What is the usual balance of eye contact during one-on-one semi-formal conversation?
I was observing my boss during our quarterly meeting today and noticed that he tended to periodically look away while he spoke, and wondered if I should also periodically look away while I listened.
I’m trying to be more accommodating and accessible towards guests. Is discomfort with making eye contact primarily while being the speaker, being the listener, or both? Does the discomfort extend to when you aren’t looking at someone’s eyes but they are looking at yours? I’ve occasionally had people tell me I have an “intent stare” and I don’t wish to seem aggressive or creepy.
Solution: take a leaf out of the Corinthian’s book and wear dark sunglasses at all times so people can’t see that I’m staring at them unblinkingly while they speak.
Somebody did science and the time period is just over three seconds of eye contact, lazy shift, and back. [x] Or just about 60-70% of the conversation. [x]
Neither article mentions whether it varies depending on who is doing the talking. It seems likely that the active speaker will be the one to break eye contact and look elsewhere more often, and that speaking to someone while holding their gaze may be what’s perceived as aggressive.
I can usually dial down my eye contact while I’m the one talking because I’m usually talking about something and can gesture to it. When I’m the one listening, I have no idea what to do with my eyes other than look at the eyes of the speaker.
Edward Suazo recorded and posted a video of a white man harassing his
wife and the cashier at a NYC deli; the Caucasian fellow was triggered
by hearing people speaking in Spanish, prompting him to loudly, grossly
insult several strangers, accusing them of being undocumented immigrants
and vowing to have them deported.
The man also accused his victims of being on welfare, and complained that their benefits came out of his taxes.
The man was subsequently identified as a New York City lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg, whose nearby firm advertises that he speaks Spanish fluently.
An open records check reveals that Schlossberg donated $500 to the Donald Trump presidential campaign.
Reporters from various news outlets have attempted to get a statement from Schlossberg; he offered no comment to PX-11:
so my campus is currently hosting an ENORMOUS conference of scholars who study medieval history. they’ve been completely flooding the tiny cafe where I work and drinking our coffee faster than we can make it, but the good news is that they provide some PRIME people watching, including:
the fact that all of their name tags include pronouns so that I won’t feel bad assuming anyone’s gender in this post
the woman RANTING about one of her colleagues on the following grounds: “he thinks he understands it from some class he took in 1996! FUCK OFF, TOM.”
the man who was loudly and earnestly discussing the “influence of the Harry Potter fandom on our modern political discourse” while he got a soda
before he was out the door he’d switched topics to his preferred methods for teaching students about elves
the two nice extremely polite young British lads who I could not tell apart to save my life. their name tags indicated that they were apparently not twins, but cloning does not seem impossible.
the sheer number of people graciously volunteering to buy lunch for people they’ve just met
an unexpected number of very handsome soft butch women involved in medieval studies. I am bisexual and weak.
the guy in the flannel shirt who had the coldest, softest, most feminine hands I’ve ever encountered. I fell in love with him for a good 60 seconds. I am bisexual and weak.
people who aren’t from America being cheerfully confused by our money, including my favorite, a Canadian woman who told me “I’m slow with American money because it’s all the same color.”
I’ve learned that people who aren’t going to be in the country for more than a few days don’t give a SHIT about their change and will toss all of it in the take a penny/leave a penny jar. I collected so many quarters, y’all.
also a nice British woman called it the penny pot, which is the cutest shit I’ve ever heard and absolutely its new name.
just in general the EXTREMELY good grace and patience with which everyone accepted that we only have 2 cashiers and that it takes about seven minutes to make more coffee.
SEVERAL times after I apologized for the coffee wait (because this is customer service and minor inconveniences mean we have to grovel) the response was ‘lmao no worries this just means I get a fresh pot’
a woman approached me to day with a fucking enamel pin of that old illustration of a nun gathering dicks from a tree (you know the one) and I said immediately “oh my god, is that a pin of the penis tree?” and she looked stoked and said “yes it is the penis tree! you’re only the second person to recognize it!” what kind of boring ass medieval scholars has she been hanging with???? she was probably so fucking excited to finally have company where she could wear that pin and nobody said anything??? rude.
you know, this one
I have more:
every single person who said “cheers” when I gave them their change.
the painfully hip young man who was dressed entirely in standard academic business casual EXCEPT FOR his shiny silver doc martens.
me: “you boots are amazing.”
him: “!!!! thank you!”
the man who walked in, spotted the selection of high octane energy drinks, and nearly cried with relief. when he came to the register to pay for what was probably enough caffeine to kill a horse he looked me dead in the eye and said cheerfully “thanks, I’m jet lagged as shit and I can’t be expected to function right now.”
the dude who overheard my friend Austin listening to Florence and the Machine, started chatting with him about it, and asked him out on a date
I sold a hot dog to An Actual Nun
I love my fellow medievalists so much <3
theres not one of them who picked that major for any reason other then they wanted to have fun and be cool
reblogging this so i have it in my ‘for later’ tag in case i can dig up my aunt’s email to send it to her. she is a history professor specializing in medieval stuffs and will Understand.
