Category: Differences

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What Ajah are you?

Like many “corporate astrology” determiners, I enjoy the question of “What Ajah are you?” from the Wheel of Time books by the late Robert Jordan (and, lately, the excellent Brandon Sanderson).

I got to talking with a friend today about it – she was hoping that the Brown Ajah we will see in Season Two would have lots and lots of pockets, since they are basically research academics (like her)!

Since my friend so clearly identified with the Brown Ajah, I started wondering: what Ajah am I? Descriptively, I’m probably Blue Ajah, because I am always arguing with people but also trying to understand them. But when I first read the books, I really wanted to be Yellow Ajah – whether this is due to over-identification with Nynaeve or just my nascent need to Fix everything (wrench/ear!), I loved the Healers.

But then! Then we got on the subject of sexual orientations, and all bets were off.

  • All Ajahs: pretty darn Sapphic, given Jordan’s obsession with “pillow friends”
  • Red Ajah: either lesbians or misandrists. We only see the latter in the books, unfortunately, but I have hope that there are some who don’t suck. IDK, maybe Lesbian Red Ajah is just my head canon.
  • Green Ajah: very very polyamorous. The way Jordan treats the Warder/Aes Sedai relationship is weird, though, and verges on consent violations, so this might be a dicey road to go down.
  • Blue Ajah: the canonical Disaster Bisexual
  • Yellow Ajah: is probably a therapist, and will have trouble separating their job from your relationship
  • White Ajah: they always struck me as pretty asexual. Who knows, though?
  • Brown Ajah: probably not interested in sex unless it’s with one of those devices that can, ah, track and record your biometrics during the act.
  • Grey Ajah: who?
  • Black Ajah: see Terry Goodkind
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Introverts and Extroverts

I was talking to a friend today about differences between folks in our group and how their introversion/extroversion presents, and I think that a big part of it is in how fast the “tank” fills or drains.

Friend A is a textbook extrovert. He feels like his tank of energy is filled by being around people in big group settings.

Friend C is a textbook introvert. He enjoys many things that are out and around people, but being in a big group setting drains his tank very quickly.

Friend B is me. I’m an introvert by nature, but I do very much enjoy group settings. I seek them out a fair bit (Covid was pretty rough for me), but they still do drain my battery pretty fast. The difference between me and Friend C is that my tank drains much more slowly than his does: I can go to the Ren Faire or a big gaming event and be good to go all day, but he’s drained after 4-5 hours.

Friend D is beyond even Friend C: big group events drain him extremely fast, and he finds them unpleasant to participate in.

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Children are an {individual|collective} responsibility

A few years back, someone linked me to this essay by Barbara Kingsolver, from 1992: “Everybody’s Somebody’s Baby.” It’s a beautiful reflection on the nature of children in society, and what it means when we treat them the way we do.

My second afternoon in Spain, standing on a crowded bus, as we ricocheted around a corner and my daughter reached starfish-like for stability, a man in a black beret stood up and gently helped her into his seat. In his weightless bearing I caught sight of the decades-old child, treasured by the manifold mothers of his neighborhood, growing up the way leavened dough rises surely to the kindness of bread. 

Kingsolver

My working theory, here, is that in America, we see children as Not Belonging in public life paradoxically because so many of us have been pressured into having them. I know that I am lucky: I wanted children, and I have an amazing child. But other people are childfree by choice, and while some are benevolent towards the mere existence of children, others cannot stand to have them around.

I think the optimal solution, like most optimal solutions, lies somewhere in the middle: We stop pressuring people to have kids when they don’t want them; and we stop acting like kids are this horrible Other Species, barely even human (see the man who called a child “it” in the essay).

