Here's Why I'm An Introvert

A comment from Chess pointed out something interesting about my introversion: online communication doesn’t drain my introvert-batteries.  After a big party, I need to go somewhere quiet to recharge, but during that “quiet” time I’m replying to emails, I’m texting, I’m chatting.
And I realized: it’s because with online communications, I don’t need to monitor body language.
As a teenager, I was a very lonely kid because I didn’t really know how to talk to people.  And what you see here, in this journal, is the moral equivalent of some nerdy teen getting into Monty Python and memorizing every one of their routines – except instead of memorizing all of Monty Python, analyzing How People Work became my nerdy hobby.  So I spent a lot of time really thinking about how conversations worked, manually picking up on all the cues that tell you when someone’s interested and when they’re not, managing the flow and ebbs of conversations.
(Okay, I also memorized all of Monty Python.  BUT REGARDLESS.)
Yet for all of that effort I put in, when I am in public, it’s not a natural habit.  It’s like conducting an orchestra – I’m always glancing from person to person, going Oh, she’s drifting off and He looks like he wants to say something and Good, she laughed at my joke.  I’m weighing and conducting my potential responses, running everything through some algorithm to ensure that I’m not dominating the conversation.
Storytelling is natural to me.  But managing the responses of everyone?  That’s an effort.
I can do it almost subconsciously at this point, thankfully.  But even if I don’t have to explicitly consider all the elements any more, face-to-face socializing is a drain on my resources – to constantly be looking at all those faces and arms and bodies, calculating and recalculating what’s appropriate in this situation – and so after a while I get tired and need to rest.
Which is not every introvert!  My wife, when she’s feeling people-burnt, comes back home and doesn’t want to text, doesn’t want to email, doesn’t want to talk.  To her, I suspect, it’s the act of shaping thoughts into communications that drains her, whereas Mr. Blog here obviously does that without a second thought.
Yet every introvert, I suspect, has some aspect of social interaction which they can do well, but not subconsciously.  You don’t have to think about, say, brushing your teeth in the morning, but you do have to think about tying some new knot you’ve just learned.  And when you expend that kind of energy in something you’ve never quite managed to pick up by rote, it becomes a thing that you need time to recharge from.
For me, I think, if I was less thoughtful then I’d probably be an extrovert.  If I could just charge in and assume that everything was going well, then I’d never need to go home!  I’d be happy to spend time with people!  I like people!  I love people!  And I’d probably be less beloved, because I’d just assume everyone was happy if I was, but what the hell.  I’d be more comfortable in my own skin, instead of constantly thinking of parties as some complex biological organism that must be maintained through an elaborate series of feedback.
Which I do.  But they’re still fun for me.  I promise.

New Story! Totes By Me! "Four Scenes…" At Fantasy Scroll!

Today, you can read one of my beloved stories – it’s set in Cleveland, a little down the street from me, and it features one of my favorite protagonists.  It’s about time passing by new technologies, and friendships that form and never quite reset again.
This is an Ohio story all the way through, as it was inspired by a visit to a bed-and-breakfast where the owner was one of the first doctors to own an X-Ray.  It was an incredible, miracle machine when it all started, something that nobody could have imagined, and by the end of his career the X-Ray was barely even noticable in the welter of changes that had happened since then.  And Blockbuster was closing at the time, and I realized the little video shops were the same thing: this technological spasm that had started on a ground level as hobbyists, enabled a brief cottage industry of do-it-yourselfers, and then consumed.
So I wrote “Four Scenes From Wieczniak’s Whisk-U-Away, And One Not.”  The obligatory sample:

Have a seat, the two of you, and your little girl. You took a taxi here, as I requested? Oh, good. The mall owner, Mrs. Tiffin, she’s always hounding the police to tow away everyone’s cars. I tell her you’re my customers, travelers, you need a place to park overnight — but no, she claims you’re stealing spaces from the Hallmark store. That’s a valid complaint, I guess, since sometimes people are gone for weeks… but I’d like it to be more convenient for you. When you return, you should just step out of the dimensional gate from Perth, Australia, and into your car and whoosh, you’re home! Not sit around this old place waiting for a cab. But I have a taxi driver — a friend of mine, Gregor. He’ll get you back in a jiffy if you call ahead. He’s a good man. Reliable.
I’ll just put in the adjustments here — it takes a good fifteen minutes for the computer to figure out the mathematics of folding space correctly, even with the assistance of the computer on the other side of the gate….

You can read the rest of the story at Fantasy Scroll Magazine, an exciting new startup that, on its second issue, has already published tales by Mike Resnick, Ken Liu, Alex Shvartsman, and now me.  Watch out for these guys.  And now, read a tale of a small business owner who’s going to watch the world literally move for him…

I Am Not Celebrating My Birthday This Year

Long-term readers will know what a horrible birthday slut I am: I tell everyone weeks in advance about my birthday, I make up large and unwieldy Greed Lists, and it all culminates in a week-long orgasmic spasm of birthday celebration where large parties are held underneath a canopy of fireworks.
And I don’t feel like that this time around, which should tell you how bad things are at La Casa McJuddMetz.
I’ll probably push off the celebration to my book release parties in October, which will help.  But now?  In the light of Rebecca’s death, I’m feeling very introverted and not at all up to people.  Which is sad.  This is literally the first time in 45 years I haven’t had a big sloppy birthday party, and I hope it’s not some harbinger of the second half of my life.
In the meantime, if you feel like wishing me a happy birthday sometime between now and the Big Day on July 3rd, you can do it by ordering an advance copy of my upcoming novel, which if you’re pissed at Amazon for their recent shenanigans, well, Powell’s and B&N stock it.  Or you can donate to the CureSearch for Children’s Cancer in Rebecca Meyer’s name.
Or just send me some private happiness.  I like happiness.

