Impressions: Stories about our relationships to data

This week we present two stories from people who used technology to understand their relationships.

Part 1: Digital consultant Phong Tran navigates his relationship through various digital platforms.

Phong Tran is a Creative Technologist at a digital consultancy. He works on websites and applications in both roles as a designer and a developer. As someone with a preference to dabble and a short attention span, he works on art projects in various mediums. The projects tend to ask questions about our relationship to our digital selves, and overall how that changes how we see each other. Also, at other times it's just about food Phong ate. A collection of his design can be found at phonghtran.com, and a collection of other things will be at his Instagram account, @phonghtran.

Part 2: Fed up with feeling lonely, Sufian Zhemukhov embarks on a data driven analysis of his own unlikability.

Sufian Zhemukhov is an award-winning author and performer. He received the 2020 J. J. Reneaux Emerging Artist Award, from the National Storytelling Network, "to a storyteller of major and unique performing talent." He is The 2019 Moth Champion and winner at the 2018 Story Slam at the National Storytelling Festival. Sufian’s recent solo show, Flirting Like an American, received critical acclaim in Washington, DC and Rochester, NY. Sufian's stories are based on his personal experience as a first-generation immigrant and professor of international affairs at George Washington University that might be much funnier than you would expect. His recent book, Mass Religious Ritual and Intergroup Tolerance, won the 2019 Best Book Award at the International Studies Association.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Phong Tran

I’m going to start with something I don't want to tell y'all, something I'd rather keep private, which is two years ago when I moved to New York, it was really, really, really easy. I already had friends here. When I looked for a job, I actually found one right away. It was the digital consultancy so when a company has a problem with an app or a website, they come to us and then we go over and try to fix it. A secret is 9 out of 10 times, it's not the app, it's the people. But shh.

Another thing is when I got here is I turned on the dating apps and I changed the location and I matched with someone and I went out with someone and we clicked. We clicked like right away. It was really just great. It was.

So I've lived in Minnesota. I've lived in Texas. I've lived in LA, and a bad date is a bad date in any city. But I realized that a great date in New York is magical. It kind of opens up. You wander the streets, you're sharing stories. She mentioned that she loves ice cream. We turned the corner and there was an ice cream shop. In LA, you don't even get to the corner because they already ghosted you.

So I just lucked out. It was just really good. We connected. We talked well. And then I promptly went to Pittsburgh.

I went to Pittsburgh because of my new job. So sometimes the companies are not in New York. They're in a different city, you had to go to that city. And I was nervous for two things. One was the job. Like I'm going to be in a random place. Can I do this job well? Am I going to fuck up?

And the second thing was her and I, because we were just starting out and it felt kind of fragile, especially I’m going to be not in the same city. But, to my surprise, we talked about it and we're both cautiously optimistic. I mean, we live in this modern era. We have phone calls and texting and DMs and Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn. Surely, we can make this work.

Phong Tran shares his story with the Story Collider audience at le Poisson Rouge in New York City in March 2020. Photo by Zhen Qin.

So I get to Pittsburgh and I'm checking out the city and it's okay. I'm checking out the client and it's okay. And her and I were feeling it out. It actually goes really well. We're in that early stage of that kind of honeymoon teenage kind of like part where you're really excited to share stories and talk to each other. So we're in that phase where we're sending four or five, six texts at a time. And I'm kind of a dork so I send in bullet points.

Bullet point number one. I'm good. How are you? Bullet point number two, that Thai place looks great. Let's go. Bullet point number three, I like The Met but I might like MoMA better. Bullet point number four, oh, he sounds just like my cousin who's trying to be a social‑media influencer, but I think he's just stress eating at expensive restaurants.

And she would send four or five texts back and it's fun, it's cute, it's cute in that gross way, but you're in it so it's great. Eventually, the project wraps up. A couple weeks go by and I'm back in New York and we're just back in the flow.

We're going to museums, restaurants, bars, parks, the whole thing. Maybe it was the summer, maybe it was her, but I was feeling so good that I'm thinking about popping the question, the big question.

So one day, it's a nice day. We're laying in bed. She has her iPhone. I have got my iPad. You know, modern romance. I turn to her and go, “Can I ask you a question?”

She puts down her phone, she turns to me and goes, “Yeah.”

