• Black And White Mood

    I’m in a black and white mood.

  • Ali Barter And The Listlessness Of Being

    Sometime in early 2016 I was sitting in Wheat Café in Newtown when I heard a catchy tune cascading from the speakers inside. It had everything that initially attracts me to new music: unique vocals, face-melting guitar and a clean structure that builds to an explosive finish. It turned out to be Far Away by Ali Barter and upon repeat listens I began to feel like it was a song written about me; a song that gave definition to a certain kind of listlessness that not infrequently colors my days (“Spent too much time on freeways and internet / I’ve never felt so far away”).

    As it turns out, Ali Barter had me right where she wanted me.

    In The Myth of Sisyphus, the French-Algerian philosopher and writer Albert Camus examines the nature of what he calls “the absurd man”. In short, an absurd person is one who has accepted that life itself is inherently meaningless (that is: absurd). One example of an absurd life that Camus explores in the essay is that of the actor. To Camus, the actor is an absurd person whose interest in theatrical shows is concerned with the limitless potentialities that it offers them to live other lives. On the stage, the absurd person can live a thousand lives in the span of one actual lifetime, allowing them to “accept the poetry without feeling the sorrow.”

    The absurd man begins where [the thoughtless man] leaves off, where… the mind wants to enter in.

    Though I am no actor, this notion of “entering in” reflects the way that I interact with art in all forms. When an artist or an artwork seizes my attention, I want to know more about it. I want to understand the motivation behind it. I want to know what made it it. Put simply: my “mind wants to enter in.” Anybody who has ever gone straight to Wikipedia after watching a movie that was “based on a true story” knows the feeling that I’m alluding to here.

    So I do “enter in” and immerse myself in these other worlds. Every now and again (though not frequently enough for my tastes) I encounter likeminded people when I arrive there. In the same way that actors meet other actors on a stage, so do I sometimes encounter others who seem to share my reality; others whose minds have likewise “enter[ed] in”.

    Having “entered in” to the work of Ali Barter, I found not only Ali herself but also the worlds that she defines through her art. Considered individually or as a total body of work, Barter’s songs define worlds in a way that reveal her as a thinker against Camus’ criteria:

    To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one’s own world, which comes to the same thing).

    It would seem that these are indeed Barter’s methods, and she uses the two interchangeably. In any given song she’ll either create a world from scratch (as in songs like Marigold and Run You Down) or – more often – she’ll bring in the boundaries of observable reality (as in Cigarette and Far Away) to create a digestible slice of reality that is representative of all the other slices. In either case, the world that Barter creates ends up feeling like the world in which you live.

    By creating these familiar worlds, Ali Barter is hoping to grant you the freedom to live within them. In his essay, Camus examines Dostoevsky’s character of Kirilov as a case study of the existential freedom that comes with embracing absurdity. Camus writes about the possibility of becoming a “tsar” by living with absurdity within a practical life and thusly being “covered in glory”. Kirilov aims to grant others this same freedom by committing suicide (thereby proving that the freedom is absolute) but Barter doesn’t need to make a martyr of herself to accomplish the same end. For her, it is enough to acknowledge the inherent absurdity of modern life – the listlessness, if not exactly meaninglessness – so that we can each take the next step on solid footing.

    This listlessness, then, becomes a common theme in her songs (and thus, her worlds). In Far Away she observes that “People walk in a trance / They never listen.” Her character (being a version of herself) in the video for Hypercolour rocks out for a crowd whose disinterest in her performance is painfully obvious to her (“I spent the summer in darkness pining for sun”). Meanwhile, Ode 2 Summa perfectly captures the aimlessness of a sweltering summer day (“Life’s a bitch and then you die / But it’s too hot to fuck, too hot to sing”) and her latest single Cigarette finds Barter’s avatar/character “Tired of standing next to you / With nobody caring what I do.”

    Ali knows that each of these characters possesses the freedom that comes with absurdity, yet she is also very aware that this freedom is rarely exercised. If these worlds feel a little familiar, don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s some deceptive trick – these are absolutely the worlds in which you already live. They are the stages of theatres that Barter is inviting you to share with her – stages on which you can both live as tsars covered in glory if you can learn to endure your freedom.

