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Tangle tap tap tap
Let’s face it. I’m forced to use AI at my job, mostly because I have writer in my title. In reality, automation by using Grammarly in the later 2010s helped me get the words right. Grammar doesn’t excite me as much as a flow of language, although, I’ve become a better writer understanding the mechanics of grammar. The other reality is oh YAY another technological change that’s going to change the world and look wow AI can be better than geography based education and honestly just wanting to make all the blue light go away.
I haven’t published in a minute – this is the one and only time I’ll use AI for an image, and look, the meta narrative of reading a book behind the noveau mirror encapsulates how far I want to go with innovation for innovation sake.
But handwriting.
That’s the thing. Me. Mechanics. Hands that knock things over, especially jars with lids that I forget to tighten all the way. Digital excited me, I didn’t have to contend with my right-left confusion and general ability to drop things easily. It only was until last year that I got the difference between the en dash – and —. (I used the Option+Shift+- and not AI to create this em dash). Getting quick with keyboard commands, one day, but I now tend to dream of days where I don’t tap a keyboard.
I grew up in that awkward time where the kids 2 years older than me and kids 2 years younger than me had either more connection to the analog world or more connection to the emerging digital world. When I was a freshman, someone 2 years older than me recommended I take a typing class. Typing? I was typing when I was 10 and starting to see how I could remedy my ‘Needs improvement’ level handwriting, TYVM. That’s thank you very much, acronyms with no reference are rude. I was surprised they offered a typing class. Didn’t everyone know how to type to play Oregon Trail and write things?
Now I’m someone who still can’t identify what GOAT in conversations, although it seems positive and having to do with someone being the best at something. Haven’t Googled or ChatGPT’ed it, and was recently thankful I had my sunglasses on while someone referred to GOAT and some very famous artist who thinks she’s an English teacher marrying a gym teacher with optimism an joy. I mean, goat’s are stubborn sweethearts, and I guess she’s a good musician because I’ll listen to a song like ‘Trouble trouble’ but dear lord she’s in a photo with someone with a Nazi sign on their shirt, and to summarize some Reddit headline, I’ve somehow managed to live my adult life and not pose with people wearing Nazi propaganda. Mostly, I listen to other things and find the obsession stangely cultish, and if kindness matters, try not to burst music bubbles – lots of other things worth popping.
Then there were the kids 2 years younger than me in middle school who seemed more confident than the entire class of 2000, they still didn’t have cell phones en masse in high school, but in general didn’t get the general anxiety of an industrial arts teacher asking to transition to a ‘computer skills’ teacher in the last year of his retirement. Those little ones maybe started with him teaching computers, which meant he sat in the back of the room while everyone else played games. They never got to make a giant paper clip in a woodshop in one of those vests and t-shift combos with a gray bearded man who looked more Appalachain than southern. Why did I have to sit and play video games, I liked the big wood clip far more than the home economics class, even though I’d never say no to baking a brownie or cookies.
Even in high school, 2 dudes dared to kiss openly who were 2002 grads; I got to sit in advanced literature with baseball bros talking about some meathead on their team using a bat to beat the boys up. I usually avoided anyone who didn’t reed nerd, but mumbled and said that it’s silly it bothers them so much.
Now, I contend with the creeping 25th anniversary of 9/11, the current 20th anniversary of Katrina and even Columbine my junior year.
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Exposure zone
I’ve delayed writing about 9/11 on the 20 year anniversary. When was that. 09/11/21. 20 years, seriously? 3 years later goes so fast, plus another week.
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An Instagram ad in 2024 on my feed.
9/11 is when I go through some emotional catharsis or epiphany. Okay, that’s many days. What’s different about 9/11 is that I had the pleasure of living in the exposure zone. How does technology know that I lived a few blocks south of Canal? Is that cough something I need to checkout? Is that a persistent itch over my lungs? My fat cells, is something still lingering there from the air?
I avoided the dust cloud, 2 blocks down by the time we evacuated.
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Flit a thought here, flit a thought there, my brain flits like dandelion seeds that tumble around like little dust specks that come from dryer lint.
I’m a deadline champ. I’m not a deadline champ.
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I ran away uptown walk walk walk walk walk walk up Lafayette, then Union Square. I had 3 days of no exposure below Canal. Then another 90 or so.
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When I left New York geographically in 2010, I figured the distance would help. I had to leave New York and move on – I was getting too angry at anyone who held their new iPhones to the beaming twin towers. Twitter in general pissed me off, it seemed like popularity contests and brand-as-self that I still feel squeamish about. I still have a hard time thinking of myself as a curated brand that says all the right things on command that’s full of style and substance, don’t go off-brand.
Organization continued to present itself in new challenges, and I had a second room filled with furniture people gave to me that I had no idea how to arrange properly, at the time. Money was low, but not out, and the recession brought out even more tense tendencies.
Interviewing for a coffee shop in Red Hook, I spoke to the owner about how gentrification was present in so many places in Brooklyn, and that I was writing about it. I didn’t get hired. Somehow, I realized opening a coffee shop dream would never be about improving a neighborhood that I’m not from.
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A year or so ago, I walked by my old dorm on Lafayette after a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge with people I love. The second floor that used to have a balcony overlooking an empty lot now has a large condo building. No more 40s from the deli for the teenagers and post-teenagers.
Was this ever an exposure zone?
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On being too sensitive
In my youth, I was a crier. A crybaby. Someone who cries frequently at inappropriate times. In class. In the hall. In a teacher’s classroom office. In the family living room. At dinner.
I got deemed as a sensitive, a particular crime in the pull yourself up by your bootstraps loving suburbs of Atlanta in the 90s. And even a deeper crime to my parents, who both started their careers at one of the first Home Depot stores. My dad in particular wore working long hours as a badge of honor; my mom had more of the attitude that people who want to put in the extra time deserve a boost. It was their first major adult job, a temporary commune that fueled the future hyper-capitalistic machine that is now The De-pot.
They had me at the dawn of the Reagan years in their mid-20s, both fresh from conservative upbringings and surroundings. My dad became an emancipated minor at 15 after years of abuse, physical and emotional. My mom’s dad died suddenly and tragically when she was 11 – my grandma had to go back to work. Mom all of the sudden had responsibilities to raise her six year old sister.
Both my parents had incredibly difficult childhoods, and married when they were in their mid-20s. My mom had me at 24. Divorced at 27 with two kids. Kept working until she was 30, then got remarried and had two more kids. By the time she was 35, she had four kids. When I turned 35, I remained committed to remaining childfree.
So yea, my queerness evoked with my mom the ‘what did I do wrong’. She worried about me having a hard life. Dad, well, he knew cause one of the women he dated called it. He’s never cared, and nor has mom once she got used to the idea.
But the crying. Oh, the crying. I didn’t even always know why I was crying in my childhood and teenage years, the salt, the red face, the sticky aftermath. My parents probably did cry – especially my mom – and now that I am older, I wonder if they ran out of tears by the time they had me, and just wanted me, well, not to cry.
The desire to acquire came from a simplicity of wanting more than freezing bedrooms and eviction based moves. And to not live in poverty again.
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One thing I accepted a long time ago is my parents didn’t know what to do with a sensitive child. Anytime I got into a spell of worry and anxiety, I was entitled, over-emotional, selfish, and many other things. ‘Get over it’ was one of my dad’s favorites. My mom, usually not as immediately callous, but not exactly patient,
I had two favorite bathroom stalls in high school.
One by the lunchroom where I could escape and listen to all the other teenage gals chat about boys. If gossip happened, I covered my ears. That bathroom’s dingy grime and narrow gap between the stalls and mirrors didn’t exactly encourage anyone to linger.
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Freeze Rage
Poof.
Aloof I go, again.
Away from a truth you hold,
Yeah right,
I’m not sold.
I lack the fight to argue on point
To ace a hole in one,
To throw the ball in your arms,
To catch that fly,
No thanks, I’ll remain shy
To your charms while you tell me to bear arms
And offer to teach me to shoot a gun.
Instead, I run, so far away,
From wanting your rights.
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From a minimally-verbal content designer type
I have a speech disorder. It has made transitioning to UX and design a unique journey for me, one where what I have to overcome to communicate is a little different than my more verbal peers.
It started at five when I almost got held back in kindergarten because the teacher thought I didn’t know how to count. Even though I hate standardized tests – they test how well you take the test, not all the different forms of intelligence – I can thank the Iowa Skills Test for Basic Skills for helping me pass Kindergarten with some high percentile score.
