Category Archives: Writing

Some claim that 93% of communication is non-verbal. Seems a little high to me; I’ve never even seen a picture of Herman Melville’s face, but Moby Dick did speak to me. While I don’t follow or remember everything from any book, I’m pretty sure I got at least 80% of the message from Ishmael. Now if Mr. Melville and I were sitting at a bar and he were trying to articulate ambiguity, revenge, and inevitability in conversation, I’d come to understand what he was trying to convey from his posture, facial expressions, and what he chose to drink (rail whiskey straight, one presumes). But I sat down and read (in my case rode a bicycle and listened) to Moby Dick as a soliloquy, following along as the author articulated his imagined world. Relational throughput feels relevant today because non-verbal interactions are largely cut off and my relationships are weaker and more transactional as a result, particularly at work. Some facial expressions are shared on video calls, some emotions make it through, (and I can still find myself crying on work Zooms, if it’s a rough enough day and someone opens a little space), but face angle, eye contact, and of course trips to the bar are nullified as communication passes through the little tiny hole at the top of my laptop. I propose a solution to this dilemma – written longform monologues, on the regular. Chat messages leave so much to be desired, emails are action or decision oriented by nature, and 1-1 coffees over video have lost the element of in-person coffee-drinking I value the most: space to be listened to for 5+ minutes at a time. It’s the absolutely rare person that can listen on a video call for ten minutes without interrupting, and the absolutely indifferent person who tries to carry on for ten minutes when the other person isn’t listening. I’m not proposing everyone write a novel over the next several months and put it into a Slack channel. That would be really cool, and I would probably read them (so much insight for my neurotic brain into why you never actually respond to my calendar invites but still show up to meetings!) But I’m talking about something different. Even 200 words amounts to a near-novel compared to the length of communications during a pandemic and when an instant message service is widely used (yo – you see the deck yet?). If I could read, in five hundred words or more, what was on the minds of the dozen people I work most closely with once a week, I think I might feel connected in a similar way to the way I feel connected when half of those dozen and me are the same amount of hung over on a Thursday morning for the same reason. And I’d have a healthier liver. This would be my first entry into the longform-thoughts channel. But here’s the thing; I started this job in the middle of the pandemic, so I haven’t had non-verbal or longform communication with almost anyone yet. So I’m more comfortable sharing this on the open internet and with those precious few of you who are reading the poems and odds and ends I write (you are all deeply appreciated, thank you) than on a work channel, at this point. But maybe I’ll get a bit more courageous (after editing out a bunch of shit that probably would explain some of my weird & annoying work foibles) and share this with the people I spend the most time with but feel the least connected to. Call me Roman.