    If you see a little of yourself in one or more (or maybe all) of these listless characters, then you are – as I was – right where Ali Barter wants you. Her songs end up sounding like ones that you would write about your own life if you happened to be a musician; they seem as if they’re about your own personal experience. Not in the way that songs with universal appeal sound like they’re “about us” by serving as a mirror in which we can see ourselves, but rather as a painting – rendered by another hand – of something undeniably and unshakably familiar. They are about everybody at once while also being about nobody in particular and yet they feel deeply personal – so much so, in fact, that it’s easy to become quite possessive of them.

    https://www.instagram.com/p/BXeyjooAtSd/

    If it’s a musical sleight of hand, it’s not one executed to trick you but rather to awaken you to your surroundings. Without putting limits on herself as an artist, Barter invites you to enjoy her songs on any level. Each is insanely catchy, built on an intoxicating sound and constructed with a tried-and-true structure. This is enjoyable enough on a superficial level, but she rewards those who are willing to look deeper and examine the subtext of the worlds she’s invited you to share with her.

    Ali accomplishes this in a few different ways, but always with simplistic strokes. In Community she employs melancholy and nostalgia in framing a night out as a quest for inclusion and connection; for belonging.

    Community reminds one of the story of Sisyphus, whose struggle Camus examines in his essay. Sisyphus was doomed to push a massive boulder up a mountain only to see it roll back down, requiring him to push it up the mountain again and again in futile and eternal repetition. The character in Community likewise seems to have been pushing a metaphorical boulder (“Drink myself to death on a Saturday night”) up the same mountain over and over again (“Give me everything and more / You know it’s never enough”). It’s a pattern, Ali knows, that we all get stuck in from time to time.

    By mining these familiar truths, Barter accomplishes what Camus considers in his essay to be the “good” relationship between the artist’s experience and the work that inevitably reflects it:

    That relationship is good when the work is but a piece cut out of experience, a facet of the diamond in which the inner luster is epitomized without being limited.

    Whether you consider the character in Community to be you, Barter, your best friend, or some faceless fictional partier matters not. What matters, Camus tells us, is whether or not you think the character is finding pleasure in the face of this repeated struggle.

    One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

    On the surface Community is a “celebration of the ordinary” that would please Camus – a tribute to good times (perhaps enjoyed in pre-lockout Kings Cross, where the video for the song was filmed) – but there are clearly layers to the worlds Barter has created here and in other songs.

    Consider the example of Girlie Bits, one of Barter’s most popular tunes. The song has been popularly described as a “feminist anthem” and it certainly sounds like one (this, of course, being merely the surface layer). While this label isn’t at all inaccurate (or, I imagine, unwelcome by Barter), it doesn’t totally capture the subtly powerful manner in which the song goes about being such an anthem.

    Girlie Bits doesn’t yell at you, call anybody out, or tell anybody what to do. The song doesn’t operate on the assumption that any of sexist attitudes referred to in the lyrics (“Give us a smile, Princess / It’s better for business”) will come as a shock to you. In fact, Barter is betting that it will all seem very familiar indeed to male and female listeners alike; that these examples of the ways in which women are frequently marginalized are so prevalent in our society that the unenlightened eye might mistake them as being normal. This world is absolutely your world and the subtext (that is, the “inner luster” layer) becomes immediately and painfully clear: we see (and/or suffer) these injustices with frequency – so what are we going to do about it?

    Barter, for her part, isn’t stopping with songs that might make us reconsider the actions of our skeevier acquaintances. For the past few months she’s been using short but moving posts on her Facebook page to highlight the powerful female singers (which she calls History Grrrls) that have inspired her through the years. In longer form she’s been railing against a musical status quo that has been perpetuated by a historical narrative that often refuses to see female musicians as legitimate artists. It’s easy to see that she’s trying to create and step into a role of an empowerment agent that she had to go largely without in her own developmental years. By taking on this role, she hopes the female artists of tomorrow will grow up in a world where the legitimacy of their work is never questioned.

