For you to be listened to in context, such as your next raise, it’s through intent. You have to put in the work. The work: positive compounded effort. Communicating effort poorly gets lost in translation.
From the Seinfeld episode where Kramer gets a job
When I speak, one of two reactions arise, Your voice! Or Will you read this for me? The first gobstruck, the latter a trial of depths.
I’ve read myriads for people across miles and oceans over fiber optic lines. Such is an experience of their choice of a bedtime book, like ‘Curious George’ or ‘Madeline’ (a favorite of mine). Or a conversation memorialized by the broken heart of a lover who wants to relive their scorn. And a corporate email exchange to test the tonal waves of my speech.
∞
The voice is mine, but it’s also crafted from years of perfecting pitch, cadence, and speaking with intonation. Early on, as a pre-tween scared to speak-conspicuously hiding behind the internalized rejection of incoherence—many hours were spent watching ‘Seinfeld.’
I learned more than culture, the subtlety of English, and the nuances of communication. You can select any show. ‘Seinfeld’ just happened to be my All-American pick.
Busy at work.
Pan for closed captions, the gold. Letters across the screen, across the page, across anything, are merelyshapes if not read. Words are disassembled pictographs. From exposure, you grasp writing structure, years of recognizing a comma here and there, and the completion of a sentence finalized by a period. The experience subsequently enhances your ability to read between the lines. Language is an understanding of symbols’ assigned meanings.1
When out of the fold.
Always, stan, substitutes. Subtitles are the receipts for the white noise that is double-speak. Things get lost in translation.
Life moves fast. The words on screens perform as side characters in what seems to be a lost art of expression. Reading is the lost art. You skim and swipe across “too many words.” Don’t even try to disagree! Objectively, you understand the context and proceed with business as usual.
Think of your foods’ packaging from farm to table—store to table. From your initial introduction to years of purchase history, products shift far from origin. The content composition changes and your awareness misaligns. There’s no guarantee that the ingredients will be the same from batch to batch. But you assume so, as added to your cart. You are operating from an assumptive narrative down a spiral staircase to dis-ease. Nesting in the comfortability of confirmation bias, you forgo the chance to spiral up the steps.2
It’s a matter of importance to maintain your craft even after a skill is acquired. The possibility to do and be anything exists beyond ability. You can perfect your voice, but it will take work. Personal work.
Words Rendezvous.
You are no longer a recipient of letters in the post. To meet in the paper gallery of letters shared, handwritten, and shrouded with affection and care.
Letter from cartoonist Alfred Joseph Frueh to his wife Giuliette Fanciulli ~ sent on Jan. 10th, 1913. The letter opens up to form a model of a gallery hung with paintings. Frueh made this model to inform his wife about the details of a specific art gallery before her visit.
The lights are off. Yet you ask yourself, “What’s going on?!” Traditional craft is not accredited enough engagement. In education, cursive is untrained at the development level.3 Letters now dance uncoupled, words still, lacking flow and rhythm. The spirit of connection snuffed.
Seemingly unable to pin why things… seem to… lack… “mpfh?” You are no longer overcome mid-sentence underlining with a page corner bookmarked for eternity.4 Yet some of you will never understand. Born into a world of responsive black boxes that spew from the recess of the black holes you subscribe to.
To you, the words I share mean nothing.
Cheers to years bound, to be spent mindlessly churning away.
