A pair of quotes to start keeping it 100:
“What, me worry? Nah, buddy, I’ve lost before, so what?/You don’t get it, I’m dirt, motherfucker, I can’t be crushed”
-El P, Run the Jewels 3: “Talk to Me”
and another, same guy:
“You talk clean and bomb hospitals/so I speak with the foulest mouth possible/and I drink like a Vulcan/losing all faith in the logical/I will not be confused for docile/I’m free, motherfuckers, I’m hostile”
I posted a little while back about survivance and my occasional problems with people who don’t understand that I’ve adopted the term but employ it in a different way. One of my big arguments is for the use of anger, the power of rage.
But I want to point something else out. People in the academy have a very touchy sense of profanity. It comes from the traditions of “school,” I think. But I remember very clearly the way I learned how to deploy profanity– from my mother. She doesn’t swear often. And really, I don’t, either, unless I’m singing along to music or quoting a movie. But when I do, it means something. There’s tremendous power in certain words. Which is why I used to quotes with the phrase “motherfucker” in them above.
Two incidents I had with that word in my past that are relevant:
- There was a kid from Laos at my high school. He was the only person other than me who wasn’t white. He must have decided that high school was a prison and picked the biggest guy in the yard (only literally– I wasn’t figuratively the biggest guy at all; I was the pacifist guy who liked art and had mostly girl friends but no girlfriend). Any time he spoke to me, usually to challenge me to a fight or insult my weight, he ended the sentence with “mo’fucker.” Even when we were in a group in a class. This was the first time in my life someone other than one of my two father figures used such profanity so wantonly. But I saw what it was– it was his power move. As a 14-year-old inside my high school I didn’t dare say such a word in response.
- My very first semester teaching, back in 2001, I had a student write an autoethnography about being abused. It was visceral, and it was probably more than a student should share. But she wrote this sentence, at one point. I will never forget the sentence, as simple as it is in structure. It was a quote: “‘You’re nothing but a little m0####f#####g b!###!’ he yelled.” As she shared this piece with an overwhelmed peer group during review, she asked me if that sentence was okay.
I looked at it, and I asked her to step out of the room for a second. In the hallway, I commended her for being brave and sharing such a personal story, but and I asked her to be certain she wanted to share it with her peer group for review. She was resolute. This young woman was a great writer. But I had to teach her a valuable lesson. I asked her “do you feel like the words he said are important?” And she nodded her head. “Then write them as they were said,” I told her. “They carry a certain meaning and power that sticking symbols into them diminishes. It is an important moment in this piece of writing for people to feel the emotion you felt. It’s okay to write the words out.”
She was afraid it would hurt her grade to even suggest such language. I told her “if you have to write fuck, you have to write fuck. People use that language in this world. We shouldn’t just bat it around like we think it’s amusing, but saying ‘fudge’ or drawing symbols isn’t the same thing.”
So what does that have to do with survivance?
Everything.
Because I was thinking hard today about what I’ve been doing this last 100 days. Some of these blog posts are just me musing about things. Some of them are about comic books or wrestling or movies. I think one was just about music. But the heart of the arguments that carry the most weight, the skeleton of this blog, is something I gave up a while back and reclaimed: my desire to speak back to power.
I think this was the time for that, not just because my 40th birthday was 3 days after Trump took the office of President and became whatever it is that he is. Rather it was the time because I quit speaking on things like this in public right around 2010 because I made a blog post to get the attention of a group of people who were mistreating me and not listening– a survival move– and when it worked, I got lambasted by those people and essentially silenced (in the professional way where they start the sentence with “I don’t want to silence you” the same way people say “I’m not racist but…”).
It is hard for me to speak my mind on issues like this because I have, many many times, been punished (formally and informally) for it. But the other problem I have is that I’m sort of tale of two Phills.
I’m a nice person. I like to think so, anyway. I try to be good to everyone. But I also have a strong moral sense of what *I* think is right and wrong, and I get more than a little upset when I see what I perceive as injustice being done. And because I’m the cuddly teddybear huge person who speaks softly, I have to employ cues that everyone can understand when I need to make a point.
Like saying “fuck.” Any time I swear in public people instantly pay more attention because they aren’t used to it. Unlike my wife, who hears me rapping around the house and is immune to me swearing.
