Title: A Common Misunderstanding; Or, The Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)
Date: 2017-12-01 19:50
Category: other
-Tags: anecdotal, personal, two-type taxonomy
+Tags: anecdotal, my robot cult, personal, two-type taxonomy
-I remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was a little less than nine years ago, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
+I remember (and [the Diary entry](/ancillary/diary/296/) helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was a little less than nine years ago, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
I worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of redeemed manufacturer's coupons at store #936 (what the company did with them after that, I was never told—perhaps they weighed them), bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked near the library construction site; I had some time to kill before I was scheduled to rendezvous at University and Shattuck at 1745 with a local genetics blogger with whom I had arranged to give a ride to the party. I walked to Ming Quong and bought a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point. I had recently reöutfitted my bag with buttons I had bought from a site I found because the proprietor occasionally commented on the blog (_the_ blog). My newly-accessorized bag could hardly be complete without a gender pin, and for some sentimental reason I wanted it _before_ taking the geneticist to the social. I have a weakness for what you might call _narrative optimization_: doing things not for any real-world utility, but rather because they would seem thematically appropriate if this were a story rather than real life.
The party was amazing, as always, but there's one exchange that haunts me to this day, a moment when I was caught off guard by having been _seen through_ in a way that, at the time, I couldn't permit myself to anticipate or understand. I wish I had an actual transcript of it, so I could pencil in "corrections" of how it _should_ have gone. (Narrative optimization should be a _deliberate_ process: you should keep separate track of what actually happened and what _should_ have happened, rather rather than letting them get blurred together in the murky, unauditable process of reconstructing the scene from an eight-and-change-year-old memory and a Diary entry from the Monday after.)
-A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks. I struck up a conversation with her. (It turned out that we had previously had a tense exchange on the blog in which [I had protested that](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/q6j) gender-stereotypical behavior shouldn't be conflated with the fact of one's sex, but I didn't know that was her at the time.)
+A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks. I struck up a conversation with her. (It turned out that we had previously had a tense exchange on the blog in which [I had protested that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd) gender-stereotypical behavior shouldn't be conflated with the fact of one's sex, but I didn't know that was her at the time.)
At some point (to my eternal regret, I cannot recall the exact context), she casually said something about my desire for social dominance. She said it matter-of-factly, as if she were commenting on something as innocuous and indisputable as my height or hair color.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff