Blood from a stone

Let's say you and I are walking down the sidewalk and we glance at the same fire hydrant. We agree that the color of the fire hydrant is red, because we are having an extremely boring conversation. How do I know that you and I are seeing the same color? What if you're actually seeing the color that I would call blue, and you're just calling the fire hydrant "red" because that's the word you were taught to associate with that shade? 

Children and potheads aren't the only ones who find this fascinating. Nerds who study consciousness professionally think about this conundrum all the time, and they call it "the qualia problem." (Qualia being nerdspeak for "all that subjective stuff that defines what it's like to be in your own mind.") Qualia is a "problem" because we all have our own mind-worlds and none of us can access anyone else's. Also, we still have no idea what qualia, like, is, scientifically speaking.

It feels pretty safe to assume that most of us have roughly the same mind-worlds, to the extent that we can agree that red is red and a rose is a rose is a rose. If we didn't, society would be impossible and the world would be a Don Hertzfeldt cartoon. 

But it's also pretty clear that none of us have exactly the same mind-world, and no one can ever verify what it's like to inhabit someone else's universe. And that creates all kinds of excitement and trouble.

Aside from the color thing, this topic tends to come up a lot in discussions of pain. Let's say I stub my toe and start swearing and crying and hopping around. You stub your toe, wince mildly, and keep walking. Did you feel the same thing I did, only you controlled your response? (I think this tends to be what people mean when they claim to have a high pain tolerance: "I felt exactly what you felt, but I managed not to be a big weenie about it.") Or did you actually feel less pain than I did from the same injury? Or is it a combination of both?

Thanks to decades of tireless research, the aforementioned nerds have made a lot of progress in figuring out ways to map out where and how our qualia overlap or don't. But the core mystery of it all is still there, smirking like the Cheshire Cat, refusing scientific explanation.

At base, the qualia problem is why we have so much trouble establishing what's "normal," experientially speaking, and why conceptions of normalcy are so prone to change. None of us have any idea how our minds or reactions compare to anyone else's. We're forced to just, like, poll each other, and build our lives on the results of the polls, all the while fending off the suspicion that someone might be skewing the survey. When it comes to human experience and behavior, "normal" just becomes another word for "qualia we think most of us roughly share, probably, most of the time." 

We tend to assume that our experiences fall into the realm of normal until we're confronted with evidence that suggests otherwise (like grades, or diagnoses, or via Nelson-Muntz-type mockery). Theoretically, this is fine, because "normal" is just a label, neither good nor bad in its own right. It's a tool, a way of helping us figure out our place in the world.


Until pretty recently, if you'd asked me, I'd have told you that I consider myself a mostly normal woman. As in, in relation to the whole "being a woman" thing [white / straight / educated division], things have been pretty average for me, maybe a bit above-average.

What would I have meant by this?

I might've said that I'm "normal" in that I've never been raped or assaulted or the victim of domestic abuse. I'd have reasoned that although these crimes disproportionately affect women (and are therefore part of the woman-experience universe), a majority of women are not subject to this kind of thing. So, avoiding these traumas is part of my woman-normalcy.

I might've also said that I'm "normal" in experiencing a fair amount of what I like to call the common gendered bullshit. I usually get catcalled if I'm walking down a city street by myself. Since I've started teaching, male students have made comments about my appearance, both in class and in course evaluations. A couple of times, back in the day, I got kissed and/or felt up by dudes I didn't want to kiss and/or be felt up by. I've felt wise for prearranging "Home safe!" texts with female friends after we've each made our way home solo. I've walked convoluted routes to put distance between myself and dudes giving me bad vibes.

Recently, for reasons obvious to all of us, I've been feeling unmoored from my sense of my own normalcy. Things I'd assumed to be abnormal-because-uncommon are revealing themselves to be not all that uncommon. My own "normal" experiences are being reframed with new vocabulary and in relation to restructured value systems. Experiencing life as a woman is becoming a perplexingly urgent-feeling qualia problem. 

My definition of "normal woman" was, as I said above, founded on a basis of common gendered bullshit, stuff that I'd internalized as somehow both unconscionable and so ordinary as to be not worth mentioning. Now that all the bullshit has been deemed worthy of discussion, I'm not totally sure what to do with myself. 

Drop a coin into the sea and shout out "Please come back to me"

Briefly Griping about Petty Things with Linda 
Today's topic: Americans who write editorials reflecting on how American culture appears to them after living abroad

Why do these writers always seem to live in France? (Is it Henry James's fault? I'd like to blame Henry James.) Why do they think it's pithy or original to point out that most Parisians enjoy a higher quality and quantity of wine, metro service, and leisure time than we do? Or that Americans, from the international view, appear loud and overenthusiastic and industrious to a fault? Why do they act like the U.S. is totally bereft of decent cheese, as if Wisconsin and Vermont and the concept of imported goods didn't exist? Why is the go-to way to express how shocking you now find America's over-the-top consumerism to narrate the experience of visiting the grocery store cereal aisle? (or toothpaste shelf? or snack selection? Also, as Calvin's dad taught us in the '90s, it doesn't take the lens of an expat to feel menaced by choice.) Tell me more about what it's like to sit in wire chairs at an outdoor cafe sipping espresso and really connecting to the human soul across the table as the afternoon sun lengthens your twinned shadows. The point of these essays is never to suggest that American life is inferior, per se, but merely that moving to the 5ème arrondissement has magically enabled the expat writer to effortlessly summit Maslow's hierarchy of needs.*

Critiquing American society, as a pastime, is fun and necessary and should be enthusiastically embraced by anyone with working eyes and a sense of humor. Taking stock of how our neighbors are conducting themselves and noting our nation's comparative successes and failures is a form of good citizenship. All I want is for our international correspondents to start writing essays that don't rehash cross-cultural hot takes from 1831.


* Yes, of course Ta-Nehisi Coates is the exception. Not because he entirely avoids the cliches I'm complaining about, but because he always manages to find a fresh angle on them.