Category Archives: Jeff gets personal

Personal blog entries, usually intended only for people that really know me. They will be full of too much drama and are often quite poorly written.

JAG thinks God is Laughing

I bought a volleyball for this guy who lost his in the rafters and was about to leave town forever. I said the whole group chipped in for it, but that was a lie, it was just me trying to be modest and build community. He was confused, and didn’t really know what to say. The people surrounding us were even more confused when I explained that I had a marker for us to all sign it as a goodbye gift. Nobody took me up on it.

The volleyball “crew” has this kind of dynamic. I know it’s trendy in Urbana to flaunt your imposter syndrome but I usually feel like I’m the only one who tries to talk about anything outside of the game – I get this continual sense that everybody is annoyed with me and just being “midwestern nice” – putting up with me out of some civic duty to be polite. They’re not there to connect or bond, they’re there to play.

I do get it, somewhat. In my failed attempts to talk to people one day I managed to mention that I work out 2 times in the span of about 10 minutes and so I was rightfully put in my place when I said hi to someone I hadn’t seen in a while, remarking that it wasn’t since bumping into one another in the scary weight lifting zone. “We get it, you work out” I was told. I’m not even insecure or trying to prove something about my body, really, as it’s incredibly obvious I’m in average shape compared to the people that we play with. I don’t get invited to join the elite crew during their invite-only days. I really just talked about it because it was what was on the surface of my mind. I actually respect the guy who teased me more because he said something directly. Nobody does that. Most others just pile up hidden resentment while I go on having no idea how annoying I am to them.

Later when I was talking to a couple of grad students about what I [used to] do at the Fab Lab with 3D printing I was teased again, suggesting that I should “3D print a volleyball” – and while that much TPU filament might be a bit expensive it’s possible with my TAZ, so I kinda rolled with it in a nerdy response, attempting to remain positive, missing the cue that I was implicitly being asked to simply stop talking.

I’m 36 years old and getting teased like a kid in junior high. And I 3D printed an eco-friendly volleyball-shaped water-regulating planter and brought it to the same guy the next week.

It’s not just men, either. One of the women we play with is one of those ultra-smart-beautiful-talented people in their late twenties who can do just about anything and be forever adored because of the aforementioned qualities. She posted a song to YouTube for a contest and I offered to help her get a better recording like I used to do back in the day and she excitedly said she was interested. I grab the gear from my parents house when visiting over the holidays, go to the effort to inspect it all, reinstall and relearn the software and test several acoustic setups around my house. She backs out for the scheduled weekend. I ask about another. She doesn’t answer. I ask in-person at volleyball and end up sounding like I’m creeping on her uninvited to the others surrounding us. “Oh well if it’s stressful or scary it can be just my partner Megan and the cat there – or just us and the cat!” I wanted to jump off a cliff. We leave it off unresolved. I later spend 45 minutes talking on the phone to a friend who recovered from hyper anxiety disorder that night about how to best talk to someone who probably has a similar condition and craft a very careful message offering to let her just borrow the equipment without me even being there and that it’s also okay if she’s just changed her mind. No response.

I dare to sound like a creep again in-person and am told “Her interest says yes but her anxiety says no”. I can live with that, it’s a real response. But nowhere along the way anywhere in here did she seem to get that I expended a lot of effort for her in all of this. But why would she? This is probably what boys do for girls like her all of the time – I’m not after anything “romantic” but it’s the universal expectation, I guess. I become the one who is desperate and weird for being interested in helping someone else and expecting communication of some sort. I’ve given up on hoping for gratitude.

These are the sorts of experiences that make me think Urbana isn’t a good place for me anymore. But I’m wondering more and more if it’s just that this is what social interactions look like in life now in my mid-30’s.

Finally today when asking a former colleague to glance at my teaching statement I think I discovered the “why” behind all of this. She didn’t get any further than looking at the link thumbnail but noted my initials on the icon are “JAG” (Jeffrey Andrew Ginger). Guess what you get when you look that one up on Urban Dictionary?

And I’m only just now getting this. JAG was the nickname bestowed to me by my friends growing up. It’s no wonder I’ve been hanging out with international folks for a decade.

