Shit, when did this become almost 1300 words?

So this blog post is partially inspired by this lovely list of questions posted by my friend Eli after attending a facilitators gathering, partially inspired by some of my own experiences, and partially inspired by some critical self-reflection.

And I want to preface this post by saying that as an able-bodied, mixed/white, queer man there are certain privileges that I have that allow me to think about and discuss issues of privilege and oppression work in such a way that I am not triggered because it does not personally affect my life. I am able to mentally or physically walk away from a given situation/conversation if I don't like it and the repercussions I will face will be having to deal with one upset person at a later time. This is a privilege I have because of my identities.

Which brings me to today's topic. I've been thinking about the nature of friendship and connection between myself and my communities. I'm what you call... well-networked. I'm highly extroverted and motivated to maintain relationships with people. I have a policy that if I think of someone more than twice in a day no matter how long it's been, I will reach out and contact them in some way.

My Strengths Quest profile shows that my top trait is Woo, which means that I excel at winning people over and making strangers like me, that in essence I'm the opposite of shy (quite the turnaround from the kindergartner who hid behind his mother and cried when she had to leave). It's a strength of my personality that I long ago learned to use to my advantage.

Which means I have a lot of friends, and even more acquaintances. Which can be draining for some people. People see that I have 1100+ Facebook friends and balk, and admittedly, I probably couldn't tell you who some of the quieter ones are. Does that mean I don't care? I don't think so. To me, it means that at some point I cared about you enough professionally, academically, personally, by extension of my relationship with someone we know in common, that I got to know you. So even if you stop me on the street and I have no idea who you are, you're still important enough to me that I will make the time to reconnect with you. You're worth that time. You will always be worth that time.

Now, as is often the case with someone as widely connected as I am, there are many people I know who I don't necessarily agree with politically, socially, either in base belief or way of approaching the world.

I believe strongly in an anti-oppression framework that seeks to dismantle the social structures (ideologies) that cause and support racial, gender and other inequalities. I'm not always super forward about this, but I make no attempts to hide it. Some of the people I know (and thankfully this group is fairly small) disagree outright. I consider these people ignorant to reality. Some of the people I know are the kinds of people who introduced me to this and continue to educate me through their words, actions, and experiences. I consider these people an inspiration. Some of the people I know don't know about any of this and are happy to live their lives within the status quo. I consider these people lucky to live in such ignorant bliss and it's beautifully painful for me every time I have to disturb that happy little bubble. Some of the people I know at base agree with the long term goals of anti-oppression work, but disagree with the language and the route such activism has taken. I often call these people problematic because while we agree on outcomes, the kinds of statements these people make can be extremely hurtful to the safe space of individuals and communities of marginalized identities. The way they express their views often comes across as polarizing to those doing the kind of anti-oppression work I'm involved in.

This often gets them labelled as racist or misogynistic or otherwise ostracizes them from the work towards equality that they do believe in. I've seen them on the internet labelled as such things like "liberal dude bros" and "fedoras" and "_______-apologists" because they usually fit under the demographic of college-educated, liberal, straight, cishet men.

I often find myself in positions where I can understand the logic that they're coming from. I don't agree with their points outright because while they may be true in the philosophical sense, they are often at odds with the lived experience being brought up. Which given the way that the discourse around marginalized identities values experience creates a fundamental ideological difference of opinion that no amount of explaining or argumentation can bridge beyond a surface intellectual level where you end the conversation by saying "I see where you're coming from, but I still disagree."

Because the difference is one of experience and you cannot teach experience, you can only ever teach ways of respecting the differences that those varied experiences create. And since my default is to side with marginalized identities, sometimes the way to respect those differences is to know when to shut up and leave. Is that always helpful? No. Will it prevent you from further alienating those whom, at base, you agree with? Yes.

And yes, I'm biased and I apologize if the description above fits the kind of interaction we've had together. This is post is not meant as an attack, merely an exploration of the ways I interact with people.

