Gave a presentation to 116 or 170 or something people yesterday…It was a weird experience. I think it went fine. Nobody really listened to what I had to say and I wasn’t given enough time even to say the basic things I set out to say but—well, if they really want to know they can read the article. Which they certainly will not.
May 30 2020
I can’t decide if this is a funny post or not. It is, in that gallows humor middle-early pandemic kind of way. It’s obvious in the writing that I’m still adjusting to Zoom life, from the presenter’s point of view. I’d been teaching on Zoom for a number of weeks by then (although was I doing a lot asynchronously? I think so. But it’s a massive blur. It was a mess). Anyway, “It was a weird experience” does kind of just understate the thing while capturing that specific experience which would have felt like such a nerve-wracking triumph in ‘normal’ circumstances.
The other thing I’m struck by is how certain I am about my perception that whatever work I have done there–the presentation to a large number of Zoom logins/people, the article itself in a peer-reviewed journal that led to the presentation to begin with–doesn’t matter much. This perception is pretty negative, and it isn’t coming from anywhere more than myself. It’s that old ugly double-edged narrative I walk around with: the way I attribute anything I do well or anything that goes smoothly is to unearned privilege and natural talent and idiot luck, while conversely all that goes poorly or is a struggle or that is thwarted by circumstances beyond your control in fact failed purely because of your own deficiencies: a lack of hard work, sloth and laziness, squandering of the aforementioned privileges and talents. Talk about lose-lose.
It’s also, probably, instructive in terms of what kind of work you want to be doing going forward, if you’ve got 20-25 years left of good work. Spend it doing the work you want to, not things that may feel like they don’t matter.
Here I think of another novel Zoom environment, a short essay I wrote in elegy of my aunt, which I read last July. It was a brutally hot day, and the service was right in the middle of it. Right up til minutes beforehand, there were guys blasting music outside our ground floor apartment. Mercifully, they stopped as the service started and moved on when it was my turn to unmute and speak. But because of the format, because I was reading off a screen–and, probably, because I knew I couldn’t handle watching people’s reactions–I had no idea what kind of reaction there was. My cousin DMd me to say ‘that was a nice story’ and my aunt, the minister, who spoke just after, called it ‘poetic’ (she’s the one who’d gotten me Langston Hughes’ Collected Poems for Christmas one year.
Anyway, after more than a year of ‘weird experiences,’ it’s nice maybe to start making sense of them, to start finding ways to connect to people across these stupid screens, and to make our technology work for us to do the things we want to get done. All of that i’s a work in progress, and, to the point above about listening, it’s a conversation.
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