SHORT:
Nothing will ever be as funny as when my brother Seth got locked out of the house in his robe for 3 hours when he was 7 years old (because he went out at 6am to water the plants, on his own accord).
MEDIUM:
My brother wore his little blue robe daily (and nightly) for years. Eventually it became less like a robe and more like a little blue mini-skirt.
I called him this week and asked him “why he thought he liked it so much” and he said, “it was super comfy and reminded me that I was at home and that it was time to relax on the couch.” — can’t argue with that!
Some things in life are that pure & simple!
If you still don’t understand the power of my brother and his little blue robe, I just have to accept that there are times when language is tragically insufficient.
LONG:
I’ve been thinking about how language fails and how I, more often than not, see my inability to articulate things as something negative.
My mom has been delivering meals to a 90-something-year-old-Holocaust-Survivor on Jewish holidays for years and she recently passed away. When my mom told me this, she started to say her go-to line for old people “she has a good, long life” — but then she stopped and started laughing and was like, “wait…” (realizing that the first quarter of her life definitely wasn’t textbook “good”) — she shook her head and was like “you know what I mean”.
I think there’s a lot of power in “you know what I mean”, in um’s and ah’s and things we can’t articulate.
I love verbalization and writing and spending hours trying to find the right language— it makes me feel powerful/relieved when I arrive at something that feels “just right” or “right enough”.
But I also think I white-knuckle self-definition as a response to other people’s doubt.
I catch myself clinging to the belief that clarity and coherence are the only way to connect with people (and yourself), when, in reality, I think I have to come to terms with the fact that nobody will ever be able to understand exactly what I mean or how I feel about certain things (or really, anything).
^Which is terrifying. Obviously. Because you feel… like … textbook “alone”. But you are, by definition, “alone”, in some ways, as you are singular, and that is lonely.
God, I keep saying “textbook”.
I promise I’m not a nerd.
I am a dork.
The difference? One has no etymological origin and the other means “whale penis”. And I identify more with the w.p. one of course (this is an example of a time when linguistic granularity is VERY important).
Anyway, my mom and I talked about this for a long while the other day (the language thing, not the whale penis thing)… how it’s nuts that we’re allowed to communicate things in “real-life” using ums and ahs etc. but students get points docked on papers and essays for language of the sort.
If, at the end of the day, our goal is human connection, then why does it matter? Especially if some of the “you know what I mean” might aid with the connect
^if I effed this up she’ll tell me later, but I’m pretty sure this was the gist?
Language is a portal to meaning-making, but also, I think, a lot of the time we already have the meaning/feeling in us or around us or right in front of us and our (or, at least, my) attempt to perfectly articulate it distracts from the feeling’s very power. Does this make sense? Or have I twisted everyone’s brains around a million times and ur like “stick to jokes, bitch! we come here for the jokes!”
The point is, I have come to realize that most things in life that have BIG meaning to me are VERY HARD to describe and I think, instead of being frustrated with that, I should revel in the impossibility. Flip the frustration into thrill.
Turn the frustrated fart-feeling that it gives me into a beautiful wind or laugh.
“Beautiful wind” — alright, what am I talking about. I’m done. Goodnight. Time to order a robe that will hopefully turn into a mini-skirt in a few years (if I manifest hard enough, I WILL grow 6 inches during this second puberty!!!).
C U Next Tuesday
Wait, also— this week my sister reminded me that, when we shared a room, and I was tired of her yammering, I would lower a disco ball on a stick from the top bunk on which I had written “please stop talking to me” and then I would wait until she saw it and then lift it back up. Guess I haven’t always been into endless chatter! Sorta fun that it was a disco ball…
Okay NOW C U Next Tuesday
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Sincerely,
Reid
Venmo: @rpope-venmo-26
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