I have no idea what this thread is about. I’m afraid that further explanations will not help.
It’s okay, I offer this instead:
dropzone, you implied that your interest in this is from the detached intellectual perch of anthropology.
I sincerely hope this doesn’t come across when you’re interacting with your coworkers.
People can pick up on when they are being “dissected”. I worked with a guy that you used to do this shit. This was when I was down in Miami. Most everyone in the lab was working-class Cuban American in their 20s. There was me, the black girl playing at fish biologist just trying to make a little paper before going on to bigger things.
Then there was Middle-Aged White Guy, who seemed to think he couldn’t possibly get the rest of us. It didn’t matter that all of us listened to classic rock, just like he did, and liked the same geeky movies and geeky trivia. No, because we also listened to hip hop and R&B and liked Michael Jackson and knew a little about contemporary pop culture and made an effort to dress like we’d been born in the late 20 century, this made us extraterrestrials to him. In addition to the fact that we used profanity and slang and laughed at dirty jokes, and cried and laughed and got angry over stuff. Since I was also the “odd man” out in lots of ways, he found it easy to kvetch to me about how “unrelatable” we all were to him. How it sucked to be him, always the outsider, the lone white cowboy in a room full of Indians. It was my job to fill him on the “lingo” we were using or educate him on “our” ways. He could never let go of the “I’m a middle-aged white guy and I’m not supposed to be around you people!” attitude. It showed in every interaction he had with us.
Every place I’ve landed in, I’ve been the “only one”. And every time this happens I feel weird and different, like I’ll never fit in or understand the scene. And yet I always manage to weave into the fabric and not look too aloof. I might be aloof inside (that’s just how I am), but I still take extra care in showing I’m “down” as opposed to a special snowflake wrapped up in a special cocoon. I am willing to even look like a fool (within reason) just so people can see I respect them and their ways, however foreign they are to me. Because people can tell when you’re playing the anthropologist taking notes. People know when they are being dissected and scrutizined and being mentally packaged into stereotypes. And laughed at. At least, in that lab I was in we all knew that’s what Middle-Aged White Guy was doing to us. And we couldn’t relate to him because of that.
I’m glad I was “most helpful”.
Monstro, I’ve tried to stand apart because my default mode is Cold Fish, but they are too funny (on purpose) to let me maintain an Observer aloofness. And they are my friends, though that took some time because they can be so loud it’s hard for me to work. I’m now a Participant/Observer in Cultural Anthropology terms (that stick is WAY up my butt) and we are beginning to understand each other some.
**
MOL**, cold sober for 21 months but it hasn’t made me any more coherent when I’m sleepy.
I don’t understand why everyone is saying they don’t understand the OP. It’s clear as crystal. He needs to know why black people shoot each other over sneaker scuffs because gleeful ghetto girls and middle class Mexicans don’t like being disrespected by baby A being posted on facebook as baby B without C giving due props to D. It’s not so hard to under fucking stand. If you would give him a goddamn minute to finish his Southern Hospitality research, he will break it down to you like you are a bunch of four year olds.
ETA: “…lone white boy in a room full of Indians” Haha. Yall are killing me up in this thread, man.
Sit down, kids, and I’ll tell you a story. Once upon a time, to a land not all that far from here, came a group of people from the island of Perfidious Albion. The parts of the island they came from were good mostly for herding, not farming, and were poorly policed so they developed an informal system where the baddest motherfuckers were able to hold onto their livestock and prosper. In the new land they found they needed help working their farms because they didn’t know from farming so, without asking nicely, they brought people from Darkest Africa, took away their cultures, and taught them the Culture of Honor. The two groups developed side by side, fussin’ and feudin’ and generally confusing the people in the Great White North. Those people had come from lands of settled farmers and shopkeepers with fully-developed legal systems and civil courts and did not need hair triggers to prosper in the new land. . . .
There. Simplistic enough for you? Some of them even get into the differences of climate as factors. And some of it sounds like bullshit, but there you are. It is used to contrast the behavior of whites in the South and West with whites in the North, but as the blacks of the South were brought up in the same atmosphere (plus lynchings) it is argued that they were infected with the same attitudes. And Southern Manners are so people won’t accidentally offend and get shot. Yankees are rude because we generally don’t need to worry about getting shot. It’s all very scientifical and not at all pulled out of somebody’s ass, like Sociology usually is. :rolleyes:
Or it has absolutely to do with race, but rather youthful bravado. Or individual personality quirks and tolerance levels to social bullshit.
Not everything needs to be analyzed through the lens of race and culture.
What? And waste four years of college? I mean, more than I wasted them during those four years? (Cheap school and no job skills. What was I supposed to do, go to Vietnam?) Anyway, I get enough shit for dismissing the values and beliefs of anybody under 25, though I may be raising it to 30.
“Oh no! I must warn Robin because Mom might’ve put onion soup mix in the rice dish and it might have a few molecules of beef in it and Robin’s a vegan!”
“She’ll be fine.”
“No, she may die from the shock to her system of consuming any meat product at all!”
“It’s Christmas. Don’t make a big deal out of it. Anyway, vegans are idiots.”
“Boo-hoo-hoo! It’s a matter of RESPECT!” And she runs from the room to cry someplace.
So you might have something there. Anyway, there probably was no onion soup mix in the dish because that would mean it might have some flavor, which it did not. And Wife made it for her gluten-sensitive sister, not some PITA niece with her own made-up dietary restrictions. And there were more meat molecules in the air from the ham than there are in a whole envelope of soup mix.
So, what it really is is that I don’t like young people, of all races, creeds, colors, or national origins, and I like them less if I’m related to them or work closely with them? An epiphany, a day early! (shrug) I’m not going anywhere today but I scraped off my car because I won’t want to do it tomorrow morning, when it will be -15F. Too cold for scraping or personal revelations.
Is it just me, or does the incoherence of dropzone’s posts make anybody want to hug him?
Carefully hug him from a distance, yes.
For MOL that distance is about 20 miles, but careful, ladies, or I might talk while you hug me. Here I can edit myself.
So this thread is dead? Good, because I long ago forgot what it was about.
This might be a long shot, but ‘respect’ in the mysterious sense you are trying to understand can manifest itself as different boundaries. Here’s an example:
Person A is very gregarious. They’re also a little narcissistic, so they enjoy it when people come up to them to invite them to a conversation. While they are reading a book, if someone else asks what they are reading or just wants to have a conversation, they jump right in! Maybe reading the book to them was just killing time, and they’d much rather talk with someone than read.
Person B is antisocial. They just want to be left alone. They enjoy reading for the sake of reading and don’t like to be bothered. When people come up to them while they are reading they get annoyed that other people are not respecting their personal space.
Person A might not understand what lack of ‘respect’ is going on here, and what it boils down to is everyone has their own boundaries. These boundaries can also fall along cultural lines. Being apathetic to other people walking all over you in certain ways doesn’t mean other people are apathetic to it. I see this all the time- Some people will say nothing if someone cuts in front of them in line, other people will make a HUGE deal of it. Some people are too lazy to fight over getting overcharged $0.45, other people will not leave the store until its resolved.
Yes.
Wait. “Hug”? No. Sorry.