dear nis
nis no. 21 | the conversation with myself continues as i make my way through this unsavory summer, perhaps even more so than the last one and the one before last
in july of 2024, last year, right around this time, i was thinking about how difficult it sometimes is to notice the things in front of you. see the forest behind the trees, as they say. i guess i was having, once again, the realization that some solutions are simpler than we think and “all” it takes is a change of perspective.
how do i know i was thinking about this? i posted a collage on social media with the title “the difficulty of noticing what's right in front of you.” a phrase reminiscent of those silly, yet enjoyable kungfu movies where a character says “my master once told me i have to be like water”, cut to a close-up of the master saying “son or daughter, you have to be like water.”
this made me retrace just how long and windy the process of starting to notice, in real time, the things in front of me. life as it is, not as i hope or want it to be. people as they are, not as i hope or want them to be. basically, just applying my good eyes and my good ears to life as it is unfolding in front of me, which, as it turns out, is useful and fun. i couldn’t direct the boy in the image above to sit in front of his master, not the his right, but oh well.
seeing and listening from the various perspectives.
i like that i can now tap into an entry level journalistic, scriptwriting, ethnographical and mindfulness perspective, with ease. because each of these perspectives are about observing what is.
journalism: catching contradictions in discourse and/or public narratives.
scriptwriting: noticing how people actually talk & act in everyday life.
ethnography: sitting among groups of people/ communities and listening to their rhythms, practices and relationships to each other & their environment.
mindfulness: feeling the breath rise and fall, thoughts appear and disappear.
listening is a game of catch with a lump of clay. each person catches it and molds it with their perceptions before tossing it back. […] education, race, gender, age, frame of minds, connotations of words, distractions, all play a role in the act of listening. (kate murphy, you’re not listening)
journalism, screenwriting, and ethnography transform observation into forms of communication, ways of understanding the external world through reporting, interviewing, imagination, direct observation or participative observation. three different, yet similar tools for engaging with the outside world. and then there’s mindfulness, the cherry on top, or perhaps the foundation of it all, the one tool that helps with the grasping of our inner worlds.
practicing fieldwork as a conscious daily activity helps with developing intimate knowledge of people and places, if you’re into that sort of thing. and i am, so i’m turning this into a regular nis section. the nothing is static field note section. this week’s note from the field in bucharest goes like this:
7pm ish, on wednesday. i’m in the neighborhood hypermarket for groceries. while i scan the options for canned tomatoes, i hear a very crunchy sound to my right. feels odd, so i turn. i see another shopper composing himself, as if taken by surprised by the sound, as well. i look down at his feet and see a pile of scattered uncooked spaghetti. it explains the crunch-crunch. i look back up at the man, he looks at me and says “i didn’t see them”. i reply “that was an unexpected sound.”
if you have any field notes, i would love to hear them.
1-3 phrases about something you’ve noticed around town, around your house, on the bus, at work, at the store, lingering in your head for too long. something that caught you’re attention. describe it for me without excess words - just the colors, smells, texture, sounds, actions, relationships between characters and environment. leave it in a comment or tell it to me personally:
and now, the section about things that peak my other deep interests. not so much a recommendation, but a personal exercice in curating my attention and content intake, as well as hang out with my own intuition more.
i watched & listened to this podcast - the good hang with amy poehler. it popped up on my youtube and i successfully ignored it for weeks, but finally felt like listening to it. there was a pull and i followed. it turned out two virgos talking to each other was exactly what i needed. i say two virgos without really knowing what that means, but when i heard them mention it, my attention got locked in. actress & director natasha lyonne made some of the best comedy-drama series i saw in recent years - the russian doll, a different kind of groundhog day. and in her newest series, poker face, she plays a character with an almost magical bullshit detector for when people are lying. it reminded me of artist laurie anderson’s advice for life “get a really good bullshit detector and learn how to use it”. buffering.
why we can’t focus - an interview about attention. hasan minhaj’s guest talks about individual slices of attention and how some people make millions and millions off of it. he touches on concepts like paradox of value, maximizing attention, casino techniques, attentional appetites. perhaps nothing new for some, but definitely information worth updating and acting more upon. “we can’t be alone with our thoughts and we’re all kings and queens with infinite amounts of jesters in our phone”. oops.
