Navel Gazing

Let’s Thank the Right People

Stephanie Zvan3 Comments

A couple of my friends have been doing the month of thanks meme on Facebook, posting something for which they are grateful each day of November instead of limiting it to today. I’ve been enjoying it far more than I do most memes, which probably has a lot to do with the kinds of thanks they’re giving.

When you’re doing 30 days of thanks, you can only spend so much time thanking God for, well, you know, everything. You have to get more specific about what you’re thankful for. In turn, that has made them be more specific about regarding to whom they owe that thanks. I’ve enjoyed it not just because it’s non-religious, but also because it seems to have inspired them to stop and thank people who wouldn’t normally be thanked–the people closest to them.

In that spirit, I have a few people to thank today.

Continue reading “Let’s Thank the Right People” →

Let’s Thank the Right People
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Big News Is Too Big

Stephanie Zvan3 Comments

The first time I stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon, my response was, “Yep. That’s big.” Then I promptly slipped on some ice and wrenched my knee. I spent the rest of that brief visit sitting down, slowly doling out peanuts to the ravens. I remember the ravens in a fair amount of detail and have been fascinated with corvidae ever since. The Grand Canyon is still just big.

It isn’t just an animal versus rock thing, either. The Little Colorado River flows through a vertical chasm nearby that gripped me as well. I was impressed by how deep and straight the water has cut through the rock and the narrowness of the channel. It was small, by comparison, but the details captured my imagination.

The Grand Canyon, on the other hand, is simply immense in a way that dwarfs its details. Maybe if I’d had more time and mobility, I could have gotten to know a small piece of it. Maybe then the pressure to have an opinion about the place–and that pressure does exist–could be met with more than a shrug. For now, it simply remains big.

On the morning September 11, 2001, the news changed between the time I got out of the car at work and the time I got to my desk. I listened to the radio long enough to understand that, once again, this was something that was simply big. I could, perhaps, if I listened longer, focus on one small aspect of the whole until it made sense, but the whole was always going to be too large. The details were never going add up to something I would truly understand.

There was a conference room with cable news reception. I didn’t go in. The pictures weren’t going to help, and watching the anchors and guests try to make sense of something that big was only going to make me hate their superficiality.

People drifted out of the room all morning. I don’t know whether they gave up on making it all make sense, or whether they each found their own little details from which to mine meaning. At lunchtime, there were two people left, two I respected for their thoughtfulness. I gently chased them out of there with the suggestion that that much immersion might not be good for them. I suspect they were still trying to find the piece that would make it all make sense.

We haven’t found it yet, nearly ten years later. Those of us who lived through it almost certainly never will. Historians who look back from a distance probably won’t either. Like us, they’ll focus on one detail or another, just as we’ve done with all of these events that are just too big.

In the meantime, however, we have a new event to deal with. In itself, it isn’t very large. A dying man is dead, at the hand of one of the nations he harmed. His influence will not have died with him. But he, himself, is dead, and his death is part of an event that is simply too big for us to handle.

There is, once again, immense pressure to decide how we feel about bin Laden’s death, despite the overwhelming size of the events he set in motion. How we react, each of us, will depend on the details we took away with us in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It was a crime, a tragedy, a political lever, a moment of deep political insecurity, a blow to our national pride, and much more. Our personal reactions now are informed by at least one of those, but I doubt that any of us can be informed by all of them at once.

As it was on September 11, it is time to give ourselves and each other a little break. We’re all behaving appropriately to our understanding of that immense event and those that followed. We’re all behaving inappropriately to someone else’s.

We can’t ever understand the whole of what has happened to us, but maybe, just for a day or two, we can understand that much and let each other be with our personal, emotional, insufficient reactions. Even those of us who have nothing more intelligent to say than, “This is big.”

Big News Is Too Big

Catch-Up

Stephanie Zvan

Oh. Hi.

Let’s just go through a few of the highlights since my last blog post, shall we? Let’s start with that day.

