friendship now

Omnibus; Anders Zorn 1892

The other night coming home on BART I reflected that I did not want to write, or read, or do much of anything really. I imagined the tantalizing possibility of unintellectual pursuits. Maybe I could watch something on Netflix. Netflix! It had been ages. I had a running list in the Notes app of things to watch when I had time. It had never been true that I didn’t have the time, just that other things had seemed more important.

Now, facing down this gaping expanse of time that belonged to me and not my ambitions, I realized that I wanted to spend it with someone else. Two friends who I might have asked automatically lived across the Bay now. Others had partners who they’d be curled up with; mine would, in two hours, be asleep. There were friends still in school, but I remembered how my weeknights had been not so long ago: frantically finishing assignments, collapsing into bed.

Who, if I reached out to them, wouldn’t see it as an imposition? Who did it feel effortless to spend time with, like our time together demanded no performance?

It was the kind of space that in the weeks of late June, with so many school friends gone, I might have filled with N—. Tempted curiosity turned force of habit. A 9pm muscle memory. Opening Facebook Messenger on my phone and sending something insouciant, the kind of language you use when you’re aspiring to an attitude like Melania Trump’s Zara coat: “I don’t really care, do u?” The therapist listened patiently when I mentioned hanging out frequently with N— and then remarked that it sounded like I needed to push myself to reach out more, or get better at being alone. In the moment I felt a twinge of resentment at this advice, but then time passed. N— became more familiar and less shiny. If once I’d wanted to see them because it had been uncomfortable in a thrilling way, now I wanted to see them because I felt lazy and un-daring. Because I wanted to ask somebody to do nothing in particular with me, and this smallest of requests seemed most intimate of all.

When you're little, you can run across the street to knock on someone's house and demand they play with you. Suddenly puberty happens. The ask becomes "Do you want to hang?" The ask becomes nerve-wracking. 

It was only when I was sixteen, on the cusp of leaving my hometown permanently, that I was daring enough to ask people I didn’t know well to spend time with me for the sake of it—no pretense, like a meal, a concert, or a movie. In the face of impending departure, I thought every night spent alone was a missed opportunity. One night I thumbed through contacts in my phone. I saw the name of a classmate I’d nursed a minor crush on for months. M— liked Camus and came tardy to our first-period class so many times he’d racked up enough absences for administration to warn him he might not graduate. I’d always wanted to talk to him more. Impulsively, I called him. 

After a couple rings, he picked up. “Hey?” A question.

“Do you wanna go on a walk?” I blurted.

M— sounded surprised. He said yes and then messaged an hour later saying that something had come up, could I take a rain check? I haven’t seen him in five years, but I like the memory. Later I called a different boy, who came and sat with me on the roof of my house as the stars came out. Calling people to hang out with no prior planning—it feels quaint, like it belongs to another time. Something out of an 80s high school movie where a girl with crimped hair in a high ponytail reaches for the pink telephone on her bedside table. 

Moments that come to pass with no preparation: these are the ones I remember most fondly, more than the meticulously planned trips or the group hang organized by some long-suffering friend who has to coordinate everyone's schedule with Doodle. Maybe my gratitude for spontaneity reveals its rarity. I'll cop to being clumsy at some of the mechanics of friendship, the kinds of little things that other people I know both intuit and take for granted. At a concert, listening to a folk singer, the friend I went with asked if she could hold my hand--a sort of novelty to me, but maybe not to her. We interlaced our fingers. When the song ended and we clapped, I realized that I missed the warmth of her palm, that the simple touch had been a balm to something I hadn't realized before was raw. There was a friend who delightedly threw his arm around me when I was ridiculously using a straw to forklift whipped cream from a Starbucks drink into my mouth, said something outsized for that moment like "I love you." After speech and debate in high school I got a ride sometimes with a friend to his house, and we'd look for something to do--play Halo on his massive TV, eat dosas and sambar his mom made. My mom would call. I'd decline, wanting to extend my stay in this place where time didn't seem to matter. There was the all-night hackathon where my friends and I didn't do much (any) coding but snuck out to a skate park at midnight to play Truth or Dare; later, we walked up to our high school track, sitting on the ice-cold bleachers as the metal shone orange in the rising sun. One New Year’s Day I lounged on a friend’s couch, sunlight dripping in like maple syrup through the living room window. I half-disbelieved that this idleness, this glorious lack of motion, could be allowed. When I think hard many more cherished moments come tumbling forth, most the fruits of spontaneity, not planning--premeditation, I think, would almost stop such things from happening at all.