    Importantly, she recognizes that her role as an artist is inextricable from her role as a person. Camus highlights the importance of this relationship in his exploration of absurdist creation. He posits that an absurd artist is not so different from a philosopher:

    The idea of an art detached from its creator is not only outmoded; it is false.

    For the same reason as the thinker, the artist commits himself and becomes himself in his work.

    This much holds true with Barter. As seen in the example of the subtext found in Girlie Bits and how this aligns with her interest in advancing a discourse toward achieving gender equity, Barter is as much thinker as artist and these two modes of her intellect are inextricably linked. Girlie Bits loses its bite if it’s not written by Barter and Barter can’t disrupt the status quo in a manner authentic to her own ideas without writing Girlie Bits.

    All of that to say: whatever you think of it otherwise, Girlie Bits is more than “just a song”. It’s a song written by a certain person in a certain way under certain circumstances and for a specific reason. To merely listen to the song (or any of her others) and not consider these circumstances (the art as an extension of the artist) is to miss what she’s freely and nakedly offering you. It’s akin to walking into the cinema late and seeing only the end of the movie.

    If Ali Barter the person can’t be removed from the songs of Ali Barter, then those same songs have the effect of making you feel as if you grew up alongside her. Each track becomes an existential comfort zone into which you can settle and allow the rhythm to wash over you or from which – on a different day, having finally seen something that Barter has already mined for “internal luster” – you can launch your revolt against inequity, an aloof romantic partner, a hot summer day, consumerism, or the fear of missing out.

    Ali’s songs (and by extension, her worlds) are – in spite of the meaninglessness they acknowledge but refuse to succumb to – ultimately hopeful. In this way her art avoids being absurd in the purest sense, but even Camus recognises “that hope cannot be eluded forever” and this speaks again to the freedom that Ali would like us all to recognise that we possess. Even Sisyphus, bound as he is to his eternal fate, enjoys – within that “world” – absurdist freedom and is thereby capable of happiness. The key, as we have seen, is that he uses his freedom to choose that happiness.

    Like those of us caught exactly where Ali wants us, her character in Cigarette is beginning to notice that something about her reality is a bit sterile. Here Ali has tightened the fences of reality on a character who is only just beginning to become fully aware of the form those fences take: in this case, gender normative romantic expectations and the mundanity of merely “being”. She wonders what measures would be necessary to escape these shackles (“If I shaved my head would you / Tell your friends you don’t really care / Really care”) but by the time she’s warning the unidentified “other” in the song to not ask her for a cigarette, it becomes clear that such measures aren’t necessary. She need not replicate the gesture of Kirilov’s suicide in order to obtain her freedom, she need only to embrace that she has always possessed that freedom.

    To paraphrase her own words that I quoted at the beginning of this piece: as well as she understands the energy it takes to have to face these feelings every day, she also knows she’s not the only one who wakes up trying not to feel that way. By illustrating that we all possess the freedom of Ali Barter the person, artist and avatar – and that we need only choose happiness, as Camus would like us to believe Sisyphus did – she reveals herself as something vitally important in the present moment: a conqueror.

    From Camus:

    The conquerors are merely those among [us] who are conscious enough of their strength to be sure of living constantly on those heights and fully aware of that grandeur.

    Ali Barter chooses revolt rather than surrender – to live fully and happily as a tsar covered in glory – in the face of inherent meaninglessness. Each of her songs is an invitation for us to do the same and we all possess the freedom to accept that invitation. All that remains is to choose to do so.

    Greg Joachim is a writer of fiction and non-fiction when not working as a PhD candidate and academic at the University of Technology Sydney. He resides in Sydney with his wife, Claire.

    Reach out on Twitter: @gregjoachim

  • Filtering Gloom

    Angry sky. Filtering gloom through a sense of foreboding. My work continues.

  • Time According To Window Washers

    Working and writing from home today. Measuring time by the progress of the window cleaners across the street.

