Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: rudeness

  • damn straight

    I went on a ten-day meditation retreat & on the last day, made an appointment to see the Teacher. The capital letter was visible in the way he held himself. “I need to leave.” He inclined his head from the dais. “No, you really need to stay.” “Thank you,” I said, “but I really need to leave.”

    He told me, “I can’t let you leave because we have a duty of care, it’s like a father releasing his child into the world… be terrible if you met with some kind of accident.”

    Threats? “I think I’ll be ok,” I said, “thank you but I want to go.”

    Then he tried, “Well if you leave now, it will be without my approval.” By now I was annoyed. “Well, fortunately I have my *own* approval. May I have my car keys & wallet back please.”

    “I want you to know that if you leave early, without completing the course, we cannot accept any dana (donation) from you. And that would be a shame because you have had the benefit of all these good teachings, the accommodation, all this lovely vegetarian food….”

    I stared. Vague threats and now blackmail? What kind of shonky operation was this? I tried once more to reach him, or at least make explicit what was happening. “Well,” I said, “if you won’t give me your goodwill… I give you *my* goodwill. Thank you for the teachings and the lovely food, I have learned a lot and I really appreciate it.” He inclined his head and dismissed me without a word, like a beauty queen.

    On the way home I stopped at a swanky resort and bought myself a colourful bracelet of carved wood and a five-dollar coffee. As I sat there drinking coffee off a leather coaster on a white marble table I realized from the courtesy of the cute waiter that my messy plaits and op-shop batik muumuu resembled, in fact, resort wear. On the headland as I joined the highway a huge water tower stood embracing itself like the concrete Jesus who looks down on Rio de Janeiro. The total meditation time of the retreat was around 160 hours.

  • mansplendour

    I was working in a cafe, head down, muttering the words aloud under my breath as I forged down the page writing for hours. The man next to me started to take an interest. I was unwilling to give over my concentration to him but gradually angled my screen away to avert his possessive interest, shaded the words with my hand, made it clear I was busy and it was none of his business.

    Some men cannot bear to be shown they have no influence in some woman’s life.

    As soon as his companion got up to go to the bathroom this man spoke to me. Loud and assured, in German. “Something something astonishing you are able to concentrate in here” – a pure ruse to get my attention, as by speaking of this concentration he hoped to dispel it. When I still didn’t look up but went on chasing the verge of the idea which 20 seconds later broke over me like a wave and transformed my expectations for the writing I was working on, he was visibly, audibly miffed.

    It reminded me of a man in Melbourne I had met only because he came to stand alongside me as I sat at the bar in an overfull restaurant, filling rapid pages with my thoughts. He stood there for a while, as I realised later, and when I didn’t react he actually passed a hand between my face and my page. This felt like someone had reached their big hand inside my head and stirred it round. I reared back. “What?” Where’s the fire?

    This man was smiling, jovial, his hands back in his pockets. He rocked on his heels a little. “I was just wondering. Writing in here – don’t you find it difficult to concentrate?”

    All the responses I could have made buzzed on my tongue like flies. But he was blind to his blindness and deaf to his own noise. This entitlement is also of course where mansplaining, manspreading, street harassment and rape come from.

  • bullying

    On the bridge I pass two young women pushing prams walking with a guy chugging beer. They have their responsibilities, he has his beer. He is much larger than his baby mama, and in order that he can burp, twice, deliberately, right in her face, he has to crouch. Her head is down, she keeps pushing, and that is what makes me want to learn how to say in German: “You are in an abusive relationship.”

  • shopgirl

    Tonight I walked into a Chinese restaurant alone and was seated at a tiny table in the centre of the crowded room. The smaller tables were set out in pairs running the length of the long restaurant; the gap between my table and the couple next door was about four inches. Idly I eavesdropped on their conversation, noticing how he invariably talked and she invariably supplied back-up: Mmm-hmm, yep, I know what you mean. Oh, my. Well, that’s fascinating! Good for you.