And there I was on BART, wondering who might want to be my accomplice in killing time and coming up empty. I guess that's part of growing up, this slow contraction of the circle of friends who you spend time with doing nothing. God knows my parents, responsible adults, didn't have people over to our suburban house to just aimlessly watch episodes of Bob's Burgers and lie on the floor in the dark, looking at glow-in-the-dark stars stuck on the ceiling and talking about mortality. If losing these long stretches of unplanned time with friends is the price we pay for adulthood, I have begun to clear my debts. I set dates with friends over Facebook Messenger. We plop appointments two weeks ahead for brunches and coffees and dinners after work into our Google Calendars. Everything is planned because nobody has any time, except, of course, when we do, and in these years those moments still catch us by surprise: standing with strangers on BART, watching the still necks of cranes in the Oakland harbor through blemished glass, drifting back to the wooden embrace of our silent homes.

time, y'know

A friend tells me the next thing I write should just be called "Time, Y'Know." He says, the entirety of the body will be "duuuude."

It's a well-deserved ribbing: we're messaging about a picture Facebook reminds me we took exactly 4 years ago. Looking at our young faces, our bodies propped up insouciantly on the rail between us and the Hudson River, I can't decide if it feels like it's been longer than 4 years or shorter.

How does one make sense of time?

*

Senior year of high school: I get into a verdant liberal arts college in the Northeast. I know I won't go, but I like the free pennant they send me and the heft of their brochure, glossy and pregnant with deep black ink. White letters announce that college promises to be the best four years of my life. This frightens me. If this--youth, what Fitzgerald called a "chemical madness"--is supposed to be the pinnacle of life, what remains in the six-some decades left over?

Are we to measure the pace of time in spirits: innocence, debauchery, responsibility, senility?

*

Or is crisis the natural benchmark of time?

It's 7 minutes until my clothes are dry. At the laundromat, I announce to my boyfriend's brother that I read an article about Quarter-Life Crises. The Quarter-Life Crisis being a phenomenon established enough to merit its own piece in Lifehacker by some underpaid freelancer makes me feel better about my own uncertainties. He is unimpressed by the terminology. Why do people arbitrarily split time up into these neat stages of crisis, he wonders. Quarter-life, mid-life. Aren't there crises happening all the time?

But if there's no happy, stable, crisis-less future to work towards, I cry out, what's the point?

Of course there's no point, he says.

*

Then there's keeping time with people. The Etruscans, Nathan Heller writes, kept time with a saeculum: spanning "from a given moment until the last people who lived through that moment had died."

Time for small children begins and ends with their own existence. At an age when you think people disappear when they duck behind a couch, it's difficult to conceive of a world without yourself in it.

Mommy says keeping journals is a gift to your future children. In a bile-yellow journal from Big Lots! with thin paper and spiral binding, I start entries with "Dear Dairy."

I don't question why my future children would have this voyeuristic interest in my past self. I know it to be true because I am deeply interested in my parents' childhoods. When my granddad shows me a box filled with sheafs of yellowing papers, old quizzes and tests from my dad's elementary school days, I marvel over them. It's an exotic kind of object permanence, realizing that your parents existed before you. And that you might exist after them.

*

People choose odd ways and places to try to freeze themselves in time.

Camping on an ugly mountain with a pretty view, I go to a bathroom, sticky and airless, lit by a dusty skylight. I notice "A+N 2016" carved into the toilet paper holder.

What kind of romantic puts their initials in a bathroom? There's something I admire about the cynicism: as if long after the bridges and redwoods and geological formations that other fools in love mark up have broken, burned, and crumbled, this piece of shit-stained black plastic snagged on concrete will announce A+N's undying love to a dying sun.

