writer. screenwriter. learning person. loves being human.
I’ve had this a long time. I cut it out of the paper when it was first published about a hundred years ago, and have been carrying it around with me ever since.
When I laugh at this, I am laughing with affection at myself and my tendency to… well, to get millennial. But it doesn’t always have to be about the hurtling 537-million-year-old starlight, you know? Fireflies are good too.
Have a lovely Sunday.
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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.
I am not a country music fan in particular, although I’ve always like a few crossover songs/artists like Bonnie Raitt and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” from the Charlie Daniels Band (although I prefer the devil’s music, quelle surprise).
And I’ve got a fondness for Dolly Parton: not so much for the music as the woman herself, who strikes me as both accessible and very classy.
For me, classy isn’t about “sophistication,” it’s about grace. The grace to be comfortable and help others be comfortable in whatever circumstances one finds oneself. Help is a key word — people with class step up and do something when something must be done. And they make other people feel not just “better” (as in, well, okay, I don’t feel embarrassed anymore), but actively good. Classy people never laugh at you — they laugh with you, or at themselves, or at the wackiness of the world. They reframe their little corner of the world so that we all fit into it.
And now I must go be busy. Enjoy your day.
This is a sketch by Pascal Campion. I think it’s great, and more to the point, right now I think it’s me — running running running with a smile.
In the last week, I suddenly find myself in a busy place. Getting things done. Having fun. But right now I need to be three of me. I need more brains, more arms, more time and less need for sleep. I am so behind on responding to comments here that I am sure many of you think I am just a figment of your imagination. I hope you will bear with me — I do want to talk to you, I do, I do. And if we’re talking about talking, I owe so many people email that I’m worried there aren’t enough pixels in the universe. If you are one of those people, I grovel through the internet and beg your continued patience.
This is what happens when I become very focused (as I am right now on putting the final touches on my business website). Focus is a sly little word: it sounds so serene, when really it just means that I fall down a rabbit hole, blink at the end of the day when Nicola forcibly removes me from my keyboard, and realize that while I was away my To Do List mysteriously got longer. How fucking serene is that?
Ah well. I’m working my way through the list, and I will catch up on the comments and the email and All Will Be Well. But right now, I think I’ll just go have a beer. And smile.
(Thanks, Pascal, for permission to use your sketch here. Hey everyone, go check out Pascal’s site.)
Kelley,
Just wanted to let you know your posts on jury duty have hit the Washington Association Of Criminal Defense Attorneys listserve. You hit the nail on the head and accurately read the undercurrents. Having been a prosecuting attorney in King and Skagit County and a criminal defense attorney for the last long ten years, I am always glad to see how others, outside the system, see the players. I say players because in many ways trials are like plays. Reasonable doubt, preponderance of the evidence, clear and convincing evidence…..forget it! It all comes down to a good story, well told.
Oh, one of the defense attorneys recognized the case, admitted his involvement (stiffness and inexperience) and told us the rest of the story. Both defendants were found not guilty.
I personally would rather look foolish and win than poised and professional and lose. Please do not post or use my name but feel free to comment to your hearts content.
It’s fascinating to hear from you. I’ve always believed that the best attorneys are storytellers under the suits, but have never had someone from your side of the table talk about it.
I go on at (perhaps tedious) length about story in this blog because I’m a writer, but also because story is at the root of so much in the world: self-identity, our presentation in the world, the way we accuse others and defend ourselves (in court or in our living rooms), the way we organize our responses to things. I think people, consciously or unconsciously, look for stories to understand the world. If we’re hard-headed intellectuals, we talk about “making sense” or “clear thinking” — but really it’s all about a story that feels true to us.
It must sometimes be enormously frustrating to do your job. Because some things that are true do not make good stories. They don’t “make sense.” And how can you make the necessary human connection, tell a human story that a human jury can understand and respond to, if the truth doesn’t make a good story? That must be beyond frustrating, it must be frightening as well, given the potential outcome for the people at the table.
I am about to start making up theories about your work, and they may be totally wrong. No offense intended, and please feel free to point out my errors and educate me out of my ignorance if you’re so inclined. But now I’m imagining that it’s at those times — when the truth isn’t sexy, when it’s a story that doesn’t make sense or that people refuse to believe (an even greater obstacle sometimes) — that lawyers need to stop being professional and poised, and start being human. Maybe foolish, maybe awkward, maybe emotional, but necessarily real. To make the story more human because a human is telling it.
My best work comes from throwing myself out there, making story and writing choices that could easily make me look foolish (and sometimes do). It’s not that I win in spite of those risks — those risks are where the win comes from. Without being willing to look foolish, I can’t create that human connection: here I am, let me tell you a story. Does it sometimes work like that for you?
