New York style vs California/New England style conversation

The older I get the more I identify as a New Yorker. New York is where I grew up. New England and California is where I've spent most of my life. I live now in Maine surrounded by polite, thoughtful, articulate people and we mostly engage in what I would call California or New England style conversation--which is very different from New York style conversation.

In most of the United States, it's polite to let someone say what they have to say, listening attentively, perhaps nodding and smiling politely as they say it, and then taking your turn. To do otherwise shows disrespect. Interrupting is rude. Almost everywhere. And especially in California and in New England.

But not in New York. In New York, it's the opposite. Interrupting isn't rude, it's a sign of engagement, of interest, of caring, of respect.

From this article:

The next time someone accuses you of interrupting, you might want to explain that you are not being rude: You’re actually engaging in “high-involvement cooperative overlapping.” 

Cooperative overlapping — talking as another person continues to speak — is typical of Jewish conversational style, according to linguist Deborah Tannen, and can be a way of showing interest and appreciation.

What I call New York style and what Tannen calls Jewish Style are same. I've got a Jewish friend who grew up in St Louis. I've told her that I think everyone from New York is Jewish even if they are not, and no one from St Louis is Jewish, even if they are. Maybe that explains something.

It's not just Jews, in my experience. I've been around Italian families that operate the same way. Everyone is interrupting, arguing, talking at the top of their voices, even yelling, and it sounds like love to me. That's the same style.

I remember so clearly the first time I became aware of the contrast in styles. I was in California, in a checkout line at the Milpas Street Trader Joe's store, in the line nearest the door, reading an article on my cell phone as I waited. That's how clearly I remembered it. It was a revelation to me. And I remember channeling my inner New Yorker and talking to the person on line behind me to share this insight.

I'm even more aware of New York style because of some recent conversations with my new buddy Mark Lesser. Mark and I have a bunch of things in common. We're about the same age (I'm a bit older); we're both MIT grads; we're both from New York; we're both Jewish, though not practicing; we both ended up in Maine; we both married women who are not in tech, and who are not Jewish (but we both put out Weihnachtspyramides at Christmas time)

And we talk New York style. For hours. Fast. Loud. Talking over each other. Interrupting each other. Changing subjects.  The article quoted from above says:

Other features of Jewish conversational style include a preference for personal topics, abrupt shifts of topics, unhesitating introduction of new topics and persistence in reintroducing a topic if others don’t immediately pick up on it.

I'm not sure we have a preference for personal topics, but personal topics are not off limits and salted throughout our conversation. We've each said that we've reached a point in our lives where we don't feel any need to hold back. Mark's said it kind of like that. I've said something more like "I don't give a fuck what anyone thinks about me." Same thing. Slightly different language.

We also stop from time to time and reflect on our conversation, how it's different from the conversations we typically have. We both talk to our wives a lot, but not this same way. Because they're not New Yorkers? Or not Jewish? Not us? I don't know.

Little by little the restraints we've adopted drop away in favor of a conversational style that's is stylistically more natural and uninhibited. And we'll interrupt the flow of conversation periodically to confirm that we each understand the meaning of the way we're expressing things as well as the meaning of what we're talking about.

I tried to find the article that I was reading in Trader Joe's and invested a little time doing it. It would be nice to go back and rediscover that moment. Meanwhile, I'm continuing to explore the boundaries of New York style.

So let me close with a favorite joke:

Q: How many New Yorkers does it change a lightbulb?
A: (Shouted) Who the FUCK made it your business?

I love Maine. And I ❤ New York.
❤

END SIMULATION!!

"END SIMULATION!!" I said. I said it loud. You can tell it was loud by the all caps.

"Who is President?" I asked.

---

Interlude. The story continues at the bottom, but first, let me tell you the origin story:

I found that in one of my Hangouts feeds last night.

I thought it was genius, and I told him so--him being +Justin Mecham, one of my buddies from Maine Hackers Club, now working in Boston.