  • Boots for escaping malaise

    I’ve been experiencing malaise for the past couple of days – melancholy but without the sadness. The balance of my life has tipped toward more input and less output. This is never the way I want this scale to tip and yet here I am, mired in unproductive worry.

    Into this malaise entered this image from one of my favorite photographers, Alice Gao:

     

    View this post on Instagram

     

    A post shared by ALICE GAO (@alice_gao)

    The image is but one example of the inputs that have begun to outnumber my outputs but it is perfect enough to help me break that seemingly inescapable loop. Case in point: in writing this very blog post about the image, I’m finally generating some output.

    The image is deceptively simple. Color has been shifted to black and white; the head and face of the subject can’t be seen; even the action being performed is unclear – is the boot being put on or removed by the subject?

    Context has been stripped to these and other ends but just enough is left to allow for infinite possibilities; myriad interpretations. The subject as exhausted worker just returned home, the subject as lover mere moments from crawling into bed, the subject as shopper – lonely or loved or both – checking the boots for fit or style.

    Or perhaps these are merely boots built for escaping malaise.

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  • Notes From A Day At
    The Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL)

    I had the great pleasure of attending the Sydney Sixers vs. Perth Scorchers Women’s Big Bash League (WBBL) match at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) on Monday. Any day at the cricket is a good day, but seeing the Sixers in action means I get to see Alyssa Healy and Ellyse Perry – two of my favorite players in any code – do some work. Their partnership was in exceptional form against the Scorchers, laying the foundation for what turned out to be a rather easy run chase. The match did come down to the final over, but one got the sense that the Sixers were merely biding their time. The win extended their running win streak to six matches.

    Ellyse Perry Taking Selfie With Fans After Sydney Sixers WBBL Match Against Perth Scorchers at SCG
    Ellyse Perry on selfie duty with the faithful.

    This was my second WBBL match – the first being the Sydney Derby at the SCG last year – and it’s encouraging to see how far the league has come in such a short amount of time. Last year marked the first season for the new league and Cricket Australia (CA) put a considerable amount of effort into the launch, maintaining “brand” consistency (the women and men’s teams are both the ‘Sixers’, ‘Scorchers’, etc.) and using promotional tactics such as double-headers to raise awareness of the women’s matches and the skill being displayed within. The match I attended last year was one such double header, as was the match on Monday.

    The broadcast of a minimum number of women’s matches is dictated in the deal CA have drawn up with Channel Ten, and this has resulted in impressive ratings that even in the WBBL’s first season were arguably higher than those of the A-League, Australia’s domestic soccer competition. In this, the second year of the league, every match is also streamed online with full commentary and production.

    Sydney Sixers WBBL Players Signing Autographs After Match Against Perth Scorchers at SCG

    Still, the true value of the WBBL is the impact that today’s players are having on tomorrow’s at the grounds themselves. Most WBBL matches are played at suburban grounds and are events unto themselves.* Admission is free and the matches take place during the day over the school holiday period. This means a young woman living in Hurstville or North Sydney can quite literally walk down the street and watch her heroines – some of whom play first grade international cricket for Australia and other countries – do what they do best. That kind of access is unparalleled in professional sport, and the arrangement will pay dividends for the WBBL (and women’s cricket at large) in the generations to come.

    Sydney Sixers WBBL Players Signing Autographs After Match Against Perth Scorchers at SCG
    A line of victorious Sixers signing autographs for girls and boys alike.

    There are still challenges in the short term, but CA seem to be addressing them. Last season’s BBL advertising rarely mentioned the women’s league, most glaringly when it came to the advertisement of the aforementioned double headers. This has been rectified this season, with WBBL players featuring prominently in shots of on-field action and the start time of women’s matches in double headers being included in the narration and graphics.** Other oversights remain, though, such as the fact that the shuttle buses from Central Station to the SCG don’t start running until a few hours prior to the men’s match, well after the women have started playing.

