you re stupid — how to take it without keeping it, in 8 steps

dave dropped the apostrophe on the phone again. you re stupid, he said, and it was affection. i recognize the dialect. how to receive it without internalizing it is a skill, and it has steps. i have refined them over years of being on the receiving end of dave’s love language. instructions follow, in order, with footnotes.

writing this from the desk on a wednesday at 10:14am. carla is in a training session on the third floor about a software none of us will ever open. the rest of the morning is mine, more or less, until somebody on the second floor discovers fire.

the call came in last night from the kitchen. i was holding a saucepan with one hand and the phone with the other and the seventh microwave was making a noise it has been making for three days now, which i am choosing to interpret as a hum. dave said the line. dave laughed. dave hung up. and i stood there with the saucepan and thought, you know what, i should write this down before i forget how it works.

step one, decode the speaker first, the line second, on hearing “you’re stupid”

the contraction is the tell. when the apostrophe gets dropped — when it comes out as you’re stupid instead of the longer formal version — the speaker is in a casual register. bar register. kitchen register. elevator register. they are not filing a report. they are not building a case. they are extending a small, slightly-disguised compliment, the kind anglosaxons in particular use when they would rather chew glass than say something kind out loud. this connects to a longer argument i have already in the working file the entire concept of stupid as a linguistic category, which lives in the pillar at the top of this cluster and is the foundation under everything we are about to do.

the formal version — the one with all the syllables in it — is a different animal. the formal version is in a memo. the formal version is in a meeting. the formal version is in writing on a piece of paper that you are signing. the contraction is in your friend’s voice on a tuesday night, while a saucepan gets cold on a stove. one of these you defend against. the other you accept like a small flat coin and put in your pocket.

so step one: who said it, where, in what posture. that is the whole thing. half the work of receiving “you’re stupid” is correctly logging the room.

step two, dave called, dave laughed, dave returned to the topic

dave is the test case. dave is the load-bearing column of this entire methodology. dave called, dave dropped the line, dave laughed for a duration i did not time precisely but estimate at four to five minutes, then dave returned to the actual topic, which was whether i had paid him back yet. (i had not.) the line was a transition device. the line was punctuation. the line meant and now we move on.

this is the canonical use of the contraction. it is a transition. it is not a verdict. dave was not preparing a dossier. dave was clearing his throat in the only way dave knows how to clear his throat. when somebody you have known for fifteen years says “you’re stupid” with the apostrophe gone, what they are really saying is i am still here, please continue.

that exchange is the entire user manual in twelve lines. note the rhythm. note the affection in the second-to-last line, which is also, technically, an insult. note that i did not flinch. that is step two in action. that is what we are building toward.

step three, do not absorb what was not directed inward

here is the trap. when somebody hands you a small soft contraction, your brain — which is, frankly, a worse organ than people give it credit for — wants to file it as a permanent record. the brain wants to take “you’re stupid” and engrave it on a small bronze plaque and hang the plaque in a hallway only the brain can see. this is what brains do. they overstate.

DO NOT ENGRAVE THE PLAQUE.

the line was a transition. the line was a hum. the line was punctuation in a casual conversation about a saucepan. let it pass through. let it land and slide off. there is a school of thought, possibly italian, possibly i made it up, that says you only keep what you choose to keep. choose not to keep this one. there is room in the brain for better souvenirs.

step four through six, the operational notes from the kitchen

step four: do not respond with a defense. defending against the contraction is like reading a receipt out loud at a wedding. nobody asked. nobody wants it. the contraction was friendly. defense escalates it into something it was never meant to be. you wind up arguing about a saucepan and a microwave and your entire intelligence, when the original conversation was about whether dave wanted another beer.

step five: do not laugh too hard either. nervous laughter is a tell. nervous laughter says i am, in fact, a little worried that you mean it. dave will hear it. mike will hear it. the barista will hear it. the move is a flat half-smile and a pivot. a small “i know” works here. so does a “fair” or a “yeah, that’s about right”.

step six: pivot to the next sentence within five seconds. the longer the line sits in the air, the more weight it accumulates. weight is the enemy. five seconds, maximum, then a new sentence, ideally about something physical and immediate — the saucepan, the time, the microwave. the third yoga mat under the couch from 2023, in the right company, also works as a pivot. it has, like the canadian pop philosophy in idiocracy, a flattening effect that brings everybody back to ground level.

step seven and eight, the residuals you may notice the next morning

step seven: the next morning, you will catch yourself remembering it. this is normal. the brain is, as established, a worse organ than people give it credit for. the brain stores everything, including the things you told it not to store. note the memory. acknowledge it. then return to the kitchen and do not act on it. the line was still a contraction. the room is still gone. the speaker is still your friend.

step eight: if it persists past forty-eight hours — and sometimes it does, i am not going to pretend it doesn’t — write it down on the back of a piece of mail you have not opened. there is a lot of unopened mail on the kitchen counter for this exact purpose. writing it down moves it out of the brain and into the world, where it is much smaller. this is, i’m fairly sure, in some kind of book about handling things, possibly written by a man with a beard.

step nine through twelve do not exist, and that is the verdict, you can take the line and not become it

i said eight steps. there are eight. there is no secret ninth step where the line was secretly a verdict and you were secretly a fool. that is the trap. that is the place where readers of how-to articles like to live. there is no ninth step. the ninth step is a small angry dragon you build for yourself in the night.

so. eight steps. one kitchen. one phone call. one saucepan. one humming seventh microwave i have not yet replaced and will not be replacing this week. the line came in, the line passed through, the line did not stick. that is the whole thing. that is what the contraction is for. it is built to slide. it is engineered to slide. that is why it has the apostrophe missing in the first place.

at the wine night a few months back, the man in the vest — stefan — said the wine i picked had “notes of forest floor”. the woman next to me, who turned out to be canadian, leaned over and said “no”. one syllable. flat. confident. a compact and complete defense. i think about it often. it is, in some ways, the same skill we are practicing here. you do not need to argue with the line. you only need to know it is wrong, in your bones, and then move on to the next sentence. dave knows this. mike knows this. always sunny is built on this. the canadian knew this. the entire concept of handling a soft insult is, when you look at it long enough, a class we should have been teaching in school instead of long division.

i hold, by the way, with hot take number twenty: reading on a kindle is the same as reading. i mention this because the man at the wine night also told me kindles “weren’t reading” and the canadian said “no” again and i have been quietly carrying her around in my head ever since as a kind of mascot. the productivity bro online would not understand this section. the productivity bro is also wrong. the productivity bro is, in fact, the only person on earth who genuinely needs to hear “you’re stupid” and absolutely will not.

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