Today's Reply All got a laugh in large part because I can't imagine requiring a house meeting in a household with only two people, which I think was the point.
One of the things I like most about this strip is Drew's no-drama way of dealing with Lizzie's drama-every-day needs.
It also connects to one of the major insights in "You Just Don't Understand," which I just cited a couple of days ago, and which is that men prefer information served straight up while women are more into nuance and suggestion.
This is not a "good" versus "bad" thing, but it's a thing and it leads to a lot of really unnecessary misunderstandings.
In the book, Tannen gives the example of a woman who, after dinner, says "Honey, I'm going to go for a walk," to which her husband says something vaguely along the lines of "Okay" when what she wanted him to say was, "Oh, I think I'll join you!"
Which he would have said, if she had said, "Let's go for a walk!" or "Would you like to go for a walk?" or "I feel like taking a walk. Want to come along?"
But, because she simply announced that she was going for a walk, he assumed that she needed some alone time, because, in his mind, if she wanted company, she'd have said so.
So now she's pissed because he didn't come along.
Maybe a house meeting would fix it, since it would force the two of them to sit down and say what's on their minds rather than stew in silence or throw out more little hints that Someone More Sensitive would pick up on.
The trick for him being to ask "Well, why didn't you say so?" in a way that doesn't carry a large message of "Why are you so freaking stupid?" while she should seek a way to ask "Why didn't you offer to come along?" in a way that doesn't carry a large message of "You should be able to read my mind, you insensitive jerk."
In my day, we didn't call these "house meetings." We called them "house raps," because that was the era, and they happened when there were more than two people involved.
When I first ran into them, I was in a house in Boulder with, I think, about 18 people, though I'm unsure about who actually lived there and who was just there all the time. I moved out three months later after the population had risen to about 30 and we had people living in cars out back and camped in the yard and if you weren't into chaos, well ... I left, and the house broke up a few weeks later anyway.
At that point, there was nothing a house rap could do to keep things together and we couldn't have gotten everyone into the livingroom at once anyway.
I think we might have stopped having house raps even if we hadn't continued to collect waifs long after the building's capacity had been exceeded.
The thing is, house raps worked really well for awhile and then they didn't. Honesty is a good thing, but, as Drew suggests, you can exceed the gravitational tolerance level pretty fast.
What happened was that, when the personal criticism started, some people said, "Oh. Okay. Sorry." and other people got up and walked out.
We stopped trying to have house raps when the number of walkers-out reached critical mass and the number of people who said, "Oh. Okay. Sorry." was no longer statistically significant.
I suspect that, if you only have two people, it compresses the roles, so that one person becomes the person who says, "We should have a house rap" and the other person is the one who says "Oh. Okay. Sorry" for awhile and then, after a few house raps, switches to being the person who walks out.
Maybe the safest bet is to say, "Honey, I'm going to have a house rap," and see if he says "Okay," or "Oh, I think I'll join you!"
On a related note
Much of the appeal of Agnes is her indomitable, unintentional egocentricity, but she really outdid herself today. This is one for the refrigerator, or virtual equivalent thereof.
Trout has been her friend for so long that she doesn't even bother asking to have a house rap anymore.
Vatican II, for better or worse
You Damn Kid was on hiatus for awhile but is back with a mix of new and vintage strips, and this weekend's gave me flashbacks to college. Go read it.
I grew up an observant Catholic, not simply an altar boy but also an officer in the Catholic Youth Organization and one who did not push back against the family rule that we apply to Catholic colleges.
Which I think made it inevitable that I would stop attending mass about halfway through freshman year: Normal rebellion.
Plus the fact that the chapel in my dorm was the center of the newly emerging Catholic Ecstatic Creepy Evangelical Movement, which drove a lot of us to other chapels, if not out of the church entirely.
However, I still went when I was at home, and I'd have had no problem covering up my apostasy prior to Vatican II because mass was mass the whole world over, and the only difference between mass in New York and mass in Belgium was that the Latin was standard and the "moves" were all the same, and only the sermon would be incomprehensible.
So, no difference.
But with Vatican II, they dropped the Latin and changed all the moves, so that I'd come home and have no idea what to do next.
Fortunately, this liturgical chaos was universal, so you could say, "Oh, we don't do it that way" and be off the hook.
For 50 years, until you wrote about it on a blog your mother reads.
Scratch that earworm
It only becomes more relevant with time
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