But the other problem is that because I listen more than I speak (something every human being should do), people often project onto me whatever they consider to be the most critical thing I could be thinking, maybe because they know me best from scenarios where I have had to vent my frustrations to make a point. Sometimes I’m trying to remember the last guy on the Pacers team with Reggie Miller, Dale Davis, Antonio Davis and Rik Smits. I think it was Mark Jackson. But it’s not always me thinking something judgmental about you. I might just be musing that Luigi never got the love that Mario did even though he’s clearly the more agile and emotionally available of the two brothers. I think about important shit.
But often I become a mirror for the person who is talking to me. I don’t think this is unique. I’m not “poor me” over here. But I think I am the type of person this harms more than others because my manner of interacting with people leaves spaces where they can deposit their issues. Most people I work with and around don’t understand how to leave a pause for anything, let alone can they pause and see you pausing and not assume you’re prepping to unleash hell.
For example, I have a couple of former colleagues who treated me poorly. They know they did. It’s not like I felt mistreated and no one noticed. But I still from time to time interact with those people. Believe it or not, I am a professional and I know how to separate my having had my feelings hurt from doing my job. When I work with these people, though, if there’s ever a hiccup in communication, they instantly assume I’ve done something out of anger. Not because I’m mad at them. Not because I said anything or did anything. Because– best I can tell– they believe I should be mad at them and can’t believe I can be a grown up about it.
I’m 40 years old. I’m a fucking adult. I can act professional.
You can slam the door to my computer lab after yelling at me to “keep it down” and I can still sit next to you in a faculty meeting and listen to what you’re saying without calling you out for acting like a child. Even though it was you who happened to choose to try to hold office hours next to a classroom full of students who were showcasing multimedia pieces that required– in some cases– loud noises. Even if one of them had to pee and left the door open, and because I was interested in the student presentations I didn’t notice, because I wasn’t hired by the University to be a door man. I wasn’t attempting to sound pollute the hallway. It also wasn’t my fault you couldn’t shut the door slowly and walk back over to where you were sitting the way most adult human beings do when they don’t want to hear what is going on in another room. But when I pause before responding to you later in a meeting, it’s because I want to make sure you stopped talking before I butt in (unlike people who try their hardest to talk over me), not because I’m mad at you over your what in your mind has turned into the great door fiasco of 2016. If you’re ashamed of yourself, don’t put that on me. It’s your problem. The fact that perhaps you don’t let such thing go, and that perhaps it’d be something you’d later mention to other members of the faculty (how disrespectful it was for me to leave the door open with such noise happening) is all about you. I quit worrying about it right after my students quit wondering why someone in a suit slammed the door. As they asked, “what’s his problem?” I moved on because life is too short to hold lab noise vendettas. It really is. That shit will kill you.
And that’s the key to survivance in the academy. You have to know how to let transgressions go until one of them is too severe. Then you have to have the ammunition to make it clear to the people you’re dealing with just how seriously the moment is. A class making you uncomfortable because the student work is a little louder than you think isn’t a big deal. Slandering a colleague because of that IS a big deal. Know the difference and know your enemy.
The truth no one ever tells you about academia is that a small but significant part of it– from top to bottom, from high school kids in study groups to full professors in committee meetings– is people who fight because they like to hear themselves talking and people who are positive they are more important than you (whoever you are). They don’t listen, they don’t employ the critical thought needed to realize when someone means the same thing they mean but values different words. It’s infuriating. Just the other day I had a 45 minute conversation with a professor who out-ranks me about something that professor didn’t understand in a meeting because that professor– just like a student– was too busy texting to pay attention and missed the key point that was being discussed. It wasn’t my fault, but somehow my explanation of what this colleague didn’t bother to hear wasn’t worded how the colleague wanted to hear it. But I was the one who got spoken down to. You know, because how dare I pay attention then thoughtfully share information. That’s fucking crazy.
I don’t ignore things, and I don’t talk to hear myself speak.
But sometimes, like in the body of these blog posts, I need to speak because if the question is “can Phill speak?” the answer has to be “of course he can.” But when should he?
And do I have the right?
Of course I have the right.
Still, past wounds, even those with thick scar tissue covering them, are hard to avoid.
I type a true sentence about a colleague without naming the colleague because it’s my right to own my experiences and share them.
I feel a chill down my spine wondering if I’ll be told off for doing it.
I walk on the eggshells, trying to carry the fire back to the spider who made the web that my soul is tangled in. I balance so nothing cracks.
Sometimes I’m just exhausted by it all.
Sometimes I’m elated.
But making myself talk every day for 100 days has led to rediscovering that I might really have things to say.
Of course if a Phill blogs in the living room and no one clicks to read it, did it make a sound?