It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

20: Performer

There is absolutely a video of me being a very small child and talking to the camera (well, to the person holding the camera) holding forth about my favored baseball team and players and all the rest of it. It is precisely the kind of record of yourself that is embarrassing to watch, because as grownups, we recognize that child, their attitudes, and their earnestness is something that is unsuited to the world we live in today. Would that we could continue on as we have from our childhood, but unfortunately, we find that the world around us is cruel, and to survive in a world where that hostility is present requires a certain amount of building walls and performing artifice. Despite the exhortations of our instructors, grownups, and others in our lives to be our authentic selves at every possible moment that we can be, that kind of vulnerability is often painful, and there are people and institutions out there ready to prey on it. (It starts early, The first time a boy hears "be a man," or "stop crying," or a girl hears that boys hurt girls because they like them, instead of because they haven't been taught how to interact with other humans, or a queer kid gets told to ignore or hide their queerness, or a young child of color gets told to hide their intelligence, because racists (including police) will target smart children of color, the artifice begins and continues.)

The earnestness and willingness to hold forth on a subject of interest is precisely the sort of thing that would be called "cringe" if it were done by anyone other than a child. Adults are supposed to have mastered the art of knowing how much of your interest to reveal, and how much to hide, and to know whether or not that interest is one that can be safely revealed and talked about (modulo NSFW-ness), so that we all present the image of a person who is well-adjusted to the society and definitely not any kind of weirdo who can be made fun of or classified as part of the out-group instead of the in-group. Our required schooling is supposed to reify and reinforce this idea, so that we all neatly sift ourselves into our appropriate social position in the hierarchy, with the popular, normal people at the top and the unpopular weird people at the bottom. Once we find (or are assigned) our caste, we're not supposed to move from it, unless we make significant effort to behave and look like the people who are part of a higher caste, or unless we do something that is taboo for a member of that specific caste. As you might expect, as with all hierarchies, those that are at the top have infinite forgiveness for their actions and infinite license to abuse those perceived as below them. They will rarely be displaced from the top, no matter how much violence and anti-social behavior they perform. Those in the middle are expected to revere and emulate the top, lest they be cast downward, and those at the bottom are supposed to be perpetually unhappy, but also accepting that they have become untouchables and will never rise from that position. The bottom is expected to perform deference for everyone above them, lest they be branded as "uppity" and the threat or reality of violence is put to them to ensure they "understand their place" and remain in it.

Which is a fairly heavy interpretation of the topic, but an important one to keep in mind as we go along. Everyone is a performer, and the question is only to what degree they are performing, based on the company they are in. It's why the phrase "mask off" gets used for people who are performing obvious -isms, and usually in conjunction with the concept that they can only go "mask off" because they know they will be insulated from the consequences of their behaviors and attitudes.

The small child would grow, and still would enjoy performance, even if rehearsal was a slog to get through. Admittedly, you have to learn how to play simple songs before you can learn how to play more complex ones, and rehearsal is meant to help develop the skills and stamina that allow you to take on those more complex pieces. I don't like the idea of playing scales forever, but they're supposed to help you develop the ear for your instrument and others, and perform the dance of adjustment that every ensemble makes as they rehearse and then perform the music in front of them. There will always be boring parts of learning any new skill, because the boring parts are almost always the fundamentals that lead to mastery and the ability to wield those fundamentals in the creative and exciting ways that produce art. (Or science.) The taste-skill gap is real, and the way to making good art is to first make bad art, and lots of it. (There's the idea that mastery of a skill requires about 10,000 hours of practice at it, which is a daunting number to look at. It's the equivalent of continuous practice for a year and two months, and with as many other things as we have in our lives, that means it'll take years to achieve that kind of mastery.) The way to train your body to do good sport things is to do a lot of bad sport things, and then have someone help you with corrections of form and technique, as well as plenty of opportunity to practice effectively. Dweck's fixed and growth mindsets appear here, as well, but also lurking in athletics is that the people who will be doing athletics professionally, or competing for their athlons on stages where television cameras, laurels, or medals d'or are offered will have been training at this since a very young age, and they are the survivors of so many other people who attempted this feat and burnt out, hit a performance plateau, or discovered the true limits of their body, where no amount of effort and refinement could surpass them (or worse, injured them trying to do so.) The same is true for academics and other professions, because the need to trade labor for wage often means people who would like to be part of a particular field are excluded from it due to a lack of opportunities. (To be clear, those opportunities are sometimes that society doesn't have enough need to support more than a handful of people in a particular discipline, but the -isms and the hierarchies also prevent qualified, excellent people from joining the ranks of practitioners for reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not a person can perform the duties of the job.)