Sunday

  • Having spent the last three weeks in the middle of fall housecleaning, the past two while our main staircase is being finished, I have about an hour’s more work to do before I start my planned pre-Thanksgiving days of relaxation.
  • My mother calls. My grandfather is in the hospital with pneumonia. The nurse isn’t telling her to go visit him right at that moment, but…well, he is 96.
  • I get in about 20 minutes of work before my mother calls again. My brother, who spent the night at our place on Thursday on his way out of town needs a place to stay again that night. He, of course, didn’t mention this on Thursday so I could have planned.
  • I get in about another 10 minutes of work before my husband comes upstairs. He’s just talked to the roommate, who is supposed to be moving out by the end of November. The roommate has just announced that he’s staying through December. Announced.
  • I discover through non-standard means (i.e., not via the roommate) that his girlfriend is staying all week (through Thanksgiving), not just for the weekend.
  • After finishing my cleaning and giving up on the day, I come out of seclusion to discover that the washing machine has exploded, or at least sounds like it. I, of course, have left the laundry out of my cleaning equation, since I usually manage it in the mornings and evenings around work. I identify one pair of clean, work-friendly pants.
  • I go back into seclusion.

Monday

  • The attempt to get the washer repaired does not go well.
  • I work 10-1/2 hours, with multiple deadlines hanging over my head.
  • Once I’ve made it home, I bake the very large batch of banana bread that will use up all the bananas we pulled out of the freezer before all hell broke loose.
  • While the banana bread is baking, I hand wash a load of work clothes in water approximately the temperature of the snow on the ground outside.

Tuesday

  • While I’m at work, my mother calls to let me know my brother had just been arrested. No, really. Oh, and I should make another dish for Thanksgiving, since he won’t be bringing his contribution.
  • I put in another 10+ hour day of racing against deadlines.
  • I don’t remember much else of the day. I can’t guarantee that’s a good sign. Oh, wait. I got a margarita…on the second try, but it was on the way to shopping for washing machines.

Wednesday

  • My mother calls again. I answer, “Now what?” Just another change of plans. They don’t want to keep my brother over the holidays after all.
  • I give up on work early.
  • While I’m washing cranberries in preparation for making relish, the roommate and girlfriend are eating their lunch, thus slightly decreasing the amount of leftovers they had taking up space in the fridge. Then the roommate asks whether he can get into the sink to rinse out his dish. I point out that he doesn’t need to do that if he’s putting it in the dishwasher. Only after he’s out of the kitchen do I realize he’s put it in with the load of clean dishes.
  • Later, the roommate sends me a text message, from within the house, to ask whether it’s okay to use the oven. When I say it is as long as it happens soon, he tells me that’s okay…since he started preheating it before asking.
  • Once again, I remember very little of the day.

Thursday

  • Ah, Thanksgiving. Prep is to start early. However, the roommate and girlfriend manage to be using both the stove and the shower. I get no bacon with my breakfast, and the turkey starts late.
  • Cooking goes fairly smoothly…except for the borosilicate pan that explodes in the oven.
  • The roommate and girlfriend leave five minutes after the first guests arrive and get back fifteen minutes before the last guests leave, thus ensuring that we are not alone once during the day.
  • Otherwise? Not so bad. Having family over is literally the simplest part of the week.

Friday-Now
Yeah, I’m still working on resting and recuperating. The fact that the washer that was supposed to be delivered today not only didn’t show up but also exists in an order status that no one’s ever heard of doesn’t exactly help, but at least I’m mostly caught up at work. Oy.

Catch-Up

Weird

Stephanie Zvan2 Comments

“Did you know that there are people who don’t hold hands when they sleep?”

“Really? Weird.”

“I know. What’s up with that?”

“Or maybe we’re weird.”

“Don’t care.”

“Maybe they’ll think we’re so weird they’ll ostracize us, drive us out of society.”

“Still don’t care. I’d rather hold your hand.”

“Okay, that’s pretty weird. But terribly sweet.”

Weird

Going Emo

Stephanie Zvan13 Comments

You were warned.

Some observations from spending far too much time with myself:

  • Competence seems like a pretty cool, objective thing on which to base your self-image…right up to the point where you can’t do what you’ve been doing. Then it all just sort of falls apart. What was the last thing you accomplished? How long ago was it? How good does that next thing need to be to make up for everything undone?
  • Social conventions are basically worthless when things aren’t going well. The answer to “How are you doing?” is “Good. And you?” It isn’t “Just anemic enough to huff and puff every time I walk up a flight of stairs.” It isn’t “Too wiped out to figure out how to get to see you but too proud to ask for help if you won’t think of it on your own.” It isn’t “Bored out of my skull from sitting here alone day after day. How would you be doing in my place?”
  • Breaking the social conventions isn’t worth it. It just makes more work. It requires reassuring all the friends whose lives have just been shaken up. It requires holding your tongue on things like, “No. I don’t need to see a professional to have my attitude adjusted. I need to stop being reasonably anxious and in pain for a while. Barring that, I need a fucking hamburger and someone who can moderate their conversation to the right degree of challenging. Not that you asked how you could help.”
  • There are some social conventions you just don’t break either way. You don’t get sad because someone else’s happiness is a contrast to your situation. You don’t get angry at people who can’t figure out how to say something while you’re doing the work to keep up a good front. You don’t get envious that someone else is moving ahead with their plans while you’re stuck. You don’t get jealous that people flock to the social butterflies while you hold yourself back from bringing storm clouds. Not publicly.
  • Being able to read people really well is not an advantage here. Yes, I can tell that my illness scares you. Yes, I can tell that you’re fooled by the fact that I gather up all my resources for a public appearance and wonder how sick I can be. Yes, I can tell that your respect for me is based largely on what I accomplish and drops off the same way my self-respect does. Yes, I can tell that you resent the dragging anchor that I’ve become and that I’ve stopped taking care of everybody around me. Yes, I can tell you’re bored. Yes, I can tell you think I’m whining.
  • Being used to being able to read people well isn’t an advantage either, particularly when it comes to ambiguous or incautious statements and very low days. It’s hard enough to shake the certainty of depression, harder still when you can’t tell yourself that feeling that certain is abnormal.
  • Introverts really hate talking about themselves. Illness brings on a self-preoccupation that gets really damned tedious even to the ill. Combining the two is roughly equivalent to turning into one of those “See no evil…” figures. Blinded, deafened and muzzled.

And that is as much of that as I can stand. You may now return to your regular, interesting programming.

Going Emo

Vacation Notes

Stephanie Zvan4 Comments

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon, avoiding the sun and awaiting a wedding. I have one of those underestimating-sun-exposure-due-to-clouds-and-trees sunburns, but life is good otherwise.

  • I’ve made it past the TSA with a minor who isn’t mine and has pins in her arm hidden under a cast. Also with a bottle of narcotics that aren’t prescribed under my name. It’s okay, though. They were in the name of that minor who had just been taken away to have her arm scanned.
  • I’ve been subject to a dramatic reading of the Skymall catalog, which was much funnier than it sounds.
  • I’ve completed two rounds of work on my mystery project and am satisfied it’s ready to go to the next stage. One of those rounds was despite the guy in front of me on the plane deciding his seat didn’t recline far enough, so he had to really lean back into it from time to time.
  • I’ve survived 90F and sunny at the Portland zoo with a teenager operating on one hour of sleep and motion sickness. I have no idea whether she’ll remember the giraffe she was so set on seeing.
  • I’ve managed to get my mother her hotel room key despite the fact that she didn’t turn her cell phone on until she was sitting in my room.
  • I’ve short-circuited a tantrum by said teenager by, instead of arguing about what she needed to do, dripping water on her “napping” self while describing the secret project to my mother and brother. (I never said I was anything like orthodox, just effective.)
  • I’ve aided and abetted saving a very confused fish from asphyxia and seagulls.
  • I’ve survived a muddy, cliffside walk with a teenager who is “too smart to do something dumb enough to get hurt” and who really wanted to show me this cool, off-trail place from which to take a great picture. She survived as well.
  • I’ve aided and abetted saving a banana slug that really wanted to hang out in the middle of the trail.
  • I’ve cleaned enough mud off myself and the teenager to be marginally presentable for an indoor lunch.
  • I’ve avoided asking a server whose great idea it was to serve crab bisque as a do-it-yourself meal: two whole crab legs served in a bowl of cream and tarragon. The task of cracking open crabs is not improved by having them covered in soup.
  • I’ve explained to said teenager which parts of the dead jellyfish she could poke at and which parts could hurt her before she was aware that there were dead jellies on the beach on which she was walking barefoot.
  • I’ve picked up a wedding present and card before the wedding itself. We were snubbed by the person doing gift wrap, probably for being sandy and windswept. I think she was jealous that we’d spent our day at 70F instead of 95F.
  • I’ve been smart enough not to drag my pink skin back out under even cloudy skies.

All in all, pretty good. Now, as long as I can figure out where the wedding is actually being held, we should be all set. Oh, yeah, that and remember the groom’s name…and manage the whole TSA thing again tomorrow…at 6:30….

