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I'd explain, but ....
I wrote 4000 words on the strange things that have been happening to my mental state in recent months - a shifting of boundaries, a nasty increase in rage. I split it into three entries, and dropped them in here, thud thud thud.
It may be that the rage comments don't leave a lot for a reader to say in return, except maybe "chin up, it's okay," and I did get a number of replies like that. (Thank you.)
But you know what I've gotten the most email about in the last twenty-four hours? The wine tasting. Specifically, my snotty comments.
This morning on the subway I noticed a poster. I've seen the poster many times before, but it was of special relevance today. The caption is, "In most schools, you'd be expelled for bringing wine to class. Here it is the class." The class, of course, is the Boston Center for Adult Education's wine-appreciation class. Except they call it a "wine tasting class."
This, plus my email, tells me that I'm being a little imprecise about my labels. Plus there's a larger issue here, but I have another anecdote which goes with that, so first things first.
Imagine a fashion show. I mean a serious runway fashion show from a serious designer. No, I haven't been to one either, but reports from the field indicate there are two types of people in the audience.
The serious woman in the black power suit at the front table taking notes is the buyer for Saks. She's here because this is business. The laughing woman in the sheer dress next to her is a movie actress. She's here because this is fun.
"Wine tasting" to me implied business. Fun business, perhaps, but the purpose was to evaluate wines to see if you wanted to buy them. I expected a trade show. I am not a wine reseller, but I certainly was there to see what wines were good and bad, and I certainly was there with my eye toward what I might like to purchase later. Nonelvis was of the same bent - she even brought a notebook with her.
Mind you, I've been to "wine tastings" - at some of the local stores who are gloriously, thankfully, working to demystify wine - which really were wine appreciation classes in disguise. I have no problem with those; I love them. I want people to learn more about wine. I'm just surprised they were doing it at the Expo, which I didn't think was the venue for it.
I guess I expected one thing and got another. I wanted a trade show and got a lot of people who were there just to fool around.
Punch line: While we were at the Expo, we ran into a co-worker. She was obviously in the "there to have fun" camp, and she was obviously achieving that goal. I spoke to her on the phone this morning about work matters, and she said that they had liked the show so much they went back on Sunday. "And you might like to know that there were a lot fewer people on Sunday," she said. "You could actually move around. It was much more tolerable after all the trade people left, I guess."
One man's meat is another man's poison.
Anyway, I'm not going to apologize for the snottiness of the wine remarks, because they were snotty - and meant to be. But please go back and re-read: I was making them in the middle of a long anecdote which illustrated how irrationally cranky I was that day, how anything and everything could set me off. I knew I was being unreasonable, and I presumed that you'd get that from context.
What was really bothering me about the Expo - and I said as much - is that there were so many people there that I couldn't have any fun. It's my rage firing on a nearby target instead of the real target again. I can't do anything about the crowds, but I can sure savage the hell out of them.
I had a similar problem on Wednesday, when we went to the Egyptian exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. (I can't remember its exact name. Something with "Sun" as the last word.)
Now, I dislike the big-money exhibits at the MFA on principle already - the ones that generate huge crowds and you have to buy a special ticket to see. That's a long, exceedingly complex rant and will have to wait for another day.
Like all the special exhibits at the MFA in the past three years - ever since the thrice-damned Monet - the gallery was packed. Nearly impossible to move. Impossible to stop and give any one work the attention it deserved, because then you were blocking the view of the other people who were clumping up behind you. Impossible to stop and read anything for very long. Impossible to reflect.
And, because I was mad at the crowd levels, and because I sincerely didn't think this was nearly as good an Egyptian exhibit as others I've seen, I started to get catty about the crowd. Bunch o' Philistines. They're oohing and ahhing over this stuff while completely missing the point that Akhenaten - the focus of this exhibit - was the Martin Luther of his time, that he threw out an entire religion and replaced it with another one and, for a while, got away with it. They miss the significance of Tutankhamon (or -amen or -amun) changing his name from Tutankhaten; that by that time to have any connection with Akhenaten's discredited god Aten was as good as a death warrant for a king; that Amon had come back in force almost as soon as Akhenaten's corpse was cooling. They see a faience vessel and all they can see is the pretty blue color. They miss the significance that the cartouche with Akhenaten's name has literally been struck from the record - it's been scraped off the front of the vessel with a chisel.
See how well I can rant when I'm annoyed about other things? What are all these people doing here? Don't they know that this stuff is really kinda puny? Look at the Egyptian wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art - now there's an exhibit. What do you mean, not everyone's been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Next you'll tell me they didn't see the famous travelling Tut show. Geez.
Sometimes these rants are the only things which save me from having a lousy time, because I enjoy the ludicrousness of my own criticism. I didn't take my comments at the Egyptian show seriously, even as I was saying them. They were blatant stress relief.
But sometimes, as in the wine show, the catty comments just make the stress worse.
Information is always a problem. Maybe it'll be a problem for the rest of my life. Despite frequent, vocal, attempts to eradicate it from my brain, I still suffer from "If I know it, surely it must be common knowledge" syndrome (known in these pages as Allegory of the Cave syndrome).
Conversely, if I don't know it, I don't get upset about not knowing it. Aussie teased me about my "formal high tea" remarks, which were of the same approximate level of ignorance as not knowing an auslese wine from a spätlese. So what; big deal. I just wanted a relaxing, elegant cup of something with some nice goodies to go with. Labels shmabels.
The irony here is not lost on me. That's the thing - the irony is never lost on me; I'm self-aware, but I sin the same sins anyway.
You're not going to believe this, but I would rather teach than mock. Honest. In a case where I have information that someone else doesn't have, there are three choices:
1. Explain
2. Criticize
3. Bite tongue
and I instinctively favor number 1.
I mean, I wasn't an education major because it seemed like an easy ride (and I wasn't this acidic when I was an education major, for that matter). I wanted more than anything to be able to make things make sense to people. I still get a little thrill when I write a piece of documentation and someone reports to me that it is has made their life easier, or that suddenly I've helped something make sense to them. Doesn't happen often enough, alas.
I am a good teacher. Or was. Before I got sour. And one of the things which made me sour is that option number one became dangerous. People don't like you to explain things to them. If I gave you the spiel on how to read German wine labels, you'd think I was being egotistical. I even cringed a little at leaving the Akhenaten rant in this entry, but finally decided it was necessary atmosphere.
Basically any explanation of things I know is way too easy for others to interpret as "showing off."
Now, before you say it: I know I'm paranoid. I know I'm generalizing. I know that there's at least one reader who wishes I'd just explain the damned wine label and have done. And at least one who'd genuinely find it useful.
But on my scale of fears, looking like a show-off trumps being a bitch. Therefore it's a better risk to be mean and acidic than to explain the facts.
I'll not contradict you if you say that there's something askew with my value system.
© Columbine
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