It’s absolutely appropriate to say that children should not be in some places; not every location, every entertainment, is intended to be enjoyed by every human. But bans like that need to be considered thoughtfully and reasonably. Take weddings, for example, the source of so much internecine drama. It’s absolutely fine for the people getting married to say “We would like to have a party that is just adults” – it sets a certain tone, it allows for fragile objects to be placed on tables, etc etc etc. But the spirit of that request does not mean banning the 17yo twin when her 18yo twin had the good fortune to be born at 11:47 pm, rather than 12:01 AM. It does not mean banning a nursing infant who is not even ambulatory yet (a ban which functionally also bans the other half of the Nursing Dyad). Acknowledging that children are part of our world means making places for children – not just banning them from things. Allowing the 17yo twin or the nursing infant does not require you to also allow the shrieking, running 5yo. (Though if you want the 5yo’s parents to attend, the best chance of that happening is to provide on-site childcare, since the logistics of babysitting in a strange city are dicey at best, and all the normal family caregivers are likely at the wedding already.)

And all this comes back to the question raised in the subject line here: are children an Individual responsibility, or a Collective one? My feeling is Collective.

(And I will ask another friend if I can get a copy of her essay “Parenthood, and the Irrational Concept of ‘Choice’,” to also post up here, because it handles the question of Individual vs. Collective so well.)

I found this tweet today, and it seems quite applicable.

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRfKUh7L/https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRfKUh7L/

This TikTok expresses a similar idea through an explicitly leftist lens: that if you build a community that is inhospitable to children, you functionally make it inhospitable to women, and all you will do is reconstruct the existing patriarchy.

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Rules, Agreements, and Boundaries

This post is another one where I mostly just link to someone else’s work and say “Hey! They make a really good point! Go read this!

Like so: Kimchi Cuddles: Rules, Agreements, and Boundaries

Let’s use the Billy Graham Rule as an example, because it’s atrocious, and thus nobody here will argue with me on the *merits* of the rule, so it stays all hypothetical.

In brief, the idea is that it’s not healthy to put a Rule on another adult. Instead, you can only choose to control your own behavior.

Rule: “You, Billy, cannot be alone in a room with another woman.”

The Rule tries to control what another person does.

Agreement: “We, Billy and Ruth, agree that we will not be alone in a room with a member of a different sex.”

The Agreement is something that two people agree to, together, about their behaviors.

Boundary: “Billy, if you ever spend time alone in a room with another woman, I will no longer spend time with you.”

The boundary is controlling your own behavior and your own response to the actions of others.

I think part of why Rule/Boundary gets blurred a lot is because of our whole cultural idea that marriage means two people become one unit. That’s a very romantic idea, of course; but it’s not practical even as a metaphor. Even in a marriage, we remain separate individuals with our own needs and wants. (I recently had someone try to tell me that legal marriage makes two people legally one entity, which, LOL nope. That’s not how that works at all.) One heart cannot hold all of this.

As a coda: Kimchi Cuddles is an explicitly non-monogamous comic, but I’ve appreciated it for a long time. I find it has a lot of observations that apply just as well for monogamous people as they do for non-mono folks.

Some of the comments in this Reddit post are also pretty on point. It’s not possible for another person to “break” your boundaries. There’s a verb that’s more applicable to the direct object “rules.” If someone violates your boundaries, then you just proceed with the action that you said would happen when your boundary got crossed. You can’t control the other person. You can’t push with a rope. You can only control your own actions, and reactions, and so forth.

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Wrench 🔧 or ear 👂 ?

One thing my social circle has started doing recently, which I find very useful, is using the “wrench” and “ear” emoji to indicate whether they are looking for help fixing a problem, or just needing to vent about their problems.

The issue between Fixers and Venters is longstanding; nobody is wrong for having their own ways of coping with a problem, but it can still make our friends feel frustrated and unheard if we try to help them the way WE want to be helped, if it’s not the way that they prefer or need.

I can’t think of any great think-pieces about Venting versus Fixing, but if any cross my mind I’ll come back and post them here. (Edit: Apparently Multiamory has a podcast about this, but it breaks it into three reactions. I’ll see if I can dig up a transcript.)