All of this is to say that I learned early on in life that I was going to find my way in the world due to mental feats and abilities, rather than physical ones. Even at things that I might want to put some time and experience into, I am probably still mostly a "filthy casual" at those things. Rather than thinking of this as an insult, which is how it's often intended, compared to the "hardcore" people, it's an acknowledgement that I am choosing to put my time and effort elsewhere, to be a little bit good at a lot of things, and a lot good at a few things, and not good at all at so many other ones. Right about high school is where, if you're not on the Olympic or professional athlete track, the opportunities start to dry up for good casual fun and start winnowing away the people who haven't demonstrated sufficient skill to keep going on the path. We get it back at university and beyond in the "beer leagues," where people gather to compete for the fun of it and social opportunities to share a beverage afterward, rather than because there's any belief that this will lead to professional contracts or Olympic opportunities, but for those four years or so, the threshing is real.

In school, performance took on another aspect: in addition to music, theater became part of my repertoire. Appropriately, the first role I played on stage that wasn't part of elementary school choruses or reading from the script in front of me was Harvey, from the play of the same name. (although my mother says that I was the person who was enthusiastic about the storytelling and narrator role, even at that young age, and before that young age so foreshadowing, perhaps.) After that, I played both on-stage and technical roles for various productions, all at the amateur level and with the amount of wanting to put on as good a show as possible. (I also learned there that while I can adapt when the power goes out in the middle of a performance, it's sometimes very hard to remember where you are in the script and get back on track when it does happen. And that I am much prefer to be the announcer voice rather than the actor on stage.) I think the most impressive thing that came out of those days was when a friend and I did a lip-sync routine for the dinner theater musical montage program based on the concert in The Blues Brothers. Costumes, ties, microphones, and dancing as well. It went over well and we were asked to do it again the next year, as well as at a blues jam in the community. All lovely opportunities to perform, with the understanding that this was not going to be anything other than people having a good time.

Music continued into university days, and I performed in an ensemble that has definitely had their fair share of cameras pointed at them, and recordings made of their work, and it was a 90 minutes each weekday and all of Saturday kind of thing. Intense preparation and training, and excellent music that came out of it, because playing for a football stadium's audience means a lot. And sometimes that means your face is on national television for a New Year's Day parade for a moment. (That particular parade had a line on the street with a sign next to it that says "Smile! You're on camera!" as the official warning that everything past that point is potentially being recorded for posterity.) Music was mostly my creative outlet through university, but it was a good one to have. And I continued it as best I could after university, playing in a hybrid student-volunteer band at the local community college, and technically being a professional musician for a bit as part of one of the house bands for an annual and local comedy/varieté festival. (Including one memorable situation where the stunt performers and jugglers had their prepared soundtrack fail on them in the middle of the performance! While the crowd cheered at the performer keeping six objects in the air, there was definitely a "Help!" that we heard, and our bandleader struck us up so that we could give them music to finish out the routine, even if it wasn't what they had originally planned. They were also the last act of the night, so we got to keep playing that particular piece to play out everybody. Sometimes the good parts of performance are the stories you get to tell of how everything went wrong and you still pulled through.) Regrettably, the still-ongoing pandemic has pretty well closed off opportunities I have to make music at this point, as a wind instrumentalist. Perhaps some day, when it's safe to breathe again, I'll be able to get back into an ensemble. (A library user at work noted my masking and told me "It's safe to breathe, you know." They did not actually receive my ire, because that's just something I've accepted as part of performing caution and care for the people around me, and for the people at home.)

