Over the years, I have spent thousands of thousands of hours conversing with Susanna. She's got a great way of thinking that's unpresumptuous, lucid, organic, earthy, but transcendent. There's no human experience she gets lost in analyzing with a scalpel. I'm hanging out with her this weekend, and I wanted to start a running list of times she had a really keen insight into something.
Baby you. One of my favorite ever Susanna moments came when we were high and she was about to say something, but forgot it. She sat there on the couch, struggling to remember the thought. Finally she got it and was able to proceed with the conversation. First, she for some reason (I forget the context) did a little celebration of having remembered her thought. "I can't even remember what it was like (just moments ago) to not have this thought. It was a little baby me." That blew my mind. It revealed the vast pivot represented by wanting to know something, struggling to know something, and knowing it. That the difference between lacking a thought -- whether it's a factoid or memory or certitude or whatever -- and having it, turns you into a different kind of person. It's the difference between futility and grasping and wholeness, completion, settledness. At the time I was working at Grovo, contemplating Khurgin's (very good) concept of the "a-ha moment," which was the idea that encoding information in story helped us contextualize and therefore retain it better. The concept of this binary existential switch essentially taking you across this divide, which feels like going from as bad as you'll feel in a week to as good as you'll feel in a week, really impacted me.
Eagerness rooted in insecurity. She was talking about cooking, and how she likes it when Sof cooks something by just getting it done, not by adding the little sprig of parsley and all that shit some men do. "I hate it when guys do things with flourish," she said with a little whirly hand motion. That it's unattractive when men have just their little right things that they're fastidious about and they fret over. She then linked that up to a larger concept: it's unattractive when people do anything too eagerly. I agreed and asked why that is. "Because your assumption is always that it's rooted in insecurity." So true.
Compliment something new. When we were dating in college, she once gave me the secret to the powerful compliment: it has to be something the recipient hasn't already thought of. It's obvious, maybe, but it hadn't occurred to me yet.
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