Summer has arrived here. I can tell because spring clothing has stopped being functional. I do not really like air conditioning, but I use it.
Following on a comment by Hattie I had a thought: is the meaning of the sentence “Do not focus on your work, take care of yourself” actually “Do not focus on your work, take care of me?”
A corollary is: how many of the people you think you are collaborating with in a collegial manner are actually competing with you and sabotaging you?
My policy is not to be paranoid, but to be aware. Considering things coldly and impartially, someone is trying to sow paranoia. “I am telling you this as your friend…”.
Mo pas olé pensé à ça-là, ça affreux.*
Axé.
*Yes, that was my version of Louisiana Creole. This language may not be Romance in terms of grammar, I am told.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I tell you this: friends of mine never say things like, I’m your friend, you can trust me! Anyone says something like that to me, I run for the door!
And: I never thought friendship was a prerequisite to being able to work well with someone. (Or that friendship meant being a kind of dumping ground, I might add!)
*
Related, as far as tricky communicative situations go, is the time I was told I was a good listener but a poor communicator. This struck me as off, in part because I recognize it so well from the discourse of men who say one is not expressing one’s wishes clearly when the fact is that they are not taking the clear and repeated expression of these seriously.
Listening is part of communicating, for one thing. For another, I was not given a chance to respond. I would have said that I was having trouble finding words because I knew I would only be given a chance to say one short sentence, and I knew disagreement would be unwelcome, and I knew assent would be destructive to me, so I was struggling to find la phrase juste.
Given the chance to say two sentences I would have said I found the communicative situation difficult because it seemed my interlocutor assumed in me interests, beliefs and values I do not hold and that ze seemed unwilling to recognize this. This was difficult because there was therefore no space for what I might have said, and because I was not sure how to or whether I should play the role in which I felt I was being cast.
*
Also somehow related, and the emerging theme is manipulative patriarchal speech: people who are convinced they are right, so much so that, paradoxically, occasions upon which they realize they are wrong are so cataclysmic that they turn into sessions in which the person extols their rightness in having acknowledged their wrongness.
😉
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/2010/05/views-of-women.html
I would have said I found the communicative situation difficult because it seemed my interlocutor assumed in me interests, beliefs and values I do not hold and that ze seemed unwilling to recognize this.
This is a big one. The other issue is the one of the culturally engendered need (and avenues) for projection, as you can see in the link I posted.
But I think the patriarchal distortions come in on the basis of attributing a false character to women. It is akin to the virgin/whore dichotomy, whereby neither is true, but the person being projected upon can at times seem to be the “opposite” to what they previously seemed, according to the logic of this dichotomy.
So women are perceived, according to the moral dichotomy of Christian civilisation as “good” women — meaning women who will suck it in without complaining — or as “bad”/damaged women. In the second case, these are women deemed to be “shrill” because they speak up for themselves. This is understood as “complaining”. To speak in a non-prescriptive way at all is FELT to be complaining about the patriarchal system, despite the fact that this is FELT by patriarchal thinkers to be a system that is good and just. (So , it is never actually justified for women to “complain” about it — that is to speak in a non-prescriptive way about it.)
So women are not just virgins or whores, they are well-adjusted, good, rationally compliant (although not actually rational) and refined, OR they are whining, complaining, incoherent, mad, bad and sad.
And this dichotomy — this outcome of false representations of women’s characters — is why they are so rarely heard and understood.
I am perhaps dealing with the first woman I ever met who was *actually* structured psychically like a man!
a woman wh0 is structured like a man?
–psychically. –Z
I know exactly what you are saying here, Z. For years I felt as if I was speaking in parentheses. The muttered aside was a speciality of mine, or the quick quip. These are useful skills to me still, sometimes, but now I mostly just stand up and say clearly what I mean and what I want. I even boss people around on occasion, which is kind of new for me.
You know, I think I’d be satisfied sometimes with the muttered aside. If I didn’t get thrown off balance as I sometimes do, I could mutter the aside and have had my say, to myself at least, and not have to spend energy thinking through what happened!
This blog totally comes up to my expectations. I couldn’t demand more.
Thanks – interesting comment – what were you looking for / what are your expectations? I am curious…