The Source Codes

July 18, 2024September 7, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“All I wanted to do was write a story about the Tortoise versus the Hare.”

I know but if you write that the tortoise is slow, won’t you be perpetuating a stereotype?

“We’re all just monologues, algorithms whirring, spinning tops bouncing off each other to build an unrivalled ensemble of narcissistic pathologies in skin suits,” he loved that line so much, he stole it. “We need to get back to our source code and dispense with all these other lines of machine code that programmers feed us to modify our thoughts and behavior.”

“We have a duty to be cheerful,” Martin Amis advised his daughters. “Be suspicious of the humorless.”

“We throw this line around a lot, but is anyone humorless? I’ve met some who come close, but I eventually found out their sense of humor was just more dark and cynical. Falling down was humorous to them, they enjoy bruises and blood, but for them to consider a joke hilarious, they want pain. They’re the type we could easily mistake for cheering on the downfall of humanity. Their sense of humor illustrates that the definition of humor is almost as varied as the sense of political identity, and it all boils down to this idea of a source code.”

What is a source code? According to built in “It is the foundation to a computer program and acts as written instructions that guide a program’s execution.” We have a similar code that basically guides our interactions with the nouns (people, places, and things) around us. Some call it our programming, but that word invites cynical speculation. Our definition of programming involves the detailed imprint left by the influential people from our maturation, and the experiences we have had that provide us our methods of dealing with the nouns we encounter. Our source code could be said to be the DNA of our programming. Depending on who we become, our sense of humor and political identity becomes intertwined as we grow into political animals.

The reader might consider this a simplistic approach, but I think some political animals are born in the audience of situation comedies and comedians. It bothers us when we don’t get jokes that reference larger matters. It makes us feel immature and uninformed. It frustrates us when we didn’t get reference jokes, so we study up on politics, until we arrive at this notion that “Everything is political.”

Say “Everything is political” to a large group of people, and most will say, “Well, it’s not to me.” Proponents of this notion will argue that if we drill deep enough into the sedimentary levels of everything, everything is political. I’ve met those who don’t even have to dig to find it. Some of them wish they hadn’t opened their mind’s eye to it, because they can’t turn it off now. They won’t laugh at a joke, unless it funnels appropriately. They hear, read and see it, searching for subtext in their never-ending search for points for their team, and they can only find humor in the vindictive and angry potshots volleyed at the other side.

“How did that happen?” others might ask political animals. We can all offer simplistic and autobiographical guesses, but for most the answer to how we became so political is, “It happens.” We can’t properly source it, but we know it happens. The next logical progression to this question is, “Why would you do that to yourself?” Most of us will experience some semblance of an escalation to politics is everything and everything is political, as we learn more about politics and build a political identity around that knowledge. Our goal, at the peak of this mindset will be to convince everyone around us of the beauty of our newfound philosophy. As we hover around that peak, however, we will see the futility of believing and seeing everything as political. Not to mention the frustration. The frustration arrives when we realize that about 75% will never agree with us. There is political, and there is political. Everyone’s experience with this is different, but the quest for ‘everything is political’ puts us in a downward spiral that can lead to humorlessness and some perpetual sense of dissatisfaction that can lead us to this sense of being unfulfilled, and as Amis warned, we should be suspicious of them.

“I have a friend for whom everything from national to local politics dictates her mood,” he said. “If she greets me with a smile and follows it with a generally pleasant afternoon, I know something happened, usually on a national scale to vindicate, or validate, her worldview. I suspected that my search for her mood, relative to political events, may have been coincidental, until she greeted one of my happy days with suspicion. She and I don’t speak openly of our positions, of course, as it’s all feel and suspicion, but if we did, and I said, “No, I just happen to be very happy today,” something tells me that she would scour her newsfeeds to find the true source of my happiness. The “Everything is political” animals generally believe that everyone is as political as they are, but most of us are afraid to admit it.

***

We all have different codes that we follow, pay allegiance to, and devote our lives, and most codes were written to feed the simple art of pleasing humans. Yet, some part of our innate reactions to their desire to please us leads to our almost instinctual dissatisfaction designed to require further appeasement. When we get our fast-food order, and we don’t find the errors until we get home, we complain, “They really need to slow down to make sure they get it right.” When we run across that fast-food employee who never gets it wrong, because he operates at such a methodical pace that it’s almost impossible for him to make an error, we complain, “I now realize I wouldn’t mind an error or two if that’s the price I have to pay!”