I know how many new writers come to the art thinking that the most important things are cool ideas and important themes and elegant phrases. I wonder how many lawyers come to their art thinking that the most important things are knowledge of the law and a certain scrappy attitude. When in the end, in both our worlds, expertise (although essential) is only part of the equation.
I’d be very interested in anything you have to say, if you’d like to continue the conversation.
You may have heard of Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a neuroanatomist who had a stroke at the age of 37. Her deep understanding of what was happening to her own brain made the experience transformative for her. She recovered, she wrote a book, it did well. I’d heard about it, but had never seen her speak until a friend sent me the link to this astonishing video (thank you, Tommaso, it’s just amazing).
Taylor made think, and cry, and feel immense wonder and joy at the possibilities within us. Maybe she’ll do that for you too.
(The talk runs about 20 minutes. Here’s a direct link in case you need it.)
How do I talk about how this makes me feel, this simple and powerful idea — just step into my right brain, anytime I choose, as easy as taking my next breath. Reach from the solitude of self into some infinite space where being human means being part of something bigger than ourselves. Except that the thing that is bigger than us is within us. That’s what it is to be human, to be larger inside than outside. To find that I am — that we all are, every single one of us — wide and deep, that we carry within us giant waves and great canyons and vast ecstatic silence, everything, everything.
Is she right? Can we really have that anytime we want?
Well, I just did. Just then. I had to come back into my left brain to talk about it, because that’s how it works, but as near as I can tell, I took a breath and I thought about stepping away and stepping into; and I looked out the window at the gray sky heavy with rain that will be thin and chilly when it comes: autumn has arrived between one day and the next, the morning darker, the trees a different green, the sun turning away. Beautiful. A time of wind and shadows and possibility. All over the world, people lived that instant of their lives and I felt as if we all took our next breath together….
The right brain is not an unfamiliar or frightening place for me. I’m an artist; I live in the midst of ongoing conversation between my two brains, because it is my work to organize my emotional response to the world so I can share it with other people. The right brain channeled through the left. There’s no writing, no music, no painting or dance or drama without them both. There is no story, at least not the kind that has any meaning for me — story in which the discipline of form and the framework of structure draw me into an experience that is immediate and emotional. The left brain opening the door so that the right brain can charge through and grab on tight; and then the story dances me from one space to the other, back and forth, back and forth… It takes my breath away.
It’s astonishing to be human. I love it. It’s easy, it’s hard, it hurts, it’s ecstasy. I find more and more that what I want is not to be balanced, but to be able to find my balance again and again. To find the balance between risk and growth and stupid choices and smart ones; to move between hope and its opposite, which for me these days is not despair but an increasingly clear sense that it doesn’t matter whether things work out the way I want: what matters is that I am being human. And maybe that’s enough: with all this enormous landscape inside me, maybe it is enough to explore it until the end of my days, without so much worry about whether it’s going exactly to plan. To find the balance between the present and the past and the future: between the right brain and the left. Between all of my selves. Between me and you.
Today is my birthday. It’s a good day to think about these things, a lovely present to laugh and cry and look at the sky and feel, for just an instant, all of us out there together.
The defense attorneys (there were two) and the district attorney took turns with the voir dire questions. It was interesting to see their different personalities emerge: the DA was friendly and accessible, one defense lawyer was smart and informal and just a little arrogant, and the other defense lawyer was a little stiff and pretty clearly the least experienced person among all the professional courtroom folks.
I mentioned that all the potential jurors had numbers, and that we sat in order, but I didn’t mention that the first 14 people sat in the jury box (12 jurors plus two alternates). They were the de facto jury until/unless someone challenged their qualifications. Anyone could be challenged for cause, meaning that the judge agreed they were unfit to serve — for example, two people in the box said they thought defendants were guilty until proven innocent, and got booted for cause. So the next two people in line moved into their places.
Each attorney also got a certain number of peremptory challenges, meaning they could just kick you out without explanation (i.e., because they didn’t think you’d vote their way). And that’s where the gaming really started, as each attorney tried to figure out how to use their challenges to get the jury that would be most sympathetic to their perspective.
The two defendants were charged with breaking and entering with intent to commit burglary, and also with malicious mischief. And in the last round of voir dire questions, along comes the DA with a hypothetical scenario about refusing to give your two kids a cookie, then coming into the kitchen to find the cookie jar broken and the kids eating cookies. You didn’t know which one had climbed on the counter and broken the jar. Do they both deserve to be punished? How do you handle the situation? She started going around the room and picking jurors at random, and asking them to answer.
