poetry, cooked and ready to christen the new blog
don’t offend your boss’s *boss
and expect your life to resemble anything worthwhile
when bad things happen to you
the way people around you react
largely determine whether or not anything good comes of them
hope is a lot like credit
the less you have
the more substantial things demanded out of it
in the game of loss of hope
psychiatrists are like safeties
trying to reach the running back
after he got past everyone else
when faith gets cooked
you’re in a pickle
between expectation and disbelief
when you have hopelessness
in front of your nose too long
it gets behind your eyes
* infinite regression of bosses, using mathematical notation denoting an infinitely repeating set
my cat is dying
My cat is dying. What’s strange about it is what hurts the most isn’t actually interacting with the cat and seeing him in a poorer and poorer state. What hurts the most is seeing his food bowl still full from last night because he’s not eating. And doing the litter, not exactly the most enjoyable job on earth, is actually more disheartening because there is so little to clean compared to what there used to be.
the first person
I have been in this town more than five years and haven’t found a single non helping professional willing to hang out with me. I have had friends in the past when I was higher status and of better mental/social health.
One thing that’s become very clear is the principle of the first person. People form groups. The first person of the group to let you in is the hardest and most important (the same way the first tear of something shrink wrapped is the hardest). The first person engaging you positively sends a message to the rest of the group that you are worth engaging. Even if no other members of the group befriend you this message will at minimum make them accepting and including.
Lesson: You are not on the Star Trek Enterprise
I love Star Trek. It seems like every episode there is some kind of crisis and the captain and crew have to use logic and ingenuity to solve it. There are even Vulcans on the original and Voyager who are super logical and whose logic is valued and often acted upon by the captain and crew. Of course there is a chain of command but it is generally a meritocracy where the people with the best ideas get their ideas acted upon.
Real life is not like the Star Trek Enterprise at all. The biggest thing you have to take into account are people’s often fragile egos. When given a task they may say their goal is to get it done in the most logical and efficient manner but generally the route to this getting done cannot damage their ego in the process. If the best route involves the ego being damaged, the second-best route will be taken. This is a hard concept to explain, even neurotypicals are left in the dark on what will trigger a threat to someone’s ego because the factors vary from person to person. I will try to give a couple of examples.
You are doing a group project for a college class where you have to present a poster collage on geological processes. You were the one responsible for creating the diagrams and—thanks to your talent in Illustrator—whipped up some great content. You emailed high resolution versions of the diagrams to the group leader who was going to put together the presentation. On the last night of the project after seeing the final put-together draft you notice that the printed out diagrams are blurry and have JPEG artifacts on them. Apparently the leader must have scaled them down prematurely. Now you are left in a quandary. Do you confront the group leader about it and tell him to redo the diagrams or do you stay quiet. The former will inconvenience him and (more importantly) hurt his ego. When you confront him about this his mind doesn’t say, “boy I’m glad you caught the error, I want the best possible finished product”, it more likely says, “This nerd is judging my poor performance with computer graphics programs. If I redo the project it will not only take a couple hours of my time but it will show that he is smarter than me and that makes me uncomfortable”.
Another example: you are working at a hospital doing Information Technology, integrating the new digital medical records into the hospital’s workflow. One of the doctors is having trouble with the system. He frequents the floor you do most of your work on and you often see him trying to do things that you could easily help him with. You have offered him help multiple times but every time he has declined. What’s going on here? What you have to understand here society is very stratified—there is definitely a chain of command though it’s not explicitly denoted like in Star Trek. The doctor is on a completely different (and much higher) social plane than you. Accepting your help might be the most logical thing he could do to better himself but in his mind it would be deferring to someone on a much lower plane than him. In Star Trek the most logical solution would bubble up the chain of command anyway but in real life it usually doesn’t work that way.
Lesson: People Will Not Give You Error Messages
If you do any kind of programming or even surf the web enough, you will run into error messages. Usually these error messages will give you an indication of what is going wrong. For example, when Dropbox failed the other night and I clicked on a video of mine that was hosted there it gave me a message about the server having trouble. Because of the message’s specificity I knew that that file probably was still on the server, it was just that Dropbox was having problems.
Now imagine if I clicked on that Dropbox link and it just gave me a white screen. Imagine if it gave me a white screen even when Dropbox was working but the file requested was not found. This is what people are like, especially people you don’t know well. They will not give you an error message—tell you what you did wrong. They will simply ignore you (and maybe cut you off) when you do something that merits their disapproval They do this for a couple reasons. First of all, there is a principle rooted in animal training that all kinds of attention (both positive and negative) is interpreted as positive by animals (and by extension humans). So any contact a person gives you, even if it’s negative, is an invitation to engage them further. Secondly, neurotypicals are afraid they will offend you if they are too direct because if someone were to be so direct to them they would take offense.
possessed by the devil
A few people online think I’m possessed by the devil. The good news is there is technology that could test this that will be available in the near future. One of the telltale signs of demonic possession is speaking in actual languages one has not learned. Under duress I sometimes utter gibberish. Since I’m by my computer a lot my camera’s microphone would pick this up and—once a service is available that can detect any language and translate into it—we can find out for sure if I’m really possessed by the prince of darkness or just am dealing with a legion of mundane pathologies.
reverse tactics
They tell police working on a case where someone is holding hostages that if they find out said hostage taker is a psychopath, they must reverse course, using a different set of tactics to try to get the hostages freed.
I feel a similar way with people in social situations. It’s not sufficient to just let me know things, I have to be told them. I had a negative experience in high school which in hindsight was very life giving. I was thinking of joining chorus again but before doing so I asked point blank the group of guys that hung out with my best friend if they’d accept me. They said no. It was hurtful at the time but that ounce of hurt saved me ten pounds of hurt had I tried joining the chorus again and attempted to fit in with the group.
Fast forward to me at age thirty, trying to join a church to get socially established. I get rejected. I am naturally painfully shy so I would pump these people for conversation and once I stopped they would shut off. After way too long I eventually quit engaging church people all together. So I find out later from a reliable source that the reason people were not kind to me was because I didn’t have a real job. Now had those church people just told me that outright I would have tried harder to get a real job and/or stopped associating with them much sooner.
Now this dilemma of whether or not to be painfully direct really leaves the neurotypical in a pretty impossible situation. Some people like to be told things up front (a lot of aspies fall into this category) while others like a more nuanced approach. Knowing which approach to take requires knowing said person pretty well. If one is blunt to someone that can’t take it, that person will probably not talk to you again. Conversely some people (me included) don’t get the “hints” of more nuanced communication so we need to be told everything up front.
From my perspective social grace is just a smokescreen to cover the lack of actual grace. It may have served more of a function when the culture had more constructive social rules but that time has passed.