I was too chicken too, but a night's sleep made me bolder.

"END SIMULATION!" I shouted the next morning.

Okay, I was at home at the time. Okay, the only other person at home was Bobbi. And, yes, she was at the other end of the house. And, sure, there were three closed doors between us. But, yes. I did shout it.

Back to Hangouts, bursting with pride, I suggested that +Daniel Wolf, one of my sons-by-marriage, a manager at a well-known tech company, and the other guy in the Hangout with Justin, make a practice of ending his meetings with "END SIMULATION." It's early days yet, so I don't know if he's going to to do that or not.

But I decided that I was going to do it whenever I had the chance. Who knows. One these days, the holodeck computer is going to listen to me. Or to one of us.

And I think that the idea of saying END SIMULATION is meme-worthy.

And that leads me back to where I left off...

---

"END SIMULATION!!" I said. I said it loud. You can tell it was loud by the all caps.

"Who is President?" I asked.

"Donald Trump," someone answered.

"END SIMULATION!" I said. I said it in a larger font, hoping that would make a difference.

"Now who is President," I asked.

I got a funny look. "Barack Obama," came the answer.

"END SIMULATION!! END SIMULATION!! END SIMULATION!!!!" I said, an undisclosed number of times.

---

Author's notes:
1: I repeated it because I thought it was funny, and I like milking a joke for laughs (even when the only laughs that I can hear are my own). I said it some (undisclosed) number of times because I don't want to imagine people counting and deciding that I liked one (undisclosed) president better than the rest.

2: If a joke is available, making a joke is always more important than making points for any particular political side.

3. I may break with recent tradition and post on social media.

Tech Solidarity

According to its landing page:

Tech Solidarity is a grass-roots organization whose goal is to better connect tech workers with the communities they live in. Our emphasis is on regular in-person meetings, volunteer assistance to organizations serving the vulnerable, and the creative use of labor law in pursuit of an ethical agenda. 

Founded in November of 2016 by Maciej Ceglowski, a San Francisco web developer, Tech Solidarity holds quasi-monthly meetups in a number of American cities, and tries to serve as a clearinghouse for information and technical assistance.

I learned about Tech Solidarity in passing from one of the people working on Jared Golden's campaign. Jared is part of Tech Solidarity's Great Slate,

Tech Solidarity is raising funds for progressive Congressional candidates fighting competitive races in eight winnable rural districts.

Jared is one of the eight. According to the website proximityone ME-02 the most rural of all the districts in the Great Slate--and it's the second most rural district in the whole countrym, exceeded only by KE-05. You can see its makeup here.

Maciej Ceglowski, who runs the site, also runs a bookmarking called pinboard that I've signed up for and am using in preference to Evernote. It's really fast! It's cheaper than Evernote. It captures and caches web pages in the background. It does not seem to capture all the pages that I've bookmarked and it's not clear whether the pages that haven't been captured will be, someday. But that's only protection against a page disappearing--and that's relatively rare. And there's always the wayback machine at archive.org.

I'm going to write a post about...

I'm going to write the second part of my post about slavery. But it's a long post. And I can't publish it until I've got it right. And I still haven't gotten it right. And then the day has come and gone and I haven't written it.

I'm going to write a post about pinboard. It's my replacement for Evernote. I haven't used it that much, but so far I like it. But I have this post about slavery that I want to write first. So even though it would be easier to write, I can't get to it, right now.

I've got around 50 web pages saved to Evernote in a notebook called "Blogging" and each one of them deserves its own post. But I can't get to them because of the slavery post and the pinboard post, and a lot of other posts, all vying for my attention.

That includes a series of posts about waking up. Especially the one about waking up _in the dream_ rather than waking up _from the dream_. That's an important one.

And then there's the one about paying the high cost of learning something new--having an important insight--and then quickly forgetting it.