*

Maybe my own method to preserve the essence of this moment in time is less well-thought-out than A+N's. I'm not even preserving the essence of one moment, but two: one in a tea shop playing 80s electropop, sitting on a wooden bench that keeps shifting jerkily under the moving haunches of my neighbors, and one in a dry office where the windows are so thick you can't hear the street.

When you're there alone, as I am, the silence creates an environment that I imagine is similar to floating in a sensory deprivation tank, except with light and air instead of darkness and water. Like a transparent womb, floating in the sky.

* 

What do we do with all our time?

Some people keep meticulous 'time journals' to better understand how they actually use all their time. The results frequently reveal they have more time for leisure than they think they do; it's just wasted on tiny chunks of browsing Facebook, usually.

Maybe one of the reasons that time is so strange, that looking back on it feels trippy, is because we actually don't think about it most of the time. It'd be petrifying to, I think--like thinking too hard about chewing or breathing. So a lot of it passes unbeknownst to us.

For me, there are all these spaces where it feels like time is hardly real: on BART, in the shower, my bedroom late at night. In these places time slips through my fingers while I am doing nothing in particular: like standing in a line at Costco staring into space until the Nigerian man behind me says, not unkindly, "Excuse me, are you going to leave your things in the cart?" and then I am suddenly jerked back into the present, putting a creaking plastic clamshell of organic strawberries and two baguettes in a paper bag and a glass bottle of vodka (heavy enough to club a man in the head and kill him) onto the black conveyor belt that whirs, onward, ceaselessly, until it slips under.


*

Duuuude.

Young people doing cool things who you should follow

My old shop at TEDxRedmond

Since I was a kid, I've had opportunities to travel around the world and give talks at conferences (sometimes very much in my wheelhouse, like education, youth, and literacy events, and sometimes very much not--shoutout to the lovely folks at the property market MIPIM, or the Association of Energy Services Professionals).

I'd be an asshole if I thought I actually deserved all these opportunities. I don't really believe in merit, and I know no one advances in life on their own; as Barack Obama said more poetically, "you didn't build that." I've been lucky, and I know a lot of peers with more drive and grit than me have not. Given that I believe strongly in equality of opportunity and other fine democratic ideals, I often wonder: how do lucky people live ethically?

Answering that is an ongoing process, but one idea I'm trying to work on is amplifying the voices of other folks who are doing interesting work. In advance of this talk I'm about to give at this year's InstructureCon in Colorado, here's a list of young people doing cool things who you should follow that I'm going to announce during my talk and invite the 2500 attendees to check out! List is certainly incomplete -- reflects biases in my own communities and who I've met personally. (If I know you, you do cool things, and you're not on the list, I think you're awesome but the sleep deprivation and 9000' elevation in Keystone, CO got to me. Will try to update this when it's not midnight MST.)

• Eva Shang, Legalist and her sister Melissa Shang, disability rights activist and author of Mia Lee is Wheeling Through High School
• Zoya Jiwa, As We Are Style, "a style website for people who are facing health challenges" to alleviate pain and build community
• Nikhil Goyal (education activism)
• Student Voice, Zak Malamed
• Irene Jiang: Fulbright in Morocco doing documentary filmmaking on a theatre troupe and posting a serial Cascadian murder mystery online.
• Daniel Kao, NYTimes and Syndicator
• Erik Martin (one of the nicest people I've ever met!) formerly of Dept of Ed and White House and now Syndicator and grad school adventures
• StudentRND, Tyler Menezes
• Hack Club, Zach Latta
• Sagaree Jain, poet and researcher about to be a Global Health Corps fellow, also a Berkeley alum
• Interact Retreat for social good-oriented technologists and affiliated community

• The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School protesting gun violence by organizing March for Our Lives 
• Filmmaker Azza Cohen
• Comedian, writer and feminist Ruby Karp
• Cal alum Rigel Robinson is running for Berkeley City Council and another alum, Caitlin Quinn, is running for Petaluma School Board
• Students United for Reproductive Justice at Berkeley; their work is a master class in how to make s**t happen (they helped pass a bill ensuring access to medication abortion on campus), and I regret not being more active in the movement, although I did show up to one meeting and eat pizza.
• Poet Peter LaBerge literally started a full-fledged literary magazine, The Adroit Journal, when he was in high school
• Rebecca Dharmapalan  - filmmaking, speaking out against human trafficking
• (My housemate for three years in college) Alex Yoon-Hendricks, writing for the NYTimes
• (Freshman year roommate!) Camille Fassett reporting for the Freedom of Press Foundation
• The young people organizing TEDx events all around the country, including my favorites at TEDxYouth@Redmond!