Update: Found this TikTok today, “This is Shit” – it’s a very 👂 song. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdssWKn5/?k=1

“I don’t want advice….I just want to vent!” Image by Oh_SoGraceful
I found this comic by Green Fox Blue Fox, about “solutions are the vent-killer,” and it’s absolutely on point here!
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Two Boxes: a metaphor about sexual ethics

One of the most influential essays I’ve ever read, in terms of how it changed my perspective on religion and sex, is the “Two Boxes” essay by Libby Anne at her blog “Love, Joy, Feminism.”

In the religious tradition I grew up in (Roman Catholicism), we did talk about consent some (in the sense that all sex should be both Unitive and Procreative, and non-consensual sex is not Unitive), but we still very much used the “Sex God approves of” and “Sex God does not approve of” set of boxes.

Being able to put this idea into words – the idea that Catholic sexual mores were lacking, and didn’t match up with how I felt about morality – was a liberating experience, and I credit it with being the beginning of my own sexual awakening. For a long time, I think I had held on to the ideas I learned as a teen steeped in Catholic youth culture — that sex was wasteful and unhealthy if done in a “wrong” context, and that only a very small number of sex acts were even plausibly “right.” Even when I verbally disavowed that attitude, it hung on in my subconscious for much longer than it ought to have.

In my mind, the thing that makes a given sexual act moral is whether it is Consensual and whether it is Honest. Not whether a given religious doctrine says it is appropriate.

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Ask Culture and Guess Culture

The first thing I’d like to share here is the concept of Ask Culture and Guess Culture.

I first learned about this on Captain Awkward’s blog, back in…2010? 2011? Something like that. It really made an impression on me, and shaped how I think about all of my interactions.

You can read a summary of it over here on MeFi Tours.

Edit: Further googling has turned up an Atlantic article, Captain Awkward discussing the MeFi Tours post, and the CA Tag about Ask vs. Guess (currently at only two posts).

I am, myself, a strongly Ask Person. I ask for things ALL THE TIME, and I often let people know pre-emptively “It’s okay if the answer is no!” when I do so. But many of my friends are Guess People, and I’m trying to be more cognizant of that when I’m interacting with folks.

My best example of how this plays out awkwardly is a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago – my daughter (“Rosie”) and her older son (“Dash”) are about the same age, and I needed to get something done on a day my husband was busy, so I asked if she could watch Rosie for me. She hemmed and hawed for a while, so I said “It’s okay if you can’t!” to which she replied “Yeah, I’d love to but it’s just that I have Jack-Jack’s birthday that day, so I’ll be hosting 20 toddlers at the house and I just don’t think I can keep an eye on Rosie too.” I was HORRIFIED that she had even CONSIDERED saying yes to my request – if I had known it was Jack-Jack’s birthday, I wouldn’t have even asked her to watch my kid. But from her perspective, she would never ask unless she desperately needed the help; so she was weighing if she could give me this help in the context of her own life. And I’m sure that if I had been having a true emergency, she would have helped or helped me find someone who could! But we weren’t talking Emergency Appendectomy here.

So if you find yourself in conflict with your friends or family members, or even co-workers (though the rules can be different there), consider: Is this a result of different request styles? And if so, can you use the Ask vs. Guess framework to communicate better with your loved ones?

This TikTok is an excellent illustration of Ask vs Guess, via a story about getting down the cereal box.

And another Tiktok, but this one uses cake as the metaphor, and the differences between Irish and German culture.

August 2022 update: A friend recently linked to this essay, “They Might Say No,” and it reminded me a great deal of the Ask/Guess dichotomy, so I’m adding it to this essay!

Additionally, doing an idle Google search found me a couple more takes on this concept, from The Guardian and Scary Mommy. So, I figured I’d share those for additional perspective.

March 2023 update: Found this TikTok about translating conversations that can take place between people who are neurotypical and people who have autism. It’s very similar to Ask/Guess!

And this Introvert Doodles cartoon about Extrovert/Introvert is also very Ask/Guess, in a lot of ways.

A 2023 essay on Substack about Ask vs Guess.

Here is an Instagram post about Ask Culture, using cute birds:

And here is another one about Ask/Guess, Build/Maintain, and Invite/Volunteer!