    When their meal was done and my meal had arrived the man picked up his unused chopsticks. He had eaten his dinner with spoon and fork and now wanted to know: Sind diese zum Mitnehmen? Are we supposed to take these home with us? His companion, who was older and had a wise, patient face though she had sat unmoved through his several recitations of what sounded like mind-numbing generalisations and prejudice (“they were obviously gay, or had spent time in prison, ha ha”) said, rather gently, “I think some people use them to eat with.” Some people like the woman at the next table, for example. He tipped the long paper bag to let the bright lacquered chopsticks slide into his hand. Playfully he mimed for her their various uses: scratching his scalp with a single chopstick, tucking it behind his ear like a newspaper man of the 1920s, trapping a long moustache under his nostrils by scrunching his upper lip. After that he bunched the two chopsticks together and slid them carefully back into their paper sachet and laid it back on the napkin on his untouched side plate.

    I felt my face squinch into an expression of disgust. The woman was so startled she broke the fourth wall. “What?”

    I said, spreading my hands, “Well – if you put those back into their case, they’re going to hand them on to the next customer.”

    The man looked blank. “And?” he said.

    I gasped a sort of soundless bark of laughter. “And, well you’ve just stuck them in your hair and put them behind your ear and… it’s not very nice, don’t you think?”

    He was so mortified he stood up instantly and began fumbling for his coat. He must have been trembling because it took him a long time to work his arms into the sleeves. For many minutes he stood there patting his pockets, clapping himself up the chest and back down and round the backs of his hips with two spread hands. His companion didn’t move and none of us looked at each other. I got on with my dinner and some time later the man reappeared, smelling of tobacco smoke, and slid into his chair beside me as though no time at all had passed. He began once again describing the world to her and she consented, nodding, agreeing, supporting. He slid the chopsticks out from their paper case and set them side by side in front of him. When I got up to leave I said, Wiedersehen, and got a nod from the listening woman but no acknowledgement from the crumpled, authoritative man.

  • dentist, draftmaker, drill seargeant

    Whenever people ask, So do you make a living from your writing, I feel obscurely coal-hauled, if not outright keel-hauled. Does anyone ask this question of an architect, a dentist? It’s so personal and somehow lip-smackingly censorious. I hear behind it two subtext questions: 2: “So. Is your writing any good?” and 3: “And am I subsidizing it?”

    The hundreds of times I have been asked, “So: do you make a living from it?” the question has never once been accompanied by, “Ah! Is your writing for sale? Where can I buy some?” But I answer the spoken and the unspoken questions either to myself or, if asked rudely enough, out loud: 1: No. 2: Yes. 3: No, so you’re not my employer, so you can put those eyebrows down.

  • tall

    The other day we found a bookstore which has a cafe in it. These are little paradices, or is it paradie. What a sweet cool feeling to leave behind the clamour of the street and let the doors close on a spacious room whose wall to wall shelving is interrupted only by a serving counter, an espresso machine, a stack of cups.

    We separated and began foraging round the overfull shelves like fish nibbling at the walls of a fish tank. I pounced on exactly the book I wanted, Alan Bennett’s diary extracts and essays; he carried to the table a small pyramid of Marshall McLuhans. Our coffee arrived. We began to read. The older couple at the next table got up and came past us on their way to the counter. The man, a bluff, rural Queenslander type, addressed me across my companion’s back. “So. How tall IS he?”

    I said, “He’s right here. Why don’t you ask him yourself, if you want to know. Don’t you think it’s rude to talk across somebody about them, without addressing them directly?”

    He was hurt. “I just noticed as he was wandering round the shop. I kept wondering, how tall is that bloke.”

    I put my hand on my companion’s beautiful shoulder. He closed his book. “Imagine he gets asked that question a lot. Imagine we both do. Maybe it feels dehumanising to constantly be asked about something you can’t do anything about. I get asked it, too.”

    His wife said, “Our daughter’s tall.”

    I said, “Well, then, she will know what it feels like. It’s amazing how people feel entitled to ask that question when we are not even in conversation, we haven’t even spoken. I’ve even had people ask me my height, and then refuse to give their own – as though mine were some kind of freakish public statistic but theirs is personal information.”

    “Our daughter’s six foot two,” she said, gamely. “Me too,” I said. Her husband said, across me, “Seven feet?”