There are so many other people and I can't write a little blurb for each person but follow them on Twitter, amplify their work on your networks, and invite them to give a talk at your next conference!

On Aziz Ansari, and Talking to Men

In a recent conversation in the wake of the story about Aziz Ansari I found myself trying to explain to a man that thing that many women do around men. If this were a circus, it could be something sensational and cute: the Magic Shrinking Act, the Play-Doh Woman, the Mansplainer Charmer. But it's not a circus, just daily life.

By way of explaining, here are some stories.

There's T., a guy I know. We were at a social event together once when some other guy provoked him--maybe with some comment about T.'s purported romantic prowess or lack thereof. T. responded by loudly declaring something to the effect of "just wait until I show them my [tech company] pay stub, which is bigger than yours." I made a joke about that, at which his expression darkened. Knowing that he could be quick to anger, I hurriedly said, "Sorry!" Another time, he gave a couple friends and me a ride. He swore at almost every other driver on the road. I laughed nervously and tried to keep the mood light, feeling somehow guilty for the perturbed air between us. I knew he liked classic rock, so I queued up seven songs, just for him, to play on the car speakers. I'm on the highway to hell / Highway to hell...

I'm not myself when I'm around T.

S. is a friend who I've known since I was fifteen. Our conversations alternate between analytical discussions of the article links we send each other and sarcastic banter. He sent me the Aziz Ansari article and the NYTimes response, "Aziz Ansari is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind-Reader." What did I think, he wondered. He must have seen my ellipsis flicker onto his screen and then off a couple times then. I typed and backspaced and backspaced some more, all those tender-looking machinations of steeling myself. I was trying to prepare the right sort of response. A calm, certain, and measured one. I thought that Ansari had behaved badly, that any instigator of sexual activity needs to consider their partner's interiority. I said this. But there would be the concessions, the disclaimers: what he did was not criminal, and certainly not Weinstein-level.

I was able to type up all the things I thought. Why was it so hard to write what I felt?

Perhaps it was wise not to delve into pathos and personal experience. After all, S. said later, after he said that he agreed with me, that he thought the tone of the story was an issue. I agreed that it could have been improved, but felt hesitant when he remarked it should have been written "professionally" rather than "hysterically."

It was a revealing choice of words, if accidentally so. The word "hysteria" comes from the Greek, hysterikos, "of the womb, suffering in the womb." The word became a catch-all phrase for a variety of female afflictions and irritations thought to be caused by a "wandering womb." The advances of medical science have thankfully disabused us of any notion of a uterus magically traveling around the female body (side note--I'd love to see someone make an animated GIF of that), but we continue to use the word disproportionately to refer to women. Hysterical: the classy way to say "bitches be crazy." I wonder if S. knows this.

Either way, I didn't want to be a crazy bitch, or an angry one. And oh, I am. I am angry at Aziz Ansari for repeatedly sticking his fingers in a woman's mouth (how can you assume she's into that without asking, "Yo, are you into fingers in your mouth?" That's a pretty non-standard part of your sexual repertoire, my dude). I am angry at him for making a move on her after he had suggested "just chilling on the couch." I am angry at him for his utter oblivion, the "I had a great time!" text after she went home crying in an Uber.

I would be angry if it was my sister.

I would be angry if it was my friend.

Wouldn't you?

But if it were me? I don't know if I would know how to be angry. Maybe I would just be numb.