I was gobsmacked at the utter brass of her spinning the case to us and asking for a verdict. I was even more gobsmacked when people started giving it to her. Some people would give the kids time out. Some would ask questions to find out more details of who had greater responsibility. Some people would punish them both equally, since they were both actually eating the cookies. Punish, punish, guilty, guilty, no more cookies ever! And so on.
And then she got to me. “Juror 35, what’s your response?”
I was not happy, and I am sure it showed. I said, “I don’t have a response to offer to your hypothetical situation.”
She looked interested. “Okay. Do hypotheticals annoy you?”
I said, “This one does.”
She looked even more interested (she was very good at this). “Okay, tell me more about that.”
I pointed at the defendants. “It’s not hypothetical. You’re asking me to start thinking about a case that I haven’t even been presented with yet. And I’m not willing to do that.”
She smiled. And then she changed the subject completely and didn’t ask anyone else that question. It was a moot point since I was number 35, and there was very little chance I would get into the jury box unless they found a way to get rid of the 19 people in front of me. But I’m guessing the DA might not have wanted me on her jury (grin).
When it was his turn, the smart defense attorney gave a speech about how this case wasn’t about a cookie jar. The DA just kept smiling. The defense lawyer asked more questions. And he discovered Juror 25. Juror 25 was an engineer: he was calm, analytical, and confident enough to know that he would make a good juror but that he needed to be on a panel with people who thought differently from him, so that he could have more than just his own perspective to consider. The defense lawyer fell stone in love with Juror 25. He actually said, “I love jurors like you,” which I think was perhaps the one dumb thing he did all day: the DA smiled even harder. And when it came time to start excusing jurors from the panel, she kicked off one obvious bleeding-heart liberal and then stuck. The two defense guys clubbed together and started using their peremptories, but they could only get to Juror 23 before they ran out of challenges. The one defense guy damn near cried: he wanted Juror 25 on the panel so bad he could taste it. And the DA just kept smiling and saying, “The state is happy with this panel, Your Honor,” while I watched in admiration and thought I bet you are!
And then the rest of us got to go home. (Actually, I went to Goodwill and bought some go-go clothes, although I should have waited an extra day, but more about that in a future post. And isn’t that another Evil TV trick, teasing like that?)
It was a fun day for me. And I’m still thinking about it off and on. Especially about all the shifting psychological dynamics I found in myself. I wanted them to like me. I wanted to speak my truth, even if that meant they didn’t like me. I watched other people give Too Much Information in some cases, revealing things they hadn’t been asked about, and I understood that because I felt the same compulsion when it was my turn. I watched other people actually auditioning to be on the jury, and I understood that too, although I didn’t do it myself. I wanted to be on the jury because I’m curious about the experience. I was worried that if I was on the jury, I would get so busy being the Writer Watching How Everything Worked that I might miss actual important points in the testimony, and then I felt badly for putting my own curiosity ahead of the reality of the situation for the two defendants. I didn’t like one of the defense lawyers. I did like the DA, even though she pissed me off with her hypothetical. I wondered if I would be able to separate the liking/not liking from the verdict. And so on. And it was also interesting knowing that it was business as usual for the lawyers and judge and courtroom staff, huge stress for the defendants, an inconvenience for some of the jury pool… so many different experiences happening simultaneously in a few hours in a small room.
I had jury duty two weeks ago. They didn’t want me on a jury — no surprise there. The surprise was how interesting the day was, when I had expected no more than bad chairs, bad coffee and bad traffic on the way home. I’ve been meaning to write about it, and then got hopelessly distracted by, well, everything. But our friend turned us on to the movie Runaway Jury which we watched last night (thanks, Liz!), and made me think more about my own experience.
King County has two superior court buildings, the ancient one in Seattle and the new one in Kent, where I was assigned. Nice! Upholstered chairs with arms, flat screen TVs, wifi, coffee and snack machines in the jury room with an espresso stand downstairs (hey, it’s Seattle… we went to get our WA license plate when we first moved back in 1995 and the sign outside was “License Tags and Espresso.” I do not make this up.)
We saw a video about the history of justice in Washington State and Why It Is Important To Not Weasel Out Of Jury Duty. We had an informative speech from a judge about what to expect from the day, along with a reiteration of the don’t-be-a-weasel speech. Then everyone went back to either doing their work (the wifi crowd) or reading their trashy novels (the rest of us). It made me feel great to see so many people reading.
