Tim's journal

A few days ago I was listening to some Vienna Teng albums on Spotify, and her song "City Hall" came up. I realized that this post -- from my LiveJournal on February 16, 2004 -- was almost nine years old. So here it is, nine years today.

If I try to think back, I don't think I thought then that we'd still be fighting for basic dignity and respect nine years later, at least not with respect to the particular issue of whether marriage should be for everyone.

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We went to City Hall, in San Francisco, and helped same-sex couples get married! And I met [livejournal.com profile] ubiquity, who I hadn't expected to see at all despite having read her post where she said she was coming here this weekend, since at that point I didn't know I was also going! ([livejournal.com profile] karenbynight and [livejournal.com profile] yakkette apparently got turned away due to an excess of volunteers, and [livejournal.com profile] wkfauna -- wisely given the former -- decided not to make the trek up. And I must thank [livejournal.com profile] wintersweet, who was there on Saturday to perform ceremonies, for passing along the information so that I could be there in the first place!)

We'll display our Assessor-Record Volunteer nametags proudly in the house, though neither of us did much assessing or recording. We handed out donuts for the first few minutes -- if there's anything happier than handing out Krispy Kremes to people taking advantage of their first chance to get married, I don't know what. For the rest of the day we stationed ourselves along the line of people waiting and checked their license application forms for validity. This was surprisingly important, since many people don't understand the concept that when they say "the name on your ID has to match the name you put on the form *exactly*", they mean "don't put down 'John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith' when your license says 'John J. Smith'."

We also had to check that they'd received the booklet on "Your Future Together" that the state is legally required to hand out, and which mostly consists of information on pregnancy (not particularly relevant, since although same-sex couples might have kids, they probably wouldn't do it accidentally) and STDs (which unmarried same-sex couples presumably know more about than married different-sex couples). As one guy commented, "We've been together 24 years." And then there was the couple both of whom were named Kenneth and both of whom were over 60, of whom the older one couldn't remember what his occupation was (he'd put down "Retired" but they wanted the previous job in those cases), and the couple whose members had the same birthdays as David and I (not the same years), and the guy who had to ask his partner what his own occupation was because he forgot...

If I were ever inclined to believe that marriage was love, today would have been that moment. And it's somehow inconceivable to think of the people who will presumably be suing tomorrow in order to protect marriage by stripping 2500+ people of their marriage licenses. I wonder how many of them are just parroting lines they've been told and have never actually met a gay person and can therefore believe that they're all purple-furred monsters with horns, and how many of them actually could have stepped inside City Hall today, watched and listened to what was going on for five minutes, and still believe that letting (mostly) normal-looking people with kids and jobs and dogs get married was a threat to Western civilization. In the first case, I can understand how it's easy to unthinkingly absorb stereotypes. I just can't possibly imagine what it's like to be inside the mind of the second kind of person, any more than I can imagine what it's like to be a jellyfish or a doorknob.

But at least for five days, love won out over hate in San Francisco, and I'm glad to have been there to see part of it.

Here's a comment I wrote on a locked post by a friend discussing frustration (as a non-programmer) about being in conversations about programming where people talking about code weren't really making an effort to be understandable. I thought it was worth posting elsewhere.

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I can sympathize with this because even though I've been programming for 17 years, I *still* get that "it might as well be Russian" (or Japanese in my case... I know a bit of Russian) feeling quite often when listening to people talk about code... and often, people I feel like I should be able to understand, like my immediate co-workers, or people at conferences (that are dedicated to the small, specialized area I used to focus on). I think part of it has to do with my difficulty processing speech (I can handle small talk just fine, but combine speech processing with any sort of difficult/complicated/abstract *content* and my brain falls over and dies), part of it is anxiety caused by impostor syndrome that ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy (when I can't understand something because I'm devoting too much effort to being worried that I won't understand it), and part of it is that CS and software are just so ridiculously specialized that even confident people with good communication skills just can't understand what each other are talking about if their specialties are different.

But believe it or not, I do know the feeling of alienation that comes from being in one of those conversations... and as with you, I hardly ever get it with any other conversation topic, even ones I know much less about than CS (well, maybe once in a while with physics or math, but most physics and math conversations I'm in on these days are people bullshitting and I'm well aware of that, so...)

Anyway, I'm not sure what the point of this comment is -- I don't think that my lack of confidence in my area of expertise should magically erase your lack of ease talking about an area you have no expertise in -- so I'm not sure what my conclusion is. One is that Bay Area tech culture can be really exclusive (when certain kinds of knowledge are used as a proxy for having had certain life experiences and *not* having had to deal with certain kinds of problems; I didn't have a computer when I was 5 and sometimes I feel like if I did, I'd be able to keep up with my peers). And another is that, well, often geeks just have a really hard time talking (or thinking?) about anything non-technical, and that's a flaw on their part, because part of being polite is to talk about things that won't exclude your conversational partners. I get the feeling people who sell insurance don't talk about it all night while hanging out at the pub. Why can't geeks extend others a similar courtesy? (And I think that also relates to my first point: privilege is *not* having to accommodate other people socially, and if you learned to talk about something besides code you might actually end up including people you'd prefer to exclude.)

ETA: I just came across this post on "technical entitlement", which overlaps with some of what I'm saying but says it more clearly.