A couple of days ago I had what was, I've now decided, my last interview for my thesis. That's fourteen altogether and it's enough. I thought of doing one more with a particular kind of person but I think it's unnecessary - I'm already four people beyond the number initially proposed. No need to overdo the overdoing.
Meanwhile, I've been slogging through the transcriptions, and while it may be mind-numbing and painfully slow, at least each interview is under an hour and a half, and at least I don't have thirty of them to do. Anyone I meet who has undertaken the same task has always had just so much more to do than I have, which is good because I realise that it can get done eventually, but also bad because I wonder when I became such a wimp as to think I can get away with complaining about a measly fourteen interviews.
Of course, a certain amount of each sound file is my own voice, and I find it pretty interesting how much I change from one interview to the next. There's hyper me and excessively agreeable me and cautious me and sympathetic me and even-toned me (all of which irritate the piss out of me when I have to listen to them being played back) and it just seems that I don whichever hat feels appropriate, which I suppose must depend on some kind of vibe I sense being exuded by the other person. It makes me wonder two things: first, could I have acted out some other shape of myself and if so, would the interview have proceeded differently in a way that we both would have noticed?; and second, which one of them are they showing me and what is it about me that made them show that particular self?
I try to treat everyone the same, but is it really possible? Where one person will laugh at something I say, another will change the subject. In return, my response will vary. It's not that one is more favourable than the other (though who doesn't enjoy having their jokes laughed at?) or that anybody is at fault; I think it's that as two people together we become something else, part you, part me, all us, but I'm never quite the same as I am on my own or with a different person.
If this is so, how is it related to the phrase 'I don't like him'? Do I not like him? Do I not like me around him? Do I not like us? When I think of the people I really like, I think that I really like myself, too.
I think that my feelings towards others is perhaps more dependent on this idea of 'us' than I normally acknowledge.
1 comment:
oh! this is so relevant to all I'm experiencing right now. It really does beg the question, what does 'I don't like him' mean?
I never thought about the fact that you'd have to listen to yourself over and over. That would drive me nuts (as stagette weekend recordings have proven). I can never believe all the false voices and intonations that come out of me.
How cool that you have to listen anyway and can notice all the things you do.
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