    The game day experience is designed to be an encouraging one for young athletes and fans of both genders (there were nearly as many boys as girls seeking autographs from players after the match concluded). I’ve included a few photos of these interactions throughout the post, but numerous other examples abound on social media:

    Clearly CA recognise the potential reach of social media, as they’ve also used Facebook to serve advertisements that very clearly illustrate the heights to which young female cricketers can aspire:

    Cricket Australia - Play Like Your Favourite WBBL Player Cricket Australia - Why Not Play Girls Cricket

    The message at the stadium is likewise clear: the opportunities for girls are there. Video profiles of star players featured on the stadium screens during down time, encouraging young cricketers to ‘give it a go’ (and rather explicity, at that – the tagline at the end reads “Inspiring young women to play cricket”). This profile of Megan Schutt is particularly powerful and leads off with a reflection on how far women’s cricket has come in just her lifetime:

    It’s hard to imagine a young female cricketer with aspirations of playing on the world stage not being inspired by what she sees when her eyes are on the WBBL. I’m not female or altogether young (as compared to a ten-year-old, anyway) and yet even I find it all very empowering and uplifting.

    Ellyse Perry Signing An Autograph After Sydney Sixers WBBL Match Against Perth Scorchers at SCG
    Ellyse Perry interacting with a potential WBBL star of tomorrow.

    The WBBL isn’t the beginning and end of this progress, either. Other breakthroughs are being made for women’s cricket, such as the NSW Breakers (the New South Wales state side) recently becoming the first fully-professionalised women’s team in any code in Australia. Commonwealth Bank has also recently announced that they will be changing the nature of their financial support of CA, a shift that will see money pumped directly into programs for female, indigenous and disabled cricketers.

    It’s an exciting moment for women’s cricket in particular and for women’s sport in general. It’s easy to see how these moves toward gender equity at the highest level of cricket in Australia will yield parallel positive changes in other sports and society at large. Whether or not today’s young female cricketers go on to WBBL careers, they will still enjoy the robust social and developmental benefits that come with playing sport. That’s an important legacy to establish, and it all starts with the Perrys, Healys and Schutts who are out there doing work today.

    *Much to my disappointment, I have not yet been able to attend a standalone WBBL match. I hope to rectify this by attending one of the final two Sixers matches of the year at North Sydney Oval on 20th and 21st January. I encourage you to do the same!

    **Although the inclusion of women in the advertising is welcome, my wife rightly points out that the wording can be improved. Presently the message is “come early and catch the women” when really it should be about attending the women’s match full stop, not “coming early” for the men’s match. This frames the women’s match as an ‘opening act’, which is rather demeaning (if we want to read into things).

    About designing sport for development

    This post relates to my PhD project at the University of Technology Sydney. My research aims to use intentional design to maximise the social outcomes of youth sport for development programs.

    You can follow along with the project on Twitter or use the contact form to get in touch with me directly.

  • Having Read His Future In The Clouds

    From this great height it seemed as though the sun would never set. He smiled. Having read his future in the clouds, he could look forward to the eternal sunshine ahead.

  • The Broadcast Violence Was Thusly Amplified

    He was watching the news. Something bad was happening in Syria.

    She was in the other room getting undressed. She thought about what she had just read on her phone. Something bad was happening in Syria.

    She used the master control to turn off the lights. The apartment fell dark and this had the effect of making the television seem somehow brighter. The intensity of the broadcast violence was thusly amplified. Something very bad was happening in Syria.

    The television was muted. The only audible sounds were those made by the passing traffic twelve stories below and the impact of her bare feet as she walked toward him across the carpeted floor. She was wearing only a pale blue bra and matching panties. The light from the television danced across her bare skin. It was performance art. He was a captive audience. The pale projection of an explosion reflected across the small of her back. Something very bad was happening in Syria.

    She straddled his lap and put her hands on either side of his face. The kiss that she gave him made him think of the first time they had kissed. Her lips had been pillowy then. Her lips were pillowy now. Her body was warm. His body was warm. She turned off the television.

    Something good was happening.

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  • Why We Should Take Each Other Seriously

    Do you want to be taken seriously? I would have a difficult time imagining that you don’t.

    The desire to be taken seriously is the fuel that powers strange personality traits that you’ve likely observed in yourself and others, including:

    • Your Facebook friends who meticulously curate their online presence in an effort to appear as if they have their shit together. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, Dorothy.
    • People who are “busy”. They’ve just had a lot on, you know? Things are crazy with the kids and there’s this huge project at work that only they can do properly so there go their weekends! Last seen opening a second bottle of white wine at 7:00 on a Monday night because “cheat day!”.
    • “Fanboys” who surrender a not insignificant portion of their identity to interests they can not directly participate in or outcomes they can not meaningfully impact. Depending on the selected devotion, this can assume the shape of either hipster escapism or – more typically – living vicariously through the success of others (see: devout fans of sports teams, athletes, bands, artists, etc.).
      • This phenomenon can also be observed in:
        • Those who dedicate themselves fully to a job they don’t believe in.
        • Those dedicated to being a “present” parent to the point of having no individual identity outside of this pursuit. When asked how they are, these parents will tell you how their kids are doing.

    It would be unfairly reductive to say that the desire to be taken seriously is the sole cause of these and other, similar behaviors. That’s not the point I wish to make. Rather, I would like us to turn the mirror back onto ourselves. How seriously would you (or do you) take people who fall into one of the categories listed above?

    None of us is more important than anybody else. This isn’t a revolutionary idea. It’s safe to say that a large majority of the human race believe this to be true on at least a philosophical level. Not many people would claim to be superior to others; above the fray. To believe that you are better than anybody else – that there is anybody “not worth your time” – is a particularly off-putting brand of solipsism.

    That said, observed human behavior (which may include your own) would seem to suggest that such espoused beliefs may be merely rhetoric. If none of us thinks that we’re better than anybody else, why are we routinely jerks to one another?

    The problem is introduced when we must adhere to this philosophy in real life.

    Talking about being fair is easy. Meanwhile, doing? Well, don’t we all have enough to do already?

    What does this kind of behavior look like?

    • Any number of aggressive traffic maneuvers. Nobody needs to get to their destination as urgently as you!
    • Elbowing in front of kids on train station escalators. Kids aren’t really people, right? Where do they have to be that’s so important? They have their whole lives to get to the top of the escalator!
    • Spilling some coffee on the counter of the office canteen but leaving it for somebody else to clean up. That’s what interns are for, right? You? You’re late for a meeting!

    You get the idea.

    In all of these instances, the “bully” (let’s just call the behavior what it is, even if I’m stretching the definition past the inherent intentionality) considers nobody but themselves. Are they doing this to be a dick? Hopefully not. Most times, they’re probably perfectly nice people. So how does this happen? Where do nice people go wrong?

    Inside their minds – unseen to all, including (usually) themselves – a complicated calculus is determining their actions. This calculus can be conceptualized as a flow chart of sorts; the reduction of complex social and natural scenarios to a ruthlessly efficient series of tripwires and routinized responses.

    The result? They elbow in front of kids on the escalator not because they closely examined the children and considered their adolescent circumstances to be of only marginal importance when contrasted against those of the adults about, but because they didn’t think about the kids at all.

    They thought only of themselves.

    This type of behavior is indicative of a profound lack of regard for the needs of anybody but the self. We can look each other in the eye and claim to be selfless and socially responsible citizens who have time for everybody because that internal calculus – that ruthless flowchart – that controls our actions like a fanboy controls Lara Croft allows us to effortlessly maintain sufficient cognitive distance between effect and cause. We behave like jerks and let ourselves off the hook because, well, we didn’t mean to hurt anybody.

    This is where the allegedly universal philosophy – believe it as we may – falls over entirely.

    Being passively rude to strangers is bad enough but it is merely a symptom and not the disease (depending on the circumstances). The problem truly becomes a tragedy when we allow it to creep into our interpersonal relationships.

    Over the last ten years I directly managed somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand staff, almost all of them younger than me and still pursuing undergraduate degrees or – more generally and with mixed results – “being twenty something”.

