but you don’t care
I got atrocious grades in math because I’d never show my work. I didn’t need scribble out pages and pages of formulae to get the right answer, so I just wrote the answers down, and handed it in.
The teachers insisted I show my work. I refused. They accused me of cheating, and refused to accept my paper. So I spent the time in class reading, or tutoring the other kids.
I feel like I’m back in class, and I’m 10 years old again, and nobody cares if my answers are right or wrong. They still shuffle up now and again, asking me to check their work. I don’t mind helping, not at all.
But you call me a cheater, a liar. It doesn’t matter that I’m right or wrong - you won’t be affected, you refuse to, you have decided not to be. I’m 10 years old again, and everything is unfair, so unfair.
So autocratic, so arbitrary, so unjust and deplorable. But I’m not still that small. That weak. That uninformed and helpless.
You told me you could talk down to me because you’re older, and you’re bigger, and you’re smarter. But standing next to me now, today, you’re none of those things, my old teachers. I could take your fucking life, and you still condescend, endlessly.
Because you lied to me after all, didn’t you? You didn’t even believe in the reasons you gave me for your authoritarianism - you didn’t have any power over your own life so you exercised power over mine. You hated me for not needing the scrap paper and rough drafts - I was a complication, and anomaly, a problem.
I’m still that problem, for everyone. For every customer service rep, for everybody I embrace and ostracize.
I spend so much bloody time, and effort, in the name of the high road, the compassionate path, to try to be right, and in the right, and fair. And I don’t see you take that time. And I don’t see you respect my time either.
Today, I took less time, less care, less restraint. I just verbally attacked someone today, made a concentrated effort. And lo and behold, it’s the same answer again - you don’t agree with my process, so you won’t even consider my conclusion. And hell, this time, with such low standards, I made up half of my conclusion out of nothing, just dreamed it up. But the reaction was the exact same reaction I get when I honestly believe something about a person, and I did get to the answer, and I do have something of value to say.
You refuse to believe that anybody can get by without scrap paper, because that’s not what you were taught; because that fact would challenge WAY too many of the ideas that help you feel safe.
Worst of all, let’s say you did respect my process, and did validate my conclusion, and did feel it was well supported. Let’s say I worked within the framework you give me, that same framework my teachers gave me. Let’s say I went out on that quest and followed your orders; you ‘opened up’ to me and I walked that line you demand that I do, and effectively showed my work.
There would still be another deflection. Oh, that’s just your opinion. Oh, I’ll take that under consideration. Oh, thanks for the input.
You don’t actually think you’re entitled to your entitlement because of reasons x, y, and z. You don’t really even think about why you feel so entitled at all, do you? You live so lazily, with such disregard for the urgency of soul, with such unwarranted trust in your life as your own.
You live with such arrogance, such a sense of safety in your paper castle. I would coax you out from it and offer my legs and my love to help you build one of stone. Better still; I would see the proverbial man to fish for himself and deny him any castle at all.
I don’t think I’ll live to live a day in this world of which I dream. I’m right, but you don’t care. I even took the time and double checked my fucking answer, but you don’t care. I think you’ll damn and condemn me until I’m damned and condemned, but even about this, your actions, my punishment, you just don’t care.
~ Driz
So why do you do it, Driz? Why won’t you show your work? Why do you attack just to attack? There are reasons. There are always reasons.
If this was a dedication, then I hate that a specific someone makes you feel like that. If it’s general, then you are wrong. I’m asking which would mean I care enough to want to know. And the reasons I care? Curiosity, maybe? Or maybe I just want to see how much like me your answers make you.
There’s no specific someone, it wasn’t a dedication.
Am I wrong? I don’t know.
I guess I feel a little like the sun. In this day and age, we experience these things ‘knowing’ their cause and effect, the astronomy of it all, the geology and geneology. We have a framework, we have work to show - but we don’t, it isn’t natural or preferred.
We don’t look at the sun and experience it as a physical body, with an atomic skeleton, or it’s confluence of energy traveling over the impossible distance to reach us. We look at the sun and we see an ethereal being, a dependable friend, a warm touch upon our face, a penitence, a cause for joy. And we do this without an explanation or a rough draft.
Science gives us work to show. Art shows us the work.
And in the end, it’s the work itself I value. I won’t reduce myself to process just because you, (the generic, everyday somebody I see sitting besides me on the bus) must reduce your life to process.
But the difference between us, is I can value and comprehend the need for a process, where you, you everyday you, cannot bear to fathom an answer before a question. And although I would persuade you to relinquish your need to show your work and prove what’s well-established to you, well… I do also understand that the transcendence of our scrap paper is a process in itself.
So Angel, I take no offense to your question; indeed, I’m drowned in delight that I compelled you to ask, at all.
In these pages, within these walls of this site, I’d give you (or anyone) the time as honestly as I’d give you my heart - so if you would ask, ask. Always.
~ Driz