I selected one of the people-facing jobs in my profession, and I knew this was going to be part of that job going in and wanting to study it in graduate school. Customer service is a performance, it always has been, and it's one of the more complex performances that people undertake in their lives, because how well you perform at customer service is often one of the things that is the line between whether you are able to trade you labor for wage or not. And in customer service positions, all of that practice and training we got as younglings about what the hierarchy is, and where someone lands upon it, comes roaring back to relevance in our lives. At the top of the hierarchy are the people who basically delegate everything to underlings and minions for the things in their lives that bother them or take them away from enjoying the benefits of never having to think about whether they will be financially insecure in their lives. Those people, for the most part, don't interact with customer service, so we rarely see them anywhere in our lives. At the bottom of the hierarchy are not the customer service workers themselves, but the people who the customer service workers have been given official permission to discard and refuse service to. In the hierarchy that we have, though, it's very rare that someone lands at the officially denied position without doing something egregiously harmful first. (and even then, sometimes, you can't permanently ban them, despite their history, because your administration believes firmly that everyone should be allowed library access in the form they desire it in, no matter how many times they've threatened or enacted violence on other users or staff. The police, with the monopoly of violence of the State, are allowed to exclude permanently, but the library may not, no mater how much it's warranted and documented.)

Everyone else in between tends to classify themselves and customer service workers according to the amount of privilege they've had in their lives, earned and unearned. Those whose privileges have generally resulted in being able to arrange things (or have them arranged for them) according to their desires treat customer service workers as a means to the end they desire, and anything that interferes with that desire is the fault of the customer service worker, because "the customer is always right." (With the implication, and sometimes explicit threat, being that if the customer service worker doesn't do things their way, they'll withhold their money from the business and/or make complaints about the worker in an attempt to get them fired from their job.) They generally treat workers is their inferiors, and it often takes backup from someone with more perceived (or actual) authority reinforcing the position that the first worker has taken before it will stick. Even then, some people will threaten complaints and livelihoods for not getting what they wanted, because they firmly believe their inferiors should never be given authority to refuse them, and certainly not authority backed up by someone else in their group.

People without the privilege of getting to arrange things according to their whims tend to be supplicants instead of demanders, and they are extremely sensitive to the possibility of a no. They are much more vulnerable to the sadists who insert themselves into organizations and then use the authority they have to cruel to the people they encounter. They won't do it to people they perceive as their their superiors in the hierarchy, which is what makes them difficult to catch. (their superiors will complain about their poor customer service.) Supplicants are usually trying to accomplish things with devices or other things where they don't have the skills, or everyone assumes they already know how, or they've been told all throughout their lives that they're a stupid fuck who won't ever amount to anything, and despite all of that, they're still trying to do the things like trade labor for wage that people need to survive, or to learn new skills to stay in communication with their communities. Supplicants tend to ask very general questions and try to keep their interactions as brief as possible, since they're used to people sitting behind the desk treating them as a bother or stupid or otherwise asserting that they're higher in the hierarchy than the person in front of the desk. They expect the people behind the desk to be unhelpful, because they won't demean themselves to help someone lesser, and to be unhappy if the person in front of the desk doesn't perform appropriate gratitude for the help they do receive. Trying to catch those people and coax them into telling us what they actually want, and earning their trust that I'm not going to be one of those sadists often involves the performance of not treating them as foolish or stupid when they come with questions or ask for help setting things correctly. This usually manifests as "if you did this as many times as I did every day, you'd be just as good at it as I am," as well as an attitude that when things go wrong, it's because the computer is doing something wrong. (The computer is almost always doing what we told it to do, which is sometimes very far away from what we actually want it to do.)