All these things that I'm going to write posts about. And instead, I write a post about something different. A post about all the posts that I wanted to write and didn't write.

This post.

Fifi and Raul and Mike and Bobbi

Family Jeopardy. Our three girls are standing in front of their buzzers.

Dana chooses the category: "People, for $100, Alex," Dana says.

The board reveals the answer. "Fifi," Alex reads.

All three girls hit their buzzers within milliseconds. The system can't tell which was first, so the tie goes to Mira.

"Who is Dad's imaginary girlfriend?" Mira says.

"Correct," says Alex.

"People, for $200," says Mira.

"Raul," says Alex.

All three girls hit their buzzers at once. This time the tie goes to Alyssa.

"Who is Mom's imaginary boyfriend?" Alyssa says.

"Correct," says Alex.

Our relationships with Fifi and Raul go way back--maybe even before we had kids. Yet despite my decades-long relationship with Fifi, I wouldn't recognize her if I saw her. I imagined her, but I never imagined what she looked like. I know she's beautiful, but hair color? Eye color? Height? Measurements? I have no idea.

All I know is that Fifi is beautiful, and she loves me. And that Bobbi isn't jealous of her as she would of a real girlfriend. If I had one, of course.
 
My friend Jim Reynolds once told me that he'd discovered that he had developed a new superpower: he was invisible to young women. I hadn't realized it, but as I looked at the young women around us at the Gogol Bordello concert we were at, I realized that I had the same superpower. It didn't make me happy.

But even though I'm invisible to most young women, I'm not invisible to Fifl.

Leave it to an imaginary woman to be able to see me as I am.

Staffing it out

I started this a while ago, and never published it. How long ago? Fortunately, I wrote it in a Google Doc, so I know that it was July 19, 2017, sometime between 3:59 AM and 4:19 AM. I could get more specific, but that's good enough, isn't it?

Here's what I wrote. Plus rewrote because, me.

---

Most of the time when people think they have been interacting with me they have been dealing with something that seems a lot like me but isn't to me. You might call it an automaticity, or a facade, a sub-personality, or a surrogate, or what Internal Family Systems describes as a “Part” or “Family Member.” Whatever it is, it acts for me and acts a lot like me. But it is not me. Sometimes I'm there watching. But most of the time I'm not there at all.

Almost no one in notices this.

Except Bobbi. Sometimes she notices it and says something. Sometimes she notices it and doesn't say something. Or at least that's what she says she does when I've asked her about it. Maybe she's the only person who seems to know the difference.  Or maybe I'm surrounded by people who know the difference and are too polite to say anything.

I can use different helpful metaphors to describe these surrogates acting for me. One is to think of them as my staff. I'm the busy executive responsible for running all the complexities of my life. When I've got something that needs doing I can do it myself, or I can staff it out. I'll staff it out intentionally if I don't think that it's worth my personal attention. And sometimes, before I decide to do or not to do, a member of my staff steps in and takes over. I don't even have to ask, that's how good they are. They're well-disciplined and well-trained. And they do a great job of impersonating me.

Of course, none of my staff does anything as well as I do. I'm the one they learned from. I'm the original article and I've got the full power of my brain at my command--when I choose to command. But they're good.

I'm both proud of and annoyed by my staff. I'm proud that they're so competent--which means that I must have done a good job training them. Or modeling behavior for them. Whatever. People of low ability can carry on routine tasks, and my staff carries out mind-numbingly boring tasks just fine. You have to be a lot better--but not that good--to engage socially. Bobbi's Dad was well down the road to Alzheimer's dementia and no one noticed--until you'd talked with him for a while and notice that he's started repeating himself. As the condition got worse, the repetition interval shortened.

But seeming intelligent and being witty takes more skill than many people can muster, even at their best. My staff can not only engage socially but access much of my vast store of interesting facts and factoids. And they can access "joke patterns" that I've collected and even seem to be making new, clever remarks when really they're only filling in the slots in a template. 

