Lesson: Bluntness Threshold
You can’t ascertain the exact meaning of any statement without taking the person into account. Some people will be blunt in most situations while others won’t until facing some grave situation. So one person’s bluntness verses another’s is not an apples to apples comparison. For example the president of a company might tell his employees that the business was financially sound despite its problems. He didn’t necessarily lie about the problems, just played them down because that was what his shareholders and customers expected him to do. One day he calls all his employees into a meeting and tells them how bad things really are. And you know him well enough to know that him being blunt about this means that the company is on the verge of bankruptcy.
This gets even messier when we add that everybody will interpret your bluntness in a different way depending on what level of it is tolerated in the subculture they belong to. Being on the spectrum often makes us more blunt and less able to feel out others’ tolerance for it. For example you’re in a room and you notice a woman with burns on her neck and you point that out. She gets offended and hurt and others echo the sentiment that she was in the right.
Many of us (or at least me) like it when people are blunt to us so we don’t understand “social grace”. For example for most of my life I have had really thick glasses. When I was a kid other kids would ask about it, I’d explain my eye problem, and they would be fine with it. As an adult almost nobody asks but most people treat me differently. I know this because for eight years of my life I wore contacts that made me look pretty normal and the treatment difference was very noticeable.
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The truly powerless people are the ones who are at the bottom of society but had a good education. I had a damn good education at Wheaton College (IL) and it taught me how to think critically (not that great of a thing for my Christian faith but I digress). The reason I say we are at the bottom is because an uneducated person who is on the bottom can play mind games that make their plight at least bearable. I can try to play them but I deconstruct them and am back to square one.
For example, pretending you have a shot at winning the lottery, or that you’ll be in a good hereafter if you just believe and conform to the right things.
marriage dynamic
I know this is shallow but the most important question to ask before getting married is, “will my marriage be significantly happier than my singleness?”. For some people (particularly undesirable people like me) singleness is not much fun. A lot of us are vary lonely and single against our will. Even a not so great marriage would be an upgrade for us, so we at least received a modicum of attention and appreciation. However for desirable people singleness is a lot more fun because they are wanted and appreciated. Marrying for them is often a step down.
The irony is that the people for whom singleness is significantly better than marriage are the ones people are trying to marry.
more on forgiveness
Naturally religion romanticizes things that have the powerless deferring to the powerful, like suffering, waiting, and forgiving. Specifically on forgiving, once a party is wronged they shoulder the burden of the wrong either way. If they forgive (which often doesn’t change the way the wronged party feels and sometimes makes them feel worse), they are deferring to the person who wronged them. If they let it fester they are immobilized by the bitterness. The important thing to remember is the aggrieved party loses either way and the more tender-hearted they are the worse the personal fallout will be.
In some cases the people who forgive are freeloaders. Take for example the bankers that crashed our economy. The conventional wisdom was to forgive them. But the angry bitter people (at least the ones who weren’t immobilized by their bitterness) were the ones speaking truth to power and fighting to change things. The bitter people shoulder the cost of change but everybody receives the benefit of it.
poetry party mostly new
God is not good enough
i need some human imaginary friends
I hate me for me
can’t you?
my past is just one big pissing wall
i go there to savor the stench of stale piss
and and add some fresh piss
hell is pain
because pain is hell
the unspeakable things that happen to us
cause us not to be spoken to
institutions
I get the feeling that hyperindividualism is destroying institutions. Yes we still have institutions in name like church and congress but people’s behavior is such that deferring to the institution’s norms is no longer the default. For example people in congress (particularly Republicans in the house) are acting infantile. They’re more concerned with their job security than the country’s future. A country can’t last long when a critical mass of elected officials act this way.
The same can be said for the church. My experience has been that church people (particularly the ones my age) are out for themselves. The married people only talk to other married people. They ignore me unless they’re trying to get me to do things for them.
Fruit Ninja analogy for social interaction
Getting to know someone when you have a mental illness is like the game Fruit Ninja. In the game you have to slice the fruit while making sure not to slice the bombs that fly up among the fruit. In this analogy the fruit are the parts of you that you can reveal to others and the bombs are the parts of you (particularly your mental illness diagnosis) which will destroy the relationship just like that. If you are overly cautious in social engagements (like I am) you will appear flat, which in our Fruit Ninja game would be just ignoring the flying fruit (which you get penalized for).
Mind Game App Store 🙂
This won’t happen in my life time but once we can upload things to our brains I think they will have a mind game app store. So you will finally be able to believe in any bullshit you want to, no matter how ridiculous it is. I could go to church and plug my brain into a USB 8 port there and download salvation. Of course faith doesn’t make sense but the downloaded mind games would work so well it would make perfect sense in your head.
The therapist office would be augmented or maybe even be replaced with an app.
poetry: two, four, and raging
love is like aloha (which means hello and goodbye)
it means two opposite things
at once
God is one
but the devil has won
i seem quiet
what I present is the eye of the storm
soon you will see the rest of it
I am a rogue planet
I don’t orbit any star
I just drift through interstellar space
cold and invisible
like an alien
bursting out of a man’s chest
the specific
bursting out of the general
all that’s needed to make the world right
is love people like they’re fictional characters
and love God like he’s real
scorn and bitterness tango
what a happy couple!
when drawing a four
the elbow sets the stage
but the last line…
that’s slitting my throat
a love that damns
is better than a hate that saves
Lesson: Metadata
Often in social interactions the metadata is the most important and poignant part of the interaction (metadata is the data that precedes and describes the main data). In the case of social interactions the metadata are things like your age, your gender, your looks, and your social status. Depending on what metadata you possess you will be treated very differently. This will happen before you have a chance to open your mouth. What comes out of your mouth is often the least important thing because you have already been judged. People don’t like to admit this because we are taught that one is judged by the content of their character (which includes what comes out of one’s mouth) not what they have to offer.
The metadata goes into serious overdrive when attempting any type of mating interaction. In these cases whether or not someone communicates is communication in and of itself. The content of said communication is less important.