The Axis of Awkward: A Psychological Theory

My friend Mishell Baker thinks the introvert/extrovert scale isn’t quite enough.  She thinks there needs to be three scales, none of which have anything to do with liking people:

• Introvert/Extrovert: Are you drained, or recharged, by hanging around people?  (Introverts are drained.)
• Shy/Gregarious: How you deal with strangers and acquaintances – will you huddle in the corner, or march right up and say hello?
• Awkward/Charming: How do you come off once you’re comfortable with people?  (Everyone’s at least a little awkward when they’re uncomfortable, so shy people get the hose here in new situations.)

And I think that’s a pretty respectable set of axes to work off of, because the three are entirely different skills.  I know that I’m charming once I’ve gotten to know people, but I am criminally shy, and as a result I won’t talk to people I don’t know well unless specifically invited.
Basically, I’m an introvert/shy/charming person, which means that once you get me in a room where I’m comfortable I’ll usually come off quite well, and then retreat to my lurky-place after a few hours.  But we’ve all known extrovert/gregarious/awkward people, who have no idea that they’re not particularly wanted in this conversation but boy howdy are they confident about inserting themselves into it.
Which is a problem with this trifold axis: it’s one internal measurement that doesn’t matter at all to your friends but matters to you deeply in terms of how you have to husband your energy, one objective measurement, and one measurement that’s determined entirely of an average of how people react to you.  And you may misrepresent yourself on that awkward/charming axis.  Internally I see myself as awkward, but I’ve gotten enough positive feedback over the years to know that most of the time I come off okay.  But a lot of people see themselves as “charming” when they are not.
Mishell also points out the living hell of the extrovert/shy lifestyle, where you absolutely need people around to function but are too nervous to talk to them.  The gregarious introvert, on the other hand, sometimes gets a rep as “weird and moody” because hey, they walked up to you and started a conversation, and now they’re retreating to their office and slamming the door now that their introvert batteries are drained.
The other interesting thing here is how on one level this trifecta is as utterly useless as simplified as a Meyers-Briggs exam, and yet on another level it’s a good shorthand for crystallizing some concepts you may not yet have internalized.  I know my life got better when I started recognizing that “introvert” did not mean “hates people,” and I think adding the range of “shy/gregarious” to the mix focuses my attention on the ways that I need to interact.  Being introvert/shy/charming, I know that I have to plan out parties in advance so that someone I know is there to introduce me around, and introduce me enthusiastically enough that other people will want to talk to me.  Once that ice is broken, I’m okay until about 1:00 a.m., at which point I’m going to run out of fuel and crash.
And that’s okay.  That’s just knowing how I work as a person.
Maybe there are other useful axes, but I think past a certain point the axes pile up and you get more accuracy at the expense of usefulness – which is to say that it becomes one of those indecipherable “geek codes” where someone’s a WMAKTRMA2BLP that summarizes every fandom they’re excited about and yet nobody knows what the fuck it means but them.  I think you could have one more useful axis on this trifecta, but it’d have to be an axis that doesn’t intersect the others at all.  And hell, maybe it’s useful as-is.
In any case, I know I’m introverted/shy/charming.  That helps me know what I need to do to come off as well as I possibly can.  It works.

This May Be The Best Way To Get Cleveland's Sports Teams To Stop Sucking

From the Cuyahoga County email:

Cleveland is the only city in the country with three major sports teams that hasn’t won a championship in the last 50 years, and second place, Oakland, isn’t even close because they won a World Series 25 years ago. And each year, Cuyahoga County taxpayers provide millions of dollars to benefit our three major sports facilities and the teams that play there.
That’s why I recently announced that I will be submitting legislation to County Council to establish a “Win Tax” bonus that links 20% of public funding for our sports facilities to how a team performs on-the-field. No fans wear their hearts on their sleeves like Browns, Cavs, and Indians fans, and it’s important that we create financial incentives that to ensure the teams that perform well each season are rewarded.
We’re going to continue discussing this issue in the weeks ahead, and I hope you’ll share your thoughts with me. Visit my Facebook page or Tweet @EdFitzGeraldCE to let me know what you think.

I gotta say, I don’t care about sports but I think this is a great idea.  From my non-sportsing perspective, all I ever see is “Oh, we got close this year” followed by “Our team’s owners sold off all the good players, what the fuck?” And considering that my taxes go to subsidizing huge investments that are supposedly tourist attractions, I’d like some incentive that the owners want to win.
I know nothing more of the Win Tax beyond what’s been stated here, and obviously legislation is all about the fine details.  But I like the idea of it.  And I’m curious what sports fans think.

My Wife And I Discuss Pacific Rim

ME: “…And then Angie left this comment: ‘Yeah, the movie started and I was all “why don’t they just….how come they don’t…” and Ferrett said, “you are going to have to stop thinking if you’re going to enjoy this movie”. And I did. And i did.'”
GINI: “I don’t know why Angie thought Pacific Rim had issues. I mean, creating a giant wall that’s actually shorter than the monsters they’re trying to keep out?  At what kind of cost and expense?  How could that ever go wrong?”
ME: “Well, Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director.  One suspects subtext.”
GINI (ponders): “Wow. I hadn’t considered that.”
ME: “Of course, it then follows that Del Toro thinks the best solution to American’s immigration problem is to suit up in giant SWAT team outfits and punch Mexicans in the face.”
GINI: “No, that’s a stopgap solution. Del Toro thinks the best solution is to nuke the border.”
ME (ponders): “…I love you.”
GINI: “I know.”