Still, my is usually VERY good.  I've created something that is able to pass the Turing test and seem to be a human. I'm a human. But they're not. They're just very good imitators.

I'm annoyed sometimes because I want to be experiencing my life directly more than I do. At least, that's what I tell myself I want. And that's what I believe that I believe. Yes, there are times when I want to check out and think deep thoughts while my staff carry on. But there are other times when I want to be fully engaged. I want to be experiencing the things that I am doing things. I want the experience to be direct and full-fidelity, not filtered through a memory recording my brain has made.

The problem is that sometimes my staff step in and do something that I'd rather be doing myself. I've left instructions. I've said: "When this happens, call me. I at least want to be present, if not doing it myself." But they don't comply, the insubordinate sons-of-bitches. Sometimes they think that they can do it better (they can't.) And sometimes, just like me, I suppose, the like the feeling of a job well done. Or well enough done.

I know I am capable of doing a better job than any of my staff, and sometimes when I realize that a staff member's doing something that I'd like to do, that I'd do better, I don't step in. Why do I do that? I think I'm like a proud parent who allows a precocious kid to act like a grown up. Maybe the kid's answering the phone and taking a message. The parent can do that a lot better, but the kid is doing well enough. It's a grown-up thing and the kid wants to do it. So you let them do it.

When Bobbi notices that I'm not present she’ll often say “Where are you? You’re not here.” It's annoying. It's not annoying because it's wrong, but because of a confusion about identities. She's saying  “Where are you? You’re not here.” to me. But I'm not there. I don't receive the communication; a staffer gets it.  The staffer who is on duty when she says “You're not here” is actually there and gets annoyed. They react defensively, and say "I am here." Because they are. But she's right because I am not.

I need to issue orders to all staff: "When you're told you're not here, please don't defend yourself. Go and get me and at least ask me if I want to be there." That will make my life better. If they follow my instructions.

This post, like others in this series (not to self, collect the series and link here) was mainly written by me but with help from my staff. Good job, guys. Let's post this

Superpowers for mundane matters

I’m a talented person, but there are a couple of areas where I feel I’ve been given superpowers. Or maybe I haven’t been given them. Maybe I’ve earned them. Whatever. Where ever they came from, I’ve got them.

Imagination is one of my superpowers. For a long time, I didn’t realize it was a superpower. When someone would say “I just can’t imagine <something>” my response would always be: “How can you not imagine that? I can imagine anything.” Most people have limited imaginations. Mine is unlimited. Superpower.

My sense of fun is another superpower. People say: you can’t make jokes about <serious subject.> But I can. Maybe I don’t. But I can. People say: you can’t make fun of <serious subject> But I can do that too.

Flexibility and enjoyment are also superpowers. I can adapt to all kinds of situations. And I can enjoy almost anything. Because enjoyment is putting joy into things.

Today I realized that I use my superpowers only when I have to--when I’m driven to use them. But I don’t think that they’re on quota. I don’t have a limited supply of imagination or fun. I can’t use up my flexibility or joy. In fact, it's likely that my powers might get stronger with use.

It seems like it ought to work that way. I know that practice is the key to developing any skill.  I know that people can improve almost as much by imagining practice and they can by actual practice. So maybe I can use my superpower of imagination to develop new skills and to improve existing skills.

Here's how I imagine that it might work.

I would start by imagining that I have the skill that I want. Then I would imagine practicing to get better. Nothing's that easy. So I would imagine problems. I would imagine solving the problems. I would imagine obstacles. Then I would imagine going over, around, and through the obstacles.

It's 10PM right now. That's around the time that I run out of energy and can't get things done. But I can imagine giving myself more energy. And I can practice that.

I’ve written several things today, but I haven’t posted any of them. I want to get better at doing that. So I guess I need some practice. I'll just imagine posting. Then I'll imagine some things getting in my way. And then I'll imagine getting past them.

And then I'll post this. And then the next thing.