I don’t actually take any of this very seriously, to be honest most of what I’ve written about here doesn’t hold a candle to how I’ve been treated by a lot of people at the Fab Lab over the past few years. Instead I think it’s evidence that God (whatever that entails) is laughing. A lot. Because how could it not be funny?

Extreme Extroversion as Mental Illness?

Can’t fall asleep again. This isn’t coherent enough to lay out a well-articulated case for the possibility of my extreme personality as a manifestation of deficiency and classifiable deviance but it’s some fragments for it.

I know a billion people and almost none of them really care much about me. It occurs to me that my deviance in terms of extroversion might put me somewhere on a mental illness spectrum. It’s not like I don’t see the disproportionate effort and intensity in my interactions with others… I’ve just always been reconciling it to myself and others one way or another. Perhaps I shouldn’t be lying to myself?

Even the people who are resistant to my high-level of intensity and energy treat me with this distanced sort of rapport. They ought not invest too much, lest they lure out the tidal wave of interactivity and expectation. Usually when I feel bad about others never proactively caring about me I try to channel my energy into doing something that helps someone else but this might just recreate the cycle. It instead creates “guilt debts” that aren’t authentic or intrinsic reciprocation. They also might exacerbate power disparities.

I do think it’s a legitimate concern, how much and if I choose to ignore implicit social cues left by the void of inaction. I’m not all that dramatically outside of what my friends growing up were like – I keep having to remind myself that CU is this weirdly-scoped/adorned/person-populated place, if I were in say DC it might be a very different story. Interestingly of all the people I know I can think of only half a dozen extroverted “initiator + leader” type women here in CU under the age of 40 and none of them actually like me.

I’m aware others would initiate if they wanted friendships or relationships and that they probably want to keep me at a distance because they deduce [some of] my intentions and they likely don’t have the same kind of reciprocative feelings. Perhaps there’s emotional baggage or fear I haven’t yet comprehended. Either way it’s those voids made of inaction and silence that I’m hyper-aware of, only minimally able to interpret and yet expected to have a keen sense or understanding of. That is perhaps where my disability lies – discerning what people think and feel purely from implications and indirect fragments of communication is like an autistic kid trying to figure out complex emotions. We can make it an intellectual enterprise but we can’t live it experientially like others do to understand it. And this is really representative of so many interpersonal interactions in my life. I’m simultaneously insanely friendly, loyal and charismatic and yet horrendously broken in my perceptual bias. Like my abusive biological mother only I’m at least self-aware enough to have continual critical introspection and revisioning. I also can only retain sadness for about a day or two, which would put me perpetually on the manic end of bi-polar (the Ginger family favorite condition), an expression of that condition that I’ve never heard of, as of yet.

So it’s back to my age-old question. How much I “bottle up” during my tacitly illustrious (read: stupid) impression-management escapades. Lately I’ve been doing things like falling in love for month-long relationships with mini-celebrities, dancing alone at weddings, live blogging online dating drama and putting videos of myself being derpy on the internet, which would indicate some healthy overdue uncorking. But my relationship support web is more fraught, frayed and fragmented than ever before. The only people who get and accept me and who have the capacity to overtly care about me seem to be a thousand miles away without any real time for it and I’ve been scaring off the flowing river of locals at an astounding rate.

I don’t know where this leaves me, but I at least feel better putting it out there for nobody to read. Time to play a videogame.

From sexism in science to examining my own capacity for sexism

In reaction to -> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/2013/10/14/standingwithdnlee-sciam

I’m glad the article focuses some on her positive impacts and solutions – those are what are most important to me 🙂 It’s a little worrisome though because this Ofek thing seems to be an instance of outright straight-forward disrespect and ‘ism’ – wound up into one moment and reply. I think a lot of it is more structural, persistent and crafty than that. Like, for instance, a lot of industries rely on participants who are essentially workaholics to be competitive to get limited positions and grants. This doesn’t seem bad at face value, but might exclude people who have alternative values – say, those who see the importance of having a family, collaboration through friendship in the workplace or doing engagement to bring in diverse perspectives, etc… Essentially a woman who wants to have a family or a person from a different culture who wants to take care of their grandmother or whatever gets penalized and this sort of thing feels like structural ‘ism’ to me. When we make our talking points mostly about people in white hoods we lose sight of the redlining.