If everything is political to us, we’re almost required to maintain a certain level of dissatisfaction. If we want progress, we can never be satisfied, lest we slip back closer to the status quo. If we want everyone to agree with us, we want them to hear our passionate argument fueled by dissatisfaction, frustration, and anger.

“I note the etymology, the origin of words, and it’s always fascinating,” Martin Amis said. “‘Widow’, for instance means ‘be empty’, ‘torture’ means literally ‘to twist’. You look up a word … and find out more about it, then you feel a little grey cell burst into life in your head, as well as all the millions that are dying.” For Amis, language was a well from which he drew delight – and into which he gleefully, to our great pleasure, emptied sack after sack of melons.”

“You talk about the simple art of pleasing humans. Imagine finding a great word and being happy for a day? That’s a guy with a firm handle on his individual source code.”

“True, but the ‘everything is political’ animal has a firm handle on their source code too, and it makes them miserable.”

“[But] I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me.”— Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Why do political animals pursue that which makes them miserable? Why do we enjoy watching and playing sports and video games, when the pain of constant failure far outweighs the temporary satisfaction of accomplishment? It’s a statement that seems contradictory, or absurd, but in reality, it expresses a truth, and the truth about the paradox is that it’s all about us. It’s all about how we hear, see, read, and absorb information. As frustrating as it is, we keep feeding the beast. We’re the problem here, and we always have been. We’re the source of the problem, and the source code tells us that it’s we’re the ones who have been the making all of the mistakes all along.

*******

Speaking exclusively to video games, my dad told us to “Just shut it off. If it makes you that angry, just shut it off.” It was so simplistic that we considered it hilarious. Just shut it off? Shut it off and presumably never play video games again? What my dad didn’t understand, and we didn’t either, was that video games became a part of our hard wiring. Following politics, like playing video games, makes us angry and leaves us perpetually unsatisfied, but that’s kind of the allure. Quick question, what do gamers do after achieving the ultimate glory of solving a game? They/we restart the game to do it over again. Temporary losses don’t mean much to either animal, and temporary wins mean almost as little. They might not even take a moment to wallow in the glory. They just start over.

We make mistakes when we chose to follow a source code. When we’re young and making messes where ever we go, they tell us to follow a code, then we see the errors of their code, and we rebel. If we want a reward, they say, we should follow their source code, but machine programmers whisper in our other ear that unless we want eternal strife, we’ll need to reject that particular source code. I didn’t believe those who coded me in my youth, because others helped me see that code for what it was, until I realized that their code required equal amounts of blind fealty. I went back and forth and forth and back, until I accidentally went so far beyond doing a 180 that I found myself turning 360-degrees to try to find what I considered a truth.

Some coders can be quite charming, as they inform us that they, like us, don’t know fecal matter. They’re the “I’m not an expert, but …” crowd. They’re funny, we appreciate their honesty, and we find their presentation compelling and persuasive. When they say they don’t know what they’re talking about, it’s delivered with their clown nose on, and then they take that clown nose off to inform us that no one else knows what they are talking about. Thus, we’re supposed to believe them when they rip apart the foundation of our source code, because at least they’re being honest about it.

“Have you ever tried following a source code?” I ask them. We get it from all corners. Everyone says we’re doing it wrong, even those following our code suggest that we’re doing it wrong, and some programmers tell us that we must be dumb for needing to follow a code in the first place. The only ones who seem to have any confidence in a code are those who don’t have one, and that is so much easier to defend.

“I wish I could believe in something, but I’ve got nothing to believe in,” the unintentionally condescending tell us. “It would be so nice to know as opposed to having to think so much.” The latter is not an exact quote, but the sentiment and inference is that believing in something frees us from having to think and question matters as much as they do, which doesn’t account for those of us who question everything, until we eventually find some code for which we happen to disagree. Those who write code also suggest that other codes exist in an authoritarian realm that require blind fealty, without questioning whether the lines of code might agree our beliefs system as opposed to us agreeing with it. The question we should ask in the face of their certitude is “Are there any nouns (people, places, and things) for whom you express blind fealty?” Most will say no, but if we talk with them long enough, we will eventually find something. We will also find those who don’t believe in anything, and they find that their most admirable quality.

