One of Those Talks
<<2003-02-08 - 3:57 a.m.>>

And I sat there with tears running down my face looking straight ahead and talking and trying not to weep.

We got to the thing about the reparations discussion, whereupon they both staunchly avowed their hatred for talking about politics. Kara talked about how she just hates to argue, hates the adversarial nature that political discussions can take on, and Miriam talked about how it's just all so stressful.

I tried to explain. I tried to explain that "politics" doesn't mean what they think it does, that politics is not just whether you vote or how you vote or if you watch the State of the Union, but whether you volunteer and where and why, and if you read a newspaper or a magazine, if you care about the labor practices of the companies you support, if you can discuss filesharing intelligently, and how you feel about your body.

It didn't work.

And Kara started to cry and said that I was arguing with her and that she didn't feel understood and so I, calmly and reasonably, said to myself, okay, let's give this a try and listened, and she clearly has some very painful memories of a particular political discussion, wherein someone used the guise of politics to rip her to shreds, and yes, I can understand the stain. But I can't understand her unwillingness to listen to me. She got all skeptical afterwards when I asked her if she thought that I understood, but then when I asked her if she understood where I was coming from, she just told me again about how I just offered a semantic argument for expanding the definition of politics.

And so I sat there and felt angry and not understood, trying to make words come out of my mouth, and I sort of was about to, and—

Rowen came home.

Pause. Chatter. Rowen goes to bed. Kara and Miriam commence discussion about some comic. I sit silently, feeling angry and not understood.

Finally Kara asked what was going on with me, if I felt like our conversation had been cut short, and I responded in the emphatic affirmative, and I proceed to carefully pick my way through the comment that I feel like maybe she didn't really listen to me, and that's not really fair, and I start in with not a discussion of why political involvement and awareness and articulation are positive and necessary, but about how I grew up feeling like the only level on which I could reach my father was an intellectual one.

And that's certainly true, but it wasn't really what I wanted to say. I suppose that it was more reasonable than what I really wanted to say. But still.

I think she grasped that one a little better, but she looked angry or sad or something and wouldn't talk about it, and I was paranoid and asking her if she was okay, and finally we changed the subject. We talked about her friend Rachel and I explained how one can not trust people and yet be a faithful idealist at the same time.

Then she said she wanted someone to read to her, and I, ever apologetic, volunteered, and she went and got me The Fountainhead and just as I was getting excited Miriam said that she'd be happy to hear the original book that Kara had wanted to read out loud, the first in a series of fantasy novels in which I really wasn't interested, but I played along and curled on the couch while Kara read out loud.

When I was leaving to come back to my dorm I bent over Kara and hugged her and she held onto my arm and we squeezed each other's hands and I left and when I got back here there was an email saying that she's not angry, that she just isn't finished processing.

And (the very last one) that is all.

I am all worn out and feel like I should feel different or the same and feel neither.

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