I guess on the flip side I have no idea how to deal with resocializing men. I’m especially bad at connecting to and influencing guys who are sexist. In the overt ways I’d disagree with, anyway. Dudes really into violence and running over animals in pickup trucks and guys who think verbal expression of emotions is for weak people.
I mean I guess my definition of sexism is debatable – a friend once took the position that my suggestion that all people should have the capacity to be more assertive and rely on individual agency underscored an emphasis on a greater masculine narrative – from the one end I can suggest that girls should reclaim territory: to be a person who is ‘assertive’ and ‘confrontational’ shouldn’t be the turf of just men, but both genders, but on the other end it excludes alternative structures of interaction, such as trying to encourage everyone (but particularly men) to be more ‘passive’ or ‘reconciliatory.’ In other words what I see as an idealized social form (compassionate, informed, positive assertion) might be considered masculine and to suggest women need to match it might be sexist because I’m asking them to conform to the masculine norm. But if most did then it wouldn’t be a masculine norm anymore. I think she was mostly just mad at me for not really truly recognizing the costs and barriers that exist for women to do this (again, my ability to believe agency matters more than structure is not just optimistic, it is enabled by my vast swaths of privilege), but on another level I guess she could be right – I may just be sexist. Even if I just use positive encouragement (promote girls who are assertive) as my mode I’d end up marginalizing those who differ. Hell paying more attention to more attractive women than less attractive women is downright sexist and for me that’s in large part driven by hormones and decades of social conditioning – I do it automatically without thinking (but can choose to override it and do my best to do this). I probably have more sexism in me than I care to admit and therefore more ability to connect to other sexist men than I might realize but some of this stuff is so ingrained and nuanced that I have to make it a big soap box project to do it – and nobody wants that. It really seems so radical. Like sure, I can recognize that genders are social constructions and try to convince people that we should move beyond them. But ain’t nobody gon understand that ish. Or maybe I just suck at explaining and convincing. Or maybe that’s better done through time and life exposure and not words.
Ah well, speaking of soap boxes that are about to crumple beneath my ego…

And on the upswing

Karma has a way of working itself around. ‘Nuff unpleasant vibes on this place lately I think.
I’ve been reading Netsmart, by Howard Rheingold, in response to a suggestion by Sally Jackson (one of the founding gods of the Fab Lab!). It serves as the motivation for much of this post, but also a worthy bit of literature for the dissertation pondering process.

Beyond Flaws

I’ll start with a happy snippet. I’ve been hanging out with these hydro engineers lately and they’re great. One reason I like them so much is that they’re very willing to proactively accept and support people despite their flaws and differences. One of our friends forgot to buy a bus ticket to get to Chicago for a flight and realized this about 6 hours before at 1am on a Saturday night. Almost without hesitation a trio stepped up to drive him directly up to the airport, crashing on a family couch before heading back the next day. They were only hung up on his mistake and forgetful personality for a sum of about two minutes, and actually really saw the ride as an outstanding opportunity to hang out. The group hasn’t even known each other that long, a year or so, and they’re willing to go to bat for one another like this.

Books on Bicycles

Rheingold identifies five literacies that together constitute a view of digital literacy (of a kind; he says they’re in process of changing the world):

Attention
Participation
Collaboration
Critical consumption of information
Network smarts

Most of what he mentions is nothing particularly new to the canon, but it does partially address what has been an open question for me for some time. I’ve asked many students and scholars what attitudes and perspectives they believe facilitate a person’s ability to effectively learn and employ digital tools. It’s easy to get a myriad of answers, and really it all depends on your granularity, but I’ve been particularly keen on patience, persistence, curiosity and independence. Motivation and confidence underline all of these, but the reason I bring any of them up at all is that they illustrate the cultural and personality-oriented dimensions of digital literacy – we learn, perform and express ourselves in contexts that shape our interpretations of meaning. Anyway what’s notable about his arrangement so far is attention. He suggests readers rethink how they direct attention, what they place it on, and why they do so.
For instance, multitasking often isn’t actually what it’s often named – if you’re driving in the car listening to music you’re probably actually multitasking, but most of the time we’re using computers, switching rapidly from screen to screen, we’re actually quickly task-switching – and there’s a cost each time we do so, which may vary by individual and circumstances. To be digitally literate might also include being cognizant (critical) enough of your own tech-toy uptake to mindfully direct your attention. I don’t think this means simply not being on Facebook or refusing to use Wikipedia. I do think this means taking a step back, examining your behaviors, goals and generally what matters, and then acting in accordance. My decision to read Rheingold’s book on an exercise bike instead of via audio book is actually a result of this process for me: I’m scribbling on the pages.
Tom Fairbank suggested I read the book Nonviolent Communication (Marshall Rosenberg) a while back and I’ve finally started to dig into it a bit. Besides being useful for determining how to better talk to people like my mother (and also wonder if when Tom talks to me with these methods if I am becoming my mother) it relies on a set of principles that matches Rheingold’s concern for attention:

Make observations
Take stock of feelings (yours and others)
Pay attention to needs
Make requests to proactively facilitate needs

An example the book gives is a teacher complaining about how she hates giving students grades. She states it as “I have to give grades because the district makes me” but this doesn’t actually recognize that she really has a choice. If she replaces the language that implies a lack of choice it comes out something more like “I give students grades because keeping my job is important to me, I’ll lose it if I don’t.” Note how the emphasis of ownership of problems, honesty and, ultimately goals and needs changes form between these two. I think it goes hand in hand with the bit about how we place attention on technologies.
My interactions with people that are mediated by electronic mediums are many but often cause frustrations – I’m great at observing how people miss emails or imply things through action (or more often lack thereof) but I don’t think I communicate my feelings and needs about it as much or as poignantly as I ought to sometimes. One observation, as of late, is that in-person interactions are downright more successful for me, I’m seeking them out more often. Which leads to the next item…

Quitting Opayboopud

OkCupid sucked for me. I mean granted I was trolling the website from the getgo – my user name was “JeffGinger” and eventually I became so disillusioned with it that my profile actively read “I’m probably using this website wrong. If you message me I’m just going to invite you to do something in person.” Anyway I kept finding myself crawling around on there at late hours of the night when I was feeling lonely, hoping there’d be a new girl hiding or, by god, a response to any of the messages I sent out. It was demoralizing – nobody ever answered and people didn’t pay attention to me because my profile wasn’t mysterious and I’m not generally all that handsome. Even when the site worked and I went on a date with someone I quickly realized I can’t handle getting to know someone who lives 50 minutes away and has no natural intersections with my life.
There are many reasons people find online dating troubling. It’s a kind of shopping mall effect – so many people to choose from, and yet so many reasons to not like them. Everyone is neatly categorized and identified and yet they’re all idyllic representations of self that probably don’t capture actual (or critical) dimensions. And, after it all, if you can’t find a person on the site, with its millions of choices, then by god there must be something wrong with you.
Clearly it does work for some people. I’m told in Chicago there are so many people who use it that are comfortable with casual dating that it’s functional. Down here in Chambana, a town teeming with single youth of all kinds, my observation was that it was a place for people who have comfort issues or trouble getting to know others. At one point I counted 8 people from GSLIS on there.
Funny interlude story – a professor from my department used the site. She was very mature about it – sent me a message saying hello, establishing a kind of friendly “there’s no shame don’t worry I won’t pay attention to you” kind of rapport. Very good of her. I then tried the same move with a fellow PhD student (who I know finds me extra annoying) and she never answered, despite being active following. To this day I am terrified of her.
Anyway I don’t mean to hate on it too bad. I know some people have success with the site and really need it to facilitate their personality. Or perhaps they’re a single mom, whatever. Point it I think it’s terrible for my personality type. I am infinitely happier meeting people through friends in real life and letting the mystery and interest be organic, rather than declared or implicit from the start. Rheingold (see, he’s back) also offers a perspective on this I really like:
I found Baron instructive regarding specific ways social media challenge traditional definitions of sociality. Baron is right, in my opinion, to urge us all to cast a critical eye on any form of socializing that can be turned on and off at will. In my own life, volume control has been a net benefit, but it’s not without its shadowy side. My craft as a writer demands that I spend my days mostly alone in a room. Given my circumstances, gaining the power to click into a virtual community increased my daily social interaction, since I was already isolated. After twenty-five years of online socializing, however, I understand (and caution others against) the danger of confining myself exclusively to communities I can click on and off. I’m healthier, and so is my society, because I’m embedded in family, neighborhood, hometown, campus, and social cyberspace. The people I’ve met online as well as mostly communicate with through virtual means have come to my rescue in times of peril, bought me lunch in Amsterdam and Istanbul, showed me caring, and shared the fun that any kind of community worthy of the name strives for—but I learned long ago that I also need to maintain my face-to-face connections.
I think with something like dating and relationships you’ve gotta be able to be exposed to that person – fully, in their real life context. I’m friends with a lot of people at the Fab Lab that I would have never ordinarily found if I didn’t just get exposed to them by working and being present around them. Every relationship I’ve had that’s been successful has been in a context where she knows me through seeing me around my friends, actively engaged in life. It may be just a way to get past my lack of Ryan Gosling good-looks, but more likely it’s a way for people to reveal the categories OKC will never capture.
And, in the meantime, when I’m feeling lonely these days I reach out to people who aren’t romantic interests that I haven’t been investing enough in. It’s a much healthier response 🙂

