Category: being human

Playing for Change

The power of music. So often, I turn to music to express things I can’t talk about any other way. Or to celebrate, or get busy, or because all I want to do is paint my room black and so I let the music drip down the walls while I cry.

And sometimes music is more than just about me. Sometimes it’s about all of us, together. That’s another power of music.

The Playing for Change Foundation wants to bring peace to the world through music. That’s not a bad idea: people who would never consider sitting down together will stand up together and dance to the same song. PFC is building community around music and committed to providing resources for musicians, music students and music schools around the world.

And they made this great video. I love the song, and I love what they’ve done with it. And right now it speaks to me particularly keenly, the way music often does: right now it seems good to remember that we all need someone to stand by us sometimes, and that when we stand by someone else we are doing good in the world.

Enjoy.

 

Strangers

Tonight we are going here to celebrate our friend Pam’s birthday. Eight people will meet for drinks, dinner, and what I hope will be good conversation — most of these folks are strangers to us, from a different part of Pam’s life.

Pam is a (hearing) ASL interpreter, as are many of her friends who will be there tonight. They are, based on my small experience of the Seattle Deaf/deaf/hearing ally community, an elite group — accomplished, expert, well-known and widely respected, deeply involved in the communities. Not just a j-o-b. I have looked through windows into that world, but I’ve never really walked there, and it strikes me as being like military service or sex work or firefighting, the kind of work that you don’t talk about to civilians. Partly because of the confidentiality that is essential to the interpreter/client relationship, but also, I imagine, partly because it’s an intense world and you just have to live there to understand. Interpreting is such a huge responsibility — to facilitate true understanding between people of different languages requires more than just a working vocabulary. I think the best interpreters have great empathy and a practiced, expert understanding of how to make a bridge between different languages, cultures, worldviews… all in the middle of Real Life happening to someone, a trial or a medical situation or a work issue or financial crisis. Or a concert or play or celebration. Or an interminable business meeting. I expect some specific interpreting jobs are just boring. But I don’t expect any of them are easy.

When I was studying ASL, and considering pursuing interpreting, I found myself on a regular basis wanting to slap some of the interpreting students I met (and some of the so-called professional interpreters as well). People who just “signed it in English” because it was easier than actually interpreting cultural meaning — to those folks, it was more important to be fast and flash and just that wee bit smug than it was to give people more complete access to each other’s meaning. Interpreters who didn’t know the difference between ASL and signed English, who “didn’t believe in” Deaf culture or assumed that it was like hearing culture except, you know, without the hearing. Snarl. I am no expert on any of this, and am prepared to be wrong about it, but that’s how it felt to me, and those people really did make me want to scream.

I do not expect to be screaming about that tonight (grin). And I hope it goes well. I know we’ll all make sure that Pam has a great time, that’s the goal and the pleasure. But I also hope that we like each other.

It’s always interesting to meet the friends of my friends, but it’s not always successful. I don’t mind that in general (although I sometimes find it very tedious in the particular). It’s one of the fascinating things about being human, this variety of others that we connect with. The space that we make in our lives for all kinds of folks, and the bias toward relationship that I think most people have — the tug toward establishing some kind of positive connection, or a negative connection if that seems the only option. But it seems like we do have to establish some kind of relationship, you know? Even ignoring someone is a relationship, if the ignoring is an active choice (and sometimes even if it isn’t).

At any rate, it’s a party! A celebration of my friend and all the good moments I’ve had with her, the things I’ve learned, the comfort and connection and recognition I feel with her. It will be nice to share that with people, and perhaps by the end of the evening some of us will no longer be strangers.

——-

Edited to add: Lovely evening, lovely people who are no longer complete strangers. There’s nothing like a five-hour dinner… Good conversations and lots of laughs and hugs, and my friend Pam glowing in the center of it all. What better way to celebrate someone’s life?

Hug someone

Another in the occasional Being Human series of posts.

I’m very late to the party on this one. It’s been going on for years. The video has been seen 30 million times on YouTube. The guy who started this (and if his real name is Juan Mann, I will eat my computer) has been on Oprah and had lots of attention. Some will think this devalues the underlying notion. But I don’t think so.

I believe in the power of these moments. We call them “random kindness” because we’re still a little afraid sometimes to say “love” in the same sentence with “stranger.” We don’t have all the words we need for all the different kinds of love there are. But this is the love that simply acknowledges and celebrates that we are human and that we are all in this together. I’ve been thinking about that this week. And this seems to fit right in (thank you, Jennifer, for turning me on to it).

Read the story of how free hugs got started over at MySpace, and find out more history here.