Have you ever considered the idea that the source codes might not be the problem, and that it could be us? Our interpretations could be the problem. I thought I had all of my interpretations down, until someone offered me a new way of looking at what I thought I knew inside and out. It dawned on me that all of my interpretations were flawed, as flawed as I am. I knew everyone else’s interpretations were flawed, don’t we all, but I never considered the idea that I didn’t know squat. This has led me to a new interpretation of the qualifier: “…But that’s just my opinion, man. It’s what we were taught, and what we believe, but it could be wrong for all I know.”

Courage in our convictions leads to comfort, but when we extend that confidence to denounce anyone who deviates from our code as those who will pay, “according to the source code,” it’s not time to denounce the source code, it an opportunity to question ourselves more, and our preferred interpretations.

You have a code, I have a code, and it doesn’t matter what that source code is, it’s as flawed as you are, and as flawed as everyone who taught it to you and influenced you to add and subtract elements to it. Critics will tell us that the problem is not us, it’s our coders. Good for them, I say, you go girl, and all that, because the leader of any movement should welcome criticism, analyze it, and defeat it with performance. We shouldn’t dismiss it either. We should read it to determine if the critique is logical and reasonable. If it is, and it exposes vulnerabilities in our source code, we should adjust accordingly. We’ve all listened to leaders of movements, and some of those leaders have been taken out through irrational and illogical ad hominem attacks. The theme of these attacks is if we cut off the head of a snake, the body dies, but what does a quality leader do more than anything else? They codify the code. The make the complex understandable. They funnel all of the information into a focus that we use to funnel our focus.

I’ve listened to everyone from the crotchety old, traditional professor to the young, emotional, and heartfelt avant garde artists. I’ve mocked both for their pursuits, and I’ve turned my back on each of them at various times, until, as I wrote, I ended up turning 360-degrees to where I am now. I can passionately speak with both sides to a degree they both think I agree with them, but running through it all is a ironclad beliefs system that is steeped in my source code.

Line cooks, bus drivers, and waiters and waitresses have all influenced elements of my source code, almost as much as the great thinkers of history. As with great athletes, great thinkers, leaders of movements, and influencers of a source code, make mistakes. These mistakes, and moments of failure, make them who they are. We won’t see their failures, or most of them, because they’re often committed in the gestation cycle, but they get better, and they learn. When a critic highlights those mistakes and failures, we shouldn’t question the leader or our movement as much as we question ourselves. Leaders and movements come and go, but if we’re doing it right, the critic’s allegations shouldn’t matter to us, even if true. We shouldn’t even have to delete the lines of code the leader influenced, because they’re ours now. Our message to the critic should be, the source code is not the problem, and it never was. It’s as flawed as we are, as flawed as that leader was, and as flawed as we all are. The problem that we’ve never considered before is that it might be us, all of us, and our interpretations.

The Patient Predator

July 9, 2024September 24, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

Those of us from an an agricultural area have all heard the tales about a parent, usually a mother, preparing a chicken for dinner. When we city-dwellers think of the preparations necessary for a chicken dinner, we think of the five-minute drive to the local supermarket, the time it takes to select the best frozen chicken, and choosing a batter (if it’s not pre-battered). We then sit down for our chicken dinner about a half hour later. That’s been the process for so long that most generations have never heard that for farming families, past and present, there are other steps involved that they’ve never heard about when mothers prepare a chicken dinner.

Disclaimer: Some might deem the following Not Safe for the Workplace, and if you are in anyway squeamish, I suggest you locate the ‘X’ in the upper righthand corner of this screen and exit stage right. Some might deem ‘the other steps’ violent and brutal, but they are a way of life on a farm. “It was just the way we did it,” they say. They way they did it, involved a mother entering a chicken coop to retrieve a chicken or rooster for that day’s meal. Once she catches it, she chops its head off and releases it to allow it to run around, headless, until the life runs out of the body, and it unceremoniously falls to the ground. It usually runs around, crashing and smashing into whatever is around it for about ten seconds without a head, until whatever nerves or final vestiges of their muscles finally run out of power. Some find this funny, others consider it sad, and still others find it so funny that it is kind of sad. Whatever the case is, the next time your mother says that you were “Running around like a chicken with its head cut off” you now know the origin of that phrase.

These chicken/rooster post-mortem displays prompt the question, do all animals do this? Do human bodies run around, crashing and smashing into things for ten seconds after the head gets chopped off, until the lifeforce drains out? There is no evidence that suggests human bodies run around in this manner, but there is some dubious evidence that suggests some consciousness remains in the head. The scientific data is about as far from conclusive as possible, but a researching physician in the French Revolution claimed, based on his observations, that a severed head could retain consciousness for 25 to 30 seconds.

