reading clearout - may 2022

Hi folks, it's been a few days! Hope all is well. Here are some thoughts on my reading from May.

Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come by Jessica Pan

One of the reading highlights of the year was showing up late to a vacation with Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come in hand. Of course, this is one of those situations where the joke is in the title given how it belies the premise - Pan, a self-diagnosed introvert, chronicles a year spent living as an extrovert, which would include wanting to go on such things as a weekend trip. One fairly unsurprising lesson from this book is how poorly the introvert-extrovert binary describes the full range of human personalities. Being a somewhat hopeless introvert myself, I could relate to the impossible challenge of networking (or generally just connecting with strangers in a large group setting). But other things Pan described as Major Introvert Challenges, such as public speaking or traveling alone, feel completely natural to me. It may be more appropriate to use these labels in the sense of an adjective (introverted behavior) rather than as a noun (there is the introvert) to better capture the way most of us are a unique combination of introverted and extroverted characteristics.

Pan notes specific tactics for building connection that I'll summarize here. A conversation is successful when both parties share a willingness for self-disclosure, but specific behaviors such as interrupting, rambling, or partial listening will quickly submarine the initial interaction. Pan suggests that the occasional personal question is a helpful way to build connections, particularly if it can safely lead to sharing vulnerabilities or insecurities, due to how those disclosures can help people see echoes of themselves in each other. The best advice in this area may be a reminder prompted by two study results - one noted that people start to see each other as friends after six to eight meetings, while others cite a range of fifty to ninety hours. Maybe like most good things, building connection isn't about any of the above but rather about finding ways to make the necessary time investment.

A couple of other good reminders jumped out at me from my notes. For gatherings or parties involving large numbers of strangers, a good way to break into a smaller group is to wait at its edge then introduce yourself during a break in the conversation. Those who are working on their charisma should learn how to ask open-ended questions, then either ask meaningful follow-up questions or validate the other's feelings. Finally, those who are familiar with the improv mindset of approaching everything with a "yes, and" response should remember that the main obstacle to this mentality is arriving somewhere with a fully formed story in mind - this usually just leads to responses aimed at acting out the predetermined plan.

Alien Nation by Sofija Stefanovic

Stefanovic collects thirty-six personal stories which describe various immigrant experiences in America. Like with the The Moth collections I've previously highlighted on TOA, these stories were originally told on stage before being transcribed for this book (and like with The Moth, I suspect some stories came across better in the original audio format). Of the many stories I enjoyed from the work, I marked "C.R.I.S.I.S." for a reread.

There wasn't much I recalled about Alien Nation when I thought back to it for this summary. Some of the notes I took from the book read like potential themes - for example, that if you tell people they don't belong enough times then it begins to change how they see themselves, or that the majority often creates the impression that minorities must explain their own importance. It seems that a consistent accomplishment of each story was articulating the way certain everyday occurrences affect people of specific identities in ways unseen by the rest of us. If you like learning these lessons through personal anecdotes, then perhaps it's worth looking at this book or checking for the availability of the audio equivalent.

Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit

There's something unusual about an author like Rebecca Solnit writing a memoir. I've read much of her work over the past few years and I've never felt too far removed from the author in those reading experiences. Unlike some of the other authors I've read regularly, she isn't the type to remove herself from the writing to the extent that her perspective disappears in the final product. It raises a question that I hadn't considered until I started looking over my notes on Recollections of My Nonexistence - what was left for her to say about herself that I haven't already learned from her other work?

This book, which Solnit mostly sets against the early portion of her four-decade adulthood, states one of its objectives early on - naming the obstacles you've encountered is one way you help the next generation. I found numerous examples in my notes of how she names these encountered obstacles, each created and enabled by a misogynist culture (the way society does little about (or even ignores) the fact that some men wish to harm women, leaving women to deal with the psychological effect on their own; the lack of places named after women or the lack of statues built of women, rendering their accomplishments invisible and leaving girls without examples and role models). These examples echo the themes I've found in her other work, but I think the memoir format gave her a new way to reflect on her experiences through writing. Recollections of My Nonexistence was important for the way it enabled Solnit to add a complementary perspective to support the ideas that she has brought into existence through her prior work.

The Purpose of Power by Alicia Garza

Garza, perhaps most commonly known for being a co-creator of the BlackLivesMatter hashtag, shares the lessons learned from two decades of organizing movements in this 2020 work. The Purpose of Power also intertwines history into these lessons, with the history including elements of memoir as well as a recounting of the moments and events that influence her work to this day. Overall, I thought Garza brought all of this together into an excellent book. However, when I thought back to my reading I struggled to recall anything specific that I had retained from the experience. My review of my own notes as well as some reviews from other readers seemed to reinforce my initial suspicion that the book often took one extra step back from the details, dealing more in strategy instead of tactics or ideas instead of examples. I think there is the potential for her to someday write a "how-to" guide for organizing, but it's not something that came through in this book due to this lack of specific detail.