I hope you hug someone today, and I hope they hug you back. It doesn’t have to be a stranger. It will feel just as good if it’s someone you know.

Secrets

Another in the occasional Being Human series of posts.

When I was a little kid, secrets were friendship currency. “Having a secret” actually usually meant that you had shared something with someone that was so interesting that everyone else would want to know it too, if only… But it was our secret. That’s how we proved we were friends. And it’s how we proved… what? That we were real. That we had Something Going On even if we were only seven. Of course I couldn’t articulate it that way then, but it’s clear to me that the enculturation of child Eskridge was already in full swing. I was already absorbing the need to be part of a community, and already feeling the pressure to differentiate myself in positive ways. What a hideous tension to put upon children — be different and be part of the group: fail at either and find the weight of adult concern or adult annoyance or adult irritation falling on you from a great height.

When I was an older kid, I learned that most real secrets are not friendship badges. Most secrets are too big, too frightening, too painful, too awful to reveal because we know that we might be severed from our group. We’ll be different in all the wrong ways. Secrets are like bags of pus in a person’s chest or stomach. They burn, or they are cold cold cold, or they ooze through us like slime. But they are not for sharing.

And so I was gobsmacked years ago to stumble across PostSecret. People mail in their secrets anonymously on postcards, and Frank Warren posts a new set every week. There’s a discussion forum, a community of people who support each other in revealing themselves. He also has a PostSecret page on Myspace where he posts additional secrets.

Yes, it’s a business as well as a service. There are books, there are speaking engagements. Good. It means he’ll be able to do it a lot longer, and give more people the chance to experience the profound act of letting go of a secret. I’ve been struggling here to describe that feeling, and it’s just… well, right now I’m not finding the right words. Maybe you can tell me what it’s like, this revelation of self that is desperate and healing and frightening and sometimes just makes things worse, except maybe it’s worse in a better way because now we can be known. We can be seen. And we find that even if a particular relationship or community or desire or goal doesn’t survive — that we do. We survive.

Sometimes when we think we are keeping a secret, that secret is actually keeping us. –Frank Warren, founder of Post Secret.

But the important word there is sometimes.

One of the most telling discussions on the PostSecret forums has to do with a secret sent in ages ago: If you’re waiting for a sign, this is it. Do it. It will be amazing. Pretty powerful stuff that goes right to one of the deep places of being human — wanting to be “sure” that our risks will pay off, that we are doing the “right thing.” Wanting a sign from the universe. And some PostSecret readers took this as their sign, as their impetus to take whatever step they’d been considering.

But as the ensuing discussion showed, the universe isn’t always talking to us, you know? Some people “did it,” whatever it was, took their risk, and were happy they did. Some were bruised and blinking but still kind of happy, or at least thought they were better off. And some people were smushed like a bug by whatever they did, left bitter and angry and full of regret. Because sometimes the things we want in secret, the things we fear, or yearn for, our secret curiosities and desires and dreams, are not good for us or other people. Sometimes the secrets keep us safe.

How do we know the difference? I don’t know. I’m still learning.

And I read PostSecret every Sunday to see what chances other people are taking, to witness their courage or desperation or sadness or relief. These secrets, they’re like little stories told in fragments. As readers, we’re coming in at the middle: we can infer the beginning, and we’ll probably never know the end. But still, for that moment we’re connected. I don’t know, maybe it’s like those days in the schoolyard — we shared it and now it’s our secret. Or maybe it’s that the internet shared it and found that it is many people’s secret, and so it loses some of its iron-jawed grasp on each of us. I don’t know. But it amazes me that human beings will find ways to be connected. If we can’t find them, we make them. And then we use them to show each other ourselves.

Oops, more of a zebra

So it turns out that the Freestyle Horse video that Iraved about the other day is actually a Nike viral marketing video.

I remember the first time I got taken by a scammer on the street for $5 because he was “out of gas.” That was in the 80’s in Chicago. He got me talking, he affiliated, he got the five bucks. I didn’t find out until weeks later that this kind of thing was starting to happen a lot. I actually got red-faced when I heard about it, because I felt so stupid. I felt like a rube.

The nice thing is, it takes more than that to make me feel stupid these days. I like this video. I think it’s way cool that someone made it. I like what it says about the power and strength and ability of young women. In other words, I like the story it tells. And I really do always want to stay open to story, even if it puts me at a disadvantage sometimes (that $5…).