As many times as I’ve heard these chicken preparation stories, over the decades, Ken’s version of this practice involved a twist I’ve never heard before. In his retelling, he remembers his mom stalking roosters in the coop. She would enter the chicken coop with a rooster in mind for their meal before she entered. We could write, “At one point, she caught the rooster,” but this does a disservice to the art of catching rooters, as they are notoriously difficult to catch. We could put them in the smallest of pens and coops, and they will still find ways to elude capture with exceptionally quick movements, tricky maneuvers, and some flying involved in their quest to escape. We could also write, right here, that they’re unusually crafty or surprisingly smart when it comes to eluding capture, but they’re not. They just have what athletes call quick-twitch muscles. As usual with animals at the bottom of the food chain, like the rabbit, roosters have quick-twitch muscles that allow them that first-step quickness and that quick change-of-direction speed and agility that athletes prize. These animals obviously need these abilities to avoid faster predators to sustain the species.

Ken’s mother knew this all of this course, and she knew she wasn’t fleet of foot. She knew she wasn’t quick enough to catch a rooster, because no one is. She knew her only path to success involved a patient pursuit. She could have a rooster cornered several times, in corner after corner, and she knew he would continue to successfully escape until eventually he tired out. “She never grew frustrated by her inability to catch the rooster,” Ken said. “It’s very difficult to catch a rooster, and she knew that.”

It would prove a difficult chore even if it were just she and the rooster in the coop, but what makes it even harder are all of the other eight to ten chickens in the coop running around and flying in short bursts to try to avoid their own capture. As such, Ken’s mother would have to watch her step in pursuit, to avoid stepping on any chickens. We can also imagine that with the effort she put into the pursuit, combined with the heat outside, she would sweat profusely throughout her chase, which would lead to all of the feathers flying around the coop to stick to her face. We have to imagine that this would only add to the frustration and anger of even the most seasoned rooster stalker, but she never showed it. “She never grew frustrated or overly impatient,” Ken said. “She knew all that was just part of it.” There were probably occasions when she caught the rooster fairly quickly, but for the most part she had to engage in this patient pursuit, until the rooster eventually tired out, stood in place and fell asleep. At that point, she grabbed it and twisted its neck.

This is the “Wait a second, what?” twist in story. When someone tells a story that is consistent with everything we’ve heard before, we tend to drift a little. We don’t mean to be rude, but we’ve heard this story so many times, and we all know how it ends. Every time I’d heard this story, it ended with an ax, a knife, or some other sharp instrument applied to the member of the fowl family. The entertaining part, if that’s what you want to call it, usually involves the portion of the tale that describes the rooster running around with its head cut off. So, when Ken added the following, the glaze over our eyes lifted, and we said, “Wait a second, what did you say?” to help the rest of our senses catch up.

“She would hold the rooster over her head, by the neck, and spin it, until she felt its neck snap,” Ken said. “She then released it and allowed it to run around the coop until the life drained out of it. Then she picked it up, stripped it of its feathers, put it in water, and took it inside to continue preparing it for our meal.”

“Wait a second, what did you say about spinning?” his open-mouthed audience asked. Ken repeated the bullet points of it. “Did she do that to be … theatrical?”

“My mom didn’t do anything to be theatrical. That was just the way she did it.” When asked if he considered her method in any way inhumane, violent, or brutal, Ken added, “Again, that was just the way she did it. My guess is that that’s probably the way her mother and her grandmother taught her to do it. If you asked her if she considered it theatrical, violent or brutal, she wouldn’t understand why you do. It was just the way it was done as far as she was concerned.

“All you need to do is give the neck a quick jerk,” Ken clarified. “Something to snap the bone. It’s really not as difficult or as violent as you might think.”

*******

Flash forward, a couple years, and Ken is a teenager. Ken admits that he was a particularly naughty kid, in his youth, and he met the back of his parents’ hands “More times than I can count. My parents were never ones to spare the rod.” As a teenager, it had been a number of years since any of his punishments were physical, but he upped the ante on one particular occasion. “I can’t remember what I did, but it was above and beyond the typical teenage tests of parental patience.”

“I’m going to have to give you the switch for this one,” his mother informed him. “You have to learn your lesson.”

“That’s all well and good,” Ken said, “but I’m a teenager now mom, and I’m a lot faster than you now.”