By God, That’s Coincidental

Okay, last one. There’s been an oddly large amount of coincidence (good fortune) in my life lately. It’s kind of wanting to make me believe in God. I mean, I guess I already do, in that I see God as love (and also a social construction that has very real human-shaped-second-order agency!), but this all seems too convenient to not be the result of something more personified. Who knows, I’m just gonna keep working on extending the positive event chain.

Jeff Goes Shopping for Clothes at the Mall

A step-by-step:
1)      Try to determine if trendy clothing store is not just for women
2)      Attempt to find men’s section (the one floor or back corner)
3)      Get harassed by store person who unleashes a fury of trendy fashion words like triple bootcutcuff and tapercraftseams
4)      Claim “just browsing” defense and scamper away to seek style of clothing that has been out of fashion for 2 to 5 years
5)      Give up, go to Sears or JC Penny
6)      Easily find preferred clothing style, but only in sizes for giant people
7)      Wonder why clearance rack is only XXL sizes
8)      Find potential item worthy of purchase, ask phone for an estimate on the number of slave children required to make it
9)      Travel to thrift shop to be ethical, find only tattered clothing for huge old people
10)   Give up and buy exact copies of current clothes on Ebay

Jeff Goes Shopping for Clothes at the Mall with Gulsim (circa 2011)

1)      Complain unnecessarily about consumerism and materialistic culture
2)      Be shut up by being told that he too can be attractive (girls don’t say this to Jeff, generally)
3)      Gulsim finds clothing that is inexpensive and not made for extreme hipsters or fat people
4)      Go home happy!
I am still resolved to open a store called “Men: Skinny and Average” for dudes with wastelines under 34 inches, sizes M, S, and XM and clothing that comes in types such as ‘long’ and ‘thin’ and ‘extra pockets.’
Perhaps I should just shop in the children’s section more often. Because, you know, 5’11 at 150 lbs is child size?