Does this mean we should always accept “the validity” of other’s stories? Always be willing to embrace the story as a good thing, on its own terms? Oh my goodness, no. Every one of us should have her bullshit detector turned way, way up on the human interaction level. The guy who insists on helping you take your groceries upstairs to your apartment because he’s on his way up to see his buddy down the hall — and who calls you paranoid when you say no — that guy is maybe not a nice guy. That guy is maybe testing you. Every human has firsthand experience of the harm of being open to a story.

As a culture we teach other to be nice, defuse conflict, avoid giving offense. And then we turn around and teach each other that being credulous or gullible in any way is basically a failing and a fault, and you get what you deserve for being an idiot. Pretty mixed message — be open, be supportive and accessible, and then take the blame when those choices lead you to a bad scene. And so we make each other feel stupid for falling for anything, in order to teach each other not to fall for the wrong things.

I think it would be better to teach each other to better recognize the wrong things when they come along, you know?

Critical thinking skills can help with that. Books like The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker or Always by Nicola Griffith can help. And it would be cool if we stopped assuming that violence was an appropriate consequence for inexperience or poor judgment.

Hmm… I seem to have traveled far from Nike. Let me wander back again. I now know the greater truth of the video, which is that it’s a deliberate story someone is telling me to make me like their brand a little better. And you know, it’s a good story. I’m still open to it.

Play like a girl

Another in the occasional Being Human series of posts.

Nicola posted this today. And I love it. I love that these young women are so brilliant at this. I would have killed for mad body skills like this as a young woman. I always admired the girls I knew who were good at sports, and this… well, it combines grace and talent and skill and a hundred split-second decisions about physics and geometry, and I just stand in awe.

And they make it look so easy. I just love their absolute sense of expertise, their genuine pleasure in making the shots, and the total lack of any body language that “apologizes” for either. And the ending is priceless, all the more so because it’s not that she didn’t make the cool shot, it’s just not the cool shot she was going for…

Anyway, go watch, and enjoy. I sure did.

Edited to add: Aha… it turns out that this is a viral marketing video from Nike. Well, here’s what I think about that.

Where the hell is Matt?

The first in the occasional Being Human series of posts.

Sometimes I just love human beings, and being human. Sometimes we just do the most amazing things. I’m going to be looking for more of those things to share here, because they please me. They give me a sense of being connected to everyone… and that’s a rare and valuable thing, hard to hold onto in the daily grinder where we all bump up against each other a little too hard sometimes.

So thanks, Matthew Harding, for making me feel like I belong to people I’ve never met, and they belong to me.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

In praise of process

Leroux’s blackberry brandy in celebration of one of my own projects (a group project actually)!!!!!

I just had to let you know that, two weeks ago, I reread, “The Hum of Human Cities”, way too many commas here, I’m sure…I was distracted the first time I read it and couldn’t enjoy it the way I wanted to. Anyway, it got me thinking about a project that me and some friends had been working on. Oh, our thing was nothing like your short story, so I don’t even know why it made me think of it. I guess it got me thinking back to a more creative time.

It’s a film project, sort of. My friend came up with this idea in 1993, but it didn’t start taking shape until 2000 (that’s when we met and became friends). I suggested that some of the dialogue could be better so he gave me what he had and told me to rewrite it. So, I did (I’m not a writer. Just an okay ear.). This got him and an other friend thinking up even more ideas. So, the three of us spent hours writing together…and drinking blackberry brandy. We rewrote the thing 17 times because we kept coming up with better ideas (that and one of the locations we wrote around got torn down).

We broke up. What started out as fun became a pain in the ass. People who said they’d act for us, showed up when they wanted to. We took on the roles of the main characters ourselves. We had to get rid of characters because there was nobody to play them…more rewrites. We argued all the time. It was a mess. And we walked away from it with silent fuck you’s. That was a little over a year ago. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other since.

After rereading your short story, my friends were on my mind more than ever. For two weeks, all I thought about was the needless death of our project. Then my friend called and said he was sorry for being an asshole and could we give it another shot. So I said sorry too and yesterday, we met up with our other friend and had blackberry brandy.

Maybe it would’ve happened sooner or later, but for now, I’m chalking it up to “The Hum of Human Cities”. So…thanks.

Don’t worry, I’m not a pub stalker. I’m just really excited about the project and thought to pass the joy along. After all, it was your story that got me thinking so hard.

Thanks again.

Lindsey

Oh, I almost forgot… If anyone is curious, it’s a pg-13 sci-fi, action-adventure, comedy, spy, romance series. It’ll be a whole bunch of 15min. shorts. Sort of like watching a comic book. Fun not deep or enlightening.

I’m curious! It’s been a while since you sent this in (my bad, sorry) –” any developments?