The point that I've been working toward this entire post is that sometimes I find myself asking (or being asked) how I can be friends with such people? If I find their way of interacting with issues and communities that I care about deeply intensely problematic, how do I call such people my friend?

I think part of it is that I always try to approach situations and people non-judgmentally. Quite frankly, it takes a lot to elicit a strong emotional reaction out of me. Usually you have to build up a history of fairly toxic interactions for me to dislike you. I have a very high tolerance for a lot of bullshit. Which is not the same as not recognizing it as bullshit.

But I also find myself separating people from their actions. I can dislike, even hate what you do. If you're flaky or rude or intentionally mean, then I dislike your behavior. Sometimes even enough where I feel it warrants removing myself from any and all situations where I will encounter such behavior from you. If that means removing myself from your life, so be it.

What I'm realizing in myself though is that if I actually stop and think about it, I can never actually dislike a person as a person who has selfhood and I think that's something important to recognize. It's not necessarily something to advocate for everyone; sometimes bad experiences or behaviors from someone are inseparable from them as a person and where I have a high enough tolerance that I have yet to be unable to distinguish a difference between the two, not everyone has that ability or can afford to have that ability and simultaneously ensure their own safety.

We may disagree on everything. I may hate your views for being poisonous to the communities of which I am a part. But I will never let that mean I hate you as a person.

I don't really know if I was going anywhere beyond this, but for now, the ideas are out there.

Responding to The Good Men Project and the Friend-Zone

I was recently reading a post by the Good Men Project that basically said the Friend Zone exists for both men and women and sucks to be on the receiving end.

Only somewhat respectfully, I disagree. The Friend Zone should not exist (though, as I'm about to explain, not for the reasons usually cited). Looks like, I'm on blogger now, and I'm still going to talk about this with fairly heteronormative language. I apologize, but it's also a far more prevalent problem in the straight community than the LGB and I'm mostly addressing men.

“The Friend Zone” creates an ontological state (way of being) that completely ignores the wants and needs of other person. “I am/have been Friend-zoned” vs. (as one of the top comments puts it) “He’s just not into you” or “He’s only using you for ______ (usually sex)” for the woman’s counterpart. I want to point out the imbalance in agency implied by this linguistic difference. In both instances, it’s about the man and his feelings, and I think this is a dangerous double standard for the socialization of youth (especially young men). The reason many feminists and those against the concept of a “Friend Zone” react so strongly is that it ignores and marginalizes (most often) what the woman involved wants. It’s not even an option to be talked about, and that’s a problem.

I also don’t like this article because it doesn't propose any kind of solution beyond an overly simplistic “give the friends a chance.” Why not teach young men how and why they should overcome their fear of rejection in talking to women? Why not teach young women to recognize when their friends are interested in them and make themselves abundantly clear that they aren't interested and have no interest in being pursued? Why not set an example by moving ourselves and our discourse to more productive line of thought? Like I’ve said in other posts, let’s use our influence as supposed adults to teach the next generation good communication rather than quibbling amongst ourselves over something that is clearly becoming damaging for both sides.

In other posts, I've talked about how the concept of the Friend Zone comes about because of a sense of entitlement caused by our societal impulse to tell men that if you work hard you can achieve anything. Apply that logic to objects of desire (women) who have autonomous desires that may not include you as the desirer, and we run into problems. If you apply yourself and pursue a friend with no success, it leaves you feeling weak and hurt and powerless and frustrated. Rather than letting this fester, we need to teach our youth to deal with that reality in healthy ways rather than continuing to project their desires on someone who is (at least currently) not interested. Respect that, especially when you interact with them. Or, and especially if they're using you, you need to get out of that situation.

I also don't like Friend Zone because it implicitly makes being a friend a bad thing. I understand that it doesn't feel like a good thing if it's not what you want, but to make it a bad thing devalues the meaning of friendship in general. This is unhealthy. 

