File under "getting it off my chest"

As much as I love a good inspirational quote—those wise words where some smart person was able to sum up a universal truth or make a grand point in one sentence—I can never remember them. "That's great!", I think when my little customized homepage pops up the Quote Of The Day. "I really should remember that," I think, but I never do.

What sticks with me more are the inspirational coversations. I've had some great epiphanies that are spurred by a point made casually to me. Sometimes it's something I never thought of before, and sometimes it's something that I'd always felt but could never put into words. The conversations are sometimes with close friends or family (my uncle got me over my teenage fear of driving with a few words that weren't really very wise, but that I just needed to hear), but just as often, they're with people that I don't know very well; casual acquaintances and freinds-of-friends, who spout off some belief and leave me nodding, always remembering them even if I never saw them again.

This is a ridiculously long intro for this: A few years ago, a college friend of mine came to DC from North Carolina for a visit, and she brought her roommate Robin. I didn't know Robin very well, but I always enjoyed the time I spent around her. She was very sweet, sometimes sing-song sweet in that elementary school teacher way (she was an elementary school teacher), and she had the preference for quiet, early nights to go with it. So I was a little nervous about how she was going to like our plans for the weekend, which were our usual weekend plans: late nights out drinking.

One of these nights took us to the Black Cat, and at some point during the night, I saw her off to the side, away from the group and sitting alone, looking tired or bored or both. I went over to her and said, "You okay, Robin?" She said that she was, that she was just a little tired. I asked if she wanted to leave and she insisted that she was fine. It seemed doubtful that she was actually fine, but I left her alone, feeling kind of bad that we were keeping her somewhere she didn't want to be.

The next day, over breakfast, we were talking about the night before. Robin said that she had been feeling a little tired, but said very firmly that if she had wanted to go, she would have said so. She talked a while about how she had realized how incredibly unfair it is to make other people guess at what you want, to not be direct with them, and instead let them have to try and predict your breaking points, trying to pick the moment where, even though you say that everything's fine, you expect them to know when it's time to go home, when you want them to say something or do something. To just somehow know.

This might seem both an obvious and innocuous thing to point out, but this conversation has obviously had a big effect on me. This was something I believed before, but to hear someone else say it (and, frankly, to hear a woman say it) made the light of my belief much brighter. It's not simply that it's confusing and wrong to expect other people to make decisions that you want because you're too weak to voice your preference: it's unfair. It seemed only too right that this idea was coming from a woman who believed very strongly in social justice. While she obviously wouldn't put this alongside race relations and class differences, it's still a belief that grows from the same place: to create environments that are fair, open and honest.

Of course, like any strongly held belief, it has it's downside, which is that the people who do the opposite annoy the hell out of me. I get intensely irritated to find out that when I asked a direct question of someone, they couldn't give me a direct answer, and instead wait for me to make the decision that would have been made if they'd had the guts to state their preference in the first place.

But the upside of it is so liberating, and that is that there's nothing in the world to do except accept the person's answer to a direct question as their absolute feeling. If they're too wimpy enough to openly express their wishes and preferences, I'm not going to let that drag me down. If they're going to answer only with what they think I want, they're digging their own hole and from that conversation with Robin on, I refused to feel responsible for the consequences of that behavior.

Of course, like so many manners (which, essentially, it is: manners), it's easy to forget a lot of times. It's easy to find myself in a position where I'm having to make decisions for passive people, and getting worked up over the fact that I may be making the wrong decision for someone else; that I'm fucking everything up because the answer I get is insincere and that someone is hoping only that I'll accept the deference in spite of my own stated preference.

While this is venting, it's also advice: if you want it so, say so. At least around me.