Passing joy along is a Good Thing. I appreciate it. It would be nice to think that Hum had something to do with it, but in the end you and your friends made the choice to reconnect. Choice is what it’s about. Choosing to pick up the phone. Choosing to have the conversation. Or choosing not to. You did the work, you get the blackberry brandy (smile). I hope everyone has a great time together, whether the project gets done or not.

This got me thinking about process (Lindsey, this isn’t about your specific story… just me wandering off into the woods of management theory). There’s an assumption down deep in our culture that if people have the burning desire to achieve a particular result, it will happen as if by magic… and if it doesn’t, it’s because someone screwed up or wasn’t really committed, or whatever. And that’s just not always the case. Bad process brings bad results, even with all the goodwill in the world among the players. How we do things may not be the sole priority, but it’s important.

The biggest conflicts I had in my corporate life revolved around this issue: I worked with some executives who were adamant that process was bullshit: it didn’t matter how chaotic our everyday was as long as we made the numbers and did the deals. These same folks were so surprised that the Project Management team of 26 people could manage half a billion dollars of product development in a year with fewer mistakes and less stress and more workplace happiness than ever before. Huh, they said, scratching their heads. What’s the secret? And when it turned out the secret was in communication, process negotiation and re-negotiation, accountability without abuse, clear descriptions of who was responsible for what, etc… oh, the horror! I could never do that! To which my response was (and still is), what an asshole. Anyone can do it. It’s just a job skill.

But whose fault is this? Our culture has historically valued independence and bootstrapping more than collaboration and community. “Everyone knows” that results without process is better than process without results. My question is, who decided this had to be an either/or equation? And my thinking, more subversively, is that sometimes process is more important. Sometimes it’s better to have agreements about working together so that people don’t have to disconnect in order to maintain their own boundaries or manage their disappointment. If Nicola and I ever collaborate on something, what counts more: the published book (or screenplay, that’d be fun!), or the next 50 years of our relationship? Well, duh.

So why, why, why aren’t these skills part of a child’s basic education? We teach our kids how to be competitive and encourage them to assert their individuality, and then wonder why they grow up with fractured notions of community and the belief that winning is an exclusive activity rather than an inclusive one. It seems that recently a balancing force has come into play in schools –” I hear more about kids being exposed to conflict management skills, collaborative activities, etc. I hope this is true. I don’t think we should raise a bunch of polite robots –” just people who understand that if we’re all going to take so much pride in being individuals, it means we have to do a little more bridging work in order to get a group result. That’s my vision. Have our cake and eat it together.

Rant off (grin). This is all coming up for me in part because of my learning more about Deaf history and Deaf culture, and the particular assumptions that exist in American (hearing) culture about what is language, what is communication, and how do we assign class and status based on those things? We read a book called Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language by Nora Ellen Groce that was instructive. She’s a researcher who traced the origins of hereditary deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, where for most of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century a huge percentage of the population was deaf. During that time, everyone in the community, hearing and deaf, was multi-lingual in some combination of spoken English, written English, and sign. She was able to talk to elders who were alive during this time, and without exception they didn’t differentiate between deaf and hearing status. When asked to remember people who were “handicapped,” they would pull out examples of people losing limbs or with some sort of mental disability. When asked specifically about deafness, one woman said, “Those people weren’t handicapped. They were just deaf.” No one was denied access to the community based on language modality.

Yikes, I’m not going to get started again. Rant control engaged. But my corporate skills and my cultural learning and my concerns as a writer (story, connection, the human heart) are beginning to mesh in some pretty interesting ways.

I wish we could feel differently about difference

(Kelley’s note: if you wish, you can follow the conversation back to Lindsey’s previous question).

I’m always bringing something to the table. Today, I’ll have whatever everyone else is having–”except beer, unless it’s Zima… I know, chick beer. I get ragged on for it every time. So, feel free.

Your ASL class sounds GREAT! I’m a fan of small classes. I went to a tiny, private, all-girls school (for the last 3 years of high school). It was more like a big blue house. There were 72 students and that was from grades 6 to 12 –” 5 in my class. So, definitely no hiding. For two years, I was the only one in my French class. And, our teachers treated us like grownups. When I got to college, I was like, is this it? But it’s so easy.

I wish I’d seen that episode of The Practice. There should have been something like that in Children of a Lesser God. If I remember correctly, William Hurt voiced everything.

Camryn Manheim does rock. So does Allison Janney (C.J. on The West Wing). And I think Ileana Douglas needs more (and better) roles because she rocks too.