Stop it with the Friend Zone shit already. And if you're so stuck on keeping the concept, at least redefine your language to be less damaging. 

A Precursor

Here, I'm going to revisit a briefly touched on topic from a previous blog post.

"I have a few parasites of my own, and for once I'm not talking about the Fool. These are more vampires upon my time and energy than mental illness."

What do we consider our friends and peers, especially those whom we acquaint ourselves with through that amorphous realm we call the classroom? Through Nanotexts, Parasites and interactions further provoked by and because of these settings, I’ve come to learn the difference between @cephalopod and @vladislavxodasevic (the url doesn’t lie, he is not @nerbiotxiste), and Kai and Andrew the same as they have learned to tell Acelessthan3 from Danny.

But in this triumvirate, what role do we each play? As Jack (Joe? The man in the hat) put so concretely in a comment on one of my blogs, “And is this what you want? To be the host, to be the giver, to be the useful? Or maybe this role [is] symbiotic in your eyes; you extract joy from the parasitic encounters. Is that more accurate?” In short, what do we want from each other, from this interaction?

I responded in a separate post:

“I think you hit the nail on the head as the saying goes when you ask if I have been feeding, guesting, leeching ‘all along, under the mask of the host.’ Because when it comes down to it, is not the rule of the extrovert to do so?”

But that only answers the question of what I want, or rather what I do, in general. When we change scale and zoom in on the specific interactions that happen between Andrew, Kai and I, we find a quantum tangle of interlocking and overlapping wants.

“Acelessthan3 asks What do you want of me?”

Before I deleted the responses and effectively rebooted this update, Andrew had asked me if it was directed at anyone in particular. I lied and said something akin to “No one. Everyone. Anyone who cares to answer.” It was directed at him specifically in an attempt to goad him into giving me the biggest thing I want of him, his attention, to see some of that energy come my way.

I would be lying if I didn’t say that part of it had to do with the fact that I’m attracted to him and have been essentially since Nanotexts spring quarter. It’s not something we talk about, like the bats lurking in the shadows of the belfry, but the elephant in the room acts as an invitation.



Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you

In the perfectly parasitic relationship, we find that both these statements hold true. The included wants to use, the excluded wants to be used.

I have something Andrew needs: namely books, the ability and willingness to listen, to act as someone to bounce ideas off, to push him past these creative and innate barriers keeping him from producing. But despite all outward appearances, this host has his own agenda, seeking to leech and feed in a libidinous want for attention. And it can never be quite satisfied, is always “Hungry for love,” so the host invites again and again.

Then in this plurk: http://www.plurk.com/p/3oyhk2 a little after Andrew responded with this:



We find a short discussion about Ace/Danny in relations to Ceph/Kai and Vlad/Andrew, the kind of thing you would expect to find in a private plurk, the kind of thing I don’t think I was ever really meant to see. In a sense, it was Awkward Sauce.

I can’t speak much on the Kai/Andrew relationship except for what I’ve observed, which is a slight parallel to the Danny/Andrew as I know it. Insomnia manifests from this relation, perhaps the spreading of an infection. He wrote a lot about sleep in his last thought experiment so I think he’s been infecting her and not the other way around.

Kai and I seem to have more of a mutualist relationship than parasitic. We gain in each other an outlet, a vent for all those little frustrations that we don’t allow ourselves to express in the greater population of our peers. We foster in each other an openness that allows the id room to stretch.

But we also seem to share in what I’m sure Rickels would call an oral fixation, namely our cookie connection. We put food in each other’s mouths, just as we are able to put thoughts in each other’s heads.

We ingest the food, the cookies, the parasite of each other and so are interrupted. And we spread this infection as well with our inside jokes that carry over between irl interactions and plurk interactions, the private and the public. Andrew is infected, bacon snickerdoodle, anyone?