What did come through, despite having the "higher level" perspective, was useful in its own way. Garza notes that movements require organization, building on the momentum created by protests or hashtags, and that their bases must expand beyond the range of people who are initially in frequent contact with the base. As an organizer, it's vital to create support for change among those who may not have initially recognized its necessity, and one way to do so is by understanding issues unique to other communities and then expanding the viewpoint of the movement to encompass those issues into the movement's goals. A growing movement, by embracing a cycle of achieving common goals across differences, finds a way to refuel its own growth and continually build power. I felt Garza spoke indirectly to the points summarized above when she noted that progressive communities, generally lacking diverse representation (and specifically Black representation), may not always present progressive solutions due to the lack of diverse perspectives.

For most of us readers, the broader lessons of organizing movements lack immediate application to challenges in our own lives. I'll highlight a note that spoke to my regular experience - when confronting racism, remember that people won't believe an idea which contradicts what they see with their own eyes. In these moments, avoid engaging in debates and work instead on asking questions or creating context to help others reframe their experience with a more inclusive and tolerant perspective.

toa rewind, world cup edition - goooool

As I'm sure many readers have suspected, I've spent the past few weeks battling an unrelenting case of World Cup Fever. My temperature has come down a few degrees today, the first day without games since the start of the tournament. What better way to fill the void than with a repost from October 2020, where I briefly mused on the tradition of Spanish-speaking commentators yelling "GOL" after the ball finds its way into the back of the net?

My hunch is that this practice is related to how fans react to goals. I noticed early on in my viewing career that Spanish-speaking crowds sounded different after a goal relative to their English-speaking counterparts. (My best but likely unhelpful attempt to explain the difference is that the Spanish-speaking crowds sounded lower, not in volume but in pitch, than the English-speaking ones.) It took a few more years before I connected the dots - in the former, fans yell "GOAL" (or "GOOOL", I suppose) while in the latter fans tend to just make all kinds of otherwise unintelligible noise. What I'm not sure about is how this might fit into the commentator's tendency, leading to a sort of pollo and huevo conundrum - do announcers yell GOL because that's what the crowds do, or do crowds yell GOL because that's what the announcers do? And of course, all of the preceding speculation comes with the caveat that I might have misunderstood something along the way, which would wipe out all of this paragraph.

Let's focus instead, then, on what I do know. In this tournament I've watched games with commentary in both languages at a roughly even split. The experience has reinforced a feeling I explained in the 2020 post linked above - those who attempt to make some sort of insightful commentary in the moments after a goal are almost certainly doomed to failure. When a goal is scored, there is simply nothing to say. What words could resonate better than just taking in the explosion of joy, excitement, and hope that comes in the moments after a goal? What is better than just becoming part of the noise for a few seconds? I think the Spanish commentator's practice of yelling "GOOOOOL" until the celebrations start to wane reveals a deep-rooted wisdom about communication - if it's not the right time to say something, maintain the connection until it becomes appropriate to resume speaking.

leftovers - reading clearout, april 2022 (reciprocal vulnerability)

While reviewing my notes ahead of preparing the original post, a sentence I scribbled down from Maggie Nelson's On Freedom caught my eye - a lack of reciprocal vulnerability often threatens to undermine certain forms of discussion or advancement. It seems like an unusually wise point, though perhaps this may be lost on those who naturally understand the idea.

I'm remembering as I write this how I would often encounter examples of this thought in action through my hospice volunteering - nurses and staff, fellow volunteers, even certain visitors or residents would find ways to establish connection through reciprocal vulnerability. One advantage of the hospice setting to this idea is that a hospice is an environment defined by vulnerability. The need to take initiative, at least in the sense of emotional exposure, rarely seemed to fall to me. It also helped that with others often going first I could sense just how much exposure was appropriate to support or even advance the interaction - too little, like Nelson writes, and I would undermine the moment. However, it's worth noting that too much could create its own problem. One thing I learned over the years is that initiating didn't always mean a willingness to reciprocate, and my misreading of those signals sometimes led to a retreat whenever I my own vulnerability pushed the other a step beyond their comfort level with reciprocation.

All of this applies outside hospice situations, but being outside that specific environment means a lot of interactions happen with an unstated assumption that vulnerability remains in a quiet corner of the interaction. Therefore, my challenge these days is correctly reading situations to determine just how much I can share without making the other feeling that they would be better off retreating rather than reciprocating. It's not my intent to make this sound like a challenge that I have mastered, or that I am some sort of guru in all matters of difficult discussions. It's really more the opposite - I remain such a beginner that my small successes remain limited to areas where I've had the steps spelled out for me.

But shouldn't we share our successes? There was a moment a few months ago where, as a panelist leading a job interview, I sensed our candidate having a hard time answering certain questions. These questions were, by design, unusual in the context of a recruiting process, with the idea being that they would help us better understand our candidates in the context of our DEI goals. I recalled from my prep work how the candidate's cover letter shared their interest in the organization, telling a story that I could relate to from my own experience, so in a quiet moment I shared a couple of comments explaining why I initially wanted to join the team. It wasn't a magic moment by any means, but it did seem like the answers from that point were a little freer, our candidate perhaps benefiting from access to a wider range of available answers due to a sense that their inherent vulnerabilities would be reciprocated by an interviewer.