And I go, “Uhm, I think you and I, we, together—I think, I think together we should try Slack. Um, um, if—if you don't know what Slack is, it falls underneath the category of productivity software. Um, it—it's as if the chat rooms from the ‘90s came back from the dead and came back in a nice corporate suit. And yeah, for companies that have trouble communicating, I actually recommend this as a consultant because you get all your employees in one place and then you all build up all these different chat rooms in one place and, in theory, nothing will get lost and be more organized because it's all in Slack. So you can see why I'm proposing,” choice of words to her, “this idea because as much as I love talking, or we had the phone calls over here the text over there, the DMs are—like let's bring it in one place.”

So I'm waiting for an answer. I'm just weird about it and she takes a moment. She looks at me and she goes, “Sure. Makes sense,” and my heart is aflutter. It's the three words I've always wanted to hear.

So I start a Slack account. She jumps on and I jump on and that's when the magic happens. It is so… so, she wants to talk about movies, chatroom called Movies. I have some books I want to talk about, chatroom Books. You find a list of restaurants you want to try, hashtag Food. It is so great.

And it's not just all fun and games, though, because we're also a couple who are building a connection. We're sharing more. So we're now starting to share our hopes and our dreams and our fears. And that doesn't go in Movies or Food or Books. Obviously, we start a new channel called Serious Talk, and it is clicking. It is feeling so good.

I'm a techie dude. She's into Slack. It feels like I have solved dating. And everything else is going really well too. So that client in Pittsburgh, they actually extended the project and they want me to come back, which is this feeling it just validates you. It’s just like you're feeling good.

So I pack my bags. Before I leave, I actually sneak a pint of ice cream into her freezer. That is my version of a bouquet of flowers. Airport, hotel, check-in, get the Wi-Fi, very important, and once I get settled I noticed there's a notification on my phone.

I tap on it and, oh, it's from her. It's on Slack. Oh, it's in Serious Talk. And I read it over and it turns out she's feeling a little uneasy about all this travel that I'm doing and I go. Got it.

So we hop on the phone and, I'm not going lie to you, it's a long conversation. But this is good. This is what I wanted. We are taking the thoughts inside our heads, putting it out there and we're working it through together. And I'm not going to lie to you. We don't get to 100% but we get to a decent place.

A decent enough place that we started a new channel called Toronto Trip Planning. There's a film festival there. We're both like, “Let's do it!” And then we start putting Airbnbs, we start picking the movies we want to see in there. It's so great, guys. You really should do it.

But I'm not going to lie. At this point, I'm really busy with work so I'm kind of in and out. I'm not quite there. And a few days later she notices and she posts. She calls me out and she posts in Serious Talk.

She's like, “Hey, get your head in the game.”

And I'm like, “You're right. I haven't been there. I'm sorry. I'm going to work on this.”

But it gets easier, though, because after a while Pittsburgh wraps up. All good. And I head back to New York. It's easier when you're face-to-face and we kind of are in a groove and we're hanging out again. But it's still kind of on our minds so we keep talking about it, you know.

She asked me, “The next project, when's the next project?”

I was like, “I don't know. I might be here. I might be there. I just don't know, I can't honestly give you an answer how much more there's going to be. But, let me tell you this. I'm here right now. You're here right now. We're here together.”

And at the time, I really meant those words. I met someone who I want to see the world with, someone who I want to work with problems with. This is what I want. But something that I'm still learning about myself is the distance from my head to my body can be really far apart. So my head was telling me this. This is a really good person. There's a lot of good things going on. But my body, the last couple of weeks, had been tense.

You know those animals in those experiments when they touch the lever and a food pellet comes down, but then the next day it switches it up so when they touch the same lever it's an electric shock? Every time my phone buzzed or lit up, I wasn't sure whether it was in Movies or Books or Food or in Serious Talk, and I started feeling a little antsy about it. But I told myself I'm pushing through. This is a good thing. This is worth fighting for. This is worth doing.

And I kept saying this and I really believed it, but what I hadn't noticed was the ratio time we spent doing things and experiencing things was slowly being pushed smaller and smaller by the time we spent talking and discussing about things that we did or didn't do or should have done or would have done.

But I kept wanting to push through. This is the thing. This is the one thing I wanted and I really genuinely wanted that up until the moment my head matched up with my body and that would turn out to be our last night.

I have to tell you, it was really hard. It was hard because it was ugly. It was mean and it was cruel. But it was actually harder because that moment it obscured all the good times we had, all the memories, all the afternoons we spent napping in each other's arms. It just pushed all that aside. And there's a really bad irony to a thing that we had all these ways of communicating with each other: calling, video, messaging, all these things. But because we ended in such a way, my feelings of how much I cared for her would never reach her.