We have an infestation

My Parasites

I have a few parasites of my own, and for once I'm not talking about the Fool.
These are more vampires upon my time and energy than mental illness.

Anyone remember these:
http://www.plurk.com/p/3jg9oz
http://www.plurk.com/p/3jgbfc
http://www.plurk.com/p/3jg9rw
http://www.plurk.com/p/3jgawg
http://www.plurk.com/p/3jgau0

Or how about that phone call I got from @cephalopod on Wednesday asking me to go to lunch with her so she could physically stay up?
http://www.plurk.com/p/3q8fvd
http://www.plurk.com/p/3q7wbp

I serve my purpose to these people. In the capacity of friendship, feedback generator and bouncing board, etc. I am available because I make myself so, sharing books, time and ideas and what do I get?

I get exactly what I ask for. Which by nature of our relationship, isn't much: the occasional conversation and tea. Did Harker ask much of Dracula? What does the country mouse ask of the city mouse? What did Master Abraham ask of Murr?

As I sit in class now, listening to the conversation about Serres and what we're getting, what we want from the text, I think the question applies here as well. We are the excluded third of Parasite. It's pushing us where we're used to pushing the text, forcing our way in. What are we asking of the text? But also, what is the text asking of us?

I state it here: I'm pushing. I'm asking that you push back.


And that's what I believe the text is doing as well. Pushing us and the only way we can understand it is to push back.

Our Parasites

"If we're going to compare the class to a sort of organism, why not go with the metaphor of an immune response. Sure, it may have been rude of Eli to interrupt and not be completely in terms with the way the class is run, but I personally found her input stimulating. 

If you completely isolate a biological system, say our class, and then randomly introduce foreign bodies, you kind of have to expect a certain level of chaos to accompany that introduction. Exactly like what happens when those little black critters get in through the little boy's nose (mouth? I don't remember). [Referring to a video we'd watched]

My point here is that I don't think Eli served so much as an invader as she did a vaccine. You can't expect the incoming bodies to follow the same routine and must adapt accordingly until they are gone. "

I take this quote from a blog post made by someone in the Nanotext class I had with Tony last spring.

The post was about a girl, Eli (pronounced like what is perhaps the more familiar spelling of Ellie), who visited the class at the invitation of one of our peers and the reactions the class had to her on plurk afterward.

I bring this up because I see it as being relevant to our Parasites class. Would we have the same kind of reaction? I hope that with all our discussion of the interruption that the answer would be no, but if I recall correctly, even in Nanotexts, we'd just finished a rather lengthy section on alterity and the meaning of the other, the exterior.

In thinking about this though, I'm brought to the question of what is a parasite unto our collective Parasites class? Clearly there are a select few of us in the 2:30 class who are parasites upon Tony's time. We're welcomed by the gracious host that he is, but even still, we encroach on his office hours, essentially owning the class from the inside out as we discuss what is, what was and what is to come: often eying others as an intrusion.

And here, I think the answer is in ourselves. We are our own parasites, interrupting and disturbing the quiet status quo of the class. To relate to another text from Nanotext we are the Ned Slades upon the Hand. We have infiltrated the system and are slowly destroying it from the inside out. This is our education.

A last point on the idea of ideas

I've already posted this as a plurk update, but wanted to reassert and expand upon it in a more cohesive format:

We hear talk of energy and tend to think it is bound within the realm of physics, that it obeys the first law of thermodynamics, but with the energy of ideas -- or rather ideas as a form of energy -- this is wrong. Ideas and technology work together as a kind of perpetual energy machine, generating more energy (ideas) than is input and required in other systems. The teme is self-replicating. It is parasite.

It's a matter of infrastructure. We've built the kind of infrastructure in our technology that allows this growth with minimal maintenance. To send a message to 20 people no longer takes a three hours of writing, 1+ days travel per message, etc. Yes, we've expended that kind of energy in building the technology to allow us to bypass that, but that was a one-off. We do not use that every time we send a message. We're standing on the shoulders of giants.

