I am sitting at the library in Utrecht. Nothing beats a good library. Possibly my favourite interior architecture type, particularly in the fall. And the fall is upon us indeed - I’ve been wearing mittens and layers.
I was thinking about my conversation with Vera last night, how she also shares long voice memos with loved ones across the world, and how WhatsApp has helped develop her relationship with her dad. I exchanged with her as well, seeing what types of sharing people are responsive too. My parents are very into images, and this seems the best and/or only way to really get their interest in trying to understand a different world. For Vera, she said she loved technology for making such relations possible. I once felt like that - during commutes, listening to the radio programs or calling my mom. Calling my mom and grandparents whilst cycling or grocery shopping. Sharing videos of my cycling routes. Simple things, simple exchanges. Most of my important relations, the deepest and the most superficial (to varying degrees of necessity), personal and professional, my social and work (and all the ranges of work - personal research, freelance bullshit, day job lugging, personal creative work, future planning and attempt to get funding), are channeled through technological affordances of my mobile device and my laptop computer. The internet. Specifically though, I am relationally spread thin. This is both a delight and a frustration. Early on in my life (my most productive and proud time, quite frankly) I almost never socialised, it was nearly the lowest on my priority list. So, a delight to have the interest in practicing relations with many loved ones and many kinds of loved ones. And, a frustration, in that I don’t have any “number 1s” in proximity (no partner, sibling or sibling like friend, no parent) yet have a lot of people in person and around me digitally I sincerely care to keep up with and do. This is incredibly time consuming, attention consuming, and distracting. My personal work nearly always is first to go to the sideline - because it is the most scary to start? Surely a part of it. How to reconcile this? I am grateful to have had this turn in my personal life, undoubtedly expedited in relation to one another. I learned love from a site of nurture and vulnerability from my British girlfriends, a rare year and situation that moved me to my core. I started to have even more people in my life spread out everywhere. Despite our life experiences and age differences were very like in so many general life condition ways (cultural studies, white, western, financially stable-enough backgrounds, traditional-enough patriarchal familial upbringings, open-mindedness enough). I could not have predicted the devastation I felt when they left, which is not something to share in this moment, and as well, I became curious that with such similar situations, we stayed in connection in many different kinds of ways. Yas and I with our long voice memos, Phoebe and I with our regular and short and scattered phone chats and pics sharing, occasional skips. Becky and I, her short voice notes and unexpected calls also in transit. Different schedules and inclinations.
These were the sites of new languages made for each set of relations. Conditions forced the necessity and care made the bodies extend towards each other despite the distance - which, distance with a connection to a physical space seems most irrelevant or shortsighted. The body indeed, although this should be considered more.
For now my interest, as it seems to always return to, is the willingness, the movement, to learn a new site - a new world, a new space of communication, a site of exchange of meanings, care, and love.
I found it funny when I asked my Dutch colleague what she found most interesting when she travelled, the things that were different to her and she would adjust to - i.e., learning a new way of navigating in a space. I prompted her with things like, different kinds of toilets or door knobs, foods in the market (market or grocery store?!), etc. She said that maybe I noticed that sort of thing during my recent travels to Croatia - in context, there is a shared interest in ‘the east’ in our workplace - which is located in The Netherlands.
I found this exchange funny because indeed, I noticed such things, but certainly not with a strong relation to my (first) trip to eastern european country. I immediately thought how I felt so embarrassed and disappointed, which is not something that I have had often with my parents, when my mother and I used the bathrooms in my university building during my parent’s visit to Amsterdam. Both my parents reviled in the bathrooms here and she ‘had’ to ask me to go into her toilet room to flush it for it because she couldn’t figure out how to - for those who don’t know, often toilets have a push-down rectangle as the flusher flush within the toilet tank top, or even a pull flusher here. In the US they are typically protruding handles. I was horrified at my mom, an intelligent woman, and even writing it now I feel terrible as both a daughter for writing this and still at her unwillingness to navigate a new space. For the rest of the trip it was indeed hard to handle the judgment my parents couldn’t (wouldn’t) separate from the design and cultural differences. Everything that was different that they didn’t like was “wrong” and they didn’t understand why (the dutch) haven’t gotten up to speed with the “right” and innately better ways that we Americans have figured out. This was shocking to me, as I revelled in falling into these new sites of navigation, for short trips or long moves, for as long as I can remember. These different languages of being with one another and in spaces and times and practices abound not from quite distinctly different physical sites like my first summer camps, travels to big cities as a child and travels to europe as a teenager, but as well such things abound even in the most local of places (and people).