But I didn’t get to read much. I was called into the first jury pool, and spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon in a group of 60 potential jurors undergoing voir dire. The point of voir dire is for everyone to find out enough about potential jurors to decide whether or not they want us on their trial. Generally the prosecution and the defense want different kinds of people, and their questions weren’t always subtle. The subtle part was that they were using the questions to start making their respective cases to us as a group even before the trial was officially underway.
Part of the point of voir dire is to get people to start talking about themselves. It’s fascinating to watch how it plays out. It becomes clear pretty quickly that some people are saying whatever they think will get them out of the building before lunch, in spite of the two weasel lectures plus a third one from the judge. I wanted to take the proto-weasels off into a corner and say you know, these attorneys’ bullshit detectors are pretty highly refined, you’re not fooling them, and the judge is so pissed off at you for trying to ditch your duty that she will keep you here all day if she can…. (And she did, too. I liked the judge, she was relaxed and decisive and tough and, I thought, very fair. And she ran a very smooth courtroom.)
The way it works is that the attorneys take turns asking general questions. We all have numbers, we’re sitting in numerical order, and if we answer “yes” to the question we are supposed to hold up our number so that everyone can write it down. Then the lawyers or the judge have the option of following up individually with any of us to get the details of our answers. The judge warned us that some of the questions might feel intrusive, and told us in the nicest possible way to get over it. Basically, they can ask you anything they want to in voir dire.
Some of the questions:
And so forth. But the most interesting part for me was yet to come…
… and here I must do an Evil Television Trick and say To Be Continued... We have an appointment to go to, and then a friend is coming to dinner. And I am surprising Nicola with apple-blackberry crumble in spite of the sniveling remark (grin).
So I will finish the story tomorrow! (And here it is.)
Kelley,
I’m working on a class page for my high school physics students, and came across this quote. It made me think of you and Nicola…and your passion for life and writing.
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. –ISAAC ASIMOV, Life, Jan. 1984
Janine
Hi Janine,
Thanks for thinking of us (grin).
There are some days where I just might keep typing. Maybe. If I was right at the end of the Best Kelley Eskridge Writing Ever. Otherwise, I would go find my sweetie and spend the six minutes with her.
And today, if we get the six-minute warning, we may very well be on a picnic. We both have much to do today, many responsibilities and goals and blah de fucking blah. But the weather forecast shows that today and tomorrow may very well be the last two days of summer in Seattle… and we decided that we don’t want to miss them.
So today, instead of doing everything I am supposed to, I will be cooking potato salad and ginger-lemon scones, buying fried chicken and paté, chilling champagne, and spreading a blanket out in the back yard. Where I sincerely hope to be spending more than six minutes (grin).
I hope you enjoy your day as much as I hope to enjoy mine!
I went wandering around the internet the other day and found this article — “Five Things Happy People Do.” It’s at the Oprah website, a place I never thought I’d find myself, but that’s the (sometimes wacky) beauty of the wide-webbed world… we end up so many unexpected places. In web as in life, no?
[Happy people] design their lives to bring in joy. — from “Five Things Happy People Do” by Gabrielle LeBlanc
I like this. And I like the notion (also in the article) of eudaimonia, that happiness is found in “flourishing,” in becoming “one’s most golden self.” Happiness as a process, not a state of being. I am learning more and more that I can be essentially eudaimonic — essentially still in process with happiness — at times when I am fiercely angry or sad or feeling kicked in the teeth. Like certain kinds of hope, this is a kind of happiness that I can get down with.
Apparently, many of us are thinking about happiness these days. We’re studying it and measuring it and trying to find the formula. I hope it works, because the happiness of the flourishing self is a Good Thing, and I would wish it for all of us. But I am not so much a scientist, and I do not have Five Pearls of Wisdom or the Secret Equation to offer you. I don’t even have an equation for myself.
Or maybe I do. Maybe I do. I have a deck, and iced tea in the refrigerator, and a book. So I think I will take 20 minutes away from my work to sit in the sun and be Kelley and give attention to a part of myself that often gets short shrift but is also essential for the flourishing of me — the part that is not so much about doing as it is about being.
I tend to think of process as a dynamic thing, a moving thing…(shakes head). My perspective can be so fucking limited. Sometime the heart of a process is in a stopping point, a stillness that is necessary if there is ever to be movement again.
Today my wish for all of us is that whatever else we may be — peaceful or angry or afraid or joyful, dreaming big dreams or picking up their pieces, nursing wounds or back in the battle, smiling in the rain or watching the elegant aerobatics of crows or eating our second-favorite flavor of ice cream because the first has run out — that underneath it all, the stillness and the motion, we know that we are daimons, becoming, becoming.