Vacation Notes

Painful Phone Calls

Stephanie Zvan18 Comments

One of the hardest parts about running a talk radio show at 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning is getting listeners to talk back. If this were a weekday, people would be mostly at work, already caffeinated. If this were a Saturday, slightly more people would be awake, somewhat fewer people would be at church and a lot fewer people would be leaving their radios off to avoid infomercials. Sunday morning is just a tough time.

Given that, one of the ways we measure the success–or lack thereof–of any show is by the number of calls and emails that we get. (Not the only way, of course. PZ doesn’t always get a lot of questions, but his download ratings are some of the highest we see.) Good shows are the ones where we can’t use everything that comes in, and not because of quality or the tendency for questions all to come in at the end of the show. Which they do.

By that measure, this morning’s program was definitely a success. We received six calls and one email. Yes, three of the calls were from the same woman, but only the email was from a Minnesota Atheists member–as far as we can tell. That’s reaching a new audience, part of what the show is supposed to do.

On the other hand, there were three calls from the same woman because she was too angry to let our engineer put her on hold so we could pick her up in the studio. One caller berated us for spreading “traditional medicine propaganda,” and the last caller called after the show was over to yell at the engineer and say he couldn’t believe Air America* would put something like this on the air. (Another thing about a Sunday morning slot is that you can’t buy your engineer a beer after a rough show. Sorry, Matt.)

We had one caller who left a message asking us to talk about the placebo effect and one email mentioning religious objections to vaccination. Aside from that, we only heard from people who were angry.

They had a reason to be angry. They were in pain. The woman who called multiple times had had a sister with cancer. The one who felt we were dealing in propaganda has two children with autism. I don’t know what the last caller’s story was, but I’m sure he had one. Every one of those people had a reason for their anger.

What they didn’t have was a rational reason to be angry at us. Reasons? Yes. Rational reasons? No.

That should have made them easier to deal with, maybe. Easier to shrug and say, “Not my fault. Not my problem.”

Easiest of all, in the short term anyway, would have been to tell them something that made them feel better. That’s what their gurus do. They tell these people that there’s a reason for what’s happening. They tell angry, hurt people that there’s something they can do to fix all this, right here, right now, without having to wait for more studies, more answers. They tell people like our callers that they’re in control–or will be if they can just get through to people like us.

We can’t do that, of course. We have to give the hard answers. We have to tell them there is no simple fix, not yet, maybe never that they’ll see. We have to take away this wall they’ve built around their pain, because it isn’t sound and it hurts people as it falls apart. And we have to make them understand that not letting their pain hurt other people is one of the hardest parts of growing up, but it’s time for them to do that.

No wonder they’re hurt. No wonder they’re angry. We’re asking a lot, and we have only two small things to give in return. Well, truth isn’t small, but it doesn’t look like a lot when you get it in the place of something you really wanted.

The other thing we can give them is their pain. We can acknowledge how they feel and acknowledge that it’s a perfectly reasonable response to their situation. And we can do that before we point out that it’s not a rational response to us. That’s not an easy thing to do when that pain is pointed straight at us with an intent to hurt, but if we’re asking them to be adults despite their difficult circumstances, it’s the least we can do. Isn’t it?

If you want to see it in practice, I recommend listening to the podcast of today’s radio show. PalMD is very good at it. I could be better, but I can practice. After all, just because I told Pal what I wanted us to talk about on the show, that doesn’t mean I can’t learn something from it too.

* The station is an Air America affiliate. We are not Air America programming. These facts calmed the caller down not at all.

Painful Phone Calls

Taking Off the Act

Stephanie Zvan10 Comments

Thursday morning, my iPod was speaking to me. In a half hour walk to work, three songs all talking about the same subject–acting.

Is there anybody in there in this self-inflicted tomb?
If you peel away the layers, is there someone in this room?

Of course, they were all talking about it because I was already thinking about it. From an email I sent earlier in the week:

I’ve never met an actor who wasn’t in character backstage as well as on. They’re just different characters. That’s what makes acting as a profession so simultaneously appealing and appalling.

Successful acting requires that you be someone else for a while. It isn’t enough to speak the lines and to make the gestures called for in the script. We’ve all seen the sort of dreadful productions that result. You don’t have to dive into the excesses of some of the method actors, but you must at least put on the mannerisms–physical and vocal–and the body language of the part.

There’s no way to do this without being affected by it. It calls for an understanding of a fictional character that few people take the time to find. The mannerisms and body language change your emotional state every time they’re rehearsed or performed. Try practicing smiling in front of a mirror until you can put a sincere-looking grin on your face on demand. Then do it again where you can’t see your reflection smiling back at you. You’ll still feel happier for doing it.