I hooked up once with a frat guy. He muttered that he'd had too much beer and smoked too much weed before I came over, so he was having a hard time getting it up. I wasn't really looking down there, just kind of sitting and waiting. Apparently he sobered up, because he gave me a kind of look and then it was happening. I lay there and crossed my fingers that it wouldn't hurt and felt quietly relieved when it didn't, much. Then I realized he wasn't wearing a condom and felt, suddenly, terrified. Like I'd entered an elevator in freefall. What did that feeling do? Make me slap him, like Caitlin Flanagan nostalgically hearkens back to in her Atlantic article? ("They [1970s magazines] told you to slap him if you had to; they told you to get out of the car and start wailing if you had to. They told you to do whatever it took to stop him from using your body in any way you didn’t want, and under no circumstances to go down without a fight.") I did not. I felt scared and small. I said, very nervously, "Um--are you not wearing a condom?"

"Don't worry, I'm clean," he said.

"Uh--but I'm not on birth control or anything..."

He said he would put one on later.

"Could you please put it on now?" I asked timidly. When it was over I walked very quickly back to the takeout sushi I'd ordered to a friend's dorm and ate it and laughed when one of my floor-mates jokingly called me a slut. Later I took a battery of STI tests.

"And then everything was negative, so it's fine," I told a female friend over pizza. I related the story the same way I told stories about my floormates' drunken escapades--can you believe the buffoonery of these harmless people? I did not mention the copay for the tests, or that first twinge of terror, and feeling small.

Even so, she was horrified. "He didn't have your consent to do that. That's sexual assault."

I reeled. "I mean, no, it's OK, I'm just not going to see that dude again."

It was painful to see my night through her prism, even if it made logical sense: my consent was predicated on a condition that was violated. That was enough to send a man in Switzerland who removed a condom without his partner's consent to jail; the Federal Supreme Court there decided such actions constitute rape. But I wasn't raped, I thought. I had a bad hookup.

Noted scholar Catharine MacKinnon writes in her paper "Pleasure Under Patriarchy,"

“Immense energy goes into defending sexuality as just fine and getting better all the time, and into trying to make sexuality feel all right, like it is supposed to feel. Women who are compromised, cajoled, pressured, tricked, blackmailed, or outright forced into sex (or pornography) often respond to the unspeakable humiliation, coupled with the sense of having lost some irreplaceable integrity, by claiming that sexuality as their own. Faced with no alternatives, the strategy to acquire self-respect and pride is: I chose it. […] The mind fuck of all of this makes the complicitous collapse into “I chose it” feel like a strategy for sanity. It certainly makes a woman at one with the world.”

Caitlin Flanagan would tell me, you didn't slap him, you didn't start wailing, you went down without a fight. There's a strange comfort in her pernicious logic--one that equates inaction with consent, timidity with choice. Because then you can think, I chose it. And suddenly you're not hysterical anymore.

When S. asked me what I thought about the Aziz Ansari story the first place my mind went to was that frat guy and freshman year. But something made me hesitant to bring it up.

I guess that I am not fully myself around S., either, even though I like him a great deal.

I hesitated because it was a story about the complicated nature of how we narrativize our own lives. In reminding me that my consent had been violated, my female friend shook my narrative. Today, I can say honestly that that night was a scary moment that I have thought little of since. But I am thankful that my friend responded more zealously than I did: her anger reminded me, in a moment when my grip on it felt tenuous, that my consent was important, that my body was my own.

The story about that frat guy was never just about a condom. It was about my feelings. I was unsure if S. wanted to hear those, because it seems like many detractors of the Ansari article are unhappy the woman in question shared hers. Let's remember that in the article on babe, no criminal charges are announced, no financial reparations are sought, no boycott is announced. Yet there are opinion writers everywhere acting like Ansari's defense attorneys, responding with screeds about women needing to be more proactive. Some demonstrate an eagle-eyed attention to physical or quantifiable details--she waited that long to put her clothes back on? This myopic focus means a failure to respect the emotional details of the story. A girl's tears in her Uber home aren't blood and semen in a rape kit, but our society's sexual standard should not be to get as close to the criminal edge of harm as possible before drawing back. That means respecting sex as an emotional process, not just a physical one.

