As I was driving home in the interminable traffic along Sunset Boulevard, I passed the LA Weekly's offices. The building has a kind of handdrawn marquee, reflecting its highminded goals. . .beginning with "Speak Freely". Normally I wouldn't notice it, really, but today, I have been reflecting, in a not so rare bit of more than irritation, at just what bullshit is the idea that we in this world, country, communities or friendship circles can ever speak freely. Pardon. I am endeavoring to speak, freely, with the use of a moderate expletive.
I did interviews today for a job in my office. One of the interviewee's resume piqued a memory from my days in New York. You see, the resume revealed that he had attended a high school at which I had often attended dances, it being a boy's school and mine being a girl's school, co-educational was a carefully orchestrated and chaperoned Friday or Saturday night get together of bad foot work and loud music amid teenage angst. He had attended back in the late sixties, just before my forays to the dances, courtesy of my friend Virginia's judge father, who drove us in cigar smoking silence each and every time. Here I was 3,000 miles and like 40 years from that time, and the man in front of me was here too. I just wanted to share my small joy at the one degree of separation with a complete stranger. He was slightly amused by the coincidence and the interview went on without incident. As we were concluding our day, one of my co-panelists who often paternalistically corrects me when I am either too ebullient or blunt (in her view) or otherwise not sufficiently circumspect, as she implicitly defines it, pointed out that in a management training she and another panelist had attended, my reference to the high school and the implication of "all those years ago" could be interpreted as some form of discrimination, ageism, I guess, because well 40 years ago he was in high school. My mere pointing out of a mutual experience, our respective experience of that high school, was, well, inappropriate, politically incorrect. Ask your questions, and shut the F up, Djinn. Nothing social. Nothing extraneous. A big goose egg of human interaction. By the way, if he is old, so am I, because I was there 40 years ago, too. Like it's a big secret.
Meanwhile, I have learned that I am not allowed, in my supervisorial role, to express disapproval to my staff for deficiencies, for that is, disrespectful. I wish that I had had the guts to tell that to the nuns I had in grammar school when they expressed their disapproval or, harshly, in my view, critiqued my poor handwriting or math skills. I am sure Mother Alphonsus Ligouri would have been touched at my showing her the light. It wasn't said, explicitly, that I am not allowed, of course, but since audiences are given to those who inevitably ask "Can she do this?" or "Can she say this?" , I am slowly becoming hip to the reality of things. Or as one of my own management trainers recently pointed out to me, that we supervisors only have the illusion of control. Actually, we don't have even that. But let me stick with the subject at hand. Speech.
Don't get me started though. These days I would call myself a conservative leaning independent, rather than the nominal Republican I have heretofore been. But to my liberal friends with whom I never bring up politics, but who forever feel the need to say something like "Your President" did this venomous thing or another (btw, does anybody understand that in fact the president doesn't make decisions unilaterally, that he is tempered, hampered by his many advisors, by press, lobbyists, his own party, the other party, the Senate, the House, the Court, those chains and shackles, oh, excuse me, checks and balances of governance?), I am a right winger. Say that I think maybe the War in Iraq and its genesis is maybe a bit more complicated than the sound bytes flung at us day after day, and I am a war monger. So, I don't discuss politics. And, as they say, I don't discuss religion, because so many of those I know are retired Catholics and they are the most lethal and unforgiving lot if you mention you might still believe in it all.
Friendship is tricky too. I have lots of examples, but let me give two. Of course I cannot know the truth of what really happened, but the since the person would not disclose the reason for our sudden lack of commonality, I speculate from the time frame in which it all changed, and the fact that our friendship went south after a nice dinner at Cafe Montana in Santa Monica in which I disputed her position that psychology, which I was studying at the time, was anti-religious. I said what I think, and then shortly thereafter, we drifted apart. When I tried to reconnect, she stopped calling me back. What to think? Because we had not had any major cataclysmic argument and we had shared some of the same religiously related charity work, I could only conclude that my defense of psychology, my faith in both it AND religion, my very thoughts, offend also some, at least one, of the religious. I am pro-life as it happens, as well, and another friend, told me that anyone who wasn't pro-choice, she did not know if she could be friends with. I apparently just can't get it right. Shut the F up, Djinn. All opinions, and all speech welcome, just not yours.
If a friend asks you what you think, or if you think you are close enough to someone to ask or to speak what is truly on your mind because you trust that closeness---cause you been down the road together, say nothing. Don't risk it. Or else lie.
Tonight's cynical view of life.
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