    “Nearly,” said the Marshall McLuhan fan.

    “He’s about six foot eight,” I said. A series of fresh questions ran through my head: How old are you? How much do you weigh? Have you measured that beer belly, what’s its circumference? But the poor man was labouring so hard to restore the goodwill he imagined he’d lost, was so awkward in his warm-heartedness, that I didn’t want to make the point because clearly he would think I was being hurtful, he wouldn’t get it, he would perhaps even not have the resources for self-expression and processing his emotions that some of us have worked hard for, and I didn’t want to leave him with an insect sting all the rest of the long hot trafficky afternoon. The only thing I feel certain of in life is this: you don’t gain ground by hurting the people who have hurt you.

  • bigness

    bigness

    Deciding not to put up with the height shite any longer has been inneresting. 18 months’ Northern Europe offered a break, I suppose, from the constant commentary that has been part of my life uninvited since I was 11 or 12 and now I see it so sharply and can’t stand it anymore. It’s not so cruel I think as the more dangerous kinds of discrimination and prejudice people encounter, for example on the basis of race. But its essence is the same. You are different to me; what I am is the norm; that gives me the right to comment uninvited and pass judgement on your qualities that are not behavioural, are simply genetic, that exclude you and you can do nothing about.

    “How’s the weather up there?” reminds me that to some it’s surprising to realise we are both living in the same shared world. “You are both too tall!” as the girl at the fruit shop blurted this afternoon invites only one answer, “Too tall for what?” and it’s simply not convincing when she smiles encouragingly, comfortingly, and assures me, “Good! I meant it’s good!” No, you didn’t. Any more than the oft-repeated “Jeez, you’re a big girl! How tall are you?” is persuasive when followed with, “No, no, it’s a compliment!” I get that great height brings with it presumptions of power and influence, particularly for people who are still responding, in their hearts, every time they look up at someone, the same way they felt when they were tiny and everyone taller than them was a teacher or parent or adult and thus had mysterious power and authority over them. But the compliment, if there is one, is something like, “You are enjoying an unearned advantage, you have a natural wealth that I don’t share in, I am envious, your life must be somehow easier and more pleasurable because of it and I imagine you coasting into things I have to work for….”… “You are different from me, I resent that.”

    I can’t imagine tackling some stranger with their back turned to me on the bus with a question like, “Jeez, you’re a big girl, I’m not sure I’ve really ever seen a girl as big as you…. How much DO you weigh?” And then persisting when they say they’d rather not say, with “Oh, no – it’s a compliment.” I learn a little something about our rudeness to each other every week of adulthood. And strangely I have no regrets about not getting to know the very short, very bald guy who came up to me on the dance floor when I was all lissom and loose and had forgotten my height, weight, age, address, ambitions, and day job and only the sweat held me down beneath the floating plastic ceiling of the music and smiled greasily and said, like he was making me an offer, “I’d like to climb you.”

     

  • I’ve been playing this music for many years

    I’ve been playing this music for many years

    Today I was walking by the river when a man accosted me for directions. His tone was accusing and he didn’t say excuse me or thank you. He was carrying a crumpled green flyer, and pointed. “Do you know This Street?”

    I turned to show him the sign. “That’s this street right here.” He frowned. “But I need the church on the corner of That Street.” I pointed. “Could it be…. this church right here?” We were standing right next to it. A leafless, skeletal tree waved its shadow over us, helpfully: or would have, had there been any sun.

    “You don’t understand,” he said, “this is very important to me. I’ve been playing this music for many years.” That’s right, he had a guitar over his shoulder. “Well,” I said, beginning to suppress a smile, “I’m pretty sure this is the place. What other church is there, on the corner of This Street and That Street, by the river?”

    Why does one pity selfish people? I guess it’s because they are innocent, and seem helpless. He pushed the flyer at me. “You should come to the concert. On Saturday.” I said, “Sorry, I can’t on Saturday. But good luck!” But my last words, possibly all my words, were wasted. He had turned away, sighing, “Yeah… well…” and was blundering into the churchyard, trailing his self-absorption like a long, dragging skirt made from stockings filled with bunched-up wet newspapers.

    H2O HoL I've been playing this music