Supplicants tend to be the people who use the library the most, which can make it frustrating when there aren't enough resources available, or when there are decisions made that are about creating scarcity where there wasn't any before, or any number of things that happen from people who are in ivory towers and consider both the front-line staff and the users of the library beneath them and not worth implementing the suggestions of, compared to paid consultants and their own grand visions for what the library or company should be like. And because they're in positions of power, it's often very difficult to oust them or demand that they get a wider view and better perspective on the changes they are about to make before implementing them and expecting us to be the ones who make it all work and smooth any ruffled feathers, since front-line customer service people are usually the ones receiving venting and feedback about those decisions and their consequences. It's all part of the performance. (As is the necessary amount of code-switching and dress and acting white that is "professionalism" in the library field, and the requirement of accepting abuse or being complicit in requests that are meant to be abusive and malicious that is "neutrality," where library workers are expected to be robota without feelings or opinions about what is being asked of them, and simply to do the thing and report the results. And never, ever, to see any kind of -ism in any request, unless it's unmistakable.)

There are actual performance aspects to my work as well as the aspects that I keep coming back to about the social dances and performative aspects of the work with other people, inside and outside of the organization. Since I chose to work with children, performance is very much a regular part of my job description, whether in facilitation of programming, delivering presentations to children about library services and programs, or that great equalizer of all, story time. Story time is backed by a significant amount of science and research on children, and very young children, about what will assist them in language acquisition, development, and practice, becoming more aware of and adept at the manipulation of their bodies, and in building social cues and interactions with their peers. Those rather dense scientific matters are then refined into things that are more easily remembered and used by the library worker and the grownups coming to story time. (Read, Write, Talk, Sing, Play. / Do these five things every day.)

How we choose to implement that is what makes all of our story times unique experiences. Some of the librarians I've seen make the story time experience an entire well-planned spectacle that threaten to spring apart at the seams if it doesn't make the timetable at each stop, and they have all kinds of flannels, puppets, and other story telling media that they use to deliver their performances. I am not that person. I tend to fall into providing simple books, and not that many of them, but delivered with performance aspects, rather than just as a reading. I stuff my story times much more with songs, rhymes, and motor movements, with or without props, and music to go along with. A co-worker of mine gave it what was intended to be a compliment by calling it "Dad story time," and I see where they're coming from and why they thought it was a compliment to say as much. I don't see it as an actual compliment because it reinforces the stereotypes about perceived men as action-oriented and bad at feelings, complex thoughts, and sitting still. I do want movement and activity in my stories because it helps kids with regulation and movement control and because I prefer having a dance break to get the wiggles out rather than subjecting my kids to too much sitting-down and focusing time. It has nothing to do with my perceived masculinity. (And I don't like adding ornamentation to my story time, so it's simple, and possibly stark to people who are used to story times with more than what I provide to them.) But I wouldn't go about calling any of my peers' story times "Mom story times" because they have more sitting and book work and flannels and different media in use and more classroom management and quietness. Everyone's story time works for them and their audience, and it's usually being tinkered here and there to add or subtract things or try and capture something about the audience for this session.

There are generally two audiences for story time, and the performance needs to address both of them well. The kids need practice at the various skills of their age range, but rather than being dry recitation and boring practice like what they will receive in their required schooling past the first year or two, story time is about performance of texts and pictures, about singing songs and doing dances with them, about scarves and shaker eggs and instruments and silly songs to follow along with. It's about being able to switch between happy loud time and quiet, focused, attentive time, and it's about collecting more examples of what language looks and sounds like. And, also, to some degree, it's about broadening their experience of what a person who can provide these things looks like, as most children won't see someone who looks like me as part of their early education, and only a few of them as they go along, and there will be certain roles those later instructors fall into. Teaching and librarianship are heavily weighted toward women, and to greater and lesser degrees, white women, so any time a child gets the opportunity to see someone who isn't a woman (or isn't a white woman) in those kinds of roles, it provides them with a picture of something other than the stereotype. Children get all of this, and practice at their motor skills, and cross-body movements, and getting the wiggles out, and finding ways of getting the wiggles out that are appropriate. And they all learn how to get along.

