I have been hesitant to post. It’s not because there is less joy in my life. In fact, the incidence of delightful events, insights, curiosities, and progressive challenges have multiplied exponentially in the course of these few months. But there is something holding me back. If you consult the urban dictionary, you will find an interesting addition to our constantly evolving language–Facebook fired. Much of my time and creativity has been sapped and tapped in professional matters. For those who know me in the macro (as opposed to the cyber) world, you know I delight in everyday challenges. The structure of my workplace is to create win-win situations, to scaffold success, to cushion set backs, to strategize progress. I am surrounded by really intelligent characters and the happiest have developed an outlook founded in a positive sense of humor.
So the concern? It is still academia and although I am on the administrative side, check this out.
Now of course, this isn’t a social networking site, it has a veneer of anonymity, a sparse few actually read it (and I appreciate all three of you!) and it’s always positive. Right? Epistemological solopsism at its best! (Or balderdash at its worst?)
When the kids made their first foray onto MySpace they first needed to understand that what they put out there stays out there. The second? Intent doesn’t matter. The moment it is cyber anyone can spin it. This is one of the real pitfalls of written language if intended for communication. How do you convey body language? Tone? Caring? Delight? Support? Positivity? How to choose words so they are received in the light of joy? Openness? Acceptance?
Answer. I can’t. My intent may be joy; the reader’s reception, informed by their perspective or upbringing or temperament or a recent case of gas, determines their interpretation of those words. I may intend humor, the reader perceive sarcasm. Ultimately, in the macro world, I may piss somebody off and end up in the unemployment line based on a personal writing that is construed to be disruptive to the workplace.
I may want to write about a (purely hypothetical) conversation with a(n alleged) young passionate scholar who (hypothetically) burst out with a statement about (possible) funding for STEM education as the precursor to (something like, don’t quote me) emergence of the singularity in a ‘geek rapture.’ But I won’t (or I just did) because it’s confusing and not fun. If I were to write such a thing, at some point, someone might accuse me of bullying and not only would I be unemployed, I could end up in prison for hate crimes against people smarter than me.
But then an echo of my own words bounces up to consciousness, the words I use as a preface when a professor or a student comes up to me with a situation that seems or is unfair. In the rare cases when a win-win structure has exploded and then escalated and a relationship implodes spiraling past a win-lose to turn into a cut your losses or it’ll be lose-lose…The words.
“If I were Queen of the Forest.” For some reason, 0ur physics guys particularly like that.
And I remember yesterday, at the physics graduate celebration, sitting in a sparsely populated room (because physics departments are just like that) with a secretary, the department chair and one professor. Hoping someone will show up. And miracle, three students do show up, one just from commencement, pleased, cheshire cat happy making a bee line past me to the department chair so they can meet as equals, or at least one step closer to equals. And he is so happy, this young guy and full of his plans as he tells the chair how he has been accepted in this great new school and he just has to make an appointment with some lady, and he refers to me by name, and how he hasn’t met her but somehow he has to make time to work out his registration but he just hasn’t figured out how he is going to get an appointment with her. And the chair smiles. Have you ever seen an accomplished physicist smile? These are the men and women who devote their lives to discovering, explicating and demonstrating how everything in the material world works. How every element and particle connects. How there is order in chaos and chaos in order and it is completely logical, rational and understandable. These are the people who say ‘there are only three things to know. Simple. Everything else is just nuance.’
So once the young man takes a breath, the chair says something like this.
“When you walk into a room, you should observe everything in the room. This is a conscious act. People tend to perceive only what they expect to perceive. Perception is determined by expectation. This was demonstrated at Harvard when during a play that the audience was familiar with, an actor dressed in a gorilla suit walked across the back of the stage. Afterward the audience was polled and a large percentage did not notice the gorilla. Sir, please turn around. You must meet the woman in the gorilla suit.”
In fact, I was wearing a rather conservative dove gray suit and red silk blouse, but I suspect that in that department, I will now be known as Queen Kong.
