Get Thee to a Nunnery

In Hamlet, the title of this post is used twice. Once it definitely does not refer to a nunnery.

In a recent email, Dear Friend asked RantWoman whether her intent moving ahead with Nom Comm without talking through all of Dear Friend's concerns with Dear Friend alone was to apply a common Anglo-Saxon epithet to Dear Friend. (For the record, there WERE screwups involved at different points, but bear with the narrative.)



RantWoman could think of much more fun scenarios for applying said epithet. To RantWoman's surprise, this morning said epithet wandered into RantWoman's brain with an exasperated alternative appreciation sense.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you ever so much. Gee Thanks. Now look...!


RantWoman is aware that Dear Friend would translate the epithet RantWoman would thus render into Quakerese a different more concise way. RantWoman so enjoys talking with Dear Friend specifically because our conversations sometimes have a level of irreverent wash-your-brain-out-for-even-thinking-that candor so completely at odds with popular images of historical and present Quaker earnestness. As RantWoman thinks about this whole story though RantWoman is wondering whether both of us in different ways are trying to vary that dynamic somehow.


RantWoman debated whether to get the above excursion out of her system and post the meat of her reflections in a separate entry. RantWoman is also sensitive to comments she has heard from several directions about emails and blog posts being abstruse and hard to read. Alas, RantWoman opted to leave things in one post, as part of vivid illustration of RantWoman's possible mental clutter. RantWoman has been compiling data.



Bless Dear Friend and his second-year Spanish mistake from an event last spring though. After only a tiny bit of reading about eldering and conflict on the way to what RantWoman was looking for about Clearness Committees, RantWoman is going to ASK whether Dear Friend and Nom Comm can help her compile a list of ways RantWoman's nomination process has helped us look again at basics of Quakerism. We just did a whole year on Discernment; what about Eldering? Conflict? Clearness processes? What exactly DO we expect of Nom Comm when a conflict arises? This paragraph MAY generate a whole separate post.



RantWoman was looking at some email at the beginning of the nomination process. RantWoman is meditating tonight partly about whether interactions between RantWoman and Dear Friend over the nomination issue got off to a bad start because of baggage from other people's history with Dear Friend. RantWoman first heard of Dear Friend's concern from someone else. Then began discussions with several Friends about Sudoku. Then Dear Friend still wanted to talk to RantWoman. Part of this was by email, part by phone.



HOWEVER, one of the early emails that so set Dear Friend off, while freighted with certain email harshness, also contains requests which seem entirely reasonable to RantWoman that perhaps Dear Friend do things like call at a reasonable hour rather than by voicemail reply left at 1 am, respect that RantWoman knows herself more than well enough to know that she often puts data together over time and different conversations, and be courteous about RantWoman's work schedule, pathetic though it might be.



RantWoman has not counted in her emails, but she is pretty sure she has told Dear Friend as least five times in email or by phone that she was having trouble hearing concerns specifically from Dear Friend. RantWoman wonders at what point it is reasonable to expect someone to get the message and try another approach.



RantWoman is also thinking about how she herself could and arguably well should have sought help sooner from others. RantWoman thinks she ought to meditate on this theme. It has come up a couple different ways. Even though RantWoman thought Dear Friend was a little bit missing the mark when he brought it up in one context,



Well, RantWoman is wondering that, but RantWoman is also finding the evolution of her thinking and explorations strangely energizing and ongoing conversations with Dear Friend are one big but definitely not the only part of that. That, RantWoman supposes, is part of why she is somehow supposed to thank Dear Friend for hanging in there with his concern.



The other night RantWoman called Dear Friend to ask him about something to do with our clearness committee. Conversation wandered to two instructive themes.



First was RantWoman's service as Recording Clerk. The first time RantWoman served as Recording Clerk, she herself was VERY new to Friends. The job suited her because RantWoman is not the most garrulous outgoing type and could just sit, write minutes, listen. RantWoman got little training about what constitutes good minutes. RantWoman is scratching her head trying to remember who was Clerk at that time. RantWoman remembers that the Clerk was well pleased with her minutes, that is the minutes were grammatical and complete sentences. Dear Friend mentioned that he thought RantWoman had been a little out of her depth and RantWoman asked him to explain.



A few years after RantWoman's term, RantWoman remembers discussion in Meeting for Business about how minutes should do things like clearly mark decisions, including both the fact of the decision and the wording of the decision so that later people can read the minutes and figure out what was decided. Minutes, Meeting for Business noted, should also distinguish between action minutes and minutes of discussion or reports.



Dear Friend mentioned these points, and RantWoman mentioned sitting in Meeting for Business during these discussions and thinking very clearly that she had probably written minutes exactly like the problems described and wished someone had told her this at the time. The second time RantWoman was recording clerk at least she tried to observed the conventions noted above. RantWoman did go and have to have serious eye surgery at the end of her second term of service so that it took a whole extra two months to get her last minutes done, but that is another problem.

The other theme that came up somehow relates both to a concern voiced by Dear Friend and variations on the theme mentioned in Meeting for Business, at the time RantWoman and Dear Friend were not present. This relates to rambling and wandering among not obviously related mental stopping points.



Somehow RantWoman and Dear Friend got to talking about a commonly used personality test that groups people into 16 groups according to their ratings on four different axes. People's groupings are not necessarily stable over time and the distribution of how people fall into the different groups is very uneven. RantWoman is most assuredly not well enough versed in the typology to think about anyone but herself. RantWoman has done the test a couple different times and for better or worse gotten similar not very common profiles in each case. RantWoman did not even think to ask Dear Friend what group he falls into.



Anyway, despite the known unreliability issue, this test gave RantWoman another way to look at comments from both Dear Friend and others in Meeting. RantWoman has consistently scored near the middle on two axes, very high for a woman on one of the third, and very high on the end of the fourth associated with people who can pick many possibilities out of just about any situation. RantWoman and Dear Friend had an interesting conversation about how this trait can be useful in picking points to work on out of conflictive situations but that seeming digressions can drive other people such as coworkers crazy. RantWoman is unclear what if anything she is going to do about noting a degree of concord between Dear Friend's concern and observations from others in her Meeting.


RantWoman at some point reacted to Dear Friend's concern with one of her trademark wisecracks: there is the committee RantWoman has been nominated to. There is Meeting for Business. If Dear Friend thinks RantWoman's level of emotional clutter is enough to overcome both of those sources of check, RantWoman really wants tips about tapping into this kind of power.

Maybe though RantWoman will season with one of the queries related to how do we help each other use our talents....?