Apparently, I wouldn’t tell my teacher my name and address on command, even though I had known it since I was 3 (according to my mom). I hated talking in front of people. Or to people I didn’t connect with, the ones who proclaimed their judgments so openly, clearly, and easily. I would daydream, nap at my desk, and feel bored most of the time. So, there are the bad social skills.
There was also the fact that my mom was single at the time, and the kindergarten teacher gave that empty empathy teachers do when parents challenge them. Don’t get me wrong; teachers are awesome. My beef is with the teachers that do that empty empathy voice so well. No teacher, you are crushing dreams! And underestimating what some parents know, especially if they don’t come from apparent means.
Working on data and verbal communication is more of a means to an end of my career goals. If I want to be a designer and researcher, then I have to think analytically and present my ideas in a cogent manner that is digestible to wide audiences. I didn’t have the luxury of starting this career path when I was 15; we didn’t have a graphic design or robust computer arts program where I went to high school, and gender discrimination expressed itself differently in the Southeast than it did across the rest of the country in the late-90s.
Anyhow, I know way more than I let on, especially for folks who primarily look for verbal and spoken cues.
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Why is my background so topsy-turvy, a story that meanders, one where the rising action still feels like it is happening?
The main difference between me now and me in my 20s is I can string together a sentence or question that is cogent, most of the time. I can also organize, and do it well enough that people think I am good at it. It takes more effort for me than others to do this kind of work, to string a logical sentence together or organize data. Attention to detail and organization are hard learned, and not innate, skills for me because both do require making sense of patterns. And pattern making is how I can make sense of what goes where.
As someone who went to speech classes as a kid because I remained non-verbal at apparently inappropriate times, I find this is ultimately what holds me back in career matters. It is why I love pre-scheduled meetings, collaboration, and organizational order. Some of this helps me be more creative, to know what sentences I have to string together, to not be in the constant anxiety of surprise. Writing jobs are hard for me without a visual component, mostly because all the jargon and structure start to overwhelm me.
And the surprises, and having to react minimally to new information. As I have learned to speak, or have practiced speech, I find rambling, trying to cover every point of the story, gets to me. Sometimes the story just has to cover the arc, and nothing more.
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I HATED improv in high school; give me a script, and I will give you an artful performance. I loved scripts because I could speak within them, through them, and just play to emotion without being overwhelmed with the intake of new speech. Creating these contained spaces, and telling a story through script, can still move me to this day.
Even though TED Talks kind of make me grumble, I appreciate the sense of theater, and the storytelling aspect.
Of course, I took improv in my adult life, and get what people think listening is. I have come to realize I listen vastly differently because of my experiences, but can mimic listening to the last word said quite well now. It is just one form of listening, a normative one, and one with benefits. Yet I find those who have that innate proclivity to logically string sentences together to be quite judgmental of folks who struggle with logical verbal communication. And I am drained if I have to communicate that way for long stretches of time. Sometimes listening happens beyond the last thing said.
People who don’t have non-verbal tendencies find people like me to overthink, to be aloof, calculating, etc. If I am vocal about inclusion, it is because my ability to express myself becomes a lot easier in environments that care about efforts to difference, and do not have the expectation that women are innately bubbly, effervescent, and smile all the time and good at organization.
If I get passionate about education, then some of it comes from attending NYU and seeing the vast difference in quality of schooling my peers received. While the high school I went to is now award winning, it was still a country school when I attended, rooted in agriculture. Digging deeper beyond my own experiences, the injustices and inequity of the education system became more apparent. Hauntingly apparent, and I am still seeing what I left behind struggle today. I found teaching exhausting; too much of the verbal communication that made me feel alienated in my schooling years.
I guess I have enough experience in both to be good enough at my jobs. I often feel frustrated that UX work seems to come easier to others, and that others find this work so ‘straightforward’. It seems like an abstract puzzle, one that feels like the answers are so simple, but all I see is depth and complexity. People often don’t come to me for straight shooter and smooth talking tendencies. I prefer less talking so I can take in all the ambiguity. Maybe I have fortitude, and I am happy that I am pushing into the skills I need to excel at designing things that help people like me who get overwhelmed with all the vocalization.
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