oh, the differences
How S. and I are different, as driven home to me this weekend after a visit with Keita and a visit with S.'s cousins up near Chicago:
1. He assumes the best about people and is genuinely suprised to learn otherwise. I, of course, usually assume that people don't like me and respond accordingly until I have reason to believe otherwise. So I assume an antagonistic stance until I figure out I that don't need to. This means I generally assume the worst. Less room for disappointment, more for surprise.
Number 2 is really just a corollary to number 1 and is most certainly related to gender: I become on-the-verge-of-hostile whenever any kind of sales person tries to talk to me in a store, especially an electronics store. S. talks with them, sharing stories and making friends. I stand there seething, knowing I'm coming off as such a royal bitch--it's the contrast between him and me that does it. But S. has never been a woman being sold in stores like this.
3. S. genuinely likes his family members and wants to spend time with them. It's a way of being that I envy. Sometimes I feel like I've been ripped off, but I'm happy now to spend time with his family. They're fantastic. Every man in his family is as sweet as he is--kind, generous, and assuming the best of people. And it just doesn't work to assume the worst about people like this.
So I'm workin' on it.
Labels: S.
posted by aerobil @ 7:20 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
In response to number 2, which may well be related to gender, though that is not certain, I give you this brief (though overlong for the comments section of any blog, sorry) excerpt from the prologue to _Everything is Miscellaneous_ by David Weinberger, which I only know about because it was EarthWideMoth's blog a while back:
“Customers fall into two buckets,” says Liz McGowan, Staples’ director of visual merchandising. “People who feel that asking for help is a personal failure and those who don’t.” Despite what comedians tell us, the dividing line is not based on gender. “My mother is in the first bucket,” she says. McGowan is data-driven, so she knows the precise volume of the buckets. “Thirty-two percent ask associates. Twenty-four percent use signage. Forty percent already know where things are.” It’s the 60 percent who need help that determine the informational layout of the store. In the Prototype Lab, that’s known as “way-finding,” and it’s where how people think meets the way their bodies deal with space.
http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/
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