Hyperbolistic Depression

Hyperbole and a Half ran a come-back post recently on depression. It might say something about my current peer group, or perhaps society in general, that I saw it referenced by at least a dozen friends and acquaintances on various social media sites.
It’s a profound illustration of what some people have to deal with, and I’m glad she wrote it. I feel bad for her, and, more importantly, I feel like I understand her perspective, one that I’m sure would ordinarily be alien to me.
I have two notable points to make:
1) In reading the post, it was easy to identify who I am in this story (pictured above). I have a savior complex. That is, I’m a privileged, empowered white hetero boy who grew up upper middle class, who has always been able to make a difference in his surroundings and make himself be heard. When a person comes to me with a problem, especially if they’re posing as a helpless attractive female, I don the cape and pick up the sword and fire my problem-solving death rays at them. I may not be qualified, I may not understand their problem, it may not even be the actual problem that’s bothering them, I just do it instinctively. People complain, I want to fix complaints. I have to actively police myself to not do this, ordinarily. It’s revealing of my own discomfort with being useless. I don’t actually know how to just sit there and be a passive listener. I don’t think I will ever say something like “boy those fish are super dead” in response to this question. I can’t generally be depressed and defeated along with the person complaining in this context – I don’t want to, but I also just don’t think I actually know how to. SO, this means I’m not the right person for ultra-depressed people to open up to. Check.
2) While that’s all fine and dandy, what I’ve found is that very few people are consummately/comprehensively depressed like this. A lot of the time only a part of them is dead. For instance, I’ve had some of my heterosexual male friends (around my age) who have never really dated express that they think romantic desire has died in them. I think people can be contextually or partially depressed. Generally with my friends who tell me this I haven’t had a lot of luck helping them to solve their problem – US society isn’t well-structured for people who don’t follow the standard steps in the sprint to the white picket fence (dating in college, job plus marriage after). I think their solution often requires single assertive women, and it seems like often those women are often paying more attention to the loud, confident men in front, not the depressed, inexperienced guys in back. Or at least, that’s what often happens when I try to set them up. Anyway so my actual response is exactly what is criticized by Allie’s blog post – I try to help them work with other problems. It’s not formulaic, exactly, but I think one of the root issues is confidence and people skills, so if I can get the romantically deceased dudes out with a gang of friends and doing things those other issues get better, usually. I don’t think it’s a direct solution, but I have faith that it’s worth doing.

Revisiting the Passive

Most people that know me well have at one point or another heard me complain about people (often women) who are ‘passive’ in damaging ways. And I still think this can happen (one of my present roommates provides a powerful example but I don’t want to waste space criticizing him), but as I’ve spent a lot of time in GSLIS, a place where extroversion is about as rare as men, social conservatives and people of color, I’ve started to gain a little perspective.
Here, for the literature review, some terrrible reading that I dragged out of the archives that will make you hate me:

So the metric I generally operate under, when thinking about passiveness and assertiveness is a spectrum based on initiation and response. People who initiate, lead, speak up, negotiate and otherwise make themselves known through action would be assertive, people who are responsive, reactive and compromise fall in the middle as reciprocative, and people who follow and don’t alter their thoughts or activities noticeably based on social stimuli and communication are passive.
Very few people really fall into that last category, and most of those that do are probably those with more severe social disorders or conditions. Hating on shy or introverted people is stupid. I think what I’ve really been struggling with over the years has been in part people who are passive aggressive, and whether or not people are confident or positive, and these intersecting threads that are hard to tease out at times (because they’re so contextual).
Anyway this post is not about this, really.
It’s that my narrative that I clung to so desperately when I was younger, that girls are (were) passive and cause hurt because of this, is only 50% right, at best. The reason so many people have avoided me, not answered my messages, talked bad about me behind my back (I was once lucky enough to be cyberbullied at age 26 – real-time tracking making fun of my soul-crushing break up via multiple Twitter accounts established by GSLIS students) or otherwise reacted to me in passive (evasive) ways is because of who and how I am.
At best it’s that I’m weird, at worst I think it’s that I’m downright undesirable. I’m pretty convinced that if I were more attractive than I am I wouldn’t have problems with this – the handsome surprise contact is a flattering secret admirer, the ugly one is a creep, so to say. But, generally, I think people find me annoying. Since I’m so frequently an initiator people probably assume that I’ll just be fine if they forget about me – afterall, they likely assume they’re probably just one minimal contact amongst hundreds (I’m 1400 Facebook friends cool, right?). And that’s shit, really, because I took the time to make the effort to do reach out to them, which shouldn’t be dismissed, but it is, all the freaking time.
I sent out gifts in the mail to approximately 50 friends this past Christmas, a spread of variety of folk of different genders. About 25% responded or acknowledged in some way or another and there was no discernible difference between men and women. Keep in mind, I’m not bitter about this, I didn’t expect responses, and I encouraged people to continue the positive event chain in their own lives. In fact I still owe responses to some of them (sorry Alicia and Matt!). What I want to emphasize is that it’s not so much that girls are passive, it’s that people don’t have time for this shit. I have to come to grips with not being worth their time.
If I think back over people that I’ve found annoying in my life, I think the only one I’ve gone to lengths to avoid or not react to is my mother. I’m terrified of becoming her – so very out of touch and untold levels of obnoxious. Now, in my world of self-imposed isolation as a miserable attempt to finish a dissertation, the second a friend reaches out to me they’re greeted with overwhelming verbal vomit, like this blog post. And no one wants that. If Tom Fairbank, my sister and a few others weren’t immune to me I’d probably have given up long ago.
Anyway I don’t know if I have that much of a point to saying all of this, other than acknowledging to the world that, yes, I get it, I’m annoying as hell and while you feel bad for me occasionally, you don’t really want to hang out with me. That’s why it was always essential that I had groups of friends over. The question is how much I want to bottle myself. I can be subdued, ask the right questions, douse the intensity, play the ‘be mysterious’ game, all pretty unhappily. It was pointed out to me recently how easy it is for me to slip in and out of making arguments and discussions simultaneously personal or theoretical/hypothetical. Now that’s yet another flaw I get to police, along with the savior complex, pigeon holing, inability to be apathetic, duty for social good and more I’m forgetting at the moment.
I think my sister captured the meditations on this better than I could:
I actually thought it was really interesting to hear your concerns about how you interact with other people, and talk about how to choose or not choose whether to continue acting in a way they might find annoying. It’s so hard to balance being yourself and conforming to or reflecting the situation you’re in. And I think it takes a good amount of self awareness to get to where you are. I also think it’s shitty that some of these groups have made you feel shitty, though. I realized another factor in your situation might be getting older; energetic positivity is much more widely embraced and followed in idealistic college years, but in masters years it wanes, and in phd programs it dies and becomes reviled. That’s the academic course; I think in so-called RL, it follows a similar trajectory but for different reasons. People get out into the working world, or don’t, and realizes how much it can suck to have and to not have a job. They have to do taxes, sign leases, worry about carpet stains, try to make friends without the support structures they’re used to, etc. And so energy saps away–or is redirected into sterile, accepted gym environments, rather than games and adventures–and world outlooks shift to become cynical and jaded. People begin to compromise on every front, including romantic ones. I think there might be an upswing when they start to have kids and have to get excited about things like Blues Clues and delude themselves into believing their progeny will inherit a world worth inhabiting, and they become interested in making it a world worth their children living in. Maybe that will be your moment again. Who knows.