I remember exploring other people’s houses as a kid, noticing what kind of different food there would be at dinner (spray margarine on spaghetti that my friend would cut (!!!) into smaller inch-length bits; the non authentic italian brand of glass-bottled marinara sauce with bits of meat in it rather than homemade meat balls; when toilet paper is put the wrong way; a messy house in general! I remember my friend had moving boxes in each of the rooms years after they had moved in; the toilet seats with the cushions (ick); tvs in bedrooms, television being watched at times never permissible in my house). What could it be like to take on those bodies, those rituals, those rooms, those schedules? To not care about doing homework or to not go to church on Sundays. To sit in the trunk row of the volvo car rather than the SUV monster.
These childhood exchanges stick hard with me, and of course the differences in the worlds built by each of these incredibly similar groups of middle-class suburbia americana in the late 80s and early 90s is trivial but I still believe, wholly different worlds. The communication between people shaped in these worlds - intimate and not - tend to stay within certain levels of social constructs so people can indeed, communicate. The self channels through varying levels of depth of such parameters so we can be heard, so we can be reflected, so we know we are there. So we can feel and share love. Fine. The idiom that the first year of marriage is the hardest can crassly be attributed to it being in traditional patriarchal structures the first year of establishing a world with someone - your roles, your spaces, your appearances to the external social spaces and your behaviours on the other side of those spaces, your schedules, your food, and so on - to what level these are tied or distant, how the politics will play in how these determinations are shared or not in their systems-making. And then this intertwined with sex, family! Highly explosive grounds.
Training wheels, or forever sublimation, for these kinds of situations come in many forms - simply adopting the most visible and practiced structures as the “right” way of life (i.e., as nearly forced by existing legal and social institutional models, depictions in media, religious/family/work or other social institutions, etc.); self-medicating, retail therapy, bitching to friends, etc.
One can leave these structures in a few ways - some big pillars though are what are typically life-constituting or at least in support of basic life needs - shelter, work, and family/friends/intimate relations. This can also trickle down into things like food (i.e., taking a diet either by choice or force that is different than the typical fair), clothes; anything that enters into or is broadly apart of the social.
Even more broadly, we can say - challenging the commonly accepted structures of a. how one spends ones time (in allocation and activity and function), b. with whom and in what relation, and c. where (geolocation within the context of proximity, the quality and type of site (like, an apartment or house). There are many long-standing formations of opinions and practices, that have made institutional ‘standards.’ I use this in the jazz sense. Certain things generationally, centennially, may shift. Certain things, like jealousy, fear, love, sex, joy, remain.
Communication is the channel (intent) for the expression of something to be understood, in some way. Systems buttress the understanding, and thus, what is more likely to be understood. If an expression is communicated outside of a supporting system, there is a bigger gap for getting lost in - i.e., it is a question - does the receiver want to understand this incoming message, outside of the systems that reassure it is something to be heard?
Inherently, this kind of expression is more difficult to navigate, if one does decide to receive it. The mood in which it is received - i.e., bad, because why did not the expression just conform to the system of expression so I know it is acceptable? (i.e., fear of an other takes shape into judgment of difference). The fibres of reaction here is key. For example, a reaction may be rooted in judgment as shield (fear?), and in willing vulnerability (love?). Likely some percentage of both.
The willing vulnerability is what I am interested in - the willingness to communicate in a yet built site.
In practice, I am trying to understand how to build a site of love with my parents. This is incredibly challenging, considering that the unquestioned site of love for our entire relationship has been the one they determined when they made their own world in 1983, 35ish years ago. It of course evolved, but within the parameters of their determination, with gentle influence of its plebeians (us kids). This is quite a common problem and no doubt one of lifelong intricacy.
As well in practice, I am trying to understand how to be comfortable in having deconstructed or departed from much of the social parameters, and build a world of my own, picking and choosing with varying degrees of choice - whether from a social, political, level or a self level (i.e., learning where I am not flexible on my needs to function in the way I want to). The role of technological affordances in relations plays in here, as I have been intermittently adopting the signing off from my constant interaction with/via internet technology, and being slower in my use of it, which I am still acutely insecure about, yet feel quite good in these spaces.
As well in practice, how to communicate with others and other systems that are different to us and our systems! How to approach, to truly embody, a willingness to vulnerability in knowing that your world is not the world, which ultimately reminds us our mortality, lack of divine purpose, our complete irrelevance, and the utmost uniqueness of the speck of you!
In keeping and making relations with others scattered around schedules and time zones, intentions and desires, the formats of these relations are a practice I am interested in. These spaces signify the compromising of something, a translation not direct. Because of the pervasiveness of technology, this is low-overhead or easy entrance into these spaces. Devices, platforms, internet providers, are buttressing, and butchering, much of expression - but also the range of practice based on material determinations, parameters that may match less in previously traditional terms (reference: when have I used snapchat and when not), is making little buds of worlds of relations: 🤗.
with love,
constant companion🝏