Had to help manage an exam for the math department this evening, in a big hall with about four hundred students. I always rather enjoy it. They always come in and want to mill around with their friends - who could blame them for being in no rush? - and I get to run around barking at them to take their seats. But effectively, without coming across like an ogre. Somehow, managing to communicate that I'm wielding authority in everyone's best interests.
And I'm not afraid to do that.
Back in 2001, a friend flew me down to St. Pete to help pack his family up in a moving truck and bring their household back to Memphis. Flown down there specifically because I can pack a moving truck more efficiently than... Well, let's just say that my friend knew that he was getting his money's worth.
We ended up with a smaller truck than planned (17' instead of 21'), and got to work. Used the front yard as our staging area - I need to be able to see the options to pack them well - and frequently ducked back into the house to give the family and friends their next priorities for bringing outdoors. At one point, an ally who had never known me before couldn't help chucking. I looked at her with a smile and said, "What? My bravado?" And she nodded and chuckled some more. I was unruffled. "Well, I got a job to do, and no one benefits if I'm not clear about it." She smiled and seemed satisfied with my answer.
The truck, incidentally, was packed to extraordinary perfection. (The piano went in last as a massive backstop against the rear door, and the largest bedframe got slotted over and above everything else.) Except that it was all so full that too much weight was upward, and it was frequently a bear to control on the twenty-someodd hour trip back to Memphis. At one point, I suffered about 90 seconds of the most intense vehicular terror that I've ever known. Got going too fast downhill and felt the whole rig swaying violently back and forth, while braking seemed to only make it worse. My friend in his Saturn kept prodding for a response through the walkie-talkie, but there certainly wasn't a free hand to respond, not until the road sloped back uphill again and I finally regained control. (And that was only the worst 90 seconds of that adventure.)
But anyway, especially since becoming a teacher, of young and generally undisciplined men, have had many occasions to reflect upon authority, and my comfort level with it. Compared to most of the instructors on our staff, I seem unusual. (About half of the newcomers get eaten alive, but I was good from the get-go.) Not only about exerting the authority, but getting away with it. The guys end up loving me more, not less.
So since arriving in this situation, have been looking back to sift out the thread in my life, and think just today that I've found the seminal moment. Had been good even in high school at leading teams or workgroups or whatever (despite being relatively unpopular at that time), but when did I get the hang of exerting authority over those who aren't already in the team spirit?
When did I flip the switch in my own head that allowed me to do that?
I mean, my default response to someone else's position is to assume that their view deserves as much respect as my own, so it's not like stomping around exerting "authority" willy-nilly. In fact, am extraordinarily slow to anger because it takes me an exceedingly long time to finally decide that someone else's position is a crock of shit. (This is not always positive - it's often too late to do any good by the time I get around to it.) But at some point, I had to learn to trust my own sense of mutual priorities in a quicker and more intuitive way than had ever came naturally to me before.
Have been aware for a while that the genesis was based in my party years in my early twenties. My deferential nature became more tentative when fifty or sixty people were having their own good time in my home. And though I never served alcohol, people brought their own and thus required me to run a tighter ship (especially with the volume knob, and anything concerning the stereo altogether). Finally had to kick a guy out on New Year's Eve of 1994 after he wouldn't quit picking Limbaugh-inspired quarrels with my left-leaning guests. (He would have gotten the hell beaten out of him if I hadn't run him off when I did.)
But just today, I tracked all the way back to 1989, and remembered the first time that I felt justified to put myself first, because I had the authority to do that.
The parties were always crazy mishmashes of people from many different walks of Memphis life - punks and preps and posers and goths and rednecks and deadheads and waitresses and whiteball players and package handlers and cooler corporate types and semi-saavy suburban high schoolers, not to mention numerous Libras of every shape and stripe. Presumably, that variety was part of the draw. And to be sure, at least a couple of my male friends from college ended up in long-term relationships with girls from the Rocky Horror crowd, as I myself had done. In fact, at that time, the Rocky crowd's alpha female, their "Janet," was living with me, which is directly relevant to this episode.
Once, and only once, in 1989, Diana brought the Friday night cast party to our place, and they were their own weird tradition. (At one point, I barged into the bedroom while she, their regular "Brad" and a former "Magenta" had been intimately negotiating a difficult politic between the latter. Or politics as usual, I should say.) I was accustomed to strangers coming along with regulars, but this was the first time the strangers were the majority, and many people didn't know me at all. (I'd backed away from the Rocky Horror scene months earlier, so it was their mainstays who knew me.)
Was cool with all of it (except the closed-door shenanigans, since she should have borne more responsibility to attend the crowd she'd invited over), and enjoyed playing "low key" host for a change, letting the party largely run itself. It was an extraordinarily cool and huge flat, lots of room for people to just wander around and recombine as they pleased. So long as I stayed near the stereo, there wasn't much for me to worry about (and it's not like no one there knew me or respected my home). The coolest room was the most intimate, the sunroom hanging off the back of the apartment, four floors above the parking lot, and a Midtown view as far as the eye could see. So I set up camp in there, welcomed anyone who came back, and kept my eye on the CD collection right outside its doorway.