Once we've sent off enough ideas, the exchange of that being sent versus that being put in to maintain the system becomes uneven. Our investment has more than paid for itself.

If we think of the meme/teme as a unit of the energy of an idea, we see that this growth has the potential to be exponential. A hyperlink, a small underlined blue word can send us to a page full of thousands more words, images and even videos. Or you input 5 words, and it's replicated 20 times with the same amount of energy it took you to put those in.

We see it here in that video we watched in class:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU


A simple search of a few key words brings us thousands (and even thousands upon thousands) of search results, of ideas. And I've said it before and I'll say it again; ideas are dangerous. Ideas are parasitic in their ability to control you. This whole update represents the small seed of Tony sitting next to me in class on Wednesday and mentioning the word energy. Like clicking an internal hyperlink in my mind, we take one simple word and expand it.

Unconditional: 100th Post!

"Imagine a perfect relationship. You are always intensely happy with your partner because you live with the perfect woman or man for you. How could you describe your life with this person?

Well, the way you relate with this person will be exactly the way you relate with a dog. A dog is a dog. It doesn't matter what you do, it's going to be a dog. You are not going to change a dog for a cat or a dog for a horse; it is what it is."
-Don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love: A Toltec Wisdom Book

It reminds me of that Depeche Mode song that goes: "People are people so why should it be you and I should get along so awfully." Every relationship is a connection between two people each with their own desires and drives that create not only who they are, but how they interact with the world. Expecting them to change to fit your drives and desires cannot work and cannot lead to happiness.

I like this dog metaphor because it's true. If you treat every relationship like you would the loving bond (an important distinction since some people treat dogs quite horribly) between dog and master, then you'll be much happier.

A dog wants to be with you when it wants to be with you because it wants to be with you (or because you have food, but even then, it still wants to be there). If it doesn't want to be with you, it will squirm and struggle and run off to the other room; there's absolutely nothing you can do about this except to laugh and let it go. You can follow if you want but it won't expect you to and will probably be just as happy if you do as if you don't. If it isn't, it will come back.

The dog doesn't try to change you. It doesn't try to control you. It will let you know when it needs to go to the restroom or that it's hungry or thirsty, and if you don't respond it will work within its means to satisfy those needs without you. If it misbehaves and poos on the floor or eats out of the garbage or drinks from the toilet it's because you didn't do your part not because it's acting out against you.

Put a dog in a kennel or lock it outside, and it will whine. It will be sad. You are containing it's free spirit to roam and wander and randomly come up and lick your face and give you its love.

The key part of all this is the unconditionality of it. The dog is a dog no matter what, just like you are you no matter what, and you both have to be those things entirely for it to work and not expect the other to be anything else than what it is. The book goes on to ask "If you want a dog, then why you are getting a cat? If you want a cat, then why would you get a horse or a chicken?"

I look around at my relationships and the relationships of the people around me, and we're constantly criticizing each other and nit-picking. You don't fit my vision of what you should be. You don't talk loudly enough. You aren't responsible with money. You never communicated with me on the level I was trying to communicate. You aren't the pretty little tabby, you're a dirty, smelly mutt.

We can't change those things. All we can do is try to change how we react to them, which isn't to say we should give up, but getting angry or upset is an action in futility.

Basically what I've taken from this is the idea that I want to love unconditionally and love compassionately for the betterment my happiness and for yours. It is by no means a completely selfless or easy endeavor, I want to be happy as much as the next person, but in recognizing that, I'm also accepting that I'm not perfect and neither are the people around me. By accepting that fact as something I will never be able to change though I'm working that much closer to my goal.

The reason I post this here is because thanks to Power of Hope, I've learned that the best way to actualize an intention or goal is to verbalize it and share it with other people.

As we say at camp: Do you support me in this?