For nearly 30 years, there was only one full-time gynecologist on staff
at the University of Southern California’s student health clinic: Dr.
George Tyndall, about whom there was a widespread understanding among
staff and students that he sexualized his examinations, making overt
sexual remarks to the teenagers under his care, fondling them, and
waxing creepy about his predilection for Asian women.
The university received a steady stream of complaints about Tyndall’s
conduct starting in the 1990s, when students complained that he had made
a habit of photographing their vulvas. The university allowed him to
continue to practice for decades more, despite mounting complaints,
until finally one of the clinic nurses reported Tyndall to the campus
rape crisis center.
After determining that Tyndall had acted improperly, the university
secretly paid him off and dismissed him. They never told the survivors
of his abuse that he had been found to have transgressed.
Many of Tyndall’s students were foreign and uncertain of US medical
norms; the chaperones who reported his conduct said he was especially
rapey with Chinese women. When the administration began to question
Tyndall’s conduct, he started handing letters of support to his patients
after examinations, asking them to sign them and email them to the
university, BCCing him so he’d know they complied.
Tyndall denies any wrongdoing. He is still licensed to practice medicine
in California and told the LA Times he intends do continue seeing
patients into his 80s.
The university has set up a hotline for Tyndall’s former patients to report sexual assaults they experienced under his care.
Kaitlin Cawley finished grad school with $95,000 in student loans,
including a $24,000 variable-rate loan that started at 9.4% and now
stands at 11%, a loan that the US government lender Sallie Mae brokered
for her when she was 20.
Sallie Mae’s portal makes it almost impossible to find out how much
you’ve paid into your loans; after a lengthy runaround, Cawley found
that she had paid back $18,000 of her $24,000 loan, but that she still
owed the full amount, thanks to sky-high interest and stiff penalties
the government assessed against her because she opted to save tens of
thousands of dollars by going to grad school outside of the USA.
Cawley comes from a working-class background and her family was not able
to substantially offset the expense of her university. She attended
anyone, convinced that postsecondary education was the path to social
mobility. Despite an advanced degree, Cawley lives in relative penury,
largely thanks to her student debt.
Americans owe $1.4 trillion in student debt. Student debts are largely
not dischargeable through bankruptcy, and is the only form of debt that
you can be forced to pay your Social Security into.
The President of the United States has declared bankruptcy six times.
His university defrauded its students of millions of dollars, which they
are still paying back. He enacted a policy that makes it impossible for defrauded students to escape their loans; while his Secretary of Education has killed the rules that prevented debt-collectors with a track-record of committing illegal acts from collecting student debts.
so i saw some people discussing how loki in ragnarok shouldn’t have been at all phased or subverted by dr. strange – which i agree with, but also, hey, it’s comedic and you can argue that he was taken off-guard, but upon re-watch, something stuck out to me –
there’s this moment when they appear at the bottom of the stairs and thor rolls down the last couple and stands up and he says
we could’ve just walked.
and it made me think of how magic works in terry pratchett’s novels, how (to paraphrase) the hard part wasn’t turning someone into a frog, it was not turning someone into a frog when you knew how easy it was.
like, the whole scene with dr. strange is just. all magic. all pointless magic. unnecessary magic, when, well. they could have just walked.
whereas loki doesn’t really rely on magic overmuch in the movie – he uses it as a tool, when he needs it, but if the job can be done with plain old non-magical trickery or a knife, he just uses those. he resorts to magic when he’s cornered by valkyrie, he uses it when his goals are most directly accomplished by using magic rather than by other means.
whereas dr. strange is using magic all over his scene, just to use it. just because he can. magic was unnecessary for ninety percent of what he did in that scene, the only time he needed magic was to whisk them away to norway. but he teleported all over the place even when he only needed to move a few feet, gave thor an ever-refilling beer that just spilled everywhere, floated around to make a show of how ~magical~ he was, when…
he could have just walked.
i mean, i’m very sure that the filmmakers intended it for comedic effect, but there’s also a layer there of dr. strange being much less comfortable with magic than loki is – loki doesn’t need to bust out the magic at every opportunity, it’s simply a skill, a tool that is completely under his control and at his disposal. whereas dr. strange (at least in his scene in ragnarok) is showing off, which reeks of insecurity.
i guess i’m thinking… if you take the magic away, loki is still a deadly, formidable opponent with many tricks up his sleeve, but dr. strange is just a guy in a cape.