Agency and Appearance

I am an assertive, friendly and extroverted male of average to slightly below-average appearance. In most contexts in life this works out to be a solid advantage but there are many times that my personality traits can’t make up for how I look. I can work out, which is good, but ultimately that does nothing to change my asymmetric face. My half-wavy hair that only grows sideways doesn’t allow for alternative looks other than short and shorter and my deep eye sockets and honking nose don’t combine well with a withdrawn chin that is almost double. I almost wish I could put on makeup. I know it would be a lie, and ultimately taxing both economically and socially (not to mention it doesn’t change head structure), but it would feel nice to have some (perceived) semblance of control.
Honestly I don’t know which is worse -> to ask people out a lot and get rejected or (worse yet intentionally ignored) OR to simply feel like you don’t have the power or worth to ask others out… left stuck in the position of not getting noticed or scaring off people by being assertive.
I stand facing an odd double-standard. If people don’t want to date me because of the kind of personality I have I’m just fine with that. If they don’t want to date me because of how I look I feel bad. I think learning to accept how I look might actually present a real honest-to-god challenge. If only I could learn to find less attractive people more attractive – hormones just don’t work that way do they.
At the end of the day I spose I should probably just feel lucky. Regardless of any number of romantic advance failures, I have a million good friends and a lion’s share of opportunity in front of me, backed by relative privilege and comfort. Yes, let’s go with that.

You Are Missed…

Be assured my mission is not to elicit guilt or play pogo stick atop your already immense and growing burden… but I miss you.
Strangest of times and circumstances I know. Happy Thanksgiving, I’m sure your family is a much welcomed solace and sanctuary. I still watch from afar, with at least as much as proverbial internet-born books of faces can afford me.
Last glimpse you were swimming, in at least a couple of ways. Think I can join some time?
I’m also bringing back a hefty helping of my childhood in a car full of Legos…
If I don’t hear from you I might churn up something more drastically creative and figure a way [someone] could help me plop it on your door step.
Find me. You know how.
…
🙂
(unrelated: coming for whenever/winter break – babies and doctors, urban prairie archeology, more…)

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