So if y'all would allow me two more bullet points, bullet point number one, thank you to her. Despite everything, I still cherish and appreciate all that we had together and it was great. And bullet point number two, thank you all for listening and have a good night.

Part 2: Sufian Zhemukhov

One weekend in 2001, I found myself alone at home thinking. I enjoy being alone. I'm a self‑sufficient introvert. And I felt happy. Then I thought, “Who am I kidding? I don't really enjoy being alone. I'm just uncomfortable around people.” And I felt unhappy. Back then, I often switched from euphoria to depression.

I published my first book before I turned 30 years old and I was extremely happy for a week. “Everyone must admire me,” I thought, “I am the youngest author in the history of our Department of History.”

Sufian Zhemukhov shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Bier Baron Tavern in Washington DC in February 2020. Photo by Lauren Lipuma.

But then I fell into depression. Who cares if I wrote a book? I have the smallest salary in the history of the Department of History and my Department Chair dislikes me. It always made me extremely unhappy when somebody disliked me.

That's when I came up with the idea of a self-research project which I titled The Study of Dislikeable Me.

I created a table with nine columns where I listed all people I knew, and some animals, according to how they made me feel. I called the first column True Love and I put there only one name, Eli, which was the name of my girlfriend's dog. Eli was the only creature in the world who made me unconditionally happy. And I titled the last column Enemies, and also put there one name, Boris, my Department Chair, a man with ugly wrinkled face. Boris made me so unhappy that I sometimes thought, “I can't believe God created Boris in his own image. What a wonderful world it would be with fewer Borises and more Elis in it.”

So I started my research with Eli, a cute, white cockapoo. Every time I visited my girlfriend, Eli would run toward me wiggling his fluffy tail and it made me happy that someone was so excited to see me at my girlfriend's apartment. A couple of minutes later, however, Eli would lose his interest in me and indifferently walk away. His attitude changed so abruptly that I always thought, “Did I do something wrong?” Trying to understand Eli's behavior, I recalled how, as a child, I used to get excited when my parents had guests because I expected that the guests should bring me presents. And I got disappointed when they didn't. “This explains Eli's behavior,” I thought. I never remember bringing him gifts and he probably thinks, “You moron, would it hurt you to bring me a treat?” That's how I discovered the root of my problem. I was putting thoughts into the dog's head while there would be no way for me to know what the dog was thinking. More importantly, I realized putting judgmental thoughts into Eli's head I made myself feel unhappy.

So I applied my discovery to all other people in the table, starting with the second column which I called Lovables and where I listed my best friends, my parents and my girlfriend. One by one, I analyzed how I was put in judgmental thoughts into people's heads around me and I could see that the more I thought they judged me, the more I was afraid that they disliked me.

It was truly a humbling self-research. I thought at the end who do I think I am that nine columns of people and animal would constantly think about me and judge me?

Finally, I approached the last ninth column with Boris, my Department Chair and the ugly wrinkled man. I remembered how I learned about his hostility thanks to an older colleague of mine, Yuri, who was Boris's rival for Department Chair position.

“I want to warn you, young man,” he told me one day, Yuri kind of arrogantly, “that our Department Chair is making unflattering comments behind your back.”

I suspect that Yuri was not my biggest fan either and that's why I put him in the eighth column which I titled Ill-wishers, together with half a dozen of others. However, while looking into Yuri’s case, I realized that he probably didn't care about me positively or negatively at all, and that's why I moved him to the seventh column which I called Indifference.

So while reviewing Boris' case, I also failed to find any real evidence of his hostility and I realized that I never personally heard of him saying anything against me. I decided temporarily move him from Enemies to Ill-wishers until I find evidence of his hostility.

Instead of finding evidence of his hostility, however, next time when I ran at him at work, I surprised myself by saying hi. And Boris surprised me by saying, “We need to talk about your promotion because you published a book.”

For the first time standing so close to Boris, I observed his wrinkles actually make him look wiser and kinder. I'm still not sure how that happened. My self-flattering theory is that my study of dislikable me made me, in general, friendlier and that made Boris subconsciously to like me. My unflattering explanation is that I only imagined Boris being evil and ugly while in reality he always was friendly and handsome.

So my self-research, The Study of Dislikeable Me actually had practical outcomes. I stopped having depression since then and I started enjoying being around people. And I never again forgot to bring treats for Eli as a kind of thank you for helping me to discover the roots of my problem. And sometimes I even brought treats for Boris and Yuri.