    I had hundreds of encounters with these staff members while they were under my management, but one sticks out in my mind. This staff member found me after her shift one day and presented me with a gift. It was nothing fancy but it was very thoughtful (when selecting the gift, she had recalled a funny moment we had shared at work) and completely unexpected.

    What had I done for her that she felt warranted this gift? I had seen that she was having a bad day and I asked her if she was okay.

    No other staff member ever presented me with a gift, and I did my part to assist as many as I could. I had helped many with interpersonal problems they were facing, wrote letters of recommendations that helped some earn better jobs or places in their university, and just generally made myself available to them.

    Sincere thanks was always offered for my assistance to those ends but the person who went beyond a mere “thank you” did so because I had done something she truly valued: I had taken her seriously. As repayment, she took me seriously.

    Of those hundreds of staff interactions, this is the one that I still remember; that I still take seriously.

    More recently I’ve begun tutoring at the University of Technology Sydney and in two years have directly worked with about 500 undergraduate and graduate students, the vast majority of whom are in their first year of study at their respective level.

    At the end of each semester, these students are invited to complete anonymous student feedback surveys in order to help us improve the class for future students. One open-ended question on this survey asks what elements of our tutorials they particularly enjoyed or found useful. Many use this opportunity to explicitly acknowledge my acknowledgment of them. They go out of their way to thank me for taking them seriously.

    The things I’ve done that they thank me for? Responding to emails, providing assistance ahead of assignment submissions, not playing favorites, and offering useful and constructive feedback on assignments. If you’re thinking that this list sounds like all the things that any teacher should be doing, I would agree with you.

    Don’t mistake this anecdote for a low key explainabrag. The entire point is that I’ve merely taken my students seriously and they’ve responded in a way that suggests this type of behavior is not something they regularly encounter. Those of us who are willing to recall our undergraduate years honestly will probably sympathize with their situation, and it’s (sadly) telling that this feedback is only offered anonymously. Clearly there is some level of shame associated with feeling like we’re not consistently being taken seriously.

    The way to undo this – to move toward a more respectful society that makes progress because of and not despite the presence of others – is to embrace self-awareness rather than self-absorption.

    One of the most difficult obstacles to achieving this is – as I already mentioned – time. By and large we are busy people these days. To stop and give everybody our undivided attention and selfless devotion is not practical. Fortunately, it’s also not necessary.

    To be merely aware as you move about the world would be to go a long way toward taking others seriously. To not elbow in on escalators. Not because you take the time to critically analyse the needs of the people whom you would be cutting off, but because you’re operating on the assumption that your needs are no more important than anybody else’s.

    Herein lies the simple, overarching truth behind all of this: taking others seriously is not an active task that consumes time and energy. It’s actually as passive as not considering them at all. The difference is a fundamental shift in the baseline of your own awareness: to not rush, to not be aggressive, to not assume that your needs are more important; that you are more important.

    If I took the time to actively integrate myself into the lives of my students, there would not be enough hours in the day. Further to that logistical obstacle, my introversion would cause me to collapse in a heap even as I explained how to construct a rigorous thesis for an academic essay.

    To take others seriously is not to insert yourself – it’s to leave the door open. Of the 35-40 students I have in any one class, only two or three will ever take me up on my offers of extensive assistance. Maybe ten will email me at least once – usually about a question relating to attendance.

    If I didn’t take them seriously? If I operated on the assumption that their undergraduate needs were inferior to my postgraduate needs and thus only relevant within the 80 minutes I’m paid to stand before them in a classroom? It would be no different to elbowing in front of them on an escalator. I wouldn’t have seen them in either scenario. I wouldn’t have taken them seriously.

    Instead, I make the choice that you should also make: I take them seriously. I offer them the world and a few approach me to claim it. They respond to my taking them seriously and they take me seriously in kind. Once we find each other, there’s no need for curating our lives or surrendering pieces of our identity. We take each other as we are and we move forward.

    As we all should.



  • An Undergraduate Refilled Their Glasses

    Neither of them moved or spoke. An undergraduate refilled their glasses. The horn of an unseen car honked succinctly, providing an auditory punctuation that neither of them could muster.