whetstone

you want to watch a movie. you put it on. two hours have passed. you haven’t watched the movie. there are five new tasks in front of you. you want to watch a different movie.

there is an object in your hand. it is extremely important you don’t lose it. you look down. there is nothing in your hand.

you don’t know your friend’s name. you’ve been friends for months. they just told you their name. you do not know their name.

your friend doesn’t laugh at your joke. why didn’t they laugh? do they hate you? they assure you otherwise. you know they are lying. did they ever like you?

someone asks you what you just said. did you say something? you said so many things. you said nothing. you said everything.

there is something you’re forgetting. you check. you check again. there is nothing you’re forgetting. there is something you’re forgetting.

you had something to say. you can’t remember. it was important. wasn’t it? you can’t remember. 

Here’s “The Camel” from Return To The City of White Donkeys:

Here’s his Paris Review interview: 

you can just walk by somebody downtown and overhear one phrase and it’s a cliché and suddenly you go, Wow, actually that’s very beautiful when it’s taken out of its normal meaning. It’s very stimulating and it gives you a lot to think about. 

And here’s a little writing tip:

“Another good thing that happens [when you allow yourself to stop writing in the middle and pick up the next day] is that the next day you’re another person… and so you may have come up against a brick wall the day before but the next day you go there and you look at that and you go, no, no, no, I want to go this direction. And you start taking in it a slightly different direction than you thought you were going. And that frees you up quite often and gets you into a new territory… You’ve had experiences, you’ve had dreams, you’ve had idle thoughts, you know. So that’s what I meant by being a new person. You look at the fifteen lines you wrote the day before and you have a different idea. Whereas when you quit the day before you thought you were out of ideas.”

https://www.uber.com/ride/express-pool/

Express Pool isn’t as bus-like as some previous Uber experiments, like Smart Routes(in which San Francisco residents were offered discounts on rides if they were willing to be picked up and dropped off along popular roads) and UberHop (a short-lived experiment in Seattle which was designed around fixed pickup and drop-off points). “There are clearly corridors and routes where it makes sense to put a 60-passenger on that and drive it back and forth in a straight line,” Stock says. “And that is very much what we’re not trying to do here.”

It’s more making people walk to convenient locations for that particular ride, so the driver doesn’t waste as much time.

It’s 7:00. I want to get home from work before the baby goes to bed, and it’d be nice to get home with enough spoons to eat dinner, too. But the BART station is over a mile from work, and after I take the BART then I’ll have another half-mile uphill to get home. I could take the MUNI from my office to the BART, take the BART home, and take a bus for the last leg, for a total cost of $7. That’s always seemed obscene to me so instead I walk to the BART and from the BART and get home at 7:45 for $2.  Or I can call an Uber Express Pool. It pulls up to my office six minutes later; it drops me off at home twelve minutes after that. I split the cost with my coworker; it’s $2.40 each, or $2.90 since we tip.  If the Uber Express Pool is delayed I cancel for free and call a new one. If the BART is delayed, haha, sucker. If I have an unpleasant Uber experience I get my money back. If I have an unpleasant BART experience, well, I did voluntarily get on the BART. 

I want public transit to be good enough to compete with Uber. I really do. But do I want it enough to spend an extra $10 and one hour every day, or enough to walk an extra three miles with my computer and all my other work stuff? 

tone: “I need a space where I won’t be scolded for my anger”/”I need a space where people aren’t acting angrily”; “I need a space where you’re expected to communicate compassionately and patiently”/“I need a space where I won’t be punished for being bitter or impatient or unable to extend the benefit of the doubt”; “I need a space where jokes and flippancy are encouraged”/”I need a space where people take the things we’re discussing seriously”.

content: “I need a space where I don’t have to debate whether I deserve to exist”/”I need a space where I can try to explain and empathize with and inhabit the opinions of my political opponents, even where their beliefs are abhorrent and scary”; “I need a space where people like me are not discussed as scary violent abusers”; “I need a space where I can talk about my scary violent abusers”; “I need a space where my religious beliefs will be respected”/”I need a space where I can complain about the religious beliefs that harmed me without worrying about being respectful”. 

social rules: “I need it to be easy to leave”; “I need it to be easy to change your mind”; “I need to know that if I make a mistake someone will talk to me in private instead of calling me out in public”; “I need transparency about moderation and what people get banned or excluded for”; “I need to know that if someone harasses me they will get excluded”. 

In other words, needs about how to communicate, what to communicate, and how to handle transgressions. 

I would be so delighted if instead of ‘this is a safe space’ posters on doors it became conventional to have signs that said “this is a safe space for emotional expression and venting” or “this is a space where harassment procedures have been refined a lot and work really well” or “this is a space where you can express hurtful and wrong ideas and expect people will try to argue with you but not shame you or attack you or exclude you, with an expectation of confidentiality, and with really emphatic moderation on the ‘not attacking people’ rule”.

If your sign says “This is a safe space” without further elaboration, then once people figure out in practice which of these conflicting needs you’re prioritizing and which you’re kicking to the curb, it’s inevitable that some of them will walk away having been told, “Your needs are not safe, you are not safe, and your idea of what safety entails is dangerous and harmful.”

If your sign says “This is a safe space for [group],” then the same thing will happen, except with the added sting of “You are a danger to the very group you’re a member of, and also you’re doing group membership wrong.”

If you’re asking, “Why can’t we make the entire community/school/world a safe space? You, person in charge of [space that exists for a completely different purpose], how dare you not declare this a safe space, how could you be so heartless?” This is why. This is how. One person’s safety is another person’s misery, repression, or even danger, because people’s needs conflict. Wanting to extend the safe space out to blanket the rest of the world inherently means going from telling people “your needs and way of existing are dangerous” to telling people “the dangerousness of your needs and existence means they’re wrong, and anyone who cares about what really matters should forbid them.”

Also:

When you don’t specify what “safe” means and who/what it’s for, people will try to figure it out. Some of them will come to different conclusions than you expected. Obviously this means false positives–people coming into the safe space thinking they’ll be allowed and supported for something you formed the safe space to get away from. But it also means false negatives–people assuming the thing they need will be rejected and labeled “unsafe,” when really you meant nothing of the sort.

The more aggressive you are about expanding the unspecified “safe space” and conflating “unsafe [for this space]” and “not okay,” the more people will hear that as “the way you are, the things you need, the thoughts you’re burning to express, are bad and dangerous and in a just world you’d either be brought into line or kicked out.” Whether your implicit idea of “unsafe” applies to them or not.