“You do what you have to do, and I’m going to do what I have to do,” she said, “but we both know how this ends.”

“We’ll see,” Ken said, as he eluded her and sped out of the house. Out on the farm, we can imagine that Ken found so many hiding places that he had a few favorites that he couldn’t wait to use on this day. He probably heard her calling out to him from his favorite hiding place on the farm, and he probably giggled when he heard the frustration in her voice, but she eventually found him. When she did, he managed to elude capture again, and he hid in another one of his time-tested hiding spots. When she found him again, he ran away and hid again. “I don’t know how long this lasted, but it lasted a pretty long time, hours I think, until I eventually got tired of running.

“I had it coming, and we both knew it. I didn’t fall asleep, like the rooster, but at some point, I just tired out. To be honest with you, I didn’t see the correlations between her patient pursuits of the roosters and me until much later in life, and when I did, I realized it was pretty funny. She never gave up, she was like a patient predator, and I saw it with the chickens and the roosters. She just never gave up. It was just her way.” Ken’s mother did not further Ken’s punishment by lifting him over her head and spinning him, but Ken never forgot that day with the switch. “It hurt like hell. I still remember how bad that hurt to this day, which was kind of the point. She only swatted me a couple of times, and she was done when she thought I learned my lesson.”

The Loud and the Quiet

July 7, 2024September 25, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

Are you loud or quiet? Tough question, right? You don’t think it is? You think you know? You probably think you’re in the middle somewhere, somewhere a couple clicks south of loud. Lets me ask someone else, someone who knows you well, but not too well. Someone who’s close to you but not so close that they share your perspective on you. What do you think they’d say?

I don’t know how anyone else approaches their matters, but when it comes to finding answers to deeply personal questions, my mind goes to children’s programming. Some cite thought-provoking authors like Shakespeare, Dickens, and others use The Bible. I find myself in Looney Tunes, Scooby Doo, and of course Sesame Street.

In one of their most famous sketches, the Sesame Street team provided a psychological think piece that explored the differences between loud and quiet people. As anyone who knows Sesame Street can guess, the Muppets displayed exaggerated characteristics for comedic effect. After introducing the families, Gordon scrambles the family members together and asks us to determine which individuals belong to which family. Everything the individuals from the loud family did was loud, of course, and everything the quiet family did was quiet. The traits they displayed were comically obvious to the viewers at home, but the individuals in the experiment were surprised when we considered our choice easy. The families knew, because they were members of the loud family and the quiet family, but the individual members of the family probably didn’t think they were as loud or quiet as the rest of their family. Message received: we think we know how we are perceived, but we’re often wrong.

I was just as shocked as those Muppets to learn that those who knew me well considered it just as obvious that I belonged to a quiet family. I never thought of myself as loud, but quiet, no. My guess is no one, especially children, considers themselves quiet. “Well, I’m not like Johnston over there, who never knows when to shut the hell up, but I’m not a quiet person.”

Most of us don’t consider ourselves quiet people, but we concede we’re not loud either. If we were to chart our characteristics on a loud v. quiet graph, comparing ourselves to the people we know, we’d probably dot ourselves somewhere north of the point of origin, on the louder side. How shocked would we be to learn that our own friends and family members dotted us on the south side of the point, as generally quiet people? I knew loud people when I was young, and I knew I wasn’t that, but I was shocked to learn that those who know me best dropped my dot on the quieter side, and they were shocked that I was shocked. It still shocks me that I’m generally considered quieter than most, until I see a member of the loud family.

Have you ever met, or witnessed, such an exaggeration of the opposite that it changed how you thought of yourself? “I never thought of myself as a slob, until I met Darrin. He’s a couple clicks north of OCD.” “I thought I was something of an unemotional robot, until I met Adam.” I dotted myself somewhere on the loud side of the graph, until I witnessed a “so obvious, it was hilarious” member of the loud family in a restaurant I was seated in. I didn’t see her grab a napkin from the dispenser, but from everything I heard from her, in such a short time, I have to imagine that it would’ve been the loudest napkin retrieval I’ve ever heard.

Everything this woman did was loud. Her laughter drew our attention. Then, once she appeared on our radar, we realized how loud she spoke. The words that followed her laugh were part of her laughter, and we could excuse that as a natural flow from the laughter, but when she returned to normal conversation, we could hear everything she said. Her normal conversation volume was a whole bunch of decibel levels higher than any of the other patrons in restaurant.

