When I have something to say, people usually listen. This isn’t by right or reason: I owe a lot of speaking time to culture privilege, opportunity, and an excess of initiative. I was a teenager when I first noticed how readily my words were accepted as authoritative. After enough instances of others being lead astray by taking my impressions as fact, I realised that I needed to be clear about what I knew and what I “figured”. That was followed by an awkward period of sentences saturated (and often burst) by qualifying phrases.

With experience, I’ve worked out better ways of keeping my claims in check but under the interrogation lamp, I would have to admit that I get credited with knowing more than that for which I can provide references. Of course, people rarely ask and that is what has me worried. I’m not out there making stuff up all the time or lying to peoples’ faces; there is usually some reasoning to fall back on. But still, why is it that I am rarely questioned (directly) when my words try to invite scepticism?

A prof gave me a clue following a presentation for which I was underprepared. He suggested that he trusted my research because I confidently voiced claims about what other people thought. Pretending to know the minds of others is a dangerous game, but it’s one I can’t stop playing. For all that I can pass as logical math girl, most of my analytical experience comes from trying to understand people and how they interact. This means a lot of my cognitive metaphors for strength of argument or association include a human face, posture or tone of voice. A new fact has a much better chance at staying in my head if I can append an impression of how people feel about it, and when I am explaining something on the fly, I often share both kinds of information.

Lucky for me, a lot of people like a sprinkling of emotional references on top of an otherwise dry discussion of time series. Humans, as a species, seem to remember socially-weighted data preferentially. Using a power-dynamics metaphor in  a presentation is not a bad things, nor is mentioning the humanity of those who generated the relevant information. Instead, the danger lies in the accuracy of these potentially subjective details and the authority it may bring to the speaker. I may be quick to read inter-human dynamics in research papers, but facility does not ensure accuracy (who hasn’t gone from fuming indignation to sheepishly agreement on a second reading? ) And if listeners are more trusting of socially charged statements, taking it to be a sign of intimacy with the topic, this may prevent proper scrutiny of ideas being shared.

I’m not inclined to desiccate my speech of feeling; it would probably be more painful than my accuracy binge of the late nineties. Nor am I likely to stop thinking in social terms. I guess the best I can do is take some more care with the statements exiting my mouth and stay conscious of how they reflect on me as well as the subject. Honestly, I don’t want any extra authority; I’ve got more than my fair share of speaking rights as is.

Every once and a while (OK, whenever I have a crushing pile of reading and/or writing to do) the question of my potential reading disability comes to mind. Besides the time and money commitement to get tested, I am still not convinced I should. What would a diagnosis mean besides an trim little label to explain some of my oddities? Do I need a label? What if I don’t even qualify? In these busy times, the effort and the uncertainty undermine curiousity and other intentions.

Despite not getting tested, I keep a mental list of all the reasons I think I might be diagnosable. Some of them are fun, like being able to read backwards and upside down and understand knots, others less so, like regularly misspelling common words (I hate adverbs and vowels and english). Today I noticed another reason for my love of taking notes on construction paper. Usually I attribute this habit to the haptics of ball point on loosely packed fibers, but using non-white paper is a common trick to help (some) dyslexics read printed instructions, and it’s true that I have preferences for some colours over others.

The trouble now is the same as the trouble back in high school, when my guidance councillor refused to consider having me tested for learning disabilities. If I do have some kind of documentable “abnormality”, it hasn’t been holding me back enough to make many people worry. Maybe I have to struggle more with some things but other stuff is a breeze; everyone has their challenges so why should mine get special accommodations? When my motivation is high, I do read and write, enough to get me through nine years of post secondary education and counting, so I really shouldn’t complain.

For all that I don’t know if it’s actually a legitimate label, I have sometimes used dyslexia as an excuse. At least I include the caveat of “untested” before a slew of reasons why I interpret some problem to be connected to my apparent sequential processing deficiency. I remember my panic before my last musicianship exam, when I still couldn’t reliably differentiate melodic whole steps and half steps within key. At that point, it was hard to tell whether the problem was my brain or just a lack of practice, though having gotten through musicianship 1 through 5 without solving the issue suggests something fishy. My teacher listened to my fears and suspicions, nodded sympathetically, and in the end I did OK, so that wave of worry passed too.

Maybe I’ll find some convincing arguments about getting tested online somewhere, but really, I should just get back to my readings and finish pulling together references for Thursday’s presentation. Looks like this is being put off yet again for the next season of overwhelming work.

If academia were to collapse one day, my satisfaction in life would turn more fully to making food. I love eating, don’t get me wrong, but making is where the fun is had. I might also fix bikes on the side for as long as pavement was also viable.

I feel better having a contingency plan, in case of revolution.

I’m listening to the Stars on CBC’s Concert’s on Demand, from a show at Metropolis over a year ago. They are a great band, and I enjoy much of the one album I own In our Bedroom After the War. So why am I not totally rocking out from this streaming experience? Well, cuz live performances are full of little distracting things.

First off, I know how the music can go, so the deviations in vocal lines, and the thinning of the instrumental lines are not adding to the intensity of the experience. Similarly, live performances, even from a pro group, are not as tight as what can be produced in studio. Not every song is going to be a together as we might be used to.

And then there are there are the recording particularities–the performance venue acoustics, the crowd noises and the messy mixing that is so hard to avoid in live performances.

As I sit the library working on homework, this recording of a live show isn’t as enjoyable as the album versions had been. But I bet that had I been at the show, all of these little differences would not have been a problem. Lots of performers know how a live crowd can get into music that would never work if listened to off site. There are genres of music that really work live but only work live. What’s the big difference? I figure it is mostly due to immersion.

Consider your last show and all the effort to help you focus on the art being performed. The lights are turned down, except for the stage, to help you ignore the people around you, the sound is turned up so you can’t avoid the audio, and so that it masks the aural cues of other again. Add to that the information gleaned from watching the music being made, and you’ve got quite a lot to help you keep tuned into what is going on. But that’s not all: when you go to a show you’ve prepared yourself for the experience. You’ve signed up to play along and get into it for considerable amount of time, and for most people, or at least most Canadians, you also have to respect for those sharing the concert experience by staying inline with acceptable concert behaviour. With all of these external and internal reasons to be into the music of a live show, deviations in performance are not nearly so disturbing. In fact, for the most part, they are easily explained by the information that doesn’t make it into the audio archive.

Of course, with a little time, we can adapt to a lot of the weirdness. By Midnight Coward, I’ve been successfully carried away by this compromised copy of the show.