Tag: words

086b – the kiki bouba effect in conversation

kiki: sharp, precise, particular

bouba: loose, round, soft

I’ve always been a little Kiki when it comes to.. most things, really. I was reminded of this while talking to a close friend of mine. We’ve been pretty close for almost a decade now— suffice to say we know each other pretty well and have talked about various things under the sun. We were reflecting on our friendship and relationship a bit, how it has evolved etc and something that came up was a difference of ours. This is one of the few differences that has persisted over the decade— he’s a little bit Bouba and I’m a little bit Kiki. 

In conversation, I tend to be quite Kiki. I’ll always be the one thinking-frowning at words that I don’t think fit very well and at generalisations and at vague descriptions of problems and (although this is unrelated) unsolicited advice. 

With some people, this results in great things, we collaborate to find words that fit better, we learn a little more about each other every time we strike off a generalisation and discuss how the generalisation may not apply even to us as data points, and we get closer to the sub-problems that we’re interested in talking or thinking about. (Even if that problem is a very simple and mundane one, like where should we hang out the next time we meet. Side note on calling this “open question” a problem is pretty Bouba of me but ah, well.)

So anyway, I suppose these people are equally or more Kiki than I am and so they’re okay with deep-diving into precision ABOUT the things I want to get more precise about. 

What happens when you talk to someone who’s not as Kiki about the same topics as you are, then? I am often met with resistance. They give me reactions like “ah, well you know what I mean don’t you” or “why are so fixated on x y z when that was clearly not the point of me talking about a b c” etc. And I’m okay to take that feedback, I think I’ve gotten a little bit better at being a little more Bouba with different people in different situations. Like yes, maybe sometimes being pedantic is really just coming in the way of transference of feelings. In a way, when I’m pedantic when the other person doesn’t want me to be, there’s of course a disconnect that they might feel. They might feel misunderstood, or like they’ve said— they might just feel like in the moment I (the listener) might be focusing on the wrong thing.

This makes sense. For people like me then, it becomes important to discern when there is a “discussion” or a “debate” happening, and perhaps when it’s just feelings being shared. 

But what about when Kikiness is actually really useful? How do I communicate that to people? Like there are some people who are so Bouba that they get defensive about any examination of the things they’re expressing. 

Maybe it does just come down to discernment. One of my friends does this pretty well, he might say: “I disagree with the use of the word XYZ here, but I know what you mean”. And then if I want to open a thread there, we can do that. If I don’t, we carry on with the original conversation. 

I don’t know, I thought I was going to go somewhere with this, I really wanted to make a case of “when can being Kiki be useful”, but I’m gong to test out my discernment theory a little more in conversation from now on and then see where that takes me. 

084a – sleepless + abundance mindset + resignation

New neighbor that I have no way of contacting is drumming (it’s the middle of the night) and I can’t sleep. Obviously, sleep has been tough even otherwise but it’s extra tough with this added problem. I have brunch plans for noon so this is quite painful. Not sure if I’ll be able to wake up on time. 

Funnily enough, I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a drum kit since I’ve been learning them for a few months now— and I’ve been super confused between an electronic and a steel kit, and even though I knew acoustic kits can be super loud I was still considering getting one, hoping that maybe since there’s no one around on my floor I could still get by. But now that I know someone is nearby AND is equally annoying as I am— this could go either ways. One thought is that I’ve been pre-given a taste of my own potential medicine, and the opposite possibility is that “hey, we could both annoy each other”.

I’ll write this and then do some reading and just hope that they eventually stop. If there is a god then I’d love to get at least 6 hours of sleep tonight. 

I’ve been having nice conversations with friends lately and I get such a kick out of stimulating conversations that it sometimes feels so dry when you don’t have that going with other people. Where this is coming from is that lately I’d been trying to be more accepting of different kinds of relationships and dynamics in my life, I was trying to spend time with people even for other things apart from conversation— ie good feelings that come from other things like a ton of shared context, shared past, physical affection, and just.. non-words, in general. But I don’t know, when the words are good, that makes everything so much more fun. 

I’ve been thinking about abundance mindset a lot lately. With art, I think I’ve incorporated it a good amount into practice as well. For example, creating “more”, posting/sharing “more”, expressing “more” and with “more” types of people, so that you are not tied to specific things. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, as they often say. 

With friends also, I’ve gotten better at this. Make more friends (to the extent you can without a quality compromise, of course) for different parts of your life, perhaps. I wouldn’t say this is a cope to “loneliness” necessarily because I don’t think more friends can solve this really, at some point you also do need to be okay with being lonely, etc. However, it’s nice to have different friends for different interests, and different kinds of activities etc, I do believe it results in greater resonance than attempting to mould existing friends for everything. 

It’s been toughest for me with romantic interests and romantic relationships, though I’ve gotten much better at it over the last few years. It’s a hard thing to learn and accept really but at the end of the day you cannot make very few specific people the centres of your universe. And the trick is to not necessarily have to make “your own self” the centre of your universe or whatever, the trick is to really have just MANY centres in your universe. 

Obviously for me that’s consistently been friends, family, animals, nature, music, writing, art, tv, books, philosophy, and a little bit of spirituality for a good amount of time now. But then on some nights (nights like these), I cannot use my usual faculties to feel okay, and that’s when things feel quite tough, I suppose. 

*Sigh*. It is what it is, I guess. I’m going to make something to eat now and then read a bit. Hopefully, I’ll get to sleep soon.