Of course, most acting isn’t about being happy.

As an actor, if you’re any good, you end up living little pieces of the lives of all of your characters. You rehearse them in a way you don’t practice being yourself. You explore them and spend time with them in a way that the world tells you is a selfish thing to do on your own. If you act, you have to enjoy being someone else. You don’t have to enjoy being yourself.

I’m a good actor.

No, my love, we can’t be friends
In fact I liked you much better
When you’d just pretend.

The days of declamation and broad emoting are gone from most stages, and the places where they still find homes are mostly in comedy. Even so, characters in modern theater and film are just a little bigger, a little simpler than any real person. Simple is seductive. People like simple.

If you act, it’s all too easy to find the right simple character for any situation. Few and far between are the people who have the time and inclination to get to know you in all your complex, contradictory glory. It’s much easier to figure out what your audience wants and to give them only that. More rewarding too. Fewer fights. More praise.

There are a few problems with this, of course. One is that everyone wants something different of you. An audience of one is very manageable. More than that, and which audience do you serve? Whom do you please, and whom do you disappoint?

Beyond that, few and far between doesn’t mean nonexistent. While you’re performing for the people who want you to be predictable and easily categorized, what happens to the others? They aren’t the sort to appreciate a shallow facade, you know. Can you act a more complex character for them? Can you drop the act entirely, and what’s there when you do?


I’ll dance for you, pose for you
Take off all my clothes for you
Speak your words, sing your song
I’m up for auction, going, gone!

When you’ve gotten used to generating your behavior from the outside, it’s very difficult to relearn how to let it come from inside again. All of the voices in your head are yours, but none of them is you. Almost everything you do has become associated with a character, a person who isn’t you. What’s left for you to build you from?

I don’t know whether it can be done while you’re still acting. I can’t imagine giving up that immediate approving feedback of individual performance while still indulging in the mass approval that is theater, but maybe someone else could do it. My process required misanthropy, solitude and a certain ruthlessness, for which, ironically, acting had prepared me beautifully.

The first step was deciding who was worthy of being my audience and ignoring (hard to do at first) or avoiding (much easier) everyone else. Whom did it please me to please? That doesn’t sound like much progress, but it was, because what it really meant was who pleased me?

It’s a question that took years to answer, and the answer changed drastically over time. This is where the ruthlessness came in. I’ve abandoned or let lapse more friendships than I really care to think about. There are only two things that reconcile me to that. One is that it was necessary. I couldn’t find another way to do what I needed to do. The other is that it was successful. These days, I mostly add friends.

I don’t avoid people much anymore either. Ironically, I’m still acting around the mass of humanity. They’re still never going to appreciate complexity and contradiction, and I’m still giving them what they want. Only now I’m doing it because it’s easier for them. And I certainly don’t do it all the time.

Now I’m willing to stop to think about what it is that I want, how I think, how I feel. Now I’m willing to risk disagreement and disapproval, even (or especially) from the people I give a damn about. I’m willing to be that geek who will stop in the middle of a sentence to try to reconcile the three tangential thoughts that just occurred to me. I’m willing to be awkward and persuasive and flirtatious and serious and sympathetic and argumentative, because all of those are who I am.

No act. Just me. And that feels pretty good.

If you peel away the armor is something underneath
If you look below for hidden treasure underneath another layer
Are you hiding underneath the skin

Taking Off the Act

Rarefied Air

Stephanie Zvan9 Comments

Every once in a while, something comes along to remind me what an atypical life I’ve built for myself. This time it was someone reacting skeptically to PalMD’s statement that he worries every day about balancing work and parenting, ’cause, you know, guys don’t really do that. Um, what? I wanted, as usual when confronting the combination of rudeness and ignorance that can be the internet, to step on the fingers responsible.

So I stepped back instead. Was there any reasonable place for the doubt to have come from?

Yeah, there was. A lot of fathers really do overestimate their contributions to the household because they’re doing more than their fathers did and more than the world tells them they must do. “Equal” parenting, when broken down by what each partner actually does, is often not equal.

