if I'm moved to write something for a call for proposals or a publication, it's usually because there's some aspect of it that I have complaints about. This is a failing of my organization, because they do so many things that they should be dragged through the mud over. Or it's a failing of a national or international organization who similarly deserve, in my opinion, to be roasted for. I would love to have more positive things to talk about in my profession, but the things that are positive in my profession tend to be practical (and therefore suited to the presentation format over the essay format) rather than political and policy-related. Which often gives the presentations a tinge of "despite the obstacles in our way, we succeeded at this thing," or "if we weren't too busy fighting crises heaped upon us by others, we could do this cool thing," or "if our policymakers weren't dunderheads about this, we could be doing this cool thing instead of these uncool things." So much of the ambition and optimism I had coming out of graduate school has been boiled off from all of the constraints that come from working in an actual library system, with its budgetary, community, and administrative concerns. I still harbor grand dreams, just in case an opportunity comes along to enact one of them, but for the most part, I've resigned myself to the understanding that my sphere of influence over everything is greatly reduced from what it should be, and that the practical parts of running a library often mean that there's no spare capacity for creative things or for exploring things that could be very valuable to our communities, if only we could offer them.

You could make an argument here that the ease in which I can create something that showcases all the negativity says something about how I don't see the positives in life, and you would be right about it. Strong emotional memories for me are usually negative, because easily and regularly recalling strong negative emotions are another one of my maladaptations, one meant to protect me from getting hurt again. If I remember that when I did this thing, I got scolded and told off for it, that makes me less likely to do it again, and since some nonzero number of the things that I get scolded and told off for are things that I'm not fully consciously doing, associating strong negative emotions either makes it less likely I'll do the thing, or makes it less likely that I'll do anything in the ballpark of that thing, which qualifies as a good result, too, in the avoidance of things that could lead to hurt. And since I've always been a "sensitive" person and prone to big feelings, you can see how that closes off some things for me if I try to approach them directly. And why I don't like to be perceived when doing things that I'm not fully confident in my ability to execute them at a level where I'm confident it'll meet my tastes and yours. ("Take a fucking compliment!" is something you could say at me, and you'd be right.) I have extensive experience working with text, and because of that disconnection, where you only read words and have to imagine what the person saying them is like (except for those of you who have seen and heard me recently), I can say things that I might not otherwise be able to put to audio of any form. It is easier to write the words than to say them aloud. And, quite possibly, it is easier for you to read the words and take them wherever they will best go than it would be to hear them and do the same. (We're funny creatures about that.)

I don't intend to stop writing any time soon, regardless of how it's received or perceived by others. It would not go over well for me, not being able to get my words out. And at the same time, while I have an extensive back catalogue of materials to look at, I still have to approach the idea of writing somewhat obliquely, and to gather the fabled courage of the mediocre white man to submit things to publications where I have crafted them, or to hit post on some entries. Indirection and trying to convince myself of the truth of "the worst they can say is no" is important in this regard. Often, what starts as writing up notes and snippets soon becomes a full essay, and then, when I've created the damn thing because my brain wouldn't let go of it, I may as well submit it, and see whether it gets accepted. It often has, and so I use those strings of successes as the benchmark of "well, I'm a mediocre what man, and I'm submitting, so, you, person with perspectives not generally heard, and who I consider to be competent and either a peer or better-suited to this than I am, will you also submit, please?" I will probably never actually know when this happens, but I think it would be thrilling to submit something for publication and have it sent back with a rejection of "this is a great piece, and we think it will go somewhere else, but we've just had too many people with perspectives and lived experiences we don't usually see submit great essays, too, and so we're going with them." I'll be disappointed that I didn't get in, but I will recognize that reason as one of the best possible reasons why I didn't get in.

And in the meantime, I'll just keep writing.