October 6, 2021

I've found lately that there's a benefit in listening. It's worrying to leave that realization to this late in my life. (34 isn't so old but it also is a lot of years for me to be bloviating on and on.) I'm a decent listener in one-to-one conversation if the other person has my same verbal inclination. What I'm realizing is that in both group and one-to-one settings, you can get a lot more out of people if you sustain listening and allow pauses/silences. Some people are just a bit slower or shyer in formulating their thoughts, but they will speak up if you just listen and wait. Louis Theroux takes advantage of that in his interviews. He'll leave a big gap, a big silence, and people's instinct is to fill it. 

I don't know what the impulse is inside me to get the thoughts from the inside of my head to outside in the world, but it seems to be a bit quieter lately. I've got a counter impulse going that says, "Hold on. Wait. See what happens." It feels powerful, nice. 

I think it's fairly good experiential evidence that when you act differently towards the world, your experience of the world changes. It seems worthwhile to switch up one's behavior from time to time just to see what happens. 

Blog Time! 

**SPOILERS**

 Margolyes, Miriam – THIS MUCH IS TRUE

Published: 2021

Read: 9/2021

I know Miriam Margolyes as Aunt Prudence from Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, but she’s also the nurse in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliette and Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films. She came on radar as a personality when I listened to her episode of Louis Theroux’s Grounded podcast. She’s energetic, filthy, honest. This Much Is True is her memoir. I listened to the audiobook, which I highly recommend. Margolyes is a voice actor and has about a hundred different accents she can do. She talks about her Jewish parents, her social-climbing mother and her reserved Scottish father. She talks about her skilled ability at sucking people off. She’s a lesbian and says she doesn’t feel groinally about men, but she likes making people feel good. Several of her stories – like being stuck on a fishing boat and having the fisherman pull his dick out – would have scared me for life, I think. But she seems to get through them with her willingness to give out a hand job and a kind of determined naivety. She says of that occasion, “Well, I didn’t want to get raped.” A decent survival technique to be sure, but still kind of awful. I’m glad she doesn’t seem to feel too weighed down by it. 

She also talks about her partner, Heather, and the time she had an affair with a professor at Colorado College. (“I won’t fuck anyone without a PhD.”) About the houses she owns. About the life she’s built for herself. I will say, that the only drawback for me in reading this kind of book is I can get sad that I don’t have a bunch of famous friends, that I haven’t worked on projects with international success. There’s no point in comparing myself to other people; it takes a toll on the ol’ mental health. And the lives of career entertainers can be a little bit of a trap that way. I like Miriam’s force of character, her panache, her willingness to be up front about things, her bad language, her shocking stories. It was delightful to sit on the tour bus of her life. 

Rating: ★★★