Have you ever heard a laugh so loud that it could silence an entire restaurant? It wasn’t an “I’ll have what she’s having” laugh. It was a short, polite laugh that she unveiled to respond to a joke someone at her table told, as opposed to the raucous laughter that leads everyone to want to know the joke. It was more of a “What the hell was that?” laugh that can be a little unsettling for a couple of seconds, until we all go back to eat our food and engage in our own private conversations.

Anytime we talk about loud people, we naturally flow into rude, sloppy, or obnoxious characterizations, but this woman didn’t appear to be any of the above. Some people go loud in an unnatural, over-the-top manner to dominate a room, but for others it just appears to be a more organic characteristic. This woman just had one of those voices, and laughs, that all but echoes throughout a sparsely populated diner.

I’ve sat with some naturally and unusually loud people. When they speak, I just assume everyone in the restaurant can hear every word they’re saying. I assume they can hear our small, personal and private conversations, and I imagine that they don’t want to hear it, but this person is so loud that they can’t help it. I was sure that that quiet couple, over in that quiet corner over there, was trying to block us out and enjoy a quiet meal together, but this guy was so loud that they can’t help but eavesdrop. We could be discussing the differences inherent in the Norwegian versus the German styles of knitting, and the rest of the restaurant hears everything he says, whether they want to or not.

When the person at my table is that loud, my shoulders instinctively cinch inwards as I attempt to camouflage myself with my chair to avoid associations with them, and I instinctually avoid dropping additions to any jokes to try to avoid making them laugh harder. Some part of me knows the patrons aren’t paying near as much attention as I fear, but I can’t help but think that it’s almost impossible for them to avoid listening in.

When I hear loud people, up close and from afar, I know I could never be with them romantically, no matter how loving, caring, or attractive they may be, because I am a private person who doesn’t enjoy drawing unwanted attention to myself. And I never thought I would be this guy. When I was younger, I thought they were the life of the party, and as far as I was concerned it was the louder the better. I don’t know if it was a crush, or a temporary romantic fling I had with the notion that louder is better, or if I was just having more fun in life when I was younger, because I thought louder people were more fun.

Yet, nestled deep inside this comparative analysis is the idea that I’m not as quiet as some suggest. Loud people, generally speaking, have been loud their whole lives. They were probably loud babies, attention seeking children, and they never had to put much effort into it. It was just who they were, are, and always will be, and I have to think they don’t care for it. I suspect that when they grow up they find that they cannot stand loud people. Most of us, on subconscious levels, abhor what we regard as our most annoying traits. “I hate complainers,” the biggest complainers we’ve ever met say. “Whiners just annoy me,” they whine, and they’re not trying to be ironic or funny when they say it. If two loud people get together romantically, I have to think it won’t last long, because they will find it exhausting on some level that they can’t quite put their finger on. They might be attracted to one another for reasons they can’t explain, and the breakup might be just as inexplicable to them. “I don’t know why we didn’t work,” is something they might say. “Some people just don’t mesh.”

The only person they could see themselves with, long term, would be a quiet person who gives them the space to be who they are. Yet, if we pointed any of this out out to them, they would be so shocked that they’d refute it, “You think I’m loud? What about Billy?” It’s the whataboutism defense, but it’s not a ruse. They genuinely believe that they’re not loud, because they can always find someone louder. If we concede that they’re not as loud as Billy, we might add that they’re still louder than most. “Why do you say that?” they might ask, and we will have to be careful how we answer, because whenever we point out a trait generally perceived to be negative, most people will exaggerate it into an insult.

I didn’t think any less of the loud patron at the restaurant, as I’m able to block out most distractions around my table, but she did draw my attention away from the conversations I was having, and she did so on at least three different occasions. I don’t view it as a negative characteristic, or even a flaw, to be louder or quieter than the average person, but it’s all those other attachments we make, loud equals obnoxious and obnoxious equals rude, and quiet equals shy, insecure, and personality-free that leads us all to fight labels.

The Sesame Street sketch was done with colorful Muppets characterizing with exaggeration, but if it were done with real people, individuals from both parties would be insulted to learn that we consider them so obvious and simple for us to decide which family they belong in. Most of us will concede that our dot on the graph sits somewhere around the point of origin, but we’re shocked when someone suggests we’re closer to an exaggeration than we know. We might never know, until we hear a humorous exaggeration. Even then, we might hold onto that exaggeration as an example we use to inform people that we’re not as loud, or quiet, as all those Muppets out there.