Ok, so while I was showering I had a great idea. (I swear to god I could do what Alexander did at my age and conquer Asia Minor if only I could take my bath on campaign.)
I think some of the anxiety comes in the feelings (not the weird kind of “feelings”) I have towards the two gentlemen whose papers I was editing. They’re actually similar, if you discount the length of time I’ve been in contact with them. The main feeling I have for them both is the desire to be useful.
So… let’s think about this. I don’t frankly see how I’m the type of person that either of them would want to have contact with. I’m certainly not in their age group, certainly not wiser than them, am certainly not able to give them any insight or provide them with any thought that they’ve not seen coming a mile away. I am in just about every way (physically, mentally, fiscally, god knows emotionally) inferior to them. Yet I want – because of their greater virtue and wisdom and insight and knowledge – very much to gain their good opinion. Yet this cannot come from my just presenting myself and expecting to magically have it. No… I must have a commodity to trade for their good opinion. Since I’ve not enough virtue, wisdom, etc… I chose to trade in time.
Now, this is less true with C (not the bastard who owes me money – the other one) than with Stef. Stef I don’t know at all, and probably never shall. So his time is the only thing I can trade for his good opinion, and so there the decision was a conscious one. With C, I trade as well in other personal qualities which he finds attractive, and the editing his articles thing – which he also does for me for god knows what reason, but I do so appreciate it – is just a sideline.
Can all personal interactions be broken down to trade terms, I wonder? Probably all of the good personal interactions. If my interactions with mother were broken down in trade terms, for instance, I’d be hemorrhaging time and money and energy and just about everything else without ever getting a transfusion of any of those things in return. That makes bad economic sense. But with friends or mentors or – one hopes – random internet philosophers, the balance is even over time. One may perhaps give a little more in one interaction, and then get a little more in return in another. But on the whole, the relationship is on par. You get at least as much as you’re giving, though the specific things traded might be different for each party.
It sounds so low and common to talk about “buying” someone’s good opinion. But I think we really are all traders in that sense, no matter what we like to call it
What the hell does this have to do with RTR? Let’s think.
I think for a moment that the trade became too unbalanced. That I felt that what I was putting out wasn’t quite being reciprocated. This was especially true in the first part of the book – which, being somewhat “old hat,” was a little boring to me… just a nod (as in affirmative nodding, not as in nodding off to sleep) fest of “Yes, I read that in UPB” or “Yes, that was in On Truth” – and it was a little bit of a slog for that reason. Necessary – for as Stef said, the book should be accessible to all, not just people already in the conversation – but a little bit of a difficult go. The way I got over this was to finish that section and come back to the book yesterday having been refreshed with a nice long sleep. I flew through the last 200 pages in an afternoon and did enjoy it really.
So the trade balanced out in the second section. Not only did I get to be useful in proofing the book (and I really do like to be useful to just about anyone who has my good opinion), but the RTR theory is interesting and validated some things I’d thought about already and seen already, as I’d said. So while in the first part I felt as though I was investing more in the book than I was getting back, the second part did not make me feel so.
If I do any more cogitating on the whys and wherefores, this blog is going to explode. In order to avoid a fate worse than a fate worse than death, here are John Cleese and Graham Chapman in a very funny sketch.
So Stef asked me this morning why I found it such a slog to get through the first section of his new book. I told him that the symptoms were my reading a couple of pages, then getting up and walking around… reading a couple of pages, then getting up to get a cup of tea… reading a couple of pages… etc. When he asked what feeling the symptoms expressed, I wasn’t sure. And I’m still not sure. Hence this navel-gazing post.
The closest I got to pinning down the feeling was introducing a Monty Python metaphor – from the end of Holy Grail when the main action keeps cutting to a shot of Arthur’s army standing on a hill and shouting “Get on with it!” in unison. Stef didn’t seem to pick up the metaphor as part of my explaining my feelings (I think he thought that it was just a random thought) and I didn’t press the issue because I guess it didn’t reveal much more than I was able to say to him before. I don’t know if the conversation was frustrating to him or not. On my end it felt like 18 minutes of him trying to pin down a fog. That’s not his fault, god knows, but mine.
