Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Conversations

Conversations aren't going too well for me, lately.  Nothing major, just....unsettling.

For one thing, I was supposed to talk with a new partner yesterday.  This is the person I spoke with for five hours during the first week.  I'd gotten a note saying that she was looking forward to talking again this week.  Yesterday, nothing.  No sight of her on Skype.  I figure hey, things happen, she'll be around later.  Probably true.  But still....

And for the other, yesterday while I was waiting for my mento to do something, I noticed that a kid in the classroom was wearing a wrist bracelet.  This kid is stocky, with short hair, but obviously had breasts, so I figured it was a girl who identified as a boy.  The kid looked depressed, so I made a comment about the bracelet.  I said Yeah, I wondered what the wristband that guy was wearing was.

Whereupon the reply was I'm a girl. 

I know, probably not a big deal.... but I feel badly about it.  I sure to hell hope I didn't set back two years of therapy. Clearly, I'm not as good at perking up kid's spirits as I thought.


Maybe I should keep my mouth shut around people I don't know, huh?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

There is a good TED talk about "marking". Deborah Tannen also talks about "marking" in her book "Talking from nine to five".
Failure to mark properly is not your problem.
Why would you assume a wrist bracelet would mark a girl who wants to be seen as a guy?

Cerulean Bill said...

The bracelet was just a ploy to talk to a kid who looked depressed to me. It was the hyper-short hair and baggy clothes that brought me to that conclusion. And for some girls my daughter knew in high school, it would have been true. Not this time, though.