The other part of story time, woven in tightly with all of the stories, songs, rhymes, chants, and motor activities involved, is grown-up instruction and reassurance. Not having children of my own, I don't have direct anecdotes and stories to swap with the grownups on various topics, but I do have the story time research, and by providing a story time, I give t he grownups opportunities to make social connections with each other and get that reassurance and advice from others who have gone through the same thing, or are going through the same thing. My actual charge is to put into the story times little tips and nuggets about the early learning practices, and the research that provides the structure for the story time, so that the grownups can continue to practice the things they learned in story time in other situations out and about. The tips are phrased and constructed in ways meant to reassure the parents that things they're already doing in their lives are contributing to the early literacy of their child. It's not new practices and techniques we're teaching them, it's ways that they can be more intentional and mindful about what they're already doing. Grownups talk with their children all the time, after all, and so what my tip on that is to turn their talking into narration and description. Even for tiny ones who can't respond, they get to hear their grownups talking about things in the world and providing names for them, and those names are important for younglings, so that they can, in turn, describe the world around them and what they're feeling inside. Or that when we sing, we're aiding our children's language acquisition by breaking words up into their syllables and putting each syllable on a different pitch, so the divisions between syllables and words are clearer for young ears.

And, of course, that practice makes permanent. Only perfect practice makes perfect, and most of the time, grownups don't need a perfect performance of their own, they need one they can pull out at a moment's notice when a meltdown is about to happen. (I learned "practice makes permanent" from the training I went to for becoming a drum major. It's meant as a way of defeating perfectionism, but also as a way of trying to make your practice as good as you want the performance to be.) That one usually gets a laugh with the explanation, because caregivers have had the experiences of those moments, whether the meltdowns themselves, or narrowly averting one through the timely application of some rhyme or other distraction. I'm trying to help the caregivers and grownups not worry that what they're doing is somehow hurting their child or not preparing them for being their very best selves, or similar such things. Most grownups raising a child will do things well, other things less well, but they usually won't slide into actively harming their child unless there are exigent circumstances or the grownup themself wants to hurt their child. It takes more than the occasional mistake to cause lasting harm, in most circumstances. (When saying that it's okay for small ones to move about the room if they're wiggly, or if they need to, duck out and come back, I usually say, "I was that kid. I turned out fine." Yes, there's a diagnosis in there, but it's true. For the most part, I turned out fine, and much of my trauma and issues stem from the ways that others treated me when I was being my most authentic and vulnerable self.)

As with so many other aspects of my work, and the hobbies I have, and the things that I've been talking about how I need to build oblique ways of getting at them, so as to defeat the perfection weasels, there's a lot of elision. Expertise in things means there's less of the obvious process available for someone to see, either in the finished product, or while watching the expert do their work. For things that re explicitly mental in a lot of their steps, unless the person is describing their process as they do it, it's not obvious at all what's going on, and so it can seem like there's input, and there's output, and the way that input becomes output is a mysterious box only learnable if you choose to study the same thing and figure out how it all works. Humans didn't come with an instruction manual, and we've mostly been reconstructing the source code and the blueprints by watching humans at work and making inferences and deductions about what's responsible for what parts of the human experience. When those processes are masked, either because of performance reasons, or because when you ask an expert about things, they often do operations that they no longer consciously think about, understanding is not so easy to achieve. That's why I like people asking questions, or the situation where documentation is from having someone watch what you're doing and ask questions when they don't understand what you did, because we learn so much and capture so many of those elisions when someone has to go back and explicitly recall why they do things. This works in all kinds of performance situations, because the people who are unaware of what they're doing, or who are eliding things they they really shouldn't, get the opportunity to be mindful about what they're doing, and perhaps decide to change their performance, and those who are more conscious about their performance get the opportunity to explain the whys of what they're doing, especially in situations where the thing they're doing seems to be out of character, or otherwise contrary to their stated goals.

It's all performance. That's not inherently a bad thing, but the necessity of performance does point at inherently bad things in the ways that we treat each other and the world around us. If the focus could shift from critiquing the performance to critiquing and removing the bad things that necessitate the performance, that would make things much better for everyone.