Eventually (as they always did), the party wound down a bit, and eventually (as it always did), the sunroom became the nexus of the remainder. Despite being only 8 by 12 feet - tiny compared to three big 15' square rooms - we could seat sixteen people back there in a pinch, leaving only a couple of hover in the doorframe. (The window ledges were eight inches deep, so people could perch on them, sometimes with their feet around the people on couches in front of them.) I'd pulled out a short stool for sitting more centrally in the room, keeping the remote aimed at the stereo, and easily fulfilling anyone's recreational needs, while having freed up a couch position for someone else. I certainly didn't need to be tucked back out of the way - the stool was perfect. (Actually, if you were around back then, I'm talking about the zen chair, but "stool" will suffice for anyone else.)
At some point, the CD ran out. I actually consciously thought to announce, "Okay, I will be right back to here..." and pointed at the stool, "once I've changed the music." I got up to take the moment to make the best selection. (Might have been Diamond Dogs, which would have well suit that crowd, but I honestly can't recall. Might have been EVOL.)
So I turned back into the room, and a sixteen-or-so year old girl had landed in my seat.
Like I said, I'm pretty deferential and mannered, so I said, "Excuse me, thanks, but that's my seat and I need it back." She looked at me and did not budge.
"Look, I got up and said that I would be right back, so here I am, and I need to sit there." She shook her head slightly. No one else was saying anything, or murmuring to themselves obliviously. New music (whatever it was) was playing, and I was trying to be cool and handle it cool.
There was a large bulky footstool tucked un-used into the corner behind her, and I looked pointedly at that, as if it might be her alternative. Instead, she scooted ever so slightly to give me room to get at it instead. But it obviously wasn't going to get me back toward the center of the room.
Completely stunned by all of this, turned tail and whisked myself into the adjacent, bigger, and abandoned living room to rapidly pace in amazement. "Wha?t?the?fu???is?go?ing?ON?!?here???" I gathered my wits and whisked right back into the sunroom. (Probably hadn't been gone forty seconds.)
More firmly this time, "Excuse me, but I said that I was coming back before I got up, and I need to sit there, so could you please move back to that footstool?" Clearly run out of patience.
And yet she sat tight, unwavering. By this time, the room had gone relatively silent, other than the music itself. And thus flustered, whisked myself out again.
Allow me to pause, to explain the framework behind my breakthrough.
Have got a theory that sometimes people disagree over truly irresolvable differences, but much more often, they disagree over a missing premise. One of them knows or believes something so fundamentally that they take it for granted that the other knows it or believes it too. Thus, one side of the disagreement is based upon a premise that isn't clear or known to the other party at all. When one realizes how often that this occurs, one becomes accustomed to looking for the unspoken assumption, because voicing it might either solve or get to the true root of a conflict.
Paced in the living room for about another thirty seconds, and then it hit me.
Whisked right back in, and with my harshest indignation yet. "Are you aware that I LIVE HERE?"
In one split instant of pregnant pause, I saw the flicker in her eyes, that yes indeed, she had entirely failed to grasp that (or at least the corresponding significance of it).
But before either of us could react, the whole room finally erupted with calls and cackles for her to get the hell up and give me my seat.
She was quickly up, and then quickly gone, and I never saw that girl again. Other Rocky Horror people later told me that they never saw her again either. And I'm a pretty sympathetic guy, but I sure never lost any sleep over it.
But that was the switch that flipped, do you see?
Previously to that, exerting my "authority" like that, no matter how justified, would have been unthinkable to me. (At least not in the months since I'd become (reasonably-)fully-conscious, which I suppose hadn't been that long, actually. But that's another story.)
And it wasn't like I just wanted a place to sit. I had 'business' to attend to, everyone's best interests in that room, and I'd be damned if someone was going to interfere with that arbitrarily.
I don't particularly seek authority. (Other than in bed, where I'm quite dom anymore.) I hope it's a well-recognized dimension that I stumbled into that whole fracas at deviantART entirely by accident and lack of design. (There had been about six of us "leader types" before the others fell by the wayside, and I'd been much happier within the original multi-headed hydra.)
But I will do my damnedest to deserve authority when it is assigned to me, and that means using it. A hugely motivating responsibility for a model photographer. And in that same dA fracas as well. And as a teacher. And so forth, and so on, and et cetera.
(In fact, all my models have appreciated exactly that I "take charge" with them, compared to most of the other quasi-pros they've worked with, who kind of putter their way through shoots.)
So, anyway, sharing these kinds of things in case someone might learn something useful from them too.
Sometimes, you not only got a right to be right, you got a responsibility to fulfill that right.
Be unafraid of both. Earn it, and use it, and thereby earn it some more.
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