Opposite of Clarity – Photo: L. Weikel

Just Weird

Am I the only one? I’m having a really hard time focusing. The day today felt surreal; I was never really sure what time it was. Perhaps because the skies grew so dark and foreboding so early in the afternoon, everything felt skewed and off. And normally, I love a good thunderstorm. But the one that struck tonight was in keeping with an entire week that was just weird.

I feel restless and unsettled. Karl and I had a misunderstanding almost first thing this morning that left us screaming in each other’s faces. It was shocking. And utterly hilarious (in retrospect). Sort of. But not really. It was just weird.

I can’t even put my finger on the word that would accurately characterize what exactly happened this morning. Argument isn’t the word – there was no issue upon which we were disagreeing. Hence disagreement, too, fails the test. Misunderstanding is probably the closest I’m going to get.

Opposite of Speaking in Tongues

Having been raised Catholic, studying the bible was not a foundational activity in my youth. That said, I am familiar with the concept of ‘speaking in tongues,’ and have always understood it to mean that when a person in biblical times spoke in tongues, no matter what their background, whoever was listening to the speaker heard the message being spoken in the listener’s native language.

Conceptually, that possibility always appealed to me. I could imagine it happening; pretty easily, in fact. Although I had to wonder how anyone would know it was happening. I figured the only way they’d realize it was happening would be by realizing they were unable to communicate with each other.

So I found it puzzling on the one or two occasions I saw what I guess were considered to be people speaking in tongues that no one could understand the gobbledygook that was issuing from their lips.

That’s not my point here, although I’m wondering if anyone else has had a similar antithetical experience.

My point is that Karl’s and my morning today began with a ‘conversation’ in which we were ostensibly speaking to each other but not communicating a damn thing. It was as if we were speaking in anti-tongues. Or talking under water. No matter how hard we tried, the words just weren’t coming out right. Or maybe they weren’t being heard correctly.

The frustration we both felt resulted in us literally screaming in each other’s faces. It was awful and unsettling and…incendiary. It was profoundly uncharacteristic of both our personalities and our relationship.

It was also just plain weird.

Just Fed Up

After each storming off to lick our wounded egos and reflect upon our justified outrage, it took us about half an hour of fits and starts at reconciliation to come to the conclusion that our explosions toward each other stemmed from our mutual frustration over…everything.

Everything ‘out there’ that we have absolutely no control over. It’s almost as if no one speaks the same language anymore. Everyone speaks their own personal dialect and it seems as if there’s no desire or attempt to understand the perspective or feelings of others anymore.

Karl had been trying to tell me where he’d found himself detoured due to flash flooding. I was trying to visualize where he was talking about. Neither one of us were approaching the scenario from a perspective that permitted communication of anything meaningful. Even this attempt to describe the utter banality of our inability to understand each other feels like a failure.

But I’m trying to capture it because somehow that feels like the point. It feels like what I imagine a lot of us are feeling with respect to a whole range of issues from the slightest (like ours) to the most consequential we can imagine.

We’re totally fine. But I have to say: it was just weird.

(T-476)