All posts in category communication

quiet person day

Today (i.e. whatever day you’re reading this) is the day when we celebrate the quiet person. The quiet person among us is often overlooked and even scorned. This occurs for many reasons, all of which are rooted in the very nature of being quiet. Quietness can be interpreted as a supernatural state. This has caused problems for certain quiet people. Back in the day, the quiet person was often suspected of witchcraft and either burned or crushed to death under large boulders. Throughout history, quiet people have been perceived as oracles, goddesses, world-creators, world-destroyers, saints, sinners, aliens, demons, angels, lunatics, et cetera. An urge to fear the quiet person presents itself. The quiet person rarely speaks unless spoken to. What is going on in their heads. How menacing. Some people think this means the quiet person is a snob. In fact, often a quiet person will open up like a rare flower (e.g., an orchid) when spoken to. Or the quiet person will simply wilt into a pile of rotting organic matter. You’ll never know which unless you try.

Some people think the quiet person has no opinions, but get that person alone and look out! You will not believe the endless stream of words flowing forth from the quiet person. You may wish you had never engaged the quiet person in conversation. At times during this ‘conversation’, it may seem like the quiet person has been possessed by some manic force. When will this person ever shut up, you may find yourself wondering, I can’t get a word in edgewise. However, the quiet person is usually smart and insightful (if you have the right decoder ring), leading you instead to wish you’d not previously overlooked this person. In fact, you may wish you could bottle the quiet person’s wisdom and keep it with you at all times, so that you could take it out when needed and breathe deeply of its essence. Too bad for you that is not possible (yet). Besides, that’s just being greedy! It’s not your place to package the quiet person into a commodity to be bought and sold on the open marketplace, you capitalist bastard. The quiet person will resist the tyranny of your economic systems!

Unfortunately, the quiet person can be perceived as ‘creepy’ or ‘weird’ due to an inherent tendency to hang back and observe instead of participate in whatever inane activity the non-quiet people are currently engaged in. This is blatant discrimination. Quiet people are not all serial killers. It’s unfortunate that the description ‘seemed nice, kind of quiet, kept to her/himself‘ can apply to both sociopaths and non-murderous quiet people. Being quiet carries a heavy stigma, whether the loudmouths among us realize it or not. So step off, fools.

To help celebrate this important day, here are a few helpful suggestions on how to honor the quiet people in your life:

1. Leave them alone. (Can’t go wrong with this one, folks.)

2. Smile and nod at them in tacit approval of their right to remain silent.

3. Refrain from ‘volunteering’ them for public speaking.

4. Do not suggest that they ‘mingle’. They’re leaning against that wall for a reason.

5. Excuse them from any ‘icebreakers’ or other forms of forced socializing (see #4 above).

6. Learn to read minds so that they are not forced to articulate their thoughts.

7. Stop asking them to speak up all the time. Instead consider buying yourself hearing aids.

8. Engage in a ‘not-talking’ contest with them. (And don’t be a sore loser, chatterbox.)

9. Invite them to a mime performance.

10. Do not assume their quietness equates to a dislike for you.

3 Comments

by sean on December 5, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in common sense, communication, nothing, pointless, quiet, quiet people, rapid-fire litmus tests for qualities in a human being, silence can be loud or quiet, socializing, thursday is my salvation, where are all the decoder rings

Posted by sean on December 5, 2013

https://sd-stewart.com/2013/12/05/quiet-person-day/

from the amalgamator’s observatory

In the city summer after the trashmen have driven off with the week’s waste, a trailing fetid odor stagnates mid-street. I ride through the rank air and it feels so oddly cool and clean. A young man asks if it will rain today and I shrug toward the dark clouds moving towards us from the south. A neighbor stares through me from behind dark glasses and I wonder why, when before she used to say hello. I believe things shifted when she bleached her hair. Perhaps she bleached out more than pigment. In the close quarters of rowhouse life, we are farther apart than in the rural countryside where being a neighbor means more than someone to avoid eye contact with. There it means sharing and helping, a way of life. I like my space and freedom from the noise of others, but I prefer a friendly understanding to rude avoidance. What if, like Bartleby, we all preferred not to. That said, I have my aloof days. I do have those.

And so…summer’s confluence of days spreads farther into time’s watershed, like tiny feeder streams losing their autonomy. Warm water mixes with cool and thus blended seeps through me. I am a slow cracked flagon, never empty, never full. Plagued by seeing all the wrong things, agreeing to mistakes made in advance. Orchestrating release of the next batch of tics, twitches, compulsions to soothe and smooth. Periods of mania descending to flatline. Elaborating on the never happening.

But wait! It’s never just the weather, is it. Isn’t it. Yes and no. This is getting repetitive. Instead let’s go word diving. It’s like pearl diving, but with words, and less dangerous. Fun fact: the average university-educated native English speaker’s receptive vocabulary size is around 20,000 word families (a word family is a base word and its inflected forms and derivations). Receptive size refers to the number of words recognized while listening and reading. Productive size refers to the number of words used in speaking and writing, and is often understood to be half the receptive size. To put this in perspective, the OED defines roughly 600,000 words. So dive deep, the bottom is farther away than you might think.

4 Comments

by sean on July 31, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in breathing rights, city life, communication, existence, human behavior, ignotum per ignotius, life, parts of the whole, philosophastering, restlessness, summer, time, words

Posted by sean on July 31, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/07/31/from-the-amalgamators-observatory/

observing a person

Reviewing web analytics can be fun. One recent visitor to my site arrived there via a search for “observing a person.” I tried replicating this search in a few search engines and did not come upon my site, but perhaps this searcher traveled much deeper into the results than I did. Regardless, it made me think about how we humans observe each other. And whether some of us do at all. I was recently talking to a friend who said her OCD tendencies allow her to immediately notice changes in her environment. This extends to people, too, of course. New haircuts are duly noted, as are unusual clothing items. I, too, closely observe the people around me, although depending on my relationship to them, I may not comment on any changes in their appearance. Awkward situations for me arise when I recognize someone but I can’t tell if they recognize me. Do I comment on this? Do I say I believe we’ve met? Or, I’ve noticed you standing outside my building in the early afternoon every day for the past 5 years? It really depends on the situation. The most awkward situations are when I’m positive that I’ve had interactions with a person and yet the person shows no indication of recognition toward me. Is it possible this person really doesn’t recognize or remember me? It boggles my mind but I suppose it can be true. What also confuses me is when there is no sign of recognition until you bring up a previous encounter. And then the person is like, “Oh, yeah, you’re so-and-so. I remember.” Is the person lying? Or just didn’t want to acknowledge me until I initiated it? I don’t get it. I guess I am just a bit obsessed with what is going on in other people’s brains. Are they observing other people as closely as I am, but just not mentioning it? Are they completely clueless and walking around in a total fog? What do you notice first about a person? Does it depend on whether it’s a man or a woman? What warrants a comment, and in what circumstances? Am I just crazy for thinking about stuff like this? Please advise.

5 Comments

by sean on February 1, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in communication, human behavior, human nature, insane humans, observation, obsessiveness, online searching

Posted by sean on February 1, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/02/01/observing-a-person/