This is also where things get complicated, because it goes back to talking to men. The way that I talk to many guys constitutes dancing around a wall, trying not to challenge some nebulous masculinity. Listening patiently when they explain something I already know about, or smiling even while telling them off for saying blatantly offensive shit because I don't want to seem mad, or apologizing too much. Saturday Night Live's Aidy Bryant even did a sketch on Weekend Update, playing herself:

AIDY BRYANT [rolls out on office chair]: I’m sorry I rolled out here kinda weird, did I ruin it? [...] I just do that [apologize]…it’s kind of my natural state because I, like most girls have been taught to be accommodating and be polite…I understand the impulse to be accommodating…everyone’s talking about how women should negotiate harder and ask for more money and that’s true, but I feel like maybe, just maybe, men could be just like, this much more dece? 

COLIN JOST: 'Dece'? Like 'decent'?

AIDY BRYANT: I wanna say decent but I’m trying to keep it cool and chill so I don’t come off like a shrew! [...] Equal pay is the goal but at this point I’d be happy to just even gain like a couple of yards, and that’s a straight-up sports reference for da boys! All I’m saying is that if I’m going to be more like Mark Wahlberg, maybe Mark can take a trip through my brain, which is just a tornado of ‘is he ok?’ ‘Is she ok?’

The sketch is meant to be exaggerated but it rang true--trying to keep it "cool and chill," the cringeworthy "sports reference for da boys." And that tornado which Aidy later describes as a "prison of the mind" is one that comes with silver linings: on balance, I've encountered more emotional perception and disclosure when I talk with girls. Yes, I may dance around other girls' feelings too, but it's not around an entire wall, an entire system, the way I try not to challenge masculinity. I've never had the feeling of "oh shit, I can't challenge a girl's femininity" because it's laughable to even imagine--what would be construed as an affront? This is one of the advances of feminism--that there is a wide selection of ways in which to be a woman, and as Gloria Steinem said, "We have begun to raise daughters more like sons," with all the riches of the world spread out for our grabbing.

But the second part of Steinem's quote, "few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters," with that Aidy-Bryant-tornado-in-the-mind, is still too true. Andrew Reiner writes in the New York Times,

"Last semester, a student in the masculinity course I teach showed a video clip she had found online of a toddler getting what appeared to be his first vaccinations. Off camera, we hear his father’s voice. “I’ll hold your hand, O.K.?” Then, as his son becomes increasingly agitated: “Don’t cry!… Aw, big boy! High five, high five! Say you’re a man: ‘I’m a man!’ ” The video ends with the whimpering toddler screwing up his face in anger and pounding his chest. “I’m a man!” he barks through tears and gritted teeth.The home video was right on point, illustrating the takeaway for the course: how boys are taught, sometimes with the best of intentions, to mutate their emotional suffering into anger."

Reiner goes on to say that we socialize vulnerability out of young boys, and this argument is borne out by research showing men are less likely to visit physicians and more likely to engage in risky behaviors. All this to say that inculcating boys with a narrow kind of masculinity, one that denies them an emotional vocabulary, has deeply negative consequences for the men they grow up to be.

It also makes life harder for the women (or more emotionally communicative men) who talk to them. My dad often mentions being in high school and feeling alienated by his male peers, who always just seemed to want to talk about cars. Sometimes I find myself standing in his shoes, perplexed by the conversations I hear groups of boys having. How is it possible to talk for so long, at such volume, about mutual funds or poker? I like your jokes and your volubility, I want to say, but I wish I knew the answers to different questions (and that you sometimes asked them): how do you know when you're falling in love? What keeps you awake at night? When was the last time you cried?

A guy I don't know very well, who I'll call N., was sitting across from me at a party one night. He wore neat, preppy sweaters, like he'd walked off the cover of a J.Crew catalogue, but seemed earnest and not douchey. During a drunken game where we all asked each other exceedingly personal questions someone asked N., who we'd already established had a girlfriend who he liked very much, "Have you ever cried after sex?"

He looked shocked for a second that it was even a question.

"Of course, yeah," he said, like it was obvious.

Some guys around the table expressed mock horror.

"It happens," he said calmly. I think he said something about things being "emotionally intense."

I don't know why that moment made me respect him so much. I suppose it was because we were sitting in a room with so many men whose vulnerabilities I had danced around like tripwire. In contrast, his nonchalant answer felt like a rare communion. I was looking across the table and picturing him curled up next to someone he loves and weeping into her shoulder. It was a fragility which I suppose he could not have known registered to me as strength.