So why did I have to step back to remember that? Because in my world, things don’t usually work that way. Really. This is my world:

  • Lots of child-free couples. Some because they don’t like kids. Some for medical reasons. Some because pursuing vocations and avocations at the same time doesn’t leave much time for good parenting. Some because the desire for children doesn’t outweigh the hassles of becoming gay parents.
  • Adults who are unpartnered for various reasons. No parents in this group.
  • Stay-at-home parents of both sexes who decided they’d stay home, not for financial reasons, but to work on their art. They were mostly delusional, at least while the kids were too young for school.
  • Gay parents who by default won’t be breaking things down by stereotyped gender role, because the trash would pile up or they’d starve.
  • Two-career parents who truly co-parent, usually with the help of family located nearby, because otherwise, they wouldn’t get any child-free time to share with each other.
  • A few divorced parents with joint custody.
  • Finally, way out on the periphery, a couple of couples who do things more “traditionally.” Dads who bring home the paycheck while Mom is primary caretaker. Even there, Dad comes home from work at a decent hour and unwinds by playing video games with the kids. Any work that has to be done in the evening is done at home after the kids are in bed, which means Dad won’t be getting credit for face time in the office.

This is my life. These are my friends of my generation. Does this look anything like the rest of the world? No, and I like it that way. I arranged it that way. But it does give me an unusual outlook sometimes.

In the end, I was a lot more gentle with the uncomprehending commenters at denialism blog, because it made me sad to think they don’t live in the same world I do.

But really, y’all are welcome to move here anytime.

Rarefied Air

Explanation Please

Stephanie Zvan5 Comments

I recently overheard an exchange that boiled down to a woman telling a man who was obviously quite close to her, “Oh, the work you do is so important and wonderful, but it’s too complicated for me. I just couldn’t understand it if I tried.”

I wanted to cry. For him. Her I wanted to shake.

How lonely it must be to have someone dear to you tell you that putting your intelligence to good use raises a barrier between you. How lonely to have embraced a vocation they won’t work to understand. To know that if you talk about the ins and outs of what you do, the little things that make it fascinating, challenging work, you’ll be speaking to the air.

She, on the other hand, has no idea what she’s missing.

I wanted to invite him to come over and tell me about his job, and not just because the whole situation tugged at my heart (or because he was smart, articulate and kind of cute). My reaction to finding someone immersed in the esoterica of a field I know nothing about is somewhere between a friendly chat about their day and a job interview combined with taking a life history.

If I were to persuade him to talk, despite the inhibiting presence of his lovely whatever, we’d start with the basics. “Where do you work? What’s your job title? What kind of training/education is required for that?” Then we’d hit the big question: “What do you actually do day to day?”

If I were lucky, I’d get an answer that I didn’t understand. More likely, I’d have to prod a bit for details. I would try very hard not to glare at the whatever at this point, because I’d know the generica I was fighting to be a product of the incurious reactions he receives every day. (Just a note, the genders here are entirely situational. This also happens with them reversed.)

Eventually, though–assuming neither of them decided I was a stalker–he’d hit details that meant nothing to me. That’s when the fun would start.

“What is an XX?”

“How do you do YY?”

“Can you explain how ZZ works?”

You’ve seen the classic maze-solving screensaver, right? The one that draws the maze, sends out a line that randomly takes each turn until it hits a wall, then backs up to the last unchosen branching and picks a new turn over and over until it finds the exit? That’s what this conversation would look like if it were diagrammed. Of course, in this case, each branch would be a new concept or process I needed explained and instead of hitting the wall, I’d gather enough information to understand the next higher explanation.

The conversation would end only when he was dragged off by his whatever or when I had a pretty good picture of what he did do with his day. At no point would I ever say, much less think, that I couldn’t understand what I was being told. If I needed more explanation, I’d just ask.

I really have conversations like this–about people’s jobs, hobbies, PhD projects. As a result, I know a fair amount about things like brewing, systems architecture and administration, the politics of management in industry and academia, fundraising tactics, how to tease apart two very interesting proteins that are widely considered to be the same but may not be, church history, etc.

Am I an expert in any of these things? Oh, no. Not even close. I can’t do any of these things that have been described to me. Deep knowledge and practice are what make an expert, and I’ve acquired neither. All I can do is understand what I’m hearing and ask intelligent questions.

So what do I get out of it? I could say that I get material for writing, which would be partly true. A shallow knowledge of many things can lend richness and realism to a fictional world, as long as the writer understands her limits. I could say that I get the friendship of extremely bright people, which is much more of the story, but still not complete.

The other thing I get out of this is the chance to test myself against a new field, a new idea. I get something the person who says, “I can’t understand that,” will never have.

I get proof, over and over, that I can.

Explanation Please