As far as seizures go, I should have said, in my comment on access, that it embarrasses me when I see that someone is embarrassed for me (why I wouldn’t discuss it outside the pub). A lot of this has to do with my high school graduation… A snippet of a story if I may: There we were, all four of us (one girl didn’t go. It was said that she thought she was too fat and didn’t want to be up on stage). Our sad little gym, for we were the poorest of private schools, was filled with family and friends and faculty and the lower class and their parents. And so, we sat in our folding chairs on that sagging stage, in our white gowns, our big hair done up around our white caps, and took turns applauding each other for this award or that. I had just returned to my seat with my scholar-athlete award and was bitching to myself because my name was spelled wrong again, when our headmaster announced that he had a special guest who wished to make a special presentation. An alumna, in an orange dress, wearing the same blue and yellow honor society sash as three of us, gimped her way to the podium with her ER “Dr. Weaver” crutch –” now, I know that’s not a nice way to put it, but I was a teenager on stage about to get a handicap award. And I was not pleased. I have no idea what she said. I was watching the audience fidget. They looked down or off to the side or to me and then down again. They were uncomfortable or embarrassed. Or both, I couldn’t tell. I glared at my mother so she would know how pissed I was. She tilted her head in the direction of the podium. The woman had finished speaking. I went over, shook her hand, took the stupid Cross pen and looked back at the empty seat (five had been set up in case the other girl changed her mind). “I’m not handicapped. And I’m not fucking retarded, so keep it,” is what I wanted to say. I smiled and said thank you and wished I were somewhere else.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to make myself vulnerable in my comment on access. Talking about seizures doesn’t bother me at all. Weird as it sounds, I’ve had some pretty funny postictal moments. When I said that I wouldn’t ask you about aftershock as seizures (outside the pub), what I meant was, I wouldn’t want that kind of fidgety attention (I should just get over that). Even in the pub, I was nervous that someone would think I was being too personal (side note: I get embarrassed when someone is too personal too soon and I didn’t want to be one of those people). Then I thought, why am I being so wispy about this? When did I start caring about what other people thought about me???

I don’t know what my point is anymore.

Ah, with anything though, it makes a difference when you can laugh at yourself and at each other. And now I sound preachy and I’m boring myself. It must be the Zima….

This was a long one, and with you being a writer with work to do, you don’t have to respond. A simple nod is fine. Besides, the more you talk about your next book, the more we want you to hurry up and finish it (grin).

Lindsey

I went to a boarding school for high school and felt a similar way about college when I got there, although my response was more geared toward the lifestyle than the teaching style. I requested a single room in a co-ed dorm, and was instead placed in a dorm full of freshman girls (all double rooms) for whom the Big Autonomy of college was as much a major adjustment as leaving home was. But I’d been living away from home and doing my own laundry and taking myself off to the cafeteria for 4 years by then, and I felt like a fish in the desert.

I can understand your comment about being embarrassed by other people’s “fidgety attention” (nice phrase, that). Being singled out for “overcoming disability” is a pretty ambivalent experience, isn’t it? I think people have a real desire to acknowledge perseverance and the extra effort that’s required in our society to achieve many of the things that people without physical or emotional conditions take for granted. But there’s also often an unfortunate flavor of “why, she’s really hardly a cripple at all” that I have less patience with as I get older. Our culture is uncomfortable with difference, and we tend to reward people who manage their difference in ways that make them more like “normal” people (lord, don’t even get me started on normative socialization, we’ll be here for days).

I’m getting a hefty dose of this in my ongoing education in ASL. I have a Deaf friend who teaches ASL and starts the first class with an interpreter (the only time an interpreter comes to class) so she can explain that being deaf does not mean being a broken hearing person who has to be fixed: it means being a person with a different language modality. She stands up in class and tells the students, “I’m not broken!” and she’s right –” she’s strong, articulate, powerful, and talks with her hands and face and body instead of her voice. Anyone who calls her disabled had better duck and cover.

I suppose what I really want is for people to acknowledge difference with respect and an approach of “okay, how can we all work together” instead of with discomfort or denial. When Nicola and I go somewhere, I want people to ease her passage and observe some standard courtesies (like making sure she has a chair). They don’t need to waste any time (theirs or mine) telling me what a fucking tragedy it is about the MS, or how brave we are, or how sad it makes them. I don’t care. Our bravery is our business, and there is nothing about our life that I would ever refer to as a tragedy, and it’s insulting to imply that I should. But… I also understand that people want to connect and want to express what are, in fact, their feelings. I just wish people could feel differently. I wish that people could understand that there are physical and emotional variations of humans, rather than the “ideal normal” standard to which most of us can’t really measure up anyway. Wouldn’t it be great to train everyone to cope with difference together, rather than having to give out awards for people who cope successfully with it alone?