So… he asked me my feelings about the RTR book. The blank, unholy surprise of it is that I really don’t. Have feelings about it, that is. As I told him, none of his books have ever moved me to great emotion. (Very few books do – this certainly isn’t an attack on or denigration of his writing.) The book made a good deal of sense, but then again I had some knowledge of the theory, having seen it in action in and around the FDR boards, and – to a much lesser extent – in chat. There were even a couple of things I will implement myself, starting with an ex-friend who constantly prates of his “honor” and won’t pay back the money he owes me or even talk about it with me. So I found myself reading with anxious impatience through the first part of the book, and nodding in a sort of “Ok, this makes sense. Good on him. Maybe I can use this stuff” sort of way. I even imagined a couple of possible emails to send to the dishonorable C – one before the book said not to present emotional conclusions as things to be shot down by the person you’re talking to, and one after. And yeah… oh, well, there were a couple of times in reading his tables of “what they say vs. what they mean” when my cynical amusement shot to the top as I recognized something I’d heard or seen from mother. That was pretty much the extent of it.
The problem is, though… what if you don’t actually feel anything when you’re talking with someone? RTR is about providing real-time emotional feedback. So… what if you can’t? I see people on the boards providing feedback like “I feel scared and anxious when you say things like that” to other people. (I certainly hope I haven’t made anyone feel scared or anxious, but I don’t know whether I have or haven’t – hence the utility of RTR for people like me who are horrifically bad at reading tone and body language – something you don’t get online anyway.) But the problem is, I’m not exactly what you’d call “in touch with my feminine side,” if any. I simply cannot imagine myself saying “I feel scared and anxious when you say things like that” to anyone!! This isn’t because I don’t have emotions. I certainly do. They just seem to be a little bit weaker and a little bit slower in coming than everyone else’s. I don’t tend to get scared in talking to anyone. My most common feelings are either anxious impatience (as exemplified in my mother’s favorite phrase – “Don’t jerk me around!” – except she only says it when she’s trying to manipulate people (projection, much?) and I only think it when I’m standing on top of a metaphorical hill shouting “Get on with it!”) or grudging indifference when speaking with “normal” people, and a sort of faintly pleased, milky happiness when talking with the few folks I would consider my “friends” and most of the people on FDR. I have the emotional range of Al Gore’s face.
So I don’t know. Was my impatience and then my lack of later emotionality just because this book was largely confirming things about which I’d already had some thoughts, or does it signal something deeper? Considering Stef’s normal audience, I think they’re going to find that it completely rocks their world (in all senses of that metaphor) and… yeah. Considering my normal reactions to Stef’s stuff, this is definitely on par with his other books.
There’s that whole feeling of anxiousness in the beginning, though. Something’s built up around that, and that’s why I had a hard time initially getting into the editing of it, and why I kept leaving little marginal comments that threw me out (so to speak) of the work. It’s kinda the same feeling I had when editing another one of my friend’s articles. I’d already seen it three times, and wasn’t necessarily keen on seeing it a fourth, and that sort of feeling of tension and “Aw, c’mon here… why do I have to slog through this shit again!” that was completely not a reaction to the work itself (don’t think it was, either of y’all – it wasn’t) but to something else. Not because I felt it was an imposition – or, ok… because I felt it was an imposition, even though I’d cheerfully agreed initially to do the editing on both pieces – but… eh.
So now I’m just trying to pin down the fog of my own impatience, which has never really worked out for me at all. If I think of something, I’ll post it. Now… I have to decide whether this is useful enough to send to Stef. I don’t think that it explains much… but maybe he can use it.
Filed under: FDR | Tags: FDR, music, philosophizing, RTR, snoozers, youtube
Reading Stef’s new RTR book. I’m enjoying it so far, but haven’t gotten to the meat of the theory yet. Am still in the run-up material, of which there is quite a bit – most of it necessary. I’m going slower than I need to because I’ve agreed to proofread it. Stef tends to write like I do: that is, with too many commas and too many words. Am doing the best I can to remove extraneous commas and the more unnecessary of the extra words. Never say in 15 words what you can say in 25, is my motto.
Will probably engage myself in proofing the book at work tomorrow as well. All I ever do there all day (besides the little projects that A and F sometimes throw me) is chat with FDR folks. I wish I had something to do, really… something useful! I don’t consider sorting through posters for various music competitions very useful. This is the same reason that I would surf YouTube at Avero when Portnoy was busy and couldn’t teach me anything new or I didn’t have useful work I could do on my outstanding tickets. Normally if I’m feeling like I’m doing something worthwhile or have something worthwhile that I can do, I don’t need to be pushed into anything. I sort of feel like I’m goading myself into proofing Stef’s book. I mean, it’s enjoyable, but I’ve built up more anxiety around it than I need to. I’ve gone a ways to dispelling that tonight, but am still behind schedule. I’ll have to get over that one.
Back to it.
Gratuitous Breton folk song – very high energy, very good:
